This Is How You Lose Her(5)

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THAT NIGHT I LOITER around the pool and the local bar, Club Cacique, Magda nowhere to be found. I meet a dominicana from West New York. Fly, of course. Trigueña, with the most outrageous perm this side of Dyckman. Lucy is her name. She’s hanging out with three of her teenage girl cousins. When she removes her robe to dive into the pool, I see a spiderweb of scars across her stomach.

I also meet these two rich older dudes drinking cognac at the bar. Introduce themselves as the Vice-President and Bárbaro, his bodyguard. I must have the footprint of fresh disaster on my face. They listen to my troubles like they’re a couple of capos and I’m talking murder. They commiserate. It’s a thousand degrees out and the mosquitoes hum like they’re about to inherit the earth, but both these cats are wearing expensive suits, and Bárbaro is even sporting a purple ascot. Once a soldier tried to saw open his neck and now he covers the scar. I’m a modest man, he says.

I go off to phone the room. No Magda. I check with reception. No messages. I return to the bar and smile.

The Vice-President is a young brother, in his late thirties, and pretty cool for a chupabarrio. He advises me to find another woman. Make her bella and negra. I think, Cassandra.

The Vice-President waves his hand and shots of Barceló appear so fast you’d think it’s science fiction.

Jealousy is the best way to jump-start a relationship, the Vice-President says. I learned that when I was a student at Syracuse. Dance with another woman, dance merengue with her, and see if your jeva’s not roused to action.

You mean roused to violence.

She hit you?

When I first told her. She smacked me right across the chops.

Pero, hermano, why’d you tell her? Bárbaro wants to know. Why didn’t you just deny it?

Compadre, she received a letter. It had evidence.

The Vice-President smiles fantastically and I can see why he’s a vice-president. Later, when I get home, I’ll tell my mother about this whole mess, and she’ll tell me what this brother was the vice-president of.

They only hit you, he says, when they care.

Amen, Bárbaro murmurs. Amen.

—

ALL OF MAGDA’S FRIENDS SAY I cheated because I was Dominican, that all us Dominican men are dogs and can’t be trusted. I doubt that I can speak for all Dominican men but I doubt they can either. From my perspective it wasn’t genetics; there were reasons. Causalities.

The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence. Mine and Magda’s certainly did.

I was living in Brooklyn and she was with her folks in Jersey. We talked every day on the phone and on weekends we saw each other. Usually I went in. We were real Jersey, too: malls, the parents, movies, a lot of TV. After a year of us together, this was where we were at. Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit, either. Especially not on Saturday mornings, over at my apartment, when she made us coffee campo-style, straining it through the sock thing. Told her parents the night before she was staying over at Claribel’s; they must have known where she was, but they never said shit. I’d sleep late and she’d read, scratching my back in slow arcs, and when I was ready to get up I would start kissing her until she would say, God, Yunior, you’re making me wet.

I wasn’t unhappy and wasn’t actively pursuing ass like some niggers. Sure, I checked out other females, even danced with them when I went out, but I wasn’t keeping numbers or nothing.

Still, it’s not like seeing somebody once a week doesn’t cool shit out, because it does. Nothing you’d really notice until some new chick arrives at your job with a big butt and a smart mouth and she’s like on you almost immediately, touching your pectorals, moaning about some moreno she’s dating who’s always treating her like shit, saying, Black guys don’t understand Spanish girls.

Cassandra. She organized the football pool and did crossword puzzles while she talked on the phone, and had a thing for denim skirts. We got into a habit of going to lunch and having the same conversation. I advised her to drop the moreno, she advised me to find a girlfriend who could fuck. First week of knowing her, I made the mistake of telling her that sex with Magda had never been top-notch.

God, I feel sorry for you, Cassandra said. At least Rupert gives me some Grade A dick.

The first night we did it — and it was good, too, she wasn’t false advertising — I felt so lousy that I couldn’t sleep, even though she was one of those sisters whose body fits next to you perfect. I was like, She knows, so I called Magda right from the bed and asked her if she was OK.