“I shouldn’t be here,” she says, her eyes finally open.
“No shit,” he says. “That just occurred to you? If you leave now, I swear—”
She scoots away from him, lowers her head. “I’m a mess, Frankie. The human equivalent of this filthy room.”
“Embrace the filth.” He tries again for the button.
“I want you to tell me something,” she says.
“Oh God,” he says. “I thought we weren’t ruining it.”
She straightens her back, rolls her eyes.
“Look,” Frankie says. “I’m still pissed off. You’ve got all this guilt. I’ve got all this rage. Let’s channel it.” He smiles. “Then I’ll tell you what you want me to tell you.”
“I’m serious.”
He sits back on his ankles, still straddling her. They’re barefoot but otherwise fully clothed. “Fine, Rhonda. What do you want?”
“I want to know how I’m seen.”
“How you’re seen? Which means . . . ?”
She turns her head toward the TV. “This morning, when I was putting my T-shirt on and fixing my hair and deciding if I could get away with these girly sandals, I thought, for the millionth time, It’s a costume, I’m playing a part. That’s no big shocker, of course; we both know everyone performs their genders, blah blah blah. Then it occurred to me—again, not the first time—how transparent the part is, how obvious I am, and that people see me as this—” She stops, holds out her hands. “But I couldn’t fill in the blank. I thought, Rebel? No. Agitator? Maybe. Each word felt so hollow. Because the part I see myself playing, Frankie, is truly subversive and uncompromising and stubborn and exacting, not just with my students, with everybody. But what if people really see me as a sappy old throwback, like Maud Benson, or a small-minded narcissist, like Lexus? What if this role I try so hard to cultivate, and reinforce in my work and my classes and my home life, such as it is—what if nobody’s buying it? Because we never get called on our bullshit, not in a serious way at least, not without the person apologizing afterward and saying, You know I didn’t mean that, and then we forget or dismiss it, even though it was real.”
“Well—” Frankie says, but she keeps talking.
“So I thought, Shouldn’t I know for sure how people see me, so I can change or adjust or something? And I realized—this was the traumatic part—I had no one I could trust to tell me the truth. Nobody without a stake in impressing me or telling me what I wanted to hear. Then today I saw you in the department—you were in the doorway of the lounge with one of those yappy work-study kids—and I thought, I can trust Frankie, I always trusted Frankie. Frankie will tell me the truth so I can stop making a fool of myself.”
She’s not backsliding, he thinks; it’s punishment she’s after. He’s not quite ready to give her what she wants. Plus, he’s never been able to lie to her.
“You want honesty?”
“Yes.”
“The problem is,” he says, “I see you exactly the way you say you want to be seen. Subversive, exacting, brilliant, all that. That’s how I describe you to—well, I can’t talk about you with anyone, but that’s how I would describe you if I could.”
“That’s just you. What about everybody else? Your classmates, and Lexus, and Gadkari?” Out of nowhere she’s almost crying.
“I’d add one word to your self-description,” he says. “Selfish. Ungenerous. OK, two words. They shouldn’t surprise you. But those aren’t exactly negatives, or inconsistent, in our field.”
“What about everybody else, Frankie?”
“Jesus, why do you care so much all of a sudden?”
“Just tell me.”
He thinks for a moment. He has her on the hook. This can go one way or the other. “Everybody else, too, then, as far as I know,” he says, which is true enough. “You’re not a fraud, Rhonda. I mean, everyone’s a fraud, but you’re less of a fraud than most.” She turns to look at him. “You did screw me over, though. Twice. You even broke my heart a little. Not just when you stood me up. Before then, a bunch of times.” He leans back, props himself up on his palms. “But hey, you could say that’s my own fault. Since I know how selfish and ungenerous you are, I should have seen it coming.”
“Now you’re being a prick.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted? You said so yourself.”
“Not for you to act like a child.”
“I am a child.”
