The Bolivian Navy

Iloved this apartment the first time I walked through the door. We both loved it, my wife and I: the unmarked hardwood, the two south-facing bedrooms warmed by the November sun, the floating stairs to a loft I could already see lined with bookshelves. The apartment was on the fifth floor. There was air and light and, three blocks from the East River, the street was quiet. I counted the spires of four churches through the double-height windows. From the roof deck, I looked over the Brooklyn warehouses—low, dark buildings, on streets I’d dreamed of—and across the water to Manhattan. I could imagine the two of us up there on a summer’s night with cold wine in our glasses, offering the view to the friends we’d make.

The apartment cost everything I had, before the monthly payments, which Lara would have to cover.

“You idiot,” said my father, when I told him.

Career, city, the expectations of my parents—what freedom to discover that none of them weighed, not at all. I was laughing when I hailed the cab that would take us to our wedding. A September in San Francisco, six weeks before we moved: sunlight across the seat cushions, stilled air, no clouds. We both wore gray. She had bare arms, me an open collar. My parents, up from San Jose, waited in the plaza in front of City Hall. My father was glum, my mother already weeping, but Lara, all grace, all forgiveness, kissed them both. Her friend Emilia witnessed and signed, and then the five of us sat awkwardly for a pasta lunch in North Beach. Before my parents drove off, my father gave me a bank draft for ninety thousand dollars. That was real money, even for a cardiologist. He told me that now I would truly be on my own, while I nodded and tried to look solemn. At home Lara and I opened the bottle of whiskey my brother had sent and went to bed.

We were twenty-eight and twenty-nine. Lara had an offer in New York in the tax department of a law firm with offices on four continents. And so we went.

In our first months in the apartment we would go out together after Lara came home from work. We went to see the new bands and the art shows. We drank absinthe in bars. I ate platters of oysters. After midnight, I stopped, on our long walks home, to piss in wind-swept alleys, while Lara giggled and kept watch. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she once gave me a hand-job in the darkness, under my coat, during the fourth act of Macbeth.

Winter passed, the city warmed, light became heat. With the double-height windows, we found that we were living in a greenhouse. In July and August, we ran the air conditioner and walked around the place in our underwear. I liked seeing my wife in her underwear. But when she was at the office, and I was working on my novel in the loft, the glare gave me a headache. The near-blank screen, the smell of my skin, my dampening T-shirts: all this awakened a thirst. I started to pour my first drink a little earlier in the day. Just a beer that I’d put in the freezer for fifteen minutes. Or two beers, sometimes three, before Lara came home.

“You’re getting fat, gringo,” she said, in year two. “You have a pot belly, no?”

Though I was several shades darker than she was, I didn’t care if she called me gringo or, frankly, anything. She could say whatever she liked in that accent. We were still going out after work, but Lara was right—I was beginning not to look the part. My T-shirts were getting tighter, and my face was swelling. I switched from beer to gin, for the calories.

Then we decided, or Lara did, that it was time for children. We had Ana-Lucia first, Zoe next. From entire winters I remember nothing...