don’t mind doing the dishes.”
“Let me use real water, I’ll do the dishes every night.”
“The gray is real enough, just not especially clear.” She didn’t want to have this battle every evening, and was relieved that he changed the subject as the pork sizzled.
“Met this afternoon with the new group we’re taking up Mount Washington,” Esteban said. “Already identified the trouble-maker. It’s never the weak, pathetic clients who give us grief, but these geriatric superheroes. Usually guys, though sometimes it’s some tough, I-still-think-I’m-thirty-five old bag held together with Scotch tape and several hundred grand in plastic surgery.”
He knew she didn’t like him to talk about his charges with such contempt, but presumably he had to get the frustration out of his system beyond their earshot. “So who’s the headache? Jesus, this meat’s so full of water, these patties will be boiled.”
“Must be the other side of eighty. Has that look, with these stringy biceps—spends hours in the gym and hasn’t noticed that he’s now doing curls with barbells made of balsa wood. Wouldn’t listen to my safety drill. His only question was how we dealt with the fact that people ‘keep to different paces,’ and some climbers prefer to ‘push themselves.’ He’s a type. They’re runners, or used to be, though that was before their double hip replacements and five keyhole heart surgeries. You can bet they have money, and back before the dawn of time they did something with stroke. So nobody’s dared to tell them they’re fucking old. Usually their doctor or their spouse has laid down the law that they can’t troop into the woods anymore without someone to scoop them up when they stumble down a gully and break their legs. But they never like the whole idea of trekking with a group, and they always look around at the other arthritic losers and think, What am I doing with these boomerpoops?—when actually they fit right in. They don’t follow directions and they don’t wait up. They’re the ones who have accidents and give Over the Hill a bad rep. On a canoe trip, they’re the ones who splash off solo and take the wrong tributary, and then we have to abandon the whole expedition to find them. Because they don’t like following a guide. Especially a Lat guide. They’re enraged that Lats are running the show now, since somebody has to—”
“Enough.” Florence threw the cabbage into what was starting to look like pork soup. “You forget. I’m on your side.”
“I know you get sick of it, but you’ve no idea the waves of resentment I get from these crusties every day. They want their domination back, even if they think of themselves as progressives. They still want credit for being tolerant, without taking the rap for the fact that you only ‘tolerate’ what you can’t stand. Besides, we gotta tolerate honks same as they gotta put up with us. It’s our country every bit as much as these has-been gringos’. It’d be even more our country if these tottering white cretins would hurry up and die already.”
“Mi amado, that’s too far,” she chided pro forma. “Please don’t talk that way around Willing.”
As ever, Florence didn’t have to ask her partner to set the table, fill the water glasses, and replenish the saltshaker. Esteban had been raised in a crowded household, and pitched in as a matter of course. He was the first boyfriend to convince her that just because she didn’t need companionship, and she didn’t need help raising her son, didn’t mean she couldn’t still like a man in her bed, and like for Willing to enjoy some semblance of a father—one who could take credit for the boy having become fluently bilingual. At once, Esteban was second generation, and spoke English with no trace of an accent; occasional insertions of Spanish were mostly tongue in cheek, a droll playing to stereotype that his elderly clients lapped up. He may not have gone to college, but that was a smart financial move, in her view.
As for the ethnic issue, it was not true, as her sister clearly believed, that she had latched on to a Lat to be hip (whoops! careless), to join what she could not beat, or to disavow her heritage out of a hackneyed liberal shame. Esteban was a forceful, responsible, vital man regardless of his bloodlines, and they had plenty in common, not least that their favorite emotion was disgust. All the same, the choice of a Mexican lover felt on the right side of history—open and melding and forward-looking—and she had to admit his background was a plus. Whether she’d still be so drawn to the man if he were a regular white guy was a question that didn’t bear asking. People were package deals. You couldn’t separate out who they were and what they were, and the bottom line was that she found Esteban’s nut-colored complexion, silken black tail braid, and wide, high cheekbones irresistibly sexy. In his otherness, he enlarged her world, and granted her access to a rich, complex American parallel universe that for battened-down rightwing paranoids like her sister Avery solely constituted an impenetrable, monolithic threat.
“Hey, remember the guy who moved in across the street last year?” Florence mentioned when Esteban returned to sweep up the bits of cabbage from the kitchen floor. “Brendan Somebody. I told you at the time it was a sign I’d never be able to buy a house in this neighborhood now. He works on Wall Street.”
“Yeah, dimly. Investment banker, you said.”
“I ran into him on the way to the bus stop this morning, and we had a pretty strange conversation. I think he was trying to be helpful. I get the feeling he likes me.”
“Whoa, don’t like the sound of that!”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s more of that disgusting reputation for goodness and mercy that follows me around like a wet stray. So he told me that we should move ‘our investments’ out of the country—right away, today. We should transfer any cash into a foreign currency—like, what cash? I wish it weren’t so funny—and get out of any, quote, ‘dollar-denominated assets.’ God, he was theatrical about it. Maybe that sort doesn’t get much drama coming their way. He touched my shoulder, and looked me straight in the eye, like this is totally fucking serious and I’m not joking. It was hysterical. I have no idea what makes him think people like us have ‘investments.’”
“We might if only your rich abuelo would keel over.”
“Our seeing a dime of that inheritance would also entail my parents keeling over, so don’t tempt fate.”
Although Esteban was no gold digger, any reference to the Mandible fortune—of what size no one seemed to know—made Florence uncomfortable. A wealthy paternal grandfather hadn’t appreciably affected her modest upbringing. Over time, she had devoted a great deal of effort to persuading a Lat boyfriend that she was not yet another lazy, cosseted, entitled gringo who didn’t deserve her good luck, and whenever the money came up, that spoiled caricature reared its head again. It was touchy enough that she held the deed to 335 East Fifty-Fifth Street, and had resisted Esteban’s offers to contribute to the mortgage payments. They’d been together for five years, but allowing him to build a claim to the equity would have meant trusting the relationship an increment further than felt fitting, given that a string of his predecessors had proved such spectacular disappointments.
“What do you think is going on that made the guy say that,” Esteban asked, “out of the blue?”
“I don’t know. I overheard on the news that some bank in Britain went bust a couple of days ago, but big deal. That has nothing to do with us. And yesterday, what, a something-something didn’t ‘roll over’ something …? You know I don’t follow this stuff. And that was somewhere in Europe, too. After years of that ‘orderly unwinding of the euro,’ I’m immense burned out on their everlasting financial problems. Anyway, the news Willing was watching definitely said something about bonds. But I bet Brendan was just trying to impress me.
“Oh,
