Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  “We do plenty of weddings. In fact, I’ve even been thinking about starting a little wedding planner business on the side. I’m always helping girls find a caterer and pick out their bridesmaids’ dresses. I think it could be a great expansion.”

  “I think they’re anti-Semitic.” Nora never listened to me.

  “That’s crazy. Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Oh,” she said, looking absently toward the candy dish on the coffee table. “I’m out with people all the time. I hear things.”

  “You hear things from your father and they aren’t true.”

  “You’re sticking up for them.”

  “I’m not sticking up, but you can’t call someone anti-Semitic just because they don’t like you. Are we anti-Catholic?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, what’s the difference?”

  Nora stood up and somehow managed to look down at me slightly even though I was taller than she was. “You just don’t understand.”

  “Jesus,” I said. Then the doorbell rang and I was awash with gratitude. “I’m going out to dinner. If you want to wait here for me, fine.” I went into the kitchen and kissed Tony and Sarah good night. Sandy looked at me wistfully for a minute and so I leaned over and kissed her, too.

  Nora had let Gloria in and they were standing in the living room laughing, the best of friends. “Time to go,” I said.

  “Maybe I could come,” Nora said. “Alex has a meeting tonight and I don’t have any plans. It could be fun, just the girls.”

  Gloria took a deep breath and put her hand on Nora’s shoulder. “Honey,” she said, “forgive me, but I need your mom all to myself tonight.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Gloria shrugged and managed to look both hopeless and brave. “I’ve just got some things I need to talk to her about. She’s such an angel to me, you know. You’re lucky to have such a wonderful mother.”

  “Hi, Gloria,” Sandy called from the kitchen.

  “Hi, sweetheart. Kiss the kids for me, we’re running.” Then Gloria put one arm around my shoulder and manhandled me out the door before any further discussion could evolve.

  The night was crisp and clear, but there were never many stars to speak of in Somerville. We threw out too much light of our own and washed them away. I got into Gloria’s Plymouth and she all but floored it getting off my street. “I thought you were just being a wimp wanting me to pick you up tonight, but that felt like a regular jailbreak.”

  “They’re watching me.”

  “I should say so. I think we should drive around for a while just to make sure Nora isn’t having us tailed. Do you know where she got those cute shoes?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t even had enough time to be nervous.”

  “Well, you look good.”

  Gloria was the one who looked good. She had had her eyes done last year, and while I swore I had no interest in plastic surgery, I had to admit the results were impressive.

  “I remember I used to tell my mother I was spending the night at your house in tenth grade when I was sneaking out with Jerry Shapiro. You were such a good cover. My mother always thought you were a wonderful influence on me.”

  “I was once a wonderful influence,” I said.

  “I’m just glad to be able to return the favor. You need to have a little more fun, Julie. You look pretty boxed in, if you ask me.” Gloria pulled up in a red zone in front of the CVS. It was ten minutes until seven. “Do you need me to pick you up?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll get home fine.”

  “Or maybe you won’t.” She leaned over and gave me a kiss. “Think positive.”

  I wondered what I could have been thinking of, asking a man to meet me in a store with fluorescent overhead lighting. Slowly, casually, I began to make my way up and down the aisles, trying not to look so incredibly suspicious that I would be arrested for shoplifting before he even got there. In the makeup aisle bottles of tan foundation claimed to make your skin young and dewy. There was a line of nail polish called Fetish. I picked up a tube of lipstick called French Kiss and then put it back in its plastic slot. Skin creams offered the miracles of youth, the overnight face-lift, and an age-recovery complex. The magazine aisle was not kinder. “What Your Mother Never Told You About Multiple Orgasms,” “How to Make Him Beg for More,” “Great Sex at 20, 30, and 40.” I stopped and picked that one up. What happened to great sex at fifty? And what about sixty? Why was there no “Great Sex at 60”? Were we finished? Unentitled? Too thrilled to be taking our grandchildren to swim practice to even think about sex? Too awash in the fulfillment of our golden years to want a piece of the action? I put the magazine in the rack with its back cover facing out, a girl and a boy, all wet and sand smeared, running through the waves with their surfboards and cigarettes. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  By the time I had wandered over toward the pharmacy, I was ready to call it a night. Lubrication creams next to adult undergarments. A wall of condoms in every conceivable color and texture, all promising protection from sexually transmitted disease. I had forgotten about those. Lambskins and Magnums. Condoms that came packaged like the gold chocolate coins of my youth. The magazine was right. I was over, out of business. I was standing there staring at the boxes, reading the hideously depressing slogans (“For Feeling Like Love”), thinking that sex was a sport for the young, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Shopping?” Romeo said.

