I Am Not the Painter from Puerto Rico

THE FIREWORKS LAST THROUGH DAWN. Smoke collects in streetlights, lingering that dense, burnt chemical sweetness you come to love through old age. It’s colder than cold and yet I’m warm inside my chest because of the smell. It’s taking me back. I live the night over decades since my first memories of New Year. The excitement of fresh beginnings. Those few hours where nothing exists from the past.

I’m tired and frozen but we haven’t left the bench around the lake. Matilda’s forehead is feverish. I can’t wake her just yet. My thoughts are galloping. From freshly bought New Year’s Eve outfits my mother dressed me in to match her gowns. Fake apple cider champagne. Then real champagne. Then vodka. Bottle rockets. Falling asleep before midnight and babies crying right as the ball drops. My whole life in one night and here we are, about to lose one another.

Matilda sniffles and a line of watery snot runs down her nose and over her lip. Who am I without her?

Yesterday, Matilda was on the phone with her mother getting a deviled egg recipe when it slipped. Matilda had been married once before and now divorced. She never told me.

I sat on the couch, head tilted like a confused cat, waiting for a laugh or ‘just kidding.’

“He was a painter,” she said.

I looked him up on the computer and not only was he searchable, but famous at that.

“From where?” I asked, his origin right there on the screen. I wanted to hear her say it and the way she’d say it.

“Puerto Rico,” Matilda said. “Are you angry?”

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Three years,” she said.

“No, I’m not angry,” I said, “just surprised.”

Matilda and I had only been together a year and I forgot to imagine any wild life beyond the two of us. I knew about the one lesbian college experience with an exchange student from France who ‘looked very boyish and wore ties’ Matilda said. And her solo backpacking trip through Morocco where she swam naked on a beach with old men in their 70s, and one got very ill from the heat and she read him a book of English poetry right there on the hot sand and he recorded her voice on a tape deck.

But I didn’t know there was a marriage. A wedding. I wasn’t mad and didn’t see her any differently, but I felt different. Suddenly smaller.

The party my sister threw was dull so Matilda and I snuck away and ran down to the lake. The firework show began as we found a bench close to the water. It had yet to snow and the night was warmer than it should be in December and so close to the mountains.

A shadow train of ducks and ducklings kicked away to the corner bog that was shaded by tall reeds. We could smell the reeds from the bench, rotted with spilled motor oil and extreme fluctuations between frost and warmth.

Against the wake, the ducklings glided, small little things, and although I felt silly smiling at such childish entertainment I was giddy anyway. They were beautiful, tiny fluffballs, and it was a miracle to see any baby animal in the dead of winter.

Only the last duckling made signs of a struggle, and only for a moment. Although the water was calm and the lake empty, the duckling was struck by a terror. To get somewhere, get free. Maybe a nipping fish or loose wire tangled to the bottom grabbing its foot.

“What was the ring shape?” I asked.

Matilda shook her bangs and said, “almond.”

“Almond?” I said, “I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“Almond,” she said, “Look,” and pointed to the sky where a firework exploded and turned the cool wind hot with steam.

I wanted to hear every detail of her marriage. Even the parts most men know nothing about, until they live it and know everything.

Had the painter seen her before the ceremony? What song did they choose and did they pick it together? Had all the parents been there and what flavor was the cake?

I wanted to know about him. The Painter. Whether he was an only child and if this almond ring he picked needed resizing or fit right away.

“Did you say yes instantly?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Yesterday, after she began telling the details, we paused to go to the grocery store. We bought mayonnaise, two cartons of eggs, fresh dill, spicy mustard, and green relish. The relish was for us, as we put it on everything. The store only had ordinary relish so we bought blue food coloring to turn it green, as we saw it done in Chicago on our first trip together last winter. We had no idea it was a thing, green Chicago relish.

I relived that trip as she checked her list, pushing the cart down the aisle. It had been Fall actually, but too cold for the clothes we packed so it felt like winter. More than the relish and the way Matilda’s nose turned red and dripped in the cold wind, I could only think now of how Chicago was no Puerto Rico.

She unpacked the groceries in the fridge and said something sharp and overthought.

“You what?” I asked. Her words had been muffled by falling ice.

Matilda stood tall and it seemed painful to say this a second time but she did.

