Don't Make a Scene

by Valerie Block

  “Who cares? Javier is like fresh air! What's wrong with that? I DO NOT CARE what happens in the end. I am only concerned with today, tomorrow, and next week. If things work out for next month, next year, then, terrific.”

  He said with a nasty edge, “And then you'll get married?”

  “Since when do all involvements lead to marriage? When you and I got involved, there was no possibility of marriage, and that was just fine with you. If it was fine with you, why shouldn't it be fine with me? I know it's weird and awkward that he's your son, but I can't help that. Get over it.”

  “It will end in tragedy.”

  “Everything ends in tragedy. At least it will have been worth it. Some people don't even give you pleasure to begin with.”

  “Thank you, Diane. That's very nice.”

  “Fuck off, Vladimir.”

  He raised his finger to her. “You'd better pay attention. He may not be a minor, but he is my son, and in my care. And I'm not satisfied with this explanation.”

  She felt her lips twist into what must have been a nasty expression.

  The father continued lecturing piously. “You forget I know a little about you, Diane. You're desperate, lonely and getting old.”

  What a horrid man. What a petty, nasty person. Why had she given him chance after chance? She must have been desperate, lonely and getting old.

  “As far as I'm concerned,” Vladimir went on, “the place for him is on the next plane back to Havana.”

  “So you'll make an irrevocable decision about his life, ignoring what he wants, just the way your father did for you, when you were his age.”

  He became so overcome with rage that he clenched his teeth. “I was twenty-one when my father did that! Twenty-one years old! He had no business forcing me into marriage. But Javier is seventeen.”

  “He's eighteen.”

  “At this age, every month counts, Diane.”

  “And you know this because you've spent so many months with him, watching him grow.”

  “I've not been a good father. I'm the first one to say this. But he's with me now and you require my permission to see him. I think this is wrong.”

  He continued to outline how he knew it was wrong: She was too old. She was taking advantage of Javier. Just a few weeks ago, he was a minor.

  “He's happy, and you just can't stand it, can you?”

  “Happy? Such a stupid American argument. Of course he's happy! He got laid last night. You're taking advantage of him, and he doesn't even understand.”

  “How am I taking advantage of him? I love him.”

  “You're homeless and bored—personally, professionally and sexually. As far as I'm concerned, he's not mature enough to make his own decisions.” Javier arrived in the doorway with a bag of oranges just as Vladimir announced, “He belongs on the next plane to Havana.”

  “What gives you the right to talk about me like that?” Javier demanded.

  Vladimir turned around. “You be quiet. You are in way over your head.”

  Javier started to argue, but Vladimir was on a roll. He repeated everything he'd told her for Javier's benefit, shouting down his objections. She knew this mode: Vladimir would now bombard them with legalities and nitpick over the usage of words. He'd harangue them for hours, going back to the beginning each time someone interrupted, repeating his diatribes until he beat them into the ground, winning the argument just by being willing to go on arguing forever.

  “Goddamn you, Vladimir!” she said. “You are just like Fidel Castro!”

  Vladimir stared at her with a wild, searing look of rage. He leaned forward and slapped her face, hard. She fell back into her desk chair, winded, stinging, with a dirty metallic taste in her mouth.

  BEFORE VLADIMIR HAD a chance to say anything more, Javier picked him up in the air; it was done so deftly and rapidly that Vladimir wasn't even sure how it had happened. Javier then threw him down, and there were loud crashes and sharp pain as he hit hard objects, probably the desk and the coffee table, on the way to the floor. Vladimir lay in shock. He was flat on his back on the carpet, surrounded by broken DVD boxes, on the spot where Diane's computer wires, pinned down by electrical tape, crossed the floor. Back when they were involved and he took her mess personally, Vladimir had offered to streamline both her wiring and her paperwork. She had turned him down. She hadn't deserved the offer, and he was glad he hadn't wasted his time.

