by Jeanne Ray
Romeo closed his hands together like a book.
“Oh, come on. Don’t do that,” she said, and patted his hands. “Don’t make me feel bad for talking. It’s already happened, I didn’t do it. It’s good to see people who’ve had some life, people who want to know true things.”
But I wasn’t sure I did want to know. I wanted the carnival act, the fashion magazine horoscope: long life, true love, a bundle of money. I wanted Madame Zikestra. I wanted twenty dollars’ worth of reassurance that everything was going to be fine. I knew I was going to die, that my girls would die, Tony and Sarah, all of us eventually. I had a general understanding of the order of life. That didn’t mean I wanted the details.
“I think we should go,” I said, but I didn’t even try to stand up.
She ignored me. “Open your hands again,” she said to Romeo.
He did what she told him.
“There are so many funny things here, the two of you. It’s like a hall of mirrors. When I see your hands, I get the strongest sense of memory, like I’ve seen these two sets of hands before. You’re not in any hurry, right? I want to tell you a story. A long time ago, years ago, two children came into my tent, very young. I was still doing the whole magic fortune-teller thing then. They said they had to come in together. I set their hands up just this way and I saw an amazing thing: The two of them had the same lines. Not the little ones, not the details, but in the big things they were twined together. But they were young, and so on their lines they were way up here”—she touched the pad beneath the base of my finger—“just at the beginning. I felt very sorry for them because I could see that, unlike other young people, they really were in love but that this love would separate them and whip them all across the world before they came together again. Their lines were so much together. In their hands there was so much love and hate. Never underestimate the hate. It can lock you just as tightly. But I didn’t tell them anything. I said what they wanted to hear—their parents would forgive them, there would be joy in their families, blah, blah, blah. It was true, in a manner of speaking, but it was so far away. They never could have stood the pain if I had explained it to them.”
Ellen had the careful, cheerful tone of someone who was giving you very complex directions to the expressway.
“And now I see the same two hands. You were right to say you had to come together. You were right to wait until now. If I had seen the two of you at fourteen, it would have been the same story and I would have told you the same lie. But this is where you are, right down here.” She touched my hand again, closer to the base of my palm. I still had a good inch, inch and a quarter of life left, but it chilled me to see how much of the line was gone. “All the storms are clearing now and the world is bringing you together again, as it should be. You know what Shakespeare said, ‘A brawling love, a loving hate’? That’s the two of you. Just don’t ever regret the past. It was all for a reason. You loved your wife,” she said to Romeo, and then she turned to me. “And you, so you had to wait longer for love, but you had your girls and so the waiting became another kind of love.” Ellen looked so pleased to be telling us all of this.
I nodded. I felt physically ill. Maybe the rides were catching up with me. Mostly it was the awful and completely impossible notion of Sandy and Tony sitting in this tent some fifteen years ago.
“So what do we do?” I said. “About the brawl?”
“It’s been a hell of a storm, but every storm in the world runs its course sooner or later. Two hands like these don’t happen very often, if I can count from personal experience.” She scooped up our hands and made them into a pile. “Love each other madly, do you understand what I’m saying?”
I suppose it was clear enough. At any rate, I would have agreed to anything if it meant getting out of there. Romeo picked up the stuffed cat. We said good-bye and stumbled out of the tent. The sudden shot of sunlight made my head ache instantly, like leaving a movie theater at two in the afternoon in July.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Romeo. “I’m so sorry about that.”
“Come on.” He took my hand and we began to walk away from the tent and the midway at a brisk pace.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re leaving.”
I followed him to the car. I wanted to ask him about the baby he and Camille had lost. I wanted to ask him if he thought it was possible she was talking about our children, but I felt so awful about dragging him in there in the first place that I couldn’t bring a single word to my mouth. I felt like I wanted to go to a dark place and sleep for a week. I felt that in exchange for information Ellen had taken every ounce of energy I had.
Five miles outside of Canobie Lake, we came to a little green-and-white motel called the Sylvan Park. Romeo pulled into the parking lot and told me to wait for a minute. I stared at the bushes, the cracked asphalt, and tried not to think about anything at all. After the minute was up, he came back with a key and got behind the wheel again. “Twenty-three,” he said. He drove to the end of the row and parked the car. We went into the room and fell down on the bed without turning on the lights. I didn’t think it was strange we had wound up here. I think it was the only place for us to go. He rolled over and held me close to him. “I found you,” he whispered into my hair. “I found you.”
Even though my heart was full of passion, the heat of the day had finally caught up with me. The rides and the food and all of the wondering what would come next covered my face like a rag soaked in chloroform, and I only struggled against it for an instant before giving in. Romeo and I passed out together, tangled up, face-to-face, fully dressed, our feet hanging over the end of the bed. It was as if someone had turned off a switch and at the same instant we were gone. Or maybe it was relief. Maybe we believed Ellen. We would be together, even if we didn’t know how, so we could rest now, finally.