  I wasn’t wearing my glasses and so my nose was approximately three inches away from a box of condoms. “I think this may be the single worst instant of my life,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Then things can only go up from here.”

  Romeo smiled at me and I thought he must be right. He took my hand and led me out of the contraceptive aisle, which was considerate because if left to my own devices I would have simply tried to claw my way out through the floor.

  “I was thinking we could go into Harvard Square and have sushi for dinner. Do you eat sushi?”

  “Raw fish?”

  “I know, I couldn’t believe it, either. Plummy got me into it. It’s what college kids eat. It’s really good once you can get past the raw part, but if you don’t want to do that, we can go someplace else.”

  “No,” I said. “Given the circumstances, I would say raw fish is exactly what we should be eating. It’s reckless food, don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  As we left CVS and walked toward the car, Romeo kept holding my hand. It’s a wonderful thing to have somebody hold your hand. Mort held my hand as we were walking back down the aisle after our wedding, but that was the last time. After that I held hands with my daughters when they were little, crossing the street and walking through parking lots until one day they got too big for it and pulled away from me. I missed that, the sweet and slightly clammy contact between us. I was glad to have Tony and Sarah to hold hands with again. I was gladder still to be holding hands with Romeo, especially since I knew he had picked mine up not because he was afraid I might dart out into traffic but because he liked the way my hand felt inside his own.

  A piece of dating advice for the out of practice: If you’re nervous about a date, especially if it is a date with your sworn enemy, try shaking off that nervousness by doing something that you would feel even more nervous about, say, skydiving, armed robbery, or eating sushi. The restaurant was pretty, very quiet, with paper walls and soft lighting. The music seemed to be a flute accompanied by a brook, and there was an ikebana arrangement at the hostess station that Romeo and I both admired. I let him order because not even the most enlightened feminist knows how to order sushi if she’s never eaten it before. The waitress brought us a bottle of cold sake, but when I picked it up, Romeo took it away from me. “Never pour your own,” Romeo said, filling my glass. “It’s bad luck. Plummy told me that.” Then he handed me the bottle and I filled his glass. “To the most beautiful florist in Somerville,” he said.


  “Don’t sell yourself short.” I touched my glass to his glass.

  “No really,” he said. “It’s you. It is absolutely you.”

  I felt drunk after two sips and it had very little to do with the sake. Then a black lacquered tray arrived, covered in slabs of raw fish perched on top of tiny bricks of white rice. Some pieces of fish were tied down with little bands of seaweed as if they were so fresh there was a chance of them swimming off. Suddenly the thought of having to eat my dinner seemed so much more frightening than having a date that I didn’t feel nervous around Romeo at all. To celebrate I popped a piece of salmon in my mouth. It wasn’t bad. The eel I spit discreetly into my napkin, as I did the abalone, which was a little bit like biting into a human ear.

  “I used to do that, too,” Romeo said. “You get used to it.”

  “That one?” I said, pointing with one chopstick. “I’d get used to that?”

  “Anything,” he said. He stretched his arms across the table and for a second he touched my hands. Then he took his hands back again. “I still can’t believe I’m having dinner with you.”

