All This Talk of Love (12 page)

It’s dark, the streetlight is weak, but still Antonio can see his friend blushing. “You?” Antonio says. And just like that, the dark spell breaks.
Th
e men are both laughing. “You fat thing?”

“She likes it,” says DiSilvio. “I got lucky, huh? She has a big bowl of pasta waiting for me when I get there and then we—”

“
Che abbondanza,
” Antonio says before DiSilvio can go on. He doesn’t need him to paint a picture.
Th
en he puts his arm around him and they laugh awhile longer.

Th
is is how Antonio’s life has been since 1971. A long darkness lit up by flashes of light that come all of a sudden, then fade just as fast. If only he could go back to the day Ida called the Al Di Là and asked him to send over somebody strong. Instead he settles for Santa Cecilia, where the darkness never touched.

He drives down Union Street, toward home, the music loud to flood his mind.

AN EMPTY TRAIN
at night puts Frankie in the mind of Hitchcock, of Wharton, of James. He loves the grimy rumble over miles of desolation, the potential secret of the mustached conductor in the black coat removing his gloves, the lonely tolling of the bells as they chug past abandoned stations. Frankie is his best self on an empty train. He can read undistracted. Recollect his emotions in tranquillity. Anywhere else, his dissertation shoots up around him thick and noisy and unchartable as a rain forest, but on an empty train he’s a conquistador, armed with a harquebus, out for blood and order.

A rain forest seems downright pleasant compared to the Wednesday- before-
Th
anksgiving Amtrak Northeast Direct, and if the crowds and smells and constant shoving put him in the mind of anyone, it’s not a literary figure. Try Manson, or John Wayne Gacy, or Mussolini. Mostly he feels as though he’s being slowly lobotomized over the course of the wobbly seven-hour trek from Boston to Wilmington.

Or something like that. He rolls his eyes at his own pretentious simile. What does Frankie Grasso know from lobotomies? His primary association is a story his father once told him about an old woman back in the village, someone called L’Abbandonata because her husband and daughters abandoned her for the new country. She went off the deep end waiting for them to return, and some traveling country quack tried to cut the crazy parts out of her, which, of course, killed her altogether. It made Frankie think of Dora—Freud’s Dora—and how much better L’Abbandonata might have fared had she lived in Vienna instead of Santa Cecilia and had access to the kind of help Sigmund and his minions could have given her. Wretchedly ignorant as Freud was when it came to the complex sensibilities of women, at least he didn’t advocate making mincemeat of their thalami and frontal cortexes, as far as he knows. If Frankie is guilted into going to Italy next summer, he will leave some flowers on the grave of L’Abbandonata, but he doubts he’ll get that chance.

He is settled firmly on his mother’s side in the trip tug-of-war. Much to his relief, he won’t have to fight that battle over
Th
anksgiving dinner, which Prima and Tom will spend with Tom’s family in Lancaster. It will be a quiet
Th
ursday night at the Al Di Là, just the three of them and a few families from the neighborhood. When he reunites with the Buckleys on Friday, it will be the first time he’s seen Prima since she delivered her edict at the confirmation, and while he expects her to harangue him with reasons and ultimatums, at least she won’t spoil the turkey and stuffing and lasagna and broccoli rabe and strawberry cheesecake of a Grasso
Th
anksgiving.

Frankie would prefer to keep his homeland free of family tensions and obligations and the ghosts of his mother’s sadness.
Th
e idea of watching her suffer pains him; why does it not pain Prima? In a few years, on sabbatical from whatever university hires him, he’ll go alone or with his father.
Th
e two Grasso men: one in search of art and wine, the other of memories. Until then, Italy will wait patiently for them.

Th
e train is pulling away from New Haven—site of another famous university at which Frankie will never present a paper on modern psychology and postcolonialism or whatever his dissertation is ultimately about—when a duffel bag falls from the overhead compartment and lands on his head.

“Oh no, that’s mine!” says a girl behind him.

“Jesus Christ,” Frankie says, clutching his skull. He picks up the bag, which weighs roughly six tons, and hands it to her. “Are you transporting gold bullion or something?”

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

His first thought is that this girl looks like a Bryn Mawr tennis player—silky brown hair in a ponytail, lots of makeup, white mohair sweater. A gold cross hangs from a chain over the fuzzy turtleneck. His second thought is that “bullion” is an extremely dorky word to utter in her presence. “It’s OK,” he says. “I’m still conscious.”

“Inasmuch as any of us are conscious,” she says as she stuffs the bag back in the overhead.

“Excuse me?”

“I noticed you were reading
Being and Nothingness.
”

Being and Nothingness,
facedown on Frankie’s lap before the duffel-bag bombing, now glares up at him from the floor.
Th
e pages are dog-eared, with yellow slips of paper sticking out from the sides. He’s rereading it after some library sleuthing revealed it to be one of Dr. Felix Carr’s sacred texts.

“We just did that in philosophy. I bet you actually understand it.”

“I wrote a paper once called ‘For-Itself, In-Itself, By Myself,’ ” he says. “I got a C plus.”

She’s a senior at Boston College, she tells him, en route to her family’s place outside Philly. In four years of college she’s never missed a holiday, birthday, baptism, confirmation, or wedding.
Th
e day she graduates, she’s moving back to find a job as a middle school teacher.

“What a regrettable era of life,” he says. “Please tell me you’re teaching kids to erase it from their minds.”

“
Th
at’s the thing!” she says, her eyes suddenly silver-dollar wide. “It doesn’t have to be so bad!
Th
ey’re doing amazing things with that age these days, especially in language arts. Have you read John Gaughan? Or Atwell’s
In the Middle
?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s this new way of teaching where kids write letters to each other and keep journals and publish their stories. Not just spit back spelling words. Kids don’t even sit in rows anymore.”

