Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  He was, from the beginning, a kind of odd duck. I never heard those words used, but I imagine hearing them used in an overheard conversation, my father and mother talking, my father and one of the men. This is what should have happened. They ought to have stepped back and understood him, dismissed him with one of the functional phrases they had invented for such men. Instead, they did what was natural for them: they accepted him. He became, almost immediately, a part of the crowd. They socialized on Saturday nights, nearly every week, in one or another of the neighbors’ basements (but these were not basements, understand; they were “lower levels,” carpeted, with big pool tables and pine paneling). My father’s idea of a good time was to gather all the men into his office as soon as they arrived and ask them to take off their clothes and get into women’s dresses and wigs. Then the men, dressed as women, would come out and dance for their wives, the “girls,” who would sit together on couches and giggle uproariously. From our rooms upstairs, my sisters and I would hear them and sometimes creep to the banister and watch these hairy, half-exposed men in scanty costumes, from the bottom of which their boxer shorts showed. In dresses and wigs, they looked more like men than they would have in their regular party clothes. That was the nature of the game; I understood, early on, that it was all about sexual display.

  My father loved to tell the story of the first time Matt Romano came to one of these parties. He grabbed him by the arm, took him into his office, and said, “Take off your pants.” “You should have seen his face!” My father laughed. He is a simple man, my father; when he laughs, his face goes red. He believes deeply, I think, that every man is at heart the same man, with the same desires, save for those few who are so perverse that they must be set aside from the rest. “And then,” my father went on, “in the next minute, he did it!” It was Matt Romano’s initiation as ordinary man. He removed his blue double-breasted blazer and the cream-colored slacks and put on a dress and a wig. I did not watch this particular party, but I saw other scenes enough like it so that I can imagine how Matt Romano would have arranged his face into a pose of easy mirth, so much like the others that anyone would have been fooled. Then he would have gone out and bared his legs, and the men would have laughed, very hard, and put their hands on his shoulders, and laughed again.

  Very soon, his name began to change. I had thought, on first hearing it, that it had a certain elegance that put him at a distance from the others. And they spoke it, too, that way at first, with a kind of perplexed respect. Who was this man, this newcomer, this lawyer who had moved in among them? His practice was in Boston. Much was made of that, his city life, his professional life, his physical removal from the cement trucks and Laundromats and muddy construction sites of my father and his cronies. It is easy enough to imagine him as he might have existed in those days, in his office with its view of the harbor. In my image, he is speaking on the phone, leaning forward, scratching the side of his nose, a familiar habit of his. Several stories below, the water runs slate gray, smoky in the afternoon light. Yet I can’t hold the image without seeing him turn away from the things on his desk, the crisp papers, the letter opener. He looks down and away, riveted by something. There in the harbor, my father and Steve Delosa are out on my father’s Chris-Craft, fishing for flounder off of Rainsford Island. They are wearing fishing jackets, funny hats; in their hands are cans of beer. He is staring at them intently; there is something he is trying to figure out, a desire he is probing. Already, they have put a spin on his name, something that does not displease him. In their flat Boston pitch they stress the an in Romano. All its languor, its otherworldliness, is being ironed out. They are making him, in all the ways they know how to, just like them.

  There is only the fact of Sundays to stand in the way of this ongoing absorption: on Sundays she comes, the slender, dark-haired girl in sunglasses. She wears dresses that cling to her small body, and she moves with the cautious precision of someone crippled in youth. Very soon, it seems, everyone knows her name. “Did Dolores visit the Romanos today?” my mother might ask my father on a Sunday evening, as if she hadn’t herself looked and seen. And the name will not be reduced, not the way they have reduced his name. The word Dolores cannot be bitten down on; it comes out, in spite of their best attempts, sounding ambiguous, dreamlike, a word from another place, one they have steadfastly determined not to visit.

