Isn't It Bro-Mantic?

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “How about, I don’t know, siblings that live nearby?”

  “No, there’s only me. Why you asking these questions?”

  “I don’t know. I was just wondering.”

  “You’re worried about me.” It’s a statement, not a question.

  “Maybe,” I admit.

  Stavros sighs. “Yeah, maybe I’m worried about me too, Johnny.”

  The guy at the plate crushes the ball to left field, or at least as much as you can crush a softball.

  “That was pretty good,” Stavros concedes. “But it’d be better if it was a football.”

  When it’s time to take Stavros home, I ask him where he lives.

  “All these years, you don’t know, Johnny?”

  Well, it’s not like it ever came up in conversation before.

  “I live right over the shop,” he says.

  Geez, that sounds depressing.

  When we get back there, he invites me up for a beer, I say yes because I want to see where he lives, and it is depressing.

  It’s a one-room apartment, the bedroom connected to the living room. Everything’s neat enough, but it’s so spartanly furnished, like he just moved in, even though he informs me he’s been there for decades. When he opens the fridge to get us two beers, I can see from behind him that there’s not a whole lot else in there.

  “I eat out most meals,” he says. “Lately, it’s gotten too depressing to eat here by myself.”

  He catches me looking around.

  “I could’ve had a house,” he says. “I’ve done very well for myself, cutting hair. But I never saw the point in spending the money on just me and it was always so convenient, living over the shop.”

  Convenience is one thing, but this all seems so…lonely. I can’t imagine reaching the end of my days, being alone, living like this.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Stavros says shrewdly.

  He does?

  “You’re thinking I shouldn’t be on my own anymore.”

  Geez, the guy’s a step ahead of me.

  “You’re thinking I should go into one of those…places.”

  Two steps!

  Stavros shudders. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that, though. I don’t even know how to go about getting into one of those places. And anyway, I think I’ve still got a little time left of, you know”—he taps himself on the side of the head—“being good.”

  I don’t blame the guy. He doesn’t want to give up on the life he has in the world, such as it is, not yet. But he knows things are slipping away on him.

  “Maybe,” I say, thinking, “there’s another way.” I look around. “You got, I don’t know, a little suitcase or something?”

  Driving home, I’m wishing the drive were longer because I could sure use more time to think things through; because, you know, apparently I did not think things through before making this offer.

  What’s Helen going to say? I mean, I didn’t even like it when she brought home a new clock for the upstairs bathroom without consulting me first—although I’ve never told her how I feel about that—so how’s she going to feel about me bringing home an old guy who’s starting to lose his stuff?

  When I open the front door, Fluffy’s waiting on the other side to greet us.

  “Hey!” Stavros says. “A cat!”

  He bends to scratch Fluffy under the chin and both of them look like they’re in heaven. Then Fluffy turns and heads toward the living room, where the sound of television is coming from, and Stavros follows, gym bag in hand. There, Fluffy settles down on the couch to watch ESPN and Stavros drops his bag, settles down next to the cat. I settle down too, wondering where Helen is, what she’s going to say.

  A few minutes later, she comes downstairs, all smiles when she sees me but then stops smiling when she sees I’m not alone. Her eyebrows shoot up, questioning. Stavros doesn’t notice her, he’s too busy petting the cat while staring at ESPN, so I get up, gesture with my head toward the kitchen. Once there:

  “Who’s the old guy on my couch?” Helen wants to know.

  I explain about finding Stavros staring out the window of the shop, him not knowing what day it is. I explain how concerned I am for him, how Stavros doesn’t have any family, doesn’t have anywhere else to go. All the while that I’m explaining, Helen just stares at me, an inscrutable expression on her face, so I continue explaining.

