Radio Belly Read online

“Remember, we are always competing with her,” we reminded each other. As staff of the second-largest hiring firm, we were in a position to run background checks on the Supreme Bitch. We could call her employer and references, or if she lived in the city, we could just stand outside her apartment and see for ourselves. We always knew exactly what we were up against.

  But this Supreme Bitch wasn’t a woman. She was the motherland and she had broken him long before anyone was keeping track. I was perfection and she was disrepair. I was modern, plain and tall, and she had the slow curves of history. How could I compete?

  “These asylum seekers,” Mum said into the answering machine, “they’re not legal, honey, not until they’ve passed this test—” there was the shuffling of paper—“this ‘Credible Fear Screening.’ They’ve actually got to have a certain amount of fear about going back where they came from. And sometimes if there isn’t enough fear, they just find someone quick to marry.” She stayed on the line, exhaling.

  “So you’re saying you want to go back there?” I asked. “It’s sexier there? You wish you’d never left? How can it be sexier there if you weren’t having sex?”

  He was ripping into his last box, Styrofoam peanuts spilling everywhere when he said there was no reason to go back, that his whole family was “disappeared.”

  “What do you mean disappeared? Just into thin air?”

  “Nobody knows. Some say thrown into the river,” he said.

  The very idea made me mad. I much preferred closure.

  He lifted a huge wooden shield from the box. Styrofoam shrieked all around us. The shield was the size of his torso, the wood so old it looked like it had been coated in tar. He twirled it around to face me. I took one look at the shrunken black head mounted there; Mum hung up and I fainted.

  When I came to he was quick with the explanations. “It’s not what you think,” he said, and then explained that it was a family heirloom, a sea tortoise from his grandfather’s shipping days.

  I could see it then—the small beaky nose, the turned-down mouth, those sad lidded eyes. Not human. Not an old man’s head shellacked and mounted to a plaque in my hallway, looking like it so badly needed a drink. More like a nailed-down worm.

  “Maybe we should get that,” I croaked.

  “Get what?”

  “The phone.”

  But the phone wasn’t ringing anymore, only in my head.

  He brought me water and then told me a sad story about his uncles being taken in the night, how his family was ejected so quickly from the upper-middle class that his mother had to sell off the family heirlooms one by one, how she finally died of grief. This tortoise head was the one thing she hadn’t sold, the last family relic.

  My limbs were tingling back to life. “So are you really afraid to go back there, or just a little afraid?” I asked. “And where’d you get the ring? Did you buy it before you moved in? Before you even knew me?”

  He sputtered, puffing and waving his hands through the air.

  In the end, I let him mount the tortoise above the TV. After all he’d been through I wanted him to feel at home. Every time I looked up at it though, I was reminded that his life was divided not just into a before and after, but also a here and there. I was reminded that I was the foreigner out on the empty street, banging on the door, wanting to be let into the pulmón, to breathe at the centre of things.

  THERE WAS NO MORE avoiding it. It was time to meet my parents.

  On our way out of the city we stopped at three different specialty shops looking for the right pot of jam. It had to be apricot, the right colour and consistency, with a smallish label. It had to be American. It couldn’t be French or Italian.

  Once we were on the road I explained how Dad refused to wear his hearing aid. I told Paolo about the help, not to help the help. I explained that our jam would be placed on a shelf with all the other jams in the summer kitchen, that this was display jam, not to be confused with the other regular jam.

  He started to say, “Where I come from—” but his voice was cancelled out by a big rig passing in the next lane. I can only assume he ended the sentence with something like “Kids line up outside the door just to lick the empty jars.” Where I come from was a sentence that never ended well. I turned up the music. If we had a fight now, it would trail us like a bad smell and Mum would detect it as soon as we walked in the door.

  For the rest of the ride I heard him rehearsing under his breath. “Tell me, do you have many friends in the country?” and “I hear your roses won third place at the county fair” and “May I ask what’s in the soup?”

