YEAR 0

Illustration by Jeffrey Decoster

Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually she’s your fiancée, but hey, in a bit it so won’t matter.) She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you’re a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six-year period, but still. Fifty fucking girls? God damn! Maybe if you’d been engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita you could have survived it—but you’re not engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita. Your girl is a bad-ass salcedense who doesn’t believe in open anything; in fact, the one thing she warned you about, that she swore she would never forgive, was cheating. I’ll put a machete in you, she promised. And, of course, you swore you wouldn’t do it. You swore you wouldn’t. You swore you wouldn’t.

And you did.

She’ll stick around for a few months because you been together a long, long time. Because you’ve gone through so much together—her father’s death, your tenure madness, her bar exam (passed on the third attempt). And because love, real love, is not so easily shed. Over a tortured six-month period you fly together to the D.R., to Mexico (for the funeral of a friend), to New Zealand. You walk the beach where they filmed “The Piano,” something she’s always wanted to do, and now, in penitent desperation, you give it to her. She is immensely sad on that beach and she walks up and down the shining sand alone, her bare feet in the freezing water, and when you try to hug her she says, Don’t. She stares at the rocks jutting out of the water, the wind carrying her hair straight back. On the ride out to the hotel, up through those wild steeps, you pick up a pair of hitchhikers, a couple so giddy with love that you almost throw them out of the car. She says nothing. Later, in the hotel, she cries.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes, like you always swore you would, so that the two of you can dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak. And every hour, like clockwork, you say that you’re so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she simply sits up in bed and says, No more, and, Ya, and asks you to move from the Harlem apartment that you two share when you’re not teaching in Boston. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say you won’t go. But, in the end, you do.

For a while you haunt the city, like a two-bit ballplayer dreaming of a call-up. You phone her every day and leave messages that she doesn’t answer. You write her long sensitive letters, which she returns unopened. You even show up at her apartment at odd hours, and at her job downtown, until finally her little sister calls you, the one who was always on your side, and she makes it plain: If you try to contact my sister again, she’s going to put a restraining order on you.

For some Negroes that wouldn’t mean shit.

But you ain’t that kind of Negro.

You stop. You move back to Boston. You never see her again.

YEAR 1

At first you pretend it doesn’t matter. You harbored a lot of grievances against her anyway. Yes, you did! She didn’t give good head, you hated the fuzz on her cheeks, she never waxed her pussy, she never cleaned up around the apartment, etc. For a few weeks, you almost believe it. Of course you go back to smoking, to drinking, you drop the therapist and the sex-addict groups and you run around with the sluts like it’s the good old days, like nothing has happened.

I’m back, you say to your boys.

Elvis laughs. It’s almost like you never left.

You’re fine for, like, a week. Then your moods become erratic. One minute you have to stop yourself from jumping in the car and driving to see her and the next you’re calling a sucia and saying, You’re the one I always wanted. You start losing your temper with friends, with students, with colleagues. You cry every time you hear Monchy y Alexandra, her favorite.

Boston, where you never wanted to live, where you feel you’ve been exiled, becomes a serious problem. You have trouble adjusting to it full time—to its trains that stop running at midnight, to the glumness of its inhabitants, to its startling lack of Szechuan food. Almost on cue, a lot of racist shit starts happening. White people pull up alongside you at traffic lights and scream at you with a hideous rage, like you nearly ran over their mother. It’s fucking scary. Before you can figure out what the hell is going on, they flip you the bird and peel out. It happens again and again. Security guards follow you in stores, and every time you step onto Harvard property you’re asked for I.D. Three times, drunk white dudes in different parts of the city try to pick fights with you.

You take it all very personally. I hope someone drops a fucking bomb on this city, you rant. This is why no people of color want to live here. Why all my black and Latino students leave as soon as they can.

Elvis says nothing. He was born and raised in Jamaica Plain, knows that trying to defend Boston from uncool is like blocking a bullet with a slice of bread. Are you O.K.? he asks, finally.

I’m dandy, you say. Mejor que nunca.

Except you’re not. You’ve lost all the mutual friends you had in N.Y.C. (they went to her), your mother won’t speak to you (she liked the fiancée more than she liked you), and you’re feeling terribly guilty and terribly alone. You keep writing letters to her, waiting for the day that you can hand them to her. You also keep fucking everything that moves. Thanksgiving you end up having to spend alone in your apartment because you can’t face your mom and the idea of accepting other people’s charity makes you furious. The ex, as you’re now calling her, always cooked: a turkey, a chicken, a pernil. Set aside all the wings for you. That night, you drink yourself into a stupor, then spend two days recovering.

You figure that’s as bad as it gets. You figure wrong. During finals a depression rolls over you, so profound that you doubt there is a name for it. It feels like you’re being slowly pincered apart, atom by atom.