The Collapse

CHAPTER FIVE from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale

The Collapse

5

On an evening that started out like all the others, her family structure collapsed. A herd of American teens, laughing and carrying on, left Billy’s Bar and wound their way through the back streets of Rio de Janeiro. As they passed a well-lit restaurant, Petra spotted her mother accepting a long-stemmed red rose. Lou, giddy like a schoolgirl, leaned across a romantic candle-lit table for two and locked lips with some random man.

“Oh hell, no!”

She redirected her friends down a side street.

“What an embarrassment…and in public? Shameless fucking bitch!”

Her father was out of town on a business trip.

“How could she? What if people saw?”

Their community of ex-pats was minuscule, and gossip of any kind ran through it like a howling tornado. All it took was one blabbermouth to launch an avalanche of malicious rumors.

She awoke the following morning, her adrenaline pumping, ready for a confrontation, prepared to let her mother have it, to make sure she understood how her behavior affected her daughter. She opened the door to her parent’s bedroom. Her mother was not there, and no one had slept in the bed. She wound her way around the apartment. On a whim, she opened the maid’s room door and there he was!

“She brought him home? Unbelievable!”

Her mother’s utter disrespect fueled Petra’s fear and rage.

“What is she thinking? How can this be happening? What about my father, our family? What about me?”

She found her mother in the kitchen, two cups of coffee in her hand.

“You get that fucking guy out of our house this minute! How dare you? I’m not covering for you. It’s bullshit! Dad’s coming home in two days and I’m telling him all about your little affair.”

Off to school she went, seething, head thumping, her mind a battleground of incongruent thought. She skipped her first class and, unafraid of consequences, smoked a joint on the smoking lounge balcony to calm her nerves, numb her feelings, and erase her thoughts.

She told herself, “No one saw anything. No one cares about me or my asshole family.”

When she arrived back home, there was a note.

A torn-off corner from a piece of notebook paper with the words, “I don’t love you. I am leaving.”

The following day, suitcase still in hand, her dad asked, “Where’s your mother?”

She tried to be gentle, you know, the way you might approach someone whose loved one had just died. There was no easy formula. She told him the whole sordid story and handed him the crumpled note. Tears welled up in his eyes. She had never seen her father cry. Never!

“Let’s go!”

Grabbing her by the arm, he marched her to the car, and drove straight to the liquor store. He filled a large cart with every kind of booze and mixer imaginable and instructed her to call everybody.

“Let them know the party is on!”

A party that would last three months.

Their house became a revolving door for countless school chums, who came and went as they pleased. Everyone stayed wasted all day, every day, and Petra lost interest in what anyone thought or said. Sometime, in the first month, her father’s new girlfriend moved in.

Unbeknownst to the old man, his home was a haven for drug use, and Petra was dealing weed. She bought a kilo from Rato. To her, it looked underweight, small, like a normal-sized brick.

“Maybe he ripped me off. Stupid little Gringa, what does she know?”

While her father toiled away at his job, she sat with her closest friends, breaking up the condensed weed on the dining room table. She had just purchased ZZ Top’s album Hombres, and they were listening to “La Grange” play as the brick expanded into an enormous pile that covered the entire tabletop.

“Wow! That is a hell of a lot of weed!”

Dark, rich, and powerful.

“Let’s make some money. Business is about to boom!”

Soon after, off-put by a house full of drunk teenagers still awake partying at sunrise, teenagers who slept all day and ate everything in sight while he went to work, her father exclaimed, “Get out! Everyone out! This party is officially over. I don’t want to see any of you in my house ever again.”

Raymond needed to get his head straight, and the houseguests were not helping. He had been busy designing a fail-safe plan to get Lou back. It was a detailed blueprint designed to humiliate her and gain back his control. He intended to turn her into his submissive, a hostage beholden to and dominated by him.

Over many sleepless nights, he formulated the plan of all plans. He laid it all out on paper, outlining his concept with the precision and clarity of a mathematical formula. He hired a new maid. The last one couldn’t handle the frat house vibe. Handing her a huge cash bonus, he instructed her to make the house immaculate, fill the cupboards, restock the bar, in short, send an obvious message to his wife, a message that she was not and never was necessary. In less than a week, she would return, playing her part as prescribed and acting as if nothing had happened.

