Who's bearing gifts this Christmas? Three hot, single guys!
Christy de la Cruz has it all: a great career as an interior designer for the stylish homes of New Mexico, marriage to a tall and handsome man, and a great family—especially her cousin Maggie. But as the holidays approach, she's down to two out of three—that handsome husband has walked out the door. Christy is so not up for dating . . . until Maggie takes Christy on as the ultimate romantic project. Just like the wise men in the nativity story, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar arrive bearing gifts and displaying their best stuff. One's a pretty boy, one's a rugged cowboy, and one's an animal lover. Which one will win Christy's heart?
Everyone Loves Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Novels!
"Intoxicating."—New York Post
"Exhilarating."—Jennifer Crusie
"Must-haves."—Latina magazine
Who's bearing gifts this Christmas? Three hot, single guys!
Christy de la Cruz has it all: a great career as an interior designer for the stylish homes of New Mexico, marriage to a tall and handsome man, and a great family—especially her cousin Maggie. But as the holidays approach, she's down to two out of three—that handsome husband has walked out the door. Christy is so not up for dating . . . until Maggie takes Christy on as the ultimate romantic project. Just like the wise men in the nativity story, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar arrive bearing gifts and displaying their best stuff. One's a pretty boy, one's a rugged cowboy, and one's an animal lover. Which one will win Christy's heart?
Everyone Loves Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Novels!
"Intoxicating."—New York Post
"Exhilarating."—Jennifer Crusie
"Must-haves."—Latina magazine
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Overview
Who's bearing gifts this Christmas? Three hot, single guys!
Christy de la Cruz has it all: a great career as an interior designer for the stylish homes of New Mexico, marriage to a tall and handsome man, and a great family—especially her cousin Maggie. But as the holidays approach, she's down to two out of three—that handsome husband has walked out the door. Christy is so not up for dating . . . until Maggie takes Christy on as the ultimate romantic project. Just like the wise men in the nativity story, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar arrive bearing gifts and displaying their best stuff. One's a pretty boy, one's a rugged cowboy, and one's an animal lover. Which one will win Christy's heart?
Everyone Loves Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Novels!
"Intoxicating."—New York Post
"Exhilarating."—Jennifer Crusie
"Must-haves."—Latina magazine
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429950190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/09/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 348 KB |
About the Author
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is an award-winning journalist who was named one of today's "25 Most Influential Hispanics in America" by Time magazine. The Three Kings is her sixth novel. She lives in Southern California and keeps a home in her native New Mexico.
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a former staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With more than one million books in print in eleven languages, she was included on Time magazine’s list of "25 Most Influential Hispanics," and was a Latina magazine Woman of the Year as well as an Entertainment Weekly Breakout Literary Star. She is the author of many novels, including Playing with Boys and The Husband Habit. Alisa divides her time between New Mexico and Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A man in a silver suit and black cowboy hat stands in the bright, high-ceilinged foyer of his modern foothill mansion, molesting his iPhone.
At least that's how it looks to me.
Then again, after spending the past ten months reading The Rules, Love in 90 Days, and other assorted old and new dating advice tomes for single (or, in my case, bitterly divorced) women, I have begun to cultivate a paranoid view of men as ad hoc rulers of the world who are supposed to be placated and appeased — and, ultimately, trapped — by the likes of me.
Not that I want to date this particular man. I don't. He's a client, and his wife is just outside, inspecting the backyard. I am their interior designer. I make the insides of buildings beautiful, while my own innards are a maelstrom of insecurities and disillusionment, romantically speaking.
This man is rich, and his wife is beautiful in the way Rules Girls ought to be beautiful — she is feminine, wears heels, and has long hair. She is mysterious and doesn't talk too much. She laughs at his jokes, but not for too long. She keeps him guessing, and wanting more. In other words, she is the opposite of me. I am trying to be a Rules Girl, but then I see guys like this and I wonder if I'd ever even be happy with one of them. I mean, if you snare a man by lying to him about your essential nature and character, isn't that a disaster waiting to happen? Oh, right, that's what happened in my marriage — only it was Zach who snared me with the illusion that he was, you know, straight.
