Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

was like I could feel the winged soul of my hand weightlessly lifting toward her while my corporeal hand hung at my side at the end of a meat hook.

Marianne is the oldest of four sisters and one little brother. Her father seemed to be some kind of recluse though apparently there was nothing wrong with him physically. But it was Mrs. Lucas who especially watched over her children, and in these times, when any fifteen-year-old girl could so easily fall into miscreancy, she had to be extra hawkeyed with Marianne, who had no older sister to guide her. Mrs. Lucas, blue eyes soft with worry that could turn to stone, worked as a secretary for a medical technology business in the part of our town built over filled-in Charles River wetlands, now known as the Industrial Zone. I’d only glimpsed Mr. Lucas once, while standing at their front door one Saturday afternoon waiting for Marianne to come down their staircase after she’d run back up to her bedroom to get something. Looking down the hallway into the kitchen I saw a slender, angular man in a sweatshirt with sleeves rolled up over thin forearms, holding a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, jutting chin and longish nose, I remember thinking he looked Egyptian, though I knew his ancestry was Portuguese. When I waved and called a greeting, he slightly lifted a hand and stepped out of view. Lana Gatto had told me that Mr. Lucas was a veterinarian who’d lost his license to practice, she said she’d kill me if I let Marianne know that I knew. Did Mr. Lucas put down the wrong dog or cat? They lived in an old three-story house with a porch out front on McIntosh Avenue, which ran behind the high school. Out on the porch that evening I could hear one of the younger sisters practicing her clarinet upstairs.

Maybe I’m mistaken, and Marianne didn’t actually say that her mother was worried about us hanging out so much, maybe my memory is tricking me with a fictionalizing finger on the scale. But I can hardly ask Marianne tonight, at our first reunion in over thirty years: Remember when your mother said that Jews are sexual perverts? Do you think the reason she said that was because she was worried that soon we were going to be fucking? What if she answered: But my mother knew I was never interested in fucking you, Frank.

Of course, I want it to be true that Marianne’s mother did say that because she was worried about her daughter falling in love with me, not to express a literary opinion about Portnoy’s Complaint. It must have been obvious to her that I was in love with Marianne. Whatever lay behind Mrs. Lucas’s words, they told me that Marianne and her mother spoke about me, and that night out on her porch, that made me happy. Had I taken that thought a step further, I would have realized they only spoke about me because Mrs. Lucas was opposed to Marianne becoming my girlfriend no matter what. I hadn’t realized yet that Marianne wasn’t the type to defy her mother, at least not to go out with me, as she would a few months later with Ian Brown.

Autumn leaves were piled in the corners of the Lucas’s porch and lay over the small front lawn. A classic autumn in New England night, cold, smoky smell in the air, glowing bursts of yellow and orange leaves in the streetlights, every tree a giant Gustav Klimt dress hung from a line running the length of the avenue, a zesty, gleaming night imprinting itself on memory even as it was happening, you’ll never forget this conversation out on Marianne’s porch, Frankie Gee, or these feelings, so weird, beautiful, and crippled. Does Marianne still remember?

There must be something I could have said that night, bold or funny, to turn things my way. Why couldn’t I have at least joked: Hey, I’m only half a sex pervert, Marianne, and half of that pastrami sandwich is yours if you want it!

Toward the end of that walk from the Congress Street Bridge to the hotel, it feels like the temperature has dropped every block. Three hours, nearly, until I have to be at the radio station. I go into the bar off the hotel lobby and order a bowl of chili and a glass of red wine before even bringing my carry-on suitcase, knapsack, and the tin of French butter cookies up to my room. Gisela always had a thing for those cotton hotel room slippers you can take home, and whenever Gisela had a thing for anything, it was obsessive, so that now I always notice those slippers as if she’s been here just before me and left them behind.

It was me who wrecked our relationship, but I don’t think too many mortals, in love with Gisela, could have avoided committing a mistake even less reprehensible than mine that she wouldn’t have forgiven anyway. If there were a perfect man for her, I used to wonder, what would he be like?

We had so much in common, and maybe it was one of my mistakes to believe it was good to have those particular things in common. She also had an extremely fucked-up relationship with her father. When Lazaro Palacios, up-from-the-bottom, high-priced Mexico City criminal defense lawyer, found out from a spying older daughter that his fourteen-year-old youngest daughter was apparently having sex with her boyfriend, the drummer in a Nezahualcóyotl punk band, he took her out to their garage, stripped her naked, and flailed at her with a bullwhip while she huddled on the cement floor determined not to cry. Ever since, she’d refused to acknowledge him as her father or to refer to him by any name other than Señor Palacios. Gisela’s primly pretty mother, the daughter of Spanish Civil War refugees, seemed to fretfully long to be a close and supportive mom to