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  All those interviews, all that inquiry, but nothing could have prepared me for the refugee lover.

  I’D BEEN AT Human Capital a few years, interviewing for the “Jefferson Account” for nearly as long, when I first met Paolo. I was as ruthless and skilled as the rest of them. So what if I kept notebooks with the specific qualities I was looking for in a mate? So I wrote down a few of my romantic fantasies, made a few collages of swarthy men on sailboats, shirtless men on beaches—is that such a grave tactical error?

  Our interview must’ve started with the usual: schools attended, best and worst qualities, extracurricular activities, but looking at his file now, I see I didn’t take notes. I’m sure I stumbled over his name—Paul-oh? Pow-low, he would’ve corrected—his name so round and seductive when spoken aloud. I probably inquired about his accent—Mexican? Argentine, he would’ve explained. All of this must’ve led to some discussion about his visa status.

  I remember him fidgeting in his seat, looking at the little scrap of paper in his hand, and asking, “Isn’t this the Day Labour Office?”

  “That’s on the third floor, sweetpea,” I said, “but you’re here now so let’s do this. You and me: a real tête-à-tête.”

  I was trying to act casual but I’d already noticed he had the posture of a question mark, hairy knuckles and the kindest face I’d ever seen—everything wide open, everything full moon and yearning upwards. I remember thinking these were both my favourite things about him and the things I most wanted to change.

  We eventually reached the interpretive portion of the interview, “Gateway Questions,” designed to separate the spontaneous thinkers from the drones. Human Capital was big on the interpretive in the eighties: If you were a tree/animal/vegetable, what kind would you be? Here so many inter-viewees would relax and say the first thing to come into their heads. Normally there was nothing I could do to help the weeping willows, the pandas, the tomatoes. But it just so happened we were in the middle of a big hiring push. Company-wide lowering of standards, the office-memo had read that morning.

  “Avocado,” Paolo said.

  Creamy, wholesome, deceptive middle, I wrote in his file.

  I tapped my pencil three times, part of General Intimidation—Never forget you are in an interview, the corporate literature read. Never allow the client to get comfortable. Remain skeptical, distant, judgmental.

  I had a soft spot for this man before me. Here was a fresh-faced immigrant, so far from home, so alone, wearing someone else’s corduroy jacket—too small in the shoulders, too big in the collar. I could rename him, take him shopping, teach him dirty words. I could mould him into whomever I wanted. The thought of having to send him upstairs made my stomach swim.

  “I’ve got just the placement for you,” I said, reaching into my desk, “but the Jefferson Account will require extensive interviewing.”

  Question 26. Some days it was a conundrum—Your lover is burning down. What parts of her do you save? Some days it was a challenge—I am the last woman on earth. You have thirty seconds to convince me to mate. And other days it was just a fragment—I need...

  I read what was at the top of my list: “If you could save just one word from the English language”—not my best work, but I was still figuring things out in those days.

  I recall he didn’t ask, “Why just one word?” or “Save it from what?” the way other interviewees did that day. He just leaned forward, lifted one corner of his mouth and with a confidence unimpeded by his corduroy jacket said, “If. If is the best word.”

  His Adam’s apple dipping and bobbing. His puddle-brown eyes. How I wanted to splash in those puddles. How I wanted to make a mess of him and then tidy him up again.

  It is, to this day, the most romantic interview I’ve had. How he teared up during the family values segment, the way he described his mother, the vulnerable self-portrait he drew—the foreshortened limbs, the fact that he forgot to draw feet—I still have it framed on my desk.

  At the end of it all, he wiped the tears from his eyes and asked me out.

  There would be no copying down his address, no “bumping into him” at various hotspots in his neighbourhood—the way we used to in those days. There would be no need to stage a follow-up interview.

  “Feliz hora?” he said.

