Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

Tomas passed through a period of extreme exhaustion, though he was still a young man. “I am passing through a period of extreme exhaustion, though I am still a young man,” he wrote to Rodriguez. He took as a girlfriend the daughter of a man who owned a diner. For a year, insensible to all but the most basic needs, he lived with this new woman, Anna, as man and wife. “Even though she is only nineteen,” he wrote to Rodriguez, “she is wise, and she has recently been telling me that I need to try to have my family again. I think she has no other reason to say so except her goodness, which was an idea I had stopped believing in, and was on the verge of killing in myself. I have even been thinking of stronger evils like robbery.”

“Yes, robbery,” he wrote to Rodriguez the next evening. “I know when the office is left unattended and where the keys are kept. I will never act upon it, because I am an honest man, and in my honesty I grow more and more certain of nothing except my sadness. And yet, there are glimmers of hope in this bleakness. I should have mentioned them yesterday. One night, in the dim days before Anna told me that I had to get back to my family, I slept outside in the street, dizzy and miserable, and I considered ending my life. Instead, I started to talk to a man who came to the restaurant who owned a cigar store. He knew a man who owned a cigar factory, and when I told him I was from Camagüey, I was hired immediately. There was a job that required setting type for the labels for the cigar boxes, and here my Spanish was useful. My boss at the factory is a terrible man named James Hooper who reminds me in every way of Dr. Ferrer, and I turn my head when I go by him for fear of being hit. Still, it is work, and work gives a man pride and money, and money is only dirty when you do not have any of it at all, and the little bit I am making these days is cleansing me somewhat, to the point where I can once again recognize myself in the mirror.”

He continued the following day. “My next step is to make contact with Eileen. I will let you know how it goes, my Yamila.” Three days later he resumed: “I made contact last night. It was raining. I stood under an awning. When I saw her coming, I stepped out into the rain, partly so that she would not pass by and partly so that she would not see the tears on my face. She cried, too. She told me that my daughter was missing me every day and that the man who had been with them was gone now. She said that she loved me still, but she also said that she did not have trust for me any longer. She asked me to go away.”

Another month passed over the planet, during which time Tomas did not write to Rodriguez. This is the second and last known gap in the correspondence. Among Tomas’s papers, there are a number of false starts: “Dear Yamila, I have long wondered,” began one. “It is morning,” read another. “It is evening,” another. Then, one day, he took up pen and composed another letter. “I will tell you, Yamila, that when I finally saw Eileen again it was a sunny day,” he wrote. “I asked her to go with me to sit in the park. She agreed. It was almost sundown and we sat there next to one another. Between us there was an invisible wire and I followed it first with my eyes and then with my hand, which I placed gently on her knee. She laughed. I took back my hand. She said that no, a hand on her knee in the grass was exactly what she dreamed about. She took my hand in hers then. We sat in the grass. I placed my head on her bosom as if I were a child and she were the earth, and I clung to her for my safety as I often dream of clinging to you.”

The next letter was dated two days later. “My dearest Yamila, I make it a practice to eat once each week at the diner that Anna’s father owns. I see her there sometimes, and though she is with another man now, though she is carrying his child, she is still close to me in ways I cannot explain to my satisfaction. When I went there last week, she asked me why I seemed happy and I told her, as best as I am able; the words fill my heart but cannot always make the journey to my mouth. ‘You have hope,’ she said, and I agreed, saying ‘yes’ and then saying nothing. I have hope, but I am unsure whether I am to act on it or not. If I act, there is the possibility of gain but a greater possibility of loss. The sweetness of hope will last only until I take action, at which point it will vanish. I force my mind to realize this. Is hope a spiritual state? I carry out this petition in hope’s name. And so I remain in the grass with Eileen, sitting there, touching her hand. I remain with you in the café in Havana, watching your hand round off a sentence in the air. I remain with my sister, reunited for the first time. I remain with my poor dear mother, at her bedside. That is a continual paradise. And yet, I am still rooted to the earth. I am still a poor man. I am still the son of two parents who are in the ground. I am still at the cigar factory, still a slave of James Hooper, whom I turn away from each time I pass him by. Yamila, my darling, my love, I will write you tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day on into eternity.” He did.

SHE’S OLDER. THAT’S THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about her.

I’m pregnant. That’s the first thing you need to know about me.

Our favorite colors are one color, blue. Even two sisters who are very different can be similar. You should know that, too, because it may explain the way things went.

I MARRIED A FARMER. I didn’t plan to do it. It just happened. To be fair, I didn’t know he was a farmer. He was just a guy I met at a dance, and then later he came into the hardware store where I was working and pretended to be surprised to see me. We went out on two dates before I even got his name right — I thought it was Bert and it turned out to be Berne, which is such a strange first name that I don’t think I can be blamed for my mistake. My sister’s husband, Ed, who owned the hardware store, said that when he first saw the name on a personal check he thought it was Verne, and he blinked twice to get the B to turn. But it didn’t. It was Berne. Berne never had trouble with my name. Who has trouble with Susan?

Berne and I dated for eleven months. He bought me presents all the time: a necklace with a heart-shaped charm, a red scarf, a hat. Then we broke it off when I went to McCook Community College to learn to be a medical secretary. My parents wanted me to go. My mother, in particular, was sold on the idea. She told me that a marriage was one thing, but you always needed a career.

We wrote to each other. He wrote more often, and though he was unpracticed at it — he spelled about every third word wrong, and his punctuation was a form of improvisation — it made me love him more, because I saw how I could improve matters. I used to tell friends at McCook that I had a boy waiting for me at home. They would nod or smile and I’d complete the thought; “He’s waiting to become a man,” I’d say.

Then we broke it off. That’s what I like to say, but really he broke up with me because he thought I was dating my teacher, Mr. Carr. This wasn’t true at all, of course. Once Mr. Carr and I went out to coffee because he said he needed to talk to me about my exam, but after about fifteen minutes it became painfully clear that he had nothing at all to say about the exam, and that he just wanted to tell me all about his divorce, and how his wife couldn’t give him any kids. I guess I felt sorry for him, because I went back to his house after that, but we didn’t do anything except sit around on the couch with the outsides of our legs touching each other. Then he leaned over and kissed my shoulder. His lips were cool on my skin. I didn’t tell him to stop, but I didn’t encourage him and I left a few minutes later.