When we entered, I went to the front desk and gave my name. A girl escorted us to a table in the back near the kitchen, where Joe indicated he preferred we sit. We ordered linguini with clams and a wine for Joe. The waitress told us she’d bring bread and antipasto. Joe excused himself to go to the bathroom. I sat and waited.
I thought about the times I had dined out before. It wasn’t a frequent occasion. I’d always arrive without reservations, choosing the quietest places on the river. When I’d arrived, they’d look me over. When I’d say my name and that I was there for dinner, they’d sometimes look at me like I was going to do a dine-and-dash—what Jaime used to call pulling the bolt—but then the waitresses or maître d’s would look in my eyes and see the shyness or defeat in them, and relax.
I heard the peel of young laughter and turned right to see them coming through the door. There were ten of them—five couples—all in evening dress, the young men in white ties and tuxedos and the girls, for they weren’t quite women yet, in gowns of peach silk and silver sequins and blue taffeta. They were laughing, out for the evening. Some special occasion, some cause for celebration.
At first, I was agitated by the distraction they caused. Then I was fascinated by their manner: their uncertainty of how to behave; the young gents’ clumsiness as to whether to rise or not when the ladies got up to use the restroom; the ladies’ eagerness to take control of the conversations, then remembering to defer to their dates; the kind of wine to order; the correct attitude to bear when tasting it; the formal codes of civilized living that they were now half-mocking but would soon take entirely to heart and come to accept as ingrained a habit as waking up and having coffee.
The longer I watched them, their initial awkwardness giving way to that imperfect ease and all-pervading enthusiasm that is the province of youth, the more fascinated I became. And the more my fascination grew, the more I remembered…
…I remembered Vera and I out for dinner at The Courtyard in Izquell, the Indian town at the foot of Mount Madonna. She would be in one of her chic black sheath dresses from the 1930s with bare shoulders, steeped in Je Reviens and a gardenia behind her ear. I’d be in my finest western regalia. I remembered when we’d walk into the restaurant, we’d cause a commotion; people would turn to look at us and smile, or whisper to one another, “There goes Ram and Vera” and “Don’t they look stunning” and that we were “so in love,” and “didn’t it show.”
When we laughed, it must’ve sounded something like the laughter now coming from the young couples at the table across the room—warm and sweet and untroubled, or so I imagined, for laughter of this sort was so long distant from me and had been so for so long that I couldn’t truly remember it as it was, only recall its outline: dim, but aureoled when the ethers stirred it, as the young couples were now doing…
‘This was a special occasion for them,’ I thought, watching the men refill the glasses of the ladies who smiled and sweetly thanked them. ‘No matter, I thought, it will be something someday, when they’re older and careworn and wish to cast back to a time when they were young and times were less troubled,’ as I did as I watched them.’Some of them will remember this night,*‘* I thought, remembering my time with Vera. I scanned down the row of faces, settling on the dark-haired man at the end, whose self-control was rigid. Not him, I concluded. And maybe not the one in the tortoise shell horn rims who knows better than the others of when to rise and sit, of when to push the ladies’ chairs and raise toasts. Not him either. Maybe the voluble one at the end, the slim one with too much energy, maybe the blonde girl in peach whose laughter is the boldest, maybe the brunette in royal blue with the glistening eyes and shy smile. Who is the Ram, among them, I wondered. Which one’s the Vera?
And who was the one that will be the one that Ram became? No longer young, not yet old, but somewhere in between; alone, unconnected, uncertain; the behavior tics becoming louder and quirkier, the tendencies no longer tendencies, but traits; the disappointments shrugged off during youth now accumulating into defeats, the bitterness from then becoming something sour in the pit of the stomach that no amount of sweet reflection can help digest.
