The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  I sat down beside him.

  “This quote from Clare is poetry, Tony. I almost cried writing it.

  Don’t make me change it.”

  “Do you ever listen to me anyway?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I leaned over so that my hair brushed his cheek for an instant.

  “Your hair is in my face.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it. You always liked red hair, you told me that once.”

  He sighed, and tucked a strand back into my hair clasp.

  “Nicky, you rushed off before I could talk to you the other night.”

  “You seemed to be otherwise occupied. Suzanne must be a full-time job on her own without your having to try to be nice to me. Should I say, a tad nicer.”

  “You don’t seem angry now.”

  “I’m trying to soften you up so that I can talk you into printing more bumper stickers.”

  “How was home? Are you going to give your Limey another chance?”

  He said this lightly.

  “Why should you care, Tony?”

  “I care because you never gave me a second chance.”

  “You never asked for another chance.”

  “You made it very damn clear you’d never give me one.”

  “You know, Tony, I’ve been beating up on myself for years that I did that to you. That I walked out on you. But I’m getting sick of being the only villain in this story.”

  “You left, dammit. I didn’t.”

  “Not physically. But you never gave me one signal that you’d be willing to change a single detail of your life for me.”

  “I moved in with you.”

  “What an honor. You moved in, and my place just became the new place that you left on Monday mornings.”

  “You don’t remember any good times we had that year and a half?

  You don’t remember that night we walked two miles to the cathedral and sat in the garden there?”

  I did remember. It was August and the Bishop’s Garden was cool and shadowy and scented with lavender. The Sunday churchgoers were long gone and the walled garden was deserted. We strolled among the roses, then Tony lay on the stone bench and put his head on my lap and sang “Jerusalem” for me in the twilight. He’d said he’d started to dread leaving me on Monday mornings. Of course, the next morning at six he left again like he always did, took the early flight though I begged him to lie in bed with me another hour. So much for Romeo and Juliet.

  “I remember a lot, Tony. But why the hell didn’t you fight me? Why didn’t you show up at Louise’s door after you got my note and tell me we’d find a way to work it out? If it’s my fault I lost heart, it’s your fault that you did nothing to make me take heart again.”

  “I know when a woman’s through with me.”

  “I wasn’t through with you. I was exhausted, that was all.”

  He said, “If I’d come back to you a month later, wanting to work things out, would you have even let me in the door?”

  “I don’t know. How can I know now?”

  “You can know,” he said.

  “Then, yes,” I said. “I was a mess. I’d have taken you back like a shot.”

  I kissed him, holding my weight away from him so that he wouldn’t be jostled. He tried to put his arm around me, but his knee slipped off the pillow and he groaned. It wasn’t a groan of passion.

  “Damn knee,” he said.

  “I owe that knee. Would you have said what you just said if you weren’t trapped here with me?”

  “Give me some credit.”

  “Okay,” I said, and then I kissed him again, on the forehead, on his pugnacious chin, on his stubborn mouth that I had longed to kiss since I walked in the door of the strike office and he shook hands with me with such heartbreaking coolness. We had kissed so long that my elbow was beginning to ache with the effort of not jarring against his poor, banged-up knee, when a muffled adolescent voice came through the door.

  “Izza,” it called. The p was inaudible.

  I opened the door to an adenoidal young man who appeared supremely bored, and fumbled in my purse for cash.

  “I don’t have change for a twenty,” he said.

  “You don’t have change for a twenty?”

  “It’s been a busy night. I can go down to the front desk and get change if you want. No one’s there now, though.”

  “I love the security in this dump,” I muttered to Tony.

  “I could go to the Chinese place down the block,” said the helpful youth.

  I shoved the twenty into his hand.

  “Never mind. Keep the change.”

  He departed into the night, and if the large tip gave him any delight, it did not show in his face.

  I turned back to face Tony, who was sitting up alertly now and looking at me with a look I knew well. I dropped the pizza on the table and smiled at him.

  “What are we doing here, Tony?”

