A Matter of Love in da Bronx

by Paul Argentini

  How shall I sleep the night with such enthralling passions that come from thoughts of you bestirring my o'erflooded heart? Ah! Show me how! Heartsinging ecstasy! Let me do it now. Is this the way? To put my arms about you, but with a feeling tenderness that sets afire your soul; then, hold you close, to have the full and fall of your body; Oh! Lord! Can I go on without losing my senses! and, now, to bring your lips toward mine, then, close in till two are one...my God!...so! This is Paradise...

  With all that is mine, this heart is yours, Sam

  CHAPTER 18

  BUOYANT. HIS WORLD was of a lightness that made him feel his head was apar the moon. It came from the chestbursting wonderment of Mary--her reaction in the restaurant to his unwarranted subjection, to the tenderness in the kitchen, her acceptation of him over Vito as her companion; and the offering of herself completely by the candle in the booth, the physical acceptance of him with the simple handholding ceremony, and then--Lord! The night's ending kiss. All, tiny parts of the whole: She was his. Ah! Love.

  It was with this feeling of disjointedness from barbpricking, cruel, demanding realities that he walked into the kitchen.

  Mother having tea at table, dropping the cup, sounding the gong, looking as distressed as a savaged sheet in a gale crashing Sam out of his ecstasis.

  Her eyes, blazing lighthouse beacons, signaling the shoals rushing up to meet him.

  Papa sending combers of air before him pounding out of the tv room, spittle foaming to his chin, he, broaching past table and chair ending like surf to sand into Sam's eyeballs. There was no greeting, no sound save the smack of the slap to Sam's face. It awakened memories of the Vitoian-received blow though not as hard the pain was nonetheless compounded as was the indignity and embarrassment. Then, came another, unannounced again, on the other side. Sam instinctively threw his hands up to either side of his eyes, as if shielding them from hard driven wind-whipped water. Nothing, he knew well at that moment, could protect him from the fierceness of his father's eyes. Germano pulled back to unleash another, this time perhaps to fly by the guards and send knuckles to the nose. --Stop! Sam screamed. The sharpness of the word was enough to give his father cause to think for a mere split second before his rocketing hand crushed into Sam's upraised fingers which dug into his own face. Coldly in control, Sam dropped his hands, pulled himself up tall. He let the words fly as sharp as the crack of a walnut shell: --I said that was enough. ...and what the hell is going on? Have you gone mad?

  --How can you talk to your father like that?

  --Pazzo! Huh? You think I'm pazzo! You the one! You should be in the crazy house! Not in this house where you have everything you want. Your food, your clean clothes, your room! Maybe you should be in a dump where you belong! Puzzolento, schifoso che sei!

  --I might just as well be there for the consideration I get here! I'm no kid, Pa! Leave me alone. For whatever reason, you don't smack me around any more...

  --Oh! Big shot! You want to show me how big you are? You would like to try? You're going to tell me in my own home what's right and what's wrong?

  --I'll tell you what's wrong! Because I'm not your favorite son you have no reason to remember when I was born! But, not a month goes by my mother doesn't go to the church to light a candle for your firstborn who killed himself with drugs! Perhaps you'd think more of me if I followed in his footsteps. Instead, you give me this grief!

  --Ah! Your birthday! We didn't come kiss your feet on your birthday! Is that what's burning your ass! That's good! That will give you a taste of your own medicine!

  --Is that so? So what's burning your ass? I'd like to know.

  --Ladrone! You're a stinking thief! You steal out of your mother's and father's mouth and you demand respect! How do you like that?

  What are you talking about? My God! Is this all life offers? Nothing but misery from one end of the day to the other for always? Is there no altar that doesn't demand a blood sacrifice for a moment of joy? And look at this! My own mother and father punishing me for some stupid thing or other by denying I even had a birthday! Like I was some strange kind of irascible asspain five-year-old brat! I know at least one reason we had to find each other, Mary: Without you in my life I'd be ready to kill myself!

  --I'm talking about you lying about getting paid! I'm talking about you getting four-weeks pay and lying about it so you can keep it all for yourself instead of bringing it home like you're supposed to!

  --How do you know?

  --Don't try to deny! Don't lie! I know!

  --How do you know? ...You went through my room! You went fishing through all my things! Sol's note! You had no right! That room is private!

