Peter faced himself in the mirror.

It had been a long day and dark circles already lined his eyes, a symptom of not enough sleep, of too much coffee, of lack of exercise, but mostly, a symptom of long, drawn-out, bitter yearning. His razor sat neatly on the bench, to the right of the washstand, and the faucet flowed, filling the basin with clear warm water. He squirted shaving cream into his hand.

In the mirror he saw her face again.

She was always there.

Peter sighed.

She had presided over Juanito’s funeral like Queen Victoria supervising a philandering Prince Albert. Juanito’s mother had clucked and fussed and bothered over his body, wailing in grief, claiming the stage for her week-long performance to follow. She sure knew how to perform, thought Peter. She’d seldom bothered to visit Juanito when he was alive but, in death, she was suddenly all too present. The last visit from her had been two years earlier. She’d stayed for just one hour. During the visit, she’d remarked on the Frida Kahlo painting that Juanito had displayed proudly on the living room wall. That was the only detail of their lives that she’d taken in. She’d been more preoccupied that day with unloading the many and varied family dramas that constantly unfolded in the Garcia-Fernandez household than with Juanito himself. Nonetheless, he’d seemed pleased that she’d visited.

She occupied the house now.

Peter had not been able to stay in their own home after Juanito died. She’d claimed it almost immediately. She was legally entitled to claim it, after all, she owned the deed. Peter had no rights. Juanito would’ve loved nothing better than to buy the house for both himself and Peter, but he’d had no choice than to go to his mother for help when he got sick. The cancer, once it had announced itself, was determined to make Juanito its servant, and his mother its willing assistant. He’d signed the house over to her eighteen months ago, on the condition that she paid the monthly mortgage. At the time, Peter had thought that it was a kind gesture on her behalf, even though she never came to visit. At least it had given Juanito a roof over his head in his final years. They could never have paid the mortgage on Peter’s paltry income.

It had only taken twenty-four hours for the barrier to fall.

Juanito had been making one of his collages when he died. That was how he’d spent most of his final year, cutting out small scraps of paper and pasting them onto large sheets of cardboard, as if trying to piece together his own life somehow, looking for clues in the pile of magazines he’d accrued over the years. Peter’s favorite image was the self-portrait that Juanito had done, which pictured him holding a small cup in his hand. There was no cup in Juanito’s hand at the moment of death, only the scissors that Peter had pried out from between Juanito’s small fingers after he’d stopped breathing.

Peter had constantly complained about the mess that Juanito made. On the day of his death, the bed was littered with the tiny scraps like wedding confetti. Peter had said his farewell then, clearing away the paper and brushing aside Juanito’s solid black fringe, kissing his small, brown forehead, folding Juanito’s arms over his chest in the bed to make him look more comfortable. "Goodbye, little Juan" were Peter’s final words to his lover of ten years. Peter had been sad that day but he’d also found a strange joy in the event. It was peaceful, a feeling of release. Juanito had looked so calm lying there in the bed that Peter couldn’t have felt any other way. Juanito was watching Ricky Lake when he died, and Peter had turned the TV off and sat for a half-hour in silence with his departed companion.

Peter should have collected more of Juanito’s things that day, but Juanito had seemed so much at ease in the bed that to start sorting through possessions would almost have been distasteful, would have somehow disturbed Juanito’s sleeping body. He’d known that the day of Juanito’s death would eventually arrive and he’d packed all his belongings a month beforehand, moving as much as possible into Eddie’s place. Even so, he’d left a lot behind. Possessions that were theirs in common still littered the house and Peter had neither the heart nor the will to gather these up.

He regretted it now. Once Peter phoned Juanito’s family and told them the news, it had taken only an hour for Juanito’s mother to arrive from Bel Aire, after nearly two year’s absence. Her arrival had broken the peaceful silence. Their home instantly filled with wailing, as if she was not one person but an entire household of mourning Latinas. Juanito’s father had trailed behind her helplessly, as usual. Peter had always thought that Juanito was more like his father, had the same quiet nature, in surreal contrast to his strident mother. It was hard to tell what Juanito’s mother looked like in reality. Her hair was bleached and her makeup always impeccably applied. She could have been anyone under that mask. Strangely enough, Juanito had been closer to her than to his father.

Peter told Juanito’s parents that day that he’d moved most of his own possessions to Eddie’s place. He remembered the look on her face when he’d told them. He hadn’t realized it at the time but they’d taken this as a license to move in. Peter had only left the house for two hours. When he’d returned he found that it was no longer his home. How she’d managed to get the locks changed in such a short period of time had been beyond him. All he’d known was that his key no longer worked.

