Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (16 page)

“No.”

“That little girl could.”

I told her a few of my favorite Mirabelle stories, and she told me stories I had forgotten about me and my brother drag-racing shopping carts down Cross Street, locking our babysitter in the basement, stretching our selves on the doorways, and praying to be tall.

“We never made you guys say your prayers, we certainly never went to church, and we kept you far away from Grammy Ruth’s Never Forgive Never Forget Pentecostal Church of the Holy Fruitcakes. And there you two would be, on your knees to Jesus, praying to be six feet tall.”

“It worked,” I said.

“It did.” She stretched her legs down a few steps, and I saw that they were unchanged, still smooth and tan, with hard calves that squared when she moved.

“You ought to think about marrying again,” I said.

“You ought to think about doing it the first time.”

“Well, let’s get on it. Let’s find people to marry. Broomstick-jumping time in Massachusetts and Paree.”

My mother stood up. “You do it, honey. You find someone smart and funny and kindhearted and get married so I can make a fuss over the grandbabies.”

I saluted her with the wineglass. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good night. Sleep tight.”

“Good night, Ma.”

I waited until I heard the toilet flush and the faucets shut, and I listened to her walk across her bedroom and heard her robe drop on the floor, and I could even hear her quilt settle down upon her. I drank in a serious way, which I rarely do, until I thought I could sleep. I made to lay my glasses on the rickety nightstand and dropped them on the floor near my clothes. Close enough, I thought, and lay down and had to sit up immediately, my eyes seeming to float out of my head, my stomach rising and falling in great waves of gin and Merlot. Stubbing my toe on the bathroom doorframe, I reached for the light switch and knocked over a water glass. I knew that broken glass lay all around me, although I couldn’t see it, and I toe-danced backward toward the bed, twirling and leaping to safety. I reached for my glasses, hiding on the blue rug near my jeans, and somehow rammed my balls into the pink and brown Billie Holiday lamp. I fell to the floor, hoping for no further damage and complete unconsciousness.

My naked mother ran into the room. I was curled up in a ball, her feet beside my ass. She knelt down, pushing back my hair to get a better look at me. Her breasts swung down, half in, half out of the hallway’s dusty light.

“You do not have a scratch on you,” she said, and patted my cheek. “Walk over toward the door—there’s nothing that way. I’ll get a broom.”

I could see her, both more and less clearly than I would have liked. She pushed herself up, and the view of her folded belly and still-dark pubic hair was replaced by the sharp swing of her hips, wider now, tenderly pulled down at the soft bottom edges, but still that same purposeful, kick-down-the-door walk.

She came back in her robe and slippers, with a broom and dustpan, and I wrapped a towel around my waist. I stood up straight so that even if she needed glasses as much as I did what she saw of me would look good.

“Quite the event. Is there something, some small thing in this room, you didn’t run into?”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ve made contact with almost everything. The armchair stayed out of my way, but otherwise, for a low-key kind of guy, I’d have to say I got the job done.”

My mother dumped the pieces of glass and the lightbulb and the lamp remains into the wastebasket.

“You smell like the whole Napa Valley,” she said, “so I won’t offer you a brandy.”

“I don’t usually drink this way, Ma. I’m sorry for the mess.”

She put down the broom and the dustpan and came over to me and smiled at my towel. She put her lips to the middle of my chest, over my beating heart.

“I love you past speech.”

We stood there, my long neck bent down to her shoulder, her hands kneading my back. We breathed in and out together.

“I’ll say good night, honey. Quite a day.”

She waved one hand over her shoulder and walked away.

LIGHT INTO DARK

“It’s six-fifteen,” Lionel says to his stepmother. “Decent people have started drinking.”

“Maybe I should put out some food,” Julia says.

Lionel nods, looking around for the little cluster of liquor bottles Julia had thrown out when his father was alive and trying to stay sober, and which she replaced on the sideboard as soon as the man passed away. Lionel’s not sorry he’s dragged himself and his stepson from Paris to Massachusetts for their first trip together, but it seems possible, even probable, that this Thanksgiving weekend will be the longest four days of his life.

“It’s all over with Paula?” Julia doesn’t sound sorry or not sorry; she sounds as if she’s simply counting places at the table.

“Yeah. Things happen.”

“Do you want to tell me more about it?”

“Nothing to tell.”

