All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  “You’re such a snob,” Prima said to him last Christmas, after he ranted on this same topic to her and his brother-in-law and nephews—otherwise intelligent people who slavishly follow baseball and car racing and feel most alive during the inexplicable phenomenon known as March Madness.

  “There are worse things to be accused of,” Frankie told her.

  “Like what?” Tom said.

  Mediocrity, Frankie could have said, if the indictment weren’t so direct. Instead: “Hypocrisy?”

  “Cruelty to other people on purpose,” offered Prima.

  “All the best people are snobs,” their mother said. “Snob means you understand what God made good and what he made ugly. It makes him angry when you don’t pay attention to the difference.”

  If the Grassos were to have that discussion again today, after the announcement of Prima’s Forced March/Sentimental Journey back to Santa Cecilia, he might add “ostentatiousness” and “showmanship”—not to mention “gross insensitivity to the feelings of one’s mother”—to the list of sins more egregious than snobbery.

  At Frankie’s apartment, 25 Stowe Street (which he likes to pretend is named after Harriet Beecher), the outdoor steps are painted a faded blue and shot through with so many cracks that one day soon, as Frankie races up to catch the last few minutes of his soap, they will give way like an ice floe. The place is generic by design, a blank canvas on which tenants have been ordered not to make their mark. For its one distinct original feature, you must walk onto the porch and check out the elaborate railing: an expertly rendered piece of waist-high ironwork that features an intricate pattern of birds and branches between the slats. Somebody loved this place once. He’d planned to stay here forever, maybe leave it to his kids, and so he’d wrought these birds. Now the tenants, Frankie included, treat it like a motel room in a stopover city. They rarely venture onto the porch, let alone lean over the railing to admire the view.

  For any other girl, Frankie would shower and spritz on a little cologne. But the Professor likes him raw. I want to smell the sleep on you. So he wastes no time and starts on the cover letter, writing and rewriting the first sentence, until he hears Anita’s heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  “Your company coming today?” she asks as she blows by his open door on the way to the kitchen.

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t worry. Just grabbing an apple.”

  “Do what you gotta do.”

  And that is his typical encounter with Anita. She is the flash in the hallway, the disembodied voice from the other side of the wall. A full-time nursing student, part-time roofer, part-time waitress, and nascent lesbian (unconfirmed), she spends little time at 25 Stowe. She knows about his walks from his predawn arrivals just as she’s leaving for the hospital. She knows about him and the Professor from coming home sick one Thursday afternoon and catching their naked bodies scampering from the kitchen. If not for the fact that the Nursing and English Departments never overlap, and closeted Anita values discretion, the Professor would have ended their relationship the day Anita saw her. Or so she says.

  He doesn’t know how long Birch has been standing in the doorway—arms folded, shoulder against the dusty frame, sunglasses flipped up onto her head—before she deadpans, “Well, aren’t you a sight.”

  This is her view: Frankie barefoot and cross-legged in his desk chair, wearing boxer briefs and a Jockey A-shirt, chewing his fingernails, his nose an inch from the computer screen. The tattoo on his left biceps—a Chinese character that, according to the artist, means both “resistance” and “pleasure”—winking at her.

  Quickly he closes the document and shuts down his weary Mac Classic. The Professor lets drop her black leather bag, places the sunglasses on the bureau alongside her rings and hair clip, unzips her boots, and stands behind him rubbing his shoulders. “You’re such a worker,” she says as she pulls his shirt straps down over his arms. “It’s very sexy to me.”

  That’s all it takes. Before the screen goes dark, she’s got him stretched out on the futon and burrows her head in his armpit. He is always naked before she is, as she makes it a struggle for him to unclasp her bra and peel off her formfitting jeans. Her skin smells of pencils. Frankie used to pretend he didn’t see or feel the hair on her legs; now he’s come to like the extra warmth of it, its whiff of perversion. For a long time he thought she didn’t shave for feminist reasons, but it turns out she’s just lazy.