  “I just kept thinking: What if it was Big John? What if something happened to me and Aunt Alfresca, he started losing his stuff and there was no one there to care for him? The idea of that just kills me, Big John being all alone. So I just couldn’t leave Stavros there, but he’s not ready to go into one of those assisted-living places, so I figured I’d bring him back here, just for a short time maybe, just until I can figure out another solution, maybe research some places…”

  She’s still staring at me.

  “But of course, that’s crazy. I see that now. It’s too much to ask of you, too much to ask of anyone, that you should let some stranger guy stay in your home for an indefinite amount of time. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll just—”

  “Shh.” She reaches a finger out, stops my lips. Then she goes on tiptoe, replaces her finger with her lips and kisses me, hard. When she pulls away, there are tears sparkling like diamonds in her eyes. “You,” she says, “are the most amazing man I’ve ever known in my life. Only you would do something like this. Of course your friend can stay, as long as he needs to. Somehow, we’ll make it work.”

  I take her hand, squeeze it tightly as we head back to the living room.

  “Hey!” Stavros says as we enter. “Who’s the pretty lady?”

  I look at Helen, who’s smiling at him.

  “Helen,” I say, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Stavros.”

  She holds out her hand, which he enthusiastically shakes.

  “Stavros,” I say, “this is Helen, my wife.”

  “Your wife?” Stavros says. “Johnny, when did you get married?”

  The Wife

  Last night, the evening we spent with Stavros was mostly very peaceful. We watched a lot of TV, and Helen and Stavros got on well together, although he did keep forgetting who she was. At one point, when she left the room to go to the bathroom, he turned to me and whispered, “She’s very pretty, for a housekeeper, but she doesn’t really do a whole lot of work around here, does she? Seven o’clock already and I don’t see any dinner on the table. Do you see any dinner on the table?”

  I reminded him that Helen’s my wife, not the hired help. Then, figuring maybe it was all a hint to let me know he was hungry, I headed off to the kitchen to see what I could scrounge up. Stavros followed me and when we looked in the fridge, it turned out there wasn’t much to scrounge.

  “Wow,” Stavros said, “this is almost as bad as my fridge. Still.” He grabbed the carton of eggs, and the remains of the salad I’d made the night before. He sniffed the salad. “Dressing’s already on, I see, but this could be interesting. You got a fry pan?”

  I did have a fry pan.

  Stavros set the burner to medium and dropped some butter on the pan, waited for it to sizzle.

  “Hey,” he said, “did I see a little bit of bacon left in the fridge? Why don’t you get that going and then we’ll crumble it right into the omelet—makes a nice contrasting crunch.”

  Apparently, Stavros knew what he was talking about, because the omelets we ate a short time later while watching ESPN were not only the fluffiest I’d ever had, but the added crunch was both contrasting and satisfying.

  “I thought you said you don’t know how to cook,” I said.

  “No, I’m pretty sure I said I mostly eat out. But I know how to make do with what’s lying around, if cooking needs to be done and the hired help is too lazy to do it.” He cast a meaningful look at Helen, who failed to notice; she was too busy enjoying her spinach salad and bacon omelet. “But if someone would take me shopping, I could do better than this.”

&nbs
p; “Really? You want to take over the cooking?”

  “Why not?” Stavros shrugged. “I got nothing better to do now.”

  It surprised me a bit—OK, a lot—how quickly Stavros was willing to give up on his previous life, his home, the barbershop. But my sense was that he’d known for a while that things were sliding downhill and was relieved to have someone—me—make the decision for him of what the next phase of his life would entail and he was also relieved that wouldn’t be an immediate nursing home.

  Stavros cast another look at Helen. “And the cooking does need to get done.”

  “Great. I’ll take you when I get home from work tomorrow. Well,” I amended, “after GH after work.”

  “What’s GH?”

  “A TV show. You’ll love it.”

  “Or not,” Helen put in.

  “Does it have football?” Stavros wanted to know.

  “Not exactly.”

  Since Stavros did the cooking, Helen and I cleaned up. This meant that for the first time, I got a chance to ask her what she did all day while I was at Big John’s and Aunt Alfresca’s.

