Dominican Republic: The Malecón (cont.)
“No, thank you, I don’t need a date.”
“Why not?”
“I already have a girlfriend,” I lied.
“So? She’s not here.”
“I can’t,” I said, doing my best to smile. “I’m just here to have a drink.”
“Where are you from? You look like a gringo, but you speak Spanish like a campesino.”
“I’m American. I’m living out in the Cibao.”
“I’m from the Cibao,” she said. “My family lives there.”
“Really? Where?”
“It’s not important,” she replied. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. She asked me to buy her a drink and I did, and she stirred it and picked at the cherry floating on the top. I don’t think she really even wanted it.
“Is the drink good?”
“You must think I’m ugly,” she said, ignoring what I had asked her.
“No, I don’t. You are very pretty. You’re the prettiest girl here. I just can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
After exhaling sharply through red lips, red as blood and the dyed cherry in her drink, she got up and returned to her place on the wall with the others, vaguely annoyed. She left her glass on the bar behind her. And there it sat still half-full, sweating condensation, a crescent moon of lipstick on its edge. I drank alone, surrounded by the prostitutes, all standing in the shadows of the darkened club watching me, tapping their feet to the music, wanting to dance.
I finished my glass of Brugal and paid for it, after an event that never happened. I laid a few extra pesos on the rum-dampened bar and asked the bartender to give them to the one who had talked to me. He scooped up the wet bills with his four-fingered hand. He said he would and I believed him. I walked out the door, held open for me by the other man in the tuxedo, leaving the music and the perfume and the girls behind.
The taxi driver was waiting for me in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and listening to the baseball game on his car radio.
“What’s the problem, didn’t you like the girls?”
“Yeah, I liked the girls.”
“You just weren’t in the mood?”
“No, I guess I wasn’t.”
“It happens. But you’re young, so you will be in the mood again soon.”
He started the engine and gestured for me to get in, but I told him that I was just going to walk back to my room. It was a nice night, good for walking, with the traffic passing along the malecón, and the palm trees trembling in the breeze that came in off the ocean, almost as if in anticipation.
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