SHE nosed her Camry onto the Interstate 880 onramp and looked with dismay at the sea of vehicles on the freeway below. It looked like another long day for the proverbial single-parenting TechPubs manager in the process of securing a divorce.
HE dozed intermittently as the jet banked just short of Cuba and began its final approach into San Juan. The redeye from the West Coast to O'Hare had been hell, followed by a 4:10 a.m. flight to Washington Dulles and a tight connection into San Juan. But his spirits lifted now as he looked at the light-blue Caribbean waters below. To the starboard was an island covered with bright-green jungle, a few lazy white clouds whisping around the peaks of the highest mountains.
He was on his way to the American Indexing Society's annual conference, being held this year at the Gran Hotel El Convento in Old San Juan. The location had been a flash of brilliance on the part of conference planners: a tropical location that preserved tax deductibility for the participants because it was technically on U.S. soil. Honolulu had been done, last year. This year's conference looked to be especially exciting, with indexing guru Hope Constance giving the keynote address.
SHE recalled with trepidation how the East-Bay-to-South-Bay commute was the least of her worries that day. She had to interview six candidates for the technical-editor position she had open, plus a lunch meeting with Tish van Dyke, who was handling her divorce. Van Dyke called herself a "divorce facilitator," and insisted that she was not a lawyer.
Her 18-hour days started with the alarm at 5:30 a.m. Then it was rush to bathe herself and feed and dress her four-year-old daughter, Jewel, for their trip down 880 to 84, then across the Dumbarton Bridge from Fremont to Mountain View. She would try to get Jewel to comb her hair and finish getting dressed in the car.
Her contract called for her to work at least 10 hours a day. At a Japanese-owned company like hers, workers were expected to arrive earlier than their managers and leave after them, so requiring her to work ten hours a day was the easiest way to get the salaried employees under her to work 11- or 12-hour days.
She had finally decided to officially unhitch herself from her alcoholic husband Bill. She had left him a year ago, and she could only guess at his present whereabouts. Now, with the distance, she might try to help him if he would let her, but she knew she would never want to live with him again. They had been married four years when she finally realized she was co-dependent and moved out.
Bill had worked at home, translating birth certificates from Spanish to English for local immigration bureaus. Even when he had work, Bill could at most command 10¢ a word, so triple-digit weeks were rare. When he had no work (the default situation, it seemed in retrospect), he started drinking at 10:00 a.m., staring at the TV with the doors and windows closed in a musty one-bedroom that smelled of bourbon and cat hair in the East-Bay heat.
The Saturday she took Jewel and the cat and left him, he had only grunted when she interrupted Xena: The Warrior Princess to say goodbye.
That was the last she had heard of him until she had had his summons served last month. She knew service would be no easy task; Bill never answered the door. She didn't know what hook or crook had done it for the private investigator she had hired, but the response did eventually come back, with an East-Bay postmark. She wondered if it was their old apartment.
HE dug his passport out of his bag while he waited in line at Customs. Odd that you should have to go through customs between one part of the U.S. and another. It had been odd at the check-in counter at LAX, too, when the attendant had espied his final destination and asked him if he had his passport with him.
"You don't need a passport to go to Puerto Rico."
"I know, but do you have your passport with you?"
"It's a territory of the United States."
"I know, but do you have your passport with you?"
He decided to hold his tongue this time as he edged forward in the customs line. Perhaps the war on drugs had spawned such a surplus of effectives that they passed the time checking for contraband on outbound flights from the mainland as well.
Customs cleared, he continued out to the curb to find a shuttle bus to the Gran Hotel El Convento. When he passed the empty information booth, the white plastic letters on the ribbed black signboard said the next hotel shuttle was at 12:15. It was 9:30 now. He wandered toward the sliding glass doors that marked the exit to the street and saw a municipal bus stop outside. He went out to check the schedule.
A bus pulled in just as he reached the curb, a large, orange-and-white job with automatic transmission, like the Los Angeles RTD busses in the 70s. After three middle-aged women climbed off, purses and pearls clanging, he leaned in to ask the driver.
