The Man I Love (22 page)

They came back to Lancaster in late August.

The girls moved into Jay Street. The boys moved into Colby. They unloaded and unpacked, then clipped back the stray branches in the gap of the hedge separating their backyards. Open for business.

After a week of classes, they threw a little dinner party. Daisy and Lucky cooked. David came over. And John Quillis, now firmly established as part of their clan. John’s height was up an inch and his voice down an octave. His face was shedding its babyish curves, sporting a careless growth of beard. He looked adult. And a little haunted. In the light of the kitchen table, they all looked older and battle-worn. Yet as they ate and laughed and passed around a bottle of red wine, they talked optimistically about what lay ahead.

Lucky was designing a dance therapy minor to go with her physical therapy major, and using Daisy as her case study thesis. Daisy hadn’t yet been green-lighted to go back to class. She was doing her therapy and her training sessions and had christened the fall semester, “Operation Irons in the Fire.” She was taking psychology, creative writing and art history, and auditing a course in French literature.

She was also teaching.

Kees took over as director for both the contemporary and ballet divisions, holding down the fort until a new ballet head could be hired. Short-staffed, he wanted Daisy to cover some of the lower-level technique classes. She balked at first. “I don’t teach,” she said, partly indignant, partly terrified.

Preoccupied and stressed, Kees would have none of it. “Consider this your senior project. Teach the damn class or I’ll flunk you.”

To her surprise she was good at it. More than good. “She’s a natural,” John said. “Like who didn’t see that coming?”

“Duh,” Will muttered.

Will’s appearance had shocked everyone: he had cut his hair. Not a mere trim, but cropped close down to the scalp. Even after a week, Erik barely recognized him. He gaped all during dinner, still getting used to the startling presence of Will’s facial features. He was all eyes and jaw. Exposed and raw. Dangerously handsome.

“Dude,” Will said, “you keep staring at me like that and we’re gonna have to take it upstairs.”

Erik rose out of his seat. “Let’s go.”

John got up as well. “I’ll witness.” And the table broke up laughing.

“What possessed you to do it?” Daisy asked, touching Will’s head.

Will shrugged. “I just felt the need to do something dramatic. You and Fish got tattoos. You know what I mean.” He massaged his left wrist as he talked. The surgeons had saved the middle finger—no end of jokes there—and Will had spent the summer in intense rehab, gaining back control of his maimed hand. It pained him—both the lingering discomfort in his palm and the phantom pain from the two lost fingers.

“Was Lucky mad?” John asked.

“Furious,” Lucky said, smiling.

“Only because I did it without telling you.” Will sunk a little in his seat. “I didn’t think that part through too good. None of us is really into surprises anymore.”

“No shit.” John said.

“But once the shock wore off… What the hell, it’s just hair. It grows back.”

Lucky ran her hand over Will’s crown. “It’s like velvet,” she said, a little dreamily. “Especially when you rub against the nap.”

“Yeah, with your inner thighs,” David muttered and again the table broke up.

Erik laughed along, but he kept an ear peeled the next few weeks, listening for Will and Lucky’s customary noises in the middle of the night. Either they were having quieter sex or, like Erik and Daisy, they weren’t having much at all. Erik desperately wanted to ask. Hit the gym or go for a run and bring up the topic. Ask Will if he and Lucky were having trouble in bed.

But he didn’t. It was awkward. And such a fucking drag. He thought his physical relationship with Daisy would get better back at school. Back in the cradle of their romance.

It didn’t.

Their desire was back—whether it was from the campus vibe, or from the memory of past sexual encounters splashed all over the apartment on Jay Street, the love call was loud and undeniable. Yet the love itself was unremarkable.

Daisy had to struggle to come. Moves and tricks Erik had once brought her around in minutes, but now brought only an indifferent, dulled pleasure. “It feels good, it’s just not taking me anywhere,” she said, her voice filled with a confused frustration. “It’s like I’m stuck. I don’t know.”

