“Well,” he said, “since you haven’t run out of here yet, I figured I should at least offer you a beverage.”
“This is … unreal. Is this what the rest of the house is like?”
“Um, kind of,” he offered sheepishly. “I, um, like to keep the stuff categorized, I guess. This is … music. Upstairs, I have a lamp room—lamps are hard for me to pass up, personally, and um, well, I know I said I don’t keep papers and stuff, but that wasn’t totally true. Downstairs is comics and magazines—but what I’d like to think of as good stuff, you know? I’ve got two decades’ worth of Rolling Stone and every issue of Vibe.”
His sheepishness began to recede as he started talking through the various rooms, his enthusiasm for their contents clearly shining through. Rather than find this repulsive, Olga was surprised that it endeared him to her. She wanted to know the size and shape of the hole that had been left in his heart that required so many objects to fill it. She found herself envious that he had identified something to pack it with.
“The TVs … they’re in my bedroom,” he continued, “I mean, I don’t watch a ton of TV, but I have a lot of them. Different models and stuff. They all work. I just keep them in there and sometimes the light can be soothing to sleep to, or to pop in an old movie. And then, I keep a Christmas room, but it’s small…”
“I thought you were Jewish.”
“Yeah, but who doesn’t like Christmas, right? Like, if you’re having a bad fucking day, what’s better than sitting near a Christmas tree and listening to some carols? Actually, there are more records up there, because I don’t mix the Christmas music.”
They were standing a few feet apart. A silence fell between them.
“No one has been in this house in eight years besides me, Olga.”
He offered the words to her, loaded as they were with meaning. And she accepted what he said with gentle care. Fear and affection bubbled warm in her chest. A sensation of intimacy innervated her body from the root of her sex to the roots of her hair. She wanted to tell him that she was honored that it was her. That she was happy he’d talked to her that sad day at the bar. That she thought the house was actually kind of fucking cool, even if it wasn’t perhaps psychologically healthy. She wanted to say that she was sorry his mother had died, that she was sorry he had felt so lost. That she understood pain like that. That, for her, instead of filling her house, she had slowly stripped herself bare, until there was nothing. But she was too out of the practice of loving, in that moment, to say those things.
“Thanks for letting me use your restroom,” she said with a smile, frustrated with her own inadequacy, and desperately hopeful that he understood.
He closed the distance between them, kissed her cheek, and pulled away with a smile.
“Girl, do I have a record that’s gonna blow your mind! Let me find this shit.”
He quickly made his way to a spot on the many shelves of records and, with slight smugness, made a show of his find.
“That’s right! Fania All Stars, San Juan seventy-three!”
“Shit!” she said, with genuine delight.
He laid the needle on the record and Olga immediately recognized the piano opening of “Mi Debilidad.” Matteo cleared a coffee table from the center of the room and they began to dance.
“Tú siempre serás mi debilidad,” he sang along to her.
“Ha! Do you even know what you’re saying?”
“Mami, I’m very, very fluent in Spanish. Shit, I bet my Spanish is better than yours.”
Olga smiled, knowing this was likely true. The song changed and she collapsed on the sofa. Matteo lay down next to her and she rested her head on his chest as the music washed over them.
“Papi loved this record. We used to have these amazing dance parties when I was little. It was just my family getting together, but I was a kid, so they felt like parties. My dad would put on music, maybe take out his congas. It was the best part of growing up, for real. Before it all changed.”
“What happened to the records?”
“Why,” she asked playfully, “growing your collection?”
He pinched her stomach, lightly. “Har, har. No, I just meant, he left them, but what did you do with them?”
Her hand had been tracing Matteo’s stomach, but now she stopped.
“I broke them,” she said, taking a breath. “After he left them, Abuelita put them in the basement. No one felt like playing music much in those days. But when he died, after the funeral, I missed him real bad. I kept thinking of all the times I’d see him in the streets, high, and would cross so he wouldn’t see me. I felt so ashamed of that. And mad that I couldn’t see him again. You asked how I felt about my dad being a junkie? I guess I felt pissed off about it, too. At him for using, at my mom for giving up on him. At my brother for enabling him.