by Anna Monardo
“I’m trying…” A full sob. He stood up and walked into the house, wanting to comfort her in some way. “I’m trying so hard, Ross. I’ve been trying so much to make up to her for everything, but she won’t fucking give me a fucking break.”
“Hey, make up for what? There’s nothing—”
“She’s letting this guy—this moron, this asshole, this psychopath pervert—she’s letting him shtup her, Ross.”
“Hey, hey, wait a minute.” He was turning lamps on in the living room, but the line was getting scratchy on the remote phone. He needed to get closer to the base.
“He’s a total letch and a loser. He can’t pay his bills. His phone got disconnected. I was in the city with her all day trying to talk to her, but she was getting ready for this asshole’s birthday like it was some kind of a gala performance or something.”
“And she’s sleeping with him? For sure?” Ross asked.
“Don’t you dare tell her I called you about this.”
He walked back outside onto the deck and stood looking into the blackness of his yard. There were gnats he hadn’t noticed before, flying around in his backyard spotlight. The cat jumped up onto the rail. “Pssh,” Ross hissed and the cat ran. Natassia. Sex. So that was the way it was now. Mary was still talking. “I hate him, Ross. Really hate him.”
“Listen, you’ve got to buy her condoms. Make sure she has plenty of condoms.”
“She bought her own.”
“Does she know how to use them?”
“Goddamn it, I’m telling you, she knows everything. She’s got it all locked up. She treats me like I’m an idiot.”
“Mary, come on, calm down. If my parents are okay with it—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. Do you know how old this asshole is? Did you know he’s like maybe even in his thirties or something? Maybe as old as we are. And he’s some kind of a wetback foreigner.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just know it, okay?”
Silence.
“Honey, she’s only fifteen.” Ross sat down, crossed one leg over the other, put two fingers on his wrist to count his pulse. “In the next couple years, she’s going to fall for men who are older than her, and younger than her, and shorter, and guys who smell bad, and guys who never learned how to drive, and guys so stupid she’ll think they’re real smart. She’s going to fall about ten thousand different times.” He couldn’t resist: “Just like you did.”
Mary said nothing, and Ross heard a train passing through downtown Spokane and wished it would come and smack him. If he lived to be two hundred, he’d never live out the shame he felt for all the ways he’d failed Natassia. Failed Mary, too, but that score was more even.
When Mary’s voice came back, she was leading him right into it. “Ross, have we ruined her life?”
“Phfffssshh,” he exhaled loud and long. “We’ve tried to ruin her life,” Ross told Mary. “Too early yet to tell how successful we’ve been.”
“Today she told me that the reason I was on her back about this guy is that I’m jealous I don’t have a man of my own.”
Ross laughed. “Little bitch.”
“Does she know we love her?”
He sighed again over the wires. “There’s this thing you see out here sometimes on I-90. Hell, even on the back roads you see it. You’re driving along and you see a truck with a flatbed, and on the flatbed is half a house. I’m not kidding—somebody’s half-a-house is rolling down the interstate. It just weirded me out the first time I saw it.”
“Where’s the rest of the house?”
“Half-mile down the road. Both halves are there, on the same road, heading in the same direction, just not traveling at the same speed.”
“That’s how Natassia sees us?”
“Yep.”
“Ross, I love you sometimes.”
“Yep.”
He thought they were almost done for tonight. He’d tucked her in, which was probably all she’d really needed. A few nice good-nights and they’d be done, he’d just be left here feeling worse than he had before. But then Mary said, “I want to tell you something, and I’m telling only you. Never tell your mother I said this, but—”
“But what?”
“Natassia’s right. I am jealous. Isn’t that pathetic? My own daughter.” He could tell by her voice that she was lying down, talking into a pillow. “You know, I quit performing, I took this stupid boarding-school job, I’m trying to do all this stuff right for once in my life, and meanwhile she’s…God, I’m so mad at her.”
“Oh, Mary. Oh, sweetie.” This crying, this was all new.
