Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  So why was I sitting there on top of my bedspread thinking I was going to jump out of my skin? Why did I want to go running down the street to see if I could catch up to his car? Oh, they were beautiful things, those kisses, every one a masterpiece, but here alone in a room with a bed I wanted to put my head through the wall, I was so eaten up by desire. Sex. I had not had sex in five years. No, let’s be honest, it had been more than five years. It was more like five years plus the last four or five months when Mort was here and we didn’t have any sex and I didn’t much care because I didn’t know he was going. And before that how long had it been? My fifties had more or less been a sexual wasteland. Those were good years that I blew, years I could have been burning down the house night after night had there been someone who wanted me, someone I wanted. So maybe tonight I had a chance and I decided what … to wait? Why? Because maybe five years and four months wasn’t long enough to get the hang of celibacy? Because I wanted to be sure, to get to know him better? Who did I know better than a Cacciamani? Because I didn’t want him to think I was that kind of woman? I was that kind of woman! Just give me half the chance. I wanted to be, I would be, but instead I got out of the car, programmed by the decade known as the 1950s. I fell facedown on the bed and bit at my pillow to keep from screaming. I could picture Sandy and Tony and Sarah running down the hallway to my room. “Mom! Grandma!” they would cry. “What’s happened to you? What’s wrong?” And what would I tell them? “Kids, tonight Grandma had the chance to make love with somebody she really, really liked. Liked more than she ever thought she was ever going to like anybody again, and she just walked away from it.” Mothers are so proud of their daughters when they say no and so painfully disappointed in themselves when they say the same thing.

  So now what was I supposed to do? Sleep was out of the question, and since I only had one thing on my mind, I didn’t think reading or television was going to cut it. I thought about calling Gloria, but she would never forgive me for waking her up to say I’d missed my chance to have sex, just as she would never forgive me for not calling if I had had sex.

  There was the strangest noise outside. It sounded like hail, which was impossible considering I had just been outside and seen the clear moon. It sounded almost like little rocks hitting the side of the house. Then I realized it was little rocks hitting the side of the house. I looked out the window but I couldn’t see anything, so I went back and turned out the light. There on the sidewalk outside my house stood Romeo Cacciamani.

  I put my shoulder onto the window frame and tugged at the handles with both hands. Damn Mort, who said we didn’t need to hire a professional painter! Damn Mort, who said he could do the windows himself! He probably knew this would happen. He knew that someday Romeo would come here at night and I’d never be able to get the damn thing open. He’d painted me in! The veins were pushing out in my forearms and I felt a distinct, hot pain in my neck. I hoped he couldn’t see the horrible face I was making as I strained against the stuck window and then beat on the edges with my palms until they stung. Helpless, trapped, I looked down at him and saw he was motioning something; he was saying something without making any noise.

  Come down, he was saying.

  I flew down the stairs. I took them like Tony, three at a time. I was out that door and back into the night and into his arms before I even knew I’d left the bedroom, back into the universe of kissing, except now we were kissing standing up, our arms so tightly around each other you would have thought we were in an airport and one of us was being shipped out for a particularly hopeless tour of duty. It had been what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? But I had felt the loss of him more than I can ever remember feeling anything.

  “Come inside,” I said. I kissed him, once and then again and again. “I can’t believe you came back.”

  “Julie Roseman,” he said. “I didn’t know where to go.” Stop, kiss. “I just kept driving around.”

  “Come inside.” Kiss. I wanted to kiss his neck, my God, I wanted to kiss his neck, but that would have meant leaving his mouth and I didn’t know how to do that.

  “I can’t come in, you know that.”

  The front door was wide open and the house was dark. For a minute passion had made me stupid, and I was not stupid. He was right. Not inside. “Your house?”

  “No, no, no.”

  “A hotel. I have credit cards.”

  He stood back for a second. We were dizzy. “Really,” he said. “You’d go to a hotel?”

  “Isn’t that why you came back?”

  “I just had to see you again. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.” He kissed me, hard this time, the kind of kiss that makes it abundantly clear what the other person has on his mind. It was joy. “I know,” he said. “My shop. There’s a place in my shop.”

  I went and closed the front door quietly, a small gesture considering all the banging I’d done on the window, then we took off for his car. We kissed at every stoplight, every stop sign. Why did car manufacturers think bucket seats were a good idea? What I wouldn’t have given for a good, old-fashioned bench seat then. I think it was all part of the conspiracy designed to slow down the sexual revolution. When we were repressed, they gave us bench seats in every model car, but once we figured out how to use them, they stuck a gearshift right in the middle of everything. I put my hand inside his shirt and touched the hair on his chest. I would have been nervous, I would have shown proper decorum, but five years and four months makes a woman forget herself, and I had forgotten everything.

  I had driven past Romeo’s shop before, but it goes without saying that I had never been inside. It was in another part of Somerville, the part I liked to say was not as nice, when in fact it was absolutely fine. There was no trouble finding parking at eleven o’clock at night. We kissed madly in front of the store while he fumbled with the keys. There on the street he ran his hands over my breasts and down to my waist and then he tried the keys again. WHEREFORE ART THOU, ROMEO? the sign said, and beneath that the word CLOSED.

