Yes, name and gender had been pre-selected. And no, the new house did not matter, the wedding did not matter (“It doesn’t even have to be a wedding sort of wedding”), what mattered was Tess. Could I, in this my hour of need, play the Tess card, or could I not? Crunch time again.
“Please just take your sad little words and your sad excuses and get the fuck gone, okay? Before I lose my fucking momentum here and reconsider.”
And there was the opening (the slit of light, the slot of space) in which to insert the Tess card, for certainly Nina had reconsidered in the past. Certainly Stan had been weighed in the balance and found wanting, only to talk us through crisis after crisis.
Of course it was really Nina who talked Nina into those one-more-chances, because she did not want to bounce me. She wanted me to change, and to want what she wanted. Tess.
“But you will never grow up,” she was saying. “Never. I know this.”
The damned thing is that I came here charged to the muzzle with devotion of a proto-commitment calibre. Left to my own devices, I might unilaterally have said exactly what Nina wished to hear. Faced, however, with the mongo trash bags and now these vicious charges laid end on end as though I had no feelings of my own, I was driven back on reflex.
More or less. I withheld a recitation of the old Shavian favorite (“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot …”) because that reflex was too much like a sock in the nose. Best to keep it couched in the blandest of nouns:
“Is it immature to value independence? Or honesty? Or art? Why does that go down in your book as immature?”
“It’s a cover-up, and you know it. It’s what a solipsistic creep says to make himself look better. What you look like to me, Stanley, is a toad.”
The toad again. Long term, the toad could get to me. I could see it chipping edges off my ego. Why that, why a toad? Why not something prouder (You, sir, are a cad and a bounder) with intimations of the handsome rake? Or if you must go reptile, why not the serpent, with some built-in metaphorical heft? A toad?
I understand I sometimes sound a bit facetious, but I hope you understand how fond I was of Nina Spiller. That with the obvious exception of Stefanie Olmsted, Nina would have to stand as my numero uno, lifetime. Hence, my numero duo: not bad, the silver.
I had battled to keep her. Maybe not with the aw-shucks reverence of Jimmy Stewart or the pained dignity of Greg Peck (for those two would never lie and I had been required to do so) but I had battled in my way. And I had come away from those bouts feeling upbeat about our future, truly convinced that we could “make this work.” Maybe even the Tess part.
I like babies. I’m good with kids, according to my sister Lisa, who provided me a niece to practice on. Plenty of fellas have settled down on the late side and been content, or so they have testified. Look at Warren Beatty, for goodness’ sake. The scourge of Hollywood for decades, and now? Four babies in four years, or something of the sort, and blissed out by it all. Strollers, diapers? Why not? Tessie could be a lot of fun.
Though one does wonder why Nina would want to make a baby with someone who will be on Social Security when help is called for with algebra. And what teenager wants to see her dad dozing off at recitals, or complaining of memory loss at parent-teacher conferences?
Such cautionary thoughts of the future came to me later, though. As I faced off with Nina in the vestibule, my thoughts traveled straight back to Stefanie and the reckoning to which I was summonsed by Barney.
It wasn’t Barney’s fault, he was just the attorney of record. Steff had been hassling me non-stop for months, and my mom was almost outdoing her. What was wrong with Stefanie, she demanded to know. (Absolutely nothing.) What was I waiting for, Grace Kelly? (Did the Princess have me under consideration?) But Barney I trusted. Steff’s motivation was normalcy, and Mom’s was neurosis or whatever you call it when a woman is obsessed that her son is still a bachelor. Barney had nothing at issue beyond my well-being, and he argued I was risking it by taking Steff’s threats lightly.
“She’s the one, Stan. The right one.”
“I could not agree more.”
“If you lose her, you will be—ipso facto—with the wrong one. Or more likely a long succession of wrong ones.”
“So you are saying it’s now or never?”
“With Stefanie it is, for sure. Now or never, precisely. And never isn’t good, bud. Never will leave you old and lonely.”
“Barn, I’m 33.”
“I’m telling you. Old and sad and soured. A worthless shriveled—”
“Enough,” I cried, “I get it.” The way he was tripping out with the terminology, it was just a matter of time before he got all the way to toad.
