He is sopping my dishrag wet and I wish he finishes that I may stop wiping the table top and begin setting down our dinner. We have a call to make at nine o’ clock: an artist friend survived a bypass operation and had gotten out of the hospital after a long period of internment. She’d be able to entertain only until tonight. Tomorrow she and her husband leave for Manila. They are going to the States for a long overdue vacation a daughter had been urging them to take. The fruit tarts I made had to get there. All nine boxes of them. But he is stalling me. He doesn’t know what waves my well-travelled tarts are making abroad. Even if my head is forever stuck in the oven.

I wish I could wipe his form off my table. He is staining the glass top with his tears, and now he is crumpling my dress, too. The soup I made he barely touched and my son the poet is in one of his great moods, he could not be bothered with driving now. Meringue yourself old woman! And my foot is blistered from the toppled brewed coffee. And now this aging poodle in my kitchen, whining and banging his fist and pulling my skirt. Can’t my son stop sulking over his working-class lover and come up, roll his hips and twirl his hands in the air? That would have been enough to rouse him and make a sober man out of him.

What is he so crazy about that woman, anyway? So thin and so young she could have been my daughter. And now he wails I could slap this rag against his balding pate. Oh dear, dear. I taught her to swim! I did! Now she took me for a pool and went for the sea! Where did he get that drivel this time? Jesus. A fag for a son and a drag for a husband. What can a body do? But how I wish he quit dear-dearing me and let go of my hip. I can’t move to telephone for a taxi and deliver my tarts by myself. How tiring. When one marries, first thing she does is admit impediments. But a lifetime of pity and understanding is never enough for one man. What is he so in love with about that girl, anyway? Coming up here to peer at my paintings, like she could find something there, her skin so glossy she glows against my black banisters, bones jutting out of her shoulders. She must fancy herself laid-back, always in clogs and A-lines buttoned from the hem up to the nape. Jesus. With the quickie way he gets it up, how do they make love, standing up?

American Apple-Pie

We’ve been at it for three years, and he has been wanting to marry me. He is white, a divorcee with two children, ages 4 and 6. Just the right thing for me, cursed as I am for having been born without a womb, and now still working my ass off in this desert, teaching English and shagging Arab sheiks to save up petro dollars to grow tits, hips and cleavage. He must love me. Hadn’t he introduced me to his children, at which occasion I put my best leg forward, coming in skirt, heeled, perfumed. Oh, how happy he was. He laid down his plans for us: As soon as I finish my two-year contract in Bahrain, we shall marry. He will end his consultancy work in the Philippines and we shall settle in California. He laughed at my fixation with getting myself recast. He doesn’t care much for cunts and cleavages, he said. He really has no use of them. “What do I want them with? It’s you I care so much about, Denisse, Darling.”

But we have to be ever so much careful, he said. We have to make sure the children did not know, would not know. They should not find out I am gay. We have to keep from them, keep from her, that he is gay, that I am gay.

Call Me Brenda

True. I broke a vase off his head. And yes, in the morning I walked off on his continental breakfast, dropped his notebook on the side of the pool. Last glance I had of him he was a phantom of fear and confusion surrounded by equally stuck idiots. “What did you do!?! What did you do!?!” I heard him say, in near-hysteria. Very like him to ask what have I done after a thing has been done. And the look in his eyes, you would think it was our baby’s skull I broke and kicked into the water. But thoughtful of him, not to alarm the guard at the hotel lobby. He had this habit of turning up the TV’s volume every time I set about to pouncing on him. I was telling him to shut it off, I am talking, he was dense enough without the help of all those shitty jokes thrown between us by those his fellow-imbeciles in the boob tube, what did he think he was doing, handing me over to those monsters, I don’t find them funny. And he snapped,

"Neither do I find you funny.” He was sitting on the edge of his bed, his back to me. There was a ceramic vase with plastic flowers on the low table attached to the wall between our beds. I always had to remind him to ask the room boy to take it away as it doesn’t sit well with my books beside it or with his IBM notebook which he felt generous enough to let me use. He must have seen me in the mirror when I grabbed the vase that he was able to duck and was rolling on the floor when it crashed against the wall.

So when he regained composure, he proposed we make peace by not ever bringing up my politics issues into our talk. It stands between us, he explained, rather tightly, as it always sets me off, making me angry, upsetting us both. I went to the bathroom and wailed like a maniac. And in the morning at the breakfast table, with the gay light shimmering on his face, he smiled his kindest and winked at me and said, You frightened me last night. You were babbling like Miriam Santiago. What time did you sleep? Did you finish the Policy Paper? Um... we're mailing that today, you know?