All This Talk of Love (26 page)

“I’m driving Amos to the airport,” she says. “He’s going to some conference in Perugia.
Th
at’s fair, right? We go to Pittsburgh and Saint Louis, and the engineers go to Tuscany.”

“Umbria,” says Frankie.

“What?”

“Perugia’s in Umbria.”

He hasn’t told her about his own trip to Italy. He doesn’t want to hear her reaction to it. He wants her take on his work, not on his parents and siblings. On the rare occasions he mentions them, he can almost see her mind spark, eager to pounce with her expert analysis of his family dynamics. What he’s pieced together of Birch’s family—a distant and long-dead father, a nervous mother remarried to an insurance salesman in Cincinnati, a sister in Lansing—calls to mind one of those bleak Rust Belt upbringings people of substance spend the rest of their lives renouncing and American novelists try, lamely, again and again, to illuminate. No wonder she is attracted to the tragedy-marked immigrant saga of the Grassos.

“Next Friday, then,” Frankie says, though he doubts he can wait that long to share with her his newest idea, the one he began to form at the grimy 7-Eleven window between the bag of chips and the chili dog.
Th
e idea will require one or two new chapters, but he thinks that he can mine two of his existing ones for material and that, moreover, the idea will help create links among the other chapters, if he can nail the introduction. He wants to get to work on this idea
right now
.

She must have heard the wistfulness in his voice, because after he says, “Next Friday, then,” she goes soft again. “How about this, Frankie. Have you ever been to the Oak Room?”

“I don’t think I know what that is.”

“It’s a restaurant. In the Fairmont Copley hotel.
Th
e prices are obscene. We can meet there, you and me, tonight, for dinner. It’s a good place for talking.”

“Isn’t that . . . very public?”

“Nobody in the English Department can afford to eat there, trust me. Someone got Amos a gift card a hundred years ago and he’s never used it. I’m sure he won’t notice if I take it.”

“Do his friends go there? What if they see us?”

“I’m your adviser. You’ve just gotten your PhD. Congratulations! We’re celebrating! Et cetera.”

It’s the least Birchy idea she’s ever had. He can’t resist. “If you’re OK with it—”

“It’s my suggestion, so obviously I’m OK with it.”

Th
ey agree to meet at seven. He has five and a half hours to kill, so he heads to the BPL, conveniently located next door to the Fairmont Copley, to check out a few titles the university library wouldn’t have. His plan is to take a break and call Kelly Anne to update her on the passport, but then he loses himself in the stacks and, while examining the bottom row of the lit-crit section, dozes off on the floor. When he wakes, it’s 6:40, he’s got slobber on his lips and carpet burn on his right cheek, and an enormous homeless man is hovering over him with his arms contemptuously crossed. By the time he makes it through the circulation-desk line and rearranges his satchel to stuff five new books in, it’s too late to call Kelly Anne, and besides, what would he tell her he was up to?

He arrives on time, if a bit woozy and disheveled, at the Fairmont Copley Plaza. It takes him a few minutes of wandering the glittery, gilt hallways to find the Oak Room, but otherwise Frankie is well within the margin of error punctualitywise. Birch runs her life like Mussolini ran the Italian train system, and grows exponentially more peevish with every minute someone keeps her waiting.

Th
is time, though, he’s the peevish one. Seven fifteen comes. Seven thirty. Twice he asks the maître d’ to confirm the reservation, and both times, yes, it’s for a party of two at 7 p.m. Name: Césaire. Birch’s favorite theorist. Seven forty-five. Eight. Dozens of other reservations arrive and cast down their disapproving eyes on Frankie, waiting on the leather banquette in a faded blue oxford unbuttoned to reveal his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, obsessively checking his watch. Eight fifteen. He could read the books in his satchel, but he’s too angry to focus. “Can I use your phone?” he asks.

Frankie’s fear—that Kelly Anne has been waiting for him—comes true: she picks up on the first ring. “Where’ve you been?” she asks. “I was getting worried.”

“I’m taking you out to dinner,” he says. “Have you ever been to the Oak Room?”

She hasn’t, she says, but she’s heard of it. He rebooks a table for Grasso for eight thirty, tells the maître d’ he’ll be right back, and walks across the square to Boylston Street. At Marshalls he purchases a white button-down shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He tries on the cheapest pair of dress shoes, but even these are too expensive, and besides, he’s already compromised too much for the sake of the maître d’ and his snooty assemblage of diners. His Converses will do just fine. He changes in the fitting room and stuffs his jeans and T-shirt into his satchel.