“I know,” Erik said, confused by his own experience. He felt like a klutz in bed. Getting aroused was no problem, the urge struck often, but once in the act, he couldn’t get completely into it. He wasn’t exactly stuck, but he couldn’t seem to find the hook during sex, the ability to step off the edge of himself and fall headlong into a climax. It was like sleeping with one eye open, or one foot planted on the floor: he couldn’t give over to pure pleasure anymore, he felt constantly braced for something.

Cruelest of all, sometimes the sex was sweet and connected, but followed by an anxiety so intense, it left them reeling and shaking, if not outright physically sick. It was a sucker punch tactic filling Erik with an angry dread. They’d be cuddling together in the afterglow, minding their own damn business, and little by little he would start to feel sick, feel the unexplainable fear coming out of the dark.

“When the wolves come,” Daisy said. To her the angst was like a pack of hunting beasts loping over the horizon, coming to tear them apart.

Erik fought it. Tried to make a stand, using all the mantras and talismans at his possession, but it was no use. The undefinable terror ensnared him like a trap, a fish in a net, dragged down by a churning undercurrent of
something is wrong, something is wrong,
and no means to fix it other than throwing more and more time at it.

Beside him Daisy shivered, caught in the same net. “Why is this happening?”

“I don’t know.” He had no answers. He could not help her, could not save her from the wolves plucking her apart, petal by petal.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. They clung to each other, shaking it out, trying to beat it back with jokes.

“Gotta love the afterglow.”

“Most people have a cigarette. We have a panic attack.”

They were both free-falling, gripped with a terrible foreboding they could not explain. Shivering, freezing cold, pulling their clothes on and seizing extra blankets.

“Let me spoon you,” she whispered.

“Please.”

She pressed up against his back, knees behind his, her hand flat against his knocking heart. Laying this way, with Erik sandwiched between her hand and her body, pressure from both sides, seemed to be the only calming remedy.

“At least we’re both feeling it,” he said.

“We’re in it together.”

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have a nervous breakdown with than you.”

“Oh, honey. You say the sweetest things to me.”

“I’m trying to be funny about it. I don’t know else what to do.”

“I love you. We’ll get through it.”

“I love you.”

“We just have to get each other through it and…fuck sex.”

He laughed. “Fuck sex.”

“Fuck this.”

“Fuck this fucking fucked-up world. Jesus Christ, what the fuck.”

“I love you. You’re fucked-up and I love you.”

“I love your fucked-upness.”

They were trying so hard but they were so young. Unskilled and powerless at three o’clock in the morning when they ought to be consumed with each other. Instead they were being eaten alive.

Erik wondered how many important conversations had taken place while he was either up a ladder or holding one.

He was holding one now for Joe Bianco, who was replacing a section of Christmas lights on the porch of La Tarasque.

“You having nightmares?” Joe asked.

“Sometimes.”

“How often?”

“Few times a week,” Erik said.

Joe grunted, yanking at the strand of lights which was caught on a nail. “Every night for me when I came home from Vietnam.”

Erik pictured a younger version of Joe, maybe longer hair and a moustache. Bolting out of bed, gasping and sweating, waking up from the war.

“For how long?”

“How long every night? Years. The bad dreams. Jumping at loud noises. Always looking for danger. Years, it took.”

Still holding the ladder, a foot on the first rung, Erik looked out over the property, at the last light of day turning the horizon pink and orange. The leaves were dead on the Japanese maples. Francine’s gardens were neatly wrapped up for the coming winter. Shrubs encased in burlap, the mulch piled high. Wood smoke hovered on the air.

“Was it different dreams?” he asked. “Or just the same one over and over?”

“A handful of different ones.”

“And you still have them?”

“Sometimes. Some things still have an effect. The sound of a helicopter. Not something I hear often but if I do, it makes me nervous. And thunder. I still hate thunder. Catch.”

Erik caught the string of dead lights and handed up the new one, then the hammer, which Joe hooked through a belt loop. “For me it’s always the same dream. Just the one.”

“What about Daisy?” Joe’s accent always seemed stronger when he was speaking names. Daisy’s name, especially, which softened and slurred into Dézi.

“What about her?”

“Is she having nightmares?” He glanced down at Erik and raised an eyebrow. “I never pretended you weren’t sleeping with her. You want me to start now?”