  “It’s pretty unbelievable,” I said, wanting his hands back.

  “I have to tell you, you didn’t bump into me by accident at that seminar.”

  “What?” I put one hand casually up on the table just in case he wanted it.

  “I was walking through and I saw this woman, this beautiful woman. I only saw her for a second but, I don’t know, I felt like I knew her.”

  I wasn’t loving this story.

  “So I circled back around so I could see the name tag, only you didn’t see me.”

  “Me?”

  “Then I came back a third time. I practically walked right into you.”

  “I hadn’t seen you before.”

  “We talked for a minute and then you were gone.” He snapped. “I completely lost my nerve. I thought, Well, that’s it. But even though I had every intention of leaving, I found myself sitting out in the hall and waiting for you. Do you ever just have a feeling about something, you know you’ve got to do it no matter what?”

  “Not until recently,” I said. I picked up the bottle of sake and refilled Romeo’s glass.

  “I’d like it if we could get to know each other better. As people, you know, not just as Rosemans and Cacciamanis.”

  “I think that’s a fine plan,” I said. “So, tell me about your children.” Children were always a big part of the story.

  Romeo smiled and leaned back in his chair. He liked his children, I could tell. “Oh, let’s see. Camille and I started early. Joe, the oldest, he’s forty. He owns a trucking company and he’s doing okay for himself. He’s married and has three kids. Then there’s Raymond, he’s still single. He works with me in the shop. He’s the one who’ll take things over—he has a great touch with flowers. Nicky is in the Air Force, stationed over in Germany. He married a German girl about five years ago and now they have two kids. Then there’s Tony.” He sighed. “You remember old Tony. He’s thirty-three now. How old is Sandy?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Tony works for the World Health Organization. He’s over in Ecuador giving out vaccinations.”

  “Did he ever get married?”

  Romeo shook his head. “Nope. I have to tell you, I think I really screwed things up for Tony.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I think Tony was in love with Sandy, and not just kid stuff. I don’t think he ever got over all that.”

  I thought of poor Sandy at home with her kids and their Happy Meals, her nursing books and her homework. She never got over it herself.

  “Anyway, Alan I told you about. He and Theresa are home with their three. And then there’s my Plummy. She’s twenty. It was such a wonderful thing for Camille to have a girl. She’s a real treat.”

  “And a real surprise, it sounds like.”

  “Five boys, we thought we were all through with that. We thought we had the whole rhythm thing down, and then Plummy. But you’ll never hear me complain about that one.”

  “And you named her Plummy?”

  “No, no, we named her Patience because Camille said that’s what it took to get a girl. The boys all called her Plummy. I don’t even know who started it. They’d say, ‘Isn’t she just Plummy.’ I think they picked it up from the Beatles. The boys were all crazy about her.”

  I liked the idea of all those children, of a house full to bursting all the time. All their friends, their boyfriends and girlfriends and then later their children. All of the flowers for all of their weddings. “It sounds nice.”

  “Camille made it nice. She was a wonderful mother. I think back on all the things she had to do. I didn’t understand it until she was sick, until I had to start doing them myself. She protected me from a lot of things, you know. She took care of us.”

  We ate green tea ice cream for dessert and drank tea out of little cups. We talked about the flower business, who we ordered from, where we got the deals. We laid out every trade secret we had, both of us, and I learned more over dinner than I ever had from a seminar. I told him how I wanted to do a little wedding planning on the side. That was the thing I was really good at, big parties, organization. Romeo said he admired that. He said he was crummy at organization. Romeo had hired on too many members of his family, and while he said his product was good, he had a tendency toward disorder. He once missed an entire wedding—bridesmaids’ bouquets, altar decorations, reception centerpieces, all of it. He had it marked down for the next week. I, on the other hand, after five years on my own, still didn’t feel like I had a handle on what I was doing, and every month the revenues slipped. One thing that I discovered was that we were both going broke.

