Heartfelt Affectations

By Gabriel Silva de Anda

The novel is three intertwined stories with one central character, the narrator, Christian Verdugo.

Christian Verdugo is a twenty-three year old male of Mexican American descent.

Story One deals with Christian and his relationship to two friends, Ezer Kadosh and Miel Mishima, both aged 23. They have been friends since high school. This story deals with each of the characters as they develop and seek to gain independence from each others influence. In the course of the story, Ezer will embark on a commercially lucrative career as a painter/artist, and he will come out of the gay closet, declaring his interest in Christian, who is not gay. This, of course, causes problems. Miel is a musician with his own band, and he is also on a path of self-discovery that includes his band, his art, his love of a woman five years his senior, and his experimentation with drugs.

Story Two deals with Christians broken heart over a girl named Maribeth who has left the country and fallen in love with someone else. Christian, in an evolving effort to ease his heartache, will have an affair with an art school teacher, a woman 14 years his senior, known both to him and Maribeth. This affair will prove to be an instructive, enlightening adventure for Christian.

Story Three deals with Christians job working for a crazy and irresponsible attorney, Gordon Hamilton, who is stealing money from his clients, and living the life of sybaritic excess. Gordons irresponsibility will cause a lot of authority to be delegated to Christian, a precocious young man growing up quickly through circumstance. Gordon will end up stealing from the wrong client, a Mexican Mafia hitman and criminal defendant, which will result in Gordons disappearance and probable but unconfirmed execution. In a bizarre twist, this hit man, Oscar Godoy, will take a paternal and professional interest in Christian, and offer him a job. A job doing what, Christian can only guess.

These three stories will run simultaneously and meld at the novels end when Christian escapes to Mexico to reassess the direction of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 26, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462811953

Gabriel Silva de Anda

Gabriel S. de Anda, a practicing attorney as well as a writer, lives in Los Angeles, California. His stories have appeared in Gordon Linzners New York magazine Space and Time, and Chris Reeds British magazine, Backbrain Recluse. He has also published poetry in The Best Chicano Literature 1986, edited by, among others, Mario Vargas Llosa. Mr. de Anda is the author of the science fiction novel, Scissors, Rock and Paper Doll, and is currently working on a novel about two generations of a Latino family, spanning their origins in early 1900s Mexico, and following them into post-millennium Los Angeles, California.

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Copyright © 2002 by Gabriel S. de Anda.

ISBN:      Softcover        978-1-4010-3590-7

                eBook             978-1-4628-1195-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/25/2017

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Contents

BOOK ONE

ONE: ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES

TWO: NEXT STOP: IXPEJO

THREE: SHY KNEES

FOUR: THE KISS

FIVE: A DAY IN THE LIFE

SIX: THE OTHER CHEEK

SEVEN: VENTURA HIGHWAY ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON

EIGHT: PURPOSEFUL STRANGERS

NINE: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

TEN: PAPER CUT

ELEVEN: WAITING FOR GODOY

TWELVE: SUCH SWEET SORROW

BOOK TWO

THIRTEEN: SOMETHING ELSE

FOURTEEN: THE FASCIST SCHOOL OF RADICALIZED & CATHARTIC INEXPERIENCE

FIFTEEN: THE DEVIL KNOWS MORE

SIXTEEN: THE OTHER PLANET

For the two now-absent musketeers, H. and D., and the

memory of winter days in Sherman Oaks Park, eating sardines,

French bread and cheese, and the pungent whorls of their

burning Camels mingling with dreams of a future that always

included the three of us.

BOOK ONE

The road to hell is paved with stylish shoes.

Gurdjieff

ONE

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES

"And furthermore, Ezer Kadosh summarized in a sneering voice, if such a God does exist, then I look forward to meeting him someday, so that I can spit in his face and let him know exactly how I feel."