Peter had gone around the back of the house to try to enter through the rear. He’d seen the back door slam shut as he rounded the corner. It was then that he’d seen the fire. His mother had gathered up all of Juanito’s collages and set them alight in one giant paper pyre. They’d burned brightly, the orange flame licking the lemon tree that Juanito had planted five years earlier, blackening its branches.

Peter had run to the flaming pile to try to salvage something from the mess. He’d scorched his hands as he tried in vain to extract just one of the precious memories from the litter, but the paper burned quickly and all that had been left were a few corners of the original work. Peter had made a collection of these but he’d thrown them out after only a week. They just made him angry when he saw them, and he resolved instead to rely on his own beautiful, fragile memories of Juanito.

Peter had been excluded from that day onward. He’d not been allowed to re-enter the house and had gone to stay with Eddie.

Was it only two weeks ago? It seemed longer.

Peter knew that she was in the process of selling the house. The priceless Frida Kahlo painting now hung in her own home in Bel Aire, taking pride of place above the dining table.

The painting had been a gift from Juanito’s ex-lover. Peter had argued with Juanito over the painting at first, feeling like he was somehow in competition with the ex-lover whenever he saw it. But Juanito wanted to keep it. He’d said that it was beautiful to have such a memory and didn’t understand Peter’s jealousy. Juanito said that he found beauty in both the painting and the gesture. His former lover had given it to Juanito the day that he’d told him that he was leaving. He’d said that he wanted to make the parting a memorable occasion, not hanging on to any bitterness. Juanito valued the gesture immensely. He’d told Peter that it was a symbol of solidarity, that the real value of the work lay in the gesture of giving. He’d told him that it had allowed the relationship with his ex-lover to become more than just a sexual one and had taken them onto another, more altruistic level. Juanito had also contradicted himself by pointing out, rather cynically, that the painting may one day come in useful as an item that could be sold, if they were ever in financial trouble. But when the reality of that trouble had finally hit them, Juanito had chosen not to sell the painting, and instead had gone to his mother for help. Peter eventually gave up, preferring to see the painting as a kind of blind spot for them both on the wall.

Juanito’s mother certainly didn’t need the inheritance. Juanito’s father had owned a factory in Mexico, before their retirement to Bel Aire. They’d manufactured beach umbrellas there for over thirty years, using the cheap labor that was so readily available below the border, importing the umbrellas for sale in the United States. Juanito had told Peter he’d visited one of the factories once and it had been mostly populated by young children, who assembled the umbrellas by hand. Peter was never sure if this was true or whether it had just been Juanito’s penchant for the dramatic where his family was concerned.

The painting had been the only possession of monetary value in the house. Juanito’s mother had known that. Everything else she’d sold to second-hand stores, burned, or thrown out.

Peter couldn’t care less about the priceless Kahlo, but he would have given anything just to have one of Juanito’s collages. He sighed now as he caught sight of his own ashen face in the mirror. He wished that he’d kept just a corner of the burned memory, even that would have been better than nothing.

He looked down into the wash-basin and suddenly noticed a bright gold sequin sitting in the bottom of the clear water.

He fished it out carefully with his thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. It seemed strangely out of place. Neither he nor Eddie could have put it there. Eddie was strictly a jeans and T-shirt type of guy. Peter had hardly been in a celebratory mood. There had been no street festivals or parades. He figured that the sequin must have stuck to somebody’s clothing and been carried into the house.

Peter scraped the sequin delicately into the soap-dish.

#

The bar wasn’t busy when Peter arrived. He’d been to Rudolfo’s only a few times before. Now that Juanito was dead, it seemed pointless to sit at Eddie’s place waiting for the world to arrive. The noise of the bar was a comforting distraction.

Jimmy, the barman, swooped up to where Peter was sitting like a seagull chasing bread. Peter didn’t know him very well. Jimmy was young, seeming almost too young to be working behind a bar and was full of boundless energy. It always seemed like Jimmy was dancing, even when he stood still. Peter ordered a Berry Calistoga.

Peter sat by himself at the bar, taking short sips of the mineral water. Before long he noticed an enormous dark-haired woman sitting in the corner of the bar, dressed in somber shades of the deepest purple. A black sequined cocktail hat sat perched on top of her head and a voluminous skirt encircled the bulk of her lower body. He was surprised that he hadn’t seen her huge, billowing frame when he walked in, sitting quietly, regarding Peter with a determined stare.

Peter nodded at her, thinking to break her train of thought, letting her know that her stare was being felt.

To his surprise she didn’t look away but just continued to stare at him.