On Petra’s eighteenth birthday, over cocktails, excited to reiterate his brilliant plan and its flawless execution, her father recounted the complete story, no detail too small. Ravings from an alcohol-driven braggart, delivered with relish, a glint in his eye and a giant smile on his face. So very proud of his ability to destroy another human being and make them pay.

He could have frozen the credit cards on the day he discovered her betrayal. Instead, he considered what he wanted and how the end game might look. He saw from the itinerary that Lou was going to New York with her lover. She had booked ten days at a Mexican beach resort.

“Let her have her honeymoon. Let her think she’s getting away with it. She should think that I don’t care, or even better, that I am too devastated to act. Make sure she gets to New York before I cut her off with nothing. Let her see what it’s like to support herself and her lover since he won’t be able to work in the States. Let her see how helpless she is.”

He had contacted his old consulting partner, referred to as Uncle Ray, same name, no relation. Uncle Ray’s mission was to keep a distant eye on her. He soon reported back that Lou had found a secretarial job. It paid a smidge above minimum wage and she was living in a shit apartment in Queens. She continued to support the lover, but that was going south and getting old. It was difficult to make ends meet. She had no money for restaurants or bars and drank cheap wine at home. It had only taken three short months for her to reach her wits’ end.

That was the moment Raymond left for New York. Uncle Ray picked him up at the airport and they headed to her apartment. Her father loved the part where he described Lou’s shocked expression when she opened her apartment door and found Uncle Ray standing there, in hip Santa Claus attire. His festive outfit included a red velvet, form-fitting jacket with white fur trim and a long hippie-style knit stocking cap on his head.

“Merry Christmas!”

Uncle Ray pressed his way inside the apartment and introduced his partner in crime as if he were hosting a game show.

“He’s here!”

The lover, demoralized, hunkered down on a kitchen chair. Raymond, in an act of uncharacteristic compassion, asked the lover if he was ready to go home. He burst into tears as her father handed him a plane ticket and enough cash to get him back to Brazil. He was out the door in less than ten minutes. Raymond chose this pre-planned moment to ask his wife, abandoned by her lover, paralyzed by the shock of it all, reeling and off balance, if she wanted to come home.

In her bewildered mind, she thought her husband loved her and was rescuing her from a harmless misstep. After all, hadn’t she stuck by him and endured his endless indiscretions?

“Oh yes, honey! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any of it. I love you. You know, I do. He means nothing to me.”

It was the moment her father had been waiting for, the moment that Uncle Ray reached into his leather satchel and handed her the divorce papers.

Chuckling, “You should have seen the look on her face. Shock, that I was divorcing her ass and then, devastation as she read the terms.”

He had backed Lou into a physical and psychological corner. Her only way out was to sign away her marital rights. She was no longer entitled to any financial compensation and had to give up custody of the children. She was, however, more than welcome to come back home and carry on as if nothing had happened.

Beaten into submission, she signed on the dotted line. With Lou defeated and back in the saddle, and him free from any financial or custodial threats, they flew home. His wife, rendered harmless, more dependent than ever, little more than a hostage, was now relegated to domestic status. He had avenged himself and was in complete control.

Lou insisted that she’d come back for the kids. In reality, she came back for financial security. Petra graduated later that year and left for college in Boston. During her first winter back in the States, while running an errand for work, a car careened around the corner and hit her. The witnesses said she flew ten feet in the air. She only suffered minor injuries, the worst of which was a mouth full of broken teeth.

Lou convinced Raymond that their daughter needed to be looked after. He agreed and sent her up to the college to care for her. She spent a few hours feigning interest in her beat-up condition and then was gone like the wind, abandoning her, the old man and her son, once again. Petra didn’t give it any thought. The dentist had prescribed Percocet, one every four hours. She was in a new heavenly state and failed to register her mother’s arrival or departure.

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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.

This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.

It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.