The Sun, the Moon, the Stars
I’M NOT A BAD GUY. I know how that sounds — defensive, unscrupulous — but it’s true. I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good. Magdalena disagrees though. She considers me a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an asshole. See, many months ago, when Magda was still my girl, when I didn’t have to be careful about almost anything, I cheated on her with this chick who had tons of eighties freestyle hair. Didn’t tell Magda about it, either. You know how it is. A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the backyard of your life. Magda only found out because homegirl wrote her a fucking letter. And the letter had details. Shit you wouldn’t even tell your boys drunk.
The thing is, that particular bit of stupidity had been over for months. Me and Magda were on an upswing. We weren’t as distant as we’d been the winter I was cheating. The freeze was over. She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys — me smoking, her bored out of her skull — we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where she’s smiling so much you’d think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other’s family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going. But then the Letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present, future. Suddenly her folks want to kill me. It don’t matter that I helped them with their taxes two years running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like he’s strangling himself with the cord. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says. I see one of Magda’s girlfriends at the Woodbridge mall — Claribel, the ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyes — and she treats me like I ate somebody’s favorite kid.
You don’t even want to hear how it went down with Magda. Like a five-train collision. She threw Cassandra’s letter at me — it missed and landed under a Volvo — and then she sat down on the curb and started hyperventilating. Oh, God, she wailed. Oh, my God.
This is when my boys claim they would have pulled a Total Fucking Denial. Cassandra who? I was too sick to my stomach even to try. I sat down next to her, grabbed her flailing arms, and said some dumb shit like You have to listen to me, Magda. Or you won’t understand.
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LET ME TELL YOU about Magda. She’s a Bergenline original: short with a big mouth and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in. Her father’s a baker, her mother sells kids’ clothes door to door. She might be nobody’s pendeja but she’s also a forgiving soul. A Catholic. Dragged me into church every Sunday for Spanish Mass, and when one of her relatives is sick, especially the ones in Cuba, she writes letters to some nuns in Pennsylvania, asks the sisters to pray for her family. She’s the nerd every librarian in town knows, a teacher whose students love her. Always cutting shit out for me from the newspapers, Dominican shit. I see her like, what, every week, and she still sends me corny little notes in the mail: So you won’t forget me. You couldn’t think of anybody worse to screw than Magda.
Anyway I won’t bore you with what happens after she finds out. The begging, the crawling over glass, the crying. Let’s just say that after two weeks of this, of my driving out to her house, sending her letters, and calling her at all hours of the night, we put it back together. Didn’t mean I ever ate with her family again or that her girlfriends were celebrating. Those cabronas, they were like, No, jamás, never. Even Magda wasn’t too hot on the rapprochement at first, but I had the momentum of the past on my side. When she asked me, Why don’t you leave me alone? I told her the truth: It’s because I love you, mami. I know this sounds like a load of doo-doo, but it’s true: Magda’s my heart. I didn’t want her to leave me; I wasn’t about to start looking for a girlfriend because I’d fucked up one lousy time.
Don’t think it was a cakewalk, because it wasn’t. Magda’s stubborn; back when we first started dating, she said she wouldn’t sleep with me until we’d been together at least a month, and homegirl stuck to it, no matter how hard I tried to get into her knickknacks. She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper. You can’t imagine how many times she asked (especially after we finished fucking), Were you ever going to tell me? This and Why? were her favorite questions. My favorite answers were Yes and It was a stupid mistake. I wasn’t thinking.