"Are you going to Old San Juan?"
"Yes sir!" The driver's 'r' rolled like a spicy consonant.
"How much?"
"One dollar and twenty-five."
He dug in his pocket for a dollar and a quarter, listening to the buzz of Spanish conversation from the interior. On the sidewalk, too, everyone was Hispanic, in varying racial shades from white to black, with most people somewhere in between.
He took his bag and climbed aboard. The bus was about half full, more stocky, middle-aged women with dark curls, print dresses, and heavy jewelry, handsome businessmen, and five teenagers in t-shirts and baggy pants sharing the bench at the back.
The driver had a broad nose, short-cropped wiry black hair, and shiny brown skin.
"Do you go to the Gran Hotel El Convento?"
The driver paused a moment as he stepped on the gas.
"It's...all the same stop."
He shrugged and found a seat on the right side of the aisle about three rows back. He slid over to the window and set his bag on the empty aisle-side of the seat. The hum of Spanish conversation aboard the bus was peppered with English in the patois of the teenagers at the back. "...38th St....shit, man...he told me to...."
After leaving the airport, the bus traveled along a modern freeway through green fields. The blue of the sea glowed off to the right until it was eclipsed by a row of tall luxury hotels. The bus continued behind the backs of the hotels, stopping from time to time, then turned inland.
He watched out the window as the city traffic grew crowded. The streets were broad, like in Southern California, and lined with palm trees. But the apartments were everywhere, six-story brownstones that looked to him like New York, or at least the New York he knew from the movies. Pedestrians thronged the corners, walking, talking, smoking. Kids in brightly colored clothes played soccer or baseball in the alleys. The breeze coming in through the open bus-windows was warm and humid, and carried strains of salsa music:
Somos un agujero
en medio del mar y el cielo
quinientos años después
He wondered what it meant. Finally the bus pulled into a large, concrete parking structure. Taking his bag, he went up to the driver after they got off and started to ask him "what now?" "Here..." said the driver, clapping a hand on his shoulder. "Here, you get the free shuttle." The driver reached inside the vest pocket of his brown uniform and produced a cigarette. "Right over there," he motioned, holding the cigarette like a pointer between his fingers.
SHE pulled into Marie Callenders on El Camino for her lunchtime meeting and walked up the landscaped path from the parking lot. The sprinklers were on, adding even more humidity to the morning haze that was just giving way to a strong sun. It was cool in the air-conditioned waiting area. She gave her name and sat down to wait for "Facilitator" van Dyke. She was early, her first chance to catch her breath all day.
"Call me Tish," reiterated van Dyke as she strode in with her arms open. She returned the hug and wondered if divorce lawyers in other states hugged their clients. She smiled grimly to ward off the abyss of even imagining going through this 49 more times to find out.
"Tish" said the hardest part was over now that they had located Bill and received proof of service; it would be up to the court to secure return of the further documents, like the Declaration of Disclosure and Declaration Re: Minors.
The Declaration of Disclosure would list each spouse's property, debts, income, and expenses. She smiled as she asked van Dyke what would happen if Bill's only assets were a couch, a TV, and seven empty bourbon bottles.
"It's not a laughing matter," corrected van Dyke with a frown. "If he can show that his situation is a result of marriage and child-rearing, you could end up paying him alimony." She shuddered. Bill had, in fact, worked at home so that one of them would be with Jewel.
The Declaration Re: Minors would govern child support, visitation, and custody. If they could come to an agreement on that, on division of debts and assets, and on other issues, they could avoid having to appear in court.
Back in the car, she scanned the radio for something pleasant and relaxing as she headed back to work. She picked up the soft, sympathetic tones of Phil Collins as she pulled into the parking lot.
Please don't ask me how I feel,
I feel fine!
I cry a little bit, I don't sleep too good,
But I'm fine!
When can I see you?
When can I touch you?
Again and again, I ask myself, was I wrong?
Oh but time's a healer, and heaven knows I've been strong.