  Inside it was dark, and in the dim shadows that the streetlight threw in from the window I could see it was mostly bare. All the flowers would be in the cooler. I couldn’t tell if it was nice or not, but I imagined it was beautiful, the Ritz-Carlton a hundred times over. “I have a little place in the back,” he said. “I sleep here sometimes when I have a really big job to get out. I like to work at night.” He locked the door behind us and started to turn on the lights, but I told him not to, somebody passing by could see.

  “Good thinking,” he said. He took my hand and squeezed it, but we were both suddenly shy. While I think we could have done the whole thing pressed up against the door if we hadn’t been able to get inside, this sudden privacy left us momentarily unsure of where to turn next.

  “Show me around,” I whispered. I didn’t want to make a sound.

  “With the lights off?” he whispered back.

  “Why not? You know where everything is.”

  He held on to me. I wanted it to be this way. I wanted to slow things down, not for a couple of months or weeks or even days but just for a few minutes, just so I could revel in what it felt like to want someone so badly and know I was going to get him.

  “The plants are over here, mums, azaleas, some little potted perennials, African violets. I got some very cute pots of miniature hyacinth this year.”

  “Do you sell a lot of azaleas?”

  “They fly out.”

  “I always figured people bought those at nurseries.”

  He stopped and kissed me until my knees felt loose and I had to lean against him. Had I known that such kissing existed in the world, I would never have married Mort.

  “And these, these are my pride. Wait, let me get the flashlight. Stand right here, don’t move.” He disappeared into the darkness and came back with a circle of light. It skimmed across a table of brightly colored, floppy little animals, but I knew for a fact that Beanie Babies were not his pride and joy. Then he shined it across a table of orc
hids. “Look at them,” he said. “Aren’t they something else?”

  And they were, like flowers from a lusher, more ingenious planet. There were big ones, white and heavy as saucers of cream, little amethyst ones, tiny yellow spiders the size of thumbnails. “I never had the nerve to try orchids,” I whispered.

  “They aren’t so hard. You just have to understand what they need. I think they are the most beautiful flowers.”

  “Show me the cooler,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I took his hand, kissed his fingers. Romeo Cacciamani, whose name I was never allowed to say at the dinner table, I kiss your hands.

  He pulled open the big steel door and we stepped inside. There was a dim automatic light. It was exactly like mine. It must have been made by the same company, the same year. It was Tuesday, so a shipment had just come in. There was just enough room for the two of us to stand. The flowers were packed in tight, bundles of twenty-four roses in plastic wrap, gerbera daisies and five kinds of lilies, pink and yellow stock, larkspur, Japanese iris, and buckets of leatherleaf ferns, jade, and galex. The flowers were up on shelves, they were everywhere. They surrounded us and pressed in against us. I loved the smell, too many smells to separate, blending and mixing, becoming one another. Everyone complains about carnations. They think carnations are low rent but they smell like heaven and they last forever. Give me carnations any day.

  Then, up on the top shelf, I saw an arrangement. A beautiful arrangement.

  “What is that?”

  Romeo looked up. “It’s for a birthday, first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Who did it?”

  “I did it. Who do you think does the flowers around here?”

  “You made that?” I said, my voice so soft it was hardly my voice at all. “You did that yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “You really are a better florist than I am. That’s brilliant. I mean it. That’s one of the best looking arrangements I’ve ever seen.” It seemed reckless and at the same time had perfect balance. I never would have thought to use the tiny lilies of the valley and the foxgloves in with these giant white peonies. Almost white, they were a little pink around the edges with a few thin veins of red, and then there were white English roses, as big as the peonies. Where did he find roses like that? How did he dare to spend the money on them? White tulips came up from everywhere and all of it balanced, balanced like it was a painting, a perfectly composed still life, a carving in white-pink marble. But it was nothing like art. It was more like something that had simply occurred in nature and soon would grow and spread and take over the room. I had been looking at flowers for as long as I can remember using my eyes, and I had never seen anything so perfect before. “I think you may be a genius.”

  “What a nice thing to say.” And when he kissed me this time, we both knew we were ready. I wasn’t nervous at all now. I was happy, so happy it was all I could do to keep from laughing. Where else should two florists come together than in a walk-in cooler stuffed to the rafters with flowers? It was cool, right at forty degrees, but that was a cool that I was plenty used to. He pulled my sweater up over my head and I unbuttoned his shirt, buried my face against his chest. Tomorrow I would walk into my own cooler and open up the packages of South American roses and it would never be the same. There was only a dim bulb in there, maybe forty watts. If there had been more time or more light I might have thought about my weight, my underwear, but maybe not. In that moment I was so happy with Romeo, I felt happy with myself. We took off our clothes and stood together naked and holding each other as much for warmth as for love.

  “Julie, it’s freezing. There’s a bed in the back.”

  I nodded and we let ourselves out of the freezer. To all the magazines that only document sex up to forty, I say this: Have you ever walked naked with your lover through a florist’s shop at midnight? No? Then don’t tell me about sex.

