Chapter 5
“See you Thursday! Let me know what to bring.”
Joana smiled at me. “Just bring yourself. I’ve tasted your cooking.” I had subbed in for dinner once or twice, and it was true; the results were less than impressive.
I laughed and walked outside. It definitely got colder up here than in LA and I zipped up my coat. I still wasn’t used to a Bay Area November.
Even if she told me not to bring anything for Thanksgiving dinner, I still wanted to. I was really excited to go to Joana’s daughter’s house for a giant family celebration. Every year I had tried to make a big deal out of it when Mikey came over, but somehow it had never gone as I had planned. He and Robin hadn’t gotten along, and someone (usually Mikey) had always ended up drinking too much. Now I thought that I would look up some recipes and bring something traditional—but it had to be something that could be made on the stovetop, since Mikey’s oven didn’t work. The burners were actually a little temperamental, too.
Maybe flowers would be better. It wasn’t worth it to get the appliances fixed, if the landlord would be willing to pay anyway, because I was in the waning days of living Mikey’s apartment. I had stayed for one extra month because Mikey—well, because I—had paid first, last, and security when he had moved in and I wanted to get my money’s worth.
I hadn’t heard from my brother. The last time I texted him, someone else answered, saying she had the number now, and could I tell the parole people too? She added a smiley face.
I steeled myself for the long ride home. It was much, much farther on the bus to Mikey’s place from Benji’s house rather than back to my old apartment. And it would have been much, much faster if I took the BART, the train running mostly underground. I had tried. It was a no go for me. I still had enough trouble on the stupid bus.
As I walked down the driveway, a low, black car was pulling in. Mrs. Dorset was home early this Friday. They were leaving for Costa Rica in the morning since Benji had the week off from school, heading to an extremely expensive and absolutely beautiful resort to spend the holiday.
“There’s nothing to do there,” Benji had said glumly when we researched it, and looked at the multiple pictures of thin, tan women lounging in white bathing suits by the numerous pools, and getting massages and facials and eating tropical fruit. It looked good to me.
“You can swim, buddy,” I told him. “The pools look great. I bet they’re really warm. Look, that one has real sand in the bottom.” I peered at the screen. “There’s a bar in that pool!”
“I hate swimming,” he had countered.
That had given me an idea.
“Maura!” Mrs. Dorset called now, stepping out of the black car in the driveway. I waved and kept walking. Faster, in fact. “Just a moment.”
I stopped. “Hi, Mrs. Dorset.”
“Are you heading home?”
“Yes.” Obviously. “Have a great trip to Costa Rica and happy Thanksgiving.” I took a step away.
“Why don’t I give you a ride? I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
My antennae went up. “I’m fine. I can take the bus.”
She hit a button inside the car and the passenger door flipped up. “It’s not a problem! Come on.”
Cautiously, I got inside, and when she asked, I gave her my address.
“Oh, wow. I’ve never been out there before,” she told me. “I don’t think I’ll drive you that far. I don’t want to get my car stolen! Just let me know a good spot to drop you.”
Wonderful. “Sure.”
“Perfect! How is Benjamin doing?”
“Ok,” I answered cautiously. There hadn’t been any more flare-ups with kids at school, as far as I knew, and he was maintaining a safe, yet somewhat miserable, equilibrium.
“Great, great. You do a great job with him.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“What I really wanted to talk to you about was Mr. Dorset.”
“Mr. Dorset?”
“Your relationship with him.” She laughed lightly. “We’re all adults! It’s ok. I knew from the moment I saw you after he hired you exactly where things were going.”
“I don’t have a relationship with him, except as my employer,” I said stiffly, and she laughed again.
“Well, let me give you some food for thought. You know, sometimes relationships, marriages, for example, just don’t last.”
“That’s too bad.” I wanted to jump out of the car.
“I could use an ally, Maura. An ally in the house. No matter how things go in my marriage to Mr. Dorset, you want to come out on top, right?”
“I don’t really feel like I have any place at all in the situation, Mrs. Dorset.”
“Please, call me Undine.”
“This is a good place to let me off,” I said, pointing at a well-lit corner. “Right here is great.”
She pulled over to the curb and I looked around. Where exactly were we? “Think about it, Maura! Women have to stick together, right? Sisterhood!” She smiled at me.
“Have a great trip,” I said again, and the door swung shut.
