Cleopatra and Frankenstein(82)

And there, in that fragrant fog, he thought of Lila, the woman who had once been his wife. Lila was from Bogotá, five feet to his six and a half. Lila spoke Spanish like she was cutting tall grass with her tongue. She could walk on her hands and cook a perfect chicken. She was always cold and never wrong. Lila won first runner-up in her local beauty pageant but had the most prized possession of all, an American passport, endowed by her half-American father. At fifteen, she was sent to high school in New York to learn to speak English like a white American and, upon graduating, dismayed her family by enrolling at Alvin Ailey to learn to dance like a Black American.

Santiago met Lila when he was still in culinary school, clearing tables at the diner on Fifty-Sixth Street. She would come in after class with the other dance students, all lithe as panthers in black leotards and sweats, all smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee and talking reverently about people he’d never heard of. He’d catch the names as he cleared away plates of smeared ketchup and discarded burger buns, try to memorize them so he could look them up later. Martha Graham. Merce Cunningham.

He noticed Lila, of course. She demanded to be noticed. One evening, perhaps on a dare, perhaps because someone had simply suggested she couldn’t, she jumped up from the table and did a series of backflips down the linoleum aisle while her friends whooped and hollered, her slim body arched like a tiny, turning rainbow.

She had noticed him too. Back then, he was lean and muscled from carrying heavy food deliveries, with a head of thick, curly hair women went wild for. It was she who first spoke to him in Spanish, under her breath, like she was sharing a secret with him, who invited him out with them one night to a club where the boys dressed as girls and everyone was high on E, who kissed him under the Brooklyn Bridge, who lay naked on his mattress and asked him to warm her up, who moved into his studio apartment above the laundromat and filled it with dry flowers and wet leotards.

It was Lila who married him so he could get his first legal job in a kitchen, who took him to dance performances that made him weep in the dark, who taught him that the body has its own kind of language that expresses what words cannot. And it was Lila who introduced him to heroin, who shot them both up for the first time with gear given to her by a choreographer who swore it was like being cradled by God. Santiago got sick that first time and didn’t have the stomach to try it again. But Lila didn’t get sick. She fell back into his lap, smiling, and said that she finally, at long last, felt warm.

Sometimes, when the restaurant was busy, whole weeks went by without him thinking about her at all. But ever since Frank and Cleo’s wedding, she’d begun visiting him in his dreams again. Sometimes she was dancing, but mostly she was just there, watching him. Now he wondered if she’d come to warn him about Cleo. She was trying to tell him that Cleo was hurting herself like Lila had before her, for reasons he had failed to understand, in ways he had once again failed to stop.

With a start, Santiago realized that the rice pudding was beginning to stick to the bottom of the pan. He scooped the creamy mass into a glass bowl and sank two cinnamon sticks into its center. He bent over it, inhaling the familiar vanilla scent, then turned away. He would not ruin it by salting it with his tears.



Santiago took a cab to the NYU hospital on Thirty-First Street, the rice pudding balanced like a favorite child on his lap. He followed the signs past the lobby and the gift shop to the elevator, where the psychiatric ward was listed on the sixth floor. The doors opened onto a small waiting area with a row of seats on one wall and a stack of lockers on the other. Through the window of the locked steel door, he could see a long fluorescent-lit hallway lined with metal carts. He checked his watch—he was a few minutes early—and took a seat next to an older Jewish woman wearing a large purple coat. She nodded at the wall of lockers in front of them. The numbers appeared to have been assigned at random, with locker 1 located between 45 and 12.

“The crazy starts here,” she said.

A loud buzzer from the steel doors announced the arrival of a nurse, who instructed the handful of visitors to place all their possessions inside the lockers. The ward, she said, did not allow any outside objects, including bags, cell phones, jackets, food, or drinks.

“I made this for one of the patients,” said Santiago, holding his bowl in front of him with a hopeful smile.

“No outside food or drinks,” repeated the nurse, turning away.

“But I—”

“Look, they’re not going to let you take that in,” said the purple-coated lady. “What if you hid a knife inside it?”

“A knife?” spluttered Santiago. “It’s rice pudding!”

“Sure,” said the lady and shoved her coat into the locker.

The ward was mostly full of sad-looking young women, NYU students, he assumed, shuffling around in cloth gowns and sweatpants with a mixture of bored and forlorn expressions. He passed what appeared to be a therapeutic art class, where the patients were gathered in a circle, painting sunsets.

Santiago found Cleo’s room at the end of the hallway. When he came in, she was sitting on a low twin bed with her back against the wall, reading. She had on a silk kimono robe in a watercolor palette of peaches, lilacs, and creams. The long fabric of the sleeves folded around her like a nest.

Her eyes darted up at him in surprise. It was the first time he had seen her look anything other than beautiful. Her face was pallid, almost gray, with bruised violet circles around her eyes and yellow crust in their corners. The usual burnished gold of her hair was dull and bundled in a greasy topknot. Her dry lips were the same anemic color as her skin. Everything about her was muted, drained, except her eyes, which were even more pellucid than he remembered, a green so clear he found himself avoiding them.