  Dolores was Matt Romano’s secretary. That explanation arrived a month or so after the Romanos moved in. I don’t know when the neighbors had begun to wonder about their Sunday arrangement, but I know the explanation, the business relationship, was spoken of with relief. After that, all forms of apocrypha sprang up. She was an orphaned girl for whom the Romanos had agreed to stand as substitute family. Her relations lived far away, in “California.” The weekends were hard for her. She had nowhere else to go.

  A snapshot: it is early summer, before Matt Romano has asked me to start mowing his lawn. I am in my backyard. I do not know what I am doing. Perhaps when you are fifteen, you only watch; it is your principal task, whatever other functions your body might be performing. It is your obsession to figure out the world. Matt Romano and Dolores are alone in the backyard, and from two houses away I can see them. They are walking among the trees in the Romanos’ backyard, the miniature forest of tall maples. Her dress is blue and belted; she is wearing a straw hat. He is walking slightly ahead of her and gesturing. His long arm goes out, as if to make a point; he turns to her. For a moment he considers her the way I was later to see him consider many things, as if from a far remove, something passing briefly over his face that to an outsider might resemble contempt. Then something else. The afternoon, for two or three seconds only, is heavy with an essence that I know, even at fifteen, he believes to be at the heart of life. If I had now to put a name on that thing I was made aware of, I would fumble, I would choose a useless word like confusion. Like ambivalence. But at that instant, as I stand in the presence of it, I seem to understand that there is no need to name it. It is simply there, on Matt Romano’s face as I view it from a distance, a seeing into life that troubles him deeply, yet that he is brave enough to hold on to for these few seconds. Then he moves past it—his body does, anyway; they sit on the edge of the fountain and resume their conversation. He goes on gesturing with his arms. Dolores sits upright, listening attentively but at the same time with an air of distraction, as though the important thing was said a while ago, and she is struggling to absorb it while only pretending to hear the words he is saying now. Through all of this, I have remained unseen.

  In July, at someone’s cookout, he spoke to me for the first time.

  “I hear you’re a pretty good lawn mower,” he said.

  I don’t remember answering. It was a bit of a surprise to come face to face with the fact that we inhabited the same universe, that he existed in dimensions identical to mine, was capable of taking me in, even of making a request. But some arrangement must have been made that afternoon, because I began mowing their lawn on Wednesdays. He had offered eleven dollars. The figure was irresistible; his largesse, everything that was impressive about him, was in it. His lawn took half a day. He was at work while I did it. I was fastidious, careful with things like edges and rocks, and I lost myself, always, in the rhythm of the humming machine. Every once in a while I would gaze up at the house, trying to get a closer look. A cedar deck rose on stilts at the far end. Through the window, I could see the cathedral ceiling, the hanging chandelier that would have lit their living room. His daughters were not girls who often played outside, but occasionally the younger one—she must have been five or six at the time—would come out and talk to me. I wanted to say nothing that would offend her, nothing she could report to her father that might cause me to lose this job, so we had a series of careful conversations in which most of our time was spent merely staring at one another. When the mowing was done, I trimmed the borders with clippers and went over the whole lawn carefully to check for any spots I’d missed. After the first time,
I made the mistake of going up to the back door and standing before Stella Romano, too embarrassed to ask for money but assuming she would know what I was there for.

  At first, she looked at me, then past me, as if I’d come to tell her about some problem with the lawn. And it was as though this worried her: the lawn wasn’t her domain.

  “I’m finished,” I said.

  She looked at me again, still not comprehending. Then she finally seemed to get it and laughed in her light, dismissive way. It was mid-afternoon, but she wore a dress, and jewelry. Beyond her, the little girls watched TV in the den.

  “You’ll have to come back tonight,” she said.

  I came back after I saw his car in the driveway, and that was the ritual I followed all summer. I left an hour for their dinner, which was later than ours, so that by the time I crossed the two yards I had to leave the very comfortable scene of our house at dusk, the television on in our family room and the yellow evening light coming in, while my sisters painted their nails and my mother did the dishes. My father, his gaze fixed absently on the screen, had set this time aside for what remained of his dream life. I looked forward to the moment when I had some excuse to leave them, to cross the two lawns in the deepening light. Something in that family room at that hour gave me cause to fear. I never probed it, or never far; something was stopped there, something had achieved perfection. I felt oddly freed by the feeling of unsettledness I had as I climbed the steps to the back landing of the Romanos’.

