All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  Prima has to get out of here, too. She’s one of the few cars left in the parking lot, and if she stays any longer the conversation with Patrick will stick to her. She drives down Delaware Avenue, scanning her mind for something to focus on. Only then does it occur to her how close she came to being discovered. She’s lucky she’s quick on her feet with a reasonable lie, but what will happen the next time? Twice she stops herself from pulling in to the Columbus Inn for a glass of wine to calm her nerves. Instead, at a pay phone in the 7-Eleven parking lot, she digs out a quarter from her purse and calls Tom.

  But no surprise, he’s too busy to meet her for a sandwich or a cup of tea.

  “You OK?” he asks. She’s never invited him out like this, in the middle of the week, with no occasion to celebrate.

  “Of course,” she says. The phone feels dirty on her chin. “Don’t worry, I’ll entertain myself.”

  “Is it your mother again?”

  If she says any more, her voice will break, and he’ll ask what’s wrong, and she won’t have a lie at the ready. She’ll have to say: It’s everything. And I’m afraid. So she gets back in the car and drives, with no destination in mind, into the glare, on the shiny roads, for an hour at least, through neighborhoods and in and out of strip mall parking lots, until she finds herself on Main Street in Newark, in the heart of the University of Delaware campus.

  She has to stop every few blocks for the crossing college kids, boys as handsome as hers and girls as bouncy and baffled as she and her girlfriends were when they were students here. As she watches them and imagines herself as one of them, she realizes she hasn’t come here by accident. It’s a place where her only memories are happy ones.

  She pulls up in front of the old row house on Academy Street, where her girlfriends lived when they were twenty-two and fresh out of U of D. Linda, Jill, Colleen, Audrey. The place looks no different than it did in the seventies: the sagging porch, the prickly holly bush, the rusted chain-link fence. This was the party house, and Prima has always been—it’s true, why not admit it?—a party girl. She wasn’t the prettiest in that circle, but guys flocked to her. She wasn’t as prissy as Colleen, or as timid as Jill; she wasn’t afraid of beer (like Linda) or dancing (like Audrey) or letting a guy take her for a ride on his motorcycle (like all of them). She had been, as the expression goes, around the block. In the years after Tony died, when she’d run wild with Dante Marconi and his friends, a high school crowd much different from this one, she got comfortable talking to boys, teasing them, flirting. She shocked herself, the things she said and did in parking lots and the back seats of cars and across state lines. Dante encouraged her. Then they went too far. But that’s not the memory she’s here for. She needs a happy memory today.

  One night, Prima was standing next to the holly bush when a new guy showed up. She was always standing in front of that holly bush, snapping off one leaf at a time, tearing it at the seam, snipping each thorn with her nail, a circle of friends around her. She got so she could do that with her left hand while holding a beer in her right and making small talk with a boy.

  She wasn’t into baseball at twenty-two, but from her time with Dante’s crowd she’d learned enough key phrases to impress a boy. “They have no defense,” she’d say, a fact that seemed to be true enough for every team in history.

  “You think?” some U of D frat guy would say.

  This new one’s eyes were a glassy blue. He parted his hair in the middle. On his feet were boat shoes; tied around his neck was a pastel polo. These preppy qualities were pluses, light-years from the boys on motorcycles and souped-up Camaros she usually took to. His friends were friends of Linda’s brother, whom no one had ever met. The house parties on Academy Street were like that then—a revolving door of tangentially connected strangers bearing six-packs and joints and armfuls of record albums. There was a lot of sitting around, asking each other who they wanted to be. No one planned to spend her life as a Wilmington housewife or a teacher at the local elementary school or a graveyard-shift nurse, though that’s how each of the girls turned out. Prima used to say she dreamed of parlaying her high school theater career into a recurring role on Days of Our Lives; and in the meantime, like all the girls (except Colleen), she made out with various guys on the couch and on the curb and on roof decks and anywhere else they could be alone.

  Thomas Patrick Buckley, this new guy, was the first to request a kiss; the others just dove in. They’d been standing on the porch, Prima asking him about his twin sister, when he’d interrupted her question with the question.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said afterward. “I couldn’t concentrate on anything except how much I wanted to kiss you.”

