I was home alone with our son when I found out, and my husband was away on
business. It was August. I hadn’t yet told anyone or recovered from the
initial shock when it happened again a few days later. The rest came rather
quickly. Tuesday was suddenly autumn. Winter turned to spring. It’s been
nearly a year.
***
My father played hopefully throughout my youth, and my sister does now, but
I wasn’t much for betting. From an early age, I associated the lottery with
all the things I wanted to escape. In the Gangs of New York-style Catholic
town where I underwent adolescence, I must have come across as
pretentious—even my father took to hiding his habit from me; my sister
seldom mentions it, still—but a disdain for gambling, in my opinion, was a
sign of maturity. Not, however, a maturity impervious to temptation.
The nearest strip mall sat a few hundred feet behind the auto repair
shop—two unimaginative brick structures linked by a glimmering trail of car
oil and antifreeze. The stationery, one of five storefronts, was sandwiched
between the Chinese restaurant and the bagel shop. It was the summer before
college, and my dad had asked me to pay the electricity bill—something that
could be done at some stationery stores through an arrangement with utility
companies that I’ve never fully understood. “But wait till three,” my dad
always said, “till the banks close.”
On a thick plastic counter with a ballpoint pen chained to its surface, I
forged my dad’s signature on a blank check that was likely to bounce in a
few days. Beneath the irreparably scratched but still translucent surface
was a stack of long, orange-and-white rectangular sheets—grids full of
empty ovals.
“Big man, eh,” said Sam, the old white guy with veiny cheeks and puffy gray
eyebrows who ran the small shop. He was resolutely unfriendly to the few
nonwhite families in the neighborhood but begrudgingly civil to my siblings
and me because my dad had saved his life a few years before—Sam was choking
on an egg sandwich just as my dad happened to walk by with a bag of bagels.
I smoothed out a folded dollar and set it between Sam and me. He traded it
for a printed ticket. “Good luck,” he said without looking up.
Immediately, a fraught hopefulness began percolating inside of me. In a few
hours, anything and everything that was wrong in my life might be righted.
That night, as my dad waited out the local news for the lottery drawing
coda, I sat on a nearby couch, pretending to read. I’d memorized the
numbers on my ticket so that I wouldn’t have to brandish it in front of
him. After the unfamiliar numbers appeared on the screen, my dad sneaked a
quick peak at the tickets in his palm and then closed his fist in routine
disappointment. I, too, was disappointed.
It would be a few years and a few hundred miles before I played again.
After my Saturday shifts at the campus bookstore, I’d make my way to a
delicatessen on the edge of town: a place for locals and class-jumping
students—we, who stayed on campus during the minor holidays; we, who relied
on the library for our textbooks; most of us brown Latino or black Black.
Our heads bowed, we engaged in surreptitious, off-campus reconnaissance: a
bacchanal of canned meats, individually-wrapped slices of cheese, cheap
cigarettes, cheaper cigars, and wrestling magazines. My indulgence was a
medium-size bag of Doritos and, occasionally, canned onion dip. For a few
months near the end of my senior year, I also bought scratch-off lottery
games. The young Somali woman who worked at the deli on the weekends—her name tag
read, Bilan; she wasn’t much older than me—didn’t approve. Whenever I
reflexively, rhetorically asked her to wish me luck, she’d say, “No,” and
then go back to reading her book or magazine. That semester, I won four
dollars and spent around seventeen.
This—the stationery and the deli—constituted the whole of my gambling
history, until two Septembers ago. More than twenty years after the strip
mall. That’s when I—a husband, a father, and a professor of public
health—became a proper lottery player.
***
I began buying Powerball tickets on Wednesdays and Saturdays—the drawing
days—and as close to the 9PM cutoff time as possible because I didn’t want
the all-day anticipation to consume me. After 11PM, I checked my phone for
the results. Each time I played, I was eighteen and on the verge of
something life changing. And when I lost, I’d have to remind myself that I
hadn’t actually lost anything. As the prize grew—which meant no one had won
it—my belief swelled. The first few times I played, I didn’t mention it to
my husband.
Gus wasn’t upset—he’s not like that. He’s a mild-mannered white man with an
upper-middle-class upbringing and the affect of a well-meaning high school
math teacher. He was, however, quick to point out that I had a greater
chance of being struck by lightning. “Out of 175 million possible
combinations of numbers, only one is the winner. Lightning is one in a
million.”
“But somebody’s going to win.”
“That’s exactly what they want you to think. Is this about the dream?”
