Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(33)

I went for a stroll on the beach to try to shake it off. You are bigger than this, you are better than this, I told myself, but that only made me think about Tom’s mantra phase, during which he read stack after stack of self-help books in an attempt to catapult himself out of his internship rut and into a real job. In hindsight, it occurred to me that Tom’s positive self-talk probably had very little to do with employment.

How long had he been deluding himself? The very morning of my D-day, he woke me up by kissing me and telling me he loved me. (Just thinking about it made me start to cry again. Did he suspect that he would soon tell me the truth? Was his love really guilt sandwiched in the affection that comes from spending so many years with another human being?) The whole thing was incredibly confusing. During childhood, Paul liked trucks and guns and football, all the stereotypical boy things, but we were barely into our first month of kindergarten when he proudly told my parents that he wanted to marry Michael Jackson. Our family was religious—church on Sundays, prayer before meals, memorizing large chunks of the Bible together—but though those around us were quick to condemn homosexuality, my parents never tried to convince Paul that the way he felt was wrong, so he never tried to hide who he was. Thus, the concept of coming out later in life seemed like something that happened on television.

Moreover, though Tom’s father was a mouthy drunk who didn’t hold back on his views of any and all perceived forms of sexual fornication, Tom happily flouted him in so many obvious ways—his calm demeanor, his big-city life and love of beautiful things, his alcohol aversion—that it never occurred to me Tom would feel the need to conceal such an integral aspect of himself.

While I might have given him a mouthful on the phone, I sort of felt bad for him. I definitely felt bad for us. If only it had happened at a time when we could have worked through it together in some sort of healthy manner—not that I would attempt to turn him straight, as I knew I was more likely to run into my mother riding a unicorn down Michigan Avenue than to expect Tom’s sexuality to be deprogrammed, like it was a DVR. But I didn’t want to hate him. I wanted to comfort him, as I had when his father showed up to his graduation party trashed, or when he was fired from his first postgrad school job after three disastrous weeks.

Correction: I wanted to want to comfort him.

Or perhaps this desire was the ghost of Libby past, trying to deceive me as she had so powerfully managed to do in so many aspects of my life.



Raj called on the way back from my walk. “You won’t believe this!”

“Try me.”

“You have three offers on the apartment.”

I smiled; the universe did owe me a favor. “Who offered?”

“Two couples and a single mom.”

“Excellent. Let’s go with the single mom.”

“Don’t you care what they’re offering? The mom’s offer is the lowest.”

“Get the papers drawn up.”

“You’re in charge,” he said, but I knew he was not pleased.

“I’ll up your commission to seven percent.”

Raj grunted.

“Eight.”

“Deal.”



When I returned to the beach house, I saw that Milagros had tacked a note to my door. “Spanish, six p.m.?” it read. Cocktail hour was as good a time as any, and despite my vow of solitude, I did want to learn Spanish. At least Milagros wouldn’t lecture me about the disease she didn’t know about.

I went to Milagros’s patio as instructed. Again she had a visitor; this evening it was a young woman jiggling a small girl on her knee.

“Gracias, Milagros,” the woman said and reached into her pocket.

Milagros waved off the woman’s attempt to slip her what looked like a bill. “De nada, de nada,” she insisted, and the woman hugged her and left with the little girl trailing behind.

“I was just reading Vicky’s palm,” Milagros explained. She patted the chair where the woman and her daughter had just been. “Here, sit down.”

Tentatively, I obliged.

“Now give me your hand.”

“What about our Spanish lesson?”

“We’ll get there. Now let’s see,” she said, taking my arm and unfurling the fist I didn’t realize I was making. She stared at my open palm for a minute, then ran a finger down the long line closest to my thumb. “Esta es—that means ‘this is.’”

“Esta es,” I repeated.

“Good!” she said enthusiastically. “Esta es tu linea de la vida. Your lifeline, mija.”

“Okay,” I said hesitantly.

“Vida,” she insisted. “Try saying it.”

“Vee-da.”

“Ay,” she said.

“Ay,” I said.

“No,” she laughed. “That’s me talking to myself. I was going to say that you have a nice, strong lifeline. Like mine,” she said, holding up her hand so I could see the deep crevice running through the maze of wrinkles that composed the map of her palm.

“Well, that can’t be accurate,” I said, taking my hand back.

“Why’s that? You don’t want to get old like Milly?”

“It’s just that I have a health condition,” I mumbled.

“Whatever it is, that hand of yours says you’re going to beat it.”