All This Talk of Love

by Christopher Castellani

  He walks several blocks through the hilly neighborhoods of Tudor mansions and wide, sloping lawns that surround BC, looking for a gardener’s shack or a patch of densely packed trees, but can find neither. There are stone pillars and gates at the feet of the driveways. Daffodil beds surround the mailboxes. He thinks of Birch, who likely lives in a house like this, Dr. Z. having made a fortune in the private sector before sliding down the ladder to academia. She calls Frankie’s Stowe Street apartment “Iron Gates” after its pitiful attempt at a grand second-floor terrace. In the beginning of their entanglement, back when the stakes were low, Frankie and Birch had role-played caretaker and lady at Iron Gates and used to joke that they’d have been better off as a couple in nineteenth-century Britain, where people knew their place.

  The last time he saw Lady Chatterley, there was no conversation, not a single word, to record in his journal. He found the note in his mailbox, hoofed it home, left the front door open, stripped down to his boxers, and beckoned her into his room; less than a half hour later she was fully dressed and grunting good-bye. No more repeat performances, no more pillow talk. D. H. Lawrence might have approved of this exchange, and Frankie can’t say it doesn’t scratch a certain itch that even Kelly Anne’s sweetly ferocious stamina can’t reach, but he misses the words. They’d had the words back in the early days, when they would spend equal time in the sack and at the kitchen table, gossiping, revisiting arguments from her African lit seminar. Obscure lines from Soyinka and Spivak and Salih spilled forth from Birch’s lips as naturally as her name and address. The Professor’s mind had thrilled Frankie before he’d even registered the litheness of her body, and at first he’d felt he’d won both on a game show, the grand prize! Now her body is a consolation that fails to console.

  He turns the corner and ends up on Commonwealth Avenue. There’s a gas station–minimart that backs up to some woods. He buys a tin of breath mints and a lighter and trudges down a faint path through the trees, a shortcut no one seems to have taken in a while. The ground is hard, the leaves stiff and cold. March in Boston. Under the branches of a dried-up pine, he fishes Curran’s bowl from his satchel, packs and sparks it, and fills his lungs with smoke. He holds in the smoke as long as he can, then coughs it out. When Curran does this, the entire process is as smooth and natural as peeling a banana, and afterward Frankie notices no change at all in the guy’s demeanor. That’s what makes Curran an addict, he supposes. Frankie’s own inability to stop coughing at this moment confirms his amateur status, as does the cloudiness that immediately fills his head. Still, the woods, as he finds the trail again, go as pleasantly flat and distant as the set of a school play, and he is the lone actor stepping across the stage.

  He arrives at the passport office on Causeway Street in time for the lunch rush, takes a number, and waits on a bench among a crowd of surprisingly normal-looking people. He expected the blighted supplicants of the DMV, but of course anyone in line at the passport office seeks to abandon the United States for another culture, for a while at least, and that alone lends them virtue.

  He sits, red pen in hand, rereading the chapter on Midnight’s Children, which he’s finally finished, twice revised, and had peer-reviewed by two of his cohorts. Try as he might, he can’t find a single example to cut. No matter what his cohorts say, if the example wasn’t essential to his argument, he wouldn’t have included it in the first place. The chapter is ready. The other chapters—some Birch-approved, some Birch-ignored, each skimmed in recent days with the help of his red pen—are also ready. He’s approaching the next phase of his work, which will require him to choose the right chapters to put in the diss, then make resonant links among them. He will start this next phase the day he returns from Italy. In the meantime, he’ll attempt to take what’s known to the wider world as a “vacation,” even though he’s ill equipped for such a thing. If he didn’t have the Rushdie chapter with him today and was forced to sit alone on this bench with his undirected thoughts, he’d have succumbed to panic.

  When his number is called, the agent, a possum-faced guy with cheeks so dry they look burnt, greets him with the charm and enthusiasm of a cigarette machine. Still, he takes Frankie’s money and DS-11 form and birth certificate and IDs and eyebrow-ring-less photo and does a bunch of joyless stamping and typing. He hands back the IDs with a receipt and says to expect the passport to arrive in the mail in four to six weeks.