I sighed to myself, wishing to have died with Vera instead of Jimmy, rather than being left as this death-in-life mariner observing wedding guests in the waltz of youth and love and promise that once was mine, was ours. Perhaps the sigh was audible, for the girl in the silver sequined gown, the loveliest and most centered-seeming of the young ladies, turned toward me and found me staring at her in a too familiar way, a look of some powerful emotion that was delirium, she probably judged. Frightening to behold, she probably thought, but somehow fascinating just the same. The gaze we were sharing was broken by a shape coming between us. I looked up just as Papa Joe sat down, and soon forgot the eternity of that moment and all that it recalled.
“Let’s get a drink,” Joe said.
“You’re on your own there, Joe. I don’t drink anymore.”
“That’s not the Ram I remember,” he laughed.
’Me either,’ I thought to myself, smiling back at him.
“Sure, Joe. Why not? For old times’ sake,” I said, motioning to our waitress. “Campari and sodas, rocks,” I said.
“Make ’em doubles,” Joe ordered.
“One double,” I said firmly.
Joe and I locked eyes for a second. I didn’t break the gaze until the waitress called the order back to me. I confirmed it.
“You’re mellowing in your old age, is that it? Or are you on one of those California health kicks?”
“Something like that,” I said.
The drinks came in a minute, we raised our glasses.
“Salute,” I said.
“Salute, Ram,” Joe replied, raising his glass, taking a sip and savoring it.
“This is pretty good stuff,” he said. “Genuine Italian.”
For the next hour and a half, we sat there, dining slowly without much conversation. When the wine came, Joe poured two glasses from the carafe. I sipped mine slowly through dinner, refusing the refills that Joe kept wanting to pour. I wanted my blood alcohol level to remain low. If my car was found in a ditch with me behind the wheel the next morning, it wasn’t going to be due to driving in an impaired condition. Every now and again, I’d look up from my plate and find Joe staring back at me. After the espressos were served, Joe and I wrangled about which of us would pay the tab, then I remembered the Sicilian tradition: that he was my houseguest and I was providing hospitality, and that it was his obligation to look after the rest, so I let him pay it.
We drove the River Road back home and said good night after I showed him where things were and told him what my schedule was for the coming week.
“I won’t be an imposition,” he said. “I won’t cause any problems with the neighbors. Nobody will know I’m here.”
I smiled crookedly back at him. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ I thought.
What he did during the hours of the day when I was at work, I didn’t know, could only guess what it was—at least the times that I did think about it. When I wasn’t at work, on my drive back home alone along the River Road, when I’d stop to watch the osprey returning home to their roosts near the ocean or look at the fresh shoots of vine beginning to climb skyward, I savored and sucked each moment down to the marrow and chewed on that which was left until it vanished into my system.
I said hello and goodbye to all that I knew, and spent all the time I had on the things I still loved until my satiety was complete. I smiled at the people and things in my catalog that gave me joy and pleasure, prayed for those that didn’t, and begged forgiveness for myself and all that I’d done. I was putting my house in order and I swept every crevice in it of cobwebs and droppings, making checklists to myself as I went and crossing off the items I’d done before I went to bed. Although my sleep was shallow, I still kept the dreams at bay.
When Joe told me he’d be leaving on Saturday, I took Friday off and we went out to Paoli’s fo
r an almost verbatim repeat of the Sunday dinner a week before. We went to the bar and into the dance hall afterward to hear Nick Gravenites play. I asked Joe if he liked the music, and he sighed. “Not too bad,” he said. “I’m more of a Perry Como kind of guy.” I laughed when he said it and then excused myself to dance a slow one with a pretty girl, wondering if this would be the last woman I’d ever hold in my arms. Then we drove home and said good night.
“Sleep well, Ram,” he said.
“You too, Joe,” I said.
…I was dreaming, and in that dream, Vera was with me and we were back in our early days together in Refugio, in that sweet little flat on Center and Cedar with the bowls of rose petals and fragrant plants on the desk filling the room with their scent, surrounded by lit candles as we lay in bed, talking and holding one another after we’d made love, and she was telling me about Papa Joe and her family and “uncles,” asking me if I still wanted to be with her, and me, looking into her dark eyes filled with fear as to what I might answer, and then me saying, “Of course, darling,” and pulling her close to me until I was inside her again.