Sleeping with someone is the ultimate intimacy, I think. Through sleeping we establish trust. When we had had all the sleep we needed, our mouths preceded us in waking. When we woke up, we were already kissing again. I let my shoes fall to the floor. I slipped out of my sweater and crumpled linen pants. Romeo took off his shirt and jeans. He touched the champagne underwear lightly with his fingers, he ran the palms of his hands over the cups of the bra, as if he had never seen anything so remarkable in his life. He was the one I was waiting for, I believed that, even though I had made different lives with other people. This was my reward, this day, this moment, for any good deed I had ever done in my life.
Sex stays with you, even in the years you never call it into service, in the months it never once occurs to you. It hibernates deep, maybe in the backs of your knees or behind your liver. At first it seems impatient, unbearable, tugging at you every minute. Then it settles down to a place so remote you can almost forget it. It turns the lights low and it waits. But when you call it up again, it’s there, full of memory and response. Romeo’s hands, Romeo’s mouth, the lines of his naked legs, the warmth of his chest against my face—every corner of him brought me back to life. The feel of his stomach against my stomach, the sweet forgetfulness of where you leave off and the other person begins. We were the roller coaster now, the Scrambler, the Zipper. Love rolled us together and tossed us into the air. We were something bigger than gravity. We stretched into it, closed our eyes, held on to each other, held tight. There was so much time that sex had a chance to be every different thing. We tumbled and devoured. I hit my hip against the headboard. He pulled my feet into the air. We slowed down and memorized each other’s fingers. I held his earlobe between my lips. He traced my eyes with his tongue. We made love so deeply that I felt the very shape of my body changing. I whispered. He sang.
Somewhere in it all, Romeo told me he loved me.
I returned the compliment.
In Somerville the houses were all dark, but my porch light was still on. We kissed good night.
“We never did come up with a plan,” I said.
“We’re the plan,” he said. �
�The rest of it will just have to fall into place.”
I got out of the car and waved. My bones felt soft. I felt like I could just slip underneath the door and float up to my bedroom. Instead I got out my keys and let myself inside. I turned and waved again and then flicked on the light in the hall.
There was someone sleeping on my sofa. The light seemed to wake him up, and Mort rolled over, stretched and smiled.
“Hey there, Julie,” he said.
chapter thirteen
MORT LIKED THAT COUCH. IT WASN’T LIKE I’D NEVER seen him there before. In the old days he would stay up late, watching television or working on the books, and when he got tired, he’d stretch out, thinking he was going to rest his eyes for a minute, and then not wake up until I woke him up in the morning. Of course, later on when things were falling apart, the couch meant something else entirely. Either he refused to come upstairs or I told him he could sleep on the goddamn couch. One way or another, Mort and that couch had logged in a lot of hours together over the years. It had been reupholstered, but it was still essentially the same piece of furniture, which is to say that Mort did not look out of place there even though I hadn’t seen him in five years.
“Ah, Mort,” I said. What was there to say? Should I scream, yell? Certainly that would come, but at that moment I was still dreamy, tired and spongy with sex. My heart was too full of goodwill to throw a lamp, even if a thrown lamp was what the situation required. Besides, I was more than a little relieved that it wasn’t one of those hulking Cacciamani boys come to murder me for corrupting their father. “Mrs. Roseman,” he would say, yawning. “I have come to kill you, but I fell asleep while waiting. Just a moment while I fish my gun out from between your sofa cushions.”
If I was going to find a strange man on my couch, Mort was a better choice than many. “You look good, Jules,” he said admiringly. “A little rumpled, but good.”
“And you’ve come to tell me this?” Why didn’t this whole thing seem stranger to me? Even with the five-year lapse, I was still so used to talking to Mort. I had lived with him longer than anyone else, longer than I had lived with my parents. Suddenly I had a terrible thought: What if something had happened with Lila? What if he was here because he wanted me back? “What’s going on, Mort?”
Mort sat up and stretched as if trying to realign his entire body. He was the most unabashed stretcher I’d ever seen. Even after a nap on an airplane, he would throw his arms over his head and roar. Then he would roll his shoulders, scratch his stomach, give his scalp several vigorous rubs with his fingertips. “What did you do with the old couch? Just couldn’t wait to get rid of it, huh?”
“That is the old couch. I had it reupholstered.”
Mort looked beneath him as if he had just sat down on a pizza. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I liked it the old way better.”
“Mort, why are you here? My God, it isn’t one of the girls? You haven’t come to tell me something horrible?”
He shook his head. “Nothing horrible, or at least nothing horrible in which you are not an active participant.” He was starting to look righteous. He was waking up.
“Romeo?”
“Jesus Christ, Julie. Like there weren’t other guys to choose from? Nora called me. She was sobbing on the phone. I have to leave my life, fly all the way across country to try and get things straightened out. Do you ever stop to think about what you’re doing to the girls?”
As of today I was starting to think of myself as lucky, maybe for the first time in my life. All those years I had conversations with Mort in my head. All those years I thought of what I should have said after it was too late. Now here was Mort, back on my sofa, presenting me with a chance to vent my spleen. I put down my purse and came into the living room. “What I’m doing to the girls? What I’m doing?”