“You’re making fun of me. But you’re better than that. It’s not like you.” She tries to slide out from under him, but his legs have her pinned.
“Tell me what I’m like, then,” he says.
“This isn’t about you.”
“Come on,” he says. “I can take it. Besides, we’ll never see each other again. Today is the last day you’ll be in my bed.”
“You sound like your soap opera.”
“This is the soap opera.”
“Fine,” she says. “Fifty words or less? Frankie Grasso is a fundamentally decent, deceptively sentimental, overly deferential scared little Catholic boy who misses his mommy.”
“No argument there.”
“So this is the last time?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says. “So say what you’re gonna say.”
His prediction: In a few minutes, after they’re done punishing each other, and she stops crying, and his legs release their grip, she’ll go for his fly, and their clothes will come off, and they’ll fuck two or three times for old time’s sake, until all the poison’s out. By the end of it, their unprecedented candor will have made them indifferent to each other and snuffed whatever electricity remained. Already her need for validation, her lack of self-awareness, has diminished her in his eyes. He longs for the swaggering Birch, the one who, not long before, behind her dark sunglasses, said, No talking, don’t ruin it.
“OK,” she says. “Let me add this, then. You see yourself as a serious scholar, that’s the part you’re playing, that’s how you think people see you, but really—and Gadkari would tell you this, too, if he had any balls—you’re a dilettante. That missing piece you keep looking for in your dissertation doesn’t exist. There’s not a text or a lens in the world that can make these pages cohere.” She picks up one of the Ngugi pages that has fallen onto the floor. “The more parentheses you jam into your words, Frankie, the less meaning they have, not more. You have to decide on the meaning you want.”
There is no exhausted relief. No indifference. There’s only him telling her that she has misread his work, she’s always misread it, that even when she used to praise it she was misreading it, that she’s got blind spots and a lack of vision and, worse, a mean, ungenerous little heart. There’s her trying to make light of it all, to say that this, too—the riling up—is part of the act, is why she came, is what she’s missed.
“I feel better now,” she says, “now that it’s all out in the open.”
She goes for his fly—he was right about that—but he pushes her hand away. His body won’t cooperate anyhow. He stumbles out of bed and kicks his way to the front porch. He leans over the railing, the sun on his face, waiting for her to come up behind him, lean her body alongside his, say, I didn’t really mean it, Frankie. He expects and deserves that, at the very least, even if it’s a lie.
Instead he hears footsteps on the stairs. Moments later, he watches her walk down Stowe toward the college. It’s like she’s walking in slow motion. At any moment, he expects her to turn around, take it all back. What a fool. She stops at the intersection, turns, and gives a little noncommittal wave, like a princess in a motorcade. Then she walks on. Good-bye, I don’t love you, good-bye.
That night, at 11:01, he gives his mother some news. He’s coming home for a little while, a month, maybe until Labor Day, who knows? He’d mentally blocked out August for the Italy trip, anyway, a long time ago, and now that the trip’s not going to happen, he might as well spend the time with her. Prima could use his help driving her places and dealing with her house; h
e could spend some time with Ryan at the Al Di Là. (What he doesn’t tell her: that Wilmington’s two hours from Newark, New Jersey, where a girl he likes is spending the summer.) Not that he’ll be socializing, he says. He’ll be sequestered in his old bedroom, where he’ll put the “finishing touches” on his dissertation—“I’m so close, Ma. I can feel it. Wait till you see how many pages”—and if she doesn’t mind, if she’s feeling up to it, could she do his laundry and keep up his room a little?
“Are you kidding?” she says. “You, home? For the whole summer? Did you hear that, Antonio?”
His father picks up the extension. “Hear what?”
“Francesco’s coming home.”
“I said the summer at most,” Frankie says. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”
“You don’t know what you do for me right now,” she says to Frankie. “You answer my prayers.”