I’d made the mistake of telling him about the vivid, unambiguous dream I’d
had the week before. In it, I was naked, dripping sweat and tears, and
clutching a winning ticket worth $600 million. “Hon…?” Gus pressed. His
skepticism, while irritating and mostly contained to his brow and crow’s
feet, was fair. I’ve always said that dreams are more like summaries of
your day than crystal balls. “But maybe I’m wrong. My grandmother”—a
magical realism archetype who always kept one foot planted in the
paranormal world—“used to say they were omens.”
Gus’s head oscillated, like a standing fan at a low setting.
For weeks, there was no winner. The jackpot rose to $429 million, and the
news reported wrap-around-the-block lines. When the prize jumped to $607
million, my grandmother’s legend grew in stature.
Our small, brownstone apartment was in its usual shambolic state. The trail
of breakfast wound its way down from the kitchen table onto to the floor
and into the living room. Aramceli, our son’s nanny—a middle-aged woman
from Puebla, who we secretly called Maria Poppins because of her
prim-yet-vintage style and crisp soprano—was ushering Ricardo out the door
for his morning constitutional. Gus ambled around the living room with a
toothbrush in his mouth, searching for his wallet. “Why are you holding on
to all these tickets?” he asked, pointing to the pile of losers on the
everything table by the front door. White foam subtly effervesced at the
corners of his mouth.
“The ones that didn’t win the jackpot might have won smaller prizes,” I
explained.
In years past, a pre-work vacuum on a Tuesday morning would have been
filled with quick, yet satisfying, sex, but now it remained empty, except
for the amusement and mild condescension in Gus’s eyes. I told him I’d scan
the tickets later.
“Could you also pick up some beer and baby wipes?”
The tree-lined block between our home and the bodega has slabs of uprooted,
cracked bluestone on one side of the street. On the other side is a large
park, where baseball games, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and crack were once
common. Now, soccer and Frisbee take up the fields of worn grass; so do
dogs and whites. A new real estate office occupies the corner. Next to it
is a popular bodega—prime location, moderate price increases, organic oat
milk—that draws in long-term and recently arrived residents alike. One of
the few places that does that.
“Want to buy more?” asked the rangy, twenty-something Yemeni man with
slightly darker skin than me, after discarding the worthless ones I’d
handed him. “Tomorrow is the big day. The lines will be long,” he said with
a knowing, uneven smile, never breaking his concentration from the video
game on his phone.
“No, thanks,” I said, before tucking the packet of butt wipes under my arm
and walking up the block to the non-halal bodega that sold beer.
The next day was a nothing-special Wednesday. I went to work, endured two
under-facilitated faculty meetings, held office hours—one student showed
up—and then assumed the late-afternoon child-rearing shift: playground
visit, game of “sidestep the dog poop,” successfully deflected plea for ice
cream. When Ricardo was finally asleep and Gus had changed into his
matching flannel sweater and sweatpants, we pivoted the dinner table toward
the screen. Gus reached for the remote control. The cursor toggled between The Year of Living Dangerously and The Killing Fields. I
shrugged.
“It’s one of these two, something from the Fellini backlog, or start a new
series,” he said.
Over the years we’d added several Fellini films to the queue but neither of
us ever showed interest in watching one. For no particular reason, we
settled on The Killing Fields. Gus held a pair of open tongs aloft
while I made room on my plate for salad. “How many tickets did you buy?” he
asked.
“Tickets?—Shit!”
Gus stared a moment. “Is it too late?”
My phone read 9:23PM. Gus’s voice took on the accommodating tenor of a
hostage negotiator: “Maybe no one will win it.”
The winner was an elderly Floridian with translucent white skin and a
heavily pleated skirt. She appeared unfazed by the enormous cardboard check
and the paparazzi encircling her. She spoke softly into the microphone: her
church needed a new roof; she’d never been to the Vatican. Behind her stood
a dowdy, thin-haired man—her son. Beside him was an equally rotund
Cuban—his boyfriend. That the money might benefit another gay Latino
consoled me in a way.
I spent the days after the big jackpot in a slump, convinced that I’d lost
nearly 600 million dollars, disappointed that I’d forgotten to buy a
ticket. But it wasn’t long before the ubiquitous orange-hued L.E.D.
displays in the windows of bodegas, supermarkets, and pharmacies were
producing an urge in me that only ever surfaced in the warm months, around
men in cut-off anything. That winter, the cold walks to and fro were, in a
way, sultry and full of opportunities for trouble. Instead of two per week,
I was suddenly buying four tickets—sometimes six. And I couldn’t explain
it. I was firmly entrenched in the middle class, one generation removed
from the backbreaking work and insecurity that make gambling aspirational.
