Marcelo in the Real World Read online

  “Good school, that Paterson. Okay, let me continue, because I’m on a roll here. All that exists in the universe is made up of a combination of the elements on the Table of Elements.”

  I disagree with Wendell. The elements in the Periodic Table of Elements deal with the most obvious parts of reality, the kind we can see and touch. But there are energy forces within the atom that also make up reality, and beyond that there are forces we are not yet attuned to. I decide not to interrupt because if Wendell asked me to explain, it could lead to speaking about religious matters.

  “What has all this to do with beauty, I can tell you are asking yourself.”

  Actually, I am asking myself if conversations with friends always feel like this—two minds bound together by their focus on the same subject.

  Wendell continues. “The attractive force behind Elemental beauty is that it holds out the promise of totality, of full, complete, and never-ending satisfaction. The woman who has this kind of beauty is like the periodic table—she has all the elements that make up womanhood, but in an understated kind of way, like matter itself.”

  “Jasmine is like that?” This time I manage to phrase this as a question.

  “She’s solid. Not only is her body solid, as in firm, as in she lifts weights every day, she’s also unshakable, fearless, permanent, basic, organic. If you were stranded in the desert with her, she’d find the water.”

  “Jasmine lifts weights,” I say mostly to myself. The thought makes me happy.

  “But what’s so special about this rare type of woman is that despite her strength, she remains in many ways eminently lust-able. Oh, my God. It’s a hard-on that comes from the depths of the soul. That’s why Jasmine is Elemental.”

  “I see.” Maybe it is the strange way Wendell mentions God, but I suddenly feel uncomfortable. I stand up. Wendell stands up also but continues talking. The lesson is not over.

  “The only problem with Elemental women is that they can just as soon be loved or not be loved. It’s not like they’re cold and calculating, like the Elegants. They just have their own road to travel. You can climb aboard and sail with them, but they’ll keep heading for their destination with you or without you. Speaking of the devil.”

  Jasmine stands in the doorway. She looks at me. “If I don’t make it to the Registry of Deeds before they close, Riese will have a cow.”

  “My fault,” says Wendell. “We were discussing the meaning and end-all of life.”

  “He’s not going to do your work,” Jasmine tells him.

  “Easy, tiger. He’s all yours.”

  “Good-bye, my friend,” I say to Wendell.

  But Wendell does not hear me. “Have you thought about what I asked you?” he is saying to Jasmine.

  “What part of no don’t you understand?” Jasmine is already walking away as she says this.

  On the way to the Registry of Deeds, Jasmine says to me, “Watch out for Wendell. He’s not someone you can trust.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I ask. “What has he done to make you say that?”

  “It’s a feeling I have,” she says. “He’s all appearance, just like his father, and inside just as mean. I don’t trust him.”

  I think back to a couple of weeks ago, when Arturo asked me if I trusted him and I said yes. I do. I trust Arturo. I trust him to keep his promise and allow me to decide where I want to go to school next year. But my trust in him is more knowledge than feeling. It is based on the experience that he has always done what he said he was going to do. I never thought of trust as a feeling, but now I hear Jasmine use the word as if it were a feeling. “What does lack of trust feel like?” I ask.

  “It’s a creepy feeling inside.”

  “Creepy.”

  “Yeah, creepy. Wendell gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Heebie-jeebies. Can you be more specific?”

  “Have you ever been greedy for something?”

  “Yes.”

  “About what?”

  “CDs. I never seem to have enough of them. I see a CD and I want to buy it even though I don’t need it, even when I have one at home with the same music.”

  “Right. Well, when I’m around Wendell, I feel like that CD would if it could feel.”