There was a momentary lull in the diner’s outdoor patio, and even the Sunday traffic outside appeared to hesitate, as if Ezer’s words had signaled a red light. Miel Mishima alternated glances between Ezer and myself, glances of his peculiar, mazy shivering delight. Miel fed off Ezer’s iconoclastic opinions, his imprecise but ponderous-sounding and poetry-soaked slant on things.

Ezer’s large, beautiful eyes narrowed with a mixture of heartfelt anger and a mocking, self-conscious adolescent triumph. He took a defiant gulp of his steaming coffee, his eyes glazing with the minor pain that must have greeted his tongue, and stubbed out his Lucky Strike with the studied carelessness that Miel and I’d come to envy. He bit his lower lip and ran a large, finely sculpted but paint-speckled hand through the unruly black forest of his poet’s mane. Ezer favored us with his magician’s smile, pleased with his performance and with the reactions of his apprentices.

I hung my head but peered surreptitiously at the neighboring tables, expecting dark, reproving stares, but the few patrons seemed either undisturbed or unconcerned with the histrionics of fat-mouthed, irreverent know-it-alls. It seemed to me that such aloofness was deliberate but disguised disdain, for surely Ezer’s pronouncement had not gone unheard. Perhaps as little as six months back I would have cringed with the apprehension that a lightning bolt (or some post modern analogue of one: after all, God worked in mysterious ways) might have descended to consume us—Ezer for his blasphemy, Miel for his approval, and myself for allowing it to stand unchallenged.

I no longer believed in such directness in matters of divine retribution. But, accustomed as I’d become to Ezer’s vulgar atheism, he nonetheless made me feel uncomfortable. It always taxed my powers of self-deception and rationalization to justify Ezer’s friendship with my conservative, Seventh Day Adventist’s upbringing.

There was no truer proof of my love for him.

Don’t look so worried, boychik, said Ezer. "Just a bad joke, after all. There is no God, so there’s no celestial face for me to spit into, nor divine right hand to swat me down."

My mind was pretzeled and tired. I was momentarily unsure of the specifics of what we’d been arguing about, but the crux of it was that I believed in God, and Ezer did not. His position was the antipode of mine, but there was an irresistibly sinewy logic in his posturings that I found alluring in a forbidden kind of way, much as in the manner we find sex spicier for its prurient, pornographic guise. This worried me more than the actual things he said.

Come on, don’t take it so seriously, Chris. His gentle smile belied his injunction against seriousness. "But just think of it for a moment, step aside from all you’ve been taught, and ask yourself: what if there is no God? Might it not be that your faith in the goodness of something divine is no different than your unshakable faith in your mother’s heaven-sent cooking? I mean, that’s what you were raised on—right?—and now you measure all fried eggs by your mama’s breakfast pan."

I wasn’t sure why, but I found the image obscene, and Miel’s cackle only reinforced that perception.

If there were no God, piped in Miel, then all meals would be possible.

Exactly.

To his face I would argue my case, but privately I found Ezer’s words more than persuasive, and this bothered me most of all. It seemed that with the mere passage of time, the force of each old argument that Ezer had presented gained depth and resonance, and my beliefs often seemed tissue-thin and tenuous. The fact that I could not defend my beliefs in an objective and intelligently articulated way angered me. I wasn’t sure if it was that my philosophy was being challenged and eroded or because I looked like a losing chess contestant, a game which favors losers even less than most.

It’s a matter of faith, I unwisely tried again, forwarding the argument that had precipitated it all. You either believe or you don’t.

But what is the source of your faith, Chris? A pastiche of tiny outdated print on onionskin, leather-bound and presumed sacred, written by a bunch of fasting diabetic visionaries and gathered up by a gang of ecclesiastical apologists?

That’s a mouthful. No, Ezer. Nature itself, I said, thinking myself not merely clever but logical. The world is just too filled with the marvelous for me to believe that it was all accidental. There’s design in everything, whether it’s the pattern of a snowflake or the geometry of a single orchid. And Jesus, just look at the architecture of the human body! Everything so carefully balanced, synchronized and timed in a rapturous bud of bone, flesh and spirit. It can’t have been just accidental luck. What are the odds against such an accident?