But there I was, every Wednesday and Saturday, waiting in line.
***
In the new year, just before classes started back up, the full-time faculty
received an email from the university’s administration. It began: “After
good faith efforts, we have decided to protect the integrity of this
institution from the unreasonable demands of a small group.” The next day,
pink flyers appeared in our mail cubbies: “Because of the administration’s
unwillingness to keep its promise and increase our wages, we, the adjunct
professors, are striking. We ask that you, OUR ALLIES, join us in the fight
against the commodification of education!” At the bottom was a pencil
drawing of several stick figures standing side by side, holding hands.
There was no clause in our union contracts requiring us to strike with the
adjuncts, and most of us didn’t. At the time, I was under tenure review and
didn’t want to jeopardize anything.
The semester proved difficult. Not only did I have to take convoluted paths
onto campus in order to avoid crossing the picket line, the dean also asked
the full-time faculty, administrative staff, and even some students, to
take on the adjuncts’ coursework. Instead of three classes, I was suddenly
saddled with six. And after the strike ended—two months into the semester,
the university acquiesced to a salary increase of a fraction of
one-percent—the cold war truly commenced. Seven of the ten faculty members
in our department were adjuncts, and all of them directed their rancorous
silences at me. Their displeasure also manifested in emptying the copy
machine of paper and the coffee maker of filters whenever they saw me
coming. Alex, the biostatistics instructor—the only other openly gay man in
the department—left a note in my mailbox. I knew it was him because there
were hearts drawn around some of the words—something he is wont to do. The
note consisted of a few lines printed directly from Dictionary.com:
Solidarity [sol-i-dar-i-tee]
noun, plural solidarities.
1. union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests,
as between members of a group or between classes, peoples, etc.: to promote
solidarity among union members.
2. community of feelings, purposes, etc.
3. community of responsibilities and interests.
Origin of solidarity: French, 1840-18501840-50; < French solidarité,
equivalent to solidaire solidary + -ité -ity
I retreated. I took to eating lunch with our department’s secretary. Soraya
refused to be called an administrative assistant. She also never missed an
opportunity to let me now when she’d been right about something: “Eduardo,
didn’t I warn you they wouldn’t be happy?” The other two full-time
professors, who I’m certain wouldn’t have joined the strike either, were
spared the brunt of the adjuncts’ backlash because one was on sabbatical,
and the other’s mother had died shortly before the strike began. After a
few tense weeks with very little eye contact, I stopped going to the
university whenever I could and did most of my work from one of the several
new cafés near my home.
In late May, the dean cornered me at a wine and cheese for graduates and
their families. I was certain he, an uncanny John Goodman lookalike, was
about to give my tenure application a green light. Instead, his
tannin-stained lips became a portal for slurred, disappointing news: “A
blackog—A backclog—A BACK LOG of administrative peculiarities. Nothing to
worry about. We’ll get you back on track in the fall.” That’s when it
occurred to me: I might never get tenure. On the walk home, I stopped at
the bodega and bought a Mega Millions. It was printed on the same smooth,
pink-and-white paper, but it cost half the price of Powerball, and its
jackpots were usually in the tens of millions. The drawing days were
Tuesdays and Fridays. By that point, I’d been playing the lottery heavily
and regularly for nearly seven months. I’d spent close to seven hundred
dollars and won four.
***
The car was nearly out of gas. Gus and I were cranky and hadn’t bathed in
three days. Ricardo had finally fallen asleep after sixty miles of whining.
“Your odds of winning are still 1 in 175 million,” Gus said as he turned
off the engine. We’d stopped in central Massachusetts at a self-service,
two-pump station on our way back from a camping trip in the Green Mountain
region of Vermont. The day was warming up but still dewy.
“I wasn’t going to buy a ticket. I was only noticing aloud that they sold
Powerball here.”
“Alright, sorry.” Gus made his way to the car’s fuel tank. “Can you get
more snacks for Ricardo? He ate the last banana,” he called out as I walked
across the empty lot toward the convenience store—a nearly dilapidated
shell of rusted, corrugated steel.
“Bananas, two waters, peanuts, raisins, and the Doritos. That it?” the
attendant with pink-infused blonde hair asked in a gravelly, pack-a-day
baritone. I slid my credit card across the murky gray quartz. “And one
Powerball Quick Pick!” I called out abruptly.
“Lottery is cash-only.” Her unflappability suggested my level of enthusiasm
wasn’t unusual. I pulled two singles from my pocket.