For a second I stared after her car as she sped away. What the hell had just happened? Then I got myself off the corner, ordered a car, and made a call.
“¿Diga?” he answered.
He was trying to teach me Spanish. “Iván, listen to this!”
On our ride over to Mikey’s apartment all those weeks ago, I had thought that I would never talk to Iván again. With the things he knew about me, I wasn’t sure that I could look him in the eye anymore. But after we had carried my belongings up to Mikey’s, he had just said, “Let’s go to class,” and then told me a funny story in the car about his friend Dylan before a race. He had never said another word about what I had told him that morning, and we had slipped into an easy friendship. Our only contentious point now was that I refused to take any money for “tutoring.” He didn’t need it, and we were just hanging out.
“Dime, tell me.”
“I just got a ride from Undine.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Iván said.
“It’s a she. Mrs. Dorset.” I repeated what she thought about me and her husband. “Isn’t that nasty? That she would think that, and then be ok with it, and then try to use it? Isn’t that funny?”
Iván didn’t see the humor. “Where did she leave you?” he demanded.
“I’m ok. I got into an ATM lobby at with my card and I’m waiting for a car. Seriously, I was afraid to even look at the woman. I thought she might turn me to stone or something.”
He sighed through the phone. “Is it possible for you to never see her or her husband again?”
“I’ll definitely do my best to make that happen. See you tomorrow?”
“Text me when you get home. Use the new lock too, ok? Buenas noches.”
“Adiós.” I knew that word, at least.
We were meeting the next morning and I was already anxious. Iván was going to teach me to swim.
I was waiting outside the aquatic center for him when he arrived a little late, with coffee, as always.
He kissed both my cheeks. It was a Spanish thing. “Hola. ¿Estás lista? Are you ready?”
“No,” I said. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“You’ll be fine,” he told me, and opened the door and guided me in. Even from far away I could smell the pool chemicals, and my stomach jumped with the thought that soon I would be immersed in them.
“I watched a bunch of videos last night to prepare. I watched you. You seem to know what you’re doing, a little,” I said.
He waved at some fans. “A little, sure. I never taught anyone before, though.”
“How did you learn?” I hung back from the door to the pool, giving myself another minute.
Iván smiled. “I played soccer at the field next to the pool. My brother Tomás and I were there, kicking around the ball, and he kicked it over the fence. I went in to get the ball back and the coach asked me if I knew how to swim.” He shrugged. “It looked fun, and I asked my mom to sign me up for the lessons. Tomás did it too. He hurt his shoulder, though, so he had to stop.”
“That’s too bad. Tell me more about your brother.”
“Later,” he said, and took my hand. “Stop delaying. You already put this lesson off four times. We are getting in the water today.”
I let him pull me into the echoing room. There were just a few people in the water doing laps. Iván immediately stripped off his clothes and stood in his little bathing suit.
Oh, glory. Oh, my…muscles. There he was, all of him. Almost all. I found myself imagining what might be underneath the bathing suit, so nicely outlined in that stretchy fabric—
I turned my back and slowly unzipped my jacket, stepped out of my sweatpants, and then lastly and very reluctantly, pulled off my t-shirt. I was fine running around the dance studio in a leotard. Standing in a bathing suit in front of Iván was different. “Ok,” I said, and bit the bullet and turned around.
His eyes never left my face. “Let’s just get our feet wet.” I didn’t know if I was gratified or relieved that he had no reaction to my nearly naked form. He sat on the edge of the pool, dipping his feet and calves into the water, and I carefully sat down next to him. “Tell me what happened the last time you went in a pool.”
I thought back. We had been at a party in Orange County at the house of one of Robin’s high school friends. “I stood in the shallow end on a step and drank sparkling water. It only came up to my knees.” Robin had been more interested in my body as displayed by my bikini than in the party and we had left shortly afterwards.
“Did you ever go under? In the pool, in the ocean?”
“In the bathtub. Does that count?”
Iván splashed into the pool. Without meaning to I reached down and grabbed his arm. “Be careful!”
He laughed. “One thing I’m reasonably certain of is that I’m water-safe.” I kept my grip on his arm. “Maura, I can feel your hand shaking.”
I let go. “People drown all the time. Statistically, it’s one of the leading causes of accidental death.”
