I'm a little out of order here in my time. This piece should have been inserted about five pieces ago as it introduces Tom and Paola, a couple I met a few weeks before the Caguas Mall began. But it explains some things that followed and is too amusing to omit.
The Caguas Mall Begins.
Two months late and many dollars short.
When I mentioned before the hackneyed phrase, with my backyard party on Woolsey street in 1983, where I met so many good friends in a single afternoon; ‘when it rains, it pours’, I can now just as poignantly apply it again to two simultaneous developments, Sanita absconding with my son to Florida with Mark, drug dealer and woman beater, and the new Caguas mall, in which I had six stores to build, delayed six weeks in the construction of the shell, and expected to open by Thanksgiving, for the Christmas shopping. Two disasters.
I’d rented a huge house there and for good reason. That part worked out quite well. I was surrounded with good friends through that long, trying experience. Actually the nightmare began and grew everyday worse, starting our first week into construction and lasting another seven, till Thanksgiving.
Caguas is a large city (fifth largest in P.R.) forty miles South of San Juan, at a higher elevation and circled with hills. At the beginning of nineteen ninety-seven it had no mall, just a few strip centers. So it was a plum ripe for a huge indoor mall, advertised to be the largest on the island, and many of the American brand name stores signed up for a space in it, with over fifty of them to fill.
It was a big ground-up project and every commercial builder in P.R. was salivating for a slice. Prints from the States rained down into every office. Victor sent out a flurry of bids and ended up with six signed contracts. Manny and he had used my formulas and thought they’d make a ton of money. They called me first thing and told me I could have all six build-outs on the one condition that I took them all. I came, looked over their prices and accepted, at five hundred a week for me, one ten dollar an hour foreman, and the rest my usual seven and eight dollar an hour helpers, with the one stipulation that Victor pay the rent of a large house for my workers, to be near the mall and ready to work long hours.
I told him the schedule was tight, that I knew no one in Caguas and didn’t want a forty minute drive from San Juan or a three hour one from Rincon. He agreed. That worked out well. Jean in Rincon had a close friend, a woman her age with just such a house, which she could vacate for three months and live with friends. She rented it to us for three hundred a month, big money to her and a big smile on Victor’s face when he heard the price.
It had four bedrooms upstairs, another downstairs, a long den that could be used as one, along with a kitchen, living room and a full bath on each floor. To sweeten the deal for him I said Frank the wall finisher and R.S. the floor man, and Addison, whom he needed as a foreman, three Rincon friends, could also stay there. The other bedrooms were for my electrical crew. He planned to use his S.J. regulars for the rest of the work and they could drive. It all seemed like a grand adventure about to begin.
After a year and a half of refusing any work from Victor my trained and true San Juan electricians had drifted their separate ways. I had Kim and a few phone numbers and knew I needed help. One person I met and liked a great deal was a carpenter who showed up in Rincon about the time Buddy showed up, Tom from Philadelphia, handsome, with long, prematurely gray hair, but with an even silver color to it, soft-spoken, smart and my age. He’d broken up with wife and children there a few years earlier, then worked on the restoration of the U.S.S. Constitution, ‘Old Ironsides’ in Boston for a year. He knew woodworking with old tools, hand lathes and chisels and such, to an art.
He showed me a leather apron he’d brought with him, over a hundred years old. It was a series of pockets, each a little smaller in descending order and in them a set of eight chisels, from one and a half to a quarter inch wide, made of Pennsylvania Dutch steel. There was a strange, bluish hue to the steel, which looked brand new. Only the wooden handles were used and beaten, a thousand times. He said they were sharper than anything modern technology could equal, forged by the Amish with some age-old secret they never divulged. He told me he dropped one once from just chest high, working on the boat. He was wearing sneakers that day and it fell blade first, sliced through his sneaker like a hot knife through butter and cut off the tip of his long toe, standing straight up in the wood of the deck, almost as if proud of itself. He also showed me the toe, one clean slice with a quarter inch missing. Scary perfection.