  The third time’s the charm today, and by two thirty they’re sitting at the kitchen table, two bowls of Rice Krispies loaded with raisins and sliced bananas between them. He keeps plenty of her favorite cereals and add-ins on hand, in all varieties, as well as the full-fat milk she prefers. Under the table, her right foot pokes around for a while and eventually finds a home on his crotch. This part, the candid free-form talk of literature and department gossip, is his favorite, less predictable and enervating than the sex. Today she reveals that Professor Audrey Wang, hired to bring some diversity to West Hall, will apparently not get tenure, and that a second-year transfer, Max Bradford, “creeps everybody out” with his glass eye. She does not mention the Fanon chapter, on which he’s desperate for guidance, or Dr. Lexus’s memo.

  “And next week, I’m on that fucking panel in Chicago,” she says. She lifts the bowl to her lips and drinks the rest of the milk. “Are you going to that, too? I keep forgetting.”

  “No,” he says. “They rejected my paper.”

  “The gothic thing?”

  “Yeah. It’s not done, so—”

  “They’re idiots,” she says. “I’ll take a half-baked Frankie Grasso paper over their overwrought bullshit any day.” She smiles. “You’re lucky, though. Now you won’t have to go. I’ll end up writing my talk on the plane like I did last year.”

  “It would have been good for my CV,” he ventures. “And it looks like a fairly decent lineup.”

  She shrugs. “I guess. To me it reads like yesterday’s news.”

  “Still,” he says, “I’ve never been, so I guess I have a glamorous notion.”

  “Oh yes, it’s terribly glamorous,” she says, laughing. “Pasty-faced English types in vintage suits sucking down cocktails, holding court on uninspired and irrelevant ideas. If they weren’t so blatantly insecure, you’d hate them for their arrogance. Instead you just feel sorry for them, and for yourself—because all the shit you talk about them goes double for you.” She reaches back, puts her hair in a ponytail, and suddenly looks a decade younger. Frankie’s age, give or take a few years. “That’s what you have to look forward to, my darling.”

  “Still,” he says again, “it’s the life of the mind.”

  “That it is,” she says, with the feigned earnestness of a shrink. She digs her foot in deeper between his legs. “But the body is more honest.”

  “Honesty’s overrated,” he says. He thinks a moment. “No—not just that. That’s too glib. I think honesty might in fact be the ultimate red herring. It’s nothing beyond the literal—”

  She’s making an anxious face. “Can I be honest with you now?” she interrupts.

  He looks at her. She has a wide, flat nose and a jaw almost manly in its severity but the smoothest skin his lips have ever kissed. There is a tiny hole in her right eyebrow where she sometimes wears a silver ring, and the faintest shadow of hair on one side above her upper lip. She is beautiful in an unexpected way, like the angry little sister of the homecoming queen, and sometimes Frankie wonders if her rebelliousness is as put on as her jewelry.

  “Why not,” he says. Sunlight streams in from the blinds in the window above the sink, striping her skin.

  “I’m really sorry,” she says, squinting. “But don’t count on that fellowship.”

  THE TWINS’ PARTY—ANOTHER party! Because isn’t life just a string of parties with dead air in between?—was Prima’s idea. She planned it before the confirmation, when she noticed that Matt and Zach’s twentieth birthdays fell on a Saturday. They’d go out and drink illegally
that night, anyway, so what was the harm in having them and their friends drive out from Penn State to her house, where she could supervise and the cops couldn’t bust them? Also, Zach didn’t need another arrest on his record.

  That first violation was just underage drinking, not DUI. The Buckley boys love their lives too much to drive drunk. In case their friends don’t love their lives, though, Prima greets each of the drivers at the front door and puts their keys into a locked drawer in the master bedroom. She’s already talked to the parents of the underage kids she knew from high school, and if they hadn’t thought the party was a good idea, they wouldn’t have let their sons come. A few of the moms do show up to check on things and deliver care packages to be taken back to the dorm in the morning.

  Prima’s at the kitchen table with her parents, half out of her chair, lecturing her mother for the hundredth time on why the trip to Italy must happen, there’s no point protesting, when the front door flies open and Ryan appears out of nowhere.

  “Where are those two candyasses?” he shouts. He drops his duffel bag in the foyer, runs down the hall, and hugs Prima so hard he lifts her off the ground.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” she asks. His next break is not until Thanksgiving, and he was home for the confirmation just two weeks earlier.