I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the science fiction writer.

A million to one, I said for lack of a published, remembered number. More, probably.

Okay. A billion to one, said Ezer. "But think about it. If the odds are a billion to one that life on this one planet, in this sector of an unimaginably huge universe should happen just so, well then, stand by your stats, goddamn it. What if we are that weird, improbable manifestation of the one-in-a-billion? We are that one. What would your math tell you then?"

I shook my head. I saw the sense in what he said, but still would not give in, could not give in.

Hey, he said, I give up. What’s the sense of discussion unless there’s a point at which you say, ‘Okay, I see what you’re saying, yes, I’ll cross over the line because of the perfectly good reasons you’ve given. By intelligent discussion.’ He took another sip of coffee. That’s what’s wrong with faith. It suspends the function of the brain. I mean, if you told me that last night you got a phone call from Jesus himself, what could I say? How would I refute such an improbable thing or argue with it?

You can’t argue with it.

"That’s the problem."

Ezer smiled resignedly and teased two cigarettes from his short packet. Miel took one, and Ezer held one out toward me. They smelled of earth and raisins, rich, familiar and oddly comforting, although with my Battle Creek upbringing, they were slightly threatening at the same time.

I shook my head and smiled with impatient and nervous amusement. We’d been through this before. It was our casual ritual. "You know I don’t smoke, Ezer."

Ezer nodded, took the cigarette he’d offered me and lipped it. As he lit first Miel’s, then his own, it danced with each word, a glowing semaphore: Well, you never know. Someday you might say yes. He shrugged, held the cigarette with a painter’s dirty hand, and spat out a fleck of tobacco. Just being polite.

I found poetry and beauty, albeit a dark, skewered Baudelarian beauty, in Ezer’s heretical approach to the world. I could see now that the puritanical bleachings of my church had inculcated an austere view of the world in me. Indeed, for the longest time I’d considered myself the most fortunate of mortals. Imagine: me, born in the circle of the One True faith. I was one of the saved.

How lucky.

But although I continued to resist Ezer’s and Miel’s sharp but loving attacks with continued aplomb, increasingly I succeeded in seeing myself through their eyes, and wasn’t sure I liked the picture.

Do you know why I love you? asked Ezer. He coughed, blue smoke swirling away with the traffic-induced breezes. It’s because you actually believe in angels.

He had me there.

I didn’t believe in the Hallmark refrigerator-magnet angels with flowing plastic robes and large, muscularly feathered wings the colors of sunset cumulus (although I had a few which Maribeth had given to me, along with some lushly illustrated votive candles). And while I loved Michelangelo and delighted in his fat, pink corpulent child-angels, cherubim and innocent-faced puti, they were after all was said and done nothing more than the charming icons of an age which was, while more poetic than ours, less enlightened. A romantic at heart, I even had a soft spot for the pint-sized Kindergarten Valentine angels with their bows and arrows, piercing hearts with Eros’ sharply tipped affections.

But the fact remained: at the age of twenty-three, I still believed in angels, in agents of God.

Ezer smiled crookedly and put his hand on my shoulder. Look at the streets, my starry-eyed child, he said, pointing a finger toward the crowded lanes. The sun was just beginning to set, and the boulevard neon began its blink under the highway halogens and the dreamy, time-exposure streaks of traffic light. A sidewalk grille across the street vented contorting plumes of white vapor, wreathing passing pedestrians in a Bladerunner-like tableaux, early winter-noir in late July. The world and its riches, all of its mysteries: these are yours, if you just acknowledge that I, and not God, am the Master of this World.

Miel giggled and forked the last of his dinner pancakes into his mouth. He loved it when Ezer played Lucifer to my Jesus of Nazareth, a role forced upon me by their love of games and mischief. I contrived a conspiratorial smile but knew I was failing. Whenever I was the butt of their mildly vicious frivolity I grew more than a little unsettled. In earlier years I would have gone to the restroom only to escape out the back way, like a rejected lover, but I’d grown accustomed enough to their ways.

