by Lou Aronica
“Yeah, thanks.”
I hung up the phone and heard my father talking to Theresa about someone from her apartment building. Both he and Tom had moved on.
~~~~~~~~
I almost wondered if my father had intended for me to overhear the conversation, though I overheard every conversation he had with my aunt. I was tempted to go out to talk to him after he got off of the phone, but I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to enjoy the confrontation. I decided instead to try to get back to work on my article. It wasn’t particularly easy to concentrate with his voice and Tom’s still in my head, though.
Tom was probably right about the Percy Kescham story. There wasn’t enough there that hadn’t been presented in other ways at other times. I of course found this a little ironic considering that I was currently working on a piece that had probably appeared – in only somewhat different form – in hundreds of magazines over the years. However, feature writing was different and, while I saw myself long-term as a feature writer, I’d had a fair amount of trouble coming up with stories on my own. I’d only published about a half dozen major feature pieces in my career and they were by far the toughest pitches for me. A story idea would come to mind, I’d spend some time with it and I would think that I had something substantial. But for whatever reason, it wouldn’t play out that way. I didn’t want to believe that I was destined for a career of how-to stories, but every time a pitch went badly for me, I started to think that this might be where I was headed.
My father wasn’t wrong about my romantic history, either. Back when I was actually looking for a life mate, I hadn’t been particularly effective at choosing my partners. Both Georgia and Karen had been women whose greatest contribution to my life had been that they allowed me to express myself romantically. In retrospect, neither had offered me nearly as much in return, though this didn’t mean that my own feelings were any less genuine. The other women I’d dated before Karen tended to be beautiful and emotionally unavailable. I just seemed to gravitate toward that kind of person.
Since Karen, the rules had changed for me as I retrofitted my view of romance to connect with the kind of woman I was drawn to. It no longer mattered that I went out with women who gave little of themselves, because I wasn’t looking for much. Companionship, sex, something to get me out of the house. I was more sanguine about my romantic life than I had ever been before. I dated interesting women, we had a good time for a while, we moved on, and no hearts were injured during the filming of this production.
My father was too much the child of another era to understand how this could work for me. To him, guys were supposed to find mates, create families, make castles that they could be king of. Just as they were supposed to go to offices, collect paychecks, and build diversified portfolios. In my father’s time, the only men who were single in their thirties were closet homosexuals and relentless womanizers, and “freelance” was code for “unemployed.” About three or four years earlier, I’d told him that he shouldn’t ever expect grandchildren from me and he looked at me like I had nine heads. To him, I wasn’t playing the game the right way.
I’m sure I threw him off with Marina. Looking back on our conversations about her, I thought I’d made it clear that things were “committed casual” with us. But I’m sure he drew his own conclusions from our seeing each other several times a week for half a year.
There was no effective way for me to explain to him what I had with Marina. I wasn’t fluent in the language, and he didn’t know what most of the words meant anyway. How do you explain to someone who grew up with a very narrow definition of love and family that you agreed with him that the woman you were seeing was extraordinary but that you had prepared your heart for the end of the romance? How could he possibly understand that I assumed Marina would be my lover until the inevitable happened, after which I was hoping that she would be one of my best friends for the rest of my life? How could I think that he would see that as not only desirable, but preferable to a marriage that was likely to be filled with quiet desperation and at best would be nothing more than comfortable?
So I decided not to try. If my father wanted to bitch at my aunt about how I was missing the point, so be it. I wasn’t going to bang my head against the wall trying to explain a healthy twenty-first century relationship to an antiquated mind like my father’s.
It took me more than an hour, seven e-mail messages, and a couple more phone calls, but I finally got my head back into the article I’d been writing. At lunchtime, I walked out of my office to find him sitting on the couch watching the television with the sound practically off.
“Do you want some lunch?” I said.
He glanced up at me briefly and then returned his gaze to the television. I assumed that was his way of saying “no” and I went into the kitchen. When I got there, I saw a pot on one of the burners with less than an inch of furiously boiling water in it.
I called out to him. “What are you doing with the water?”
“I’m making something for myself.”
“Something that has to do with boiling water until it evaporates completely?”
“I was just about to go in to take care of it. You need more pasta, by the way.”
He shuffled toward me, avoiding eye contact as he did.
“Dad, I thought we agreed that I’d do the cooking in the house.”
“I’ll cook for myself. I don’t like the way you cook.”
“You didn’t have any complaints last night.”
“I was putting on a show for your ‘girlfriend.’”
“No kidding. And it was a hell of a show. But I think she probably would have been convinced after your second helping. You didn’t need to eat a fourth.”
He grumbled. “I’ll do my own cooking.”
“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll make sure the insurance on the house is up to date.”
I started to make myself a sandwich. While I was at the refrigerator, I pulled out the container of bolognese (or “meat sauce,” as my father referred to it – we didn’t discuss the fact that the meat was ground turkey) that I’d made a few nights earlier. He was so damned set in his ways. Pasta came dressed with either meat sauce or marinara. God forbid I try anything else with him.