Maybe it was the time off, or maybe it was the traveling we did that
summer, which meant I was always with Gus and Ricardo, but I’d cut back on
buying tickets. Here and there, but not regularly anymore. That Sunday
morning in August, however, I couldn’t help myself.
The next day, I had a dentist appointment in Midtown. I took Ricardo to the
local public pool in the afternoon. We ate pizza for dinner.
On Tuesday, I went to a hair salon for people with curly hair. It was my
first time. The hipster stylist was thirty minutes late and then accidently
snipped my right ear—also a first. She apologized profusely, but I found it
difficult to relax afterward. For dinner, Gus made tofu—extra firm—over
braised kale and soba noodles.
On Wednesday, I watched porn in the morning. Then I deposited some money in
my dad’s bank account without telling him—he wouldn’t accept it otherwise.
In the afternoon, I played tennis with a college friend whom I hadn’t seen
in years. Afterward, we each drank two beers and shared samosas at the
sidewalk café of a nearby South African restaurant.
On Thursday, I worked on a federal grant application at a communal café
table full of laptops. On the walk home, I ducked into the bodega to use
the ATM. As I was leaving, the owner—portly, bearded, mercurial—greeted me
with a we’re-not-a-bank-what-are-you-going-to-buy head nod. I bumbled
before settling on a Mega Millions as quid pro quo. I don’t remember what
we ate for dinner.
Gus left for California early Friday morning. He had a company retreat
designed for engineers to develop social skills. He’d be back on Tuesday.
Since I hate flying, and I hate when people I care about fly, the trip to
the children’s museum that day served to distract both a boy and his
father—Aramceli refused to work on Fridays in the summer. By the time
Ricardo went down for his afternoon nap, I’d received two text messages:
“Landed,” and “Heading to car rental kiosk now.”
By nightfall, I’d earned myself a homemade Manhattan. I settled into the
couch, put on the newest Xavier Dolan film, and snacked on plantain chips.
I spent most of the movie wondering if any people of color lived in
Montreal. I’d been there before, and I knew that they did, but I couldn’t
figure out why none of them made it into Dolan’s films. Not even the
extras.
A mosquito’s faint buzz woke me just before midnight. My mouth was nearly
dry cement. A summer moisture filled the space between my thighs and the
couch cushions. I wasn’t sure if I’d finished watching the movie. I poured
myself a glass of water and turned on the dishwasher. While I brushed my
teeth, I peeked in on Ricardo and plugged in my phone. I’d missed two calls
and one text: “Guess you’re asleep. Love you. Talk tomorrow.” “You’re
probably at dinner. Call me when you get up,” I texted back.
I was already in bed—my secondary pillow sandwiched between my knees, the
tenacious guilt of not flossing slowly loosening its grip—when I remembered
the Mega Millions ticket from the day before; the drawing had taken place
while I’d dozed on the couch. I turned onto my stomach and willed myself
not to care. But after a few minutes, I got up.
The ticket was pinned beneath a cascade of lose coins. Its numbers didn’t
match those on the website. As I crumpled up the thin, glossy paper, I felt
a sandy film on my fingers. The familiar, synthetic smell lit up the morsel
of my brain associated with adolescence. I wasn’t holding a Mega Millions.
It was the Powerball ticket coated in Doritos dust from the gas station in
Massachusetts.
I found another set of numbers online. They teetered on their axes and
waltzed across the screen in a cheap, lazy animation. They were the same as
the ones on the crumpled ticket.
Whatever I was feeling wasn’t happiness—or maybe it was an extreme form of
happiness that I’d never before come close to experiencing: sudden,
surreal, knee-numbing. I sat on the ground, in the dark, except for my
phone screen and the refracted light of a lamppost coming through the
window. I felt somewhere between pot and acid high. A forceful yet
involuntary laughter escaped from my body. After a few minutes, I used the
floor and the wall to get to my feet. I feared that Ricardo might wake and
that I was in no state to parent. The path to calm would have to be
synthetic. I measured out two little pink circles (0.5 mg each) from the
bottle of alprazolam that was tucked behind thermometers, travel-size
toothpaste tubes, expired fungal cream, and heartburn tablets and cupped my
hand beneath the running water. I took deep breaths and held each for five
seconds.
“What would you do if you won the lottery?” I’d asked Gus a few months
earlier.
“I haven’t given it much thought,” he’d responded.
It hadn’t been a particularly focused conversation: my sister was on her
way over to babysit; he was changing a diaper; and I was searching for
losing tickets in the living room because I didn’t want my sister to know I
was playing.
“Have you never daydreamed the possibility?”
