And yet, he married me, a dark-skinned Latina. In church, in a wedding that was lacking nothing. There was a priest and altar boys, Madonna lilies, white roses, a cake with three tiers, various canapés, a hot and cold buffet that included lobster, a bride’s dress and a veil with a crown of orange blossoms, and even a cubic zirconia ring that looked like a diamond. Because that’s how Greg had wanted it. I had never been very religious, but he was so Catholic that he even hung a crucifix over our marriage bed. He paid for everything with part of his pension funds, the church, the reception, the honeymoon in Hawaii, and even bought a royal-blue tuxedo with a bow tie and a tight-fitting, wine-colored cummerbund to hide his belly, if you know what I mean. The wedding dress also came out of Greg’s pocket, and my sister, Violeta, who was to be the maid of honor, her dress, and even the bridesmaids, four of my coworkers, their dresses. Because Bolivia didn’t live to see it, I had asked Violeta to be my maid of honor. But in the end she didn’t do it. At the last moment, she decided not to come to the wedding, and left us holding a long, almond-colored shantung dress that we had had made for her to pair with mine, which wasn’t shantung but embroidered and also almond-colored. But Violeta’s case is a whole other chapter and requires its own explanations, so it’d be best if I talk about her later; just keep in mind from this point that she’s the heart of the story. For now, I’ll only say that I’d have rather been married in a more simple ceremony, definitely a more private one. Don’t think that I was feeling like one of Charlie’s Angels strolling on the beaches of Hawaii with an old fatso like Greg.
Our relationship began according to the law because that’s the way he wanted it. And it suited me, after all, because after so much anguish and effort I was finally going to become an American citizen. Put yourself in my shoes. From the moment that my mother passed away, I was the only person who cared for Violeta, and they could deport me at any moment. Now do you understand why I almost fell to my knees the night Greg and I met at Applebee’s to go to the movies afterward, and he pulled a black velvet box out of his pocket, with white felt on the inside, like a miniature coffin, and in it was the cubic zirconia set in white gold? It wasn’t from Tiffany’s, Mr. Rose, as Holly Golightly would have wanted it, but for me it was as if it were. Always generous, my poor Greg, he had his savings. At home, we never lacked food or services, and after we were married, we always paid the rent ahead of time. Not that it was much. They’d have had some gall to charge us more, given the depressed neighborhood and the depressing building. We’re talking about one of those “white flight” zones. It had been a long time since anybody saw a white face around there. My Greg was like a museum piece amid so much brown and black, mestizo and mulatto. The truth was that even though Greg was the white one, he always felt like a fly in a puddle of milk, and he couldn’t wait for the day we would leave. He was just waiting for the rest of his pension to kick in so we could get the fuck out of there to that town of poor white folk where he had his house, where the fly in the milk would be me. What I’m trying to tell you was that my neighborhood was in a seriously bad state. A few years before, suffice it to say, the owner of our building had tried to burn it down to collect insurance and would have gotten his way had the firemen not put out the fire in time. To this day, no one lives on the first floor, the walls still blackened. But my apartment is different. Freshly painted, cozy, with all the necessary appliances, blinds in good condition, and a white rug. I always kept my apartment gleaming. Or as Bolivia would say, like a silver cup. And Greg lent a hand, with his toolbox always ready to fix anything. The last thing he had been able to do, my poor old man, was to widen the barbecue on the so-called roof terrace so that we could fit more burgers and corn on the cob on it, a nice detail on his part. A rather useless detail, though, because we never really invited anyone, except Sleepy Joe, who invited himself. But that we even had a roof terrace with a barbecue — tell me if that’s not the “American way”? The terrace also had a splendid view and with binoculars we could even see the Empire State Building. But what you saw with the naked eye was our neighborhood, not a great sight, as I said, a rather depressed area, but at least we had a barbecue. Although we never got to try the new larger version.
My husband had his things. Odd ticks of a cop, but a Catholic ex-cop. He belonged to an order of retired officers called the Most Holy Name of Jesus. He’d bring me there on the first Sunday of every month to take Holy Communion and then we’d have breakfast with his old coworkers, the Catholic cops. And I sat there quietly, listening to them talk about everything, but foremost about how to live your life so as to not offend the most holy name of Jesus. On top of that, three or four times a year we’d go to these nighttime ceremonies in which they’d give each other awards, for courage, devotion, or any other virtue. Greg would don his uniform on those occasions, which despite the alterations barely fit him. And I’d put my hair up in a bun and wear a long evening dress. The whole thing would end with a dance and fireworks. I looked like the daughter of even the youngest couple there, and Greg showed me off with pride. In the summer, we would meet with the same group for a commemorative picnic in one of the national parks, and that was about it. But these occasions were mandatory. My Greg would never skip out on the sacred host of those first Sundays, or the sandwiches in the national parks, or the cannellonis of the evening dances.
Why did he marry me and not a white girl? The first answer is the obvious one: I was young and pretty. And I doubt that a white girl who was young and pretty would ever want to marry the likes of him. But on top of that he thought that white girls were a bit too whorish. And he knew a thing or two about whores. He had been part of an anticrime unit in which he’d worked the streets undercover. This was the most unsupervised and fucked-up part of the police force, I’m telling you, but I’d have never said such a thing to Greg’s face. Greg was only rude to me once — he who was otherwise so gentle and delicate — only once, and for a very surprising reason. It must have been eight or nine at night, and I was stretched out on the sofa, watching a movie that I had just gotten at Blockbuster. He arrived home in a good mood, as always, asking me what I wanted to do with dinner, because, like I said, he was the only one who cooked. Everything was fine up to that point, but his face grew contorted when he saw the movie I was watching, one with Nick Nolte, playing a corrupt cop with his hair gelled and a thin mustache. Q & A it was called, remember? Nothing special, a convoluted plot I’d already lost track of and was just looking at the pictures, thinking about other things. Well, Greg dashed toward the TV to shut it off, pulled out the DVD, and went to return it to Blockbuster right away, screaming that he’d not allow this thing to be in his home one second longer. Which by the way wasn’t his home but mine. And all the furniture was mine, bought by me, beginning with the TV. The only thing that was his was the crucifix, which I could have done without. That little bloodied figure hanging from the cross wasn’t anything to get aroused about, if you know what I mean. And here you may ask yourself, Mr. Rose, why Greg didn’t have a house in spite of his police pension and salary as a security guard. But he did have one, a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a studio, a garage, and a garden in a nearby town, where according to the plans we would go live in a couple of years. Not yet, we couldn’t leave the city yet, because there were no jobs in the town and it wasn’t enough with only the pension, especially because of the extremely expensive school that I paid for, for my sister Violeta, and because I didn’t want to stop working — I had made that quite clear to him. Anyway, that time with Q & A, Greg slammed the door on his way out and I was left confused. But then he came back and he was the same as ever, just Greg, with a pizza from Sbarro and a six-pack of Coors. While we were eating, he apologized and explained that he hated the morbidity of people who enjoy the stories of bad cops.