“She’s so much smarter than me, she could have so much.”
“Mar, you’re overtired. We’re both tired.”
“You know, I went down there today to talk to her, and she’s playing the violin—I don’t even want to tell you about the violin—but she’s playing and I’m watching her, and she’s, like, so—I don’t know—stiff. She actually looked afraid, like she was doing what she had to do with this instrument but there wasn’t anything inside her that wanted to be doing what she was doing, but she was terrified to stop. I can’t explain it. It’s like how I felt onstage just before I quit performing.” Mary was rambling, and he wasn’t hearing words, just voice. He wondered if she was drinking something. He thought about a beer. “I’ll never forget that feeling. All of a sudden, Ross, I couldn’t even get onstage. Can I tell you something else?”
He waited. A cloud half covered the quarter-moon, then uncovered it. A breeze with a chill in it blew over and left him with goose bumps on his legs. He and Mary had never been any good at knowing what to do with Natassia. It was too late to start now. They could cry if they wanted—he did want to cry—but it was too late.
“Do you know it’s almost a year since I was on tour, and since then I haven’t slept with anyone—totally no one.” He heard her sheepishness, and it was this that finally did get him teary.
He threw back his head, rubbed his eyes. “God, Mar, there’ve been so many changes in your life this year. Give it time.” He realized he was sitting on the pages of the book of Egyptian erotica. He pulled it out from under him, looked down at drawings of people doing it every which way, tossed the book into the yard.
“Taking this school job was a big mistake.” By now her voice had turned flat, scary in that way he hadn’t heard in so long. “It was a mistake.”
Here we go. “Mary, don’t do that. You made a sound decision. You thought about it every which way.”
“I’m really scared, Ross.”
“Of what? What, honey?”
“This afternoon I hit her. I didn’t hit her, but she was holding these scissors. She wouldn’t stop ripping her clothes up to make ribbons for this guy’s birthday presents, and I was trying to stop her. I was holding her hand really tight, and the scissors dropped onto the top of her foot.” So this was where they’d been headed during this whole conversation. Sure, he thought, dump your guilt right here, with me. I can take it. “There was blood,” Mary told him.
“A lot?”
“A little.”
“She’ll live,” he said. “Mary.” He was conscious of himself alone in the dark now, his voice low, like hers. “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t think it. Stop. You are smart. You’re strong. You’re talented.” At AA meetings, he was always getting reminded that, for every evening he spent on the phone with Mary, he paid with a week of feeling lousy. His sponsor said, “You can choose to tell Mary, clearly, I gotta go now, goodbye. Detach. With love.” Yeah, right. Everyone in the world thought Mary was a bitch, but Ross knew she wasn’t trying to torture him, she really wasn’t. She just had this psychic pain inside her that came and went like an infection, and when it flared up there was nothing but her ugly, smelly behavior, her spewing self-hate. When she got like this, he wanted to grab her, hold her tongue down with a spoon, get her to stop saying the bad stuff she said about herself. “You’re remarkable, Mary.
Beautiful. Sexy.”
“Then why’m I alone, Ross? Why’m I living up here alone like a dog? I swear, if Natassia ever ends up like this, I’ll kill myself. I really will. I’m so afraid this’ll happen to her.”
It was quiet on the phone. “What’re you thinking, Ross?”
He was thinking, If you’re alone, the only reason you’re alone is that you move around so damn much, never stay still. He was thinking that she could be with him now if she hadn’t split them up ten years ago. He was also thinking that if he said anything, anything at all about the past, it would start a fight. “I’m alone right now, Mar.” His hand was inside his boxer shorts. Years ago this conversation would have gone a different way, but Ross had learned what he and Mary could not do anymore. “I’m alone a lot. It’s never easy. Not for anyone.”
“Don’t give me that every-man-is-an-island bullshit. There’s alone, Ross, and then there’s a-lone.” He listened as she switched the phone from one ear to another. “Goddamn it, Ross, you keep going silent on me.”