  MY PARENTS BURST out of the dining room in a stampede of poodles. I had forgotten to warn Paolo about the dogs. Mum had him backed into a corner and agreeing to be “just Paul” in no time. It was then I noticed he was wearing that old corduroy jacket from our first interview along with matching pants that were hemmed too short. He looked out of place and time—a used car salesman suddenly beamed into my parents’ marble foyer.

  Since it was a beautiful day, we were going to eat out in the summer kitchen—a peachy turret detached from the rest of the house and the place where Mum kept her jam collection. It was arranged on shelves in front of the tall windows, creating a stained-glass effect.

  We were still talking about the weather, about the fresh coat of paint and how much the jam collection had grown, when Paolo barked: “Do you have friends in the country?” His accent was as thick and gooey as the light. Fortunately, neither of them heard. I patted his leg under the table. Bad timing was all. I’d forgotten about the acoustics out there, how the high ceilings swallowed sound.

  I waited until we were all settled and then repeated his question at a more appropriate volume, without the accent.

  “Well, of course,” Mum said looking at me. She rested her hand on her collarbone. “All our friends are American.”

  I was just about to clear up the misunderstanding—countryside not country—when Maria came in with the soup. Paolo could hardly look at her. He just bowed his head and kept it there. She was probably his mother’s age.

  “So, Paul, were things extremely bad in your homeland?” Mum asked while Maria dished the soup. “Is that why you came to the United States of America?”

  “Mum!” I said. “Jesus!”

  “Language?” she said.

  The soup was served. Maria backed out of the room.

  “Isn’t this soup lovely?” Mum said, changing tack.

  “Yes, it’s a very lovely soup,” I said.

  “Lovely soup for a lovely day,” Dad said.

  We all swallowed: one, two, three.

  “May I ask what’s in the soup?” Paolo asked, but he sounded like he’d just woken from a deep sleep, like his mouth wasn’t working properly and he didn’t look up when he said it, as if he were asking the soup itself.

  Nobody responded.

  “The goat cheese is lovely, too,” Mum said next. “And these olives are from—”

  “Gazpacho,” Paolo interrupted.

  My parents turned to me then, slack-jawed.

  “Gazpacho,” I yelled. “It’s a cold soup popular in southern Spain—”

  “Darling, stop yelling,” Mum hissed.

  Paolo and Dad waited a beat and then jumped in at the same time—something about his roses. Dad ignored the blunder. His eyes found their anchor just above Paolo’s head and he answered his question at such great length it carried us straight through to the end of the meal. But while Dad talked I noticed Mum watching Paolo, taking in his suit, his hair, his every move, from across the table. I noticed a new framed portrait of the president hanging high on the wall above Paolo’s head.

  While waiting for dessert, I pulled out Paolo’s wedding magazines. We each grabbed a few, flipped and pointed, describing what we saw to no one in particular.
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  “Here’s a nice dress!” (Paolo).

  “Grey bridesmaids, how awful.” (Mum).

  “I can’t say I understand any of this.” (Dad).

  Dessert was served—apple pie with ice cream—and Mum started in with the questions again. She wanted to know why Paolo had come to a country where he knew no one, and just how bad it had felt when his father was taken in the night. “On a scale of one to ten,” she asked, “exactly how afraid are you to return, and would you describe that fear as constant or intermittent?” But she didn’t wait for his answer. “You say you were seeking refugee status,” she continued, “but were you ever actually granted asylum? Were you ever legal to work? Were you a refugee or were you an illegal?”

  Paolo stammered, “Cómo se dice? Cómo se dice?” scanning the floor frantically as if the words he was looking for might be written there. Had his English always been this bad?

  When he did manage a sentence, my parents turned to me puffing like goldfish and I had to do an English-to-English translation. Sometimes all three of them spoke at once—questions and answers colliding mid-table. It was the acoustics, I convinced myself. But then I noticed when Mum asked Paolo to pass the cream, their hands both traced blind circles mid-air, unable to connect. And there was that one moment, once the sun had sunk low in the sky, filling the turret with a yolky light, when I looked at him and then, it seemed, through him to his ripe red insides, his hundred snaking veins. It was as if he were a bottled specimen—a tadpole or a skinned lizard—amid all that apricot jam.