  His head was still ringing from the impact. Javier was kneeling over him, staring at him intently. Vladimir held his hand up, hoping his son would help him to a sitting position. Instead, Javier put his knee on his chest, pinning him to the floor in an unnecessary display of dominance. So this was what he was dealing with.

  He tried to resist this aggression.

  “Don't move,” Javier said, like a kung fu thug.

  “I can't breathe,” Vladimir said.

  “You have no authority over me,” Javier answered in Spanish, releasing some of the pressure on Vladimir's chest. “I make my own decisions. Considering that you don't want me in your life and never have, this sudden fatherly concern is pretty surprising.”

  Vladimir coughed, and Javier leaned back a little more. The carpet was filthy; Vladimir was almost positive that this office had never been vacuumed. Diane, her face white, sat a few feet away, watching the two of them with a shocked expression. He was not sorry he hit her. He'd never hit a woman in his life. Well, María: once, in response, if not exactly in self-defense.

  “You want me out of your life so badly you can't wait!” Javier was laughing as he said it, still speaking in Spanish.

  “That's not true,” Vladimir said wearily.

  “So what's the difference if you put me on the next plane to Havana or if I move uptown and never see you again?” Javier leaned back on his haunches, waiting for an answer. Vladimir sat up, and felt the blood drain from his head. He was dizzy and nauseated. He was acutely aware of the bones in his skull and every nerve in his back that had hit the desk, the coffee table, the wires and the floor.

  “You made it clear that you have no interest in Diane,” Javier said. “For this, you're an idiot, but I benefit, so I thank you for being so stupid. So what's the problem, ‘Dad’?”

  A good question. Was his problem with Javier, or with Diane? Or with the combination? He had no idea why he was so bothered, or even if he was bothered at all. What did it matter, really, if Diane was taking Javier to the movies or to bed? Did it affect him in any way?

  “And: HOW DARE YOU HIT DIANE?” Javier demanded in English. He grabbed Vladimir's shirt as if to rip it off, but then let go in disgust and fell back on the sofa with his arms folded. “You're worse than Castro! You're just like your father.”

  SEPTEMBER

  IN AN AWKWARD SUMMIT that Vladimir called in a coffee shop on Twenty-third Street a few days after the martial arts showdown in Diane's office, the three principals gathered to talk about the future. Vladimir announced that he would agree to Javier's move. But he insisted that Javier use his apartment as his official address, so that he could attend the high school he was registered in, which was apparently a better school than the one in Diane's neighborhood, and it was too late to change schools in any event.

  “I also want you to know that if you ever want to come back, for any reason, at any time, my door is always open to you,” he said. “No questions asked.”

  Diane was not prepared to be moved at this meeting. “Oh, Vladimir. You're a decent man. That's what a good father would say to his son.”

  Vladimir stared at her with some malice.

  So did Javier.

  Vladimir asked for a few moments to speak to Javier alone, and Diane went next door to the magazine shop and browsed. In a not-so-recent French film with relevant content, Le Petit Amour / Kung Fu Master (Agnès Varda, 1987), Jane Birkin plays a forty-year-old divorcée who becomes obsessed with a fifteen-year-old schoolmate of one of her daughters. The schoolmate is truly on the cusp of adolescence, not a boy and not a
man, obsessed with a kung fu video game. He receives her attentions with gauche indifference. When she takes him on vacation with her daughters to her parents’ home in England, her mother approves of the crush (it's a French movie), and sends her off to a family house on a nearly deserted island with just the younger daughter and the young man. The folie ends in much embarrassment for the older woman, of course.

  Javier came to find her, and the meeting ended on a cordial note: Vladimir wished them both well on the avenue as buses passed by, belching black smoke. There were no kisses or handshakes. He hadn't apologized for slapping her; she hadn't apologized for falling into bed with his son. Vladimir turned to walk west to his office. She and Javier stopped at an office supply store on the corner: he had orientation at school the following day.