“Tomorrow, I want you to decide if you still want me. I don’t need to be with anyone but I like being with you. Think on it and don’t tell me until tomorrow.”

I tried saying ‘of course I want you,’ but the words clattered around my head before going away.

The duckling ebbed against the wake and the crossing made me jolt against the bench. A ripple in the ordinary thump of my heart.

Matilda’s hand rushed to my thigh, grounding the muscle down. Her face was dark and wondering, and when the buzzing rise of the firework finally peaked above us she lit up pink and gold. Her whole face changed and she was a child again. Of course I still want her, I thought.

She turned to watch the show and it hurt for a moment. Then even I could not keep gazing at her when another whirling pod rang up and I knew it meant another great explosion.

Pop!

My eyes stuck to the dark sky, exploding with fireworks above and beyond the horizon.

That uncanny fright stayed in me for hours as we swept closer to midnight and even once it passed. In my bones, sort of.

We did not kiss at midnight.

My complete comfort with Matilda had been broken. For the first time there was doubt if we would be together this time next year. She had left men who are better, more exotic and bold than I am, and so I had no chance.

What did happen at midnight was Matilda tipped her mouth my way, still watching the sky, and said, “It’s our own private show.” Her pupils dancing.

Instead of a kiss, I wrapped my arm around her and she nestled in the pit. It inflated me with such pride. Who cares if another man proposed? If she said yes and bought a dress and walked an aisle and had a honeymoon. Her marriage would have been nothing like I imagined it. Matilda and I have had hundreds of tender and wild moments in only a year, and who’s to say those moments meant more to her, even a single one, than all the romantic landmarks with the Painter.

Of course I wanted her. By the third month of dating, I imagined Matilda one day being my wife.

In a kitchen. A small wooden island and a child whirling passed to the backyard. A modest home, some struggle, a second child on the way, and so much love. So much love.

The ducks were disturbed from their bog by a solo kayaker stroking through the lake. The water, dark as oil, didn’t look like real water. And the ducks didn’t look like real ducks. This moment, it cannot be real and the crisscrossing of disbelief hit me again with a deeper terror. This view like a funhouse illusion I struggled to take in and make sense of. I was sick with the thought of Matilda leaving.

The world came forward from its soft haze and sharpened in dimension. Even I became more real. Real as the ducks and the couple on the next bench wrapped in hoodies and so together they appeared conjoined like a freak in a carnival.

Every bit of the world was terrifying and real, real with dangers, real with loneliness, and I could not turn to Matilda and explain.

I breathed. Breathed. Then had to sit up from Matilda and remove my arm.

She took my thigh again with her hand. I searched for the shadow of a ring. A sunburn or hair worn down. Of course, there’s no trace of a ring. There’s nothing.

“It’s passed midnight,” she said, “you haven’t told me what you decide.”

A firework burst over us, green and blue. I felt her eyes on me, then felt them away. Hot to cold.

I breathed the rubbery smoke, still sweet. It was apple cider and champagne, my mother’s lipstick, tall candles melting with wax monsters, and buffed shoe tips, old Christmas trees, puking in the snow, my niece shrieking at the taste of spicy pickles.

“You’re the only woman I’ve ever been with,” I said.

“Dated?” she asked.

“All of it,” I said. I think to myself, I am so ordinary. I am not the painter from Puerto Rico. “All with you, you’re all of it,” I said.

The conversation ended there and it was surprisingly natural. We sat on the bench. Fireworks kept going off long past when I expected them to run out.

I lost track of the ducks, the kayak, even Matilda, and allowed myself to be completely there and completely afraid. I breathed into the fear. Like I said, it’s still there in my bones. A nervousness with being so out in the open, so free to make a choice like saying goodbye to someone you imagined forever. The fact that Matilda asked me to choose told me what she wanted. And I think I wanted it too.

Ours was to be the story of a single year together, and although I am ordinary and she is wild, and we will not grow old together and have that kitchen with sunlight on the wooden island, it doesn’t make our plain and ordinary time any less important.

All fears, dangers, and heartaches are born of something small. I know even the slightest kernel of love can cause catastrophic heartbreak. That life-taking sadness starts with a splinter. This means there is more to the world, more than we will ever expect of it, so much we cannot imagine.