“Neither of us is going to drown in this pool today. Look, I’m standing!” He stepped away from the side and I reached for him. “Ok, here. Come in with me.” He stepped back to me and took my hand. Very slowly and reluctantly, I lowered myself into the water.
I progressed to holding onto the side and kicking, then holding onto Iván and kicking around the pool. I felt like an idiot, but he was inordinately proud. “See? I knew you could do it,” he kept saying, along with a lot of Spanish that I still didn’t understand but interpreted as expressions of happiness. He stopped walking backwards, beaming at me. “¡Enhorabuena, Maura! I can see that you’re a natural. Next we’re going to put our faces in.”
“No.”
“You have to, to swim.”
“I don’t like it if I can’t breathe. I don’t…no, I won’t. No.” I pulled my hands away from his and my foot slipped on the bottom. My arms flailed.
Iván was there. “Vale, vale,” he said, and held me up above the water. “No problem. Maybe another day.” He pulled me to him.
I put my arms around his neck and clung to him like a baby monkey. “I think I’m done swimming.”
“Yes, your teeth are chattering. Let’s get out.”
I managed not to die of shame when I had to climb out in front of him, my butt directly in his face. He lifted himself out in a gleaming blur of skin and biceps. I hurried to grab my towel, a bath-sized version I had brought from home. Iván took it from me and wrapped me in his giant towel, then put my small one around his waist. “Muy bien,” he told me. “Very good.” He reached for me and hugged me, rubbing my back over the towel. “That wasn’t so hard. Right?”
My face was on his chest, which was, in fact, rock hard and just above his defined abs which looked to be in the same condition. “I didn’t think I could do it,” I admitted. “I was always so scared.”
He held me by the shoulders. “I’m very proud.”
I smiled into his chest. I was actually pretty proud, myself. And I was liking the hugging part, more than I should have.
∞
Iván picked me up that night rather than me taking the multiple buses to San Francisco as I had suggested. He had been in drivers’ ed for three weeks, and it was making a difference in his driving. After the first day, when the teacher told him to pull over or she was going to quit, he started to understand my criticism of his skills a lot more. I had wanted to send his teacher a bouquet of flowers, I was so happy with the job she had done with him.
Iván had wanted me to come out with him and his friends for weeks, but I’d had a lot of excuses. I didn’t feel like going out very much for a while. Not that I was dwelling, because there was just no point in that, but I had felt slightly off or something. Probably just that I had been thrown out of my usual routine.
As the days went on, I started to feel a little better. I hadn’t realized how much of my time and energy had gone into taking care of Robin. And Mikey too, for that matter. I hadn’t minded it at all, but it was true that with just myself, my classes, and my jobs, I had a lot less responsibility. I missed Robin, I reminded myself. I hadn’t heard from him except for one drunken phone call, asking me to send a selfie. Naked. I had told him to call me again when he was sober, and that had been it.
I stepped back, away from Mikey’s tiny bathroom mirror, to try to get a full picture of how I looked in the dress I had bought at the second-hand store. I meant, vintage store. I still loved it. Did it make my breasts look too big? I turned to the side and hunched my shoulders forward a little, trying to make them less, well, obvious. From this far away my hair looked pretty good. I had gotten a haircut the week before, my first one in I didn’t remember how long.
“How do you style it usually?” the lady had asked me.
I held up a rubber band.
“No!” She had slapped it from my hand. But she had done a good job and my hair looked shiny and pretty. I felt pretty. I smiled at myself, then went to wait by the door for Iván’s text when he was getting close so he wouldn’t have to stop the car for too long.
“Tell me who we’re meeting,” I said, after I jumped into the front seat.
“Let’s see. Mauricio, my friend for many years, Anya who is his girlfriend. She’s in the commercials for the underwear that changes color with your mood.”
My mouth fell open a little. “She’s an honest-to-god underwear model?”
“Yes, and probably she’ll bring some of her friends. They’re always three or four together.”
Models traveled in a pack. Got it. “Who else?” He listed some more names. Isabella, Mac, Jules. A photographer, a light-installation artist, a few internet and software people. San Francisco was full of those. There were at least ten people going to this dinner. “They’re all your friends?” I asked.
“I know all of them, yes.” He ran his hand through his hair, which I now knew to be purposefully messy. He had admitted to it. “Friends, I guess.”
“Am I overdressed? Underdressed?”