Unnerved, Peter deliberately turned in his chair and sat with his back to the woman, trying to avoid her gaze. He couldn’t see her now but he knew she was still watching. He took another sip of his Calistoga and sat, hoping to wait it out.

After several minutes Peter turned again to see if the woman was still watching him.

Her gaze hadn’t moved an inch.

Resigned to break the ice, Peter got up from his chair and walked over to her. As he approached, Peter thought he recognized her face. He stopped for a moment but decided he couldn’t really tell.

He moved closer to her.

"Do I know you?" he offered.

The woman appeared caught out, as if she’d woken from a dream, completely unaware that she’d stared at him for so long. She shook her head and offered her hand to him.

"Tiresa," she said in a smooth, bass-baritone voice.

Peter now knew where he’d seen her. This woman was one of the performers that frequented Saturday nights at the club. Peter couldn’t tell whether Tiresa was a man or a woman. She had a feminine appearance and was dressed in female attire but she spoke with a man’s voice. But it wasn’t simply an issue of gender with Tiresa. She seemed to have no racial identity either. She was dark skinned but her features were strangely universal. She could easily have been of Mexican or African-American or Anglo-Saxon origin. Peter couldn’t remember her particular brand of performance.

He took her hand and sat beside her.

“Excuse me, Precious, but I was miles away,” she apologized, in a mellifluous voice. "I thought you were one of the regular bar-flies. Then I realized that you weren’t, but it’s what you were wearing that caught my eye."

Peter looked at his clothing. It was nothing out of the ordinary, just a T-shirt and jeans.

"You mean this?" Peter asked.

Tiresa looked at his clothing as if she saw the T-shirt and jeans for the first time.

"No, Precious,” she said. "Not that. You were wearing the most wonderful gold-sequined gown that I have ever seen. It just shimmered all over you."

"I don’t do drag,” he said, abruptly. "Sorry."

As soon as the comment had come out of Peter’s mouth he was embarrassed by it. If this woman was indeed a man, a drag queen, then he might be offended by Peter’s comment. Peter wished he could take it back.

But the woman seemed more amused than annoyed.

"I don’t do drag either, Precious," she said, indicating her own deep purple skirt. "This is more of a uniform now than anything else. It gives me great comfort and great sorrow at the same time."

The melodramatic comment annoyed Peter. He wasn’t in the mood for this and felt that she was mocking him now.

"What’s her name?" asked Tiresa, suddenly.

Peter noticed Jimmy, the barman, looking over at them.

"Excuse me?" Peter asked. "I don’t understand."

Tiresa didn’t seem to have heard him. She was drifting off into her own world again.

"What’s her name?" she asked again.

Peter hesitated.

"Who do you mean?" he asked.

"The woman who has caused you so much grief,” said Tiresa. "I can see fair hair but I can’t tell if it’s real. No…"

Tiresa raised her hand in the air, as if swatting at a fly.

"…No, Precious. It’s not real,” she concluded.

Peter thought instantly of Juanito’s mother, and then hurriedly dismissed the thought.

"I don’t know what you mean,” he insisted.

Tiresa smiled. She raised a bejeweled hand and placed it delicately on Peter’s shoulder. She was almost whispering now.

"She is framed, Precious,” said Tiresa. "She is surrounded by a frame, like a painting."

Peter gasped, thinking for a minute that Tiresa must have been privy to some local gossip, must have somehow found out about Juanito’s death and the subsequent inheritance. But nobody knew of the painting. Even if she’d known Juanito, Peter had said nothing to anyone about Juanito’s family. He’d been too ashamed of the whole, sordid incident.

Peter thought about the Frida Kahlo painting, and for a moment he became confused, imagining Juanito’s mother’s face superimposed on it, forming an even more grotesque spectacle than the painter intended. Kahlo, a Mexican artist born in the early twentieth century, had met with a terrible accident when she was just eighteen. Travelling home from school on a bus, the vehicle had collided with a trolley car and Frida was impaled right through from the pelvis to the stomach on the trolley’s metal hand-rail. Legend has it that a bag of gold glitter carried by another passenger had burst open and covered Frida’s body with its contents, making her appear like a giant kewpie doll, impaled on the metal rod. The painting which now hung in Juanito’s mother’s mansion depicted this scene, in all its gruesome detail. Peter shuddered at the image in his head.

He noticed that Tiresa’s eyes now glowed with warmth, as if she’d somehow become privy to his thoughts, and was enjoying the ghastly image in his head. She smiled at him knowingly, and withdrew her hand, tucking it away somewhere in the purple folds of her ample skirt.

"I just need a name," she repeated.

Peter looked down at the floor, ashamed of his own failure to do anything about Juanito’s death.