Don’t be afraid, continued Ezer in a sibilant, intentionally mincing voice, narrowing his eyes. "If you were to run out there into the snarling traffic, the Lord would instantly send a cadre of his angels to protect you, to save you. You, yes, you, God’s favorite."

Come on.

"No, no, really Christian. Haven’t you been out there in the desert long enough? It’s time to come home, don’t you think? Break your fast, admit your appetites; don’t be ashamed of your hunger. He picked up Miel’s syrup-streaked dish and held it in one hand like a tent preacher fisting a bible, the other hand over his heart. Confess your sins t’Gawd, and he will command—Ah say, coe-mand—the empty plates transformed into fishes and loaves."

How ’bout pancakes for the multitudes? suggested Miel.

Okay guys, I protested, but even I was laughing.

Miel sighed, clapped his hands, and stood up. I don’t think a legion of angels would help me if I don’t get home soon, he said, shaking his head and glancing at the clock on the wall. He pulled a few soiled and crumpled dollar bills from a pocket and set them on the table.

What’s the story with the mountain pilgrimage? asked Ezer casually. Two weeks, right?

No. It’s changed. Again, said Miel. We go at the beginning of September. Everybody’s schedule, you know? He shrugged apologetically. You going to go this year?

Ezer looked at me, but continued speaking to Miel. I think so. He bit his lower lip. Who else is going?

Randy, Jeff, D’artagnon, Chip. Weber, Fredrickson and Jessie. Maybe Castro. Miel gave me his inscrutable Oriental, thin-lipped smile. Still standing and buttoning up his vest, he asked, And you, Christian? How about it? A week in the mountains.

I shook my head. I don’t know.

Don’t know what you’re missing. You want to commune with God, this is the place, man. It’s beautiful.

Maybe. I’ll have to check with work.

Okay. And Saturday? You guys can make it, right?

"The Other Cheek, right? What time exactly do you play?"

Eight-thirty. You’re on the guest list, so you don’t have to pay.

Righteous. We’ll be there.

All right. Good night, Judas Iscariot.

Good night, Irene.

See ya later, Miel.

Good night, Christ Killer.

Three voices warbled Right right right, making it sound like Rot rot rot.

*     *     *

I loved Miel, but at that moment wasn’t sad to see him leave. We had fun, the three of us, more often than not, but our friendship had underscored for me the instability of odd numbers. Everyone has insecurities, their own personal demons that aren’t always—in fact, rarely—inscribed on the features of our face. Soft spots usually hidden by the clothes we wear, by the colorful patterned socks on our feet. And I had (at least) two Achilles’ Heels to deal with: my religious upbringing, or rather my continued seriousness over it; and the sloppy, carpet-burning romantic obsessiveness I had exhibited in dealing with Maribeth.

No doubt Miel had his phantoms in the closet, but I was unaware of them. He seemed balanced and whole in his pop-rock-stoner sort of way. Always merry and bright, as Henry Miller would say, a happy rock.

What Ezer’s weak spot was I couldn’t say. Whatever it was, I suspected that it was wrapped up in his loneliness, a sense of disassociation that coalesced around a poetic, literary talent for creating enchantingly bizarre paintings and sharp, quirky poems. It made him offbeat and not a little hostile. It was odd, for he was a tall, darkly handsome fellow, subject to a popularity in high school which he either disdained or twisted to his own, petty, narrow, jokester’s ends. He fell into a type which he would have denied, but it was true, he wanted to be the tortured, bohemian artist, culling beauties from the recyclable garbage of everyday life. He even wore, for most of the year, a dove-gray gabardine jacket that, along with the wild black shock of his hair, made him look like a cross between Federico Garcia Lorca and Columbo: dark, sexy, unkempt, a little dangerous. His favorite writers were Rupert Brooke, Lautremont and Samuel R. Delany. It was Ezer who’d turned me onto Stars In My Pocket, Like Grains of Sand. He wanted to be a painter and a poet, and it seemed reasonable to me that he should earn a living that way, he was that talented.