  There, the scene was always repeated, always the same—Matt Romano would answer the door and look at me as if he had never seen me before and had no idea what I was there for. Seconds would pass; he would focus, then seem displeased by the fact that had finally risen into his consciousness. I was the boy who mowed their lawn, the neighbor’s son come looking for money. He seemed, in his half-unbuttoned white shirt and black dress pants, to have emerged recently from a scene of violence. There was about him an agitation that made me think at any second a wild gesture might spring forth, though he would only reach into his pocket and count out eleven dollars, and as he spoke, in the transparent effort he made to be kind, I came to know that he was only drunk. Behind him, there might have been some noise, a woman’s whimpering, though I am quite sure I am reading this in. The single instance Stella Romano appeared behind him, it was the cagey, frightened look of a keeper that she wore; she drew him back when he began to speak to me. His words were slurred; I doubt I even heard him. She must have been afraid, though, of what he might say. She drew him back with one hand, and as I turned to her I lost the haunted look in his eyes, the look that drunks get when they want, terribly, to be understood. There seemed to be in it some message meant directly for me. But it, too, was lost. One or the other of them shut the door.

  It doesn’t seem at all strange to me how little my life that summer had to do with the outside world, the world of my peers, how fully and simply I inhabited that neighborhood. I don’t think my evening bike rides ever took me beyond the street, or the sand pits that announced foundations that would soon be built on the newly cleared lots opening into the forest. I circled the houses and studied hard, noticed small architectural flaws—the Zagamis had left too much foundation showing, so had my father—and grew attuned to an unnameable melancholy that settled over me as I stared at new brick and stone at dusk. Sometimes I wandered through the skeletons of houses that were still just wood, naming the rooms. If I saw a man walking past—Steve Delosa with his dog, Al Zagami whistling—I would stare hard at that, too, waiting for the image to reveal its deeper truth. The intuition that guided my days was that something was about to be shown to me, some fact about life I had to be alert for, a thing that might free me from what, even then, I could see was not a usual infatuation.

  In September, they decided to throw themselves a ball. It did not seem extraordinary, though a far cry from the parties where the men dressed as women. The women were to purchase gowns; the men, tuxedos. I don’t think the ball was the Romanos’ idea exactly, but I believe it was because of the Romanos that a change occurred. Within a year, the raucous Saturday night cross-dressing became a thing of the past.

  There was a school dance that Saturday night, but I didn’t go. Instead, I sat in my house and waited for my parents to appear, dressed for the occasion. The Noceras joined my parents for a pre-ball drink, but there was tension as soon as they came in. Elena Nocera seemed uncomfortable, as if waiting to be sprung from the tight white gown she wore, to put her feet up and make one of the ribald comments that were her trademark. Charlie Nocera, too, looked fidgety in his tuxedo. But my father moved about the rooms, appearing purposefully stiff, as though guided by the stately measures of a piece of music none of the rest of us could hear. “Have a brandy, Charlie?” he asked, and went to pour it. Charlie Nocera put his hands in his pockets. Elena made a joke. My mother, in her yellow gown, sat as if in a trance.

  When they had all gone into the Romanos’, I stood at the foot of their lawn to see what I could of the party. A bay window, twelve feet across, cast its light onto the lawn. A single birch rose up in front, stark and long-trunked. Through its leaves, I watched the pastel women pass, the men in black suits. Matt himself came for a moment and stood at the window. I don’t believe he saw me. One hand was in the pocket of his tuxedo pants, the other held a long-stemmed drink. On his face was that by now familiar, wistful suggestion that what was most dear to him, most essential, existed elsewhere. I was sure he was going to step away, come outside, drive off. Around his body was that slight, subliminal blurring, as in a film, where you know an action is forthcoming, and I understood it was the action I’d been waiting for. I might have been coaxing him, hoping for the gesture, the tug of the rope with which all the scenery might be lifted and the mechanics of this world revealed to me so that I might see it, at last, for the blunt thing it was. But all he did was turn away. He went back to the party. The movement of the room seemed to slow down and gather around him, as if he had gotten lost on an outing, stopped somewhere to get a closer look at some amazing, briefly glimpsed thing, and now the others had formed a party to carry him away from it.

