by Eddie Joyce
Leave me alone, she thinks, for a little while.
She releases her legs, straightens them. She thinks of nothing but the physical reality of the moment: the slight chill in the room, the softness of the pillow, the fabric of the bedsheet draped on her nipples, a strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth, the scratchy soreness of her eyes from all the crying.
This is a physical act, she tells herself, nothing more. Like going to the bathroom or eating.
No, it’s not, she thinks. That is ridiculous beyond words. It is something more, has to be, or else you would have done it a lot sooner. You waited for a reason, Tina. You waited for the right person and you’re lying in bed with him.
She thinks of Wade: the tensile rope of his runner’s thighs, his spare chest with ribbons of thin hair, the surprising thickness of his penis, a pleasant contrast from his leanness everywhere else. An impulse to compare Wade and Bobby, to line their naked bodies beside each other in her mind’s eye and catalog the differences, arises; she has a vision of Stephanie asking scandalous questions of comparison. She fights these thoughts off. She will not do that here. Everywhere else but not here.
She thinks of Wade again: the smell of him, his way. She visualizes their kissing episode in the car earlier, his hand finding the curve of her ass through the dress, the moistness between her legs as he fondled her. She feels the moistness returning. She reaches her hand backward across the bed, searching for his groin. He slides over to accommodate her reach. His erection has dwindled, but it responds to her trembling fingers.
When he swells solid in her grip, she turns and straddles him, pushing down on his chest with her free hand. Her other hand is still holding his cock, fully erect now, and she lowers herself onto it. She stops, her body clenching as it adjusts to a distantly familiar sensation; the pain lessens in spasms. When he’s fully inside her, she starts to ride him. He reaches around the middle of her stomach, his fingers nearly touching across the small of her back. The physical dynamics are awkward—he is tall and she is short and this is their first go—but they settle into a pleasurable rhythm. Tina’s tears return involuntarily and Wade stops moving when he notices. He starts to say something, but she kisses him, urges him on, takes control of their fucking, because she wants this, she needs this, needs to feel alive again, to sweat and to thrust and to fuck, to feel him throbbing inside of her, to cry and to scream and to come.
And she does. She has a ferocious orgasm that sends shudders up and down her body. The intensity of it sends her nails digging into the wiry muscle of his biceps, drives her teeth together in a jarring gnash. She remembers to breathe and the feeling expands and she puts everything into it and lets go. It crests and slowly descends; she feels like she’s floating backward through a door toward humanity.
Her orgasm surprises Wade too, who comes in response, his fingers tensing as they slide down and grip the cheeks of her ass. She feels his stiffening spurt and slithery retreat; even after he’s gone soft, their groins are still joined in sticky, wet congress. Tina feels an urge to hike her sex up to his face and grind her groin over his mouth, to have his hands on her ass as she careens toward another orgasm. She doesn’t want to stop, doesn’t want to start thinking again.
“Jesus Christ,” Wade says, breathlessly. “Holy shit.”
She feels the world returning.
“Holy shit,” he says again, reaching a hand up for her tears.
Her crying becomes a wet giggle. She leans down and kisses him, then lays her head down on his chest. The room has a fecund stink, the smell of sex. Tina yawns, suddenly exhausted.
“Tired?” he asks, half jokingly.
“Long day,” she says and then, through a hazy euphoria, she remembers how it started, with her telling Gail and the heartrending look on Gail’s face. Then Bobby is back in her head and Stephanie is asking her questions in the bathroom and Alyssa is frowning at her smoking and Bobby Jr. needs something. So before the whole crew can get properly started and ruin this moment, she tucks herself under Wade’s arm, closes her eyes, and falls asleep.
