All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  Antonio unfolds his napkin and lays it across the plate of cold pasta, the bacon losing its shine, the egg in clumps. “You ruined my lunch,” he says, “but I’ll think about it.”

  Days later he’s in the same spot with the same dish, except Prima and Ryan, who’s home for the weekend, sit on either side of him. They’re halfway through the meal before Prima finally asks, “So what’s the occasion, Dad? Why didn’t you want us to bring Tom or Patrick or Mom?”

  He calls over the managers, who are here for a wine tasting, and asks them to sit. “How’s this?” he asks them. “How about I give all three of you a raise and you work less hours?”

  “We like that,” says Olindo, the newest guy.

  “What’s the catch?” Gilberto says.

  “No catch,” says Antonio. He turns to Ryan. “My grandson here, he’ll be home from college in June. He’s my oldest, very intelligent, very handsome, as you can see. He’s got nothing to do this summer. He needs to work—not for the money, for the experience. He’s been a waiter here before—Gilberto remembers him—but not a manager. So you three can give him some training. And if you train him good, he takes over some of your shifts, you get the time off, and a small raise at the end of the summer.”

  “How much is ‘small’?” asks Maurizio.

  “Um, Nonno?” Ryan says. “Did we talk about this when I was drunk or something? I don’t remember ever—”

  “Zitto,” says Antonio. He puts his hand on the boy’s leg.

  “So the better job the boy does, the bigger raise we get?” asks Olindo.

  Maurizio looks suspicious. “To train somebody is not easy, without a guarantee of funds—”

  “Antonio will take care of us,” Gilberto says. “You should know that by now.”

  “You start in June,” Antonio says to Ryan. “Your school will be over by then.”

  “Aren’t you full of surprises,” says Prima to her father. “It’s a great idea, I think. Don’t you, Ryan?” She sits up straight. “You want to spend the summer in Wilmington, anyway, right? There’s nothing in Syracuse. You’ve got free room and board at Casa Buckley.”

  “I gotta think about it,” Ryan says. “There’s this job at a pro shop my buddy was telling me about . . .”

  The wine guy, Enzo, shows up with his crate of bottles, and for the next hour the six of them taste Chiantis and Montepulcianos and some dry whites from the north. The Al Di Là tradition is to serve only Italian imports, but today, as he does every visit, Enzo tries to persuade Antonio to open up his mind to California and France and—stunod that he is—Australia. “What’s your opinion, Ryan?” Antonio asks.

  He thinks a second. “Nobody comes to Little Italy looking for wine from Kangaroo Land,” he says.

  “You hear that?” Antonio says to Enzo, handing him back the Syrah without a sip. “The new manager has spoken.”

  Prima is happy—Antonio can tell—but Ryan isn’t quite convinced. From what Antonio has seen of his grandson, though, he fell in love with the place from the beginning, not as much as Tony, but close, and he’ll learn the manager job quick. Eventually, if the love affair is real, he can take over the place. Two summers ago, when Ryan waited tables, it didn’t take long for the customers to ask for him by name. A natural salesman, he was always warm and friendly, but professional, clean shaven, his hair perfect and shiny with that sticky stuff guys put in it now. He flirted with the ladies—young or old, it didn’t matter—and made the men feel like big shots when they ordered veal or the expensive wines. He never got tired, not even after working lunch and dinner on the same Saturday. When one of the other waiters asked Antonio if he was sure his grandson didn’t take speed, he told him he didn’t have to: speed was in the Grasso blood. Hard work at a high speed had built the Al Di Là and kept it running. It didn’t matter much that Ryan showed up late once in a while, that he sometimes had beer on his breath, and that once he dropped a bowl of mussels on a customer’s arm; the other waiters liked him enough to cover for him, he could just pop a breath mint in his mouth when he needed to, and the customer he burned was a cheap bastard Antonio had never liked to begin with.