“What do you want me to say?” Suddenly he was so lonely for Mary, and even more lonely for his young self, that college boy who fucked and turned over and fucked again. He’d never been like that since, not with anyone. He wasn’t sure if it was his youth or Mary’s dancer’s body that had made him that way. They had fucked in elevators, out on the street at night between cars, on trains, in restaurant bathrooms, on a fire escape in the middle of a dinner party, on park benches pretending they were strangers; sometimes she let him get behind her and pretend she was a guy. Ross remembered all of it. How he had fucking loved the way they moved together. For him now, it was gone. He was a fattening, widening middle-aged man with bad habits that would eventually kill him. But Mary still had that whatever it was in her body. That’s what made him really mad. All that freedom, yet she couldn’t even realize it, and his cock in his palm was hard, but if Harriet walked in right now he wouldn’t want her.
There was no way over this sadness. Ross had hated Mary, grown away from her, ignored her, betrayed her, but there was no getting around this: she thrilled him, still. He breathed in and breathed out. His erection, it was going. “Mar, I want to tell you something.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“Forget it. I want to tell you two things.”
“Tell me,” Mary said.
“Natassia’s going to be all right.”
“What else?”
“You’re going to find somebody. Somebody good.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
Mary made him listen to her yawn, satisfied like a cat. “You know, Ross, I really am glad for you that you met Harriet.”
“I’m glad, too.” The cat was back on the deck. He scooped it up, curled it onto his lap, patted it.
“I want to meet her sometime.”
“Yeah.”
In his garage there were two vintage Mustangs. He had restored the outsides, Harriet had done the insides. She could open up someone’s gut and reorganize their intestines, and she could reupholster an old car so that it looked brand-new. He had met Harriet one month to the day after he’d quit all the bad stuff, the coke and the hard booze. Since then, he’d been pretty clean. Not even beers anymore. He had shamed himself into promising himself he would never let Harriet see him completely messed up. She was the kind of person who went around thinking that anything good was possible. When he met her, he knew it was a toss-up: either she was going to become a huge pain-in-the-ass, or he could embrace her, let her try to save him. Sometimes he wanted to ask her, Harriet, since you think anything is possible, do you think Mary and I will ever get back together?
“Ross,” Mary was saying, “you’re a good friend.”
You don’t know how good.
“It’s amazing, you still take care of me.”
You don’t know how much.
“When you talk to Natassia, will you tell her how many boyfriends I used to have all the time?” Mary was sounding better now, joking. It made him smile to hear her like that. “So will you—” There was a click on the phone. “Is that your other line?”
“Yeah.” Damn. He didn’t want to go.
“Go, Ross, you gotta go. Call Natassia when you have a chance.”
“Bye, Mar.”
AFTER THEY HUNG UP, Mary lay in the dark, pulled the soggy ice pack out from under her, tapped the ash out of her pipe into an ashtray. She couldn’t come up with a picture in her mind of what Ross’s Spokane life was all about. The last time she’d seen Ross, last Christmas, he’d gained a lot of weight and was deep into AA or NA or some twelve-step thing. Lotte and David nagged Ross to come back to New York. They didn’t want him so far away, but he said he needed to hold on to the quiet. He said that out there—wherever the hell he was—the landscape was uncluttered and he felt clear. He made enough money to fly Natassia out a couple times a year. Everybody said he was a great doctor. Only once, a few years ago, had he asked Mary, “Do you think I’m a bad father?”
“You? What, are you kidding? You’re a natural. You’re a great father.”
Sometimes it seemed to Mary that all they ever did was lie to each other.
CHAPTER 7 :
SEPTEMBER
1989
Natassia’s love affair with the BF lasted ninety-seven days, and she would later chronicle in her journal what she remembered of every one of those days. Even after the guy called everything off, Natassia would not tell anyone anything about him. She wouldn’t give his name, age, neighborhood, nationality, citizenship, or profession. Natassia revealed nothing, but the night her grandparents rushed her to a psychiatrist’s office, she told her grandmother, “I just want to die.”