It made him happy that Miel and I, who had been friends since kindergarten, had become a group of three. Ezer was the nucleus of this troika, and he enjoyed the role. He was sort of the Trotsky of our circle, our theorist, explaining us to ourselves. He was clever, a conversationalist, and he led our line of vision into interesting quarters.

And it was plain that Ezer had grown dependent on the attention we gave him. It made him possessive with Miel and I as against the rest of the world. It hadn’t been a real problem, not yet, and as a matter of fact, I enjoyed the curious bond, the petite jealousies. He’d never said catty things about Maribeth, but by his oblique philosophizing and general jawboning, I knew what he’d thought, then and now, and it was something Miel lightly concurred with. We were a small school of fish that had to keep in loose but constant formation, and we liked it that way. We were friends.

Alone, Ezer was less the dark, histrionic primadonna. With an audience of more than one, he was a child trying to impress; he tried to be a literary Pope of Chaos. But one-on-one, he played the part of the wicked but loving mentor, Lestat to Anne Rice’s Louis. Miel and I were no doubt drawn to him for similar reasons: launched off the cusp of adolescence when we had met him, we were hungry for a world of wonder, for the new, the different, the wild, and Ezer was all of these things to us. A mysterious poet and a powerfully evocative artist of the offbeat and the twisty, he appealed to the inarticulate and inchoate bohemian stirring within us. Miel played guitar and wrote songs for a band he was in, Ultra Vires; and I wanted to be a science fiction novelist. It was our common love of poetry which had drawn the three of us together in high school and beyond.

We thought of ourselves as serious artists.

Get a chance to read my story yet? I asked, pushing the dishes Miel had abandoned out of the way. I was finally working on a first novel with the working title of A Slice of Now, A Dish of Then, but I had a few separate short stories that I was still polishing. The short story I’d given to Ezer was also science fiction, a piece called Local Color. I was planning to submit to a small press magazine in New York which had already published three others. I was waiting on Ezer’s edits and suggestions, which, while I didn’t always use, I always valued.

Almost finished. He nodded and flagged our waitress down; he ordered more java, and I took a bit more hot water for my abused chamomile teabag.

It’s pretty quirky, I like that. And the style’s very lyrical. He flashed me his you’re-the-center-of-my-universe smile, and I forgave all his jibes. "Listen, Chris. Has it occurred to you that as an SDA, as a member of the Saved, and a person with the date of the Second Coming penciled in his daytimer, that the future you detail in your sci-fi stories isn’t going to come about? I mean, if Christ is coming back, what’s all this about cities in the sky and the colonization of other worlds, about time travel and sentient androids and meetings with exquisitely weird aliens? Star Wars, you must realize, is the futuristic equivalent of a science fictional Tower of Babel. It’s not gonna happen."

If he meant that I was tempting my allegiance to God with false idols, well, it was something that I’d thought of before, and it did make sense, which was precisely why I chose not to dwell on it. At the age of nine or ten I’d been fanatically enamored of anything science fiction. But when I had turned thirteen, I’d thrown my whole collection of paperbacks and comics away for just the reason Ezer had mentioned. I had decided, at that time, to become a pastor of my church, to dedicate my life, body and soul, to Christ.

It was a flirtation, which had only lasted four years or so before the fever broke, but I was to carry the scars for life. And like a friend that has love and patience in her heart, science fiction was waiting for me outside the prison gates.

Science fiction, however, as I wrote and loved it was literary entertainment, not predictive art. I’d been raised on Walt Disney and the Bible, and SF was an extension of my infatuation with the poetic and the wondrous. Ezer was right, there was something blasphemous about the literary field I loved and labored in. And religiously speaking, although I may have been released from its prison, I was still on parole.

Without waiting for an answer, Ezer withdrew the point of his sword and smiled. Are you sure you don’t want a cigarette?