“Do you? It’s crunch time, man. Show us there is some good in you. Show us there is brain.”
We each swept a fresh pint of stout toward our chins, each tilted back a long smooth swallow to interrupt the merciless eye contact. I breathed. The late Otis Redding was making this world so much wealthier by giving us “Dreams to Remember” on the jukebox. Damn. Me and Barn could have been having a terrific time here.
Barney and Chloe had been married ten years already. Nor could anyone doubt they would be married till death undid them. Plus Barney was Barney, so he may not have known just how marginal the proposition was, that I had “good” in me, for like most people (and unlike Barney) I pretend to be anywhere from 15 to 40 percent nicer than I am, at any given moment.
“Tell you what. I’ll flip a coin. Now or Never.”
“Heads it’s Now, tails it’s Never?”
“Right. Heads I propose marriage to Steff tonight, tails I break it off cleanly and set her free. A fifty/fifty shot at goodness, by your definition.”
“Unless,” said the lawyer in him, “it goes to intent. But my client will stipulate to the coin flip. Let’s write it up and get it signed.”
“Hey, man, let’s fucking notarize it. You don’t trust me?
“Fine. You don’t want it in writing, we’ll call Stefanie and get her down here. She can witness the flip.”
“She would fucking murder me if she knew we were joking about this.”
“Oh she knows—or she knows you. She knows what an asshole you are. The only way you can surprise her is by not being that asshole for a change.”
“Who wants to surprise her?” I said. Then, after a swallow: “You think she doesn’t love me, Barn?”
“I think it’s astonishing that she does love you. I am going to call her. And you had better be here when I get back.”
Fat chance. At that time, very few people had cell phones. Maybe realtors, in their cars. Even a lawyer in a white-shoe firm, which Barney was, did not carry one around. I have sometimes wondered what would have become of me if he had. If he had been able to sit there at the table thumb-dialing, nailing me to the chair with the relentless eye contact.
But he was heading for the pay phone (wedged back behind The Red Stripe’s famously grungy restroom) and I was headed for the hills. Scattering money on the table, I made my getaway. The whole setup, the coin flip, was “non-binding” as Barney might say, yet I suspect I was going to be bound by it. That if I was ever going down, I would go in somesuch theatre-of-the-absurd fashion. It was a large moment in any case, possibly The Turning Point itself, as the Now passed and the Never began. According to Barney and Mom, I wrecked my life right then and there.
Certainly I changed it. And every nuance of that backstory was present in my mind as Nina and I stood in her ex-husband’s parents’ ex-vestibule alongside my worldly possessions. It felt like Take 2 of the movie version: snap the sticks, roll camera, see if you can nail the scene this time. Barney keeps saying he has given up on me (which obviously he hasn’t, or he wouldn’t keep saying it) yet God was willing to give me a second chance. He believed in me, even if I didn’t believe in Him!
I had composed my line (“Would you marry me if I begged?”) yet could not manage to speak it. My mind, or more liter
ally my head, was humming numbly; speech was impaired. For all her fine points, Nina was not Stefanie and that was still the salient thing. It was why this could not be a proper Take 2. Had Nina been Stefanie, I might have proved equal to the challenge. Because she was not, I proved to be the exact asshole everyone expected. And Barn was looking good yet again on the Now or Never.
“You don’t even want to discuss this?” I finally mustered. Bland dialogue, flat delivery. I could hear the director shouting “Cut! That was pitiful, let’s try it again with some feeling.”
“Why, Stanley? Do you have something to actually say?”
“How about I love you? Would that count as something?”
“Say it and I’ll see.”
“Neen, this isn’t what I want and well, is it what you really want? To wake up tomorrow and not have each other there? Just suddenly and arbitrarily like that?”
“Go. Just please get the fuck gone.”
Something about the word “arbitrarily” got to her, I guess—like she thinks I don’t understand she has issues. And now she was crying, which is always tough to watch. My partner in life (scarcely 10 minutes ago) was two feet from me and desperately unhappy. I could keep my distance, as she was pretending to prefer, or I could embrace her, as a lover or even a friend would do.
