Angeles

Notes on a friendship

Angeles Romero, actor and friend

The next Zoom conversation.

The next Zoom conversation will gather on Saturday February 24 from 3 to 4pm EST. The Zoom conversations have been great fun so far, and I hope everyone will feel welcome to try one or all of them. There is one per month, and we talk about issues in writing craft. They might include, “How do you know where a story begins?” Or, “How do you come up with an image, and what do you do with it in a piece of writing?” Or, “How do you establish the tone in a piece?” Or, “What is the ‘contract’ the narrator makes with the reader to spill all or not?”

I have just written a piece about the novel Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré. It will appear on Thursday in

Oldster Magazine

. In this book, Debré has created a female narrator who doesn’t care if she’s “sympathetic” or “likable,” and that disregard for approval is the beginning of freedom for a writer and for a human being. At the next Zoom, we will talk about gaining this kind of freedom—as well as what it may allow and also cost.

All paid subscribers at either the monthly or annual rate are invited to attend Zoom conversations, and everyone is encouraged to send ahead a specific question about a writing project they are working on. IMPORTANT NOTE: The Zooms are not workshops. You will not be asked to write or read or perform! TO SIGN UP FOR THE NEXT ZOOM, PLEASE EMAIL ME AT: lauriestone@substack.com.

Angeles

In 2002, I was in Ohio, staying in the house where humorist and famous woman hater James Thurber had lived. I gave a talk, and at the reception, a beautifu woman brought me a plate of food, and in careful, slightly accented English asked if I would come to a rehearsal of a monologue she was developing. Her name was Angeles. She was working on a graduate degree in theater at Ohio State University. She had a raven’s wing of dark hair, smoky eyes, and full lips. In the solo, she would play Frida Kahlo. She was twenty years younger than me. In time, she called me Elstonie.

While I was In Ohio, I struck up an email flirtation with a writer in Michigan, and when I told Angeles I was driving there to meet him and would stay in a motel, she said, “He has to pay for the dinner.” We were parked at the edge of a pond and ducks were quacking. I said, “I don’t like men to pay for me.” It might have been true. She said, “Cabrona, no, I insist.” She chopped the air with her hand. “You are driving there and making a big effort. It’s romantic. You have to be open. And he has to pay, or else he’s not right for you.”

When I met this man, I felt zero attraction. It was like a negative forcefield, where even the sound of breathing is sucked out of the air. At the end of the meal, he coughed up only for his portion of the food. It was worth it in order to tell Angeles she was right.

Alejandro, Elena, Angeles, me, and Horacio

Four years later, we’re on our way to San Miguel, Mexico and we stop in Brownsville—a border town of highways, fast food joints, and gas stations—where she grew up. Her brother, Horacio, meets us in a parking lot. He hugs his sister and me, too, although we’ve never met. I love him immediately, the way I loved Angeles immediately. With some people, there are no questions asked, no passport needed, no nothing. He looks like a Marx brother, Chico or Harpo, handsome in the style of a circus strong man. His cheeks are stubbled, his thick hair is swept back. He’s a man with a yearning look in his eyes, as if he is finding in your face a horizon he wants to arrive at.

We follow him to the neat, sun-bleached development where Angeles’ mother lives. Elena is small and gray haired with hawk eyes that scan for your respect. Her four marriages produced seven children, and they all belong to her. When she lived on the Mexican side of the border, she would cross the bridge each day to earn dollars to support them. She wears an aqua t-shirt and loose-fitting cotton pants. I give her the soap and chocolate I’ve brought, and she kisses me as if I am one of hers. Another brother, Alejandro, arrives. Alejandro is sleek and his hair is long. He’s a cat, who has just eaten a mouse and is looking for some grass to take a nap on. There they are, the three Romero siblings, stamped with the face of their father, a handsome man with a cleft chin, who ghosted in and out of their lives.

The year before this trip, Angeles and I had participated in a theater lab in Germany. She had a speaking part in a play we were in together. I did a songspiel routine. (Don’t ask.) Angeles was breaking up with the director of the festival, and the lead opera singer was on a tear because we were performing in an abandoned coal mine and the air was filled with poisonous spores we could see floating in shafts of light. Not good for her throat. To say the least.

The space was beautiful, and the piece was brilliant, based on Blindness, the allegorical novel by Jose Saramago. It included slide projections. The world around us was going up in floating spores, and one afternoon Angeles and I snuck away and talked in an empty rehearsal space. She sat on the floor and sobbed about the way her father had drawn her close many times only to disappear again. Tears kept falling. I didn’t know how she could keep producing them.

She told me she had run away from home at seventeen and had lived on the streets for a year, knowing that her mother would be waiting to take her back, no matter what. I thought this certainty was at the core of her ability to love. She sometimes wasn’t sure if she really loved a person or was good at seducing them. She made the talent sound dangerous, like bending metal with your mind and inadvertently extracting the fillings from people’s teeth. She said, “I give the perfect audition, and I always want to get called back, but I don’t always want the part.” I wondered if she meant that about me, because I wonder that with everybody.