“He wants a job,” says his father. To Frankie: “I told you, one day you’ll get tired of living on prestige.”
“I’m so happy,” says his mother.
It doesn’t take him long to pack his dirty and half-dirty clothes into his suitcase, stuff his knapsack with books and a toothbrush, and write a brief note to Anita. First thing in the morning, he buys a round-trip ticket on Amtrak, using his own credit card. This decision belongs to him, not his parents. He keeps the return date open. By the end of July, he’ll be back in Boston; if not, then Labor Day at the very latest, in time for the fall term and his yawning English 101 kids with their two-dollar pens. Until then, it will be him and his pages and his old room with air conditioning and the sailboat wallpaper and a box of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and his mother and father’s daily benedictions. More than enough to live on.
At the campus computer center, he prints out two clean copies of his dissertation chapters. “Wow,” says the sari-clad girl at the help window when she hands them to him. “You wrote all these?”
“Yup.”
“Is it, like, your final?”
“Most of it.”
“There’s more?”
“Maybe.”
“How long’s it have to be?”
“About two hundred.”
She looks at him.
“Most people have the opposite problem I do.”
Maybe that’s it, he thinks, walking back across campus, checking his (empty) West Hall mailbox for the last time, taking the long way around the admissions building. Maybe Frankie Grasso will always have the opposite problem. His fellow scholars are blocked, but he can’t shut the floodgates. His friends resent their parents; Frankie courts them like lovers. His lovers want to be courted; Frankie resents them for not pinning him down with brute force. It’s all so postcolonial, really, he thinks, walking down the engraved stone steps toward College, this buried desire for (benign?) domination by your oppressor, this ambivalence toward home rule, this exceptionalism. Or not. The connections are half-baked, the metaphors tortured. They’ve always been, according to Birch, according, apparently, to Gadkari. He has a long way to go to make sense of himself, of what he’s creating, of the firings and misfirings in his brain. And now, to figure it all out, he’s going to his parents’ house, the place he fled in order to gain clarity.
10 Volare
FRANKIE SITS ON his mother’s worktable, legs dangling, while she irons his shirt. She and his father are throwing him a party tonight, and he is glad. Officially, the party is for both Frankie and Ryan, to welcome back the son and wish the grandson a happy twenty-second birthday, and for the first time this year, all the Grassos will be together for a happy reason.
They’re expected at the Al Di Là in a half hour, but Maddalena doesn’t rush. She takes each crease with passion and precision, bent like a pianist over the crumpled button-down he extricated from his suitcase. Say what you want, Birch, Frankie thinks, I’m taken care of here at Casa Grasso. Call it patronage. Call him a mama’s boy, or developmentally arrested, or sentimental. Say he can’t be serious. He’ll embrace every epithet. He has his mother and father close, and work to do, and Kelly Anne driving down from Newark, and that is all good and right.
Frankie has always loved his mother’s workroom. In college he’d drive his laundry the half hour home to her once a month, and she’d spend most of her day washing and ironing while he wrote his papers upstairs at the kitchen table. He’d come down every couple of hours to keep her company, sit for a while on her long padded table, and listen to her stories of the village and Vito Leone’s bike and the olive grove, and of working in various sweatshops in the fifties alongside Greeks and divorced ladies and “colored people,” and of his father’s tight fist and stubbornness, his frustrating tics and tricks. The years were a jumble to her, even then, while Frankie lived in the narrow and buzzing present of a college kid. Week after week he tried to explain what he was learning in his classes, but the fancifulness of the subjects, their disconnect from anything she found familiar or applicable in the world she’d just brought to life in her stories, embarrassed him; so he stuck to character sketches of his floor mates and profs, whom she imagined as more spoiled and distinguished, respectively, than they were. She’d show him the drapes she was sewing for a lady she met at church; he’d show her the photos in the campus directory and his byline in the monthly newspaper. She’d show him the missing ruby in the ring her mother gave her when she left for America; he’d show her the broken zipper on his jacket.