  Now a blond girl in pink sweatpants opens the torn screen door halfway and squints at the middle-aged woman in the silver BMW. When she doesn’t recognize her, she slams the door. The entire porch rattles. Prima doesn’t drive off. She has as much right to sit here as the girl does to be young and suspicious. She could tell the girl a thing or two about men and marriage, how quickly they come, how you have to prepare for them like you would an exam.

  Tom’s first kiss was enough to hook Prima. His Grand Prix, his cleft chin, his steadiness—those kept her on the line. She and Amy hit it off, too, though the girl was stoned most of the time and would have hit it off just as well with a palm tree. Tom liked numbers, Prima liked people; this seemed complementary. So after three months, she informed her father that she was bringing somebody around. She had to pretend she’d just met him, because even though she was in college, if her father knew she’d already let this young man drive her to the beach and buy her dinner and meet his own parents, he’d have called her a disgraziata, and maybe even closed the bank account he’d opened for her the day she graduated. Dazed as her father was at the time, he knew nothing of the running around Prima did after Tony died; by the time he came out of his daze, Prima was going to church with Linda on Sundays and had enrolled at the U of D after putting it off a semester, and father and daughter silently agreed to pretend those years never happened.

  That first night at her parents’, they sat in the den, Antonio in his recliner with his arms stiff on the rests, Tom and Prima on the couch opposite him, hands folded in their laps. Maddalena clattered around the kitchen, making coffee and assembling a tray of cookies and chocolates. Tom wore a blue button-down shirt and pressed dress pants. His face was pink and clean shaven. He called Antonio “sir.” They discussed his goal of starting his own accounting firm with two friends from college. He’d liked UPenn, he said, but wasn’t a fan of the city, which was too loud. As soon as he could afford one, he’d buy a house on a golf course. No, he didn’t want to become a dentist like his father. No, he had no plans to settle down in another state. He liked Delaware; his family had settled here in 1802.

  “Your mother, she’s still living?” Antonio asked.

  “Yes,” said Tom. “Of course.”

  “You don’t mention her once. Why? You say ‘my father,’ ‘my sister,’ even ‘my uncle with the boat business.’ ”

  Tom looked at Prima, then back at him. “She’s at home, Mr. Grasso. We play golf together sometimes; she’s better than me.” He laughed and put his head down. “Besides that, she’s just, you know, my mom. Not the best cook, but otherwise like any other mom.”

  “Hm,” said Antonio. “The mother is everything.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Her name is Diane. Maiden name Blanchard.”

  Antonio looked at his watch. “Maddalé!” he called. “You’re coming to meet this Tom Buckley or not?” Then finally he smiled at him. “We raised our daughter right. She’s a good girl. The best. She belongs to us first, always, no matter what. Husbands come and go. You’ll do all right in life. You have a good head on your shoulders. But don’t forget what I’m telling you: She’s not yours. She’s ours.”

  “We just met, Dad.”

  “What are you saying to him?” said Maddalena, appearing in the doorway.
She loved to make an entrance. She had her hair up and wore blue eye shadow, red lipstick, and a party dress. Frankie was a toddler then, and she’d quickly lost the pregnancy weight. Right away she went to Tom and took him by the hands and kissed him on both cheeks. She was playing a part—the flirty housewife, Sophia Loren in A Special Day—and so was Antonio, the vaguely threatening mafioso. “Don’t pay any attention to him, sweetheart. You two have fun together. Don’t get married too soon. You end up like us.”

  Soon Maddalena brought in the tray of amaretti, and they ate them with spiked espresso, though in real life Tom never touched caffeine or liquor. His leg kept shaking. After a while, they turned on the TV and sat in stress-free silence, like two middle-aged couples after a bridge game.

  “Handsome,” said Maddalena later, pinching Prima’s side. The Grand Prix pulled away, and Tom honked twice and waved. “And nice. Rich. You really did it, Prima. I was so afraid for you, but now—”

  “Don’t jump ahead,” Prima said. “We barely know each other yet.”

  Maddalena leaned in. “You don’t have to lie,” she whispered. “Not to me, OK?”

