'Amsterdam' by Junot Díaz

She was from Amsterdam, a black Dominican mother, a white Dutch father, a luminous gale of a girl.  I called her my chabine because that’s what she looked like, only her lips and her hair keeping her from passing completely, from pulling a Jean Toomer.

And the ass she had—my fucking God—it was supersonic—which is to say she couldn’t walk past a group of straight men without pulling out the shingles or shattering the panes of their conversation.

She was about the most exotic Dominican woman I’d ever met (that’s the kind of shit that matters to you when you’re in your twenties), and the classiest.

She spoke Spanish and could dance bachata, but she’d grown up in the farthest spiral reaches of the Diaspora, in Delft, Vermeer’s old stomping ground.  Was smart too; could speak four other languages, had traveled all over the world, and could tell a story like you and I can tell a lie.

She was in the City to finish her thesis on Dominican women’s identity, but what she really wanted to do was write children’s stories.  She wanted to be the next Roald Dahl.  Every now and then, especially when she was excited, she would forget articles and misconjugate her verbs.  She’d pick up her camera and say, I want to make picture.  I found it incredibly endearing.

It wasn’t hard to love her.  She was funny and she was sexy (she moved like something only recently evicted from the ocean—an undine or a Nereid), and best of all, she loved me.  Loved me so much she’d broken off a three year engagement after the first time we kissed.  (Could have been the second time, you know how these things are.)

She said she’d never met anybody as alive as me or as smart. And every time we fucked I was shaken, absolutely shaken, and because I was a fatalist at my core, I had dreams, nearly every week, where I would lose her.

The shit should have been perfect, perfect, except for the fact that I was basically nuts.  In technical terms, I was depressed, experienced alarming mood swings and suffered from what a psychologist called baseline irritability (which means that I could go from zero to violent in 2.2 seconds.)

And to top it all off I wasn’t writing—and wouldn’t for nearly six years.  Took that shit out on everybody around me.  Especially her.

She wasn’t perfect either.  She was a fiend for male attention, would have flirted at the Pope’s funeral, and she could throw a plate with the best of them. But in the final analysis, the banana-ness was mostly mine.

Some relationships snap like bones, otherwise go into long slow Byzantine declines.  Ours was the latter.  I was always doing something good followed by something real stupid.

I would surprise her at her job in Holland, show up with my suitcase and expensive gifts, and then at her graduation, in front of her whole family, I would attack some poor homeless guy who made a swipe at the flowers I’d bought her.

Nearly broke her father’s leg in the process.  (And he in turn called me a fucking idiot.)  Somebody would cut us in line at a restaurant and I would take their dinner and break it across their face, noodles flying everywhere. (And the waiter yelling, You no come back!)  And yet no matter how crazy I acted, I had this unshakeable adamantine conviction that things could work out, and something of my feverish delusions passed on to her.

The crap she tolerated from me—I can’t think about it without wanting to laugh.  I mean, I’d treated plenty of chicks a lot worse but the thing was, I actually cared about Elicia, in my own way, and had I been saner and less self-destructive, we probably could have worked.

Or is that just the nostalgia talking?

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