Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

I’m standing in Terence’s hotel room naked. A Polaroid hangs from his neck, and a tape measure slides between his thumbs. He jots down the circumference of my thighs, the width of my hips, and, as I roll my eyes, the minutiae of my genitalia. He promises to send a photo of the life-size work he’s basing on my body.

It will be without a head.

Terence is my first official boyfriend, and the only foreigner I’ve been able to procure since the incident at the Havana Libre with the American a month before. Terence and I have been “dating” for a week. The Canadian barely lets me out of his sight.

“That man needs a sheet of Bounce,” I tell Camila, but the island’s lack of laundry luxuries makes the joke fall flat.

A plane will take Terence home in a few hours, and Camila instructs me to get some good-bye cash. Thus far, I’ve been given $480 for reasons of my own invention—“cab fare,” “medicine,” and an “ill grandmother.”

I’m one of the lucky ones: I’m a rubia,a blonde. As a Cuban girl’s skin darkens, her worth on the foreign-man market decreases. But I insist on condoms—most Cuban girls don’t care—so my price plummets.

In actual time with Terence, I’ve earned about $2.85 an hour. Or, conversely, if you add up my sexual tricks (seven blow jobs; eleven tries at intercourse; two hand jobs; and public sex in the Jacuzzi on the rooftop of the Parque Central), it comes to about $22.85 per act.

A biochemist makes $13 per month.

Roach poison is $6 a bottle.

Band-Aids are not sold.

Blood drips from my skinned knee. Terence lies on his back. I’m on top. We’re fucking. His flesh feels like wet bread; our body fluids form a sticky paste. Though the room is eerily silent, I move as though dancing to salsa, in slow, rhythmic circles. One-two-three, pause. One-two-three. It could take me ages to perfect the hip movements of the Cuban dance. The feet are easy.

I look between his legs. I’ve straddled him, and like a good jockey am riding the beast, clenching myself, just as Camila taught me. (“It’s like when you hold pee,” she instructed. “Same muscle. Do ten reps fast, then ten reps slow. Twice a day.”)

Terence clutches my waist. He’s small and prone to premature shriveling. I make him comfortable. Tell him he’s a real man, my kind of man, baby, and when he’s inside it fills me up like a tank. His eyes shine and he wants to believe, needs to believe, and so he believes. I move faster. He gropes now for my breasts. Gets a fistful, then slaps them, from the side, like the racket on a ball, slow at first, then frantic, screaming that he’s about to come, and he slaps harder and my tits sting red and I’m clenching and he’s pushing his hips up, inside me, faster and faster still, a frenzy of slaps and jerks, his head thrashing, and then his head burrows under a pillow, and when he comes, it’s weeping and gnashing, a holy noise, an expulsion of guilt and shame and pleasure.

I roll off, holding the condom firmly to his stub so that it doesn’t slip inside me. I lay next to him, unfulfilled, panting slightly under the ceiling fan that chugs above, grinding through rusty gears.

Terence keeps the pillow tightly over his face and turns on his side, in a fetal position. He cries and shakes off efforts at consolation. I shrug. I’m not a shrink. I wait, listening to his sobs, until my own thoughts drown the noise.

But I’m tortured. I refuse the force that wants to reason with me, with what I’m doing. I don’t want to stop. I want to find my real family, the family that is here, somewhere in Cuba, and considering the love and affection Cubans shower on their children, I won’t risk not finding them, having them die off without ever knowing me, without us knowing each other.

So I stay, and so I am Cuban and, like my sisters, live a life of struggle, la lucha,a life that would surely have been mine had I not been given lucky passage across the Straits of Florida many years ago.

I lock myself in the bathroom and pull a surefire fantasy from the mental file. I exhale my pleasure quietly, savoring it internally. Quickly, I shower and dress.

The hotel room is empty, Terence has fled.

The note on the bed sits like frosting on a cake of dollar bills.

On it is scrawled one word: bitch.

J iggle. Jiggle. Metalpay phones scorch fingertips under a torrid sun. The stench of rotting fruit permeates the humid air, mixing with petrol leaked from forty-year-old carburetors.

“Camila?” I say into the receiver.

“ Chica.What happened to Bounce?” she says in a chirpy tone. I swear Camila is enjoying herself at my expense. She’s amused I’ve got an American passport and may, in less than a year’s time, return to my homeland.

“He’s got issues,” I say with a sigh, explaining my recent encounter.

“Hmmm.” She listens. “Insecurities, Oedipus complex, probably molested by his mom. Explains the breast smacking,” she says perfunctorily. “I once had a man who couldn’t orgasm unless he had a nipple in his mouth. All about the matriarch.”

I roll my eyes. The Cubans love Freudian analysis. I’m more fond of Jung, myself, but the populace here thinks he’s déclassé,so I change the subject whenever Herr Sigmund comes up. I’ve had enough penis as it is.

“Guess who came over last night.”

“Dígame.”

“Señor Rafael Oro-Sabell.” My heart stops. “He asked after you. Ay chica,did he think it was extraño”—weird—“how you left Las Vegas so fast?”

“What’d you tell him I said?” I practically shout.

“That his tongue felt like an iguana’s.”

“Didn’t!”

Camila laughs. “You’re right. I gave him your number.”

“I’m going to kill you,” I say with a huge smile.

“Richard comes when, tomorrow?” she asks. “He may be your best client yet. I’m superjealous, mi vida.”

“God, if I didhave a sexual relationship with him it would be so much easier.”

“What, baby-sitting his teenage object of affection isn’t glamorous enough for you?”

“I’d take a Canadian with mommy issues any day.”

Camila ekes out her generous laughter as I watch toddlers in the park play with condoms blown up and tied at the opening. The only prophylactics to be had on the peso economy are imported from trading partners such as China and Vietnam. But a condom manufactured for the Asian set is sewn a little tight for the typically robust and unclipped cubano.The only thing the condoms are good for here are as a substitute for the children’s balloons, which cannot be found in any store.

I feel a tap on my shoulder. “Gotta go,” I say into the phone as Limón flashes white teeth and criss-crosses his dark hands. We air-kiss. Limón is in his early twenties and his yo-yo-yo, arm-swingin’, dreads-floppin’braggadocio belies his cool, calculating self.

Despite the tightly controlled media in Cuba, Limón and his friends have picked up the Rasta look surprisingly well, and use it as a subtle signal of anti-governmental rebellion, as well as to hustle young European girls. Girls with a clichéd idea of tropical romance.

“ ¿Qué bola?It’s hotter than a bank robber’s pistol,” Limón says, wiping the sweat that drips down his temples.

Limón and I have a little deal: he helps me with my search for my Cuban father, and I teach him American slang. Problem is, I don’t know much current slang, so I’ve pulled out expressions I remember my Mississippi grandfather using. Limón won’t know the difference, I figure.

Limón pulls me aside, into the shade of a colonial building in Old Havana. His mother says she named him Limón, the Cuban word for lime, because that’s the type of citrus tree under which he was conceived.