“What you’re doing,” Mort said, not giving an inch.
“I’m a single, sixty-year-old woman getting on with her life, that’s what I’m doing. I’m not married and neither is Romeo. We’re not busting up any families, betraying any confidences. You want to talk about the girls? Let’s talk about the girls, Mort. Let’s talk about what the divorce did to them.”
“You can’t throw this off on my shoulders. This isn’t about me.”
“You’re damn right it isn’t about you.” There went the love, the sleepy tenderness. “So get your sorry ass off my couch and get out of my house.”
Mort got up off the couch. He looked good himself, I was sad to say. He was thinner. He was wearing nicer clothes than he had been when he left. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow when you’re a little more rational. When you haven’t been out half the night on a date.” He managed to get a very nasty spin on the word date.
I looked at my watch. “It isn’t even midnight. And we have talked about this. We’re not talking about this anymore.”
Mort pointed his finger at me. I could see the veins bulging out on the sides of his temples where he had once had hair. “I’m not going to watch you throw my business and my family down the tubes over a stinking Cacciamani. I will stop you if I have to sign the papers to have you committed myself.”
I opened the door. “Out.” We had been here once before, this hallway, these words, only it was his sex life we were screaming about then.
“Grandma?” Tony called down from the top of the stairs.
“It’s okay, baby.” I shot Mort a fierce look, what he used to call my boiling stare. “I’m home. I’m sorry we woke you up.”
“Is Grandpa still here?”
“You’ve seen the kids?” I said to Mort.
“What do you think, I snuck in and got on the couch?”
“He’s right here,” I called up to Tony. “We were just talking.”
Tony came padding down the stairs in his pajamas. I loved to see him in his pajamas. I knew that he was going to get big soon, that he wouldn’t be the little boy who came and got into bed with me in the mornings. “Hey, Grandpa.”
“Hey, Killer,” Mort said. Why would you call a child that?
“Are you going to spend the night?” Tony came over and looped himself in my arms.
“Grandpa’s in a hurry,” I said.
“I’m going to spend the night at Aunt Nora’s.”
“Are you coming back tomorrow?”
“I’ll be here when you get out of school.”
“And Lila?” he said suspiciously.
“Lila’s here?” I said.
“She’s at Nora’s.”
“She played poker with me,” Tony said. “She’s not very good.”
“Here?” I said. “She came here?”
“I wanted to see Sandy and the kids,” Mort said. “What was I supposed to do, leave her in the car?”
“Yes. You were supposed to leave her in the car. Why are you bringing Lila out here, anyway?”
“She wanted to visit her friends and Nora sent us two plane tickets.”
I put the heels of my hands over my eyes. “No more,” I said, as quietly as possible so as not to frighten Tony. “Good night.”
Mort leaned over and kissed Tony on the top of his head. “You’re getting so big.”
“You told me that already,” Tony said.
Mort finally said good night and left. I put on the dead bolt and the chain. “You need to get to bed,” I said to Tony. “School tomorrow.”
“You and Grandpa don’t get along.”
I tilted my head to the left and then the right. “Not particularly, but it’s nothing that you should be worried about.”
“I can’t believe he likes Lila better than you,” Tony said.
And on that bright note we went upstairs.
The night I had planned went something like this: I go up to my room, maybe light a candle. I take off my clothes and think fondly of every article before putting them in the hamper. Then I put on my nightgown, fluff up my pillows, and slide into bed. I don’t go to sleep for a long time. I stop and take my time to rethink everythi
ng that happened. I ride every ride over again, I play Fascination, I eat the clams. I want to think about the sex right away, but I don’t let myself, I save it, and when I’ve thought over every other aspect of the day, I remember the Sylvan Park motel. I think about nothing but that for at least an hour. I replay every second of happiness over in my mind. I make constructive plans for our future. I revel. That’s what I was going to do.
Instead I tuck Tony back into bed and then go into my room and try very hard not to slam the door. Just who in the hell did Mort think he was showing up and telling me how I’m supposed to conduct my life in his absence? Who did he think he was sleeping on my couch, which I would now probably have to have covered again just so I didn’t have to think of him on it every time I walked into the living room? I tore off my clothes, including my champagne underwear, and threw them into a ball at the foot of the bed. My hands were shaking as I dug through the medicine cabinet looking for my bottle of Excedrin P.M. I swallowed two blue pills without water, got into a T-shirt, and sat down on the bed. Lila in my house? Playing poker with my grandchildren? And what about Nora? It was one thing to deal with her harping disapproval, but for her to call in the National Guard to prevent me from having my one shot at happiness, that was more than I could easily forgive. How was I supposed to deal with her now? And, if it wasn’t enough that it all had to happen, why did it have to happen tonight? Why did they all have to come in and chop down the best day I’ve had in I don’t know when? I shut my eyes and tried to think of Romeo, but all I could see was Mort’s bald head, his face contorted in righteous indignation. I used to feel so terrible when he looked at me that way, and while I still felt terrible, it was a different kind of terrible entirely.