Horseshit, I thought, which wasn't strictly the point. The real question was
why his car had been pulled over in the first place, and why, after a brief
but unfriendly conversation, the backseat of his car had been removed,
disassembled, and his trunk thoroughly searched. Bad attitudes didn't void the
Constitution.
Pitting the word of Miguel Caliz against the Atlanta Police would not be a
walk in the park, except I met the arresting officers later that afternoon,
and they were exactly as Caliz described. That was the moment I knew for
certain that Caliz would walk, whether or not he was guilty. The two policemen
were a couple of meanspirited assholes who couldn't keep their dispositions
off their faces. They reminded me of Caliz himself: they were bullies, making
their living off the pain of society. It was simple human nature,
therefore--people despising being reminded of their own shortcomings--that
Caliz would bring out the worst in them. I could see it in their eyes: they
didn't like Latinos, they didn't like Caliz, and above all, they didn't like
people they couldn't scare. If I put together a jury with the right
disposition, just looking at those officers would be all it would take to
spring Caliz.
None of that explained what happened, how I took his girlfriend to dinner, how
for three or four hours the conversation drifted easily into areas she knew
nothing about: law school, the summer I had backpacked across Europe--it was
only three weeks, but we were a couple of drinks into it by now--how the cost
of a really good bottle of wine wasn't something to compare with other, lesser
things. In fact, I knew very little of these matters, but she had watched me
with those shining, dark eyes, which was enough. It was a wet fall evening,
and she had huddled close to me as we walked past the shops in Buckhead, a
world she couldn't reasonably expect to ever call her own. She was wearing
what ghetto girls always wear when they go someplace decent--something black, a
little too tight, a little too short.
The word seduction implies a victim, and there is too much confusion about
what happened next to assign the word here. Certainly, I found myself
wondering what it would be like to lose myself in her beauty, to see myself in
her dark, shining eyes. And after a few hours I invited her home--I fumbled the
invitation a little, but she didn't seem to notice--still telling myself we
were only going to talk, to spend some time together. But inside my apartment
she brushed against me, bringing her breasts against my chest, and I pulled
her to me, determined to treat her like the angel I wanted her to be. My sin
was not lust. My sin was the sin of Satan, who wanted to be like God. I wanted
to be the savior of the earthbound Violeta Ramirez, and I wanted her to
worship me for doing it.
The next morning there was a rustle of sheets beside me, her exquisitely
feminine scent creeping over me as I woke, making me dizzy. She sighed deeply
and turned over, her light brown backside coming up against my hip. I closed
my eyes and felt something like euphoria, only deeper, earthier. Her sleeping
was so deep, so untroubled, that I marveled once again how God, with His
infinite capacity for irony, so often paired angels like Violeta with losers
like Caliz. Maybe I was romanticizing. I'm certain that I was, because at that
point in my life I still had that capacity. Maybe she had a bad-boy complex.
Maybe she was working through some father issues by dating a guy like Caliz.
Maybe she was like me, and just wanted someone of her own to save. Caliz
certainly fit that bill. The mind is infinitely complex.
Lying awake beside her in bed, I didn't know if what happened between us was
romantic or cheap. There was so little context, and I never had the chance to
find out. One of God's tricks is to cloud the human mind at the moment of
mating with so much angel dust that it's only in looking back at things that
you can discover what they really meant. We fall in love and then, on the
fourth date, we wonder who the hell we're with. I do know that when Violeta
finally awakened and started to dress, she looked even more beautiful to me
than the night before. It hit me how extraordinary sex was, that she was
walking around with me inside her, every strand of genetic code containing the
purest essence of myself. Inside her warm body was every detail of who I am,
and I felt extravagantly, marvelously happy.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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