As I reached out to embrace her, Nina’s arms came up in a nifty chopsocky move, clipping my beak squarely enough to bring tears to my eyes too. Then she bullrushed me back onto the walkway, slammed the door in my face, and threw the deadbolt with a magnified clack like a bat smacking a baseball. Behind the door, I am fairly certain, she quietly reiterated the word ‘toad’ before releasing the lower lock into the strike with a softer snick.
Mechanically, these locks posed no problem. After all, I had keys. I have said, though, that when told to go you must go—even if you are “home” at the time. Plus, the very instant you hear the clear command to disembark, you are no longer “home” anymore, you are at her house.
Wellsir, I had been at her house for roughly 1001 better-than-Arabian nights. On each of those nights, I could roll a quarter-turn to my right and place a palm on the perfect swell of Nina’s unclad hip, or slide up under her sleeveless cotton tee-shirt to engage the lovely weight of her breasts until her nipples confirmed. We could roll together so simply, any way we wished, for this was conjugality, this was the human treasure we together had unburied and accumulated, a rich bounty indeed. I hated to see Nina go, or me go I should say, back to the Bozarts to sleep or to eat, for I had caught a rich whiff of ginger emanating from Nina’s ex-husband’s parents’ ex-kitchen and intuited the teriyaki salmon.
Without question, I owed my health to Nina’s matchless cookery. In the desultory years before she came along, I had fallen among non-cooking women. It was less and less about their style in the kitchen and more about which restaurants they favored. I couldn’t cook worth a damn, either, though even Julia Child might have encountered limits with my setup: toaster oven, hotplate, one-cup coffeemaker.
PizzaIndianChinese—such was my regimen when forced to feed myself. And on the seventh day (in desperation at the notion that we are what we eat, or even might be) an antipasto-to-go, or some other busy pile of green stuff. Nina took me away from all that.
And it wasn’t just the food. During my year with Nina’s predecessor Anna Klein (Anno Anna, on your calendar), the entire range of healthy behaviors slipped from my grasp. Anna suffered from severe laziness (mighty fine at 29, that gal would not be a pretty sight at 39) and it turns out that laziness is contagious. Not only had I let go of running and volleyball, I had let go of walking. We would drive to restaurants five blocks from her apartment. Given the option, I think Anna would have taken a cab to the bathroom.
Plus, I was at a fulcrum point, age-wise. I woke up one day staring my 40th birthday in the eye. My sister’s little family and the Parentini drove up for a ceremonial blowout at the Feast of July, in Weeks Square. Big Al insisted on it, even when apprised of their secret motto. (“The food sucks, but at least it’s expensive.”)
“Even Stan had to turn forty, sooner or later,” said Lisa, 43, as the toasts were spoken.
“Like fine wine, my boy,” said Big Al.
“You don’t look that old yet,” said Maisie, trying to be helpful, but I knew I did. And I knew all the ways in which it was scheduled to get worse over the next decade. I could expect to lose hair and teeth; allegedly, I was slated to lose half an inch of height. What the hell kind of growth spurt is that?
It was not long after that painful celebration that Clapper began insisting I was clinically depressed and ought to be “talking” to someone. Naturally he was jealous (the same month I was leaving my Anna, he was marrying his) so his advice could be ignored and in time forgotten once Nina Spiller was placed in my watery path at Onset and a summer of undiluted joy ensued.
Campfires on the beach, fresh sex in new venues—and those sweet early days where disagreements do not yet count. If I was older, if Nina was younger, it sure didn’t get in our way. And later on, when grating details began to emerge, it may even have helped, for along with age had come some wisdom. Talk to someone? Hey, someone ought to talk to me.
I had learned to listen, and learned that bachelorhood at 45 might hold less appeal than the same condition at 35. I could suppress my own complaints and work to accommodate Nina’s. Or better yet, anticipate them. Because basically the deal is this: you don’t want complaint to surface. The key to the whole genre of complaint is that once it surfaces it is already too late.
So say we had been at a party, and say I had danced with a female of worthy appointments, while Nina busily pretended not to notice or mind. Okay, but: 1) She noticed. 2) She minded. 3) It was time for a pre-emptive strike against complaint. And there I would be, poised to present unbidden gifts, happy to evince free-floating affection.
