Do you remember Sonya? She was from Hartford, studied Journalism at Barnard but she would always hang at Olenka’s with us CUNY kids drinking those shitty IPA’s and watered- down liquor. Her mother was Quebecois so she also spoke a bit funny, her neat upper crust New England accent with splashes of that strange Canadian french. Remember she dated that South Carolina ‘Good ol Boy’ Henry who went to NYU, remember the one who bloodied my nose in front of the Soho Grand? Well you know the problem with those ‘Good ol Boys’ is that they’re never all that good, and Sonya was never one to take too much bull so they split.
Her sister, I think she was named Amelia, studied Physics at UC Berkeley. Maybe that’s where she got all those dreams of hers from, but I don’t think so. You remember those dreams of the West? She would always be talking about the west, but not any west, no, she would talk about the ‘True West.’ She would never fantasize about Los Angeles, Reno, or Tucson. No she would talk about Sequoia, Yuma, Sonora, and Baja California. She could talk for hours with love about these places she’d never seen.
I remember that sometimes after two brandies and a sip of the third she would look at me and say “Oh Sy,” remember how everyone used to call me Sy, “I wish we could go down, way way down, to La Ribera.” She could say all those names perfectly, like little spanish breaks in her snowflake accent. “We could both get jobs, and every morning and every evening we could swim in the gulf, and every saturday we could drive to Todos Santos or El Pescadero and swim in the Pacific Ocean and absorb its vastness! Oh come on, Sy” she would lean over to me, kneeling on the tall chair “just the 2 of us! We could leave all this nonsense behind!” And I would always no, even though I wanted nothing more than to say yes and be off. Then she would look at me, with her big honey eyes, and say “Oh come on Sy, don’t you love me?” And I, unable to answer, would look down into my drink and talk about how Georgia O’Keeffe would paint roses in the desert, or something else trivial.
Of course I loved her, how couldn’t I love her? And she knew, everyone knew, which is probably why Malinda left me, and why Henry bloodied my nose in front of the Soho Grand. I loved her, I loved everything about her, but how could she love me? That’s what I never could believe– that she could love me.
Sometimes, when no one was paying attention, she would in her energetic way grab my hand and say “Look me in the eyes Sy, and listen to me closely as I say this, as I say that I love you. I love you, I really do.” I didn’t have to say that I loved her, but I always did. Then someone would come in, sit down next to one of us, or drop a glass, and with that the magical bubble would pop and we would pull our hands apart.
Even when I looked her in the eyes, and saw her sincerity like my reflection in a clear stream, I couldn’t believe that she loved me. I thought she was playing me for a fool, trying to get at my money even though I didn’t have any and she didn’t need any. After all, Jason said I seemed like an easy mark to con-men, remember how they would all come to me with stories of broken down cars and children’s birthdays? But Trish-whenever I told her my fears- said that Sonya was not like that and I knew Trish was right, but I still couldn’t believe it. How could someone as amazing as Sonya love someone like me? So we never went out, and we never went west. Tyron once said that was the saddest thing about that time.
Trish told me that Sonya made it, that she went to her true west. Apparently they talked, and Sonya said that it was all so beautiful. She talked about the Sequoia trees, cactatuses, and pacific waves. I nodded along as Trish said all this, I said how happy I was for Sonya and I was, but I wasn’t surprised. Because last week I got a letter, a letter from La Ribera.