  CHAPTER 10

  This morning as I was waiting for Aurora to drive me to the train station, Arturo asked me to pack my sneakers, a T-shirt, and a pair of shorts. Now I know why. We are on our way to the physical fitness club. I had no idea that Arturo “works out,” as he calls it, almost every day. His preference is to work out in the morning when he gets to work. Arturo likes to drive in by himself, even though I am awake by the time he leaves, and then Aurora takes me to the train station on her way to work. Arturo thinks I learn more about the real world from commuting on the train every day. Perhaps he thinks that I interact more with people if I take the train. But usually I make the trip in silence, trying to recollect the IM, which is getting harder and harder to access.

  “How are you doing at work?” Arturo asks me.

  “Hunky-dory,” I respond. I try to say it the way Jasmine says it, but I don’t quite get the right intonation.

  “Hunky-dory?” Arturo asks.

  I don’t know why it is harder to reach the place of the IM. It is impossible to listen to the IM at work even on the rare occasions when I sit at my desk without anything to do. It is like the IM is afraid to be heard for fear that it will be ridiculed.

  “I never heard you say that before,” he says.

  “Jasmine says it,” I say.

  “I see.”

  Now Arturo walks in silence. I prefer that. Around this time I usually go out to the small park in front of the building and have lunch. This trip to the physical fitness club interferes with the one hour during the day when I can direct my thoughts wherever I want without any interruptions. I was annoyed when he told me what we were doing for lunch, but I did not say anything. I know by now that I have a tendency to get annoyed about being asked to do something unexpected. I have worked very hard over the years to reduce the level and duration of the annoyance. I have been working on that for as long as I can remember.

  “You and Jasmine must be getting along then.”

  That sounds to me like a conclusion and not a question so I don’t respond. We stand at the corner waiting for the miniature person on the walk sign to turn white so we can cross. Part of the momentary annoyance at working out is that I don’t need to work out. I lift the dumbbells every morning, as I have ever since my uncle Hector taught me how to do it.

  “I asked you if you and Jasmine were getting along.”

  So it was a question then. I hesitate because Arturo is crossing the street even though the person in the sign is still red. I remain at the curb but Arturo waves for me to follow. I look to see if there are any cars coming as I start across. A car turns from a side street and comes toward us but Arturo does not speed up. I automatically grab his arm. That is something a small child would do, I think.

  “She hasn’t complained about you,” he says in the middle of the street.

  We reach the other curb. Arturo seems to be speaking to himself. It takes me a few seconds to realize who “she” is.

  “So everything is okay with Jasmine?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Did that sound rude? The intonation of my words is mostly the same regardless of what I say, although lately I have been able to raise my voice at the end of a sentence when I am asking a question. Most people are not able to tell that I am nervous speaking to them or that I am anxious about what I will next say to them. Yet that is the case with almost everyone except for Aurora, Yolanda, Rabbi Heschel, the kids at the hospital, and the kids at Paterson. And now that I think of it, it is true with Jasmine as well. That is very strange. I had not thought about it before. I wonder how that happened without my noticing.

  It is true that Arturo sometimes makes me nervous. He is constantly asking questions, challenging me to quicken my ability to
respond. I am nervous now, walking with him to the fitness club. I have never been to a fitness club. I wonder if it will be like the exercise room at Paterson.

  He opens the door to the fitness club and shows a young woman behind the desk his card.

  “Good morning, Mr. Sandoval.”

  “Hello, Jane.”

  Everyone knows my father and my father knows everyone. No one calls him Arturo, except maybe Holmesy. Holmesy. I must have picked that up from Jasmine too.

  We are walking by the exercise bicycles and a man pedaling on one waves at Arturo. He takes a towel and wipes the sweat from his face. Arturo stops. “I need to talk to you,” the man says to Arturo. He lowers his voice like he doesn’t want anyone else to hear him.

  “I thought you would,” responds Arturo.

  The man laughs a kind of muffled laugh.

  “Can I call you this afternoon?” Arturo asks.

  “No can do,” says the man. I notice that the flesh on his stomach and thighs is loose and his arms are full of brown spots. “I’m flying to L.A. at three. Why don’t you pull a bike up next to me now and we’ll grab a few minutes?”