  “Watched the Mets game.” She shrugged.

  Really? She could have watched the Mets game with us.

  “So you’re feeling OK?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

  “You didn’t go because you said you weren’t feeling well.”

  “Well, I’m fine now.”

  I neglected to point out how this was all making me feel a little…annoyed. I also neglected to direct her attention to what Aunt Alfresca’s been saying about us on Twitter. After all, Helen was nice enough—amazing enough!—to take Stavros in, so how could I complain about petty crap like her not going to my dad’s and how she spent her day?

  Speaking of Stavros…

  “Is anybody ever coming back out here?” he called from the living room. “The cat disappeared behind the TV and the TV reception disappeared too.”

  I went out to the living room, fixed the TVs, found the cat, and soon we were all back to watching stuff. Things went on nicely until time for bed, which was when the trouble started.

  “Come on,” I said, carrying Stavros’s bag as I led him up the stairs. “Let me show you to the room that’ll be yours while you’re staying with us.”

  At the top of the staircase, the bathroom lay straight ahead, and I turned right down the short hall and switched on the light in the guest bedroom, gestured for him to enter.

  I was figuring Stavros would be impressed with it. The bedrooms in this house are a decent size and even the guest room is bigger than Stavros’s old living/bedroom/dining area put together. Plus, when Helen and I first moved in and discovered that the moving people had shoved all our stuff in the master bedroom, we moved the second set of furniture—mine—across the hall to this spare bedroom. If I do say so myself, my old bed and dresser and stuff looked homey in that room, even if the walls were still white because we hadn’t gotten around to painting in there yet. Come to think of it, that white was a lot more peaceful than the pink-and-black monstrosity my bedroom had become.

  “What do you think?” I asked, setting Stavros’s bag just inside the room.

  He turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, bounced a little, testing it, smiling at the nice level of bounce. A moment later, he sprang up, went to the door and poked his head out, turning his head first left and then right. He came back in, sat down again, bounced some more, only this time the bouncing was less enthusiastic and he was no longer smiling. A wistful expression had replaced the joy on his face and that’s when I noticed the tears in his eyes.

  “I gotta go back home, Johnny,” he said. “It was nice of you to offer, and I’d like to stay here, but I just can’t.”

  “What?” I was confused. “No. You don’t understand. It’s fine with Helen. She doesn’t have a problem with you staying. She already said it’s fine with her.”

  “I’m not worried about the housekeeper.” He waved a dismissive hand.

  “Then what is it? Why can’t you stay?”

  “It’s…” He looked embarrassed, but finally, after a long pause he came out with it. “It’s the bathroom.”

  “The bathroom? But I haven’t even showed that to you yet. It’s a very nice bathroom. Well, except for the clock.”

  “I don’t care about any stupid clock.” Another dismissive wave; really, it was more of a disgusted wave. “The bathroom,” Stavros informed me, “is on the wrong side of the hall.”

  “What?” Now I was really confused.

  “At my place, the bathroom is to the left of my bedroom. Here, it’s on the right. I can’t have that.”

  “So it’s on the opposite side. You’ll get used to it.”

  Stavros continued like he hadn’t heard me. “I’ll get up in the middle of the night to go, like I always do, then I’ll turn left, after which I’ll either fall down the stairs or pee on them. You can’t have that, Johnny, neither of us can.”

  “What? No, that won’t happen. You’ll get used to it,” I said again.

  “I don’t think so,” Stavros said sadly. “Sometimes the mistress and me like to spice things up by going to a hotel—you know, play a few games, like Wealthy Widow And Cabana Boy. A few weeks back, we went to our usual hotel but our usual room was taken so they gave us a different one with the bathroom on the wrong side. I fell asleep for a bit and, pfft, it did not end well.”

  I pictured the scene. It was not pretty.

