Louis Di Leo
“No.” She smiles. “I don’t think so. Luna.”
Luna, Luna—lovely sound. Her name means Moon. I shake her hand. She
has enchanted irises, like brown galaxies that wheel round the space of pupils.
“May I have one more, Moon?” I’ve been thinking that more i s best at times like
this, of these still unfamiliar Spanish afternoons, of heat, to halt the persistent
sting of solitude; but now? To hope and speak with satellites! To toast the breadth
of orbits, to fantasize! But my new position—catedrático asociado, sounding so
grand—starts so soon. And what a pledge it is to write and read and teach, which
is to admit, correctly, to studying forever—a thing the ex never liked: husband
as neophyte. Forget your sighs! There is some story, some surprise right here!
Luna laughs.
I think: She laughs, too! What geniality!
“So, where’s your compañera?”
“Girlfriend,” I convert. And I think of her, the ex, in Poughkeepsie
somewhere. Forget her, man. Four better years will come sooner here. “Nowhere,”
I say. “No existe—she preferred the snow. Me?” And I wave my hand toward that
fluorescent brine, “El mar.” I don’t want to have to tell myself again: “It was for
the best.”
Then Luna tells me, “Ah, sí. Este mar holds your story.”
But I don’t even try to think it through; instead I nod and say, “Un otro
punch, por favor.” And she turns, her coral lips hidden toward the mixer.
Island ladies, I wonder, must hate white men, all the Anglos coming through,
harassingly nodding toward lips and hips and smiling and doubtless speaking
no español, or speaking it poorly—like me. Jesus. Just like me. But I’m not some
sexual tourist. I have to tell myself that again: I’m not a sexual tourist. I’m not
some first-world invasive species eating up the local fauna. I am no lothario;
I live here. Mi vida está aquí. And I’m going to stay well past when the sigh of
history dissolves, as Mr. Walcott says, until the surprises of this isla are separated
by decades and this story, this Trans-Am drama, is marked by years onto stone.
But este mar? Did she mean this ocean as it circles San Juan? Or was it
metaphor or some idiom I should’ve known? ¡Ven acá! Come back! I hope she
does. And she does, and I pull myself down into a stool.
We chat: “I just moved here,” I say. “For work, to teach. En la universidad.”
“And I’ve been here all my life,” she says. “No, momento—once I been to
Nueva York.”
“Nueva York?” I say. “Bah. Exhaust and ice and screw you’s abound.”
“No, no.” She laughs again.
88
TCW