  I am sorry to say that after that night, or soon after, I began to change. A new school year had begun, different from the one before; circumstances converged in a way that made me grow more interested in myself, less so in the world around me. I lost the perfect outward attunement of a fifteen-year-old boy, and never again recovered it. Or let me say, instead, that I found it, or had it thrust on me, on only two other occasions, so that what might have been a rich, dark, satisfying story becomes instead jagged, a thing of snapshots.

  The first occurred at another cookout, during another summer, and it was the only time I saw Matt Romano flare up, openly declare his independence from the others, though when I say “flare up,” that’s too much; it was subtler than that. The Noceras had built a pool; there were gatherings on Sundays, celebrations, really, of Charlie Nocera’s deepening success in the construction business. No one else had a pool. Charlie Nocera’s grin grew foxier, wider in those days. You see this gathering of energy in certain men, the moment when they peak. The children are still young, the pool is new, all the calls are for them. He began to take some of the limelight away from Matt Romano. Perhaps Matt sensed this and was annoyed; perhaps that’s the explanation for his behavior that day. I don’t know. We all leaped into the pool, one nearly on top of the other, but after a time I sat in a lounge chair, wrapped in a towel, taking time off from my growing fascination with myself to pay attention to the men.

  They were talking: Matt Romano, my father, Charlie Nocera, Steve Delosa. The women were elsewhere and the chatter was aggressive, punctuated by laughter, then softening, drifting, falling back into the rhythms of the summer afternoon. Matt Romano began a story. It always surprised me to hear him talk. Whenever he opened his mouth and spoke, I was made certain that I had invented him, invented, at least, the dreaming, wraith-like figure who hovered over the neighbor
hood but was never quite one with it. When he spoke, he was a coarse man whose eyes revealed the desperation of someone wanting merely to be liked. I turned away. I remember, though, when he’d finished, registering on some level that his story had failed to make the desired impression. The men seemed disturbed by it. Matt had told a story about a rascal, a business cheat he half-admired. The story ended, the men made a kind of silent grumble, then Matt said, in afterthought, “I liked the cut of his jib.”

  I turned back then, I had to, because some sixth sense told me I was about to witness a scene. Charlie Nocera was sitting, his hands folded, leaning slightly forward, with his thumbs flicking at one another. He was grinning, but the grin had passed its point of animation and some darker assessment was taking place in his eyes. Hatred would be too strong a word for it, but it was not impossible to imagine, from that look, that in other circumstances he might be about to get up and hit Matt Romano. My father leaned back in his chair with one finger pressing against the side of his lips—his thoughtful, impatient pose. Steve Delosa glanced off at the neighboring trees, waiting for something to pass.

  All of this took place in a matter of seconds, and within it, I saw Matt Romano watch them all, quietly defiant. “The cut of his jib.” It was not language any of them would ever have used; he had brought it from somewhere else and held it before them like a sign of his dual citizenship, his ability to escape their little world, if it came to that. They all knew this: they were antagonists at heart. All their silent acceptance of Dolores, of his transgression of the rules, felt about to erupt. Instead, the unexpected, habitual thing happened. It was as though a bird, emerging from its egg, went backward, covered itself over, so that the egg, though newly whole, revealed its network of cracks. Someone said something, to offset the tension. Matt Romano’s face turned grim. Whatever he was seeking took its form in the space between him and the men. He considered it, then lowered his eyes. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. From a distance, it might have appeared as though an ease had returned to the scene. A breeze made the tops of the trees move. Elena Nocera, grinning widely, came out with iced tea.