  I USED TO dream Paolo was made of tissue paper. I’d be running through a wide-open field with him neatly folded in my hand, but then it would start to rain—fat, fierce drops dissolving him. When that tissue paper was so thin it was hardly there, I would rub my palms together, rolling him up until he was pill sized. Then I’d pop him in my mouth and he’d be gone.

  In another dream we’d be on the couch talking. I’d lean in to ask him a question and he’d hang his head, searching for the right words. “Answer me,” I’d say, an impatient mother screaming in his ear. I’d grab him by the chin and shake him until his face slipped from his head and landed in his lap, like pea soup, or pudding, or face gravy. I’d look up, but there’d just be a blank pad of skin where his face once was. I’d reach into the slop in his lap trying to reassemble his nose, eyes, lips, but I’d only stir things up, making it worse. He would scream if only he could find his mouth.

  IN THE FOLLOWING weeks I was the one chasing Paolo from room to room, calling my questions after him: “What exactly were you doing before I met you?” I’d ask. “Who were your friends?” and “What were your plans?” and “Have you been reading my notebooks while I’m at work?”

  Every time I entered a room I’d find a stiff wind cutting right through the centre, indicating he’d just fled. Sometimes if I ran fast enough, I’d see his back disappearing around the corner.

  I asked and I asked until I got my answers.

  Paolo was illegal after all. He’d applied for asylum but, one by one, he’d seen his other Argentine friends get turned down—not enough Credible Fear. Without me, he’d had little hope of getting papers, little hope for the future. Without me he couldn’t drive or work or see a doctor or rent a video. Without me he was nobody, nothing, a ghost. He was marooned on the tiny island of the present. But that wasn’t the point, he insisted. The point was he loved me. Very much.

  His ninety-day fiancé visa expired and Paolo went back to being a refugee. He lost his job at the architecture firm. The only work he could find was the night shift as a security guard downtown. We held opposite hours from Monday to Friday. He started sleeping on the couch. Sometimes I’d peek in, see him curled up with his stacks of bridal magazines and wonder, was I the Supreme Bitch in this situation? I knew what my questions were doing to him: that I was tearing holes in him through which his love leaked out. I saw it happening, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was made for this.

  Was I wrong to question his motives? Wrong to call off the wedding? Did my discoveries necessarily cancel out our love? Isn’t it possible to hold need in one hand, love in the other? Aren’t we all refugees when it comes to matters of the heart?

  OUR LAST CONVERSATION, if you could call it that, was on a Sunday in February. I’d been chasing him around the house, and had tricked him by switching directions several times. We collided under the tortoise head. I hardly recognized him. He had grown a beard since we’d last seen each other.

  “Wait right there,” I said. I’d been waiting for this mo-ment for months. I pressed play on the stereo, the tape synched to the right spot. It was Elvis, singing the exact words from Paolo’s proposal. I folded my arms, ready to wait out his silence.

  Paolo’s lips were moving, but only a strangled sound was coming out. He might’ve been saying “I love you” or “I loved you” or maybe “I loathe you”—I couldn’t tell. It was as if something was stealing the words from his mouth, as if he were calling me from another country, using one of those cheap, warbly phone cards.

  I looked up at the tortoise head and imagined its body squirming around on the other side of the wall, flippers thrashing to be free of its heavy wooden collar. I looked down at Paolo. The two of them were craning, treading water. The two of them pinched, frozen in time. In some other dimension Paolo was saying all the right things. If only I could hear him.

  THOSE LAST MONTHS, I stayed at the office late most nights. I was working on a new side project, Mating Game™—a board game not unlike Trivial Pursuit—except instead of plastic pie pieces, I was thinking of using fake diamonds that fit into a plastic ring. I wanted there to be a box of cards—on one side of those cards, every Question 26 I’d ever written; on the other side, different answers with point values. I wanted all my hard work to come to something. I wanted there to be winners and losers.