Gus turned his head from side to side: “Not really.”
What if
was a game I’d been playing for as long as I could remember. He never had.
He remained the grounded person I’d met nearly two decades earlier—a
customer at the campus bookstore who kept coming back to buy mechanical
pencils, who casually grabbed my hand after our third date, unconcerned
with the frat boys in our midst. With Gus, things either happened or they
didn’t. He rarely worried—about anything in fact. Not about a check
clearing or college debt or rent. In our early years, the
upstairs-downstairs divide between us seemed unbridgeable, but eventually
it narrowed. Eventually, I paid off my loans. Eventually, we got married.
Eventually, our bills were withdrawn automatically from a shared checking
account. Some months, I didn’t even look at the bank statement. Plotted on
a graph, the years with Gus would show a downward trend in worrying on my
part. And yet, there were times when I found his practicality stifling.
Sometimes, it left me speechless. He’d never envisioned winning the
lottery? I thought everyone did that.
After taking the anti-anxiety pills, I left Gus a voicemail asking him to
call me. Then I grabbed the bottle of whisky from the kitchen and walked to
the couch to wait for the medicine to slow down my nervous system. I
thought of calling my parents and siblings, but many of them, too, were
prone to panic. In some cases, heart disease. In some cases, both. A
ringing phone at this late hour alone would catalyze an irreversible chain
reaction. In the morning, I thought. I sat instead and fantasized: I’d pay
off everyone’s debts; I’d buy well-made shoes; I’d never travel coach
again. And then it occurred to me that Gus would cut his work trip short
after hearing the news. The odds of a plane crashing were certainly greater
than the odds of winning the lottery. “Lightning Strikes…Twice! Man Kills
Husband with Powerball!” the New York Post headline would read. Of
course, this would happen to me. I shut off my phone. The initial vertigo
that comes from mixing alcohol and a benzodiazepine began as concentric
circles in my chest. I turned onto my side, set the whisky onto the ground,
and everything faded to black.
***
Breakfast, the farmers’ market, Ricardo’s gym class, and his obsession with
sprinklers were all worse bleary-eyed and anxiety-ridden. But by lunch, I
was steadier. That’s when Gus texted: “Incredibly busy. Call you later.
Sorry.” Later, he was in the shower. Then he was at dinner. Then, nothing.
Something wasn’t right—if only to say he’s busy, Gus always answers the
phone. I decided I wouldn’t tell him until we were face to face. And then I
took another pill.
The first two days, it was surprisingly easy to keep a secret of this
magnitude. I busied myself imagining how vastly different and better our
lives would be. But I also feared being so irrationally wealthy and
exposed. Single parenting, by comparison, was scary but manageable and
all-consuming. I focused on Ricardo instead. I read him a total of
thirty-four books. I found tutorials online for juggling and crafting paper
airplanes. I baked cookies. But by Monday night, my serotonin levels were
again in disarray. To make matters worse, Gus and I hadn’t talked in three
days. Suddenly, the fear of dying and the ticket never being found had gone
from vague thought to fully formed scene. In the dark, I sat on the edge of
Ricardo’s bed. “Daddy won the lottery,” I whispered. He lay motionless,
breathing through his mouth, but I felt a moment of relief. Afterward, I
stuck the ticket under a “Jesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you’re
an asshole” magnet on the refrigerator and went to bed.
***
Gus’s face dug into my neck. His love was urgent and chafing—he hadn’t
shaved since he’d left. I slid my hand between his chest and mine: “Ricardo
is about to wake up. Aramceli will be here soon. How was the flight?” Gus
dabbed a corner of his mouth with his thumb: “Red-eyes are rough, but we
landed early.” He froze: “Did you hear that? I think it was Ricardo.”
Gus was a good person to parent with and generally-speaking a good person.
He would surely be a worthy co-multi-millionaire, I thought, as he
disappeared toward our son.
No sooner had Aramceli and Ricardo gone, than Gus’s hands appeared around
my waist, and my shorts were at my ankles. His beard grazed my thighs
gently at first; then, less so. A little pain became pleasure seamlessly.
We collapsed onto the jute rug, continued in the hallway, and finished in
the bedroom. The sex was passionate beyond what I was expecting. When it
was over, I made my way swiftly toward the kitchen, hoping to outrun the
soporific aftermath that typically seizes Gus.