  It wasn’t exactly a lighthearted conversation we’d stumbled into, but still I felt like singing when we left the restaurant. Romeo said he would drive me home, or at least he would drive me to the end of my street and let me walk home from there. When we got to the end of my street, he pulled over and turned off the car. “No one ever told me Rosemans were such good company,” Romeo said.

  “When we’re not selling the dried beaks of nightingales.”

  “When Camille died I thought, That’s it. I’d known her since eighth grade. We were each other’s family. I thought, There’s never going to be enough time to get to know somebody like that again.”

  “Sure,” I said. From a distance I could see my house. All the lights were off. My own family safe asleep.

  “But the thing is, I do know you. That’s how I felt yesterday. That’s how I felt tonight. I’ve been hearing stories about the Rosemans since I was born. They weren’t the right stories maybe—” He stopped and drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “In the end a Roseman and a Cacciamani are all the same thing.”

  “All the same thing,” he said. He had a way of repeating what I said and I liked it. It made me feel like he was really listening. And then Romeo Cacciamani did something truly miraculous. He leaned over and he kissed me. It was just on my lower lip at first, and then my upper lip. Little kisses, and after each one he’d pull away from me like it was over, that was it, but then he would come back for more. He put his hands on my face and ran his thumbs beneath my eyes, then he kissed my eyelids, first right, then left, then my forehead, and then the part in my hair. I put my hands on the back of his neck and kissed his mouth, his neck. This was the part that no one told me while they discussed the evils of the Cacciamanis. No one said they were such good kissers. I was dreaming, sinking, swimming in a warm dark river of kissing, kissing hands and chins, every kiss soft. I could smell the soap on his skin and the fabric softener in his undershirt. I could smell his hair and taste his mouth, which still tasted like sake and rice. Oh, Romeo, this makes it all worthwhile, all those nights of working late and coming home alone, crying over the books and the roses that came in with brown spots on every petal, the worrying about Sandy and Nora and the children, the an
ger at Mort, the missing my parents, all of it lifted off of me and was washed back by the sea of tender kissing, maybe not forever but for now, and frankly, what else was there? I was lighter in that moment. I was my best self, loving and gentle and kind. It was so good to see that woman again, so good to hold another person in this way and be held. If a giant asteroid fell on us at that moment, parked in a car at the end of my block, the touch of Romeo Cacciamani’s tongue against my teeth, mine would be counted as a happy life, a good life.

  I kissed him again. I knew nothing about time, but after a time we decided it was late enough.

  “Can I walk you down?” he said.

  “Better not.” I leaned forward and kissed him again.

  “We’ll manage this, right? We’ll find a way to do this.”

  “I have every intention of it,” I said. I put my hand on his hand and then let myself out of the car. I had walked all the way from Boston to Somerville. Tonight I felt like I could walk past my house and keep heading west. I could walk to Rochester, to Cleveland, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. I could walk all the way to Iowa and through Nebraska, over the Rockies until I got to Oregon, and even then I wouldn’t stop if I didn’t want to. I could go into the ocean, I could swim. I was that sure of myself tonight. I could go on forever.

  chapter six

  I WENT UP THE STAIRS TO MY ROOM IN THE DARK. I knew the way. My lips were puffy and I kept touching them with my fingers, my tongue. They still had the goods. They could still come through for me when I needed them. After such a period of neglect, what a thrill to find they still had all their spring intact, they were still capable lips. I found the lamp beside my bed and turned it on. I sat down on the edge of the bed, bounced a couple of times. If I had been twenty, I would have gone to bed with him. I would not have known how to get out of the car after kissing like that. After twenty minutes or so I would have gone straight for the buttons like a lemming goes for the sea. But now I was older, more sensible. Theoretically, I was supposed to believe in relationships, getting to know a person, enjoying the magic of the time. I was supposed to be grateful for what I got.