  “Four to six weeks?”

  He points to the part of the form that clearly states, PASSPORTS ISSUED 4–6 WEEKS FROM DATE OF SIGNATURE. “Is that a problem?”

  His heart skips a beat. “I’m supposed to leave for a family trip on March twenty-fifth!”

  The man looks at the calendar, looks back at him, wrinkles his nose.

  Frankie’s eyes well up. For a moment it’s just the two of them in a duel of stares. Except Possum-Face has all the power, and Frankie can only beg, though he’s filled with rage. This smug man will keep him from his family, from walking his mother through the olive grove. Without this man’s help, Frankie will not be there when she walks up the hill and, for the first time in fifty years, finds her brother and sister and first love waiting for her at the top of it. They are hoping for a miracle in Santa Cecilia, for time to go in reverse, for her to find her memories, but Frankie won’t see it, won’t make the trip he’s come not only to want but to need. He hasn’t quite known this until now, when it’s about to be taken away. “Oh God,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “You don’t understand. My mom—she’s sick. This might be the last time she can come with us. Isn’t there anything you can do—”

  “Sir,” says Possum-Face, “this is a regional office. You can have your passport today if you need it. Most people don’t. It takes just a few minutes.”

  “Today?” Frankie says. He rubs his eyes. “Jesus. Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I was about to,” he says kindly. “You didn’t give me a chance.” And then Possum-Face smiles in that earnest way, with his lips turned in—a smile that says, I’m my mother’s son, too—and when he does, he’s not so ugly, not so burnt.

  “Thank you,” Frankie says. If there were a tip jar, he’d empty his pockets.

  When Frankie does reach into his pocket, on the way out of the passport building onto blustery Causeway Street, he finds one of Kelly Anne’s quarters. She expects an update. But he knows what she’ll say if he gives her one: that he should have sent in his application weeks ago when she reminded him, that he should see this as further evidence that he needs her in Italy to manage his affairs. He checks his watch: twelve thirty. Birch is in office hours. She holds them on Friday afternoons because they are the least popular with students. He finds a pay phone, dials her West Hall number. When it rings, he hangs up. The phone eats the quarter.

  There must be a Bruins game at the Boston Garden tonight because, all around him, packs of grown men malinger in gold jerseys, shouting at each other. Frankie doesn’t come to this part of the city, with its dingy sports bars and screeching elevated trolleys, unless he’s on his way to an Italian restaurant in the North End, but even those visits are rare. He avoids the Italian section. All those restaurants, one after the other up and down the narrow streets, remind him of the Al Di Là, except in none of them would he find his father sweet-talking the customers or his mother adjusting the drapes or Zio Giulio with his accordion or his ten-year-old self hiding under a booth. He certainly won’t find his father’s homemade pasta and veal cutlets and garlicky sautéed spinach, or his mother’s frittelli and deep-fried smelts, all prepared with hundred-year-old recipes and fresh ingredients and love. When he’s home, Frankie devours every dish his parents set before him, thinking, with each bite of the endangered and unrepeatable flavors, that they will soon disappear, irretrievably, and the rest of his life will be spent in longing. Does Ryan, who will eat at the Al Di Là every day this summer, and possibly for the rest of his life, understand how lucky he is?

  He hits a 7-Eleven, buys a large bag of salt-and
-vinegar chips, and stands at the window overlooking the street, stuffing the chips in his mouth like a junkie. Then he buys a chili dog with extra chili.

  He calls her again. This time, he lets it ring, and his fear comes true: she answers.

  “This is Professor Birch.”

  “Hey” or “hello”? He chooses, “Hey there, it’s Frankie. Are you with a student?”

  “No,” she says. “Students don’t like me.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  He hears the sound of her office door closing. “Are you calling for a reason? It’s Friday, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s Friday,” he says. “I just—this is a business call, actually. I’d like to discuss my diss soon. Just the diss, that’s it. We haven’t really, you know, talked lately. About that.”