  As he selected binders, Javier told her that in their private talk, Vladimir had said, “Listen to me, because I'll only tell you this once. You have your entire future ahead of you. Don't be stupid. You'll have only yourself to blame if Diane gets pregnant.” Javier was standing still, holding three binders in his hands, looking at her intently. She was having a hard time deciphering his expression.

  “Well, that must have been awkward for you,” she said finally.

  “He must think I'm an idiot. He thinks you want to trap me.”

  “He just wants you to keep your options open. Don't worry: so do I.”

  Javier now looked as if he might cry. “I will never be more to him than the mistake that screw up his life.”

  “I'm not so sure about that.”

  Was it too much to hope for that Javier and Vladimir would get to know and appreciate each other as adults? How could she make that happen? Of course, if they did, it wouldn't be because of something that she initiated.

  When they approached the counter, Vladimir was on line buying rolls of paper, and he smiled as if they had caught him doing something shameful. He insisted on paying for the school supplies, and as he handed over his credit card, Diane wondered what kind of life he might have had if he'd heeded his own advice nineteen years earlier. They said another awkward goodbye outside. In spite of everything that had transpired, she felt bad for Vladimir.

  Diane had never quite bought the premise of the love triangle in Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1961), even if Jeanne Moreau was compelling enough to explain everyone's fascination with her. Few films ever bothered to explore the third leg of the triangle, the relationship between the two men. That film had a terrible ending. But love triangles always ended terribly. Never mind, she decided. It was precisely in those things that had no future that one found freedom, joy, inspiration and everything else worth getting nostalgic about later on. And if it had taken her forty years to figure this out, so be it.

  DIANE ACCOMPANIED JAVIER on his first day of school. The teenagers on the train and the street displayed loud, obnoxious juvenile pack behavior. By contrast, Javier seemed like a sober anthropologist looking on and taking notes. He was mature, in spite of the omnipresent electronic toy. Often he ended grown-up discussions by saying, “Okay, Diane, I need to go shoot things now.” As they approached the enormous redbrick building that was already hopping with activity, Diane again lectured him on why public displays of affection were forbidden. Javier responded to this by squeezing her ass goodbye in front of all of Seventh Avenue South.

  At the end of Le Petit Amour / Kung Fu Master, Julien, the adolescent, is hanging out in the courtyard of a new school, telling a group of boys about his older lover: “She was just a housewife with big feet and no tits…. She was nuts about me, so I played along. She wasn't much of a lay—no spring chicken and a bit of a drag. But I did my duty.” The final sound of the film is a school bell, ringing to announce the end of classes.

  Javier could go in a lot of different directions, Diane reflected. The people he met, the things he chose to get involved with now, all of this would be critical for his development. And no, she wasn't his mother, but she had a great deal of responsibility toward him and impact on him, more than she'd had toward a run-of-the-mill adult boyfriend—his father, for example.

  Diane walked away from the school, feeling the shrug taking over her entire body, her shoulders up to her ears and her head falling at an odd angle. Her life had turned into an implausible French movie. The only time she was relieved of this bizarre position was when she was with Javier, and everything made perfect sense.

  Diane had programmed a week of “Backstage Dramas,” a prescient theme given the chaos that characterized the period just before the grand opening gala. The new marquee wasn't up yet. The lobby was covered in drop cloths and abandoned equipment. Diane had a vision of 250 people drinking cocktails and falling onto table saws. When she telephoned the contractor, his assistant told her that Joe Franco was out of town.

  This was horrendous. “Oh really? Doing what?”

  “Buying real estate in Florida.”

  “WHAT? Nothing has been done in a month! Where's the crew?”

  “They're on another job.”

  “What other job? This is the job, and the job is not done!”

  She called the architects, and fortunately got Chris.

  “Let me talk to Vladimir about this,” he said.

  “You're passing the buck?”

  “No, I'm figuring out the fastest way to solve this. Joe is slightly afraid of Vladimir and he doesn't listen to me. Believe me, I'd call him if I thought it would do any good.”

