All This Talk of Love (15 page)

“Well, this has been great,” says Frankie.

TH
EY WALK TO
the car, Frankie and Maddalena a step or two behind Prima, without saying more.
Th
ey pass a trio of animatronic elves, a dozen Allison Greys, a long mirror in which Prima spots herself and looks away.
Th
e harder she tries, the less her plans come together.
Th
e breakdown in logic infuriates her.

Between putting the keys in the ignition and turning them, Prima says, “Fine. We won’t go. You win.”

“It’s not about winning,” says Frankie from the backseat.

“We’ll go to Paris,” Maddalena says. She puts her hand on Prima’s shoulder. “My friend Arlene says Paris is better, anyway. You can switch the tickets?”

Prima shrugs off her mother’s hand. “I’m driving,” she says.

She drops them off without coming in to say hello to her father—an act of rebellion she’ll pay for later—and heads straight home. Tom is outside in the drizzle, stringing lights on the holly bushes. He’s wearing a pair of old jeans, a Syracuse sweatshirt, and a baseball cap that offers little protection from the icy rain. “I’m almost done,” he says before she can scold him. As he fiddles with the cords, knees in the mud and rain pelting them both, she tells him what’s been decided.

“
Th
e luggage really freaked them out, huh?” he says. “I gotta say, I didn’t think that was such a great idea. Not everybody likes being put on the spot.”

“My intentions were good,” Prima says. “If they’d only trust me—” She stops. She doesn’t want to cry in front of Tom, not over the trip, not out here in the rain like a hysterical housewife, for the neighbors to see. And yet she can’t seem to control the waves of emotion swelling and crashing inside her. She wonders if this acute, uncontainable emotion, like her burning feet, like the weight she’s put on, can be blamed on the change of life. And suddenly she’s furious again.

“Your intentions are always good, Prima. I’m sorry.”

Prima looks up at the gray sky, watches the ice fall and settle onto the red berries, making them glisten deliciously, looks at Tom crouched under the bay window. He’s stringing these lights for her, on the first possible day it’s OK to do so, despite the rain, because he knows how much she loves them. Some nights, she’ll bundle up and take a walk around the block just so she can turn the corner onto their street and come upon their house aglow. Watching Tom, his strong back, his full head of blond curls, his act of kindness, something in her stirs. It’s a rare urge these days, and this, too, she blames on the new season of departures and decay in which she finds herself.

“Let’s go out tonight,” she says. “I don’t feel like cooking.”

“Really? In this weather?”

“Why not? We’re not so old yet.”

He looks over his shoulder and gives her a quick smile back. “Sure,” he says. “Give me ten minutes.”

“You don’t have to finish this tonight,” Prima says, and when he turns back to her again, his smile widens. He hops up onto his feet and brushes the dirt from his knees.

“
Th
ank you, Sergeant,” he says, and he kisses her.

Th
ey decide to try a new place called the Bourbon Street Café, out on Kirkwood Highway.
Th
ere’s live jazz on Fridays and half-price appetizers and a soft-shell crab entrée that won Best of Delaware. Prima would have preferred a longer drive, even in the rain, but Tom’s a big fan of Cajun food and she never cooks it, so she’s happy enough with the pick. Like her mother, Prima finds car rides soothing, especially when her husband’s behind the wheel. She could ride all the way to New Orleans, him beside her with his eyes fixed seriously on the road, her with her head resting on the window, shoes off, heat blasting.

Tom doesn’t fiddle with the radio, never drives faster than the speed limit, and doesn’t talk much unless he’s safe at a stoplight. He’s driven this way ever since his twin sister, Amy, was killed in a car wreck when they were twenty-four, a year after he married Prima. It’s a wound that opens each time he steps into a car. Prima understands this. It’s one of the many reasons she’s confident they will be together forever, why the cord that binds her to her husband is as strong as the one that binds her to her family.