* * *
Tina wakes with a shiver. She feels Wade’s body coiled behind her. They fell asleep in a loose spoon, his hand is still draped over her shoulder. She’s still naked and the thin bedsheet isn’t much cover. She lifts his arm gently, slides out of bed, and retrieves her underwear off the floor. As she’s putting them on, she spots the shirt he was wearing earlier, draped over an easy chair in the corner. She slips it on, like she’s seen in movies but never actually done herself. Bobby almost never wore dress shirts. The shirt is comically long on her, like a nightgown; the hem sits below her knees. She closes a few buttons and pads into the kitchen.
He has the fridge of a wealthy bachelor: a six-pack of Stella, a bottle of half-empty white wine with a French label, a few hunks of cheese in the crisper, and a white bag holding restaurant leftovers. She wants cold pasta, a handful of rigatoni with gravy. Maybe a sliver of chicken parm and some almost-stale bread. She closes the fridge.
It was pretty damn good. One romp has awakened a hunger almost ten years in the making. Part of her wants to go back to bed, wake Wade, and do it again, but another part wants to be alone for a bit, to enjoy this nothingness, this leap between two lives.
She looks around the apartment. She didn’t get the grand tour earlier. It’s modern, a little austere. Lots of clean lines and sharp edges. She doesn’t want to be nosy, but she has a restless energy that defies the hour. She walks through the living room to the second bedroom. She opens the door and flicks on a light.
The room is a mess; cardboard boxes lie scattered on the floor. A desk sits under a window that looks out onto Jersey. A sliding glass door next to it leads to a terrace. The white wall across from Tina holds three swaths of paint: robin’s egg blue, a deep yellow, and a barely there gray. The room is stuck in a transitive state; it sits heavy with the weight of unfulfilled expectations.
A daybed sits against the wall opposite the window; a solitary box leans precariously, one corner off the edge, frames of pictures jutting above the rim. Tina walks over and sits on the daybed. She lifts the open cardboard box onto her lap. It’s filled with pictures of Wade’s dead wife, Morgan. Tina’s seen Morgan before—she and Wade had shown each other pictures of their deceased spouses on their third date—but these pictures are more intimate.
Here’s Morgan and Wade at a fancy ball of some sort: Wade next to her in a tuxedo, she in a stunning red dress. Here they are in a restaurant: she’s hoisting a glass of red wine in a jokey toast and Wade is rolling his eyes. She’s beautiful, an athletic blond girl from Northern California with a touch of mischief in her eyes. A Stanford grad, an architect.
Tina looks through the pictures and each one summons the same question: How could the same man love this woman and love me?
One particular photo draws Tina in. Morgan is alone in this one, wearing hiking gear: thick socks and clunky boots, an oppressive backpack, a sweat-stained tank top. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her lips are pursed in a tight smile under sunglasses. She’s sitting on a large stone and behind her, Tina can see the white trunks of trees.
The Morgans in the other pictures are unaware, anchored to the moment of the photo, but this one knows somehow. Knows that another woman will be looking at this very picture one day. The look on this Morgan’s face is one of reluctant acceptance. It unsettles Tina, but after she stares at it for a minute, it’s oddly comforting.
Some part of Wade will always belong to Morgan in the way that some part of her will always belong to Bobby. That’s the way it has to be. It’s not even a sadness. It couldn’t be any other way; their losses bind them to each other. Sure, it’s other things as well, but without their losses, there’s little chance they would have found each other in a thousand years. It’s okay to admit that. Their losses were the most important events in their lives. There’s no shame in loving eac
h other for the way they carried them.
Tina thinks back to earlier in the night on the BQE. She was so consumed by her own emotions, it didn’t sink in that they were almost in a car accident. He reached his hand across like he could actually prevent her from going through the windshield. Morgan died in a car accident on the Cross Bronx Expressway, driving up to look at a house for sale in Rye. They wanted a yard and a family to fill it. She was thirty-four, having trouble getting pregnant. The coroner said death was instantaneous, she didn’t suffer.
Small mercies.
She lifts the photo to her mouth, kisses the sunglass-ed image of Morgan.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She puts the photo back in the box and sets the box on the bed.