Erik smiled at his shoes then looked back up at him. “She has them, too,” he said. “She wakes me up or I wake her up. I’d say at least three nights out of a week, someone is waking somebody up.”

Joe held down his palm and Erik put a few nails into it. “I went to war, Erique, and saw death rain from the skies.” He kept speaking, punctuating each quiet sentence with a blow of his hammer. “I took apart land mines so my men could get through, then I put mines back together to kill other men. I blew up bridges and set fire to trees. I saw children gunned down in the fields where they played. I saw women with their bellies sliced open and men with their limbs blown off. I heard screaming in the night I cannot ever un-hear. But I did my tours and came home to build a life where my own child could be safe. I deal with the nightmares because I think of them as extra insurance. I take them on. I can carry the burden, just as long as my family is safe.”

He stopped, a forearm on the top of the ladder, the hammer poised in the air. “Then a boy with a gun goes after my daughter. Now it is my own child with her leg sliced open. My Dézi screaming in the night. And it turns out nothing I did made any difference.”

Erik looked at him, seeing Daisy’s mannerisms and expressions flit in and out of his face.

“What can you do with a world like this? No insurance exists. You can’t control who lives or who dies. All I know, Erique, is if my only daughter is having nightmares, then I want you sleeping next to her. Not just because you love her. But because you understand her.”

Joe indicated the switch with the handle of the hammer, and Erik threw it. The porch lit up, gold and twinkling.

“Ça y est,” Joe said, and carefully came down the ladder. He was struggling with an arthritic hip, resigned it would eventually need to be replaced. He was touchy about being coddled though. Erik helped him fold up the ladder and stow it as unobtrusively as possible.

“Come with me a minute,” Joe said as they went back inside. They hung their jackets on the pegs in the mudroom, then Erik followed Joe’s limping gait down the hall to the small study next to the living room. The inner sanctum. Joe’s desk and bookshelves, antique map collections, and his two beloved Meyer lemon trees by the southwest windows. Both were in bloom, and the citrus smell from the blossoms was strong.

“I’d like you to have something,” Joe said, opening a drawer in his desk. He drew out a small box of navy blue leather, a double, flourished rectangle embossed in gold on its top. He handed it to Erik.

Erik looked at him a moment, then opened the lid.

“I can’t take this,” he said, staring down at the Purple Heart.

“You can,” Joe said. “I am giving it to you.”

Erik shook his head, bewildered. “Why?”

“Because, Erique, this is what you do for the boy who looks a killer in the eye and calls him by name. The boy who crawls through broken glass to get to your daughter. The boy who stares down her wounds and is there when the thunder wakes her up in the night. Technically speaking, a Purple Heart is not the right medal for this situation. But it’s my medal. And I would like you to have it.”

Erik couldn’t speak.

“And one other thing,” Joe said. “If you cross paths with your old man someday, and he has nothing good to say to you? You show him your medal. And you tell him Joe Bianco is proud to call you his son.”

If Joe had smacked him in the chest with a two-by-four, Erik could not have been more felled. “You’re killing me,” he whispered, clutching his decoration.

“You and me both, mon pote.”

* * *

He had come to the Biancos for Thanksgiving. They had all come. Will was free because Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. Lucky waved the Bianco’s invitation at her mother and conveniently forgot to mention her boyfriend’s inclusion. And David came because wherever they went, he followed.

Now the four of them were plonked down at the long farmhouse table in Francine’s kitchen, making gnocchi. By intense principle, Francine never made turkey on Thanksgiving, a notion which struck Erik, Lucky and David as bizarre. Almost on the verge of treasonous.

“Turkey is vile,” Francine said. “You wait. I’m going to convert each and every one of you tonight.”

She and Daisy had prepped one batch of plain gnocchi dough, another with butternut squash, and a third with spinach. Watching Daisy in the kitchen, working side-by-side with Francine, ricing potatoes, kneading dough, laughing, joking, Erik was so happy and so in love, he was practically choking up.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He didn’t know how he’d missed it before, but the shape of Daisy’s physique had completely changed. The training of the summer and fall was evident in her lean muscles and athletic curves. Nothing near Lucky Dare’s hourglass figure, but still, quite a respectable pair of boobs was up high in her tight sweater. And what she did to a pair of jeans, in Erik’s opinion, should have been illegal. She was gorgeous. Moving confidently and competently around the kitchen. Chattering French. And smiling.