She jerked the keys out of the ignition. That was not the comfort she needed on her way back from the divorce facilitator. She wiped the tears from her eyes and marched into the building.
There was no chance of getting any actual work done this afternoon. She surfed the Web in an effort to look busy. After a while, she stopped asking herself "was I wrong?" as a little voice inside her noted that her real mistake had been made four years ago. Looking at it practically, she had been single-parenting Jewel most of the time since the girl was born.
As she pondered the jaw of a dark-haired model in a Panasonic Razor online ad, her thoughts turned to her own needs, needs Bill had not filled for a long time, and needs no one had touched at all in the last year. She was too young to dry up and become a spinster. She thought of Jewel, not wanting to be selfish. But Jewel needed a father figure in the house to avoid ending up like her Conradian namesake. She thought: Maybe it's time to start dating again.
Curious, she trained her Web browser on FlirtWolf.com, with its hundreds of pages of singles ads. Sex, sex, sex! It was a crash course in the amorous proclivities of the digital male. Most of them were quick to specify limits re: weight and dress size. One read, sic, "Will have sex with any woman who ways less than 130 lbs."
HE followed the pointer across the street and saw a short, yellow platform bus with an orange-and-white canopy. Grabbing his bag, he hurried out of the parking garage into the bright sunlight and crossed to the free shuttle. He made for the rear bench, for an empty spot between two overweight couples that looked like North American tourists. A man in a white guayabera shirt caught his arm as he stumbled in the aisle and smiled under his straw hat to reveal two missing teeth.
The Gran Hotel El Convento was a 17th-century Carmelite convent now converted into a first-class hotel. Its whitewashed bulwarks faced a cool, dark, treelined park with dusty paths, pigeons, and benches, just across the narrow street. He went in to the reception desk and deposited his bag. The receptionist smiled a greeting but remained silent until he spoke first, then smiled broadly and welcomed him in English. She was about his height, with short, straight, black hair and brown eyes. She wore a low-cut white blouse, a dark brown skirt, and black stockings.
After he completed the formalities, he asked her how to get to that famous castle. He had a guide book with him, but had not yet cracked it open.
"El Morro? Here." He savored more spicy consonants as she produced a colored map, then struggled to keep his eyes from descending her décolletage as she leaned over to draw a line with her pen up Calle del Cristo, left on Calle San Sebastián, then right along Calle Norzagaray to the El Morro National Historical Site. "The scenic route—have fun!"
He went up to his room to shower. He was on the top floor. From the door of his room he could see the hotel's interior patio, with its arches, palm trees, pool, and parasols. The shower felt good. He opened up the curtain on the window in his room and looked out over the modern container port just beyond the Bacardi plant. Looking down he could see the striking whitewash of governor's mansion, with a swath of bright-blue sea at the far right.
He walked through the cobbled streets of the old city, eyeing the ornate street lamps, beautiful tile work, and wrought-iron balconies shared by canaries and drying clothes, until he reached Calle Norzagaray above the coast and followed it toward El Morro. The wind from the open sea on his left tousled his hair as he walked.
When he reached El Morro, it was marked by a sign that looked oddly familiar: "United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service." The fortress was a massive, stone construction from the 17th and 18th centuries, with little round watchtowers and cannons looking over the Caribbean. Inside, the garrison had been a complete town, ready to sustain itself for several months in case of a siege. The Military Museum reminded him of Fort Point in San Francisco—except all the exhibits had bilingual explanations.
Leaving the fortress, he descended into the roofs of downtown and crossed the isthmus of the peninsula on which Old San Juan sat, separating the sea from the port. He headed toward the port and stared agape at the rococo façade of the U.S. Customs Service, where gold gothic finials inlaid with green palm fronds, tiered arches, and golden window-grates vied with lions, airplanes, the scales of justice, and the Stars and Stripes.
Following a wide pedestrian pathway just above the water, he continued clockwise until he was parallel with the governor's mansion. Here he headed uphill, past the mansion's white walls and lush greenery, until he spotted a grocery store. He picked up a bottle of Bacardi Dark and a liter of Diet Coke. "Cheaper than room service," he thought as he paid.
