Now, though, I think it’s as if, without ever deciding to, I withdrew from life in some way during those five-plus years since things finally ended between Gisela and me. I can’t really explain what happened. Often when I try, my inner voice stammers to a stop … Is it just that I reached age forty-four and told myself, Time to stop, take a break, in order to … so that before I ever try this again … need what in order to … and now I’m forty-nine, the sort of self-sufficient man people think must not really require or especially want anyone to be close to … he has his books, and an eventful past to ruminate on, just look at him, invited on the radio to talk about his enemy General Cara de Culo … to talk about José Marti, in order to … happy to be going home to visit his mother in her nursing home, to have dinner with Marianne, to see Feli, though probably he won’t make the time to visit his sister, too, depends on … on how impatient he’ll be by then to get back to New York … forty-nine, the perfect age at which to sit back on this train and gaze out this window in order to think that five years have passed and that it’s all led exactly to … this, ready to try again … we’ll see.
Lulú’s stayed over at my apartment twice, though we only made love the first time, such raucous sweet bliss from deep within like I hadn’t felt in years; not even with Gisela. It was all so different with Gisela, who possessed what Mexicans call morbo, a moody sultriness like human opium.
Lulú and I met a little less than two months ago, at the beginning of January, at that learning sanctuary for immigrant kids in Bushwick where I lead a Wednesday evening story-writing workshop. I have four students. Betzi writes stories about the adventures of a character she calls Sushiman. Ashley has been writing about her trip last summer to her abuelos’ village in Zacatecas. Jazmery is obsessed with peregrine falcons, but her story has yet to get past its first line: “Peregrine falcons are the fastest birds alive.” Marisela has been writing about her long trek north from her village in Veracruz with her mother and their pet pigeon in the back of a dark, smelly truck. Along the way a man in long white robes gave them a matchbox with a ladybug inside and said, This is Vaquita. She will get you over the wall. When they reached the wall, her mother opened the matchbox, set it down on the ground, and the ladybug turned into a small cow, red with black spots. The pigeon flew up to make sure it was all clear on the other side, and her mom, holding tiny Marisela in her arms, climbed onto Vaquita’s back, and the cow jumped over the wall. Marisela always adds: Like the cow that jumped over the moon.
Those girls are often chatty and restless. It’s a lot, after their long school days, to ask them to sit still into the evening, working on their stories, so sometimes not much writing gets done. Last night, they spent part of class passing my phone around, huddling over it, trying to crack the lock’s four-digit code. That group giggling fit should have been a clue. Later, when I was home, waiting for my delivery beef chow fun, an email came in from Teresa Fijalkowski, my book’s editor. A little nervously I opened it and found just a “?” I saw as I thumbed down that it was Teresa’s response to a message sent from my email a few hours earlier: “Sushiman is coming to get you!”
One section of the long, green chalkboard in the one-room learning sanctuary is covered with conjugations of Latin verbs: amõ, amās, amat. Books piled everywhere, an upright piano, music stands. The kids, arriving from their various public and charter schools in midafternoon, get time and help for homework, but when I arrive, just before 4:30, when the writing workshops start, I usually find most of them, boys and girls, out on the sidewalk exuberantly kicking a soccer ball around, even in freezing cold. Other days they have classes and workshops in other subjects, including the Latin classes taught by Stephen, who founded and runs the learning sanctuary. He also has them reading Milton’s Paradise Lost together. Stephen’s a sort of saintly mad visionary genius, he even has the deep-set dramatic eyes and nearly platinum tousled hair. I know that if I had small children of my own there’d be no one better to entrust them to after school.
The Wednesday night workshops are led by volunteer writers, all on the young side; there’s even an MFA student. The kids sit at separate tables crowded into that one square room, grouped by age and gender, from my four chamaquitas to sixteen-year-olds. Stephen has the three oldest boys, Mexicans, two with broad, thick shoulders seemingly set in perpetual wrestling hunches and young masculine faces so tender and apprehensive that sometimes when, as just now, their expressions come back to me, I feel a vague distress; the third is a brilliant boy from Michoacán, cheerfully aloof, tall, shock of hair falling into his eyes, in his first year at one of the city’s top public high schools, a going-places boy. The older teenage girls, the largest group, sit at the table in the farthest corner, one girl at a time talking, moving her hands, the others listening, expressions deepening, lightening. Often they all break out in laughter or gaze with intense adoration as they listen to Angie, a Chicana writer who grew up in South Texas, whose memoir won a big literary award and who keeps her black leather jacket on inside while her Yamaha 450 waits by the curb outside.
Most of the