She wants to punctuate this moment, singe the night into her memory. She remembers the pack of cigarettes that Stephanie left in her purse. She goes back to the kitchen, finds her purse, and fishes a cigarette from the pack. She lights it on the stove top and then goes back to the office. She opens the sliding door and steps onto the terrace.
It’s cold outside. The rain has stopped, but the cement on the terrace is still wet beneath her bare feet. The terrace extends around the corner, back around to where Wade is still sleeping in the master bedroom. A covered gas grill and a few throaty pigeons are her only companions.
Tina can hear the city below. She walks to the corner of the terrace. Even at this hour, thousands of tiny lights illuminate the city. She can see the harbor through other buildings. She can see Brooklyn, the Verrazano, the ferry terminal, the hilly North Shore of Staten Island, the last-century industries of the Jersey waterfront. She feels the flesh on her legs ripple with goose pimples. She takes a drag of the cigarette.
She’s never felt smaller than she does at this moment. The enormity of the city, the space and significance of it, overwhelm her. She sees herself from a mile away, a fleck of nothing on one terrace on one floor in one tall building of thousands.
She lowers the lit end of her cigarette into a puddle on the railing. She flicks the stub out into the cold air and watches it plummet into the cradled space between buildings.
The color of the night is shifting from black to deepest blue. Dawn is coming. The daylight will break over Long Island first, make its way over the boroughs, illuminate Staten Island last. Her gaze fixes on Staten Island and its low, whispering darkness. The only place she’s ever called home. She wishes she could hold back the dawn, prevent the light from crossing the Verrazano, hold back the day and its inevitable sadnesses for all those she loves.
But her wishes are useless. The dawn’s march is steady, executed without mercy or cruelty, and even this colossus of a city is powerless against it. In mere minutes, the dawn has passed and left the pristine blueness of a perfect day in its wake.
Chapter 3
A QUARTER COME TO REST IN A QUIET PLACE
Gail is already awake when first light reaches the house. She skimmed through sleep, like a stone skipping over water. Strange dreams skittered away when she woke, the retreat of their dark tendrils leaving her anxious. She shifts to a sitting position, massages her closed eyes with the palms of her hands.
She puts on an oversized FDNY sweater and a pair of gray sweatpants, walks across the hall to Bobby’s room. She lies on his bed, hoping to cajole her body into another half hour of shut-eye, but it’s useless: she’s up. Nothing short of a case of Chianti will remedy that.
She goes downstairs to the kitchen, takes a Tupperware container out of the fridge, grabs a fork, and sits at the table. She uses the side of the fork like a knife, carves off a sliver of meatball. She goes back to the fridge, finds a container of sauce, and pours some in with the meatballs. She stares, bleary-eyed, out at the street. It rained in the night; she could hear it from bed. The street is still slick with it and the air smells thick and lush.
They didn’t go into the city last night. She told Michael she was too tired. She didn’t tell him about Tina’s new fella. Soon enough.
A pocket of drizzle descends on Wirra Lane. Across the street, one of their new neighbors, Dmitri, runs out from the old Grasso house to his car. He is thin, tall, Russian. The wife, Ava, seems nice; her face always carries a smile, but she speaks very little English. They have two young kids, a boy and a girl, with dirty-blond hair and the pinched faces of the frequently disciplined. The family moved in two years ago, after the Grassos moved to a retirement home in New Jersey.
“The last stop,” Sal Grasso told them on the day they moved out. Michael laughed. Gail bit her lip so she wouldn’t. Sal’s wife, Carla, punched Sal’s shoulder.
“Stop saying that.”
“What?” he said, as one beefy hand rubbed his enormous gut and the other brought a cigarette to his mouth. “How long you think I got anyway, babe?”
It was hard to argue with Sal. He was an obese, two-pack-a-day smoker charging hard on seventy, with two heart attacks in his rearview, possessed of a complete unwillingness to make any lifestyle changes at “this stage of the game,” as he put it.