A few weeks ago she was given the all-clear to go back to class. And just before they broke for the holiday, she put her left foot into a pointe shoe and went up on her toes. The pain was there—a sharp bite in her inner thigh, an ache in her calf and shin, and a morbid complaint from her ankle. One way or another, those pains would always be there. But now Daisy was back up on pointe, her leg straight and true. Erik always marked it as the day Daisy’s smile came back.

She sat down at Francine’s kitchen table, kissed him carelessly, then joined the others in rolling out snakes of gnocchi dough, yellow, orange and green. They cut the snakes crosswise and rolled the knuckles off the tines of forks, dropping them onto floured wax paper. Daisy could make two dozen in a minute. Will soon got the knack. Lucky, David and Erik just made a mosh of their gnocchi, but Francine walked among them like a nursery school teacher, praising, coaching, ruffling heads. Joe poured wine with a lavish hand. Then he sat quietly, rolling perfect, ridged gnocchi off the tines of his fork. Three yellow, three orange, three green. Each one precisely the same size.

“Erique, darling, tell me,” Francine said. “At boarding school I had a friend who was Swedish, and at Christmastime her mother would always send her these wonderful cookies. They had orange zest in them, and black pepper. I loved them, but I forgot what they are called. Do you know these cookies?”

Erik was about to shrug apologetically when his memory nudged him in the side and he heard himself say, “Pepparkakor.”

“Yes,” Francine said, her face lighting up.

Erik laughed as if he’d sunk a half-court shot at the buzzer. “I totally pulled that out of my ass,” he said. “Pepparkakor. They were the Christmas cookies.”

Daisy was smiling at him. “Who made them?”

“My grandmother. She sent them in the mail. She made one batch without pepper for me and my brother, and another with just a little pepper for my mom. Then my dad would get his own little box and they’d have both pepper in them and pepper sprinkled on top. He liked them really hot.”

“Is she alive?” Francine asked, with wide, hopeful eyes. Mentally she was already tying on an apron and zesting oranges.

“No, she passed away. I’m not really in touch with my father’s family. It’s all distant cousins. But maybe there’s someone I could ask…”

Francine touched his wrist. “No, no, darling, don’t go to any trouble. I’m just happy you remembered the name. Pepparkakor,” she said, as if it were a private joke. Then she clapped her hands and surveyed the efforts of her many slaves. “Are we done here? Yes? Let’s eat, then.”

The gnocchi were thrown into boiling water then divided up into two giant bowls, one tossed with butter and sage, the other with a light tomato sauce. A wooden bowl had an arugula salad, and a platter held a mountain of roasted asparagus. They took plates and served buffet style, then sat at the kitchen table. No candles, no china or silver, no formal place settings. Bread, parmesan cheese and wine bottles went hand to hand, up and down the table. Francine pressed seconds on them. Then thirds. Joe went up an impressive fourth time, sat back down with a tiny portion and ate it in the admiration of his stuffed company.

“Where do you put it all?” David asked, regarding Joe’s trim physique. “Do you have a third leg or something?”

Joe smiled conspiratorially at him. “Beaucoup de place dans la bitte.”

Francine threw her napkin down the length of the table at him, as the boys let out a yell of laughter. Even Erik, who needed no translation.

“He said there’s room in his cock,” Daisy mumbled to Lucky.

Lucky threw up her hands. “Cock? How can you even say ‘cock’ at the same table with your parents? How do you even acknowledge your father
has
a cock?”

Will choked on his wine and turned away. Francine shrieked with laughter and even Joe, normally so deadpan, had his face in a hand, shoulders quaking.

Lucky patted Daisy, who was sprawled on her, laughing. “Francine, can I come live here?” she asked. “Please? Just let me come live here and eat, curse, make lewd jokes and screw in peace. Honestly…”

“I love you,” Daisy said, gasping, running her knuckle along her streaming eyes. “Oh my God, I love you.” She toppled onto Erik now, giggling. “I love everybody so much…”