  --Hey! That room is in my home! Fingerthumping breast beating. That room--finger pointing--is in my--chest hitting--house! And your rights come only after my rights! And my right is to know everything that's going on, your room, my room, every room! When you have a house of your own, you can run it any damn way you please. In this house, you do as I say! Capisce? Si? O no?

  --Sure. I understand.

  --Good! Now give me the paycheck... The paychecks! He gave you four weeks pay! I want them! You lied! You said the son-of-a-bitch Jew bastard didn't pay you! And I want your pay from the restaurant, and all of it! I need all of it!

  --No. There's no pay from the restaurant.

  --No pay? What are you talking? I'll break your head! The menacement.

  --I have no pay. As if his body was frozen in ice, Sam remained stolid, only his hand reaching up to snatch his father's wrist mid-way to delivering another slap. That's the last time you do that. Capisce? He released the hand. There is no pay. I was fired tonight. He could see the frustration on the man's face, keeping caution and control by not following through with what he yearned to do: To crunch his kid's face.

  All Germano saw was the arrogance and disconcern shown for the problems he was shouldering. Some small warning also came through that the pigeon might flee the cage. It was perhaps a good moment to back off; to ignore the confrontation; to use wile to get what he wanted; then beat the holy shit out of the stupid bastard if that was what he felt he should do. --I say everybody should be fired one time in their life, but you shoulda got your pay. We count on that money. So? We do without, but we need your other paychecks. We need them now.

  --I bet you do. I need them, too. I have some things going on. I must hold on to them.

  --No! First you take care here where you live! Then someplace else.

  --I'll think about it.

  --There's nothing to think about! How do you expect us to pay our bills!

  --Bills! Come on, Pa! Look around! What are you supporting? This is a two-bedroom apartment in a broken-down cockroach infested tenement in the Bronx! We're lucky to have indoor plumbing! You're not talking about supporting the White House, which I could have been doing for all the money I've turned over to you! And what do I have to show for it? Spilled blood! What the hell have you been doing with the thousands upon thousands of dollars you've taken from me since the day I was fourteen years old? You know what I used to imagine, Pa? That you and Ma really loved me, that you were both showing me about life, and how one does. Do you know I actually thought the day I turned eighteen you would give me a bankbook, and in it, all the money I handed over to you. You gave me a five dollar bill, Pa, a crummy, old five dollar bill you scrunched up almost into a little ball you didn't want to let it go. So, I thought, no, it was too early to take charge of my own account, after all, I was only a stupid, working kid. It would come to me on my twenty-first birthday, I said. When I didn't get it then, I knew. There never would be a bank account with my name on it for all the money I gave you. I did as I was expected. I spilled my blood and gave my youth to your neverending need for money. So? Come on, Pa. Clear the mystery. Do me one favor in case God strikes me down dead tonight. Tell me, Pa. Tell me. Where is it, Pa, show me? Show me!

  --So that's the respect we get!

  --Forget the respect, Pa. I don't see Cadillacs, or furs, or
jewelry. What? Do you chase women? Do you gamble? Are you paying off the Empire State Building mortgage? A Swiss bank account? What do you say, Pa. It's only a question. It's only a question of money. A question of about a half-a-million dollars and twenty-five years of my lifetime! So? Satisfy me. Give me a hint.

  He could see the look pass between Germano and Concetta. His shoulders sagged. His chin fell near on his chest. He seemed to grow shorter, limp, old, tired. A pitiable sight that made Sam scrunch his forehead in wonder. He did not recognize what happened to them. The transformation was dramatic and immediate. She became haughty, imperious; and he became submissive, defeated. Germano asked her quietly to make coffee to have while they sat at the kitchen table to talk.

  And to give Sam a hint of what made nine months womb rent so lifelong expensive.

