Consequences of Desire

Bésame, Bésame

Besome, Sesame Richie's mother flew out to Californiafor Christmas, just a simple, quiet two weeks with Richie and Consuelo and the kids, but it wasn't to be—on the very first day Richie came home from work to find her in her room, sitting on the edge of the bed, hands twisted and bloodless in her lap and a sour look of endurance on her face. It wasn't an entirely unfamiliar look, but neither were her swollen eyes what Richie wanted to see, not when he had gone to the expense of her ticket and taken time off to pick her up at the airport and allowed himself to imagine scenes of filial warmth just vague enough that he didn't have to consider theirplausibility. He marched into the living room where Consuelo and her friend Margarita had the stereo turned up and were drinking wine in water glasses, and he spun the volume knob way down and said, "Can't you once, just once in your life, consider somebody other than yourself? Just once. Just one goddamn time?" "I don't know what's the matter with her," Consuelo said, in a childish tone of injury. She turned and said something in Spanish to Margarita, and Margarita nodded, irritating Richieto the point where he began to feel loose and unconstrained. As if he might pick up something and throw it, not at Consuelo but against the wall, or the sliding glass door through which he could see the kids rolling across the patio in mortal combat, emitting a chorus of shrieks and yelps. Let them kill each other, he said to himself. He crossed the room and sat down carefully next to Consuelo on the sofa and stared into her bright black eyes. 162 The Consequencesof Desire "Her nerves are bad," he said slowly and emphatically, as if explaining something simple but at the same time complicated to one of the kids, why they couldn't stay up, or have ice cream right before dinner. "She can't stand loud noise. She's going to be here two weeks. Just two weeks. Fourteen days." He pushed his palm into the space between them and began to count aloud on his ringers. "One, two, three . . ." She made a noise of suffering in her throat. "She doesn't like me." "Huh?" Richie dropped the hand to his knee. He gazed at arcs of black at the tips of the fingers and a vein of dried blood running crookedly from one of the knuckles. A dull pain spread from his upper arm to his shoulder and throbbed at the base of his neck, threatening to enter his head and beat there like a drum. What had she been doing? Running around with Margarita? While he was busting his can, making enough to pay for the new bikes they had already bought for the kids, and whatever they would decide to get for themselves—a TV for their bedroom maybe, or a microwave oven. And then there was the cost of his mother's ticket. "She thinks the house is dirty." "She said that?" He had spent the past ten hours on his knees, setting tile on the floor of a large and opulent bathroom in a house being built for a doctor and his wife, and his Levi'swere caked and stiff with mortar and his shirt was stained with sweat. Consuelo had reproached him in the past for sitting on the furniture before getting out of his work clothes and it made no sense whatever for his mother to criticize her housekeeping. He looked around. He saw nothing out of place. He couldn't see a single speck of dirt. The carpet looked as smooth as freshly combed hair. "What did she say?" he asked, suspicion dilutinghis anger, turning it into the fatigue that he would mitigate by getting into the shower and then afterwards opening a beer and reading the paper or maybe watching the news on TV. Besame, Besame / 63 "She said, 'Do you vacuum every day?' " "Yeah?" "She thinks the house is dirty." Richie heard his mother's voice in his head, threatening him with some forgotten punishment ifhe didn't straighten up the mess in his room. "She said she thought it was dirty?" "She didn't say that." "She just asked if you vacuumed every day?" "Yes." "Jesus." Richie stood up...