I gave him an amused smile. I’m sure. Did you bring your poem? I asked, pulling one of mine out from the inner pocket of my Aardvark-bought suit jacket.

Yeah.

Great.

He began unfolding the sheet of legal-sized paper to read it aloud, which was one of the things we did at these coffee shops.

Listen, Ezer. Can I take it with me? I gotta go too.

Ezer looked stony for a moment, robbed of an opportunity.

I’ve got to get up early tomorrow, you know. Some of us have to work for a living?

Yeah, I know. And other people like us, we gotta dance. Oriana? he asked, and I caught the note of jealousy in his voice. I also caught a trace of his concern for the current state of my heart. It only made me love him more.

Yeah. She’s taking me out to the phosphorescent tides. I looked away. I haven’t seen her in two weeks, I exaggerated.

His eyes arched with interest. I thought you had to get up early? he said churlishly.

I shrugged my shoulders and inclined my head five degrees to my right. Well, yeah. I do.

He nodded dubiously. Heard from Maribeth?

Even after her two-and-one-half months’ absence, a fluttering in my chest made me feel dissolutely introspective and melancholy. I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, and looked down at my folded hands.

Poor Christian. If God don’t kill you, love will.

His smile was probative, and if I’d been less romance-befuddled I would have thanked the stars above for the great varieties of love, and for the company of friends acquainted with them. Miel, Ezer, Oriana. I felt rich, even though the person who I most wanted on my list of friends wasn’t even in the country.

Ezer’s friendly competition kept me writing on the numerous occasions when I would have rather sulked or simply watched TV, an effective way of trying to reach the zen state of no-mind. (It makes me smile when I think about it. Zen monks must have led some really crazy lives to suddenly enter the profession of forgetting full-time.)

Okay, he said. Tomorrow, then. I’ll have finished your story by then.

Sounds right.

He rubbed the black sandpaper of his jaw, then nodded. "We’ll go to Onyx Sequel?"

Yeah. I’ll pick you up.

Bring me your first chapter too, he said

He pocketed his smokes and pulled out some money. Ezer flashed teeth and winked. Rot rot rot, he said in a froggy rasp. It was our signature sign-off, a line from Kubrick’s version of A Clockwork Orange.

I gave the thumbs up sign. Rot rot rot.

TWO

NEXT STOP: IXPEJO

The waves crashed languidly, milking a delightfully red-speckled green luminescence from black night Pacific waters.

It’s bacterial life which glows with the action of the churning sea, explained Oriana Mandello. Lovely, isn’t it?

Yeah. It is. I’d never heard of phosphorescent tides until this week.

We were quiet for a while, sitting on a large, pink blanket that looked blue in the darkness. I was hobbled in a lazy, half-lotus; Oriana sat gently rocking, hugging her knees to her chest. The air stirred by the deep currents was summer warm, even at 9:00 P.M. I watched her for a long moment.

She turned abruptly, catching my stare. There must have been something of the lovesick wastrel on my face, for she lowered her chin, offering a shy smile that resolved into a bold peel of laughter. Oriana could be subtle, though she was anything but shy. Her face was chiseled, large deep-set eyes of blue with black irises so large people often thought she was on drugs.

This reminds you of something, I said.

You have acute vision, my little backsliding minister of God. She reached over and brushed away sand that had somehow made it onto my cheek. Sighing, she turned back to the imperceptible ocean horizon. It makes me think of Ariel. She ran short-nailed, long-fingered hands through the short, loose, dirty gold curls of her Neapolitan hair. The first time we made love, we were here.

I’d known Oriana’s second husband when they’d both been members of my church. Ariel Paz had been the director of our choir, of which I was one of three tenors. Oriana was the thirty-year-old choir director’s wife we teenagers watched surreptiously with glassy, adolescent eyes.