  Maddalena approves of Antonio’s plan for Ryan. He hasn’t told Frankie yet, but he knows he will be relieved. The pressure will be off him to carry on the Al Di Là tradition. Frankie might not realize this yet, but he will want and need young family like Ryan and his other nephews in his life down the line. After Antonio and Maddalena go, Prima won’t be too far behind, and the youngest will be left alone. Antonio doesn’t expect to be alive by the time Frankie gets married and has kids of his own, but Maddalena still believes it will happen soon. She thinks that she sees everything, that she can translate what the kids really mean when they talk and can explain why they make the choices they make in life. In her mind she is inside them every second, like a saint or a witch, feeling what they feel, the pain and the pleasure both. But she’s not.

  She doesn’t see that Frankie’s too selfish, that he’s one of those types who’ll wake up at forty-five a grown man and have to do all at once the grown-man things he should have been doing all along: job, wife, house, kids. Antonio knows lots of men like this, men no more unhappy than anybody else. Frankie’s not as complicated as Maddalena makes him out to be.

  Does nobody else plan or think ahead the way Antonio does? It used to be considered healthy, but it’s not what people on TV tell you to do anymore. On CNN the doctors keep saying that the secret to life is to live “in the moment,” but Antonio does not like this expression. The moment is always already past. As soon as you recognize it—as soon as you say, This is right, my heart is full, oh, how beautiful everything is!—the moment is outside you, and you’re looking in and can’t get it back. The best you can do is stay three steps ahead of tragedy. It’s like driving on the freeway. If you keep your eyes on the cars far in front of you, you’ll never get into a wreck. Sixty years he’s been driving in this country, and not a single scratch. It’s not luck. There are no accidents, just people who don’t care enough to keep safe, who are too lazy to pay attention.

  “We worry about you, you know,” Antonio says to Ryan. “Up at that school all by yourself.” He’s skinnier than he was just two months ago at Christmas. His skin pale. This is what happens when you’re away from family too long. “You get enough to eat there? You take care of yourself?”

  “You kidding?” Ryan says. “College is the balls!”

  “Language,” says Prima.

  “That means it’s good?” Antonio asks.

  “That means it’s really good.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” Antonio says. They go over some of what the manager job will require—the hours, the uniform, dealing with the kitchen—and Ryan says that he doesn’t mind hard work, that the Al Di Là’s the coolest thing about his family. His high school friends still bring their dates here. “It’s a part of Wilmington history,” he says. “Like the du Ponts or the Charcoal Pit. That summer I waited tables? I got more chicks than I could count. Remember, Ma?”

  “You spared very few details,” says Prima.

  “That means you’re excited to be my new summer manager?” Antonio asks. “You think it’s ‘the balls,’ too?”

  “That means I’ll definitely think about it,” he says. “Here’s the thing, though. If I’m gonna be here all summer, you gotta hang out. This place is more fun with you around.”

  Antonio draws a long breath, lets it out slow. “You’re a good boy,” he says. “Don’t worry. If you come work for me, it will be like you say, the balls.”

  “And I’ll teach you some new expressions,” Ryan says.

  Before they leave, Prima takes Antonio aside. “Thank you,” she says with tears in her eyes. Antonio watches them get into their car and waves as they drive away.

  It’s the middle of the afternoon, that time of peace in the restaurant day that Antonio loves most (unless he counts the weekend dinner rush, when the line of customers crowds the entrance and spills o
ut onto the sidewalk—for that he feels a different kind of love). The dining room is quiet and clean, the lights dim; he can hear the dishwashers singing the old songs, and the hum of the freezers, and the bar glasses clinking as they’re put away. The TV’s on without sound. The front doors are locked, the shades pulled over the glass even though there’s no sun. It’s a gray winter’s day and will be for a long time. Gilberto, who’ll stay through the dinner shift, reads the Corriere della Sera in the corner booth, no shoes, his feet up on the seat. The paper takes two weeks to show up in the mail, but since nothing ever happens fast in Italy, news two weeks late is right on time.