My client watches me for a moment, with an unclean grin on his face. He once suggested we meet without his wife around, and he winked as he said it. A certain kind of men all do this, I am convinced. The powerful kind. For them, women are accessories. I declined, because as a Rules Girl I do not date married men, or cokeheads, or — Well, at this point I don't seem to be dating anybody.
I'm on an online dating site — two, actually, per suggestion of the Love in 90 Days lady, and what you get in New Mexico is grim — men who confuse "are" with "our," and who pose in their own bathrooms, taking their own photos with a cheap camera phone, wearing undershirts and with filthy towels all over the floor. They wink at me every day on the site, and every day I delete them all without responding. I'm trying to move on from the painful divorce, but it seems there is no one to move on with. There was one I almost met, but then I Googled him and discovered he belonged to one of those Renaissance clubs where grown men dress up like knights and battle each other at Bataan Park on Saturday afternoons. In his free time, he dressed up like a Stormtrooper and went to Star Wars conventions. Scary.
My client. Look at him. Tap, tap, tap. Sniff, sniff, sniff. Touch the nose, look around with paranoid urgency, then back to the phone, tap, tap. Now and then, he snickers wickedly, like something small and slimy off the Cartoon Network. It's like watching a nervous gerbil with a head cold. I try to remember why, exactly, I love my job. Pretty things, as I recall. Right. Pretty things. I have coveted pretty, high-quality things all my life, the result of having been dragged exhausted from the swap meet to the flea market to the thrift store by my miserly mother, in her never-ending quest for inexpensive beauty. He's not a pretty thing himself, this client-o-mine, but he can afford pretty things, and I am the one hired to scour the ends of the earth to find them, buy them, and place them in his home for him.
The rest of the world, the people around him, the house I've worked three months to perfect for him, mean nothing. He's a trader, a wheeler-dealer, a Yosemite Sam lost in a bucking bronco of bucks — or something. Illumination from the enormous modern chandelier makes his puffy white hair glow like some sort of radioactive marshmallow. He is the cowboy Andy Warhol king of the marshmallow men whom The Rules were designed to trap. A real prize, we are told. He chuckles to himself, something helpless and exploitable no doubt caught in his business net and flopping in death throes. Success, American style. Millionaire.
I stare at him and wonder if this is simply what all successful men are like, in the end. Selfish and ugly. I believe so. I wonder, then, why I have wasted the past year trying to get one of them to notice me.
I realize, with a gut-thud of misery, that I will never be able to love any man other than my ex-husband, who left me a year ago saying he was gay. I still cannot believe it; not Zach! He's a grungy kind of tall and (I once believed) thoughtful, gentle white-guy architect with flannel shirts, ratty baseball caps, and a stubbly baby face with soft pink lips and laughing green eyes; and he came out of the closet almost exactly a year ago, on New Year's Eve, at The Pink Adobe restaurant in Santa Fe.
Why, I wonder, do we women turn ourselves inside out for these beasts? Why do we work so hard to please them when, in the end, they all seem so perfectly pleased to be themselves regardless of what we say or do?
Men. I ask you, who the hell can trust them?
* * *
Conversation one is with my friend Crystal's husband, Fred. Crystal is a doctor. She is a good doctor, a cardiologist in the land of fry bread, and went to an Ivy League school. Fred never finished college because he figured out you could have a keg party without paying tuition. They're as mismatched as a mare and a pigeon. I have a lot of female friends in this predicament in Albuquerque, because we are Latinas and feel like we should marry Latinos, and then we end up realizing that the ones who finished college all married gringas or moved out of state, and whatever's left is, well, Fred.
Crystal is tall and beautiful. Fred is not. They have two beautiful children who take after their mother. Fred used to have money because he, like his father, worked building houses. I don't mean Fred was a construction worker. I mean he designed and built houses, without a degree, because Fred is smart and funny and charming in spite of being very short and driving a very big truck. Crystal met him in Mexico on vacation and fell in love with him, even though she is ten years older and he uses double negatives.
At any rate, Fred came over, per Crystal's insistence, after Zach moved out, when I had trouble connecting my new home-theater sound system. Fred knows how to do these manly sorts of things, and Crystal had joked that she was going to share her husband with me now that mine was playing patty-cake with the rainbow flag coalition.
So he's at my house, putting things together. We talk a bit, and then he goes home, and fifteen minutes later I have a text message from him, saying: "U lkd hot 2day."