I invited Tom to live and work with me in Caguas. Though he wasn’t an electrician I was sure I could keep him busy, just as I did with Kim and Rachel, from their first day on. I told him I could only pay him ten an hour but he was broke and gladly accepted, on the condition he could bring his girlfriend, Paola, along. I agreed and said the den downstairs was the largest room and the most private. They could make that their bedroom.
No ring in the nose or tattoo, and thirty five, but a strikingly close match.
Paola was a striking woman and they were deeply in love. She was tall, near six feet, skinny, with light skin and carrot-red hair, which was cut short around her neck but straight across the forehead, a ‘Louise Brooks’ hairstyle, with two locks curling behind each ear.
She was Puerto Rican to the core, a true rarity considering her hair and pale skin. She spoke perfect English but with a Spanish accent, had a fiery temper and was a professional model for many years, a decade earlier, as she had the prettiest face and green eyes. Everywhere she went she still turned heads. She was now nearing forty, Tom’s age. I don’t know where they met, as I’d never seen her in Rincon and with her looks one could never forget spotting her. But they did meet, perhaps in Mayaguez, and were now happily living together in Tom’s cottage on a hilltop a mile from my place.
I’d met her at a house project I helped Tom finish as she’d come by just to spend a few minutes with Tom at lunchtime, bringing him a sandwich. He introduced me as his close friend and as he said that about no one else, it put me in a special category with her. She was all smiles and full of questions as we sat together and ate.
So she learned a little about Willy and Sanita. Her love for Tom was a mad infatuation, a doting upon him all day with all the poisons of jealousy and suspicions intertwined. But he was faithful to her in every way. Who wouldn’t be, with her stunning charms. On weekends I think they spent the whole day together in bed. In Caguas they certainly did, egressing maybe three or four times for ten minutes to make some quick snack or drink, then straight back into their den.
Their love was fully mutual. The only thing Tom couldn’t reciprocate was to dote on her all day. He worked those daylight hours on projects to support her, concentrating on the tasks to complete, and was much more sane with a tool in his hand or directing others, than her sitting on a couch, waiting for his evening return, idle vagaries of infidelities floating through her pretty skull.
She had her own ambitions. She wanted to start a clothing business and sewed together dresses. They were always ankle long flowing robes of light, colorful materials, sometimes even semi-transparent, they were so light, some hinting the underwear and suggestive in naughty ways in their cuts. But they were all made to fit her long and very slender form.
They visited me one Saturday at my house, going down the thirty steps. Willy was there on the couch and I remember her, as soon as she entered and saw how cute he was, running over to him and hugging him and kissing his face many times, using every adjective she could think of to describe an angel. He took it in stride as he’d had the same treatment at Irma’s three years before, and lately with Kim. It was the Puerto Rican way. Tom finally pulled her away, embarrassed for the both of us.
She’d heard about Sanita and our divorce and asked to see a picture of her. I pulled out a few. Big mistake. Sanita was tall and slender too, and pretty. Paola was putting on a small fashion show in Mayaguez in a week and was short one model for her clothes. Sanita fit the bill and now Paola had to meet her right away. She was in a fluster of excitement with rapid, barely coherent talk, pulling Willy by the arm, so we followed running up the hill to Tom’s truck, all crowding in the front seat, Willy on Paola’s lap, tightly squeezed in her arms. She kept kissing the hair on Willy’s head, breathing in, delighting in the scent, catching her breath for her next spiel about Sanita becoming a model. Tom and I could only wonder at this excitement as we drove there. To me a picture of schizophrenia came to mind
Besides being oversexed, most P.R. women are overemotional, subject to the most radical mood swings within seconds, from ecstatic to devastated in an instant, their hormones running wild to incredible degrees, floods of tears turning to wild screams of joy and then back again, minute by minute. They’re worse than soccer fans. The sit-coms they constantly watch only aggravate it. Large earthquakes on seismometers don’t register such highs and lows.