  “Well, these are my office hours. I’m on the clock, so let’s talk.” She must sense that this stings him, because right after she says it, her voice changes. “Or did you want to come by? No reason why you shouldn’t come by.”

  “I’m not on campus,” he says. “I’m downtown. Are you free in, like, two hours? I know that’s off the clock . . .”

  “I’m driving Amos to the airport,” she says. “He’s going to some conference in Perugia. That’s fair, right? We go to Pittsburgh and Saint Louis, and the engineers go to Tuscany.”

  “Umbria,” says Frankie.

  “What?”

  “Perugia’s in Umbria.”

  He hasn’t told her about his own trip to Italy. He doesn’t want to hear her reaction to it. He wants her take on his work, not on his parents and siblings. On the rare occasions he mentions them, he can almost see her mind spark, eager to pounce with her expert analysis of his family dynamics. What he’s pieced together of Birch’s family—a distant and long-dead father, a nervous mother remarried to an insurance salesman in Cincinnati, a sister in Lansing—calls to mind one of those bleak Rust Belt upbringings people of substance spend the rest of their lives renouncing and American novelists try, lamely, again and again, to illuminate. No wonder she is attracted to the tragedy-marked immigrant saga of the Grassos.

  “Next Friday, then,” Frankie says, though he doubts he can wait that long to share with her his newest idea, the one he began to form at the grimy 7-Eleven window between the bag of chips and the chili dog. The idea will require one or two new chapters, but he thinks that he can mine two of his existing ones for material and that, moreover, the idea will help create links among the other chapters, if he can nail the introduction. He wants to get to work on this idea right now.

  She must have heard the wistfulness in his voice, because after he says, “Next Friday, then,” she goes soft again. “How about this, Frankie. Have you ever been to the Oak Room?”

  “I don’t think I know what that is.”

  “It’s a restaurant. In the Fairmont Copley hotel. The prices are obscene. We can meet there, you and me, tonight, for dinner. It’s a good place for talking.”

  “Isn’t that . . . very public?”

  “Nobody in the English Department can afford to eat there, trust me. Someone got Amos a gift card a hundred years ago and he’s never used it. I’m sure he won’t notice if I take it.”

  “Do his friends go there? What if they see us?”

  “I’m your adviser. You’ve just gotten your PhD. Congratulations! We’re celebrating! Et cetera.”

  It’s the least Birchy idea she’s ever had. He can’t resist. “If you’re OK with it—”

  “It’s my suggestion, so obviously I’m OK with it.”

  They agree to meet at seven. He has five and a half hours to kill, so he heads to the BPL, conveniently located next door to the Fairmont Copley, to check out a few titles the university library wouldn’t have. His plan is to take a break and call Kelly Anne to update her on the passport, but then he loses himself in the stacks and, while examining the bottom row of the lit-crit section, dozes off on the floor. When he wakes, it’s 6:40, he’s got slobber on his lips and carpet burn on his right cheek, and an enormous homeless man is hovering over him with his arms contemptuously crossed. By the time he makes it through the circulation-desk line and rearranges his satchel to stuff five new books in, it’s too late to call Kelly Anne, and besides, what would he tell her he was up to?

  He arrives on time, if a bit woozy and disheveled, at the Fairmont Copley Plaza. It takes him a few minutes of wandering the glittery, gilt hallways to find the Oak Room, but otherwise Frankie is well within the margin of error punctualitywise. Birch runs her life like Mussolini ran the Italian train system, and grows exponentially more peevish with every minute someone keeps her waiting.

  This time, though, he’s the peevish one. Seven fifteen comes. Seven thirty. Twice he asks the maître d’ to confirm the reservation, and both times, yes, it’s for a party of two at 7 p.m. Name: Césaire. Birch’s favorite theorist. Seven forty-five. Eight. Dozens of other reservations arrive and cast down their disapproving eyes on Frankie, waiting on the leather banquette in a faded blue oxford unbuttoned to reveal his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, obsessively checking his watch. Eight fifteen. He could read the books in his satchel, but he’s too angry to focus. “Can I use your phone?” he asks.

