All This Talk of Love (20 page)

Antonio reaches behind the dresser and, in the dust, finds the twelve torn-out pages he stapled into a book with a guest check on top. Even in the half light, he can make out every letter because he has read them over and over for the past twenty-eight years.
I hate him I hate him I hate him
covers every line.
Th
is is the kind of poem Tony wrote for his father at the end of his life.

Th
e next page is from the brown notebook.
Th
ere is no way out. He’ll never understand. I’m a bird in a cage. He’ll never give me the key. I see the way he looks at me. He hates me and I hate him and I love him but does he love me? HE WILL NEVER LOOK AT ME THE SAME WAY.

Th
e next:
It’s not fair It’s not fair what did I do to deserve this my God it’s never going to end, is it? Daddy, it’s never going to end. You’re never going to let it end and Dante is never coming back and there is no one in the cage but me so why not just let me die It’s not fair You’re never and Dante and God and coming back and Daddy

Th
e next:
Where are you, Tony Grasso? Who are you, Tony Grasso? You are a boy with a father who hates you and a mother who doesn’t see you and no friends who know you in a world that will destroy you Get out before it’s too late before he tells and sends you away before he kills you with his own hands

Th
e next and the next and the next.
Th
ere were more pages, but over the years of Antonio’s holding them and pressing them to his chest, the thin paper tore and disintegrated. Each time he reads the words is like the first.
Th
e same knife to his heart.
Th
e blood it draws is a kind of relief. He wants the blood, the questions, the tears, the rage, the thing beyond sadness that there is no word for in Italian or English because it belongs only to him.

If Antonio Grasso were ever to write his son a poem, it would be this:
I want you back. Give me another chance.
But he’s not a writer. He says it out loud. Once, then again.
Th
en again. Again.

He rests his head on the side of the bed, the pages in his lap. Behind the closet door, Tony’s school uniform hangs with his belts and jackets and clip-on ties. Maddalena still changes the sheets once in a while, vacuums the carpet, dusts the shelves. Everything is as it was. He wants to stay here. He won’t tell Prima or Frankie about Maddalena’s conversation with Carolina. He won’t tell Maddalena what he read in the paper about heredity. He won’t tell anyone about his meetings with DiSilvio. But in this room, with Tony, there are no secrets.

A sharp pain shoots from his lower back down to his leg, as if to remind him he can’t stay here long. He slides the pages back behind the dresser, far enough so Maddalena won’t notice them, and tries to stand, using the dresser for balance. But his old joints and bones fail him, and he falls onto the bed. For a few moments he lies there on his back, catching his breath.
Th
e bed is already wrinkled, so there is no reason not to cover his face with Tony’s pillow. Except that the boy’s smell is long gone.

It’s one o’clock in the morning. From the hallway window he sees cars leaving the church parking lot. He goes downstairs, turns on the spotlight, and walks to the end of the driveway without his coat. Before long, his family rounds the corner.
Th
en they say their good-byes and “see you tomorrows” and Prima and Tom and the boys get into their cars—too many cars for one family, a waste of gas and mileage, an extravagance. He takes Prima aside and thanks her for not mentioning the Italy trip the entire night, for helping to give her mother a peaceful Christmas Eve without a single argument.

“I’m on my best behavior,” she tells him.

“Tomorrow, too?”

“Tomorrow maybe.”
Th
en she sees his face. “Yes, Daddy. Tomorrow, too.”

Before Frankie can disappear into his room, Antonio asks him, “So, how was church?”

“How do you think?” Frankie says, smiling. “Smoke, mirrors, and hypocrites.”

Th
ey share this, at least. Neither of them trusts the Catholic Church to do anything for you except take your money.

“
Th
ank you for going,” Antonio says. “It means a lot to your mother.”

Frankie shrugs. “It’s good people-watching.”

Th
ey can talk like this only when Maddalena is not in the room. Just as Antonio is about to ask Frankie more questions (isn’t he glad he got it out of the way tonight instead of having to get up early tomorrow morning? Are any of his friends in Boston religious? What does he think keeps people coming back year after year for the same nonsense?), Maddalena comes toward them, Frankie winks, and they kiss each other good night.