  “I don’t miss a party.”

  Ryan loves his brothers. And maybe he’s lonely, up in New York, the middle of nowhere, all by himself. He has a thousand friends and a scholarship and girls throwing themselves at him night and day, but he has a sad streak, too. Prima can’t take her eyes off him. The blond crew cut, the sandals, the sunglasses—he looks just like Tom twenty years ago. She falls in love with her men every time she sees them.

  “My favorite Italians!” he says to his nonna and nonno. He hugs them, too. Any other kid would rush to his buddies. Prima notices Mary Walsh, mother of Charlie (a boy with no manners at all), watching Ryan’s respectful behavior from the living room with her jealous little mouth.

  “You’re half-Italian, you know,” says his nonno, his arm around Ryan’s shoulder.

  “That’s right,” Ryan says. “The good half.” The punch line in a routine they’ve done a thousand times.

  “Bravo.”

  “How’d you get so tan?” asks Maddalena.

  “Booth,” he says. His puts hands on his hips, posing. “Buy ten sessions, get one free.”

  She shakes her head. “Those things are poison.”

  “I live in Syracuse, Nonna. The sun’s out, like, four days a year.”

  “You risk your health, you get cancer, then how good will you look? Tell him, Prima.”

  “Mom, relax.” Prima’s no fan of tanning booths, either, but this isn’t the time to get into it.

  The cancer talk chases Ryan out of the kitchen. He presses himself up against the sliding glass door Prima just windexed until Zach and Matt notice him from outside. Then they all four hug, the twins and their younger and older brothers in a huddle. Prima rushes for her camera, but by the time she gets to them, they’ve broken up and Ryan has his arm around some girl.

  The torches on the deck aren’t throwing much light, so Prima turns on the floods. Still, as the night comes on and the kids spread out onto the lawn and into various rooms of the house, she has a hard time keeping track of where everybody is. Her mother and father disappear from the kitchen. She goes upstairs to look for Tom, finds him asleep on their bed in his underwear in front of ESPN, and pulls the covers over him in case one of the kids walks in by mistake.

  She sits for a moment beside her husband on the bed, her hand on his shoulder, wishing, briefly, that he were the partying type. She checks herself. He works sixty hours a week. On Saturdays he takes care of the lawn and the cars. On Sundays they go to ten thirty Mass, then to brunch in the same corner booth at Klondike Kate’s, then for a beer at Grotto’s to watch the Phillies or to his brother’s out in Lancaster to play cards. On some Sunday evenings on the way back, Tom puts his hand on her thigh, which means they’ll head straight to the bedroom when they get home. It makes her happy—thrilled, really, and, every time, relieved—to see his hand rise slowly from the steering wheel, to feel its warmth and to hold it there in her lap. No, Tom Buckley is not the partying type, but he and Prima have their own rhythms, and it’s nothing to complain about, so she shuts off the light and lets him sleep.

  Ryan’s dragged the old Ping-Pong table up from the basement to the deck. He’s gathering a group around him to pick teams, and drafts Prima onto Matt’s the moment he sees her. This is the woman Prima Buckley has become: a forty-five-year-old housewife and mother of four, varsity shopper and JV gardener, playing beer pong with a bunch of teenagers. She does it for Matt and Zach, of course, not to get drunk. She doesn’t drink much anymore. She’ll have a strawberry daiquiri once in a while at the shore, but she hasn’t had more than two beers in a row since college. Even so, she’s glad Tom’s upstairs and her parents are out of sight.

  “You’ve got such a nice house, Mrs. Buckley,” says the girl on the opposite team, a skinny flat-chested thing in painted-on jeans and a fuzzy pink tank top. Her squeaky voice, and her arm rubbing along Zach’s, staking a claim, disrupt Prima’s concentration.

  “Thank you,” Prima says. She holds the Ping-Pong ball between her thumb and index finger, aiming for the cup at the other end of the table. She prefers the bounce method rather than the direct-in-cup strategy. Everyone is watching. The handsome young men in their dark jeans and Eagles jerseys. The glossy lips of the girls. Matt. If the ball in Prima’s hand goes in, mother and son will win.