  Happy Hour. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  IF. “IF” WAS a sweet little game we all liked to play in the eighties: if he hadn’t stumbled into the wrong office that day, if I hadn’t got my hands on his paperwork before he realized his mistake, if I hadn’t stunned him and then worked him into a corner with my questions, if he hadn’t been so gentle and awkward, if I hadn’t been so well-trained—what then? Would we have met some other way? Would the fate fairies have twinkled down on little wings and somehow rearranged time and space to bring us together?

  DECEMBER IS A month for catching colds on purpose so you can call in sick and worm around in bed. It is a month for peeling one orange after another and not even eating them, just sticking your nose into the heaps of peel on your bedside table and remembering warmer times. It is a month to turn up the heat and drink sangria in bed while recalling your best sunburn ever, your worst mosquito bite, and feeling you’d give anything to have your blood airborne just now. It is all of this, but it’s a dangerous month to fall in love, a dangerous time of year to turn to one another and say, “Why pay two rents when we could pay one?” December weakens us, makes us foolish and sentimental. I know this now, but I didn’t know it then.

  In December he moved in. It was a decision based on necessity more than romance. We hadn’t even slept together yet, but his roommate, Escobar, had forgotten to pay the rent three months in a row and Paolo had nowhere else to go. “But I still want to go slow,” he insisted, placing his four boxes at the back of my closet.

  I bought new sheets, faked a thyroid condition and said I’d be working from home that week, administrative work and follow-up calls.

  We had complete disregard for time of day. We stayed up late “getting to know each other,” making out, watching movies. I’d never met a man like this before. He wanted to know all about my childhood, my secrets, my heartbreaks. He was big on lists: top three biggest crushes, top five best days of my life, top ten worst fears. He wanted to play Truth or Dare and Twenty Questions into the early morning. Half the time it felt like he was interviewing me. I’d never felt so hopeful, so weak in the knees. We ate at midnight and slept into the afternoon. He drew pictures of me while I slept. I’d find them stuck to the fridge later with little poems attached. He insisted on painting my toenails. He’d meet me just out of the tub with a new bottle in hand, saying only, “Ravishing Red.” I’d pretend to be coy—“Who me?”—and then he’d tackle. It was the most wonderful, epic foreplay I’d had in years. I felt like a teenager, like a princess, like an exotic and extremely ripe fruit. Then he sat me down and explained that he wanted to wait until we were seriously committed to make love. “It’s a religious thing,” he said. Then, “Do you want to play Twenty Questions again?” I agreed, because it was my number one all-time favourite game but also because I was confident I could break him.

  He started to talk about the future a lot—our future. We would flip through lifestyle magazines, nailing down the details of our dream home. “Do you like window seats?” he’d ask. “Carpet or wood flooring?” He even started making collages: vacation spots, home furnishings, his and hers clothing, cars, espresso machines.

  Looking back, something in me should have sat up alert at all this, but it was around this time he turned to me and said it, the actual word, out loud.

  “Love,” he said. He screwed the cap back on the Ravishing Red, looked at me, into me. “I think I’m in love.”

  Some parts of me fluttered. Some other parts ached.

  It’s not that I was surprised. I’d been checking the love line on my palm fo
r changes and every morning it seemed redder, deeper, truer. I had been smiling at the chest hairs in my bathroom sink, using Crest when I really preferred Colgate, eating pizza even though I was lactose intolerant. I had let him have the better pillow. Why all this making way if I wasn’t in love too? Why else this giving over of palms so that things could be written there?

  But love was a word I was unaccustomed to hearing from the mouths of men. It was such a taboo word in the dating world back then, we of the first floor had undergone extensive hypnotherapy to erase it from our vocabularies entirely. And yet, here was a man saying it with such intention, the same way he’d slid his tattered blue Bible onto my bookshelf, the same way he moved through a room, planting each footstep solidly as if it were the only thing holding him to the earth. I wanted to say it back, but I couldn’t. It went against all of my training. It was the third most romantic moment of my life, but I couldn’t quite participate.