Meanwhile, he threw pasta into the water and walked back into the den. As much as I wanted to prove a point to him, I didn’t feel like cleaning burnt pasta out of the pot, so I decided to wait around until it was ready. I put it in a dish for him with the sauce and left it on the kitchen table.
“Your lunch is ready,” I said as I walked back into the den on my way to my office.
“I told you I’d take care of it.”
“I know what you told me.”
He got out of the chair slowly. Regardless of how peeved I was at him, I always felt a pang of sympathy watching him try to move on his failing legs. The doctors had told us that his only option was joint replacement, something my father had flatly rejected.
“I can take care of myself,” he said as he walked past me.
“You’re welcome,” I said and started toward my office. I stopped and turned toward him. “By the way, I’m going to Marina’s tonight. I’ll be leaving around six. There’s stuff in the refrigerator for you. If you’re going to cook for yourself, I’d prefer if you did it while I was on the premises.”
He stopped and looked back at me. “You spending the night over there?”
“Yes, I am.”
He muttered something as he turned away. It wasn’t until after I walked back to my office that I realized what he said.
It was, “You don’t deserve her.”
Chapter Ten
It was 7:43. Mickey sat at the kitchen table thinking that Jesse would be home in a few minutes. He was probably kissing Marina goodbye just about now, not appreciating her any more than he ever did.
Mickey wasn’t sure exactly what it was about Marina. Sure, there was the passing physical resemblance, but you had to look awfully close to recognize it. The shape and s
et of their eyes. The tiny creases there. But there was something much deeper than that. It was the way that Marina seemed to embrace you simply by saying hello. The way she held Jesse when she greeted him. The way she regarded him when she first walked into the room that said she was thankful for his presence and that she cherished it. There is nothing more satisfying than having a woman look at you that way.
If Jesse couldn’t identify that for what it was, Mickey felt sorry for him. “We’re just being realistic,” he had said. Was it possible for a second that Marina was as blind to this as he was? In some ways, Mickey hoped that was the case, because it would be less painful to her if his unenlightened son never came around. But Mickey really wanted things to turn out differently. Marina was a rare woman. That much had to be clear even to the casual observer. And Mickey wanted her to stay with his son – for both Jesse and himself.
Mickey appreciated the fact that Marina let him be a little flirtatious with her the other night. He didn’t get the opportunity to spend much time around gorgeous women in their early thirties, and the encounter had tickled him. It was the first time he’d talked to a woman like that since Dorothy died. She used to tease him mercilessly about doing that kind of thing when she was alive. Even pretended to be jealous every now and again, though she knew without a doubt that she had nothing to worry about. From the moment he first talked to Dorothy, Mickey was sure about where his life was headed, and he wouldn’t have compromised that for anything on Earth.
Mickey took another sip of coffee. So damned strong. He couldn’t understand how his son could drink coffee like this all the time. Where the hell were his taste buds? Normally, if he got up before Jesse, Mickey made the coffee his way, but not this morning. He didn’t want the conversation to get off track because Jesse was preoccupied with the “dirty water.” The extra caffeine was probably beneficial, anyway. If he was going to get this story out, he was going to require a little additional stimulation.
A few minutes later, Jesse walked through the door. As usual, he bounded into the kitchen. How could he not notice that he even walked differently after spending the night with Marina?
“Hey Dad. Sleep okay?”
“Yeah, it was great,” Mickey said. The fact was, he’d hardly slept at all in anticipation of this morning, but that was beside the point. “Grab a cup of coffee. I just made a pot.”
“Ooh, Dad’s secret recipe,” Jesse said as he took a mug out of the cupboard. “I don’t know how you get so much flavor into every drop.”
Mickey bristled, but held back. His reward came moments later.
“Hmm, good,” Jesse said, his brows arched. “Looks like the old man has made a breakthrough.” He started to walk out of the kitchen. “I’ve got a ton of stuff to do today. I might have to work late tonight.”
“Jess, come sit down for a couple of minutes.”
Mickey could tell by Jesse’s reaction that his son had picked up the nuance in his voice. He could also tell that Jesse wasn’t enthusiastic about “a talk.”
“Dad, I have a ton.”
“I heard you the first time. There’s something I’d like to tell to you about. Come sit with me for a few minutes.”
From the expression on Jesse’s face, you would think that Mickey had been holding a foot-long hypodermic needle in his hand when he’d extended his invitation.
“Can we do this tonight? Like maybe after dinner or something?”
Mickey appraised his son thoughtfully. Jesse held his gaze, but Mickey could tell that he was looking to run, and for more reasons than simply the deadline he needed to meet. Mickey knew that the handful of father/sons they’d had over the years had tended to go badly. But they’d never discussed anything like this before.
“Give me a few minutes now. This isn’t what you think, I promise you that much. It isn’t about you – at least not directly. It’s about me.”
He had Jesse’s attention now. His son seemed less evasive and more apprehensive as he reluctantly sat down at the kitchen table.