  When I wasn’t working on the design, I was working on my pitch:

  Dear Parker Brothers, I have a dream. Bingo, Monopoly, Scrabble: each started with a dream, behind each dream, a dreamer.

  Or:

  Brothers, It wasn’t so long ago courtship began with the handing over of a “confession album,” a book of Proustian questions and the answers given at every stage of a young man or woman’s life. Isn’t it time to bring us back to a more familiar time, to a world where lovers can ask each other, “In what ways do I disappoint you?” and “Who would you be without me?” free of consequence?

  Or:

  George and Charles, you are brothers but how well do you really know each other? What secrets do you hold in your hearts? Fear not, Mating Game™ is here!

  I DON’T THINK I laid eyes on him from March through May, but I could sense him. Most mornings when I woke up, the bathroom walls were still steamy from his shower. I’d enter a room to find a warm spot on the vinyl chair, a book open, a cup of yerba mate and half-eaten toast. I’d hear his soft feet padding in the room next to me. I’d rush forward, calling, “Paolo, do you love me? Do you loathe me?” and “Maybe we can work it out!” but by the time I got there, the room would be empty. I’d find the couch pillows still holding his shape, the smell of him in the room, sometimes more than his smell, the bright dust of him hanging in the air. He was still there, all around me, living off the smallest sliver of the past. Then I destroyed that, too.

  While he was at work one night, after polishing off a bottle of red wine, I pushed the TV aside, climbed up on a small ladder and fished my finger into the tortoise’s mouth. What was I hoping to find? Lost words? All the conversations we’d never had? His secrets, black and curled beneath the tongue? I found none of those things, not even the tongue. It had probably been eaten in some South American ritual I would never understand. My fingers brushed up against the prickly stump where the tongue had been and the tears slid sideways across my cheeks. I curled my finger up and punctured the roof of the mouth. It was thinne
r than I expected, like phyllo pastry. Something like loose tea slid down my arm. Then I reached up into the brain, into the nose. My finger poked around inside the milky eyeball like a worm in a snow globe, then I accidentally punched through the thin skin of the face, scrunching it up in my fist. One second I was tippy-toe on the top of the ladder, and the next I was up to my elbow in turtle.

  Soon it was all dust. Something like a turtle-skin collar remained glued to the wood but the rest was airborne. It was in my hair and on my skin. It was in my mouth. His past was everywhere and I was suddenly, devastatingly sober.

  IT WAS MUCH LATER when I heard his footsteps in the dark cave of our room. I know it was him because of the smell of garlic and toothpaste. Also because I felt his hands on me, because I had waited so long to feel his hands on me, all over me, because I had memorized his hands. Then his mouth was on my mouth, breathing into me. The time was right. He wasn’t saying it but I could feel it. Only love could make him kiss me like that, like he was drinking my face. He was in me and through me to the count of one, two, three, and I was just starting to comprehend that love is need and need is love, that you can’t have one without some of the other, when he started to come apart in my hands. He was without a past and without a future, caught between worlds, all shivering pixels, his edges thinning out, the molecules of him sloughing off. The most romantic moment of my life. Then I sneezed and he was gone.

  THERE’S NO NEED to hide what we do anymore, no need to pretend. Ever since the men upstairs were made redundant and I became boss, I’ve given my girls free rein. Lord knows they need it. Men these days are trickier than ever, but our techniques have kept pace with the times. Our psycho-emotional profiling is as accurate as the FBI’s. Our attachment-pattern analysis and emotional aptitude indicators are all bang-on. And our turnover rate doesn’t lie. It seems every weekend one of my girls is getting engaged or holding a rehearsal dinner.

  Still, there are times when some good old-fashioned advice is in order. “If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is,” I tell my girls, and “Ask yourself, who has the most to gain from this relationship?” Occasionally, if I’m feeling sentimental, I find myself saying, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”