“I love you, Son,” says Antonio.

“Love you, too, Dad. Merry Christmas.”

“
Buon Natale.
”

Th
e dining room table is cleared, the dishes are clean, and the hallway swept. Only the den remains a mess: the presents, the wrapping paper crumpled into balls, the pine needles. Antonio and Maddalena will take care of this tomorrow, together, before they drive with Frankie out to Prima’s. Now it’s time to rest.

Maddalena closes all the lights. She lies on the couch in front of the tree, using her old flowered housedress for a blanket. Antonio goes back to his chair, then changes his mind and sits beside her, her feet and ankles in his lap.
Th
ey don’t talk.
Th
ey’re both so tired.

“Another year,” she says.

Th
e TV stays on Mute.
Th
e tree glows.
Th
ey fall asleep this way, eventually, and when they wake it’s morning and the tree lights are still on, and Tony’s still gone, and they’re still older than they’ve ever been, and it’s like any other day, except when Antonio says, “I’ll make the coffee,” Maddalena asks, “But who are you?”

6
Beautiful Everything

F
RANKIE HAS BEEN
hoping for the phone call. Instead, a week after the January 20 notification date, he gets a letter.
Th
ere sits the envelope, thin and cold and bone-white, his name scrawled longhand across the middle like a seppuku scar.

Quickly he snatches it and stuffs it into the front pocket of his backpack.
Th
e rest of his mailbox consists of predictable flyers announcing study groups forming for the spring term, a beer night in Davis Square to welcome grad students joining the program midyear, and a long-delayed postcard from a jock in his eight thirty composition class thanking him for an “awesome fall” in which he “learned a ton.”
Th
e postcard was sent from Bali, as if that’s a reasonable place for an eighteen-year-old to spend Christmas vacation.
Th
ere are no postcards or Post-its or postscripts from Birch. In fact, he’s heard nothing from her since January 20
came and went. Before that, she and her husband were on their own exotic trip: a Christmas cruise to Alaska.

For the rest of the day, through his nine thirty History of Ideas class, through a lunch meeting with the Graduate Student Union, through an afternoon lecture called “Derrida’s Parenthesis”—at which Annalise
Th
eroux sits in the front row nodding and furiously scribbling notes—he keeps the letter unopened in his bag. As long as it stays there, he still has a chance. He avoids eye contact with Annalise and Dr. Lexus and Professor Yarrow. He skips the postlecture wine and cheese.

Th
e campus is covered in snow. He walks across it, bundled against the blustery wind, and just as he’s about to enter the library, where he plans to spend the next three to five hours grading the semester’s first set of essays, he changes his mind and heads home. He wants to be alone. And according to the chatter he overheard at the lecture, a foot of snow is expected by midnight.

He’s in the hallway unbuttoning his coat when he hears Anita’s voice through her closed bedroom door. He walks to the door and shouts into it. “Anita, are you talking to me?”

It sounds like she says, “A mister called.”

“Mr.
who
called?” he shouts back. His heart is pounding. Mr. Yarrow? Mr. Arbuckle?

“
YOUR SISTER CALLED
,” she says, still not opening the door.

“Oh,” he says. “Great.” He breathes. “When?”

“Like, two minutes ago.”

“How’d she sound?”

“It’s not an emergency,” shouts Anita. “She said, ‘Make sure you tell Frankie it’s not an emergency.’ ”

“OK.” He can barely hear her and doesn’t understand why she doesn’t just open the door.

“She said she had a ‘work-related question’ and that you can call her back whenever.”

“She doesn’t work,” Frankie says.

“I’m just the messenger,” she says, or maybe it’s, “Well, just ask her.” Either way, Frankie has a stack of persuasive essays to grade and no time to go over the same muddy territory with Prima.
Th
e next four hours must be spent making marginal notes that complicate his students’ generalities about abortion, cloning, and the death penalty.
Th
eir syntax must be wrestled with and ultimately tamed by annotating every instance of awkward phrasing and mangled grammar.
Th
e end result will be a treasure map that leads to a perfect revision, handed to them by their graduate student lecturer like a gift and with the faith that, by the time the class ends in four short months, they will be able to draw their own treasure maps from essays he will never have to read. He is one of the few GRSLs (“Gristles,” they call themselves) who works this hard, who doesn’t resent wholesale the hours required to complete his responsibilities as a teacher.

