BORGES

The evening has turned rather sexy—sipping red wine beneath crystal chandeliers has led to a limousine ride back to George’s place in Old Town. The townhouse is a bachelor’s pad, but a nicer, older, wiser bachelor pad. I run my hand along the back of the sofa, feeling the skin, caressing the supple slink of unborn calves. The seat fits like a vintage hermes glove. George walks over with three books in his hand and places them in my lap. “For you,” he says, “written by friends. They’re writers just like you.”  I peer down at the covers—Christopher Dickey, Christopher Buckley and Christina Garcia. I nod behind a glass goblet and choke back despair. Of course, just like me.

            George flips through the pages and fingers the passages where he is mentioned, pointing here and here. This is my kind of foreplay.

My eyes dart around his study taking in pictures of movie stars and baseball players, which I know are famous by the people swarmed to their sides, trying to reach in for autographs. There is one sepia-grained photo with two women wearing George’s dark Cuban eyes and his boyish grin. “My mother and grandmother,” he says smiling and filling his brows with spiced memories. And right next to that photo, next to the women dicing onions in the kitchen, hangs a picture of George, the hem of his dark suit picked up in the wind, exposing a silver lining as shiny as a wet stingray. There he is, George, standing next to Fidel Castro. I feel small. And they are all watching us, abuelita y mama and DiMaggio and Fidel, all watching to see how I will respond to George’s next move. He seems not to notice, his eyes cast off to the side, staring at the most important objects in the room—the floating fish pinned to the wall.

Before George and I ever went on a date, we left each other numerous voice mails in a never-ending game of phone tag. We’d make calls from mysterious locations, never wanting to be discovered as available or, god forbid, at home alone. George left so many phone messages that I couldn’t help but dream of him long before our romance. I dreamt that we were standing in the labyrinth of an open-air market, a maze full of tables with fresh cut sunflowers and clusters of blue and purple hydrangea and rows of red and yellow peppers twisted into pungent wreaths. We were surrounded in a sky full of fish that floated past us, like clouds, skimming mid-air. You could poke at them like you would a stray bubble. Pop. I woke and left George a message about the dream and the whole business of the fish.

And here we are, in his house, where he has sculptures of large and small fish floating on the walls. This amazes George, like I’ve secretly snuck inside on some previous night or more prophetically, that we are meant to be together. I stare at the curled metal fins, sipping my wine, and walk away from their silly mouths and over to the wall of bookshelves. Tall. Packed. Cherry that’s darkened with age. One of the spines catches my eye. I run my fingers across the vertical bumps of the author’s name. BORGES, all in caps. I decide not to pull the book from the shelf. I fear I might be careless or worse yet I’ll pull it out and a piece of paper or a receipt or an old photo will fall out and try and tell me something I don’t want to know. This has happened once before. My boyfriend secretly sends another woman a dozen purple roses and a note about giving things another go. I leave the book in its tuck and drop my hand and settle for saying something clever, “Borges. Ooh, I love Borges.” 

George says, “I met him.” 

I flip around and my spine stiffens. “You met him?” My pupils crack with the siss-boom-aahhs of firework confetti.

“I interviewed him, once. He was fairly old and terribly blind.”

 I picture George sitting on the edge of an ottoman scribbling in a small reporter’s notebook, across from Borges, who I seat in an overstuffed chair with ripped gold brocade. The wide tips of palm leaves hang high over their heads and everything smells like crusted salt and cinnamon.

“Did you wear a yellow shirt because he liked the color. I think he could still see yellow, yes, that’s it, he could see the color of tigers and butter,” I say.

 George laughs and I want to rub silly putty across his lips and stretch out what he and Borges had to say to each other. I want to copy the words directly into my ear and make my forked tongue part of the secret garden, long gone and disappeared. George leans in closer and says, “He asked if he could touch my face.”

“Did you let him?”

“Of course,” he says. I can feel the hook in my mouth, tugging, ready to yank me up on the wall next to George’s sculptures. Borges is exceptional bait. I clasp George’s hands and raise them up to my neck.

“Show me. Show me what he did to you.”  I close my eyes and feel warm, cigar-thick fingers, run up my chin, up my forehead, and then back down again. I open my eyes and tell George to close his. “You should remember what it feels like,” I say. I place my hands near his mouth and trace with tippy-fingers and then I hold the entirety of his face between my hands, closing in like a baseball mitt. I draw him closer to me, his eyes shut tight, my eyes wide open, and my lips touch his mouth and I watch. I watch myself taste the man who met Borges, and all the while, I’m thinking, George, solo un besso, just one kiss away.