  I took another week off work. We stayed indoors. He followed me room to room, composing songs on his ukulele, offering to wash and braid my hair, painting and repainting my toes, but still no sex. Eventually, when the only food left in the house was a watermelon, I went to put my shoes on. I was feeling bug-eyed, twitchy, with an itch I couldn’t scratch.

  “Why do you leave me?” he asked.

  “Just getting some food,” I answered.

  At that, he picked up the watermelon and smashed it against the floor. “But we have food right here!” He slurped the meat rather than cutting into it the regular way. “Fruit should be an experience,” he said, sucking up seeds from his leg hair. I knew he was South American but this was the moment I believed it.

  It wasn’t until the next day that I finally got my chance to slip away to the corner store. Enough with the fruit and foreplay! I needed a moment alone and also some beef jerky. I needed to reconnect with my training. Every client has a past, the corporate literature read. Never let the client run away with the interview.

  “Listen,” I said when I got back to our lair. “I need to know about your past, so give me the bad news and give it to me straight. What’s your damage?”

  I noticed he had lit a whole bunch of candles while I was out, that he’d covered the floor with what looked like tea but was actually dried rose petals. The whole place smelled like singed grass.

  “I have no past. I have only the future,” he said, and I’ll admit they were words I’d waited all my life to hear.

  That’s when it happened.

  He got down on one knee. “A wise man once said to me, only a fool rushes into love,” he said. “But I just can’t help falling in love with you.” He produced a ring from behind his back. “Please give me your hand, but give me your whole life too. I just can’t help falling in love with you—”

  “You just said that,” I interrupted.

  “Please will you marry me?” he said

  Something in me went splat: the second most romantic moment of my life.

  My answer: “Does that mean we can have sex now?”

  His answer: “Let’s wait until the honeymoon” and “What’s a couple of weeks compared to a lifetime?”

  “Okay, okay. Yes, yes, yes,” I said, because the eighties had been a long, hard decade and I was staring down a diamond and even a killer can lose her focus when she’s face-to-face with the prize. After all, I had cracked the code, found the loophole. I couldn’t wait to tell the girls at work. Immigrants for all! Puppy love for everyone!

  “UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!” FAITH SAID, fluffing her perm. We were standing in the first-floor bathroom. “You asked him about his past and he proposed!”

  “He said ‘love,’ and you haven’t even had sex!” said Ginger, hiking up her nylons.

  “That is so totally romantic!” Tiffany said, hairspraying her bangs.

  Then they started in with the questions:

  Faith: “Is he gay? Check if his fingernails are manicured.”

  Ginger: “Is he an ex-con? Check if his clothes are way out of style.”

  Tiffany: “How did he propose? Was it so romantic?”

  I told them the story. How a wise old man once told Paolo that only a fool would rush into love—

  “Wait, aren’t those Elvis lyrics?” Faith interrupted. She started humming. They all did. Crooning Paolo’s proposal to some tune they all knew.

  “‘Only Fools Rush In.’ It is an Elvis song,” said Ginger. “My parents had their first dance to that song.”

  “Wait. That doesn’t make it any less romantic, does it?” asked Tiffany. “Maybe he’s never heard the song.”

  “Maybe he’s a whole new type,” Faith said, spraying perfume into the air and ducking under it, “working a whole new angle we’ve never seen before.”

  All four of us looked at each other, inhaled, choked on perfume.

  THE NEXT FEW weeks Paolo chased me around the house asking me endless wedding questions. He’d been to the immigration office to get something called a fiancé visa and was a little overexcited. We lived in one of those fifties-style apartments where all the rooms open onto one another. I would come home from work and he’d follow me from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room to the bedroom to the bathroom, calling his questions after me: “Indoor or outdoor?” he wanted to know. “Winter or spring? Tiered cake or slab cake?”

  “What’s that?” I’d call back. “I can’t hear you.”