Tom still dreams about Amy, he’s said, still talks to her on his drive to work. He keeps her photo on the wall behind his desk and talks about her with his clients. He comes from the kind of family that believes in this type of public mourning, of making your lost loved ones part of your daily life.
Th
e Grassos—like most Italians Prima knows—are different. After you say your good-byes, after you’ve thrown yourself on your brother’s or your son’s body for one last touch as the casket closes, you keep your grief to yourself.
Th
e rest of your life is a long silence.

At the Bourbon Street Café, Prima and Tom sit side by side at the one available booth, closest to the stage, where an old black man with a white goatee blares a saxophone in their faces.
Th
ey yell their orders to the waitress—conch fritters, two soft-shell crabs, and two hurricanes—then sit with their legs up and crossed on the opposite side of the booth, his arm around her shoulders, like they’re in bed watching TV. Prima’s not a jazz fan (she likes the singer to tell a story, and here there’s no singer, much less a story), but Tom loses himself in it. She watches him close his eyes and let the music wash over him. It’s nice how at peace he is. When the set ends and the sax player drifts outside to smoke, she tells him that they’ll come to this place more often, once a month if he wants, that he works too hard and could use a little music.

“You know,” he says, midway through his second hurricane, “the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am about Italy.”

“Me, too.”

“
Th
e food, the historic stuff, the boys all together, your mom and dad in their native habitat. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why it’s so complicated.”

Prima can’t bear to go over her mother’s reasons again. Anyway, the layers of family dynamics are all lost on Tom, who grew up Irish Catholic. When the Buckleys had disagreements, they simply stopped talking; no wonder they don’t know each other’s hearts the way the Grassos do.

“I’ll tell you this,” Prima says. “I’m not dragging my parents and Frankie to Paris just to go somewhere. Not if they’re going to be ungrateful. If it’s not Italy, it’s nothing.”

“OK,” Tom says as Prima sips her hurricane.

“We should take our own trip,” Prima says. “Just us.”

“You read my mind,” Tom says. He sits up straight, his hand still around her shoulders. “I was just thinking as you were talking: my buddy from college has a cabin in northern Michigan. He tells me it’s gorgeous up there. You have to take a little plane from Detroit, but once you get there it’s . . . like Paradise. Unspoiled land and all that. Romantic. I’d love to see you in hiking boots.”

“Oh,” says Prima. “You mean, just the two of us?”

“
Th
at’s not what you meant?”

She can’t come up with a decent answer, and luckily the sax player’s back. What would they talk about, she wonders, just the two of them in the Michigan woods for a week? It’s one thing to take a Sunday drive or splurge on a hotel room overnight in Philly, but it’s another to stretch out all that alone time over a week. When they were dating, they had a circle of friends to gossip about, career decisions to deliberate, wedding and honeymoon plans to make, and, until Amy died, only happy memories to bring forth in conversation. Now they have the boys and the house and baseball, but those only go so far, and besides, Tom, who was never a talker to begin with, has gotten even quieter in his forties.

“You take care of other people enough,” Tom says at the next break. “Let me take care of you for a change. I’ll teach you how to fish. I’ll buy you the entire L.L. Bean catalog. It’ll be an adventure.” He leans over and whispers, “Plus, you’d look sexy in flannel. And the hiking boots. Or just the hiking boots—”

“Where’s this coming from?” Prima interrupts, blushing.
Th
e people in the next booth can hear.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not like you.”

“Is that bad?” He puts his hand on her thigh.

“No. It’s just not like you.”

“I saw the way you looked at me back at the house,” he says. “It’s been a while, but I still recognize that look.”

“Tom!”

“ ‘We’re not so old,’ you said.”

“I was talking about driving in the rain.”

“Listen,” he says. He pulls her closer. “Next fall’s gonna be strange as hell. Alone in the house. I know you’re worried about it.
Th
e truth is, I am, too. So let’s take some steps. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Empty nest, second honeymoon, all that jazz?”