After his first wife, the terrible Claudine, Lionel had thought he would never even sleep with another woman, but Paula had been the anti-Claudine: not French, not thin, not mean. She was plump and pretty, a good-natured woman with an English-language bookstore and a three-year-old son. It did not seem possible, when they married in the garden of the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, with Paula in a short white dress and her little boy holding the rings, that after five years she would be thin and irritable and given to the same shrugs and expensive cigarettes as the terrible Claudine. After he moved out, Lionel insisted on weekly dinners and movie nights with his stepson. He wants to do right by the one child to whom he is “Papa,” although he has begun to think, as Ari turns eight, that there is no reason not to have the boy call him by his first name instead.

“Really nothing to tell. We were in love and then not.”

“You slept with someone else?” Julia asks.

“Julia.”

“I’m just trying to see how you got to ‘not.’”

“I bet Buster told you.”

“Your brother did not rat on you.” He had, of course. Buster, the family big-mouth, a convert to monogamy, had told his mother that Lionel slept with the ticket taker from the cinema Studio 28, and Julia was not as shocked as Buster had hoped she would be. “A cutie, I bet,” was all she said. (The beauty of Lionel’s girlfriends was legendary. Paula, dimpled, fair, and curvy in her high heels, would have been the belle of any American country club, and even so was barely on the bottom rung of Lionel’s girls.)

Buster talks about everything: his wife’s dissolving sense of self, Jordan’s occasional bed-wetting, Corinne’s thumb-sucking, all just to open the door for his own concerns and sore spots—his climbing weight, his anxiety about becoming a judge so young. Julia thinks that Buster is a good and fine-looking man, and tall enough to carry the weight well, although it breaks her heart to see her boy so encumbered. She knows that he will make a fine judge, short on oratory and long on common sense and kindness.

“Even in my day, honey, most people got divorced because they had someone else on the side and got tired of pretending they didn’t.” Julia herself had been Lionel senior’s someone on the side before she became his wife.

“Let’s not go there. Anyway, definitely over with Paula. But I’m going to bring Ari every Thanksgiving.”

Everyone had liked Paula (even when she got so crabby, it was not with the new in-laws three thousand miles away), but no one, including Lionel, can look at the poor kid without wanting to run a thumb up his slack spine. Bringing Ari is no gift to anyone; he’s a burden to Jordan, an annoyance to little Corinne. Of course, Buster doesn’t mind; he’s the soft touch in the family, and Jewelle, inclined to love everything even faintly Buster, tries, but her whole beautiful frowning face signals that this is an inferior sort of child, one who does not appreciate friendly jokes or good cooking or the chance to ingratiate himself with his American family. It is to Ari’s credit, Lionel thinks, that instead of clinging forlornly, he has retreated into bitter, silent, superior Frenchness.

“Julia, are you listening?” Lionel asks. “On Friday I’ll fix the kitchen steps.”

Julia sets down a platter of cold chicken and sits on the floor to do Colorforms with Jordan. She puts a red square next to Jordy’s little green dots.

“It’s like talking to myself. It’s like I’m not even in the room.” Lionel pours himself a drink, walking over to his nephew. Jordan peels a blue triangle off the bottom of Lionel’s sneaker without looking up. Jordan takes after his father, and they both hate disturbances; Uncle Lionel can be a disturbance of the worst kind, the kind that might make Grandma Julia walk out of the room or put away the toys, slamming the cabinet door shut, knocking the hidden chocolates out of their boxes.

“Oh, we know you’re here,” Julia says. “We can tell because your size thirteens are splayed all over Jordy’s Colorforms. Squashing them.”

“They’re already flat, Julia,” Lionel says, and she laughs. Lionel makes her laugh.

Jordan moves his Colorforms board a safe distance from his uncle’s feet. Uncle Lionel is sharp, is what Jordan’s parents say. Sharp as a knife. Ari, not really Uncle Lionel’s son, not really Jordan’s cousin, is sharp, too, but he’s sharp mostly in French, so Jordan doesn’t even have to get into it with him. Ari has Tintin and Jordan has Spider-Man, and Jordan stretches out on the blue velvet couch and Ari gets just the blue-striped armchair, plus Jordan has his own room and Ari has to share with Uncle Lionel.

“You invite Ari to play with you,” Julia tells Jordan. “Take your sister with you.”