The Powerball ticket wasn’t under the refrigerator magnet. It wasn’t in the
hallway closet either. Nor was it on the everything table. Instead, between
a furniture catalog and an alumni magazine, I found the Mega Millions I’d
been searching for on Friday night, but I didn’t care because the sensation
of misplaced Powerball millions was already alight. And then I remembered
the glass of water. Around 3AM, I’d awoken parched. Fearing the ticket was
too exposed, I’d relocated it to the bookcase, into a García Márquez
collection on the top shelf.
And there it was, tucked inside the tale of a newlywed who slowly bleeds to
death on her honeymoon after her wedding ring pricks her finger. I
re-loaded the lottery website. As the cluttered page assembled itself, my
jaw tightened. Beneath my numbers was another banner: more unclaimed money,
more dancing numbers.
I knew the wall was cold. I knew that my bare back was pressed against it.
And I knew that it should have produced in me some sort of immediate,
exaggerated reaction. But I felt nothing as I slid toward the ground. The
late-morning sun gilded the room, turning the dark-red wood floor orange.
There was lint in my belly button, which must have been there during sex.
Beneath me, a scatterplot of cereal crumbs dug into my skin. I was
completely nude and about to embark on a new world, like a baby, or the
Terminator. My stomach grumbled. I pressed both tickets to my chest and ran
past Gus’s light snore. Three pills under my tongue. I sat on the toilet.
At my feet, a landslide of unread magazines poured out from a wicker basket
too small to meet its demands. Above me was a shelf stacked with
multicolored, unevenly folded towels. In a corner, a faint cobweb. The
sunlight and the bathroom’s stained-glass window gave everything a
religious sheen. I was there for almost forty minutes, the stillicide of a
leaky faucet my soundtrack. Over and over, I re-read the numbers—all of
them. We weren’t only multi-millionaires; we were richer than everyone on
our gentrified block, after taxes: the art dealer, the vascular surgeon,
the ophthalmologist, the B-list movie actor, the sculptor, the painter,
both stockbrokers, the jazz musician, the A-list television actress, the
countless lawyers and software developers, and the handful of octogenarians
who’d survived the real estate booms.
No one would believe this.
I rolled up the tickets and stuffed them into the Neti pot in the medicine
cabinet. Then I stepped into the shower and let the hot water batter my
neck for at least ten minutes.
“We need to talk,” Gus said before I could say the same. He was seated
upright in our bed, half of him shrouded in a dark gray sheet; the rest, in
fear. His pained expression told me something bad was coming, but I was too
medicated to be afraid.
Gus hadn’t missed my call on Friday night; he’d ignored it. A platonic
drink with a colleague had become something else, at the pace of an empty,
hobbled shopping cart on the descent. Before long, the spacious sofa in his
corporate apartment had swallowed them whole. Gus had details but no
reasons. The pear-shaped project manager with hapless eyebrows and
horn-rimmed glasses—I’d met him and his wife at the holiday party the year
before—finished first. Gus reached for the box of tissues on the table
behind them and zipped himself up. His co-worker asked if he’d be discreet.
Gus nodded and then walked him to the door. Afterward, he went to the
bathroom in search of the complimentary mouthwash. He cried while he
gargled. He cried while he told me.
“Were you safe?”
“Yes.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?”
“He was nice, I guess. Funny, too. I hadn’t had that kind of company in a
while.”
We were two men. Two gay men. Two people in a long-term relationship. Two
parents raising a small child. I wasn’t naïve. At the same time, I thought
we’d earned the right to take each other for granted. I’d believed the
emotional austerity between us—a recent drought of hugs, kisses, pleases,
and thank-yous—was a consequence of parenthood. I’d told myself everything
would return with time.
I gave him the silent treatment. It lasted weeks. And for most of the fall
semester, I withheld sex. As for the lottery, I didn’t breathe a word.
Telling him felt like rewarding bad behavior, and I didn’t want him to feel
good about anything. I also feared masking whatever was wrong with us.
Since college, I’d known two couples who’d become dot-com rich, and one
who’d inherited a fortune. They retired, renovated, remodeled, and
traveled. Their vicissitudes weren’t those of a normal life. All of them
eventually divorced. All their kids were brats. All of their friends were
new.
The tickets were a parachute I could open exactly once. I took them back to
the bookshelf and tucked them inside Giovanni’s Room because Gus
had read it within the last year and wasn’t likely to pick it up again any
time soon. Then I went to the bank and deposited three times as much as
usual into my dad’s account.