He returns to the Oak Room to find Kelly Anne already waiting for him at the bar. Walking toward her, he is struck again by his gut-level attraction to her all-American looks; this surprises him now, as it did that first night on Amtrak, because he’s spent much of his adult life chasing the exotic. Tonight she’s pulled her hair back and wears a simple blue-and-white polka-dot dress, her gold cross front and center at her throat. She’s half on, half off the barstool, legs delicately crossed, drinking through a straw from a pint glass of ice water. When she sees the scrubbed-up version of Frankie walk through the door, she covers her mouth.
Th
en she stands, adjusts her dress over her thighs, and holds out her arms.

“Look at you!” she says as Frankie steps into her embrace. “What’s going
on
?”

He shrugs. “I’m not sure. I just thought, For one night, let’s be adults. See what it’s like.”

“Well,” she says, extending her hand. “We’ll pretend this
isn’t
my prom dress, then. Let’s say we bought it at Saks. It cost three thousand dollars.”

“And I’m the chair of the Department of Engineering,” Frankie says. “I saw you across the crowded campus center.”

“
Th
at’s creepy.”

“Is it? You’re not a student, though, remember? You’re in the Ed Department. You’re a professor, too. Not the chair, though. Not yet.” He smiles.

“An ed professor in a three-thousand-dollar dress?” says Kelly Anne.

Th
e maître d’, surely eavesdropping, waits impatiently with their menus.
Th
ey follow him to a table in the back corner, likely on account of the sneakers. Frankie doesn’t care.
Th
e chair backs are padded with thick, satiny material that reminds him of his mother’s drapes.
Th
ey’re surrounded by oak walls on all sides and those little brass light fixtures that stick out—he can’t remember what they’re called—and then Kelly Anne says, “Sconces. We’re eating in a room with sconces.”

He folds his napkin over his lap. A fern tickles the back of his head. He’s starving. While he was waiting for Birch on the banquette, he read from a thick coffee-table book of clipped magazine and newspaper articles, all of which argued that the experience of dinner at the Oak Room is singular and unmatched. One writer devoted three paragraphs to the Dover sole alone, and so, when Frankie sees it on the menu, he orders two. And Waldorf salads. And a manhattan. Kelly Anne, not a drinker and only recently twenty-one, orders a Coke.

Th
ey discuss her day (busy), the passport office (no sweat), and the prices on the menu (one decimal point off, surely? Should they bring this to the waiter’s attention?). But Frankie has a sky-high limit on his credit card, and at this point, who cares?
Th
ey’re on the cusp of spring. His diss is in its final stages, thanks to the New Idea. He’ll ditch Birch, as an adviser and a lover, once and for all, now that she’s made her blatant disregard for him abundantly clear. Until now, he hasn’t minded being a kept man, but being stood up at the Oak Room changes a person. He’d imagined he and Birch would discuss the New Idea over wine the way they used to discuss it over cereal, like adults, then have sex in the oversize lockable bathroom, among the fresh flowers and Elizabeth Grady scents, like rock stars. But she didn’t give them that chance. She could still show up, of course, catch him canoodling with Kelly Anne, about whom she knows nothing, and make some sort of scene, but Frankie’s aware of the more likely scenario: she wussed out and didn’t have the balls to tell him.

Kelly Anne is watching him think. “Did you take me here because you don’t want me to go with you to Italy?” she asks.

“
Th
at wasn’t my thought process,” Frankie says. He takes a sip of his manhattan. “But now that you mention it . . . Can we agree not to talk about that? Can we just enjoy this place and make fun of it?”

“I want us to be closer,” she says. “A real couple.”

“We can’t get any closer than this,” Frankie jokes. For such a fancy restaurant, the table is so small that their salad plates touch. “Besides, we are a real couple. We don’t have to take some extravagant trip to prove anything.
Th
is isn’t
Pretty Woman.
”

She laughs. “Did Frankie Grasso just reference a Julia Roberts movie? You really did have a brain transplant today.
Th
at’s
why you couldn’t call me.”

A busboy appears and whisks away their salad plates. Behind him, the waiter wheels over two big, scaly fish, heads and all, on a cart draped in tablecloths. As Frankie and Kelly Anne watch, he scoops off the heads with a spoon, deposits them out of sight on the second tier of the cart, and goes to town on the rest of the bodies. He splits and unfolds them like they’re antique books, teases out with precision the delicate white bones, and leaves only the juiciest, lemoniest flesh, which he places before them with the confident flourish of a magician.