…when I awakened and came to in the dark, at first, I thought it was Rilke, the great horned owl, clicking his beak, and sat up, listening. The wind was coming in from upriver, steady with a sting in it, feathering the shades back into the room. The ball on the shade was twisting in the wind and tapping on the sash. I got up and pulled the cord. It rolled up with a snap. Across the canyon, Armstrong had the moon directly above its shoulders—hour of the wolf, I thought, taking it in and watching the moon light the redwoods.
…then I heard the clicking again, soft and machinelike. I could tell it wasn’t coming from the outside, but directly outside my door in the dining room. I got up, opened the door, and Joe sat there, easing bullets into the clip of an automatic. When I came into the room, his eyes rose to meet mine. We looked at one another. Then I spoke.
“Time to pay the fiddler, right? That’s more or less what I thought from the moment, you got here.”
He looked at me, nodded, and kept loading bullets.
“I know how it is,” I said, “according to your code.”
He nodded again.
“Can I get myself ready?”
“Sit down. You’re not going anywhere.”
I did as I was directed and took the chair opposite him.
“Know how long I been planning this?”
I shook my head slowly in the negative.
“Since the moment it happened. I watched your every move since then, had my guys in the courtroom during the trial, also thought about doing you when you were inside. At the plant, where you work, I had one of my guys placed there. Guy you eat lunch with sometimes, Pete Miller he goes by. Pietro Sangiovese is his real name. But I wanted to do it myself. She was my daughter and I wanted to look you in the eye when I shot you.”
I nodded and closed my eyes, then opened them again.
“Now, I can’t do it,” Joe said, shaking his head. “In the time that I’ve spent here, I’ve watched you and see how you live and who you are and what you do. You’re not the same man Vera married. You’re already dead. Lost everything you had, work at a nothing job, live in a nothing house, and don’t do nothing but sit on your deck and watch the trees.”
I said nothing, just stood there watching him with the gun and clip in one hand. After a minute, he continued.
“I can tell, you’re still thinkin’ about her. You’re not over what you did, and you never will be.”
I nodded in the affirmative.
“You got a life sentence, Ram; the weight on your soul of taking someone’s life. That’s something I never had. A contract’s a contract with me, a job I do because I’m told to, because it’s family business. This one was gonna be personal for me. She was my daughter. But why kill you when you’re dead already and have a conscience that won’t let you rest? You’re better left alive for my revenge.”
He paused, smiled, and seemed to consider something. Then he continued… “Then there’s what she did to you, and I’ve been thinking about that too and wondering how I’d have felt if I was in your place. Yeah, she was my daughter, but she was your wife and she whored around on you. Then you catch her in bed with some guy—in your home—and you whack ’em both. I’d have done the same thing, but I don’t know if I’d have felt as bad about it as you do. Makes me mad at Vera when I think about what she did… makes me not too proud to be her father.”
The consciousness of what was happening in the moment began dawning on me—that I wasn’t about to die as I was expecting I would since Joe arrived. Or was this just part of it? A kind of torture to make me think I was reprieved, and then, bang, right in the head while he’s smiling and relaxed. I couldn’t tell. The blur of emotions I was feeling—relief and gratitude, remorse and guilt, uncertainty and astonishment, suspicion—passed through me in succeeding waves that I was too shocked to register fully. I sat there across the table from Joe as placidly as I could, waiting.
“How did such a thing come out of my loins?”
He shook his head, put down the gun and clip, and sighed.
“She wasn’t a thing,” I said, finally risking comment. “She was just a woman who had some kind of need for a love that neither of us could understand. I never could, and I tried as best I could. She never gave me an answer to what it was. When she hit it big, it got worse. I was a spectator by then. I couldn’t understand her at all. I tried confronting her once about it at our home, but I couldn’t get an answer out of her. She just looked up at me and turned away—to where, I couldn’t guess. It was better after we split up in Paris. Then the Louie Verde thing got going and she brought it into our home and I snapped…”
Joe raised his head and looked at me. He cleared his throat, blew his nose, and spoke.
