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6 Interracial Love, Sex, and Marriage THE TIME WAS several months later. The term had ended, and much had happened. Rodrigo and Giannina had returned home. I had finished my semester, discharged that onerous obligation the dean had imposed on me, and passed the responsibility for note-taking onto an unsuspecting senior professor, even older than I, who had come out of retirement to teach a tax course we were having trouble covering. Hee-hee, I thought—pretty clever of me to keep quiet about it until just before the faculty meeting, when I presented her with my stenographer ’s pad and a copy of the faculty handbook setting out how the minutes are to be recorded and distributed. But the real news was that Teresa and I had just decided to move in together. It all happened rather suddenly. In fact, at this very moment I was rehearsing what I would say when Teresa and I faced the two youngsters who, with their now much more grown-up baby, would be calling on us in about—I looked at my watch—one hour. I was sitting in my office in the gathering dusk, looking at the pile of seminar papers I had to grade before packing up my apartment and moving in with—my God, I thought, I am a lucky man—the beauteous widow Teresa. I still could not believe my good fortune. Knowing that Rodrigo and Giannina would have many questions, I thought back to the beginning. I remembered the time, more than a year ago, when I had first met Teresa, almost by chance. If I had not run into the vacation-bound Rodrigo in the supermarket that day, would I have even met her at all? Rodrigo did say that he had mentioned me to her, that she knew of my work, and wanted to meet me. But if it had not been for that chance meeting in the rows of cans of anchovies and refried beans, Rodrigo might not have invited me over, Teresa and I might never have met, and our lives might have been radically different, mine anyway. I remembered the pleasure and delight we each experienced in 92 getting to know one another over the course of those meetings in her townhouse, accompanied by the young people, and finding out the many ways in which we were alike, yet also different. I remembered our first, rather formal evenings out together, and the pleasure I took in realizing, over time, how much pleasure she, in turn, took in my company. I remembered the time I had first visited her apartment , in the company of Rodrigo and Giannina, and noticed that the photograph of her late husband had been casually rotated on the mantelpiece so that it no longer faced the entryway and, then, the time a few weeks later when it had been missing altogether. I remembered the terrible months when everything seemed to be coming apart—Rodrigo missing, Giannina reeling from the effects of a cesarean delivery, Teresa staying up half the night helping with the baby, and I struggling to hold the institute together. I recalled how, even during these dark days we had managed to steal our first kiss in the darkened entryway to her daughter’s apartment, and how, earlier, she had fallen asleep in the taxi on the way back from a night at the theater, her head on my shoulder. I remembered, as vividly as anything in my life, that first night, back in my hometown and with Teresa unpacked and ensconced in her new, permanent apartment, when she had asked me up to her place, alone. The night outside had been cold and still. We had gone to a local art house to see an Italian movie, one that turned out to have been made in her hometown in Italy. She had excitedly pointed out to me streets and piazzas near the very neighborhood in which she had grown up. Afterward, we drank espresso (the decaffeinated variety, in my case) in a local café, then walked home hand in hand through the dark streets, lit mainly by the new moon. At the door to her apartment, she had hesitated a moment, then said, “I haven’t got it quite all fixed up yet, but you’re very welcome to come in.” We walked up the short flight of stairs together, then she fished out the key and opened the door. “I just had the dead...

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