At night in San Miguel, we would climb from the center of the town up stone stairs cut into the hill that rises high above it. We would see stars spill across the dark sky. Cats skittered along the edges of the roofs, and birds peeped on the flowering vines. One time in New York, Angeles was staying in my apartment, and she said, “What’s my job description? Who am I to you? What can I give you?” I was getting dressed and moving fast. I thought she wanted to talk about the romance of us, the way we liked ourselves more when we were together than we did apart. I said, “You’re my friend. You give me yourself. It’s enough.” Her brow was furrowed. She was sitting on the couch in a mound of pillows. “That’s what I am to you, your friend?” “Yes,” I said, “my dear friend.”

Over coffee one morning in San Miguel, she echoed a complaint I have heard all my life. You might think I would change, but I am a gunny sack of habits, and I can’t read a room. She said I didn’t listen to her. I leapt ahead of her thoughts before she had formed them. I made it hard for her to guide me and protect me, even in Mexico. I said it wasn’t easy for me to accept those things, maybe, from people and I was sorry I crowded out her thoughts.

Before coming to Mexico, I had left the arrangements of our trip to her, imagining our travels would be similar to our time in Germany—drifting to cafés, gabbing about theater, laughing with strangers. After breakfast, I asked her to take me anywhere she liked. We visited the cultural center, Bellas Artes, which had been a convent in the 18^th Century and housed a mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1948, Siqueiros had talked at the school, offering a vision of art as political and collective—an alternative to then ruling ideas about abstraction and individualism. The students invited him to make an artwork, and he chose to portray the life of the revolutionary General Ignacio Allende, who was born in San Miguel.

Siqueiros mural in San Miguel

Although unfinished, the mural stretches across the walls and ceiling of a space the size of a football field. Some sections are cartoons, others suggest the angled panels of Francis Bacon. Angeles made yipping sounds in one corner that produced echoes off the bare walls. In Ohio, following the second election of George W. Bush, she had launched a protest against the ballot counting that had been widely covered in the press. In Houston, where she lived, she supplemented her work in theater translating for poor, Spanish-speaking people, helping them sign up for health insurance and register their children for school.

Before we drove to Brownsville, she couldn’t find her passport. She searched for an hour and there it was in a drawer she had looked in several times. At the border, the passport was gone again. She found it in a pocket of her backpack, where she had already searched. We repeat what we repeat. We see what we are able to see.

In San Miguel, she tried to locate Raoul, a college friend whose number she’d left at home. She found the address of his business in a local paper, wrote it down, then lost the scrap of paper. On our last day in San Miguel, as we were walking around, she found the office accidentally, and there was Raoul, a financial planner. I watched her twirl around and laugh with him through a glass door. He was handsome and worldly. I was invited to meet him, but Angeles cut me off when I began to speak.

Their mutual friend, Sergio, lived in Carretera, and during an hour we had between busses back to Houston, Sergio picked us up and drove us to his house and served us tequila and key lime pie. He was a joyful person with the kind of body that says, “Come closer.” We tiptoed into the bedroom of his sleeping daughters. Their hair fanned across the pillows. He was an architect. He had built his sleek, light-filled house. Compared to her friends, Angeles still lived like a graduate student. She said that the way she had found Raoul and Sergio, by accident, was better than if she had planned ahead.

In Houston, we had dinner at a Greek taverna, and the waitress said that she and Angeles looked alike. The woman was blond and careworn. Angeles was dark haired and dewy, but Angeles said, “Yes, you’re right.” She wanted me to like the neighborhood where she lived and her apartment, and I did, but when I first arrived the living room was piled with the boxes we’d packed up in Ohio two years earlier.

We drink wine, emptied the cartons, arranged the books and files against a wall, took out the trash. Afterward, the place looked serene with a little bed on the floor for me, positioned by Angeles according to feng shui. She stretched out on the floor beside the mattress, her face flopped in a pillow. She whispered things she was thinking about as I rubbed her back and we fell asleep.

One time when we were having dinner, she told me I chewed with my mouth open. She wanted to alert me, so I wouldn’t do it anymore. It tickled her to see me as a slob. She was staying with me in New York during the time my mother had a heart attack and a stroke. One afternoon when we entered Toby’s hospital room, my mother eyed me suspiciously (not a function of the stroke) and out of the corner of her lopsided mouth said in rapid succession, “Did I shit?” “Why are you here?” And, “Don’t touch me.”

On the street, afterward, Angeles acted out all the parts, playing my mother and me and the nurses who came in to check on Toby. We held each other, laughing for I don’t know how long. She found Toby tender and insane—in a good way I could see, too.

There was a taco truck parked near my apartment. Angeles talked to the guys in the truck, and the tacos they made for us were very good. We stood outside, eating. She sometimes talked about moving to New York, and I imagined all the people I would introduce her to and the linens and towels I would give her to start her life here.

In 2017, at the Women’s March in Washington DC, we found each other. I had come from New York, and she had traveled from Houston. It was impossible to find anyone. Several times I was caught in crowds so dense I thought I would have to live in them for the rest of my life. Angeles and I sat in a restaurant and talked for two hours. How did we find each other? What did we talk about? Who cares. I am looking at her face, and we are laughing.

There is one space open in a writing workshop on Sunday March 10 from 3 to 5pm EST. The cost is $50. If you would like to attend or to be placed on a waiting list for a later workshop, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com

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