Ariel and Oriana had been married for a little over a year when it was rumored that she’d cuckolded him. I remember my parents talking about it, in the same whispers that the rest of the congregation fluttered through the pews. I was sixteen at the time. What I remember most was that although there was general disapproval of her, the consensus seemed to be that Ariel was the fool, a fool in love who did not know how to love, a man to be pitied. No doubt Oriana’s quirky beauty and her generally warm, solicitous, Christian demeanor deflected any truly ugly sentiments anyone might feel onto her husband, who had the reputation for being slow to act. After a brief period of time during which Oriana had stopped showing up at the Saturday sermons, they reconciled.

This happened three times in all before Ariel finally couldn’t take anymore, and filed for divorce. I felt very sorry for him then, but not as much as two years later when he married the pastor’s daughter, an incredibly good-natured, and just as incredibly ugly, woman. The theory, we safely assumed, was that Ariel figured his new wife would never, ever leave him, cuckold him, or embarrass him in any way. What he didn’t figure on was that no one would ever make him happy again. Oriana’s absence had seeped into his soul on the cellular level, and his second wife’s ugliness worked like an enzyme activating the memories of a time when he thought he might have been whole and content. He’d confided in the wrong person (or right person, from a gossiper’s p.o.v.) that he missed Oriana, that he now wished he hadn’t been so hasty (we laughed at that) in dismissing her.

He grew more taciturn and gloomy, packed an extra fifty pounds onto his slight, five-foot-eight-inch frame, then moved to Mexico City, along with his rebound, tamper-proof bride, and became nothing more than another story occasionally recalled.

Some six years later, when I had been courting Maribeth, the only friend she’d ever introduced me to was a fifteen-year-old schoolmate. Frieda Iacona was a thin cipher of a waif with a nondescript face. At first I didn’t understand their friendship, for Frieda seemed as shallow as Maribeth was deep and literate, despite her mere eighteen years. But Maribeth was in love with me, and she wanted to show me off. She’d invited me to dinner at Frieda’s house, telling me to bring my guitar along. She loved my voice.

When I arrived, guitar case in hand, at the front door of a small house along one of the walks in Venice, Oriana Mandello answered the door.

Christian Verdugo, she said. My, how you’ve grown. How are your parents? Your sister?

It was a surprise, to say the least. I was flattered that she’d remembered a minor someone whom she’d never spoken to, and we exchanged pieces of our history throughout the evening, but the moment, after all, belonged to the girl of my dreams, Maribeth. We ate a linguine with blackened salmon dish, which Oriana had prepared, laughed a lot, and Oriana conversed quite a bit while her daughter pretty much played the shy spectator. It was later when I serenaded Maribeth and Frieda in the living room, where Oriana joined us, that I began to understand the situation. Maribeth was friends with Oriana, not Frieda. The daughter was merely the ostensible ticket into this warm, entertaining home.

Maribeth wanted to be an artist, and she had a talent noticed and nurtured by Oriana. This woman twice Maribeth’s age was a high school art teacher, a painter in her own right as well as a creative artisan of jewelry. No doubt Oriana felt an attraction for Maribeth’s nascent but quite real sensitivities, in much the same manner as I was. Maribeth was no ordinary eighteen-year-old.

Frieda was one of two children from Oriana’s first marriage; the fifteen-year-old son being out at the home of a friend that evening. I marveled at the synchronicity and smallness of this complex and interesting world, but I was too much in love with Maribeth to make more out of it than an evening pleasantly spent. Afterwards, I put my guitar in its case, shook hands and kissed cheeks, and Maribeth walked me to my car, where we fogged up the windows. She stayed that night at the Venice house on Amoroso Place, Oriana’s house. I briefly wondered if it was the inspiration for Jim Morrison’s Love Street, then drove home in an amorous haze.

Oriana found me interesting, Maribeth later told me, she approved of me. She, too, was surprised at the size of the world, at the fact that her adolescent friend was dating someone she’d known of in a previous, but not too far removed, life. Maribeth had been showing off Oriana to me as much as she’d been showing me off to Oriana.

Two weeks after Maribeth