  “I am with my son,” Arturo says. He turns to me. “Marcelo, this is Mr. Gustafson.”

  “How do you do?” I say. His large hands remain on the handlebars so I don’t extend my hand.

  “How do you do?” he says, imitating me. Then he laughs and says to Arturo, “Good-looking boy, eh? Like father, like son. I got another twenty painful minutes on this damn thing. I already talked to Holmes, he’s okay with the process. I need you to be on board. Twenty minutes, that’s all.”

  I am looking at the row of televisions in front of the bicycles. There must be a dozen or so sets on different channels. Then I hear Arturo say: “Okay, I’ll be right out.”

  The locker room is full of men walking around without any clothes on, so I keep my eyes down. This is something that is not hard for me, since that’s where I keep them as a matter of course. I don’t understand how anyone can walk without clothes in front of others without feeling it to be a violation of their privacy. The only time I’ve taken my clothes off in front of someone else is at the doctor’s office. I raise my eyes enough to look for the showers. I am relieved to see that they have plastic curtains that can be closed.

  Arturo has a locker with a combination lock. He points to a locker next to his and tells me that I can put my clothes in there, except for my wallet, which he will put in his locker. At Paterson there are no lockers in the boys’ changing room. There are hooks on the wall and there’s no need to be concerned about your wallet.

  I find a stool and begin to change. Arturo has his shorts and T-shirt on when I have barely taken my shoes off and am unbuttoning my shirt. There is a white speaker right above us blasting popular music. I am trying to understand what the woman is singing, but it is impossible. I catch a word here and there. Her voice is drowned out by the beat of drums.

  “I’ll be at the bicycles,” Arturo tells me as I slip my T-shirt on. “Come join me after you change.”

  “I like to lift the weights,” I say.

  “I know, but I thought we could spend some time together. After I finish talking to Mr. Gustafson, we can exercise and chat about how things are going.”

  “Chat.”

  “Yes, chat. You know, as in father and son spending a little time together talking about nothing in particular. I’ll be waiting for you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  When Arturo is gone, I take my pants off and fold them carefully. Then I put on the blue shorts with the Yale insignia that Yolanda gave me. I realize that I did not bring any white socks, so I leave my blue socks on and put my sneakers on. I am thinking about how difficult it is for me to communicate with my father. He is the one person in the world I would most like to “chat” with. We could sit in our backyard and talk small talk or large talk. It wouldn’t matter. But this requires an effort, or rather, a lack of effort that seems beyond both our powers. Now we will “chat,” and I think that this is good, but it will not be easy for me. I know what he is really interested in when he asks “How are you doing?” He wants me to confirm that he was right, that I can function in the real world. I wish he wouldn’t be so concerned about this. I wish he and I could chat about some of the things I chat about with Rabbi Heschel. I wish he would ask me about Buddha or Jesus or Jacob, the kind of things that fill my head.

  I leave the locker room and find a bicycle next to my father. I start to pedal and a series of lights appears on the bike’s control panel. Arturo is talking to the puffy man who greeted us when we came in. There is a set of headphones on the handlebars. I put them on, thinking that they might have a different kind of music, but the headphones transmit the sound from the television that is in front of us. I take them off. I want to block out the strident music coming from a hundred amplifiers but instead I am drawn to my father’s voice. He and the other man have to speak loud enough to hear each other, and the volume of their voices is loud enough for me to hear as well.

  “Look.” Mr. Gustafson is speaking and wiping his forehead with a white towel at the same time. “It’s a win-win. We get our clients to settle for the sum we agreed and we give ourselves a little bonus. They would have paid the extra cash for legal fees anyway if we kept fighting.”

  I don’t know why I feel that Arturo is looking at me. I turn and I see him questioning me with his eyes. Suspicion. That is what my father’s face most closely resembles. I look away and close my eyes.