  NEAR THE END of January, Mum called with a whole new lineup. A dentist and a banker. A lawyer and a realtor. One was a widower, which might’ve been tempting once.

  “No can do,” I said.

  “What does that mean, sweetie? Speak properly.”

  “Means I’m busy, Mum. Like, marathon busy.”

  Paolo had finally caught up to me and was leaning in the door frame, listening.

  He pointed to the wedding magazine in his hand and mouthed, “Tell her.” Those full-moon eyes, his pouty shoulders.

  I broke it to Mum as slowly as possible, in a roundabout way, but it didn’t help. “Paul-who?” she screeched.

  “Pow-low,” I corrected.

  “Po-elo,” she said. “Aren’t things moving a bit fast? Shouldn’t we meet him first? You know your father’s not very good with accents.”

  “Like this, Mum: Pow-low. And it’s not too fast.”

  “Paul-oh,” she said. “Oh dear. I just saw a movie about this. He isn’t looking for citizenship is he? Is that what the rush is all about?” Her questions were ice cubes. They chilled and then stung and then numbed.

  “Just call him Paul,” I said. “Paul is fine.”

  THAT NIGHT WHILE Paolo called around to different wedding venues, I pulled my old notebooks down from my highest bookshelves. What I found there, in amongst the descriptions of my dream partner, the lists of “Top Ten Most Romantic Gestures” and “Five Best Proposals Ever,” made the skin under my engagement ring itch. Not afraid to speak of the future. Unconventional, exotic, I had written. Paints toes, plays with hair—not just after sex. There was even a photo of a shirtless Hawaiian man serenading a woman with a ukulele, even an article about a sweet Russian couple who’d saved themselves until marriage. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I had wanted this once. I had dreamed Paolo long ago, down to every last detail and now he had appeared.

  THE NEXT MORNING I made Paolo drag his four boxes out from the back of my closet. We were sitting on my bedroom floor—speechless, surrounded by old photos, books, letters and diaries, everything in Spanish and coated in thick South American dust—when the phone started to ring. We sat upright, like squirrels sensing a storm. Our eyes locked onto each other for four whole rings before the machine picked up. Then Mum’s voice filled the apartment.

  “Listen, honey, this Paul-oh. I just didn’t have a good feeling so I called a lawyer. It doesn’
t look good. Call me back.”

  “So you do have a past?” I said looking at Paolo’s belongings all around us.

  My finger had swollen up overnight—red and tight under my ring. Of course he had a past. Every man has a past: it was the number one rule. I was used to a long line of exes stretching off into the distance, winking and waving like the bitches they are, each having left her mark, the different dents and bruises that made up the man before me—we of the first floor had ways of dealing with exes—but this was something else.

  He reached across and squeezed my hand. “More importantly, I have a future,” he said. I wanted to believe him, but my mother was still in the air.

  I interrogated him further while he continued to un-pack. He told me about Buenos Aires, a crumbling city with a grand old history. “Disrepair is so much more beautiful than perfection,” he said. The buildings there were organized into impenetrable city blocks locked off from the street but for a single door, he said. On the other side of that door, a long dark hallway led to the very centre of the manzana, or apple, as the blocks were called.

  I was trying to locate myself in this anecdote. Was he the apple? Was I the worm? I was confused. Were we disrepair or perfection?

  The phone was ringing again. Mum: she would call and call until she got an answer.

  To a foreigner out on the street, the city might seem abandoned, he said, but at the centre of each manzana lay an open square of green, the pulmón, or lung. That’s where families breathed. Women cooked and children chased dogs and old men stared at the sun, spitting sunflower seeds. He said that from a rooftop you could look out and see all those pulmónes as wild bursts of green amidst so much concrete.

  I was starting to understand. In every man’s past there is that one, the girl who divided his life into a before and after, the “Supreme Bitch” we the women of the first floor liked to call her.