  “I get confused too much,” Stavros said. “Some things, I just have to keep exactly the same.”

  “Hey.” Helen’s voice, then she was in the doorway beside me. “How are you boys making out?”

  “Stavros says he wants to leave.”

  “What?” Helen had the same reaction I did. “No. Why?”

  I led her out into the hall and whispered an explanation, about the bathroom and the confusion and the peeing.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Helen said sternly, heading back into the guest bedroom.

  I tried to stop her. Helen can be a bit brusque at times—that whole no-nonsense-D.A. thing—and I didn’t want her telling Stavros he was ridiculous in his fears. How would that help the guy any? What might seem ridiculous to us was clearly very real to him. But as it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Helen told Stavros firmly. “So the bathroom’s on the wrong side of the hall from here? Then you’ll take our bedroom and it’ll be on the right side. Or at least it’ll be on the left side, which is the right side for you.” She grabbed hold of one of his large hands with both of her feminine ones. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Was she serious? I thought, following behind. Was she going to turn over our bedroom, the bedroom she painted those hideous colors, to my barber? And what was he going to think of all that pink and black?

  “Oh,” Stavros said, awed, doing that slow-turning-in-a-circle thing again. “This is…amazing.”

  “Isn’t it great?” Helen agreed.

  “Oh, yes. It reminds me exactly of a bordello I visited one time down in Florida.”

  I expected Helen to get offended at that last part, but she just smiled.

  “We all set then?” she asked. “You’ll stay?”

  “Oh, yes. I think I could be very happy here.”

  “Great,” Helen said, crossing to the bureau. “Let me just get my things for tonight and for the morning.” Next, she hit the closet, picking out a suit and some heels. “Tomorrow after work, Johnny and I can move the rest of our stuff out. Goodnight, Stavros.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Sweet dreams.”

  Stavros and I watched her go.

  “She’s got a helluva nice walk on her,” Stavros pointed out appreciatively.

  “That she does,” I said.

  It’s a decisive walk, with just the right amount of sex and attitude in it. In the Friday New York Times, there’d been a review of a new Richard Gere
movie in which the reviewer mentioned that Gere had one of Hollywood’s great movie walks. At the time, I realized how true this was; as soon as it was said, I could immediately picture Gere walking across the screen in dozens of movies, owning his movement in a distinctive way. Helen’s like that, only now I was rolling her walk in my mind with that of Richard Gere’s, which was not the image I wanted, so I stopped.

  “She’s also an incredibly nice lady,” Stavros added, indicating the bedroom, now his, at least for the time being, “to do something like this.”

  “That she is,” I agreed.

  Then I grabbed my own things from the bureau, my cat-behavior book from the night table, and got out of there.

  A short time later, Helen and I lay in bed, the door to our new bedroom closed. A part of me couldn’t believe my good fortune. True, the guest room was smaller than the master, but—yes!—I was out of that pink-and-black monstrosity. Still. I took her in my arms.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I said, “giving Stavros our bedroom.”

  “Why? It’s no big deal. And if it makes him feel more comfortable and secure here…”

  “Yeah, but you loved that bedroom. You had it painted exactly as you wanted it.”

  “It’s no big deal,” she said again. She looked around, a relieved expression on her face, then sighed contentedly as she shut her eyes. “Actually, I kind of like the white in here.”

  Then why did she insist on painting…

  Huh.

  And now it’s a new day.

  I wake earlier than usual, because someone is singing. The shower is running, but Helen’s still beside me, and I realize that the person singing happily is Stavros. The song is in Greek, so perhaps that’s an added clue. Helen manages to sleep through it, but much as I try to return to sleep, I’m unable to, so I get up, head downstairs and start the coffee.

  A few minutes later, Stavros joins me, all crisply dressed for the day. Beside him struts Fluffy, who is soaking wet.

  “What happened to the cat?” I ask, groggily, from where I’m sitting at the kitchen table.