Frankie believes in paying his dues, in serving the process, in hard work as the most potent antidote to bitterness. Simultaneously he indulges in the fantasy that Annalise
Th
eroux—surely $15,000 richer as of January 20, about to complete her thesis in a warm bath of confidence, if the letter in his backpack says what he thinks it says—will be caught plagiarizing and forced to return her fortune to its rightful owner.

He boils some water for tea, puts a Stone Roses CD in the changer, closes the dresser drawers left open all day, and kicks off his duck boots. His socks are wet and cold. He adds them to the pile of soggy socks, scarves, and hats from the day before. He is digging through the hall closet for an extra blanket when he hears a voice other than Anita’s through her bedroom door. It’s not a man’s voice.

He leans against her door, but the floorboards creak, and he steps away. He shouldn’t spy. It’s none of his business. He’s happy for Anita. But what he wouldn’t do for a good look at the girl who’s finally yanked her over to the wild side! Anita herself has never held any attraction for Frankie, but the idea of her tumbling around with another girl on the other side of the wall provides exactly the sort of distraction he’s been hungry for all day. He’s read the theories on this.
Th
e titillation is derived from the power dynamic, and it’s all about the male gaze, and blah blah blah, and because of this he’s supposed to fight the desire, but desire—and who doesn’t know this?—is invincible.

It’s dinnertime, so he boils pastina in milk and tops it with Parmesan cheese and lots of black pepper, a dish his mother used to make when he got home from playing in the snow.
Th
e little stars soak up the milk and congeal into a cheesy mush. He eats at the dining room table, with its panoptic view of every door in the apartment, so Anita’s lover can’t escape undetected. He has to clear the table of old newspapers, catalogs, and cardboard boxes, but it’s worth it—or at least it will be worth it when the sapphic beauty emerges.

So he waits. Instead of calling Prima, instead of diving into the persuasive essays or unearthing the letter, he reads a
Globe
article from three weeks ago profiling each member of the harem of women who’ve claimed affairs with President Clinton. It seems there is no escape from men in power, gazing. He tries the op-ed section. Boston’s Big Dig, the most ambitious construction project in American history, is many gazillions of dollars overbudget, and according to Ralph Lind of Quincy, Massachusetts, the greed and corruption is yet another index of the imminent collapse of the Great Satan called Taxachusetts, and therefore Mr. Lind will be moving to Arizona. Frankie knows zilch about local politics, and cares even less. His passions reach beyond long-gone America to countries still forming, still salvageable. If someone paid him to write an op-ed piece for the
Globe,
he would use soaring rents and the citywide ban on happy hour as examples of how blithely citizens collude in their own exploitation.

Eventually he faces the first of the essays: “To Clone or Not To Clone:
Th
aaaat Is
Th
e Question,” or so Jim Delaney claims.

Since the dawn of Time, man has longed to reproduce himself. But what happens when there are no fertile women around to satisfy his natural need? Like a Science Fiction movie gone horribly wrong, scientists now have the capacity to create copies of ourselves, and as we speak they are going down a path toward making progenitors not just out of innocent animals like Dolly the Sheep, but out of human beings like you and me.

In pencil, Frankie circles “
Th
aaaat.” He puts a wavy line under “as we speak” and “innocent animals.” A question mark over “progenitors.” Between this intro and the final sentence is a journey of only three double-spaced pages, but it might as well be a sea of quicksand. Jim Delaney seems like a nice kid, not unlike Ray Savage, the jock from Bali, and not stupid. He deserves Frankie’s hard labor. Frankie can rescue him from the wrath of a future professor—Dr. Birch, for one—who would take an essay as clunky and unsophisticated as this, cross out entire sentences, write, “
NO
!” beside them with a red Sharpie, and crush any budding romance with words Jim might be exploring.

“I can’t waste my time on the fixer-uppers,” Birch has said to Frankie. “A kid’s got to at least have good bones. A solid foundation. A window of insight here and there.
Th
at’s all I ask. Leave the rest to physics and engineering. It’s a mercy killing, really.”

