Sometimes I just want to throw up.”
She was only peripherally aware of it when the suits vanished and a commercial came on. A fortyish man in a golf outfit is bouncing on the floor of a living room as if he’s a basketball thubba thubba thubba thubba, while a woman, slightly younger, and two children point fingers at him and weep with laughter thubba thubba thubba thubba. The bouncing man vanished, an event Magdalena noticed only because the screen became much brighter. She was deep into the Columbus Day Regatta—“Norman was just aching to be recognized as the great porn doctor and get himself invited up onto one of those boats.” She flicked only the quickest glance at what had lit up the screen, namely, a second commercial, an animated cartoon of thirty or forty pigs with wings flying in a military formation beneath a radiant blue sky and then peeling off one by one and diving like dive-bombers, whereupon a single name takes over the screen: ANASOL, and Magdalena was telling Amélia how “the girls were pulling the thongs out of the cracks of their asses and the boys were taking their shorts off and fucking them doggie-style right there on the deck in front of everybody, and Norman’s trying to get me to take off my bikini top, and I knew he wouldn’t stop there.” She was only momentarily aware of it when a news anchorman appears on the screen. A TV news reporter is in some sort of run-down gymnasium holding a microphone up to a tall man about thirty-five with a lot of muscles. Magdalena was vaguely aware of some guys, late teens, early twenties, milling about behind them… Couldn’t have been less interesting… All she was interested in was telling Amélia about how Norman was “sitting there on the deck, and he’s like crammed in with about forty or fifty other people, mostly men who look like they’re gonna need some porn-addiction therapy themselves—and I mean like need it very soon—and here’s the noted porn psychiatrist sitting there with them—and I couldn’t believe it. It was scary. They’re projecting porn movies onto the huge sails of a boat—huge—and ¡Dios mío! Norman’s the worst of them all! He’s got this tent pole underneath his bathing trunks, and it’s so obvious! Talk about a porn addict! He’s enchanted—I mean like on those huge sails all those erections looked gigantic, and when the girls spread their legs, it looked like a man could walk in standing up. I couldn’t believe it!” Magdalena had such a compulsion to impart every detail to Amélia, she didn’t even notice it when the same sort of boat, a schooner with very high masts and voluminous sails, appears on the screen, and way up on the highest mast two little figures are struggling, and the bigger one locks his legs around the waist of the smaller one, who’s about to fall to his death, and starts swinging hand over hand down the jib sail cable, carrying him down toward the deck and toward the camera, and now you can see the savior’s face—
“Magdalena!” said Amélia. “Isn’t that your boyfriend?”
Magdalena looked squarely at the TV for the first time “¡Dios mío! Nestor!”
The sight took her breath away… She hadn’t seen this on TV at the time. She had been too consumed that day with working up the nerve to tell her mother off and kiss Hialeah goodbye… and now she wasn’t in the mood for one second of Nestor’s great triumph… yet curiosity got the better of her: “Amélia, turn that up, will you?”
Amélia’s instinct exactly; she was already remoting the sound up. On the screen Nestor’s face is heading straight for the two of them, his face and the boos, catcalls, imprecations pouring down from the causeway up above, a regular squall of Spanish and English and God knows what other tongues. ::::::Good! His own people hate him! So what does it matter that he gets so much publicity—right?… right!… That old Hialeah stuff—you either get rid of it or you get all tangled up in it until it suffocates you completely… and Nestor was part of it, wasn’t he, a big part… How dare these americanos prop up his reputation and try to make some kind of hero out of him? How dare they insinuate that maybe I’ve made the wrong choice and given up a… celebrity?::::::
“¡Caramba!” Amélia said. “He’s really cute, that Hialeah boyfriend of yours!”
Magdalena grew quiet, testy, and abrupt.