  Though Antonio said nothing, Prima knew he was as pleased as he could be with a ’merican. British, Irish, German—they were all the same to him. They didn’t love their families the way Italians did; they had no sense of humor and lacked warmth; they ate mayonnaise and sour cream and watched too much football; but this one, this Tom Buckley, seemed as good as those people got. Prima didn’t disagree with any of these assessments. At the very least, he’d be an excellent provider, and she could relax into a long marriage. At best, he’d be strong and decisive and romantic—a rock with flowers growing underneath.

  As Prima lay in bed that night, beneath the canopy her mother had sewn for her, a Carpenters album on the turntable in the corner, her father lingered outside her bedroom door. Just stood there, listening. She could hear him shift his weight, breathe. He paced for a little while. Then she fell asleep.

  On New Year’s Eve came Tom’s proposal. Ten months after the wedding, Ryan was born. Prima never made it to nursing school. Tom and one of his buddies opened the firm right on schedule, and since then the money’s flowed like a fountain. January to April—tax season—her husband’s a ghost, but the summers are their rewards. When summer comes, they take walks around the development in the evenings and eat ice cream cones and chat with the neighbors. They listen to baseball on the radio even though they have a big TV. They’ve road-tripped with the boys through thirty-six states. Together the Buckleys have seen everything.

  The pretty girl appears again in the doorway. This time she’s dressed for class: jeans, pink fleece jacket, backpack hanging off one shoulder. Another girl’s right behind her. Then another, each in fleece with a ponytail and backpack. It’s a clown car still, the old Academy Street party house, and might be forever. There will never be a shortage of girls. They narrow their eyes at Prima when they walk by her car, but she’s not moving.

  She could visit her mother, but even she is too busy. She has a dance lesson today, or so they discussed last night on the phone. The tango. Her friend Arlene is driving her, and afterward Arlene is taking her to a flower show at Winterthur. Her seventy-two-year-old mother is doing the tango, fighting for every step, as full of life as she can be, strolling among flowers. And Prima is alone in her car, scanning her mind for happy memories.

  She gets out of the car, pulls off a branch from the holly bush, gets back in, and drives off.

  IN BED WITH Kelly Anne McDonald, the fog in a chilly hover outside her dorm window, their bodies entwined under her pink down comforter, George Winston on her stereo, Frankie is stalling. He should be showered by now, at least, and on his way to the passport office downtown. Instead he nuzzles his head deeper into the glorious warmth of Kelly Anne’s breasts and shoulders, holds her tighter against the morning. For Frankie, she has set aside the first few hours of her Fridays, her days of relative rest, free of classes and appointments with her mentor in the Education Department. Leave it to the paternalistic US government, which requires Frankie to show up with his birth certificate in order to obtain a document that allows him to escape it, to disturb this one brief stretch of peace.

  “So, what you really mean is, your family hates the Irish,” says Kelly Anne playfully. “That’s why I can’t go to Italy with the Grassos.”

  “They do hate the Irish,” Frankie says. “And you can go with us. I’m just saying you’ll regret it. You’ve heard of the Warren Commission? That was nothing compared to the grilling you’ll get.”

  “I’m a big hit with families.”

  Frankie can’t tell how serious she is. They’ve been dating only three months. She has zero funds for a plane ticket. She’d never miss Easter with her beloved clan of McDonalds. And yet she’s been passive-aggressively inviting herself on his family trip since Prima rejiggered the schedule and sent him his ticket certified mail.

  “Here’s a plan,” she says. “I come home with you on the twenty-fifth. I meet your family, turn on the charm, flirt a little with your brother-in-law, talk recipes and gardening with your sister, they get inspired, and before you know it they’re paying my way.”

  “I don’t think so,” says Frankie. “This trip’s all about family. And you’re not.” He’s aiming for matter-of-fact, but it comes off harsh. Does she really think three months gets you a seat at the table?

  “Not yet,” she says.

  Sometimes he forgets she’s a Catholic girl of twenty-two who’s seen too many romantic comedies.

  “I’ll meet them anytime, anywhere,” she continues, “but no pressure.” She tugs on his earlobe. “Well, OK, some pressure.”