  CHAPTER 19

  Friday evening

  SAM, MY DEAREST: You are lost to me forever. Our precious few moments together this night will have to take me through my lifetime. When I've completed this to you I will relive each of our moments moment by moment to be sure I have missed none. To lose a look, a glance, a touch, a word, a gesture; to find the slightest interruption in my nearness to you; to discover one less sensation in the millions you have caused to flow through me--any one of these would make me feel impoverished, incomplete; any two would make a devastating void. I must treasure this night because it allows my imagination to soar, and only with this ready access to such a heaven may I think to endure a life which has become so oppressive and dark. Just think! in a thought I can have you here beside me! Come! Sit! Watch me write! Boring? Then hold my hand, as I held yours this night. Ah! Fervor! Ah! Provocation! Ah! Exhilaration! Did you feel it, too? But you had to! Of course! How else could there be such heights without a sympathetic vibration? And, of course, that's how I know you have some feeling for me. Oh! It could never be the delicious ecstasy I hold for you in my heart; it could never be the white, moulten heat that rests in my crucible of love; it will never be the anguish that tortures my soul with the unbearable thought that there is to be no moment more with you. How grateful I am that that is so. But I hope it isn't! I want you not to share the hurt, but pity me! Think how little else is held for me if I could not hold on some sericeous hope some nestled tenderness in you for me. I tell you this: There was nothing before you. What can I expect in a tomorrow if you're not there? Here is anger, here is disappointment, here is dejection I must allay. How dare some arrogant power trifle with our lives? To give us together barely the foretoken of a moment then hold hard the bestowal of a bit of a fraction more! But there was that! Yet my soul knows this was to be no fugacious love! And with each thought I keep of you I see what inspires their fear! Not you! Not me! It is, but together the inspiration for a magnificence that goes beyond mere mortals' love. Envious prigs. Instinct must have told them this is no frivolous love. How little they understand that we have already had more than they could ever dream would be theirs. How in all questions one answer obtains: By this love for you. Just to say one, how is it when I'm with you I hear you say so many wondrous and splendid things about so many facets of the world and us, to such heights and depths, with an understanding that belies all reason, in a manner that flows with the ease and joy of a rockstrewn brook--yet! You speak not a word! And just to say another, how is it I come to find your hands to cup my face, raise it up, have you come forward to bend over me to make our lips from one and one to one then know they are your arms that encircle me to hold inescapable the rapture within--yet! You move not a millimeter! Just to say another, how is it I find a supremely elegant togetherness--yet! Your soul in solitude stays? Teach me about this love that mystifies all reason. There are feelings, and sensations, and desires--all the same and all different and all at once and all separate! I know all of these. But, how do they come about when you're not near me? When there is no sight, or touch, or sound or smell of you? When in a doing there comes the essence that presents itself to me as you. To find you personified in things diverse and plenty: in a note, a bird, a branch, a petal, a breeze, a plum, a waterdrop, a potato...a potato! Gracious! That says it! Then, in everything! To find a sweetpain, Yes! a joyfulhurt in wanting you to be near me but needing the desire to miss you; to have you fill my sight but needing you invisible to conjure your visions; to have my heart full of you, but needing the emptiness to take you in; to feel the rapturous bliss of your affection, but needing the sadness to focus on the importance of you... I could go on! Ah! I could go on and on and on and on! But, my dearest, my love, my dearest love! How then do I expiate the terror I feel when I think you shall never be mine again! Thought torturous! Domination abominable! Tonight, I've been subjected to the worst possible of calamities. That my soul should be subjugated to a curse so far less than your whisper of love that I must prepare myself for an infinitely inferior Hell--which makes it worse than the best ever imagined--and be denied a Paradise where one--you and I--may conceive an inconceivable love. My parents are the problem. On one hand, they gave me life--what a miraculous gift! But on the other hand they deny me my own life! They want it to do with as they wish! They want me to live as they want, and I don't want! I'll give it back! A gift intrinsically is given free--or it's not given as a gift. It's given as something quite else. The fact is the choice of what kind of gift is no longer theirs, or mine. This is me of mine. This is my world. This is Mary. I cannot share more or less than what I am. But, there is this hold they have which comes from the bond of bonds. Bloodwelded; soaked in gratitude; devoid of uncaring. What shall I do? I'm afraid the hard choice is mine, and I cannot make it; too long have I been steeped in their pot. Sam, my dearest, sweetest, most precious love, help me! Despite all that, I want to hurt you! I want you to understand what has befallen me because of your timidity, a prism of mine. Of ours. You should have taken me away this night! Before you were full of contrition and soulful, you should have been carnal and wanting and hied me away to indissolubly, indiscernibly dissolve you into me, me into you. But you did not and I love you still with everyfragment of my vibrating being. If I had to do what I had to do, I would hate most what I would do to you. Know that now, for I may be never given another chance. Above all, I implore, beseech, ask, pray, that you will not trespass what you already understand: only I hold the answer to all of this in my hand. May I now ask for forgiveness for my hypocrisy, of condemning you for an action that I have justified in cold reasoning that I must do. What satisfaction to know it will never be settled in our hearts. How I appreciate and understand the reasonableness of the madness in the world of passion where lay discarded stones of customs' and mores' walls, prejudiced fences, stakes of erudition, barriers of commercialism, flags of convenience, religious ramparts. One instant's rocketsburst of ungovernable desire consummated can illuminate more humanism than can be matched by all the repositories of human knowledge. In just these moments since I started this letter I have grown to resent, vehemently, the controls that have denied us this scorching delectability. That it would've saved me the lunacy I encountered when I walked into my home notwithstanding, I would rather be reciting not what might have been, but what took place. If I had that moment, I could face anything. As it is, I'm in a void where even dreams of you are unrealistic. We lost the moment, My Love. It has flown. We can never go back to the heat of it. When every single bit of an act we did would have been multiplied in its goodness a thousand times a thousand, not ever to be recaptured in our memory. We were close to it! We almost went up to that room; but even that close opens no pinhole portal to perceive what might have been. That we might soon come close! How that is to be desired! But here, in my room, this room instead, the likelihood seems impossible. I can only tell you, we will not see each other again. Vito, to portray himself heroic and protect his ingratiated, groveling self with my father and mother, came here to lie as insanely as a straight snake. He preserved my honor, defended the name of Dolorosso, suffered the loss of the pleasure of my company--Ha! Can anyone believe this? Without
a word from me? Oh! Yes! They did. My mother. My father. Indeed, my father. I may never leave my room again for as long as I live unpurified impenitent that I am though well-flayed. That I should have brought about the harm I did near destroys me. How can I make it up to you? I can't make it up to myself! Where then do I find the altar which accepts such sad contrition for the sake of the salvation of our oneness? I have no answer. I'm sure, my most precious love, you're searching for some palliative for your own omissions, doubts, questions. Between us, with so much taken away from us, we are lacking a completeness without which we would be unable to support our love. So? Despair. We know just enough to grasp the horizon of what could be, but not enough to push back the blackness that envelopes our plea for a mere breath more of our gale of love. How sad. With this moment near the end, I find myself with tearless eyes, for what further lost exquisiteness was I to save their flow? And how will this get to you? Not its delivery, but how it's taken in by you. Let me tell you, Love, not with your head.