Flowers, man. Flowers make women happy. They like the actual flowers, but what they really like is the notion that you have thought about them while outside their line of sight. This is a biggie, powerful enough to forestall and, in some cases, completely dissolve complaint.
And so the morning after my banishment, waking alone in my narrow prison-issue cot at the Bozarts, I gave serious consideration to a floral offering—combined of course with powerful doses of contrition and affection. Why not simply present myself to Nina in the light of a new morning and say, with Sheridan, “Come into my garden, for I would like my roses to behold you!”
To be sure, Nina had shown impressive resolve. Nevertheless, would she not wake from her own rough-tossed darkness and realize it simply did not have to be this way? That in some measure she had done this to herself? Were I to present my better self along with a fistful of jonquil, might she not reconsider after all?
Here then was a moment for each of us to field. And in that long tug of war between free will and determinism, was it not a moment in which free will, the underdog, might hold sway? Our lovely connection might well lapse, but it would lapse only if Nina said certain things and stood by them and/or if I left certain things unsaid and stood clear. A single sentence could translate into another year, even a lifetime together. An entire human being, the beautiful child Tess, might spring into existence.
I paced the corridor, balancing pros and cons, weighing a phone call to the floral sector. I paced to the river and back in a November wind heavy with unexpressed wet. It was a Sunday, the world was deserted and a bit forbidding. Nina had no doubt laid a fire, was no doubt reading the Sunday paper with her poppyseed bagel. (Iggy’s, man, studded with enough poppyseeds to get you buzzed.) It was a setpiece designed to draw a man and seduce him with comforts, yet something nagged and deterred me, and back at the Bozarts I learned precisely what it was. There, smack across the bow of free will came determinism, a Rose of a different kind.
She was ascending as I turned the corner, so that I saw her briefly, from a distance, and from the rear. The view, however, provided pageantry sufficient t
o clarify the point: a floral offering would be wrong. What I wanted was what I always wanted, shamefully enough, an extremely attractive 28 year-old woman to woo and win and stay beside till the Bioclock did us part. At present the woman’s name was Rose Gately and the game (call it the Rose Bowl if you must) looked unwinnable. That the game was on, even in my head, made a future with Nina unworkable—and yes, unfair.
Free will? I don’t think so. The rush of events laid out like a series of steel doors slamming in sequence on a cell block. Jan showing up with that old photograph, Nina’s badly timed ultimatum, Rose’s perfectly timed cameo? Ducks in a row, man. Take away one of them, or stagger them out over a few months’ time, and I might well have become the doddering senior citizen directing my ear trumpet at teenage Tessie’s be-banged French teacher. “Heh? What’s that you say, M’amselle?”
Lined up like volleys, bam bam bam, these incursions left room only for the sort of free will that is pretty much determined for you. Which again is no more than that failure of synchronicity sometimes known as “life.”
* * *
“The Day The Bozarts Died,” by Lucy Young, reprinted from The Baskin Reader:
Most of the day jobs had been dropped or scaled back. Sheldon Gross and his wife Janice, who together comprised “The Merry Maids of Canterbury,” had cleaned their last house. Deirdre Wright retained only her lucrative Saturday night shift at Legal Sea Foods, and not because she needed the money: “I’m like those people who went through the Depression, I guess. Where you can never quite believe in security?”
Monk Barrett still jumped from the occasional cake (“How not, when the price was up to 60 bucks?”) but the age of bohemianism was giving way to distinctly bourgeois trappings. Taking stock one night, Arnie Cloud came to realize the Beaux-Arts colony by now included five householders, with mortages to meet and, in three instances, baby strollers to push.
“And Ronald Reagan had been re-elected. Re-elected!” Where once had seemed an aberration, a trick of some passing political constellation, twice put any remaining 60’s style holdouts on notice that the revolution was over and had fallen well short of altering the fundamental American drift. “All that good stuff was in the rear view mirror, baby,” says Cloud, “but we were okay here. The economy was roaring, so Tech just left us alone.”
The Day the Bozarts Died Page 5