  Frankie’s instinct tells him that this thing with Kelly Anne McDonald, whatever it is, won’t survive the semester, let alone her summer internship at a bombed-out youth shelter in Jersey. Here’s how he sees it going: over the next few months, before and after they part ways at the end of the school year, she’ll write him letters and call every other night, and maybe even persuade him to rendezvous with her in Philly or New York some June weekend, but by the end of July the interest on both sides will have moldered. They are similar creatures of habit, he and Kelly Anne, unsuited to the randomness and unpredictability of summer. He can see all this as clearly as the sad face of James Dean, which stares back at him from the life-size poster on her dorm room wall. Before long, Frankie’s cynicism and persistent flirtation with bleakness will have exhausted Kelly Anne; likewise, her sunny enthusiasms and dogged faith in the essential beauty of humankind will have bred contempt in him. Which is why he should enjoy her body and her sunshine and her adorable dabble with him now, while it still pleases them both. Which is why there is no need for her to meet his family on March 25 or anytime after.

  “Call me,” she says after he has showered and dressed and slung his satchel over his shoulder. “Let me know how it goes.” On his way out, she hands him a fistful of quarters from the top of her dresser. “There are lots of pay phones downtown.”

  “You’re going to make a great teacher,” he says.

  “And for the record, I already have my passport.”

  It had taken two months of movie dates and Socratic questioning and hand-in-hand walks through Harvard Square for Kelly Anne to agree to sleep with him, and since that night (February 1, a date to which she refers with gravity), she has shown alarming flashes of wifeliness. More than once, she’s braved the dorm kitchen to cook him real dinners—Irish stew, broiled salmon, turkey tetrazzini—and served it to him on real plates, with stainless steel silverware and linen napkins, in the lounge. She’s called him from the Rite Aid pay phone to ask which toothpaste and soap he preferred, since she was restocking and might as well get something they both liked.

  The window for telling her about Birch has closed. Before February 1, she might have found the information intriguing and sexily dangerous; after February 1, it would count as a betrayal, a symptom of his rotting soul. She has
given herself to him, and in return she expects his loyalty, if not his consistent emotional availability. As a lover, Kelly Anne is, surprisingly, as wild and generous and attentive and thorough as Birch is impatient and demanding. Sparing no part of him, she approaches each act with the assured serenity of a sculptor or a surgeon. One day she will find a better man, her own age, to spoil.

  As he walks across the BC campus, past the towering cathedral, through the dissipating fog, a poem comes to him. The first lines: “Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; / In my own way, and with my full consent.” Edna St. Vincent Millay, Frankie remembers, minor but notable. The poem had spoken to him, though he’d yet to lose anyone he’d loved in a romantic way. The next lines: “Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely / Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.” Even then, he’d found that metaphor fitting: relationship as sovereign in an execution cart. He has forgotten the middle, but the last lines go something like, “Should I outlive this anguish—and men do— / I shall have only good to say of you.” Sentimental, yes, Millay, but a fine craftswoman, like a weaver of intricate but tacky baskets. Frankie turns, walks backward, as if he can see Kelly Anne from here—sitting up in her bed, textbook on her lap even though it’s her day off, a pack of multicolored highlighters on the pillow where Frankie’s head just lay, a mug of English breakfast tea steaming on the windowsill—and repeats the last nine words of Millay’s poem. I will have only good to say of you. There is no sadness to outlive, of course—not yet, not yet—but Frankie’s philosophy has always been to expect the worst, to steel himself, to inoculate.

  To that end, he reaches into his satchel, finds the smallest interior pouch, unsnaps it, and fingers the bag of pot that Chris Curran, the stoner medievalist, the Big Winner, unloaded on him after the dissertation fellowship convinced him he should quit once and for all. The bag had been full when Curran handed it to him in the West Hall men’s room two months ago, but since then Chris has dropped by the apartment more than a few times to “say hey,” his code for a raid of his old stash. Rarely has Frankie joined in. He’s had no urge. The drug makes him giddy and slow witted and excitable—in other words, useless if he’s to sleep or get work done or satisfy two demanding women. To brave the passport office, on the other hand, to wait in line with the masses of the American traveling public, Frankie couldn’t ask for a more useful tool.