***
WE SOLD THE WINNING MEGA MILLIONS TICKET!!! The crisp, yellow banner with
red lettering hung in the window of the bodega on the corner. I was going
to buy some toilet paper when the owner yelled, “Hey, buddy, I know you’re
the winner!” My heart stopped. I couldn’t believe he remembered mine from
the hundreds of tickets he sells every day. The three beefy men waiting for
their late-afternoon, breakfast sandwiches, with yellow hard hats under
their arms, stared at me, like a working-class Greek chorus. “Why are you
lying to everyone?” continued the owner, a pudgy Yemeni man. But before I
could respond to the charges, his raspy, full-throated cackling had
erupted. Turns out he’d been saying that to everyone—he’d say it to me at
least three more times.
In the weeks after the drawings, the media also engaged in round-the-clock
speculation. How could two national lottery jackpots go unclaimed in the
same week? (“Missing Loot-tery” was the best the Post could
muster.) There were theories and accusations of corruption. There was even
a reported decline in lottery sales. But with an economy still reeling from
the Great Recession, sales reached their pre-scandal levels within a few
months. And the halal bodega, in spite of it not carrying any beer, became
the most popular store in the neighborhood.
I seemed to be the only person in the country trying not to think about the
unclaimed millions. In the months that followed, I took up yoga. I read
more. I switched from coffee to tea. I finished two research articles and
completed two grant applications. I made my father’s bank a weekly
destination. I also started fucking a second-year law student—a thin,
clean-shaven white guy in his late-twenties, who, as far as I could tell,
stepped out of an outdoor clothing catalog each morning, an array of
highlighting markers in his hand and a satchel of textbooks draped over his
shoulder (constitutional law, torts, contracts). Even before Gus’s
indiscretion, I’d noticed him in the café.
“Is Marbury v. Madison in that textbook?” I asked on a muggy early
fall day, in the midst of my drought with Gus. It was the only case I could
recall from an undergraduate class I’d taken many years before.
He took off his headphones and smiled: “First time the Supreme Court
invalidated an act of Congress.” He was seated beside me, one blonde thigh
resting on the other, each held snug by his Australian outback-style
shorts.
After a little chitchat and extended eye contact, he asked if I’d watch his
things while he went to the bathroom. I nodded, but followed him instead,
leaving everything unattended. He must have known I was coming because the
door was slightly ajar. Over a large, cracked sink, we had quick, supple,
unprotected sex. Afterward, we sneaked out carefully, one at a time, no
longer any eye contact. I took advantage of the rain to cry all the way
home, but within a few days, we were in the bathroom again.
The sex continued, usually on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at his place.
Kevin was sweet, passionate, liked to be bitten, and had distractingly
small earlobes. His dream was to work for the ACLU. I liked him, but there
was an immaturity to his conversation that facilitated my distance and made
me want to warn the ACLU. Our affair, while making the moratorium with Gus
bearable, ended almost as unexpectedly as it began. Around the holidays,
Kevin sent a misguided, poorly punctuated text message replete with emojis
but only eight words: “i miss u my hot latino santa daddy.” On various
levels, I detested that text.
The act, or phenomenon, of cheating had once been as irredeemable as
driving off a cliff. Suddenly, it was a medium-size pothole. I didn’t tell
Gus about Kevin, but when it was all said and done—including a clean bill
of health from the STI clinic—the state of our marriage returned to what it
had been before. Only now, there was less sincerity between us.
“You don’t have to worry about anything. I promise—If you don’t want me to
go, I can cancel,” Gus said before a business trip in February. I told him
I wasn’t worried. But the truth was I didn’t care.
As for Kevin, I ceded him the café—the second year of law school is
stressful enough without being displaced—and returned to working in my
office at the university.
In the spring, at an event for prospective students, the dean introduced me
as “one of our most valued professors. As an Hispanic, he knows intimately
the public health needs of society’s most underserved communities.”
Afterward, I asked him if I was ever going to be a valued professor with
tenure. “Of course it’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of
time. Having a tenured Latino on staff will be great for our faculty
demographic.”
Soraya didn’t buy it. That week’s loose, blonde curls shook with
disapproval. “Eduardo, these people will string you along for years. I’ve
seen it before. Trust me, dear,” she said in her South
Carolina-by-way-of-the-Bronx way.
***
The lottery tickets were set to expire in August, one year after the
drawings. In late June, the local papers ran a few articles about the
unclaimed Mega Millions prize—someone was quoted as suggesting that there
should be lottery ticket insurance. I found similar articles online about
the Powerball prize. Theories abounded: the tickets had been cleaned to
death in a washing machine; accidentally thrown away; or eaten by dogs.
Near the bodega in Brooklyn and the gas station in Massachusetts, there
were arrests: people who had entered the sewer systems in search of the
tickets, some wearing wetsuits and oxygen tanks.