“Dinner theater,” Frankie says.

Th
ere’s peril in eating here, he thinks, as he brings a forkful of fish to his lips. It’s dangerous to know what you’re missing, what’s available to the man willing and able to pay for it. He eats most days like there’s a depression: lunch on bread from the Pepperidge Farm outlet and market-brand ham and cheese, washed down with tap water. For the rest of the day he snacks on energy bars and peanut butter. His fridge is filled with cubes of cheese left over from department parties. If he didn’t have a freezer full of his father’s lasagnas, he’d be swimming in his new size 28 khakis.

“It’s really good,” he says, of the sole.

“It’s amazing,” Kelly Anne says. “I want to learn how to cut a fish like that.”

“I’ve seen my dad do it. He teaches the waiters at the Al Di Là, too.”

“I want to eat there one day.”

Maybe it’s the second manhattan, or the perfection of the fish, or the sense that nothing matters that comes after you spend lots of money you don’t have, but whatever it is, Frankie hears himself say to Kelly Anne McDonald, “You will,” and after he does, it’s as if he’s just plugged her into an electrical socket. Her eyes widen. She sits up two inches taller. It’s possible that her teeth get whiter. She calls the waiter over and orders a manhattan for herself. In her mind, the occasion calls for a libation. Plus, she says, she likes the heavy tumbler, the red glow of the cherry on the glass.

Dessert is Irish coffees and crème brûlées.
Th
e waiter is their new best friend. With tip, the bill comes to $150, more than Frankie spends on groceries in two months. He doesn’t blink.
Th
ey consider staying another hour, maybe grabbing a final drink at the bar, but then Frankie decides against it; the splurge feels good, and when something feels good it should be held and admired, not stretched thin.

Th
ey push through the revolving door of the hotel into a busy and rainy Copley Square.
Th
ey take the T back to BC, to the warmth of her bedroom, where they immediately undress and dive under the covers.
Th
ough they’re jazzed and tipsy, the gluttony has made them more sleepy than horny.
Th
ey pass out in each other’s arms at eleven thirty. At 2 a.m. he bolts up in bed: he’s forgotten to call his mother.

He pads out to the pay phone in the hallway, dials her number, assures her quivering voice that he’s fine, he’s great, he was just out walking after a double feature at that movie theater in Harvard Square he’s always telling her about. No, he wasn’t alone. Yes, he was with nice people. Smart people. Yes, he’s excited to see her in a couple weeks, and yes, he’s already bought his train ticket to Wilmington using his father’s credit card. No, the Italy trip’s not going to be as bad as she thinks, but now’s not the time to talk about it. It’s late. It’s too late. Now’s the time they should both get some sleep.

“You sound good,” he says at the end, because she does. It’s one of her good nights. And she says, “So do you.”

8
Th
e Grasso Brain

I
T NEVER FAILS:
just as Prima settles in to relax, the telephone rings.

She’s alone in the house, a six-hundred-calorie dinner of boiled chicken, mesclun greens, and one baked sweet potato in front of her. Patrick’s next door and Tom’s at the office late again to bank as much time as he can before Italy. Her parents are on their way to the dance studio for the weekend social. All Prima wanted from this lazy Friday evening, the last Friday before the big trip, was to take a break from the plans and the double checks and sit in front of the TV with her sensible dinner (because she, too, is banking) and her March Madness brackets. It scratches her gambling itch, and she must admit, watching the fresh-faced college men spin around in their shorts and tank tops is a perfectly fine way to pass the time.

A ringing phone never fails to worry Prima. She wasn’t always like this. But then one day she was called out of US History and told that Tony was missing and asked, over and over, if she had any idea where her brother might be hiding. A day later, the police called to say he’d been found, and she can still see her mother on the floor of the kitchen, weeping, wrapped in the long green cord.
Th
e ringing phone is a constant threat to the years of peace Prima has had since high school, this blessed span of sidestepped tragedies, this golden era she knows won’t last.

Th
e girl on the phone is crying.

“Who is this?” Prima asks. “Who’s
cal
l
ing?”

Prima’s been preparing for this call, the one that changes her life with unbearable news: Patrick’s flipped his car, Ryan’s gotten drunk and fallen off a roof deck, her father’s had a stroke, Tom a heart attack, her mother’s left the oven on and burned the house down. Frankie has been home with Maddalena the past few days, though, and this has eased Prima’s worry. He arrived earlier in the week to help get them ready for the trip. So who will it be tonight, then? How has Prima lived this long with these wolves outside the door?