  After a while I hear Arturo say, “It will take a lot of work to convince the Vidromek people to settle. I mean, they hate your law firm. They think you rounded up five people hurt by their windshield and pretty much told them they would be rich if they sued. Vidromek wants me to destroy you, really. They want me to drive you into the ground with discovery and delays until you regret ever taking this on.”

  “Don’t get too righteous on me. We didn’t have to try too hard to ‘round people up,’ as you put it. My five clients came out of the woodwork pretty easily.”

  “You’re not the only one suing us, you know. There’s a bunch of ambulance chasers out there waiting in line for some payoff. We’ve said no to all of them, even to the ones that we could have paid a few thousand bucks to go away. Vidromek does not want to settle with anyone.”

  It occurs to me that I have never heard my father talk about his business. Here I am working at the law firm and I’m not sure what it is he does.

  “Yeah, but that’s the point. Those other saps are being represented by garbage. I’m the only one that Vidromek has to worry about. You get rid of me and my five clients and you’re home free. You can squash the other ones.”

  Arturo lowers his voice. “Listen, this is very risky on many counts, as you know. In order for this to work I will have to convince my client that you will be the only exception and that we can do this without anyone else finding out. Then we have to do the paperwork so that it looks good. The risks outweigh the ‘little bonus,’ as you put it.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it here. Talk numbers with Stephen. Whatever he agrees to is okay with me.”

  “Hell, Art, don’t make me talk to Holmes. He’s as greedy a little pig as there ever was.”

  “That’s why I let him handle little bonuses.”

  “Ha, ha. All right. I’m out of this torture chamber, and I’m not just talking about the machines.”

  I hear him get off the bike and walk away. My eyes have been closed throughout the conversation. I have been trying to maintain a steady rhythm with my legs but have not been successful. The conversation between Arturo and Mr. Gustafson absorbed me. It reminded me of when I was learning sign language. The kids at Paterson would move their hands so quickly that I would only pick up a word here and there. But there was something else about this conversation. It was like hearing something I wasn’t supposed to hear or seeing a side of my father I was not meant to see.


  “Are you awake or did you fall asleep?” I realize Arturo is speaking to me.

  I open my eyes. “Awake.”

  “Did you hear what Mr. Gustafson and I were talking about?”

  For a second I am tempted to say that I did not. Maybe it was the way he asked the question, like he was hoping that I hadn’t. But I say, “Yes, I heard it.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “Think.”

  “About the conversation. What impression did you get? What did you gather?”

  “I did not understand all the terms. What does it mean to settle a case?”

  “It means that we agree to pay the people that are suing us without going to court. We make an agreement with them. We pay them and they stop suing us.”

  “There were words like ‘hate’ and ‘destroy’ used, but there was no anger between Mr. Gustafson and you.”

  “That’s right. That’s the way it is. It’s just business. Nothing personal.”

  “Vidromek wants you to put Mr. Gustafson’s law firm out of business. Vidromek hates Mr. Gustafson.”

  “Not necessarily Mr. Gustafson.”

  “‘Hate’ is a very strong term. It is a desire to hurt someone physically or emotionally by word or deed. Did you mean to use that word?”

  “Yes. I guess that’s right. They don’t want to hurt him physically but they would like to hurt him financially and…maybe emotionally as well.”

  “They want Arturo to hurt Mr. Gustafson financially and maybe emotionally.”

  “I am Vidromek’s lawyer, so, yes, I’m the one.”

  “Arturo can do that? You can do that?”

  “Yes. Sometimes it is necessary. You stopped pedaling. Is something wrong?”

  Not too far from the bicycles that Arturo and I are on, there is a water cooler. “Excuse me,” I say. I get down from the bicycle, walk over to the water cooler, and pour water into a paper cup that is shaped like a cone. I can feel my heart beat in my chest and my face is hot, as if it were sunburned. It is not from the bike, I know. I don’t know what has come over me. It is a strange feeling. Like the time when I touched my chest and discovered I had lost the cross Abba gave me just before she died.