On his way back to the hotel he passed a small plaza where people were dancing to a salsa band on a diminutive stage at one end. As he made his way around the edge of the crowd, a tall jíbara, her skin the color of mocha, caught his eye. Her curves seemed ready to spill out of her white blouse and cut-off jeans as she grabbed him by the hand and danced him around in a quick circle, her curls flying. A familiar feeling began to come over him, but it was mostly a longing for his wife back in San Clemente. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she was gone, pressing a finely printed sheet of paper into his hand as she danced away.
Back in his room, he poured himself a rum and Coke and sat on the bed. What had the beautiful jíbara given him? Both sides of the page were filled with single-spaced type, the uneven darkness revealing a ribbon in need of changing on an old manual machine. He couldn't understand much, but he could pick out a few words: independencia, paternalismo, Estados Unidos de Norteamérica....
The conference kicked off at 9:00 a.m. the next day with breakfast rolls and fresh coffee in the lobby. He said good morning all around, then took a roll and went into the auditorium. The room was furnished with long, one-piece mahogany desk/bench combinations that looked like what they no doubt were: antique pews in a 17th-century convent. He settled in to hear Hope Constance's talk.
SHE nosed her car into the long line for the Interstate 880 onramp while coaxing Jewel to comb her own hair. She gritted her teeth as a sport-utility vehicle inexorably shoved them onto the shoulder where the two lanes narrowed to one. The car behind the SUV took pity and she crept back into line.
Traffic on the freeway was only marginally faster, and it seemed an eternity before they were moving west across the Dumbarton bridge, inching toward the carpool lane. A rusty ship plied the bay to their right.
"I wanna ride on the boat!" said Jewel.
"Not today," she responded mechanically, her spirit toying with the idea of giving in to total defeat.
A momentary eclipse blocked the sun. The planets aligned. In Vienna, a student was late for class. A pigeon shat upon a German tourist in the Plaza de España in Seville. In Fez, a muezzin missed a step on his way up the minaret to call the faithful. A pot of porridge boiled over in Kaohsiung.
SHE looked around the luxury hotel room overlooking the Port of San Juan, with the bright-blue glow of the Caribbean off to the right. A half-bottle of rum stood on the dresser, and a guide book lay unopened on the bed. With nothing but time, the soft bed, and the blue sea stretching in front of her, she picked up the book and began to orient herself, starting from the first page, as always:
Congratulations and Welcome
We think of this introductory section as a congratulation as much as a welcome. You are visiting, or soon will be visiting, one of the just plain nicest places on earth: Puerto Rico, where the temperature is a balmy 70 to 80° F year-round. Puerto Rico, island of rugged peaks and crystal-blue seas, of fascinating history and a rich, verdant interior populated by tropical plants and animals whose variety staggers the imagination. Puerto Rico, where Spanish is the national language but nearly everyone is bilingual, where Americans can travel freely with no need for a passport or currency exchange. A capitalist showcase two doors down from Cuba, home to the finest luxury hotels and a degree of racial harmony seldom seen on the mainland. The authors congratulate you on choosing this destination because we believe that Puerto Rico is as close as some of us will ever get to Paradise.
HE looked around the Camry and observed the sea of vehicles all around. The four-year-old in the passenger seat smiled expectantly. He knew he was headed west on the Dumbarton Bridge and had another long day ahead of him. "Look at that cloud," said Jewel. "It looks just like a camel." "You're right," he craned his neck. "Have you ever ridden a camel?" Her braids flew as she shook her head no. He knew his first order of business would be getting his wife up from San Clemente to help care for the girl.
SHE looked up from the book into the port beyond the Bacardi plant. She had just read how the port was originally named Puerto Rico and the island, San Juan, before some strange historical metathesis forever transposed the two. She watched the sun beat down on the blue water and the green hills beyond. "Paradise," the word played on her lips as the feeling welled up inside her. She buried her head in her hands and cried. She missed her daughter.
© 1999 by Matthew J. Hammond. All rights reserved