But the joke was on him after all. Three months after they moved, Carla was dead. A massive stroke. The one thing Sal had never counted on was outliving his wife, who was a decade younger and infinitely healthier. The last Gail had heard was that he’d moved out to Vegas to work as a blackjack dealer, something he always wanted to do. Go figure.
The Grassos had been good neighbors: friendly, not too nosy, helped you in a pinch. Invited Gail and Michael over for drinks every year sometime around the holidays. They reciprocated with a barbecue once a summer. Close, but not too close.
The Russians aren’t as friendly. Michael gave up after inviting Dmitri to the Leaf one night. Dmitri said he didn’t drink, didn’t even thank Michael for the offer. A little brusque in his decline. That was enough for Michael.
“Even the fucking kids are unfriendly.”
Gail feels differently. These things take time. She was a stranger here once. A newcomer in a place with a distaste for newcomers. That newcomer sat at this same table, waiting for Maria.
She runs her free hand over the surface of the table. They’ve had the table since they moved in: a gift from Maria and Enzo. The oak bears the nicks, bruises, and stains of forty years. So many words—angry, joyous, sad, hopeful—have passed over it. This table has heard more secrets than a confessional box. So much news. Even Tina’s nugget from yesterday.
What was it that Maria used to say?
The news of the world passes between women in kitchens.
Gail can’t remember the Italian words, only the lilt of Maria’s voice, the hand gestures and pauses, the wooden spoon used to punctuate the point. The real news of the world: births, deaths, sicknesses, affairs. Whenever Gail had a bit of news, she told Maria here in this kitchen. And vice versa. Gail had no daughters of her own, no special confidante to pass news along to. There were friends, of course, but it never felt the way it did with Maria.
Until Tina. They’ve spent a good bit of the past ten years at this table: talking, crying, commiserating. Tina sat with her at this table on the night Franky was arrested. Two days after Christmas. No one had seen him since Thanksgiving, when he showed up drunk to Peter’s house. They didn’t have any details but Gail knew it was bad. Franky had called Michael and Michael had called the only lawyer he knew: Peter. There was nothing to do but wait. So Tina waited with Gail. Had a friend stay over to watch her own kids, sat here through a long, eerie night, holding Gail’s hand, both of them sneaking glances at the phone. It finally rang a little after six in the morning.
Peter said that Franky was being held in the Tombs, would be arraigned later that morning, would probably be released later that day, but they might need to line up some money for bail. Peter had already hired a good criminal lawyer, someone who knew state courts, handled street crime.
“What did he do, Peter?”
“He beat the shi
t out of a cabby outside the ferry terminal in Manhattan. Broke his nose.”
“Why? Why would he do that?”
“He says the guy said something about you.”
“About me?”
Her stomach churned. Bile climbed into her mouth.
“About his mother. Like, ‘fuck your mother,’ something like that. Who the hell knows, Mom. He’s not making a ton of sense.”
After Gail hung up with Peter, Tina heard her confession. She was responsible for Franky getting arrested. What she’d said to him at Thanksgiving had precipitated this incident. But it was more than that. She blamed herself for everything that was wrong with Franky. She’d failed him from the start, had never known how to be the mother he needed. She’d cut him too much slack except on the few occasions when he really needed it. She dismissed Tina’s protestations to the contrary.
“I’m a horrible mother, Tina. Don’t ask my advice on raising kids anymore.”
Tina didn’t listen. She came to the table again and again, seeking Gail’s counsel. When Alyssa was being teased at school, beyond the usual adolescent girl nonsense. When Bobby was having trouble reading. When Alyssa was driving her nuts with her moodiness, which was pretty much all the time. Nothing terrible, thank God. Just the everyday trials and tribulations of motherhood, complicated by the absence of a father. Gail’s advice was simple, reassuring.
Be patient. This will pass. All kids go through an awkward phase. Bobby was a late bloomer too. Let them make their own mistakes. You’re doing a great job. You’re a great mother.