"Maria Garcia-Fernandez,” he said.

Tiresa reached into the folds of her skirt again and produced a small, glittering notebook, covered in shiny, dark, purple sequins. She extracted a gold pencil from the spine of the book and carefully wrote the name. Then she closed the book quietly, replaced the pencil in the spine and tucked it away again in her lap, clasping her hands together like a little girl, as if nothing had happened.

"I’m performing next Saturday, Precious,” she said, changing the subject abruptly. "I’d love it if you could come."

Peter remembered that he had to work back late on Saturday. He expressed his regret and told her that he would try to make the following month.

"That’s a shame,” she said. "I’m doing my Miss Liberty next Saturday. It always draws a crowd. Never mind."

With that, she raised her enormous bulk from the chair and was suddenly on her way, as if the thought of the performance had prompted her.

As she left the bar, Peter remembered that he had seen her perform already. "Miss Liberty" was an enormous robed caricature riding high on a cardboard rock. He remembered that her weight had made her look more like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a cookie cutter on his head than the statue, but the performance had been entertaining. Tiresa’s cardboard cutout stage persona was at odds with her mysterious and intimately personal private persona, it seemed.

Peter noticed the barman, Jimmy, still staring at him, as he walked back to the bar and sat in his former position.

"You’re done for now,” said Jimmy, in hushed tones. His eyes were wide, making him seem even younger still.

"What do you mean?" asked Peter.

"She took your name,” said Jimmy. "That means you’re done for."

"She didn’t write my name," said Peter, frowning.

Jimmy looked relieved. "You’re lucky,” he said. "She’s a witch, you know. Obia. Always something going on under that skirt, nobody knows what."

Peter dismissed the idea, no longer in the mood for discussion. He felt annoyed now at their insensitivity. If only Jimmy or Tiresa had known of Juanito’s death then maybe they wouldn’t be so prepared to make light of it.

Peter drained his bottle of mineral water, got up and left the bar.

#

A heat haze shimmered over the acres of endless L.A. concrete. The plane taxied onto the runway, hovering in the haze. It was going to be a long flight, stopping in Phoenix and Chicago on the way. Peter was resigned to travelling the whole day and had bought a newspaper and several magazines to read in an effort to break up the monotony. There was also that novel that he’d been trying to read for weeks without success.

It was over a month now since Juanito had died and the invitation to New York had been a welcome one. Keith and Tommy had heard about Juanito’s death and had called Peter as soon as the news reached them, inviting him to stay with them in their apartment in New Jersey. Peter had turned down the offer at first but had then lost his job at the print shop the following day. There had suddenly seemed like no good reason to be in L.A. any more and Peter had called them back and told them he was coming as soon as he could get a ticket.

He pulled out the L.A. Times and scanned the headlines, as he felt the plane’s take-off pulling him back in his chair. He turned several pages and noticed a headline, "Frida Kahlo Beach Incident." Peter read the story. Apparently a man and a woman had been on the beach near Santa Barbara when a freak gust of wind had picked up an umbrella and speared the woman in the chest. In his rush to come to her assistance, her husband had tripped over his own clumsy feet and pushed the woman so that she’d fallen heavily onto the umbrella shaft, impaling her even further. The woman’s husband had then tried to detach the huge shade of the umbrella, but had only managed to work the shaft further into her body, until the tip of the lethal stake could be seen pushing the skin of her lower back out in a pointed bump. The woman had died on the way to the hospital. The locals had dubbed the accident the "Frida Kahlo Beach Incident" due to its similarity to the freak accident that had crippled the famous artist many years ago. It was fast becoming a local legend.

Peter almost dropped the paper as he read the name of the victim.

"Maria Garcia-Fernandez."

His mind flew back to Tiresa in the bar and her little book. It seemed too implausible for words.

Peter put down the newspaper and rubbed his tired eyes. He looked out the window and tried to put the incident out of his mind. The stress of Juanito’s death had been enough, he really didn’t want to start losing his head by stringing together coincidences like this. Juanito was gone and he had to deal with it now. This trip to New York would do him good.

Down the aisle of the plane the cabin crew were starting their journey with morning refreshments. Peter watched as they handed out small, cling-wrapped parcels of sandwiches. He wondered for a moment whether he felt hungry and then decided that he would have something to eat. Anything to break up the monotony of the journey.

Peter turned the plastic clip of his tray table and dropped it into position.

He looked down at the flat surface.

In the center of the table lay a purple sequin, glittering like a dark diamond.

He moistened the tip of his finger and picked up the sequin.

For the first time since Juanito’s death, Peter smiled.

 

THE END