“It’s nothing like that. I’m not dying or anything. I just have a story I want to tell you, something that I haven’t told your sisters or brother about. Something I haven’t told anyone in a very long time. After seeing you and Marina, I realized you needed to know about this.”
Jesse’s expression changed again, and Mickey could tell that his son was expecting a lecture.
“Relax. This’ll be painless. But you’re going to have to keep an open mind because I know how close you were to your mother.”
Jesse’s eyes opened wide.
“And it’s not that, either. I was always faithful to your mother. I don’t believe that you can be any other way and still look at yourself in the mirror. But I think if you’re lucky, you’re blessed with one great love in your life, one person who makes the world a completely different place for you.” He looked over to Jesse, a little less sure about how his son was going to receive this story.
“That person came to me before I ever met your mother and I want to tell you about her now.”
~~~~~~~~
Manhattan was a place teeming with possibility. The war was a couple of years in the past, the country was on the road to unprecedented prosperity, and Manhattan was the beating heart of America, if not the entire world. For a young man with an education and a good head for numbers, the doors were wide open. Mickey Sienna was just such a man.
A problem with his right knee had kept Mickey out of active service during the war, though it hadn’t kept tragedy from his family’s doorstep. Mickey had made as much of a contribution as he could working in the communications office at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. While doing so, he had enough time on his hands to get a degree in business administration. He was the first person in his family to graduate college, which brought him their admiration but also set him apart from them. When the war ended, a friend mentioned that the brokerage firm of Quick, Banks, and Kay was looking for bright candidates for their training program and Mickey applied. Within six months, he was building a modest client base. The brokerage field was a natural for someone with Mickey’s keen understanding of how different people regarded various levels of risk and reward. Soon, Mickey had earned the approval of his superiors, the respect (and some closeted envy) of his colleagues, and enough money to allow him to rent an apartment in a townhouse on Gramercy Park.
This elevated life suited Mickey well. As the son of a modest shopkeeper, he’d grown up in a home where there was always food on the table, but few luxuries. Now Mickey found that he enjoyed the taste of white Burgundy and the way his Brooks Brothers shirts draped his frame. He ate out regularly and danced to live jazz at least once a week.
The move from Brooklyn to Manhattan was more than a sign that Mickey was doing well at his job, though. It was also a symbolic step from his old world into a new one. There had been clouds over his family from the time Paulie died, but Teddy’s death and Theresa’s attack had cast a pall over his mother and father and seemingly the entire neighborhood. Mickey continued to visit his parents at least once a week, and he saw Theresa every two or three days, but he also knew that he needed to create a life for himself or he would wind up trapped by the despair.
Mickey found it easy to make friends within the quickly evolving financial community. There were so many young men in his same position and so many bright, attractive women to spend time with. There was always another dinner party to attend, always another Vassar graduate to walk arm-in-arm with. Settling down was the last thing on his mind, and he truly believed he could go on like this indefinitely.
Among his better friends at QBK was Carl Ceraf. They had gone through the training program together, and there was initially some competitive tension between them. But once they realized that there were plenty of clients to go around if you were aggressive enough and good enough, they began to socialize outside of the office. They’d double-dated on several occasions, went out for drinks together regularly, and spent many summer days at the Polo Gr
ounds cheering on the Giants. Carl still lived in his family home because it was “the best deal in town.” Mickey knew that the Cerafs had lived in Manhattan for three generations, that Carl’s father was a professor at Columbia, and that Carl’s sister was “the resident genius,” but beyond that he knew very little. That all changed the night Carl invited him and “a couple dozen of our closest friends” to a cocktail party at the family house.
Mickey took Jessica Fain to the party. He had only a passing interest in Jessica, but she was the most sophisticated woman he dated and, while Carl himself was always casual in his demeanor, Mickey knew that this evening demanded the highest level of decorum. He was actually very excited, if a little intimidated, at the prospect of meeting the estimable Professor Ceraf. Little did he know that a far more fateful introduction awaited him.
Mickey and Jessica arrived some twenty minutes or so after the party had begun. There were probably twenty people already milling through the living room, where the bar was set up, the dining room, where various cold hors d’oeuvres were laid out on a table, and the den, where soft jazz played and people sat and talked. When he came through the door with Jessica, Carl broke away from a conversation to greet them.
“Mickey, great to see you,” Carl said. “Jessica, you’re looking statuesque as always.” Mickey shook Carl’s hand while Jessica offered a demure smile and a faint peck on the cheek. Carl escorted them into the house. Mickey knew several of the people there from work and was introduced by Carl to several others as “my partner in crime at QBK.” They moved to the den, where Carl’s father stood telling a story to two women in their early twenties.
“Dad, I’d like you to meet my friends Mickey Sienna and Jessica Fain,” Carl said as they walked up. Daniel Ceraf turned, took Jessica politely by the hand, and welcomed her to his home. He then gripped Mickey’s hand and said, “My son tells me that you’re an absolute wiz at the Market.”
Mickey made solid eye contact with Professor Ceraf. “That’s kind of him, sir. Actually, he’s taught me everything I know.”