The Bonjour Gene: A Novel

Chapter 6. Cappuccino

She always arrived at the midtown food court a half hour before he did, to secure a table as well as to have a little time to herself, gather her thoughts, enjoy a few pages of a novel. But on this afternoon the court was inordinately busy, and she had to use up her cherished, private half hour to find and hold a table for just the two of them. Luckily, while paying at the coffee counter, she spotted a frail woman getting up to help a slow-motion old man with his coat. Careful not to spill the brimming steamed milk from the cardboard cup, she reached the newly unoccupied table and claimed it with her briefcase and purse. This much accomplished, she removed her coat, sat and made herself comfortable. The first sips of cappuccino were welcomed by her throat and then her entire body, a stress-tightened fist that slowly loosened its grip. Soon feeling relaxed, she reached into her briefcase for her paperback copy of Jorge Amado’s Doña Flora and Her Two Husbands , and that was when her balloon of tranquility exploded, punctured by the sight of, wedged in the paperback, the lengthwisefolded manuscript of her husband’s latest short story. Manuel Bonjour, a reporter for the Spanish-language daily El Diario , had forfeited her respect after squandering too many nights writing stories. When they married, her old Aunt Grace, who knew his family back in the dinosaur days of Puerto Rico, warned her about that family and their men’s reputation as adulterers. But he 62 k Cappuccino 63 Cappuccino seemed completely different, never staying out late, coming home early every chance he could—but not to be with her. She never expected this kind of betrayal and now bristled when she thought of the mornings when a manuscript of a fresh story written at her sexual expense waited for her on the dining table. A yellow stick-on note always apologized for his going to bed after she had fallen asleep. In their first year, when she was willing to go to any lengths to make this second marriage succeed, she read his every effort, lacking the courage to confess that they were difficult to follow. She thought she really did love him and recalled that she never felt closer than when he was assigned to report on the death of some distant relation—actually nobody he even knew—whose last name was also Bonjour. The guy was found beaten to shreds in a motel over drugs, and Manuel didn’t want to report it, but his editor liked the tabloid irony of his byline flashing the same surname and, of course, insisted on printing the horrible picture of the blood-covered victim. Manuel was just starting out and felt that he couldn’t refuse. He lied to his editor and the readers, underscoring that he wasn’t related to the subject. But at home he poured out the shame that was killing him because, of course, as he had told her on the day they first met, on the island there was only one family with that name. This experience only produced more stories that he just had to write, stories based on that drug-dealing loser and other Bonjours he must have made up, everyone signed by different pen names that never seemed to be the right one. And she, of course, had to read them, praising sections, always suggesting that he simplify but ever careful not to trample his tender dream of becoming a Borges or Cortázar. Two years it took for her to realize her mistake from the start, that reading them only collaborated with her nemesis, and since that insight she refused to read his manuscripts, and he stopped leaving them for her. But her heart remained scarred: he patently loved writing more than he loved her. Her defeat to writing left him owing a debt that accrued high interest over their eight married years, the debt she was now collecting in installments every time she met her younger, graduate-student lover. Her conviction that she had a compensatory right to this affair, coupled with a certainty that it was an absolute secret, doubled her fortitude to resist any sympathy for Manuel’s intuition-provoked jealousy tantrums or any remorse after his exploratory accusations that only succeeded in making her life impossible. Four...