  “Let’s do it some more and see.”

  I hadn’t reached the bed when the knocking started again. Thinking it was the pizza boy returning with napkins or plastic forks or perhaps a thank-you for the eight-dollar gratuity, I flung open the door.

  There was a lesson here for me about flinging open doors based on hasty assumptions, for standing there, not at all disconcerted, was Suzanne. She was carrying a bottle of red wine that, judging from its label, probably cost more than a night’s stay in this lousy motel.

  “Nicky,” she said, and brushed past me.

  She wore a pale blue cashmere coat, soft and spotless. In her other hand was a dark red leather makeup case with brass clasps, the kind women used to carry on trains in the twenties. Behind her in the hallway was a suitcase on wheels. The suitcase was about the size of a toaster. I assumed that the rest of her luggage was in the trunk of her car and that she’d hauled these two pieces up the concrete stairs because they contained jewelry or expensive electronic equipment.

  “Are you going somewhere?” I said.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.” She put the wine on the table next to the pizza. “Why are you here?”

  I pointed silently to the press release, crumpled under Tony’s left buttock.

  “I see you’ve fed him,” she said, as if Tony were her dog whom I’d been looking after while she was on vacation. “Thank you, Nicky. I’m in such a rush.”

  “Want some pizza?” said Tony feebly. He smoothed his hair down and rubbed a palm against his mouth in one incriminating gesture. The man was trusted to negotiate high-dollar contracts and he couldn’t bluff for beans.

  “I have to leave for Boston, actually,” said Suzanne. “They need me back at the office.”

  Funny. They hadn’t shown any signs of needing her for weeks now. I wondered if she had read one of those 1950s-style books on man catching and was at the section entitled “Maintain the mystery: when your guy thinks he has you where he wants you, leave town.”

  She turned to me.

  “I just wanted to review a few points with Tony before I go,” she said. “Have you finished with him?”

  Tony said nothing.

  “For right now,” I said. “Someone will check on you tomorrow, Tony, and bring you breakfast. Now eat that pizza.”

  “I’ll make sure he does,” said Suzanne, who apparently hadn’t even noticed my dishevelment or the room’s general air of interrupted passion. Perhaps she considered Tony and me such slobs that our tousled and rumpled appearance didn’t seem out of the ordinary to her, to be explained in me by recent travel and in Tony by his laid-up state.

  A woman of more spirit might have made a stand for her man, then and there. Certainly a woman of spirit would not have left the room with a breezy wave of the hand, gently closing the door behind her. Then again, a man of spirit wouldn’t have let me leave like that. I didn’t pause to reflect that Tony wasn’t in the best shape for leaping up and rushing down the stairs to clasp me in his arms.

  The desk clerk was at his post, leaning back in his swive
l chair and watching a special about botched police chases. He did not glance at me as I left. I could have been an ax murderer fleeing the scene covered in arterial blood for all he cared. The announcer of the cop chase show observed, “Whoa! Have you ever seen a minivan spin like that?

  Bad move, dude.” The clerk chuckled unlovably.

  In my car I pounded the steering wheel with my fists. Damn the man. After all these years. He must think that he had only to crook a finger in my direction—and why refuse a free roll in the hay with an old flame? If he thought I was a fool for him, he wasn’t far wrong. Tony hadn’t bathed for two days, and there he was in that seedy motel, ensconced in the arms of a scheming vamp, like Mike Hammer or something. And I still wished we hadn’t been interrupted.

  Maybe I was just suffering that strange malaise that affects people who have seen a love end badly. It was powerful and enchanting, this wish to rewrite history, this wish to make it all come out the way you thought it would when you first found him, when you were all in all to each other.

  Maybe I’d been seeking to rescue the past in those kisses. But it didn’t feel like that. Tony, in his threadbare sweatpants and his three-day stubble, his voice, his hair, his scent, his arms—he wasn’t the kind of man who fades politely into sepia tones. The thought of him made me smile, and it wasn’t a reminiscent smile, or a rueful smile, or a resigned smile. What I’d felt back there had been suspiciously like delight, and I hadn’t felt it to this degree since I wrote that note to him and packed my bags five years ago. How smart of me to realize this, at a moment when it couldn’t do either of us any good.