Now Iván played with his collar. “You look fine.”
We left the car with the valet, and Iván held out his arm to me. “Maura? Why are you doing that to your lip?”
I stopped biting it. “I’m nervous to meet your friends.”
“No, no. They’ll love you.”
Iván, with his looks and his height, turned heads wherever he went, and walking across this weird restaurant with the dim, blue lights was no exception. There was a movie playing on one wall in—was it Russian? I thought it sounded Slavic, at least. The hostess’ skirt was so short that I could see that she wasn’t wearing panties. Maybe the underwear models we were going to meet could hook her with some up later.
“Iván!” He was suddenly surrounded by a group of what seemed to be a minimum of 30 statuesque women wearing less than the hostess. I stepped back, stumbling in my high heels, the ones I hadn’t worn since Robin and I went to a black-tie wedding six years ago. Iván was laughing and kissing everyone, with a complicated system of one kiss on the right cheek for some, two on both cheeks for most, and three, right-left-right, for a few. And one smack on the lips from a particularly beautiful woman who also ran a nail down his chest and looked directly into his eyes while doing it.
He mostly shook hands with the men, who stood up next. “Maura?” he finally asked, looking around. I stepped out from behind a chair, where I had been waiting.
“Here. Hello,” I said to the crowd in general, nodding and staring at my purse.
“Come and meet everyone.” He pointed out all the people, saying their names and sometimes what they did, and I mostly waved and nodded, trying to remember as many as I could. I didn’t do the kissing thing at all.
The table didn’t seem to actually hold all the people who had been greeting Iván. Some of the women and men were sitting on each other’s laps, and others just disappeared back into the crowd milling around the restaurant. I took a chair where there was space, across the table from Iván, next to a man whose name I couldn’t understand, even after I asked him three times and didn’t feel like I could keep questioning him about it. He focused on downing drink after drink, and after a while, he put his head back and fell asleep. On my other side was a woman sitting on another woman’s lap. They were too busy groping each other for conversation. I ordered something by pointing at it, because although the menu was written in English, I couldn’t seem to comprehend it at all. When the food came I still wasn’t sure what it was.
I mostly watched Iván interact with his friends. Or, as he had put it, these people he knew. They vacillated between speaking in loud voices to promote themselves to him and hanging on his every word. He didn’t seem to talk much, really. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much, either.
No one in that crowd ordered a lot of food, but they all drank like fishes. After the baffling first course, which was some type of broth with leaves and petals in a tiny cup, Iván walked around the table to talk to me.
“Are you ok?” he asked. He poked the man next to me.
“I’m good. Are you having fun?”
Iván shrugged, then reached behind him and removed a woman’s hand from the vicinity of his ass. “Sure,” he said blandly. “Are you? Do you want a drink?”
“I don’t drink,” I explained.
“Are you pregnant?” a female voice asked. The two women next to me who had been joined at the lips had stopped making out and were listening avidly to our conversation. They both looked up at Iván.
“No!” I said. My heart suddenly stopped. When had I last gotten my period?
“Maura?” Iván touched my shoulder, and left his fingers on my bare skin. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” I glared at the two women. I wasn’t pregnant, no way. “Which one is your friend Mauricio again?”
“Come.” He led me over to the other side of the table. Since there weren’t any chairs available, Iván just patted his lap. I glanced at him briefly, then cautiously sat down. He slid an arm around my waist and introduced me to the people on either side of him. Gradually my spine got less iron rod-like and I relaxed against him. His beard tickled my shoulder.
The conversation was much better over here. Mauricio wanted to talk about boat racing, which he was apparently trying to convince Iván to invest in, but at least he was talking to me too, and Anya was nice. The most beautiful human being I had ever seen outside of Iván, and nice. She told me about her dog’s medical problems, mostly. She was spending thousands to prolong his life.
“He’s my only child,” she explained.
Mauricio frowned. “Anya, you have to let him go. He’s lived a long time.”
Anya started to cry, jumped up, and hurried off. “I’ll go see if she’s ok,” I told Mauricio, who rolled his eyes.
“Iván, think about the lifestyle!” he started saying. “The races are in Monte Carlo, Saint-Tropez.” Iván didn’t seem to be listening.
“Anya?” I called into the bathroom. There were two women in the corner who I assumed were getting high. It reminded me of high school.