I stared at it for a bit, and texted back: "Did you send this to the wrong person?"
Fred: "Nope."
I wrote nothing back, and ten minutes later I get another one: "ScaredU off?"
My text: "No. Just confused."
Fred's text: "Don'tB UR hot n Im a man. LOL."
My text: "LOL?"
Fred's text: "Ur uptite? want2jump u. just say the wrd i'll cum bk."
At that point, I threatened to forward the messages to Crystal, and Fred called to tell me she'd never believe they were real, because everyone knows what divorced Latina women are like, especially ones who wear low-cut blouses when men come over. I did not bother to tell him the low-cut, colorful blouse was what had been advised to me by The Rules, not something I would have ever actually bought, and that I didn't think of him as a man, exactly. He was Fred.
I looked in the mirror next to the front door of my condo, and tried to see what he saw. I didn't see a cheap whore, however. I saw me, five-four, fit at last after a lifetime of being chubby, with a controlled, chin-length layered bob, brown with subtle highlights and sideswept bangs. I saw an efficient, intelligent professional woman with mocha skin, an oval face, and pretty brown eyes that men liked to point out, back when I was fat, right before they said I'd be beautiful if I lost weight. I'd lost the weight over six determined months a few years back. I guessed I was fine now, a size four with toned legs and decent cleavage in spite of all the cardio. I didn't feel fine, however. I looked good, in an objective sort of way, but once you've been fat you never really believe the mirror anyway.
My text: "U r a pig."
He let me know he was "just playing," and that he'd never cheat on my friend.
Yeah, right.
I wondered what's worse, a gay ex or a philandering hubby? They both sucked; one literally, of course, and with great sloppy wetness; and one figuratively, via passive-aggressive texting.
I'd call it a draw.
* * *
Back to the client, and meandering thoughts.
You don't ever think a man like Zach could ever be gay, because he oozes competent log-cabin-bow-legged manliness and never puts his dirty clothes in the hamper. I'm not sure he even knows the word hamper. He can't cook, not even a can of soup — in his burly hands, it's a can't of soup. He can barely find the ice function on the fridge door. His hobby is rehabilitating Harley-Davidson bikes while Snow Patrol blares, and it used to be that when I was out of town on business he'd sneak off to Hooters or Twin Peaks or whatever the new boob restaurant was with his buddies, and if I found out, insist it had been "for the wings," which made me wonder if he thought women wore their wings on the front.
Zach talks Thom Hartmann and football with his dude buddies, called dude buddies because they "dude" each other constantly. They all hold their beer bottles between two large fingers, not needing a thumb, and flip it to their lips like flicking dried mocos out the window of a moving truck. Zach never throws his head back when he laughs, because he's so in control his laughs never get that big. He'll wear white T-shirts until they're yellow in the pits and won't notice, but also won't notice if you throw them away while he's at work. He wears steel-toed boots and is a structural engineer focused on green building and off-the-grid homes for bearded mountain men, who always end up being his friends and always end up on fishing trips with him, where they all wear hats with hooks in them and talk about the Yankees-versus-Red-Sox thing. You could imagine Zach playing cards in a smoky basement with Seth Rogen, not swooning over Cirque du Soleil with his hands clasped below his chin with Perez effing Hilton. Guys like Zach simply aren't like that. They're not.
Until they are, apparently.
I wonder if my depression is showing, like the exploded hem on the back of these black slacks, which caught on the heel of my pump earlier, as I exited my black Mercedes, and ripped. Please don't be impressed by the car. The trunk is full of weird trash and dry cleaning I keep forgetting to take out. I can only keep up appearances to a certain extent before the sadness of losing Zach weighs me down.
I wonder if anyone can tell my life is fraying, too. I wonder how good it might feel to kick this iPhone man in the nuts, just because he's a man. I wonder why, if God intended all men to suck so badly, he did not make me a lesbian. I shouldn't say this, of course. But still. It would be easier, right? This makes me doubt the existence of a God at all, which, because I'm Catholic, makes me feel dirty and guilty as hell — even though I shouldn't say that word, either. Hell. Fire and brimstone. Lucifer. I married Lucifer, and now he goes by Luci with an i that he dots with a hot pink heart.
