Vida by Patricia Engel Read Free Book Online

it into the trash, and never thought of Maureen again.
    Your plan was to forget. But you did think of her, often, while wishing you could cull your memory to craft a provisional mercy. You never managed. Told yourself, In time. In time.

DESALIENTO

Diego was this guy that I met on Washington Avenue at three in the morning the summer I quit my job at the art gallery and decided I needed a month in Miami to evaluate my next move. Elsa and I had just come out of a nightclub, sweaty, half-drunk, and stinking of cigarettes, because that’s how we did it back then. We needed to sober up before driving home, so we went to Gino’s for a slice of pizza. Elsa’s Ukranian, a magnet for Russian guys, and within seconds she was showing off her Moscow slang to some guy named Vlad who was handing out flyers for the full moon party. Vlad pulled up a chair, and then his friend showed up: a shirtless Argentino—there are millions in South Beach—wearing camouflage shorts and a pair of blue eyes like they were all he needed to get by. He spotted Vlad and dropped his own flyers on our table, sat next to me, and said this is where he needed to be.
    You know how it is when you’re twenty-three and looking for meaning. I was so empty back then that Diego seemedprescribed by the gods. We gave him and Vlad a lift to Opium because they were supposed to hand out flyers outside the club. They got paid twenty dollars a night for that work. When they got out of our car Diego stuck his head in through my window and kissed me like some kind of satyr, deep, wet, and fast. Before I knew it, he was halfway down the block.
    We were staying in my parents’ condo. Told everyone we were reflecting on our lives. But really we were just tanning and partying. We made a ton of beaded jewelry and tried to sell it on Ocean Drive but we always ended up giving it away to guys who flirted with us. And when we weren’t smoking cigarettes on the beach, we were at Diego’s place. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the craziest building on Collins, where they rent by the month and the lobby is a revolving stage of drag queens, college kids, hookers, and the men who love them. And then there were the illegals: kids who should be in school or something but they were exiled from wherever they came from by either a shit economy or a miserable home life. Diego shared his apartment with fifteen others. The bedroom had eight mattresses on the floor and they all slept there like it was war times. Most of these kids were from Argentina, like Diego, fleeing last year’s collapse; backpackers-turned-refugees working valet parking at thehotels and clubs while the girls waited tables at the cafés on Lincoln where they don’t ask for papers.
    Vlad lived there, too, and while he and Elsa huddled on the couch talking about how he fled Lithuania by stowing away on a cruise ship and jumping off at New York harbor, Diego and I sat on the balcony smoking and drinking yerba maté from his special gourd. He didn’t try to kiss me again after that first night. I was mad for his fat lips and clear eyes, his choppy singsong Spanish and the way he thought shirts were optional. When I complained to Elsa she just rolled her eyes at me and said, “You always do this.”
    Even when we got sloppy drunk in the pool, beer cans floating next to us, me on his shoulders for a chicken fight trying to knock Elsa off of Vlad, Diego never made a move. Even when we ended up sleeping in the same bed, like that time we all drove down to Key West in nothing but our bathing suits and ended up staying for three days. We washed our swimsuits in the bathroom and let them dry. Vlad and Elsa in one bed doing God knows what, and me and Diego in the other, chaste as virgins.
    I knew Diego slept with tons of other girls. There was this one, Valeria, a Uruguayan fox with long black curls, who seemed to own only hot pants and halter tops. She wastwenty-six, and I pointed out that she was older than Diego and me