The tickets had been in my bookshelves the entire time. After James
Baldwin, I’d placed them inside a Zadie Smith book Gus had read already.
Then, a Pynchon he’d given up on years before. Followed by a Fanon book
that neither of us had ever been able to get through. Galeano had been
their most recent steward. But in early July, when I went to retrieve them,
they were nowhere in The Open Veins of Latin America—
anonymously left in my faculty mailbox in the last week of school. I turned
the book upside down, shook it furiously, and flipped carefully through
each of its 379 pages. Nothing but paper cuts. I’d been reading it
sporadically, in the kitchen, on the toilet, in bed. I searched all of
those places too. Nothing.
I remained surprisingly calm for having just lost so many millions of
dollars. I wondered if I’d entered a new realm of panic, where one doesn’t
even know he’s panicking. I walked back to the bookcase and examined the
Scandinavian-designed behemoth at a distance—we hadn’t read half of those
books. I crouched into a squat and tapped the tip of my thumb against by my
two front teeth. After a minute, I eyed a corner of faded pink ink on white
jutting out from the base of the bookcase. I slid them toward me. They were
pressed onto each other, like young lovers do. Maybe while my relationship
was in the doldrums, Powerball and Mega Millions had fallen in love. Maybe
they were running away together, and I’d just interrupted them. Or maybe
holding onto each other was an act of survival—safety in numbers.
Immediately, I stuck them inside a Mailer that we used to prop up a loose
shelf.
***
Because of the size of the prizes, and because I had waited more than 180
days to reclaim them, I would have to undergo “additional security
verification as required by the Multi-State Lottery Association.” I also
read it was wise to retain a lawyer and a good idea to move.
Even if Gus were upset, he’d never show it—we were back to normal, in a
way, but he wasn’t yet over his guilt. My parents, on the other hand,
wouldn’t understand. My mom maybe, but my dad would be hung up on the year
of missed opportunities. And my sister, well, she’d be torn between feeling
slighted and wanting to celebrate. The media, however, would have a field
day: “Gay, Crazy Leprechaun and His Two Pots of Gold!”
It was hard to believe that I could trace all of this back to one dream.
***
In an effort to preempt a strike, the university took the unprecedented
step of locking out the entire faculty just before the start of the fall
semester. No access to campus or email. No one would be paid or receive any
benefits until the contract dispute was settled.
Four hundred professors—part-time, full-time, associate, assistant, and
adjunct—filled a church not far from campus. The room was frantic but
inspirited. From the sparsely decorated pulpit, our union’s lawyer—a bald
man with an industrialist’s mustache and a red bowtie—explained the dire
situation. During the Q&A, a tenured chemistry professor approached the
microphone almost in tears; she couldn’t afford her son’s medications
without insurance. A post-doc in the English department had just re-located
from California. This was his first semester. How was he supposed to pay
his rent? A group of adjuncts who were already receiving public assistance
held an impromptu survival-tips workshop near a replica of the Virgin Mary.
The scant media coverage of the lockout, most of it from the perspective of
the university’s administration, painted us as money-hungry and unconcerned
with the students. I wondered how much it would cost to rent every
billboard in New York City and fill them with facts about the history of
unions and the labor laws in this country.
The following morning, I joined the sidewalk protest outside of the
university—a collection of art deco buildings across two gated, square city
blocks. Something about the long shadows on the street and the spectacle
reminded me of an airline pilot protest I’d seen reported a few years
before, during Occupy Wall Street. The dapper, uniformed group had formed a
perfect grid and held placards in their hands. They’d been visually
stunning and commanded attention, like a fashionable fascist youth camp. We
teachers, on the other hand, looked like a ragtag assembly of misshapen
discontents. Nevertheless, our turnout was large and varied: not just
faculty; students and alumni too. After a few hours of chanting, marching,
and giving interviews to local news outlets, I went home. Protests would
resume the next day.
Before going up to our apartment, I settled myself onto the building’s
stoop. Later, there would be a thunderstorm, but for now, the hot
brownstone beneath my thighs was a cheap Russian-style bathhouse. Air
conditioners above dripped with impunity, but the water barely hit the
ground before evaporating. On me, sweat beaded and then streamed down my
sides. It was too late in the season for such a hot day. In the park across
the street, the men in cut-off everything were also losing the battle
against climate change.
I pulled the phone from my pocket.
“Hi, hon. Do you have a minute?”
“Yeah. Just grabbing a late lunch in the cafeteria.”
“Can you find a quiet place?”
“Of course. Everything okay?”
“We need to talk.”