  When the customers arrive, Antonio gives up his table by the window. The early-bird dinner special, Gilberto’s idea, ends at seven. So far it’s a big hit: they offer a smaller menu that they can xerox in the back office, a few simple pasta dishes and hot sandwiches with a side salad and a glass of wine, and the people can’t get enough. Gilberto is proud. Maurizio’s new idea, on the other hand—a late-night bar menu on the weekends—Antonio doesn’t like as much; it will bring in the wrong kind of crowd. Maurizio keeps telling him that’s where the real money is: drunk people after midnight, hungry and alone, and by his calculations, later hours on Friday and Saturday nights mean they can close completely on Mondays, the slowest days. But Antonio doesn’t like this part of the idea, either. The slow-day customers may be few, but they’re the most loyal. All of this is important. He will teach it to Ryan, and Ryan will carry it through the next forty years.

  On his way out, he shakes the hands of the people in line—a young couple new to the neighborhood, the old Irish lady from Forty Acres who reminds him of Giulio’s Helen, a priest from St. Anthony’s with a colored teenage boy he’s trying to save—and they say they’re happy to see him, he’s not around so much anymore. Antonio promises to change that this summer. Did they hear? he asks them. His grandson (they remember him? the handsome one? the smart college boy?) he’s coming back as manager, June 1. And before that, for Easter, the Grassos are all going back together to the Old Country, to the original Al Di Là.

  “Won’t that be magical!” says the Irish lady.

  “Magical, yes,” Antonio says. “ ‘Magical’ is a good word.”

  “Buon viaggio,” says the priest.

  The colored boy nods.

  It will be a good trip, Antonio thinks. If Maddalena could hear him, she’d say, Touch wood, so as he makes his way down Union, he knocks on a shingle of what was once Lamberti’s Bakery. It’s a rainy rush hour, loud with a whistling wind and cars and buses barreling through the slush. He forgot to pick up dinner from the restaurant, but Maddalena won’t mind a simple frittata with onions and some fresh bread. She has no appetite lately, anyway, because of the new pills she’s taking, pills Dr. Ferretti hopes will slow down what’s going on in her brain.

  They sat together in the room with Ferretti, told him about her sisters and what’s like a curse in the family. Then, when she went to the lab to get her blood drawn, Antonio asked him how bad it really was, and all he could say was, “The pills could help a little, but it will get worse. We just don’t know how long it will take.”

  It was Antonio’s idea, not Prima’s, to move up the trip to Easter. He told Prima why, and she said she’d had the same idea all along but couldn’t say the words. She won’t tell her boys about the meeting with Dr. Ferretti, not even about the pills their grandmother will be taking. But neither Prima nor Maddalena knows the half of it, how bad it could get, and how soon. It’s better they don’t know, Antonio thinks, that he and Dr. Ferretti keep it between them, the old-fashioned way.

  Maddalena will be happy to hear about Ryan. It will bring her joy to have him here, finishing what they cannot. Antonio will start driving her to the restaurant once or twice a week after Ryan starts and will make her eat a full meal, and their grandson will sit at their table even though he’s working, and they’ll pick out pretty girls for him from the crowd. She’ll like that.

  A good year for the Al Di Là, yes—good people, good business, and now Ryan on the way in. For all that, he is proud. But he’d burn the place to the ground for Maddalena—burn the money, too, and all of Union Street if that’s what it took—to give her a moment more.

  AT 11:01 THE rates go down and the news comes on and Antonio walks in from the club and goes straight to the kitchen to fix himself an ice cream cone. Maddalena lies on the sofa in the den with the cordless in the pocket of her nightgown. She hits the buttons on the remote control for channel 4, then Video/TV, then the two little backward arrows, like Frankie taught her, and the phone rings as the tape starts to rewind to the beginning of the story.

  “What a stupid show,” she says to Frankie. He’s always a day ahead because he watches it on his lunch break. Maddalena, who’s too busy cleaning or at the dance studio during the day, has to tape the show and watch it late at night, which is good because the story settles her mind. The nonsense of the actors and actresses, with their crazy love lives and mysteries—their familiar faces, the soft music behind them—helps her sleep. As Frankie talks, the tape starts up, and she hits the Pause button, freezing the face of the pregnancy faker on the screen. Antonio stands in the doorway, licking the three scoops of butter pecan so loud she can hear it all the way across the room. Lately he has been watching the story with her in his leather chair. He can’t keep the names straight and has no idea who’s married and who’s evil and who’s backstabbing who, and she thinks he just likes to look at the pretty, half-naked girls, but that’s all fine with her because at least it’s time they spend together.