She came out of a stall. “Here.”
“How are you?”
“Mauricio doesn’t understand how I feel about Barney. He’s not just a dog. He’s everything to me!”
“Maybe Mauricio is jealous,” I said. “That you love something, I mean, someone else that much.”
Anya stared at me. “Mauricio wouldn’t be jealous. That would mean he had to care about me. He doesn’t.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She ran a paper towel under the water and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s ok. It’s not that kind of relationship. I make him look good, and he pays for things.” She shrugged. “It’s kind of fun, when I’m in town. I don’t mind him.”
It sounded awful and I tried not to show that in my expression.
“What about you and Iván?” she asked me.
“We’re friends.”
Anya burst out laughing. “Friends! Sure, Iván has been ‘friends’ with lots of women. He was a good friend to me a year ago in Paris. We were friends three times in one night!” She smiled at me. “Is my makeup ok?”
I swallowed hard. “You look beautiful.”
“You can’t tell I’ve been crying?”
I shook my head. Anya smiled again and went out and the women in the corner left too. I looked in the mirror at myself in my dress, now thinking it looked like I was going to the prom or something. All I needed was a corsage. I put on some lipstick but it didn’t seem to help. I ran my hand over my stomach and thought back to having to buy tampons and when I’d last had cramps. I told myself I was being silly.
I went back to the table, where Iván was engaged in conversation with the woman on his other side and Mauricio and Anya appeared to be fighting quietly. I took my old seat across the table and tried to eat the second course, which I thought was fish. Maybe. Iván raised his eyebrows at me and I smiled at him, nodding as if I was fine. Which I was.
The dinner lasted forever, then it seemed that everyone at the table was heading somewhere else together. “Do you want to go?” Iván asked me.
“It’s a little late,” I said, feeling like I was his mother. “Go ahead, I can get home on my own.”
“No,” he said slowly, “I’m tired too. Very tired. It was a real workout this morning in the pool.” I slapped him lightly on the stomach and he held my hand there and put his other arm around me. “We’re heading home,” he told the crowd. The woman who had kissed him on the lips when we walked in came up for more, but I shook my head at her. None of that, now.
We waited for the car and I was freezing in the damp San Francisco air. I was fully an LA girl. Iván put both arms around me and pulled my back to his chest. “You’re shaking like you did in the water,” he said, yawned, and rested his chin on my head.
I twisted up to look at him. “You really do seem tired. Were you out late last night too?”
He shrugged. “I’m getting old, I suppose.”
“I don’t want you to have to drive me all the way home and back here.”
“I don’t want you to go back to that apartment again. I hate leaving you in that neighborhood.”
I hadn’t told him about the burglaries in the building or the new group of prostitutes that had taken up residence on the corner at night. “It’s fine. I won’t be there that much longer.” I still hadn’t found a place I could afford to rent, however, that was any nicer.
“I think I am too tired to drive,” Iván announced. “Maybe you could come and sleep at my apartment. I have two bedrooms,” he explained quickly.
My heart had started to beat harder.
“I have to be at practice early tomorrow morning. No vacation for the swimmers. I can drop you off then.”
I nodded slowly, my eyes on the street in front of us. “Yeah, ok. Thank you.”
We were mostly quiet on the way to his house. When we pulled up to drive down into an underground parking garage, I started to get nervous. “Hey, can you just let me off here? I’ll wait outside.” He glanced over at me. I swallowed.
“Wait right at the entrance to the garage, Maura. I’ll be right there.” It wasn’t too long before I heard him jogging up the ramp to me.
“Iván, what floor do you live on?” I asked as we went into the building.
“The sixteenth floor.” He paused. “Maybe this could be a day of facing your fears. You could ride up in the elevator. I swear they’re safe.”
I was already shaking my head no. “I’ll just meet you up at your place.”
“Maura.” We had stopped in front of the elevators and he took my hands, tugging me toward the door. “Sixteen floors? You’re going to walk up all that way?”
I pulled away from him. “I’ll meet you up there. No!” I held up my hand as he started to follow me. “You take the elevator. I’ll meet you up there!”
Sixteen floors, in high heels, was a very, very long way to walk up, as it turned out. It took me a long time, and the whole time I was climbing, I was thinking that I was going to sleep with Iván Marrero.
I meant, sleep over with Iván Marrero. Slip of the tongue.