“How do they sit?”

“In pods,” she says.

“Pods?”

She laughs. “Group learning and cooperation build self-esteem and make better citizens.”

“Sister Carmelita used to throw chalk at my face when I got an answer wrong,” Frankie says. “I don’t think self-esteem was her top priority.”

“And you’re still a good citizen?” she asks.

“You have me there.”

Th
ey trade Catholic-school stories for a while, him turned backward in his seat, his legs sticking out into the aisle, her leaning forward. Every time someone squeezes by, their knees touch. But she is five years his junior, not to mention a firm believer in the sanctity of the sacraments, and draws her knees back the moment the path clears. I need a girl like you, Frankie thinks. Decent, salt of the earth. Someone who cares about things like the self-esteem of sweaty, hormonal eleven-year-olds. He’s done with sex, anyway. With Birch, he’s had enough to sustain him through the long fallow period sure to be necessary with a girl like this.

Kelly Anne McDonald is her name. He’s put in mind of Irish fields, of green beer, of luck.

What I don’t need, he thinks: A selfish careerist, a woman who stands ready to betray me just to preserve her already assured place in the polluted ecosystem of academia. A woman unwilling to take even the slightest (and frankly theoretical) risk if it means a potential threat to her reputation as an evenhanded scholar, a faithful wife. A willing slave to the whims of the body. A corrupter. But that’s what he’s got.

Th
e holiday week began well. “Dear Francesco Grasso,” began Dr. Lexus’s brief letter, typed on department stationery, left for him yesterday, the Tuesday before
Th
anksgiving, in his campus mailbox. In a spirit of fraternity and camaraderie, Lexus had crossed out “Francesco” with a blue pen and, above it, written “Frankie.” “
Th
ank you for submitting to the 2000 J—
—
University Dissertation Fellowship. I am pleased to inform you that the selection committee—Professors Arbuckle, Birch, McLean, and Yarrow—has selected your application as one of three to move forward to the final round of consideration. I congratulate you on this significant achievement. As stipulated in the design of the prize, the winner of the fellowship will be chosen by a visiting juror, who will read the finalists’ applications and meet individually with candidates the week of December 13. As you know, this year the visiting juror will be Dr. Felix Carr. Enclosed please find a sign-up sheet for interviews.
Th
e winner will be notified no later than January 20. Sincerely,” et cetera.

Within minutes of having received the letter, Frankie had marked the first interview slot as his first choice and the last slot for his second choice and returned the form to the department secretary. No matter that both slots conflicted with his teaching schedule; it was important to make a strong either initial or final impression. He hadn’t heard of this Dr. Felix Carr, but he’d already made it his top priority to find out all he could about him, read his books, bone up on whatever field he was in. Lexus’s letter didn’t reveal the other two candidates, but he had no doubt Annalise
Th
eroux was one of them.
Th
e third candidate was inconsequential because whoever it was had no chance.

Birch had come through for him after all. In the weeks since their first discussion of the fellowship, she’d promised Frankie that if he had plenty of support on the committee, she’d join in that support. Recognizing her moral failings, she also promised that if a vote came down to him and someone else, she’d choose him.

It came as no surprise, then, that under the letter from Dr. Lexus was a note from Birch.

She arrived, as usual, just after one o’clock. Frankie lay waiting for her on his futon, wearing nothing but Dr. Lexus’s letter. “I squeaked through somehow,” he said, taking the letter from its artful arrangement between his legs and waving it at her. “How did this happen, I wonder?”

“Classy,” she said.

“Come on,” said Frankie. “Let me have my fun. We’re celebrating. You did the right thing. And if Dr. Felix Carr of Princeton picks me, it can’t possibly reflect on you. You’re free and clear.”

“
Th
at’s true enough, I guess.”

She was still wearing a lot of clothes, which was rare for her. Frankie felt increasingly silly and confused as each second ticked by and she stood above him, hands on her hips, surveying, in her coat and scarf, how excited he was by Lexus’s decision and their chance to christen it.
Th
en it occurred to him that she might have buyer’s remorse.

“What?”

He covered himself with a pillow.

“No, no,” she said, tossing the pillow aside. She looked from his crotch to his eyes, then back again. “You just keep going, don’t you? You don’t give up.”

“
Th
at’s why you keep me around, I thought,” he said. “Plus, why would I give up now? If I were going to give up, I’d have done it two months ago. Or last year, when you took a hatchet to my introduction . . .”

“
Th
at was the
Hindenburg
of introductions,” she said. She laughed, and Frankie laughed, too, because she was right and because it was during the protracted and contentious dissection of his introduction that they’d decided to walk down to Elm Street for a glass of wine. It was that glass of wine that led to her first trip to his bedroom.

“You’ve helped me every step of the way,” he said. He reached for her.

She remained stiff and unbearably clothed. “Frankie, I have to confess something,” she said. “I’m sure it won’t surprise you, but I have to say it. I won’t feel right if I don’t. I won’t be able to enjoy”—she looked down at him again—“
today
if I don’t.”

“Jesus,” he said. He got up, pulled on a pair of sweats, and muted the Cure CD,
Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me,
that he’d put in especially for this session. His gut already guessed what she was going to tell him, but he stood across from her, arms crossed, until she fessed up.

“I didn’t vote for you,” she said. “I told you I would, even if the committee was deadlocked, but I didn’t. In fact, there was a deadlock, and I argued for Mary Kessler. You made it to the final three in
spite
of me. And don’t ask why because I’ve already gone over it.”

“I’m in
third place
? You had to debate between me and
Mary Kessler
?”