  The way was dark and he held my hand, stopping to kiss me and touch me. The very hands that had arranged those flowers arranged me now. We were Adam and Eve and this was a dark, flowered Eden. “In here,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Romeo?” I whispered. “Is that you?”

  “Raymond?” said Romeo.

  “Dad? Dad is that you?”

  Maybe a better woman would have stuck by her man, but my reflexes were too good for that. I was flying naked through the store. The lights came on just as I leapt for the cooler door. If Raymond Cacciamani caught sight of my naked backside, I will never know. I pulled the door behind me tight and cursed the safety precautions that did not allow me to lock it from inside. Our clothes were all over the place, strung over dahlias, crushing down the baby’s breath. I untangled them, his from mine, and inserted myself as quickly as any human being has ever put on clothing. As for my beating passion, my heart’s desire, forget about it. All I wanted now was to exit.

  There was a knock on the door. Romeo was calling my name, wanting to know if I was all right.

  “Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  I was pretty much put together when he came in wearing a ratty plaid bathrobe. “That’s my son, Raymond. He was working late. He fell asleep.”

  “Well, he’s up now.”

  Romeo found his underwear and stepped into them while keeping on his robe. He dressed as quickly as possible, but he had nothing on me. “We have to go out there now.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “I’m good with coolers. I’m going to be fine in here.”

  “I have to take you home.”

  “I don’t see how,” I said, but I knew he was right. I knew we were leaving. He opened the door and took my hand and together we came out of the cooler.

  Raymond was standing there in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, his arms folded across his chest. He was bigger than his father, softer in the face and with less hair, but still a nice enough looking guy. He had a big grin on, like this was a very funny moment, until he saw who I was.

  “Raymond,” Romeo said. “This is Julie Roseman.”

  “I know who that is,” he said. “And she can get the hell out of this store.”

  “Raymond!” Romeo said. It was his parental voice. I had one myself. Even though the son was clearly in his late thirties, the tone had some effect on him.

  “How could you bring, bring—” He was struggling to find a properly awful word. He did not succeed, thank God. “Her here.”

  “Mrs. Roseman and I are friends,” Romeo said. I didn’t blame him. There was no right thing to say.

  “How you could bring her into Mama’s shop. How you could bring her here. What is Grandma going to say, you bringing a Roseman here to fuck?”

  “Raymond, stop it, I swear to God.”

  “I won’t stop it,” he said, his own voice raised now. “Not a Roseman. Not a Roseman in this store. Not a Roseman with my father.”

  I must confess this outburst had very little effect on me, except to increase my wonderment at what, exactly, had gone so wrong between us. This Raymond was not so different from my own girls. We could line our children up on either side of the room and they could scream at us until our ears bled.

  “I’ll take you home, Julie.”

  “She can walk,” Raymond said.

  At that point Romeo turned and went at him, I think went at him to strike, but Raymond held up his palms and stepped aside. “Forget it,” he said, and turned to walk out of the room. But before he left, he did the most remarkable thing of all: He said my name, and then he spit.

  chapter seven

  “WE ARE COOKED,” I SAID ON THE DRIVE HOME. We had both been quiet for a while, both of us stunned as if by a sharp blow.

  “Raymond,” Romeo said, shaking his head. “If it had been Joe, all hell would have broken loose. If it had been Nicky or Alan, even Tony, I might have believed it. But Raymond is so easygoing. Of all my boys, I would have guessed that he would be the one who wouldn’t care.”

 
; “We have such good luck,” I said glumly. “Do you think he’s going to tell?”

  Romeo sighed. “I guess I better get back there and try and talk him out of it. Raymond I can deal with, but if they all get into this, it’s going to be impossible.” He pulled up in front of my house. Too much had happened for us to try to play it safe.

  “Not to sound too much like a teenager, but do you think I’m going to see you again?” I asked.

  “You’re going to see me. You’re going to see me everywhere you go. I’m crazy about you, Julie Roseman.”

  I kissed him again. The last thing either of us was feeling right now was sexy, and yet I knew I was crazy for him, too. I said good night and for the second time that night I unlocked the door and went upstairs to my room.

  I would have thought I’d spend the night staring at the wall and wringing my hands, but I don’t think I’d ever been that tired in my life. I barely struggled out of my clothes, which I left in a heap on the floor and fell into bed.

  When Sandy woke me it was bright outside, not just light but daytime. “I took the kids to school already. Are you feeling all right? Did you and Gloria tie one on last night?”

  I really had to think about what she was talking about. I could barely open my eyes. Dear Sandy had brought me both a cup of coffee and an alibi. “I don’t know what I was thinking of,” I said, reaching for the coffee. “Gloria is such a bad influence on me.”

  “White wine?” Sandy asked.

  “Manhattans,” I whispered hoarsely. “Then pinot noir with dinner.”

  “Grape and grain,” Sandy said sympathetically. “You shouldn’t ever do that. Red wine always does me in.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She patted my knee beneath the covers. “Well, I’ll go on in and get things started at the shop. You come when you can. Do you think you can come in?”

  “Oh, sure. I just need a minute to pull myself together. I’ll be right behind you.”