  “Stupid is right,” Frankie says. “I can’t wait till tomorrow. Friday episodes are the best.” He’s in a good mood. Maddalena can tell. There’s a smile in his voice, no clink of ice from the whiskey glass. “You sound good,” he tells her, and she wants to ask, How do I usually sound?

  “Things actually happen on Fridays,” she says, waving at Antonio to get his attention. “Your father just walked in. He says hello. His mouth is full of butter pecan.”

  Antonio picks up the kitchen extension. “Hello, Son,” he says, swallowing.

  “Another late-night bocce game?”

  He licks and slurps. “What else? It’s Thursday.”

  “How many games did you win?”

  “Three for three. Me and Tomasso twice as a team. Then eleven to five I beat him one-on-one.”

  “I don’t like you driving after three drinks,” Frankie says.

  Maddalena breaks in. “He can’t see good during the day, you can imagine at night half-drunk.” She can say this only with Frankie around. Otherwise it becomes a fight. “I tell him, but you think he listens?”

  “So I hit a tree,” says Antonio. “Big deal. I’ve lived long enough.”

  “What if you hit a little kid? How would you feel then?”

  “No little kid’s out at eleven o’clock,” Antonio says. “Use your common sense.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I gave the drinks away, Frankie. I always do. You don’t know me yet? Let’s change the subject. Did you eat?”

  “No,” Frankie says, like he’s angry about it. “I sat at my table starving to death, waiting for food that never appeared. Of course I ate.”

  Now, so fast, he’s in a bad mood, all because he worries about his father. “It’s just a question,” Maddalena says. “What else are we supposed to ask you about?”

  “Nothing,” says Frankie. “I’m sorry. I had macaroni and cheese, some salad, and an orange. Very balanced. For dessert: about twenty chocolate chip cookies dunked in milk.” Again there’s a smile in his voice. “Once I start, I can’t stop.”

  “Don’t get fat,” says Maddalena. “It sneaks up on you. You’re not so young anymore.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Macaroni and cheese,” Antonio repeats. “From a box, I bet. Only an American could eat that slop.”

  “Like I have time to cook a gourmet Italian meal—”

>   “What gourmet? It’s so simple, Francesco! A can of tomatoes, some garlic, olive oil, a cut of meat flipped over once in a pan. You learned nothing from me.”

  When her husband’s on the phone, everything’s an argument. Maddalena enjoys it more when it’s just her and Frankie. They can gossip about Prima and she can hear about his students and the weather in Boston. Then they can agree and agree some more about the Italy trip and how neither of them will go, her most of all, Easter or August or ten years from now, and someone should tell the Buckleys to stop making plans and pretending it’s going to happen. How long can it go on, all this pretending? Sooner or later, someone has to say the truth, and she’s so tired. “Hang up,” she says to her husband. “Go put your pajamas on. I’ve got the story rewinded already.”

  “Good night, Son,” Antonio says. “Be careful.”

  “Good night, Dad. You be careful.”

  “I love you. Good-bye.”

  “Love you, too, Dad. Bye.”

  “Bye, love you, bye. Bye.”

  “Love you, bye. Bye.”

  This jumble of “I love yous” and good-byes is how they end every one of their calls, every time, all of them—her children, her husband, always the same, whether they’re fighting or not. You can’t say it—“Good-bye, I love you”—enough times. The jumble would sound funny to someone listening, some American, but there’s only family in the room tonight, no strangers, none of her friends from the dance studio, no neighbors stopping by, so why be embarrassed? You never know if you’ll get the chance to say it—“Good-bye, I love you, good-bye, I love you”—again. You never know when everything will disappear.

  Frankie tells a story about one of his students, but Maddalena can’t quite follow it. In the meantime, Antonio appears in the doorway in a mismatched set of pajamas. The bottom is green plaid, the top red silk and missing a button. His hair sticks up in the back; one of his socks has a hole in the toe.