  “How many square feet is this place?” the girl asks.

  “Dude, she’s trying to throw,” Zach says.

  Prima releases. The ball bounces once, then plops into the cup. She pumps both fists, her bracelets jangling, and Matt gives her a high five. Everyone claps.

  “She’s a ringer!” says the guy on the other team.

  “That’s it for me,” she says. “Quit while I’m ahead.”

  “No way!” Matt says. “We’re defending champs. You gotta keep playing till somebody beats us, or you lose your honor. That’s how it works.”

  Prima glances at the girl. She’s holding Zach’s hand now. “You’re really good, Mrs. Buckley,” she says. “Seriously. You really never played this before? It’s, like, all they do at U of D.”

  Turns out it’s just beginner’s luck, though, because the next round Prima can’t get the ball anywhere near the cup. Matt’s expertise carries them; the other team can barely stand up straight, so they win again, but in the meantime the rules make her drink many, many cups of beer. She keeps one eye on the living room and kitchen through the sliding doors. She has no idea what’s become of her parents but suspects they’re in the garage inspecting Tom’s new tractor. She checks the upstairs windows for spies. “All righty, then!” she calls out. “Next victims!”

  Zach and the girl step up.

  Her name, it turns out, is Allison. Allison Grey. She’s a senior at Padua, the sister high school to Salesianum, where Zach used to go and where Patrick goes now. What would the nuns at Padua think of Allison, Prima wonders, a good Catholic with glitter on her cheeks, smoke breath, and a Coors Light in her hand? She’s pretty enough for Zach—he likes blonds, all his girlfriends have been blonds—but she thought he was going steady with a girl in his biology class at Penn, or at least that he was done with high school girls altogether. Their teams take turns at the Ping-Pong table, and in between, Allison keeps grilling Prima about the house like she’s a real estate agent. Does she have a decorator? Who picked the border on the wallpaper in the study? Prima wonders how grand a tour Allison Grey got, and when. All the back-and-forth with her makes Prima dizzy. Her yammering voice and sparkly face are like an overloud commercial for zit cream.

  “I just love the lowboy in the hallway. Is it Ethan Allen? My mom and I saw one just like it in the showroom last week. That’s what we do, me and my mom, go to sample houses and
furniture stores and antique fairs.” She says this as she flicks the ball effortlessly into the cup. She and Zach are beating them pretty bad, and now Prima’s forced to take another drink.

  “All right, Chatty Cathy,” Prima says when it’s her throw. “I’m hip to your mind games. You, too, Zachary Joseph.”

  Maybe if she doesn’t concentrate so hard, Prima thinks, she’ll make this next one go in. She guzzles the rest of her beer, steps up to the table, and tosses the ball with barely a look. It hits the Gooch square in the face.

  “OK, she’s cut off,” says the Gooch.

  “Oh yeah?” Prima says. “You gonna stop me?”

  She senses her mother’s presence. And when she turns, there are her fierce, accusing eyes behind the glass door. Daddy beside her. Both stand stone-still, arms crossed. Prima gives them a jaunty wave. No reaction.

  Zach’s next shot wins the round, and Prima and Matt’s short but glorious reign comes to an end. Matt puts his arm around her. “Maybe you should take a break.”

  “You’re saying I’m drunk?”

  “You’re the coolest mom ever,” says Allison Grey. Prima looks over at her. It’s possible that she’s quite sweet. Is she going to marry my son? Prima can’t stop staring at her cheeks. Then Allison turns away. “Break his heart and I’ll kill you,” Prima says under her breath, but it’s louder than she realizes, and Zach hears her and shoos her toward the house.

  You were necking in my guest room, weren’t you? Prima thinks. No wonder the fringe on the Oriental rug was out of whack. She looks around her in all directions, up at the second-floor windows; the floodlights dazzle her eyes. Where’d Ryan go, anyway? And Patrick? Why’s that group of kids walking into the field? They’re being too loud. The neighbors will call. What if Tom wakes up? He’ll be mad at her, like he gets when she’s relaxed enough to enjoy a few drinks. Why doesn’t he like her when she’s relaxed? Why does he need two beers at Grotto’s before he puts his hand on her thigh?