Is he crazy for missing her?

She used to arrange her naked body on top of his, rest her chin on his shoulder, and recite Hopkins. “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!”

In contrast: the last time he saw Kelly Anne McDonald, she read him letters her sixth graders had written to Anne Frank.

He’s losing focus. He nukes his tea and adds honey. From Anita’s room a Joni Mitchell CD starts up.
Court and Spark.
Th
e volume is raised. Still no one has emerged from the room. Frankie holds Jim Delaney’s essay at arm’s length, reads to the end of the first paragraph, rubs his forehead in agitation, puts it down. Looks at his backpack, looks away.

He dials Prima’s number from the kitchen extension, stretches the cord into the hall so he can sit on the floor and lean against the wall. From this angle, he can see enough of the apartment to detect any disturbance. He hasn’t spoken to his sister for over a month, since the uneventful Christmas Day dinner she hosted at her house.

Her phone rings and rings; then the machine picks up. Perfect. “Hey, Sis,” says Frankie. “It’s me, returning your call. No need to call back unless—”

“Frankie!” Prima says.

“Oh, you’re screening.”

“Of course I’m screening. Every other call’s somebody selling something.
Th
at doesn’t bother you?”

“
Th
ose people don’t call hovels.”

“I must be on a list. Do yourself a favor: don’t rack up huge mortgage and credit card bills.”

“So far, so good,” says Frankie. He glances down the still-empty hallway. “So what’s up? My housemate said you have a work-related question. I’m superbusy tonight, but . . . are you, like, looking for a job or something?”

“I have a job,” says Prima, with a defensive laugh. “It’s called raising four sons, cooking six nights a week for my husband, and babysitting two senior citizens.” She’s on a cordless and, from the jumpy fuzziness of the reception, seems to be running laps around the house. “And you know what?
Th
ere’s no better job in the world.”

“Gotcha,” says Frankie. God, Birch would despise his sister. Kelly Anne would not. He’s been thinking in these comparative terms lately, even though he envisions no scenario in which either woman will meet his family. Frankie has never brought a girl home to his parents, let alone to Prima. He doesn’t see the point until—unless—he meets a girl he might consider staying with for a few decades, and even then he wouldn’t introduce her to anyone until they’d lived together awhile. No use everybody falling for her, or cutting her down for not being good enough, before he’s had a chance to do so himself. He doesn’t understand people who parade their entanglements before their families like it’s a beauty pageant, seeking their ratings and recommendations. Love, like art, has no use for committees. If your instinct’s not an accurate enough guide, you’ve got some growing up to do.

“It’s
your
work I wanted to ask about,” Prima says. “I’m wondering what your schedule’s like in April. You have off Easter week, right?”

“We get a week break around then, yeah. It doesn’t always line up exactly. Why?”

“You know the exact dates?”

“I can look them up.
Why?
”

She sighs heavily, then gets all fake jaunty. “Because I was doing some research, and you know what? I was totally wrong about going to Italy in August! Everyone I talk to tells me it’s just too darn hot. So I thought, why not Easter? Better weather, all the churches decked out with flowers, less crowded with tourists.”

“
Th
is Easter, as in three months from now?”

“Yeah.
Th
e boys are off school. Well, Syracuse’s schedule doesn’t quite match up, but whatever. Ryan can miss a few days.”

“I thought the tickets were nonrefundable, nonchangeable, engraved by God on indestructible stone tablets. And, um, isn’t the whole thing off, anyway? Has something happened in the past few weeks to change that? Because if so, Mom hasn’t mentioned a word to me—”

“Let me worry about Mom.”

“It’s not a minor detail that she’d rather die than go.”

“Honestly, Frankie, you take her drama too seriously. I’ll worry about her. Just trust me.”

“I need Easter week to work on my dissertation,” he says. “I have plans to go down to Providence and New Haven to use their libraries.”
Th
is is a lie, one he’s worried he’s used before on Prima to get out of some other family event.

“You can’t go to the library some other time?”

“You have no respect for what I do,” Frankie says.