A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son. Sergio Troncoso

      A LIVING MUSEUM OF LOVE

      Before Sarah or anyone else downstairs came up to Stanley’s bathroom, Carlos took the Cialis and jammed it in his pocket. No one would miss one bottle in a cabinet with maybe fifteen different prescriptions sitting beside them. Did Carlos have any clue what they’re for? No. He studied revolutionary movements in Mexico, not pharmaceuticals. Stanley’s daughters—Carlos’s wife Sarah and his sister-in-law Deborah—would soon throw away the lot, and Carlos didn’t care about the cufflinks, watches, and shotguns Deborah’s husband Sam coveted from his dead father-in-law. Okay, here I am, the Mexican stealing from my father-in-law. How crass is that? But Stan won’t need these anymore. Carlos alternately stared in the mirror and then turned to study the pills still left in the bottle he’d just stolen. Would he dare take one to see what would happen? He had already slipped two of the best old Playboys from Stanley’s musty stacks in the attic: Jenny McCarthy, October 1993, and Stephanie Seymour, March 1991.

      Three months ago, Stanley had died of a heart attack, and their house on the Merrimack River in Newburyport, Massachusetts would be up for sale in six weeks. Carlos thought about this grand old house, or at least how grand it had once seemed to him as a Harvard undergraduate from El Paso, Texas. Three decades ago. When he still wore more t-shirts and blue jeans than button-down Oxfords and khakis. When Sarah was this wicked-smart Jewish girl from the suburbs of Boston who loved canoeing and spoke Spanish perfectly, one of the many attributes Carlos’s father and mother would come to adore about her. Three decades ago. Before graduate school, their children Jonathan and Ethan, and New York’s Upper Westside. Before the “You-are-not-a-Jew” tomahawk to his chest by his future mother-in-law, Nancy, at the announcement of their betrothal. Nancy, Stanley’s wife from Waban. Nancy, who had too often blurted put-downs from her cushioned throne in her kitchen like a rugelach bursting with nuts and raisins. Nancy who now, with slight dementia, sat helplessly, her face lost in the flow of the river, and smiled distractedly at her daughters and son and even her Mexican-American son-in-law. Carlos even loved his mother-in-law, despite the memory of her old attacks against “the Spaniard” her daughter was marrying. Was it the dementia or simply time and Carlos’s stubbornness that had worn away his mother-in-law’s hatred and pettiness? Was it his good relationship with his father-in-law, the erudite oncologist and once-Conservative Jew from Manhattan, who appreciated that his son-in-law had scored a tenured job at Columbia University, his old alma mater? Who knows what changes the human heart. Who knows if it changes at all. Maybe the objects around it simply change too, so the heart-in-the-world is only an older heart lost in a different world. The question then becomes: Are we the same person as our younger selves, or a collection of different selves in new worlds, or something disquietly suspended between the past and the present?

      Carlos remembered the first week he had really met the Mondsheins in Newburyport, when Sarah and he were writing their senior theses, she on the literature of revolution in Latin America—Mariano Azuela, José Vasconcelos, Martín Luis Guzman—and he on the Mexican Revolution itself, a historian-in-the-making. He remembered Nancy’s “Spaniard” comment, which red-faced Sarah corrected in her offhanded way. Carlos also remembered making love to Sarah at the Mondscheins after a day of writing and work. In her old bedroom, while her parents slept downstairs, Sarah encouraging him, “As long as we keep quiet.” She had jammed towels at the bottom of her bedroom door. The college boyfriend, Carlos couldn’t believe her parents had allowed him to stay not just one night, but an entire week, to write their magnum opuses of their undergraduate years. He could only imagine his mother barging in with a cast-iron skillet to smash his head if ever he dared to bring a girl home and close his bedroom door in Ysleta. Or what his father would do, calling the father of the girl, the two joining together, with baseball bats, to teach these sinvergüenzas how to respect a Mexican home. Newburyport was like hitting the Mexican lottery for young Carlos: from the panoramic view of the Merrimack River in their living room with a black Steinway grand piano nobody played, to delicious Sarah every night, kind and sweet Sarah, Sarah whom he would marry years later. And now Newburyport, this house along the river, would be dismantled, sold, the Mondscheins but a memory. The patriarch was dead: Stanley Phillip Mondshein. He had indeed created different selves. Oncologist who had saved many lives and wouldn’t stop lecturing his children about the country’s healthcare problems. Intellectual who read David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, and Playboy. Jewish macho who was a revelation to his son-in-law from the United States-Mexico border. The Cialis jingled in Carlos’s pocket as he walked into Sarah’s old bedroom with its sunflowers-on-lime-green wallpaper and a human-size, stuffed green frog collapsed in one corner.

      “Ready to go?” he asked a few minutes later as Sarah entered the room. She wasn’t quite packed yet. They still had a long drive to New York City. Was she about to cry? Carlos jammed the Cialis deeper into a running sneaker. “What’s wrong?”

      “My dad…it’s so sad.”

      Carlos hugged her. He had always loved her scent, which wasn’t flowery or sweet, not like licorice or cinnamon, just Sarah’s musky smell. He kissed her on the lips, kissed her big blue eyes which he never tired of studying. Oddly, they were her father’s eyes. Sarah also had her mother’s ample hips. In Carlos’s mind, after three decades of being together, Sarah was still perfect, still the one he wanted, even if, if…well, she… said nothing, did nothing. This nothing in between them like a series of black walls nobody wanted to touch. Still love. But now with decades of nothingness to fill up the space in between… only walls he would occasionally make a half-hearted effort to breach…walls separating him from who he had once been on the border, for better or for worse. “Thank you for spending so much time here. You didn’t have to. Just one more weekend, and we’ll be done. Is that okay?”

      “Of course. I’ll be here. Where else am I going to be? You have any more boxes that need to go to the Dumpster? Anything else for the Highlander? I think we could get one or two more boxes in the back underneath your mother’s wooden bench. There’s still room.”

      “I got a text from Jonathan. He said he was going out with some friends tonight,” she said, wrapping her arms around her husband. For years, Sarah had relished losing herself in him. Carlos missed these impromptu hugs so much.

      “On a school night? Doesn’t he have a term paper due this week?” Carlos pulled away, too tense to hold her anymore.

      “Please don’t yell at him. Please, Carlos. He’s doing fine.”

      “Is that good enough for you? That’s the reason Ethan doesn’t drive, the reason Jonathan will be lucky to get into Fordham in three years. You don’t push them. You cover for them. I was driving at thirteen—”

      “’Cause your father needed someone else to haul cinderblocks, I know.”

      “Why are you interrupting me? Don’t interrupt me. Am I wrong? Ethan should’ve gone twice to the driving school this weekend. What’s his excuse this time? You let him off the hook. I would’ve forced him to practice with me if we were in New York. Saturday and Sunday. He’s a smart kid, at least he’s got that, but you don’t learn to drive by thinking about it. You gotta get your ass behind the wheel.”

      “Carlos, please. Let’s talk about it on the way home, okay. Deborah’s choosing what Oriental rugs she wants, and what’s left will be mine. Maybe one more box after that. Then we can go.”

      “Deborah’s choosing ‘her rugs’? I thought you were going to divide them. Even. Please, don’t be a dupe.”

      “I got the china I wanted. Dad’s paintings. You want anything else? Just shove it in the car. Please. Mom doesn’t want much