The iPhone molester man catches me staring and snorts like a walrus bull, like the Old Man with all the sea from which to yank. Yanker. Blech. I look away and force myself not to look back. He is vile, but he pays my bills. Most of my clients, truth be told, are vile pigs. Ah, servitude. And to think I once believed I had escaped it, because I went to college and got a profession and wasn't, God forbid, a bank teller like my mother, who read three novels a week during her off-hours, just for fun. I didn't want to end up like that, underemployed and with an invisible tail tucked between my legs forever and ever, amen.
Oh, and yes, I'll admit that I also felt superior because I had married a gringo from Southern California, instead of shacking up with a life-size homie doll from the South Valley like my cousin Maggie has done repeatedly for the past two decades, since she was eleven years old. Maggie has four kids by four men, none of the dads being around anymore; they're all off somewhere with a 40-ounce, their pants pooling over their homie work boots.
For twelve years, since I went away to college at eighteen, I have toiled under the guilty, ecstatic, college-educated, Starbucksed, Uggs-alicious illusion of socioeconomic escape. The family has called me a coconut because, being poor and undereducated, they still confuse "poor and uneducated" with "Mexican American," just like Michael Savage. Whoops. Bad thought.
According to The Rules, I'm not to discuss politics or identity on dates. I am supposed to be demure and serene and mysterious. Which is torture.
I have reacted to my family's accusations of sellout-dom by driving back to my downtown loft in my Mercedes and telling myself they, like those who persecuted our Savior, knew not what they did. They have insisted I was cut out for more pedestrian things. I have ignored them.
And yet, here I am, a servant with a tail tucked up just there, in the spaces where no man shall ever be allowed to visit lest the folded pink flesh-terrors therein also turn him gay. Me: the celibate twenty-nine-year-old divorcée of the Gay Ex-husband, who, I might add, considers us to still be dear friends because, really, you cannot hate a man for being born gay, though you can hate him for lying.
Zach and I still meet for brunch at least once a month. He invites me, and asks me for dating advice. This makes me pity the entire gay male population of Albuquerque, because no one should follow my advice. But I tell myself Zach needs me, as a friend, and then I suffer through his dating stories over blueberry pancakes at the Flying Star. He tells me terrifying details about his new life that I try unsuccessfully to forget in the ensuing days. For example, I did not even know there were clubs where gay men hung themselves from literal meat hooks on the ceiling.
Zach calls these men "the self-cutters," and he hates them. The self-cutters, however, are drawn to Zach because he seems like a young Ron Howard in Abercrombie clothes.
Zach has a hard time finding men, but not as hard a time as I do, because I, sadly, am still in love with him, and I can't seem to avoid texting or calling the cool men I meet and therefore, according to The Rules (and anecdotal experience), push them all away by being too needy, too easy, too human. I feel sick of myself all the time, failed.
My parents might be right about what I was cut out for, after all.
I am a slave all over. Just like Bryan Ferry sang, I am a slave to love. Perhaps I am still single because I know — and quote — Bryan Ferry songs, and it is the twenty-first century.
The legacies we carry — they cripple us forever.
* * *
Massive windows in the living room frame panoramic views of the city of Albuquerque, spread out below and lighting up in the dusk like glittery butter on a piece of hard, dry toast. I stand on the steps between this room and the foyer in my stirrup pants, a long belted black sweater, and chunky red jewelry and wonder why I've been here for an hour when it should have taken ten minutes.
I release my shoulder-length brown hair from the clip on the back of my head, then pin it up again, just to have something to do. In the absence of someone to do, it is always useful to have something to do. This is my new credo, courtesy of The Rules, whose authors insist a "girl" stay busy, busy, busy so she doesn't have time to ponder a life spent alone.
I wish I lived here, in this house. Such a clean, uncluttered space. I could let the worries go in a house like this. The house? She loves me. We've bonded. And now I have to hand her over to this dork. Men get all the good stuff.
I wait, and stare out at the world, and try to convince myself the house is in good hands now, even though I can see his hands and they are squishy, soft, and far too white.
The setting sun spills honey over the mesa and valley; it is a stark, enormous desert-and-mountain landscape like a spectacular painting, one of many reasons I returned to this city of my birth once I'd finished design school in Rhode Island.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Three Kings"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
"Witty."—Kirkus Reviews "Sassy and fun holiday chick lit."
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