  Any couple with a past like ours could come together in nostalgic affection. Any couple could lapse into a wistful passion for ten minutes.

  But Tony and I were not just any couple, and it hadn’t been just any kiss, said the side of me that does all my wishful thinking.

  You’re reckless and foolish and completely banal, said the guardian angel of common sense. So I drove the car back to the White Hart. I unpacked my bags and said hello to Mrs. Crawley, and brushed my teeth and flossed. I got into bed and finished the first chapter of Death in the Air, the next Christie on my rereading list. In Death in the Air a wealthy, ruthless woman is killed with a poisoned thorn dart in full view of rows of her fellow passengers on the noon flight from Paris to London. I entertained a fantasy of ordering a blowpipe and similarly dispatching Suzanne, with a spare dart left over for Doug if he didn’t watch his step. I could probably blame the whole thing on Eric. Poisoned blowpipes would be just his style.

  Then, because I had a long day ahead of me tomorrow, I put out the light. I was too old to be bamboozled by a kiss, said the sensible angel. A kiss changed nothing. A kiss was a bonbon, a daisy petal, a bunch of cheap ribbons from a country fair. So the sensible angel contended.

  She must have retired for the night soon after I closed my eyes, for she made no appearance in my dreams.

  17

  “BETSEY LOVE YOUR invitation idea,” said my mother on the phone, in the surprised tone that shows I’ve actually pleased her.

  “Fine. I’ll get going on the rest.”

  “I know you’re busy,” said my mother, with an unusual deference to my work schedule that was explained by her next words.

  “Have you heard from Jeremy?”

  “We’ve spoken a few times, Ma.”

  Jeremy’s ardent phone calls were sops to my ego, for Tony had made no move toward me in the days after that night in the motel. He’d simply delivered a blunt announcement to all of us that Suzanne had been called away on business and did not know when she’d be returning. And everyone in the office assumed that Tony would be the first to know when she got the green light to come back.

  Perhaps he’d been doped up on painkillers that night, or weak with hunger. Perhaps I’d been mistaken, and I was the one who’d done all the kissing. I hid my wounded pride and treated Tony with impersonal friendliness.

  I couldn’t summarize any of this for my mother, so I said, “Jeremy’s trying.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Give me a clue as to how I could try, Ma. I’m sure you can think of ways for me to make up to Jeremy for having cheated on me.”

  “Sulking. You never grew out of it,” said my mother unfairly. “That time Louise was a flower girl in your cousin Mona’s wedding and you weren’t, you fussed for days.”

  “I was five years old, Ma. And, if you recall, Louise threw up ten minutes before the ceremony and I had to go on in her place. With the dress all pinned together in the back.”

  “Well, don’t dig your heels too far in about Jeremy. Resentment is a lonely road.”

  “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  “Ira and I were talking the other day about how, as you get older, your grudges and old spites seem to matter less.”

  She’d reached the stage where she had to mention his name all the time.

  “Is Ira treating you all right? Should I ask him what his intentions are?”

  “I have to go,” said my mother. “I promised Betsey I’d look at some Butterick patterns with her. She needs resort wear for the honeymoon.”

  I could picture my mother and Betsey at the sewing shop, poring over the unwieldy pattern books in search of the right flower-splashed trousseau items. Johnny had booked tickets to Antigua and reserved a “honeymoon cottage” in a complex of such cottages. How unromantic—newlywed copulation in a hutch, with a bunch of other hornyrabbit filled hutches all around you.

  Probably this was a choice made with Betsey’s preferences in mind. Left on his own, the Johnny we knew would never drink mai tais on a white sand beach. He’d said a few months ago, in a conversation with Louise and me, that his idea of a perfect honeymoon was a trip by motorcycle up the West Coast from northern California to Seattle. I remembered the way Louise turned her head to hide her hurt expression. Louise would have loved a free-form, unstructured honeymoon like that. She’d have loved any honeymoon that included Johnny. Men are such stupid, cruel idiots sometimes.