Prima can almost see Tom checking off the “second honeymoon” box in his head. He has always been conscious of life’s schedules, and holds himself and his family to them. When he turned forty, he took up golf. At forty-five, he bought a sailboat. At forty-six, he sold it. His predictability has been a comfort to Prima over the years, but she didn’t expect him to check off this latest box so soon. She’s not quite ready.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It doesn’t feel right to abandon everyone so soon. We should see how Patrick does in school. It’ll be a big transition for him. You remember how Ryan lost all that weight his first term? What if Patrick needs to come home all of a sudden, and we’re in some cabin in the middle of nowhere? Does this Michigan place even have a phone?”

Tom narrows his eyes at her.
Th
e waitress stands awkwardly behind him, trying to get their attention. “Never mind,” he says, and suddenly there’s a space between them.
Th
eir legs meet but don’t touch.
Th
ey watch the stage for a while, the crew adjusting the lights and arranging the chairs and various instruments for the headliners. When the waitress goes by, he signals for the check, even though Prima’s hurricane is still half-full.

“It’s still early,” says Prima. “We don’t have to go. You’re enjoying this.”

He shrugs.

“I screwed up again, didn’t I?” she says.

Again he says nothing.

“How much was it?” she asks him as he hands the waitress his Amex.

“All I asked you to do,” he says, “was spend one week with me and be excited about it—as excited as you were about spending two weeks with your family in Italy. I didn’t even ask you to
do
it, just to
consider
it. But I guess that’s asking too much.”

“I’m excited about the idea. I’m just—the timing. Remember Ryan, when he left—”

“You’re too close to those boys,” Tom continues. “I love them just as much as you do. I pay attention. I remember how Ryan was at Syracuse that first term. I argued religion with Patrick for two years, even drove up to that monastery he was infatuated with! But there’s such a thing as being too involved. You have to let go.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” Prima says. “I don’t even want it to be possible.”

Frankie has accused her of the same crime, of being too close to her kids. Her mother, too, and her magazines. But Prima’s not going to change, not one little bit. Because if she lets go of her boys, she’ll have to replace them with something else, and nothing else compares. Not even you, Tom, she thinks. I’m sorry.

He keeps talking, painting the picture of their bright future as “empty nesters,” but as soon as Prima hears that awful word, she tunes out. Cruises? Golf? A time-share in the Keys? She has little patience for relaxation. Volunteering? As a Catholic, she’s as loyal as Tom, but she’s unmotivated to nurture the poor if neither the Buckleys nor the Grassos will benefit directly. She’d rather sweep the sidewalks outside the Al Di Là than serve soup to homeless strangers. Unlike every other Grasso, Prima has never embraced paid work. She’s been more than content as a mother and housewife, compensated with trust and gratitude. Retirement from such a career, with such benefits, might as well be death.

For a short time, at sixteen, Prima thought she might have a passion for the kind of career her father had—the management of a busy restaurant, which, it turns out, is much like running a family—but in retrospect that passion had everything to do with Dante Marconi.
Th
ey used to kiss in the alley behind the Al Di Là.
Th
ey fell in love there, the summer before Tony died, when Prima had no reason to think life wouldn’t keep handing her one beautiful thing after another. In the blur of years that followed, it was Dante who helped numb Prima’s mind. Memories of him keep coming back to her lately, in dreams and in her waking life, more often in the past year than in the twenty-seven before. Like tonight, after too many hurricanes and with Tom talking romantic getaways, she is thinking of the weekend they spent in Wildwood in a sleeping bag on the floor of Dante’s cousin’s beach house.
Th
ere was no planning that weekend, just Dante surprising her one Friday at the door of her parents’ house, his car packed with the sleeping bag, a cooler of beer, a swimsuit, and little else. Dante Marconi was my great love, she once thought. Now she wonders if love can earn its greatness only with history.