  As she was making arrangements with a pest-control service to deal with the cat, and whatever was making the cat so fat, once the cat was gone, Vladimir called.

  “I just heard from Chris,” he said. “I'll meet you there in half an hour.”

  He came in with a sour expression, but brightened once he looked around.

  “It's just the seats and the equipment. This can be done in a couple of days.”

  “Really? And the marquee?”

  “That's separate. Let me call them. But it will be done. I promise you.”

  Her boyfriend's father, her former boyfriend, was being a professional.

  She thanked him, aware that her face was flushed red. He walked out of the construction zone. She'd become a trite example in a women's magazine (“Diane—not her real name—”) of what can happen when an office romance goes wrong.

  The following day, Bobby Wald tripped on a drill box and landed on his kneecap; Diane raced him to St. Vincent's in a cab. As she waited for him to be treated, she received a call from the special-events-equipment rental company: they didn't have a permit to unload in front of the theater the day of the opening.

  “Well, get one!” she shouted.

  A cleaning crew, the regular staff, two newly hired employees and three of the contractor's men had methodically transformed the scattered construction site into the new and improved Bedford Street Cinema Twin, with new seats in both theaters. The popcorn machine broke down the first day, but was fixed by the weekend. The enlarged lobby with a newly configured ticket holders’ line was a much better arrangement.

  Dorothy came to inspect the renovation on the first day of business and arrived in Diane's office after a screening of Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937).

  “What a dump!” Dorothy said, looking around. Diane still hadn't had time to completely organize what the cat had torn apart. “Your architect must hate you!”

  “Indeed,” she said.

  There followed a discussion of what people were wearing to the gala. Dorothy announced that she would be wearing red; she'd heard that Estelle, who still wasn't dancing, or even walking, would wear yellow. She waited. Diane didn't have a dress or a clue.

  “You've been too busy cavorting naked to worry about clothing,” Dorothy said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don't play dumb. I have my sources. Get it while you can, Diane.”

  Diane inhaled, looking down at her hands folded on the desk.

  “But when you come to your senses, remember Estelle's nephew. He's giving u
p his dental practice and retiring: he'll have lots of time to go to the movies.”

  Diane could go in a lot of different directions, too.

  “You need a drink,” Chris said as he and Paul pushed Vladimir to the back of the restaurant. “You need to talk.”

  Vladimir seemed angrier than usual. “Why?”

  “Because it's shocking,” Paul said, as if shocked.

  “This is not a topic of conversation for you,” Vladimir said.

  “You're wrong,” Paul said with relish. “It's a major topic of conversation for me.”

  Vladimir cast a nasty look at him.

  Drinks arrived. There was silence for a moment, as Paul looked around the restaurant and Vladimir sipped his drink, staring into the middle distance. In the last few weeks, Vladimir's hygiene had taken some kind of nosedive. He was unshaven, unwashed and he looked as if he hadn't slept in a good long time.

  “Is it spite, do you think?” he asked Chris.

  “Absolutely not,” Chris said.

  Vladimir looked up. “No?”

  “No. I think Diane is cut up about it.”

  “Have you spoken to her about it?”

  “No, but I can tell,” Chris said.

  In fact, the one who had spoken to him, at length, was Javier. He'd called Chris the previous night, asking if he could come over to talk. This came in the midst of a mind-numbing argument that had lasted most of Labor Day weekend, the first weekend at the renovated house. The fight had begun when Paul said something nasty about someone passing by. Chris told Paul that if he couldn't stop speaking ill of people, then he wasn't welcome on the porch.

  “Oh, come on. Did you see that ass? As big as a motel room.”

  Paul was systematically setting out to destroy any ties Chris had made, or might make, in the neighborhood. Or so it appeared.

  “Making comments like that is rude and inconsiderate. It says more about you and your bad character than it does about the person passing.”