  “Don’t get Betsey sewing up a storm, Ma. Who knows what could happen.”

  “I’m starting to take a liking to Betsey. At least she expresses an interest in sewing.”

  “You mean, an interest in getting married.”

  “You can’t deny the fact that you were raised a certain way, Nicky. You can’t escape your upbringing. You need a man who wants to marry you. You need some security.”

  “No, Ma. You need a man who wants to marry me. If Jeremy’s so wonderful, marry him yourself. Better yet, maybe you can talk him into switching teams and foist him off on Michael. Think how pretty the children would be.”

  “I give up,” said my mother. “I give up. But I only want you to have the things you should have.”

  “Then we’re in complete agreement.”

  “When can you ship those invitations?” said Ma.

  I would never learn. Conversations with my mother were like those basketball hoops at amusement parks and carnivals. “Sink a bucket, win a prize, three tries for a dollar,” the sign would say. It was only when you walked around the side of the hoop that you saw it was a flattened circle that rendered it almost impossible to score a basket. The game was rigged with Ma, the hoop eternally flattened. Still, I’d keep forking over my dollar bills for one more try.

  The St. Francis strike was now in the second week of December, and flagging. It wasn’t that we’d lost support from any quarter. We had our rally, and it gave us the expected bump in the press. We had the mayor, plus two state senators, a retired folksinger, and a celebrity nun who was active in animal rights causes. Even a minor movie actor stopped by on his way to Bangor, Maine, to film a comedy about ice hockey.

  The town did not forget us at this festive time of year, either. Sts. Jude and Rita had already set up a Santa’s workshop in the basement of the rectory, where strikers’ kids could buy donated toys for a dime each. Tokens of encouragement kept pouring in: a Christmas tre
e from Clare’s uncle who had a tree farm in Vermont, a basket of gourmet coffees that the office coffeemaker transformed into the usual rusty water, a carton of paper clips and binders in Christmas green and red from a sympathetic office supply store down the street. The defunct doughnut counter in the strike office was still laden with baked hams and layer cakes. Outwardly, we were fighting the good fight.

  But our people were starting to get weary. The picket lines thinned a little. We were trudging along out there, and the cold was a horrible reminder of what the hospital said in their letters: Come back in, where it’s warm. Come back in, where people need you. All is forgiven. Six nurses crossed the line in the first week of December. Tony reminded us that we hadn’t yet lost even the 20 percent we had predicted would cross, but it was depressing all the same.

  There were a few diehards. Lester still stood out on the traffic island every morning, and the cars that passed him still honked and waved thumbs-up. Margaret still snapped endless photos on every conceivable occasion, so that none of us would forget these times of our life. We even managed to ignore the unsettling incidents that kept occurring.

  One morning we arrived to a horrible odor and found that a hunk of Gorgonzola had been taken out of a gift basket of cheeses and salamis that had been sent from the IBEW a few days before. It had been left in bits and pieces in various hidden places around the office. Another night, Margaret left three rolls of film on her desk to remind herself to take them for developing, and in the morning they’d been pulled open and the spoiled contents looped festively over the men’s room stall doors.

  Seeing Bennett Winslow humming and hawing in the news like an actor who’s muffing his lines, I found it hard to believe that he was authorizing such petty persecutions. Puny gestures like these weren’t Finchley and Crouse’s style, either. By all accounts, if they intended to scare you, they made sure they really scared you. The mysterious occurrences seemed to wear away at our last reserves of energy and optimism. Clare was taciturn with weariness, saving all her energy for bucking up the picket line and meeting with politicos and the press. Tony’s knee healed, but it still pained him; you could see it when he stood up suddenly or insisted on carrying a box or moving a piece of furniture. I had a cold that seemed to be in the running for immortality. And Kate was low, though keeping up a good front.