The BF broke up with her over the phone on a Tuesday night—September 19, 1989. Natassia’s third week of eleventh grade. He’d been out of town for a long weekend and had just come back. Every minute of the five days he’d been away, Natassia had been waiting for his return. Over the past three months, they’d never gone so long without seeing each other or at least talking. (“He needs to see old colleagues of his,” Natassia told her grandparents. “Colleagues from where?” Lotte asked. Nothing.) Natassia made good use of the weekend: she finished writing a history paper on the Cuban missile crisis that wasn’t due for a week, read ahead in chemistry, and wrote a book review for the school paper (a special section on international literature, which had been Natassia’s editorial suggestion) with the deadline still two weeks away. Someone had given David tickets to a violin concert at Carnegie Hall for Saturday night, and he asked Natassia to go with him, but she turned him down and stayed home to do homework. She wanted everything done when her boyfriend got back in town.
Tuesday, the day he was due home, Natassia skipped French class, but when she got home there was no message from him yet. Lotte arrived from work around six o’clock with a bag of fresh shrimp and clams from Citarella and asked Natassia, “Paella okay for dinner? I want to use up that sausage Poppy got at Zabar’s this weekend,” but Natassia said that by dinnertime she’d probably be out.
But he didn’t call. Figuring that probably the BF’s flight had been delayed, Natassia dialed his apartment and left a message on his machine: “Good, your phone’s working again. Call me the very second you get in. I’ve missed you way too much.”
This was the point, Lotte told the others afterward, when she began to feel that things were getting out of hand. That night, though, all she said to Natassia was “Did you ever hear, dear, of playing a little bit hard to get?”
“We don’t do that, Grammy. He and I are completely honest with each other.”
A few hours passed. By eight-forty-five, there still was no phone call. She sat at the dinner table with Lotte and David, poking a fork at the paella on her plate. She was dressed to go out, in jeans and an antique lace blouse. A cloth napkin was tucked into her neckline, and her ruffled sleeves were pushed above her elbows to make sure she didn’t pick up any food stains. She
forked a slice of sausage, raised it to her mouth, sniffed, put the fork down. “I really have never cared much for sausage.” With her face made up, and her hair pulled back into a French braid, and her silver long-tasseled earrings swinging around her neck, she looked too adult to be sulking about her dinner. She was wearing silver rings on her index fingers and thumbs.
Even Lotte, who never got irritated, was a little irritated. “Eat around it, Natassia. Just pick the sausage out.”
“Well, even if you pick it out, the sauce is infused with the taste of it.”
“That’s the point,” David said, and reached over for Natassia’s glass and poured her an inch of white wine. “Here, drink this and chill.” She pushed the glass away. “Listen, Natassia,” David said, “don’t you know a deadbeat when you see one? Why hasn’t this guy figured out he’s supposed to call his girlfriend when he’s late?”
“David,” Lotte said, “leave it alone. Of course she’s upset.”
And Natassia said, “I’m not upset. I just don’t like sausage. Why’s that such a big deal for everybody? God,” she sighed, whipped her braid over her shoulder, and left the table.
This time when she dialed his number she got a busy signal; triumphantly, she yelled into the apartment, “He’s home!” and ran back to the dinner table. Lotte was clearing away plates. Natassia, in her clogs, clomped behind Lotte across the hallway from the dining room into the kitchen, reached over her grandmother’s shoulders to pick shrimp from the serving bowl. Natassia kissed Lotte on the cheek. “I’m sorry about what I said before, Grammy. Don’t be mad at me.”
“Who’s mad?” Lotte handed the bowl and a spoon to Natassia. “Here, eat. And, please, a slice of bread, so I know you’ve got something solid in your stomach before you go out.”
“You know you’re the best cook on the Upper West Side. Everybody thinks so. It’s not just me. This bread is really, really good. Did you make it?”
“Bought it. Three-forty a loaf.”
“Isn’t three-forty expensive for bread? Why’d you pay so much?”