“He’s mean. And he only talks French, anyway. He’s—”

“Jordy, invite your cousin to play with you. He’s never been to America before, and you are the host.”

“I’m the host?” Jordan can see himself in his blue blazer with his feet up on the coffee table like Uncle Lionel, waving a fat cigar.

“You are.”

“All right. We’re gonna play outside, then.” Ari is not an outside person.

“That’s nice,” Lionel says.

“Nice enough,” Julia says. It is terrible to prefer one grandchild over another, but who would not prefer sweet Jordan or Princess Corinne to poor long-nosed Ari, slinking around the house like a marmoset.

Julia has not had both sons with her for Thanksgiving for more than twenty years. Until 1978 the Sampson family sat around a big bird with corn-bread stuffing, pralined sweet potatoes, and three kinds of deep-dish pie, and it has been easier since her husband and in-laws died to stay in with a bourbon and a bowl of pasta when one son couldn’t come home and the other didn’t, and not too hard, later, to come as a pitied favorite guest to Buster’s in-laws’, and sweet and very easy, during the five happy, private years with Peaches Figueroa, for the two of them to wear their pajamas and eat fettuccine al barese in honor of Julia’s Italian roots and in honor of Peaches, who had grown up with canned food and Thanksgiving from United Catholic Charities. With her whole extant family in the house now, sons and affectionate daughter-in-law (Jewelle must have had to promise her mother a hundred future Christmases to get away on Thanksgiving), grandson, granddaughter, and poor Ari, Lionel’s little ex–step marmoset, Julia can see that she has entered Official Grandmahood. Sweet or sour, spry or arthritic, she is now a stock character, as essential and unknown as the maid in a drawing-room comedy.

“Looks good. Ari likes chicken.” Lionel walks toward the sideboard.

Julia watches him sideways, his clever, darkly mournful eyes, the small blue circles of fatigue beneath them, the sparks of silver in his black curls. She does not say, How did we cripple you so? Don’t some people survive a bad mother and her early death? Couldn’t you have been the kind of man who overcomes terrible misfortune, even a truly calamitous error in judgment? It was just one night—not that that excuses anything, Julia thinks. She loves him like no one else; she remembers meeting him for the first time, wooing him for his father’s sake and loving him exuberantly, openhandedly, without any of the prickling maternal guilt or profound irritation she sometimes felt with Buster. Just one shameful, gold-rimmed night together, and it still runs through her like bad sap. She has no idea what runs through him.

There is a knot in his heart, Julia thinks, as she puts away the Colorforms, and nothing will loosen it. She sees a line of ex–daughters-in-law, short and tall, dark and fair, stretching from Paris to Massachusetts, throwing their wedding bands into the sea and waving regret fully in her direction.

Julia kisses Lionel firmly on the forehead, and he smiles. It would be nicer if his stepmother’s rare kisses and pats on the cheek did not feel so much like forgiveness, like Julia’s wish to convey that she does not blame him for being who he is. Lionel wonders whom exactly she does blame.

“Let’s talk later,” he says. It seems safe to assume that later will not happen.

Lionel watches his niece and his sister-in-law through the kitchen door. He likes Jewelle. He always has. Likes her for loving his little brother and shaking him up, and likes her more now that she has somehow shaped Buster into a grown man, easy in his young family and smoothly armored for the outside world. He likes her for always making him feel that what she finds attractive in her husband she finds attractive, too, in the older, slightly darker brother-in-law. And Lionel likes, can’t help being glad to see on his worst days, those spectacular breasts of hers, which, even as she has settled down into family life, no longer throwing plates in annoyance or driving to Mexico out of pique, she displays with the transparent pride of her youth.

“Looking good, Jewelle. Looking babe-a-licious, Miss Corinne.”

They both smile, and Jewelle shakes her head. Why do the bad ones always look so good? Buster is a handsome man, but Lionel is just the devil.

“Are you here to help or to bother us?”

“Helping. He’s helping me,” Corinne says. She likes Uncle Lionel. She likes his big white smile and the gold band of his cigar, which he always, always gives to her, and the way he butters her bread, covering the slice right to the crust with twice as much butter as her mother puts on.

“I could help,” Lionel says. There is an unopened bottle of Scotch under the sink, and he finds Julia’s handsome, square, heavy-bottomed glasses, the kind that make you glad you drink hard liquor.