I bumped into Tommy in the park one afternoon, and the first thing he did was to slap me five.
“Good for you, my man,” he told me. “I read your book, and I liked it, though I would have done a lot of things differently.” Tommy took a drag of a cigarette. “And better, you hear?”
“If you say so.” I looked off, leaves whisked up by the wind in pinwheels along the cracked park pavement.
“But the thing is, that novel doesn’t really count ’cause, like, it’s your story, and real books are about other shit, you know?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
That day, I made sure not to seem at all above him in any way: In fact, I told him that I couldn’t wait to see what he was writing himself — even offered to help him in whatever fashion I could. But it was as if it didn’t matter. Lighting one of his Tareytons with the butt of another, and offering me a sip from his can of beer, he said, “Nah, I’m all right — don’t even think about it, man.” Then we talked about hanging out again, and, parting, we kind of embraced. Leaving him, I hadn’t the slightest notion that I’d never see that beautiful and rambunctious dude again.
My older brother, for what it’s worth, made no bones about telling me that my mother had been upset by the book (as if she could read it?), that she could not bear any of the passages about Pop’s drinking, and that, on top of it all, I had gotten a lot of stuff wrong. And he thought that my portrayals of family friends like Olga were offensive — that I had no business describing her (or someone like her) as the kind of vainglorious cubana who would parade around in negligees and brassieres, and undress, to reveal her fabulous figure, in our living room.
“You know that she’s going to feel offended by that, don’t you?” he told me.
In the end, I believed him, and took to skulking up my block whenever I’d visit my mother. Worried about running into any of the folks I had portrayed, I had almost gone ducking behind a car at the sight of Olga coming out of my mother’s building one day. But she saw me: “Oscarito, come over here!” she ordered. I did.
“Why are you avoiding me? I’m not going to bite you.”
“I know.”
“Well, there’s something you should hear,” she said, with the severity of the Old World Spaniard she, with her curled Coco Chanel hairdo and intensely dark features, resembled. “I read your book, and I will tell you, mi vida, that I loved it!” And she flashed me a sweet, toothy smile. “And thank you for putting me in it — you got me right.”
Indeed, Olga, in her sixties, well past her prime by then, seemed to have enjoyed the fact that I had more or less described the way she had once been as a shapely Cuban bombshell, whose mere glance left men breathless. But she did chastise me about other things. “You were too hard on your mother. I don’t blame you,” she said. “She could be difficult, but you were still too hard on her.” She did not mention my pop, though she must have been thinking about him as well. Happily though, as I went by her on the stoop, on my way to see my mother, whose face peered out at me from behind the venetian blinds, Olga gave me a kiss on the cheek and a slap to my bottom. Her final appraisal, as I blushed: “We’re proud of you. Fue un libro, muy muy lindo!”
And my mother? As my brother had surmised, she wasn’t too pleased by whatever she had managed to read of that novel. Having come a long way since my childhood, in terms of her ability to understand written English, she had made it a monthly ritual to visit the corner bookstore and return with a bag full of romance novels, which she’d go through methodically, with, I believe, the help of a Spanish-English dictionary. Otherwise she passed her days working in some Harlem-based version of a temp agency like Manpower, or else she, knowing every Latina in the neighborhood, made some extra money watching the comings and goings of customers in a friend’s clothing shop along Broadway. However she spent her days, she seemed to have enormous amounts of time to read, though I think it took her weeks after I had given her an inscribed copy of Our House to get around to deciphering the text. Once she began to, however, she became quite circumspect about it. The only things she ever had to say about that novel? “Why did you have to write me in that way? Yo no fui tan mala! I wasn’t that bad!” And, as I recalclass="underline" “Yes, your father was a good man who could be angry with me sometimes. Pero me quería mucho. But he loved me very much.”
(Of course there was more to her reactions than those few words: Sometimes when I’d come over to see her with some Chinese food from Broadway, while sitting across the kitchen table from her, I’d catch her looking at me wistfully, as she used to when I was a child, as if I were a stranger who had somehow learned all about her. At least once, she told me, in such a moment: “But I never wanted to hurt Pascual in any way.”)
She once mentioned that she could never get past a certain point (I never knew if the text became too difficult for her, or whether she could take only so much of her own life, however roughly, thrust back in her face), but whatever she may have felt about that book, my mother took the trouble to carefully wrap her copy in plastic so that it would not become worn-out on the shelf. Learning how impressed her New York Times—reading friends, like the Zabalas sisters and classy Chaclita, were by the fact that I had been reviewed there, she took to keeping a copy of that notice in her purse, ever willing to show it off to anyone she bumped into. Obviously her pride over the fact that she had a published author as a son overrode any reservations or hurt that my mother had surely felt over what she perceived to be its content.
For my part, I can recall riding the subways uptown from work and thinking that even if that book couldn’t ever sell very much — I think maybe only fifteen hundred copies had been printed — I had begun, in some small way, to make something of myself. But aside from that feeling — ever so fleeting at three o’clock on a dreary afternoon — virtually nothing else had changed in my life. Though I had avoided the fate of so many would-be writers, I kept at my full-time job.
Still, I had my occasional moment of glory. Not long after Our House came out, I got a call from the Endicott bookstore on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-first, then one of the great independents in Manhattan. Their manager, a lady named Susan Berkholtz, asked me if I wouldn’t mind coming by one morning to sign some books, and since I hadn’t ever done anything of that nature before, and because it felt like such a professional thing to do, I eagerly accepted. Leaving my office at about eleven, I made my way uptown. When I came in sight of that store’s two massive front windows, I almost fell over: One of the windows had been filled with pyramids of Our House in the Last World, copies adorning the wall in a row, and nothing else. It seemed the fulfillment of a dream, and, once inside, I passed the next hour or so by the front counter euphorically signing my book for the occasional customer — perhaps twenty in all, not a bad turnout. Afterward, Ms. Berkholtz, later an agent best known for representing Latino authors, had me sign some stock copies, and that also left me floating on air. Beaming with accomplishment, I sipped a cup of coffee, and thanking all her employees, I walked out of the store sometime after one, intending to go back to work.
But once I got outside again, I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed by the moment. I was filled with such pride that instead of heading downtown, I thought, “To hell with it,” and hailed a taxi instead, giving the driver my mother’s 118th Street address.