building downtown. It was a job for life, he'dtold Tito, but he was the lowest on the totem pole and wouldn't get a day shift or a regular weekend day off until he was forty. Lastly, there was Ruben, the most successful of them all, a bona fide entrepreneur, who'd made a fortune with some Web site and bought his mother a house in Fair Lawn and drove a Range Rover. Ruben was always flying to Atlanta or California or Chicago for some convention, always making deals on his cell phone, but he'd gotten too big for the neighborhood. Tito still saw them, his boys, sometimes, on birthdays and holidays, for the Super Bowl or the Dominican Day Parade, but they were no longer a part of his normal existence. And with their departure, his life went back to being what it had been when he was a schoolboy: routine, repetitive, and limited.
Sometimes, when he was sitting down to dinner with his parents or dealing with a tenant complaining about the noisy people upstairs or looking for something to do on a Friday night, he felt stagnant and festering, felt that the very simplicity and lack of change were poisoning him. At such times, he always went back to Clara's disappearance as the root of all his problems, as the missed chance to change his life's trajectory. There had been plenty of other girls since thenâmost recently, the luscious but difficult Jasmina, who'd finally broken up with him for not proposing after they'd been together a year. Jasmina was a teller at the Banco Popular on Dyckman. She had once confessed to him that she'd taken the job in the hopes of meeting a Dominican businessman, but she'd ended up with Tito instead. Tito didn't want to settle for a woman and he didn't want to feel settled for. It didn't work out with Jasmina just as it never seemed to work out with anyone else. The relationships ended and he looked around at the wreckage as if a natural disaster had been the cause. Some guys would have welcomed the serial monogamy, but not Tito. He felt cursed, snake-bit, and as he grew older, he became simultaneously resigned to and terrified of the rut he was in. He coped by withdrawing into a vividly imagined alternate reality in which he was married and living in suburbs likeJansel or Ruben; in which he and his family came into the city on Sundays to dine with his mother and father; in which, after those Sunday lunches, he took his kids to the Emerson Playground.
Now and then, the real collided with the imaginary. For a few weeks, earlier in the summer, Tito had taken a flesh-and-blood child to the playground, a five-year-old boy named Wyatt. Pretending became a lot easier as he sat on the benches with the nannies and stay-at-home moms calling to their kids. Because Wyatt was freckled and blond and Tito was as brown as the mulch in the park's flowerbeds, the women on the benches initially gave him the hairy eyeball. But repeated appearances in the playground along with the boy's obvious affection for him soon vanquished their suspicions. He instructed Wyatt to call him TÃoâclose enough to his real nameâand that seemed to satisfy the curious.
Wyatt and his mother, Tamsin, had moved into the building in June, two months before Tito's sales call with Ms. Almonte. Tito saw the U-Haul as he came up the street from the subway after work one evening, saw Tamsin and another womanâher friend from Philly, it later turned outâcarrying a sofa into the building's front entrance. Halfway up the steps, the friend set her end of the couch down and said, âI can't. My arms are killing me.â
By the time she said this, Tito was right behind Tamsin, admiring her square shoulders and her lobeless ears. Normally the last thing he wanted to do when he got off work was help someone lift furniture, but the women were good-looking and he sensed that he needed to do something to change his luck. It had been almost a year since his breakup with Jasmina, and the loneliness was getting to him.
When a Stranger
Sometimes, when he was sitting down to dinner with his parents or dealing with a tenant complaining about the noisy people upstairs or looking for something to do on a Friday night, he felt stagnant and festering, felt that the very simplicity and lack of change were poisoning him. At such times, he always went back to Clara's disappearance as the root of all his problems, as the missed chance to change his life's trajectory. There had been plenty of other girls since thenâmost recently, the luscious but difficult Jasmina, who'd finally broken up with him for not proposing after they'd been together a year. Jasmina was a teller at the Banco Popular on Dyckman. She had once confessed to him that she'd taken the job in the hopes of meeting a Dominican businessman, but she'd ended up with Tito instead. Tito didn't want to settle for a woman and he didn't want to feel settled for. It didn't work out with Jasmina just as it never seemed to work out with anyone else. The relationships ended and he looked around at the wreckage as if a natural disaster had been the cause. Some guys would have welcomed the serial monogamy, but not Tito. He felt cursed, snake-bit, and as he grew older, he became simultaneously resigned to and terrified of the rut he was in. He coped by withdrawing into a vividly imagined alternate reality in which he was married and living in suburbs likeJansel or Ruben; in which he and his family came into the city on Sundays to dine with his mother and father; in which, after those Sunday lunches, he took his kids to the Emerson Playground.
Now and then, the real collided with the imaginary. For a few weeks, earlier in the summer, Tito had taken a flesh-and-blood child to the playground, a five-year-old boy named Wyatt. Pretending became a lot easier as he sat on the benches with the nannies and stay-at-home moms calling to their kids. Because Wyatt was freckled and blond and Tito was as brown as the mulch in the park's flowerbeds, the women on the benches initially gave him the hairy eyeball. But repeated appearances in the playground along with the boy's obvious affection for him soon vanquished their suspicions. He instructed Wyatt to call him TÃoâclose enough to his real nameâand that seemed to satisfy the curious.
Wyatt and his mother, Tamsin, had moved into the building in June, two months before Tito's sales call with Ms. Almonte. Tito saw the U-Haul as he came up the street from the subway after work one evening, saw Tamsin and another womanâher friend from Philly, it later turned outâcarrying a sofa into the building's front entrance. Halfway up the steps, the friend set her end of the couch down and said, âI can't. My arms are killing me.â
By the time she said this, Tito was right behind Tamsin, admiring her square shoulders and her lobeless ears. Normally the last thing he wanted to do when he got off work was help someone lift furniture, but the women were good-looking and he sensed that he needed to do something to change his luck. It had been almost a year since his breakup with Jasmina, and the loneliness was getting to him.
When a Stranger
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