“What rich material!” she says now, spreading the collar of his shirt flat. Frankie found it at a vintage store on Newbury Street, convinced by the owner that Allen Ginsberg once wore it in an author photo. “I’m scared to ruin it.”
“How much you pay for that?” asks his father. He’s appeared in the doorway, at a distance, arms crossed.
“He got a good deal, I bet,” says his mother. She looks him up and down. He’s wearing a T-shirt with yellow stains in the armpits and green army pants three sizes too big, with frays at the cuffs. No shoes. His socks have a hole in the big toe. “You know clothes don’t mean too much to Frankie. He cares about his inside.” She taps her forehead.
“That’s true enough, I guess,” Frankie says.
His father is staring at him. “You’re OK up there, though?” he asks. “In Boston, I mean. You’re happy?”
“It’s not my job to be happy, Dad,” he says.
“Why you bring up Boston now?” says his mother. “He’s home. Forget Boston.”
Antonio ignores this. “What I’m asking you is, was it the right thing to do, all that graduate school? You’ll get a good job soon, at least?”
“Is this really the best time to discuss my career path?” Frankie says. “How many times have I explained it to you? I’ll get a job, but it’ll be a shitty one for a few years, and I’ll make no money, and the college’ll work me to death, and then eventually I’ll get what’s called tenure, and then I’ll be all set.”
No college would hire a man in those pants, Maddalena thinks. He looks like a Vietnam vet. Antonio goes on. “And you’ll make what, a hundred thousand a year, with the summers off? That’s what some professor customer told me he makes, and you know what he teaches about? Flowers!”
“Not quite. More like fifty, if I’m lucky. That’s guy’s probably a botanist, Dad. And he’s old, right? The longer you teach, the more you make.”
“Fifty thousand? With all those degrees? You could make more as a bricklayer.”
“But then I’d be a bricklayer,” he says.
Frankie and me, we’re snobs, thinks Maddalena, but in different ways. It was her doing, and she doesn’t regret it. It makes him want a better life than she had, slaving over sewing machines and irons, the tips of her fingers bleeding from the needles. Still, though, there’s honor in laying bricks. The blocks fit together. At the end of the day, you have a house, a wall at least, that will stand up after you’re dead. What will Frankie have?
“I won’t get any job at all if I don’t finish my dissertation this su
mmer,” he says, putting on the Ginsberg shirt. “That’s where you come in.” He walks to the other end of the room, checks himself in the mirror. He looks older than twenty-seven. Neither Birch nor Kelly Anne has ever seemed to mind that he doesn’t care much about his outsides. His hair is not as thick on top as it is in the photos on the basement shelf. His skin is pale. Is this dullness professorial? Is he wizened? Should he take afternoon breaks and walk around the park? Prima told him something recently about vitamin D stimulating the mind.
“Hurry up,” his father says on the way up the stairs. “I don’t want to be late. We have a big party coming in after we leave.”
Maddalena makes the sign of the cross, as she’s been doing lately, every time someone she loves leaves the room. She can protect them while they’re in her sight, but once they’re not she calls on God. It’s a lot of work, all this calling and watching, and it’s making her very tired.
She’s onto ironing Frankie’s dress pants now, the ones he wore to the Oak Room. As he waits, he notices two books on a shelf behind her sewing machine. They’re shoved into a cracked plastic desk organizer along with a motley assortment of pens, pencils, crayons, and markers. He pages through one of the books, word games for kids ages three and up. Next to a drawing of a cat is the letter C, followed by two blank lines; next to a dog is a blank line, followed by an O, followed by another blank line. The handwriting belongs to his mother. She must be practicing letters, learning to spell basic words: COW, MOUSE, PONY. Many of the answers are wrong. The ink she’s using keeps running out. He looks over at her, but she’s so focused on his pants that she doesn’t see what he’s reading.
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