“I feel bad about that thing. The family should have done a better job of protecting you. I got a call from the Scalia family’s consigliere after you’d gone to see him and asked for their protection. None of us provided it. I don’t know, maybe I was still angry at you and Vera for not coming to that last family reunion. Maybe I was too busy with other family business. Who knows? What’s it matter now? Both of us have to live with what we did… or didn’t do. But it was my call to make, and I didn’t make it, so maybe, in some sense, I’m a bit more like you than I’d like to think. That’s a guilt I’ll have to live with.”
“I’ve got a bunch of stuff like that,” I finally said. “If I’d have been stronger, put my foot down earlier, got Vera to a counselor or gone to one with her, I don’t know, so many maybes, too many maybes. Maybe there was nothing either of us could have done. Maybe she got what she wanted, what she’d been seeking. I don’t know and you don’t know and Vera’s not here to tell us, so we can only guess. But we’re here, and both of us being as connected with her as we were, in a sense, she’s still with us, still living through us, still the center of attention like she always was and always wanted to be.”
Joe looked back at me sternly for a moment, then smiled.
“Isn’t that the truth?”
He shook his head and laughed. I could see in his eyes he was casting back to a distant time and remembering some story from her childhood.
For the rest of that night until dawn, we told one another tales of Vera; tales of her joy and grandiosity, tales of her particular madness and how it could be endearing; tales of her boldness and defiance and strength, omitting the instances of the dangerous places where those traits would eventually lure her. At seven, we were all talked out, and I cooked us a breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, and spicy Italian sausage. Afterwards, Joe showered and dressed, and I drove him to San Francisco and put him on the plane, embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks as he neared the front of the line.
I watched the plane until it was airborne and then laughed, probably out of nervous relief, then drove north heading home. When I got to the river, I did as Joe instructed me to and thru the bullets,
clip, and gun in three different parts of the river. I made a pot of coffee and sat on the deck in the brilliant sunlight, looking toward Armstrong until I fell asleep. When I awoke, the sky was blue and the stars brilliant, with Aries to the west and Orion directly above me.
The following morning was bright and gold with the sun vectoring off the hard-green river. Puffy spring clouds were scudding in and gathering when the call came in telling me that Tim Shaughnessy was dead.
It was Earl McHugh on the other end of the line—a voice I hadn’t heard in fifteen years or so—calling to tell me that Tim Shaughnessy was dead. Like it was with Jaime many years before, I was more relieved than shocked, for in his last years, just as it was with Jaime’s, all that was left of the Tim Shaughnessy that I knew and loved, was the shell of him, a husk encasing a spirit that had left or fled him long ago.
Earl read me the obituary in that flat tone of his that I hadn’t heard in so long, but which sounded as familiar as yesterday. “In Sagrada, April 2, 2002, Timothy Flynn Shaughnessy died after a long illness.”
He droned on, listing those that Tim Shaughnessy had left behind, and where he’d attended school, and what his accomplishments were and who he’d been married to and what clubs he’d belonged to and likewise fled before this, his actual departure. I didn’t know much, if any of it, until Earl got to the end, where the services would be held and where Shaughn would be buried.
When he finished, Earl asked me if I’d be coming for the funeral. I told him that I’d be there, and he asked where I’d be staying. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if he was offering to put me up at his house, wherever that was. He said nothing, and so I said, “Probably a motel.”
“I’m sorry this is the occasion to call you after so long, but I just thought you’d want to know, Ram,” he said.
I stood there mute with the cordless in hand, trying to think of something to say to Earl—to ask him about himself or talk about Shaughn, but I couldn’t come up with anything, so I just said thank you and told him I’d see him at the funeral.
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