Chapter 1-Meeting Jimmy

Photo of Marina and Jimmy at the back table at Chef Manuel's, after hours.
Marina and Jimmy sat at a table at Chef Manuel's, after hours. Chef Manuel took the photo. He was already drunk and had decided to serve the left over special of the evening because they had just invited him to their wedding the following day. Marina wore a halter top dress she made herself, two rectangles of orange corduroy sewn together, and a green belt from another dress strung into the top to make a drawstring collar. She was laughing and Jimmy was leaning toward her with his hand on her shoulder. Also drunk. The wedding had been easy to arrange because when the idea had struck them both it turned out that while Jimmy and Marlen the Mother of his four year old had lived together for ten years, they were not married.
She and Jimmy met in the kitchen of Chef Manuel's. Marina walked in one afternoon, through the alley to the back door, and asked for work. Jimmy welcomed her, took her to the rear and introduced her to Chef Manuel. He had risen to Manuel's assistant because he was smart and learned everything just from looking, by osmosis, and because he and Manuel drank together after hours. Manuel was an economic immigrant from Ventura (long before the Revolution), more Spanish than Indigenous and Black, and Jimmy's father had been an economic immigrant too, from the same town, Los Santos, from the African section of the town, and Chef Manuel, a little drunk already, who liked pretty young girls,especially ones who turned out to also come from Los Santos, hired her on the spot, made her the salad maker's assistant.
Jimmy borrowed twenty dollars from Marina one Sunday on the week before pay week, and showed up at Marina's door the following Monday just after payday, their common day off, when Chef Manuel was closed, to pay her back. They chatted a bit, mostly about Chef Manuel, and because Jimmy was able to chat with a streetpost. After awhile he said, “I bet you thought I'd never pay you back, so since you weren't counting on that money, why don't I buy us some Venturan rum? He took back the twenty and went downstairs and came back up with a quart. That was the day Marina found out Jimmy had a wife and a four year old boy. Found out Jimmy had a happy childhood until his Father's life went to hell from unemployment and impoverishment and drink. From the time he was 9, after his Mother died, he lived in foster homes and group homes.
They'd finished the rum, more Jimmy than Marina, and stayed up all night talking and then making love. She didn't know where the talking ended and the touching began, the talking brimmed and spilled over. Later she could never remember exactly what they talked about, only the feeling that at last her mind had merged with another mind. She had never before felt like she wasn't alone. (Or she had but each time it happened it felt like the first time, like it had never happened before, like all the last times had been not fully real, only rehearsals for this time. Only this time had always proved to be a failed merging of minds yet again. Still each new time was the hope that this time...By converting each of these men into “the only one” her mind was still waiting for her Papi to come home, the only man of whom there truly was only one, the man whose mind she first imagined merging with, or first longed to merge with, lying on the floor writing poems while he wrote sermons. Were her writing and her lovers the same quest to merge with Papi?..)
At the time of her first merging with Jimmy she had no feelings, no feelings she noticed or actually let herself feel, about his white City wife and his little boy. Did she feel entitled or justified because Jimmy told her of Marlen's affairs? Very early the morning after one of her nights with her Danish lover Asulf, Marlen came home and found a banner Jimmy had hung out of their front window, all the way to the windows in the apartment below theirs, that said, Marlen lives here, Come and get it.
One day their family dog Ho Chi showed up at the door, looking for Jimmy, or more likely looking for the boy Osmani. That afternoon Jimmy had picked up the boy from the day care center and brought him to Marina's, and gone out, probably to drink at the Waterhole, or to have a political meeting there. Both activities looked and ended up the same, Jimmy home late, drunk.
She didn't know what to say to the child, what to do with him, how to go toward him. She waited for him to initiate contact with her. He stripped, without saying a word, and climbed into the bathtub by the kitchen wall. In silence she helped him turn on the water, made sure it wasn't too hot. She watched as he filled up the tub. He lay in the water for two minutes then suddenly stood up and climbed onto the edge of the clawfoot cast iron tub. He balanced with the towel she handed him draping off his shoulders like a superhero cape. She saw his small penis was erect. He looked down at it and said, “I'm a boy and one day I'm going to be a man.”
He jumped down, dried himself, got dressed, and sat at the long narrow table by the kitchen window eating the bowl of cold cereal she served him. There was a loud pounding on the door.
On the other side stood Marlen. She didn't need to introduce herself. She had blonde hair, pale skin, and Osmani's big, light brown eyes. The dog Ho Chi greeted her and appropriated her, stayed at her heel as she pushed past Marina and walked inside. Marina followed her the length of the long narrow hallway, into the kitchen. Osmani kept right on eating. “Today is Jimmy's day.” He spoke without looking up.
Marina stood with her arms hanging, looked from son to mother and back again. She didn't know what the custody arrangements were. Everything with Jimmy happened too fast, by impulse, and still he'd managed to live with Marlen for ten whole years. At last Marlen broke the impasse. She grabbed Osmani's jacket from a chair by the tub, yanked him from where he sat, and put on his coat.
“It's Jimmy's day but the day is over.” She pulled the boy by the arm to the door. Marina followed. At the top of the stairs, Marlen held onto Osmani's hand hard. “There's no way I'm letting you stay here with this woman.” She glared at Marina. “How can you be so cold to a four year old? Don't you have a heart?”
She wanted to defend herself. She wanted to scream out, I'm not cold.
But was she cold? She liked to think she was just awkward, shy. She hated the way adults talked to children in Ventura, had talked to her. She imagined it was a foreign language she didn't know. “Dile a Mami que te de un tentealla.” She did so and Mami made sure to keep her nearby. Years later she deciphered the word tentealla...It was no word at all, but combined tente and alla, keep you and over there...It was what grownups said to a child when they wanted the child to tell another grownup to keep her away. Even when she didn't know the meaning of the word she felt the humiliation, and when she deciphered it, she felt humiliated in retrospect and permanently. She didn't want to humiliate Osmani and didn't know what to say to him, a person she didn't know, a person whose life her very existence had disrupted.