Star-crossed again.
Lost.
Kim had a few similarities to Sanita’s troubled soul but on a much lesser scale. First of all I could always reason with her and she understood and enjoyed talking with me. She told me her boyfriend sometimes hit her, then he'd apologize profusely and swore it would never happen again, until it did. I never asked for details. But I don’t think it happened often as she went back to him four months later. As for venereal disease, I have no clue, as we never had sex.
But she never invited me to bed either, though plenty of mornings I’d knock on her door, was called in and watched her crawl out of bed in her undies, topless, asking me to wait a few minutes as she took a shower before our ride to work. She was like Rachel in that respect, European, unabashed about half-nudity. But in her case that didn’t matter. Her flat chest was about the same as a ten year old boy’s. Her tits were so small she called them “bee stings”, a term I’d never heard before but in her case, a perfect match.
What made me wonder though, in these frequent half-naked displays in front of me was her unexpressed intentions. She could have easily invited me to join her under those sheets for five minutes, or five hours, and I would have instantly agreed. We were alone and I had no specific hours of work per week, just one goal, to finish the store by the deadline. I could have spent entire mornings with her and had sex, or to put it more politely, close intimacy, (the first step to any lasting relationship), a dozen times. A major shift in our futures would have followed.
I think she was testing me, my interest in her, my willingness to overcome the ‘Sanita situation’, through her temptations. I often talked to boring lengths about Sanita on all the long rides we shared going to work together, week after week, the unfolding, sorry saga. At least she was a good listener and in that respect, an appreciated confidant. I even asked for her perspective on many parts to this sad history and my plight. But because she was an interested and biased party, (I suspect), she only replied with vague commiserations, not actionable advice like, “ditch her”.
Or she never considered herself my potential partner, (just like Vicky years before, who stopped me on that first occasion when we were in bed together, full of kisses). I’ll never know which it was, but I wonder to this day. For her it would have been a real advantage to snag me and a step up into whole new vistas of possibilities in her life, though at that time I was at my lowest ebb.
She knew she could win me. She also saw my talents, knew of my education, family and connections, too many advantages not to prosper again, or move anywhere we chose. She must also have seen that this was only a temporary glitch in my life, this depression. On many occasions we laughed the whole three hour long drive to work and back. We were happy together, telling stories about ourselves or living them.
One one occasion I told a laborer I liked, Carlos, that I’d give him a ride back to Rincon. I’d traded my Vitara that day for Manny’s truck. He needed my newer car to make a better impression on some clients that weekend. So the three of us crammed in the front seat and stopped for a bag of coke at the nearest projects, on our way home on a Friday night.
Now Carlos was a simple, uneducated Puerto Rican, simple in every way. He spoke perfect English, had a fat wife and two kids at twenty. The projects on our way home was a little different than the others. One had to stop on the street and step through a space of two missing slats in a wood fence, six feet high and make the transaction with anyone right inside. This always took thirty seconds. I’d done it several times. We handed Carlos a twenty and to our surprise we sat and sat, engine idling, for over five minutes, Kim and I wondering at Carlos’ fate.
Then he returned, all smiles, bag in hand. After driving off and doing a line each we asked what took so long. Kim was in the middle and we were crunched together, the truck being a small Toyota. Carlos, to put it mildly, was smelly of sweat in his sleeveless tee-shirt and khaki shorts and sandals, typical work outfit in P.R. He told us the dealer he met was a cute girl and with the sale she offered him a blowjob for five dollars more, which he just happened to have. He couldn’t refuse.
Twenty minutes later, after a stop for a six-pack, the three of us contentedly sipping Heineken's, he starts squirming and bumping Kim. She complains and asks him what his problem is. He replies: “Now I feel all sticky. I shouldn’t have done that. We have a long drive home”.
The look of disgust on Kim’s face was unforgettable. I couldn’t help snickering. She turns to me and says: “So these are your friends”? I had to admit they were my workmates. This was P.R. “Just grin and bear it” I told her and offered the both of them another line. Carlos was strangely silent for a while. After a few more lines we were all talkative again.
Kim was a trailer park girl from rural Tennessee. Yet she had spirit, good humor and a constant sparkle. She seemed in my imagination a ‘sprite’, or, more exactly, a female ‘Puck’ from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. And without all that other clutter in my brain I would certainly have loved her with a passion.
I never made the first move with any woman in my whole life. It wasn’t abnormal shyness or lack of libido. It was thought and respect, which only increased over time. To me they were the undisputed arbiters of sex, the rulers of the bedroom. They were the traffic controllers, the police, in lingerie uniforms, their batons signaling red or green lights to every approach, able to stop any further advance in an instant, without explanation. And this is why:
They are sexuality embodied, A to Z. Their lives wrap around it. In physical terms they have ten times more parts than a man. They have monthly cycles that affect their days and moods. They have the means to procreate, so radical a gift it boggles the mind to fathom. It involves not nine months but years of care on their part to make and raise a baby, beginning even before that in choosing a proper mate to support them. Their minds must be deluged in considerations and comparisons and questions, that is, every intelligent women with any foresight, aware of all the duties and labors and trials of motherhood.
In my twenties I never thought that far ahead and jumped into a girl’s bed as quickly and eagerly as a six year old boy jumps on the trampoline in his backyard, fresh home from school. But by forty-two I was different, no longer eager for sex and wary of complications to Will’s life. I still wanted love. I gave Kim some signals I was ready to take her into my arms and my life, in our long talks and on several obviously romantic dates.
And I think it would have happened, the very night she came by my house before she was about to leave the island, ready to abort that flight and tear up that ticket, wanting to talk to me, with a bottle of rum in her purse so the conversation would be long and deep.
But, at one more momentous crossroads in my life, I was asleep, or more accurately, passed out.
This all happened right after the fiasco of “Caguas”.