  I'll call you! I will! I promise! The day will not go by I shan't hear the ring of your voice, the promise of your love, the keeping of my vow--that I shall love you forever and forever and forevermore.

  My kiss to yours, your heart to mine,

  Our love eternal; I'm yours!

  Mary

  CHAPTER 20

  THE VISION OF MARY racing to meet him would be a vivid re-run for the rest of his life. It was as if a screen had come up on his day, her disevanescence forming on the sidewalk a short distance away from a mist dissipated by the late afternoon sunlight though he was aware later that he had been watching her since she turned the corner of her block. Jeans, athletic shoes, white blouse, hair snatched back in a bandanna tie; eyes narrowbeamed into his--he felt--behind the dark glasses, mouth parted, arms swinging; short, hard breaths; and though she avoided other bodies, he saw none but her; his energy rushing to meet her as she struggled with the distance, the air between impeding her wish to have touched him as quickly as their superhypersonic emotions had intermingled. He would hold his breath until he could touch her to confirm the reality. Interminable. The same shot on the screen of her action, but she seemed not to move an inch closer! How long, Oh! Lord! Could it take until I could reach out with hopes to touch her! Don't stop! Oh! Dearest! My God! Don't stop, I'll die! How I want to rush to meet you, but we can't dare the scene. You must seem to be strolling by, casually. Me? Blasé. Not interested. Just a person waiting by a phone booth, like a call is expected. Watching the world go by. Bored. Am I convincing? How shall I say it for my acceptance speech for the Oscar? I almost missed my calling folks, I almost became an actor! I almost died for lack of air it took so long for her to reach me! And when she did, Oh! Precious Heart! Suspended moment! Confusion! Disanimation! Rejunction! Our quandary. What do we do? To meet, to be seen together, is to endanger our world. In a blip, we have communicated, a mere glanceworth's, and all questions are dispelled, the answer in action. I follow her into the phone booth, close the door, and gasp as my old life leaves me as we press together.