At Sanita’s the circus begins all over again. Paola hugs her as she opens the door, a total stranger, but not to Paola. She says she has great news, eyes her up and down, then puts her hands on Sanita’s hips, as if taking a measurement. Sanita stands there stunned.
Paola tells her she’s perfect. She has narrow yet shapely hips. She’s going to be in a fashion show very soon with many more to follow. Sanita is not unreceptive to all this adulation, slowly catching Paola’s excitement, as Paola sits her down on the couch and explains more details and tells her she has to come to her house right away to try on her new fashion wardrobe. A few pieces might need alterations for the tightest and sexiest fit.
Sanita, the model for a day.
They left in Sanita’s car, while Tom and I headed to the Calypso for a much needed beer, dragging Will along. He had Nonny to play with. We needed to switch gears, calm down from the proximity of all those female hormones let loose, perhaps pheromones, their intensity scalding our minds, which only a series of cold beers could cool down. I asked Tom if life with her was always like this. He told me sadly that it was, exhaustively so.
Tom and I had a fine afternoon at the bar. Will found Nonny in the tourist shop. He was still her little brother in her mind. So she took perfect care of him while we discussed women issues, cementing our friendship even more and looking forward to the Caguas expedition.
Paola and Sanita spent the next days together, and their show, though small, went well, with applause from the twenty or so in the audience, which greatly bolstered Sanita’s spirits and self-esteem. Paola was a good make-up artist and spent hours on Sanita’s face before the show, another perk to her ego. This might have blossomed into a beautiful partnership except that she met Mark two weeks later.
This was just another friendship, fraught with opportunities, nipped in the bud. She should have realized that to forfeit every friendship, however old or new, the respect of family, her entire past, for the infatuated love of one man, something is amiss. The trade-off is so imbalanced, it can’t be right, and is doomed to a disastrous end.
That’s the one reason they had to leave the island so quickly. Everyone in Rincon would only look upon her as an utter fool, and then reproach her for the insult of leaving them for him. She would be universally hated. Mark already was. She was his new inamorata, so they disappeared. They had to.
It was lucky for her that her two best friends, Laura and Joan, though slighted and ignored in their warnings, came back to help after the certain disaster unfolded. They gave the bruised, homeless, penniless waif, (and my son) the much needed shelter and consolation she needed.
Such friendships and a second chance is rare in life and needs to be acknowledged. I don’t know how Sanita merited these friends, but there was always something about her, indescribable, that attracted me to her from the start. I call it her beauty and the ‘pity’ factor throughout. But those are vague terms and I know they didn’t apply to these two level-headed women. There was something else in her that tied an allegiance when one got to know her. Charm has many elusive forms.
Paola’s creations were unique and beautiful to look at. Even more so when on her body or Sanita’s. The butterfly colors and styles ranged them from casual wear to evening dresses to something akin to lingerie and she shopped carefully for the cloth and sewed it up all by herself. Tom even rented her a window display case in San Juan where locals and tourists walked by each day. But few sold, though they caught many eyes and were gazed upon. They were modestly priced around forty dollars.
The problem was the fit. These were elegant and stylish pieces and would have looked stunning on many a nineteen year old. But they were adult wear and by thirty or forty, ninety percent of Puerto Rican women were no longer the size ‘one’, but closer to a ‘ten’ or ‘twenty’. It was their diet, (hardly a ‘diet’) and their genes. So Paola’s creations had little market. They weren’t designed to translate to larger woman, or else she never tried hard enough to make them so. She always fit them to herself, the one in a thousand ‘size one’.
I’m always amazed at fashion shows whenever I chance to glimpse one on T.V. I watch it for two minutes to see the pretty faces then flick it off disgusted at all the outlandish scraps on the tall, anorexic women traipsing along the walkway. I always with the same annoyed remark: “Who buys those things?” I strongly suspect nobody in their right mind does, except maybe skinny actresses or the models themselves, and most of them, I’m sure, are not in their right minds.