  Frankie’s fear—that Kelly Anne has been waiting for him—comes true: she picks up on the first ring. “Where’ve you been?” she asks. “I was getting worried.”

  “I’m taking you out to dinner,” he says. “Have you ever been to the Oak Room?”

  She hasn’t, she says, but she’s heard of it. He rebooks a table for Grasso for eight thirty, tells the maître d’ he’ll be right back, and walks across the square to Boylston Street. At Marshalls he purchases a white button-down shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He tries on the cheapest pair of dress shoes, but even these are too expensive, and besides, he’s already compromised too much for the sake of the maître d’ and his snooty assemblage of diners. His Converses will do just fine. He changes in the fitting room and stuffs his jeans and T-shirt into his satchel.

  He returns to the Oak Room to find Kelly Anne already waiting for him at the bar. Walking toward her, he is struck again by his gut-level attraction to her all-American looks; this surprises him now, as it did that first night on Amtrak, because he’s spent much of his adult life chasing the exotic. Tonight she’s pulled her hair back and wears a simple blue-and-white polka-dot dress, her gold cross front and center at her throat. She’s half on, half off the barstool, legs delicately crossed, drinking through a straw from a pint glass of ice water. When she sees the scrubbed-up version of Frankie walk through the door, she covers her mouth. Then she stands, adjusts her dress over her thighs, and holds out her arms.

  “Look at you!” she says as Frankie steps into her embrace. “What’s going on?”

  He shrugs. “I’m not sure. I just thought, For one night, let’s be adults. See what it’s like.”

  “Well,” she says, extending her hand. “We’ll pretend this isn’t my prom dress, then. Let’s say we bought it at Saks. It cost three thousand dollars.”

  “And I’m the chair of the Department of Engineering,” Frankie says. “I saw you across the crowded campus center.”

  “That’s creepy.”

  “Is it? You’re not a student, though, remember? You’re in the Ed Department. You’re a professor, too. Not the chair, though. Not yet.” He smiles.

  “An ed professor in a three-thousand-dollar dress?” says Kelly Anne.

  The maître d’, surely eavesdropping, waits impatiently with their menus. They follow him to a table in the back corner, likely on account of the sneakers. Frankie doesn’t care. The chair backs are padded with thick, satiny material that reminds him of his mother’s drapes. They’re surrounded by oak walls on all sides and those little brass light fixtures that stick out—he can’t remember what they’re called—and then Kelly Anne says, “Sconces. We’re eating in a room with sconces.”

  He folds his napkin over his lap. A fern tickles the back of his head.
He’s starving. While he was waiting for Birch on the banquette, he read from a thick coffee-table book of clipped magazine and newspaper articles, all of which argued that the experience of dinner at the Oak Room is singular and unmatched. One writer devoted three paragraphs to the Dover sole alone, and so, when Frankie sees it on the menu, he orders two. And Waldorf salads. And a manhattan. Kelly Anne, not a drinker and only recently twenty-one, orders a Coke.

  They discuss her day (busy), the passport office (no sweat), and the prices on the menu (one decimal point off, surely? Should they bring this to the waiter’s attention?). But Frankie has a sky-high limit on his credit card, and at this point, who cares? They’re on the cusp of spring. His diss is in its final stages, thanks to the New Idea. He’ll ditch Birch, as an adviser and a lover, once and for all, now that she’s made her blatant disregard for him abundantly clear. Until now, he hasn’t minded being a kept man, but being stood up at the Oak Room changes a person. He’d imagined he and Birch would discuss the New Idea over wine the way they used to discuss it over cereal, like adults, then have sex in the oversize lockable bathroom, among the fresh flowers and Elizabeth Grady scents, like rock stars. But she didn’t give them that chance. She could still show up, of course, catch him canoodling with Kelly Anne, about whom she knows nothing, and make some sort of scene, but Frankie’s aware of the more likely scenario: she wussed out and didn’t have the balls to tell him.