“It’s Allison,” says the crying girl.
Th
e connection is scratchy, and there’s a sound like thunder in the background. “I need your help, Mrs. Grasso.”

She’s pregnant, thinks Prima immediately.
Th
en: Zach’s beaten her up. Both options are all too possible. Her son, like all men, is a lover and a fighter, capable of anything. Whichever it is, Allison drove him to it, and now it will be up to Prima to fix the situation.

“Tell me,” Prima says.

All in a rush it comes: “I ran out of gas and I’m on the road to Penn State and I can’t call my parents because I’m not supposed to visit Zach without them knowing and I didn’t ask their permission to take the car all the way out to State College and they don’t even know we’re dating, Mrs. Grasso, they think I’m spending the night at my friend Katie’s house and I don’t know what to do, so I was calling you because you’re a cool mom and you’d tell me what I need to do or maybe Patrick—”

“Allison, slow down,” Prima says, catching her own breath. “
Th
is is a relief. You made it sound much worse. I thought something happened to Zach. Did you even think of what might be going through my mind?”

“My parents are going to
KILL
me!” she wails.

“It’ll be fine,” says Prima. “Eventually, though, you have to pay the piper.”

“What?”

Prima switches the phone to her other ear. Relief washes over her. In three minutes she’ll leave Allison to solve her own problem, and she’ll get back to her brackets. “What are you expecting me to do for you, Allison? I won’t call your parents and lie for you, if that’s what you think.”

“No,” she says. “
Th
at’s not—is Patrick there? Because I thought, maybe Patrick could drive out to meet me? Like, with a gas can, the kind you have for a lawn mower?” She babbles on: Her father had to do that once for her mother. He drove out in the middle of nowhere, which is where she is—somewhere on 41, near Harrisburg—even though her dad was so mad at her mom and didn’t say a word to her when he got there. Her dad just filled the tank and left, and that’s all Allison Grey says she needs from Patrick Buckley: to waste his Friday night to drive forty miles looking for her blue Honda Civic on the side of the road, then turn around and come home so she can make the rest of her journey without her parents finding out.

“No. Way,” Prima says.

“What? Really?”

“Really. No way. I may be a ‘cool mom,’ but I’m not letting my son go all the way out there by himself.”

“Can I talk to Patrick?”

“Even if he was here, Allison, I wouldn’t let you. No seventeen-year-old should be making that trip alone, not you and not Patrick. It’s not safe. You need to call your mother, or I’ll do it for you. Why don’t you just call Zach? His friends have cars. You’re halfway there.”

“I still want it to be a surprise,” she says, her voice shaking, from cold or nerves or both.
Th
ere’s more of that thunder in the background and car horns and wind. She’s quiet for a minute, then starts to cry again, louder than before, a kind of whimpering wail, but Prima is unmoved.
Th
e sooner Allison learns that actions have consequences, that you have to prepare for any and all calamities, the better.

“You need to figure this out on your own, Allison. I’m sorry.”

“But Mrs. Grasso, I’m scared.
Th
ere’s, like, nothing around here.”

“If there’s a phone, there has to be something near it, right? You’re not at a restaurant or rest area?”

“I’m near a gas station. But it’s closed. It’s right off the exit. I had to walk on the highway to get here. My car’s on the side of Forty-One. I could see the gas station from the road. I thought for sure I’d make it. I didn’t even notice I had no gas at first. I was so excited to see Zach. It’s our six-month anniversary. Six months. Isn’t that crazy? But it’s all farms around here. And really, really dark. Some crazy guy’s gonna come out of the woods with an ax, Mrs. Grasso. I swear that’s what’ll happen if I’m stuck here.”

“You need to call your mother,” Prima says again firmly. “Or give up the surprise and call Zach or one of your other friends. Doesn’t Katie have a car?” Surely this is not Prima’s problem to solve. Meanwhile, Allison continues to cry and asks if she can stay on the phone while she figures out what to do.

“Fine,” says Prima.
Th
en she offers, “Nine one one, maybe?” But Allison is a minor, and the police would have to notify her parents, anyway. She looks out her window at the neighbor’s house, where Patrick is having dinner and watching a movie with one of his classmates he doesn’t particularly like. Prima could easily run next door and get him—she’d be rescuing him, too, in a way—and ask him to come with her out to Harrisburg to rescue Allison Grey.
Th
ey could stop for ice cream on the way home. Soon enough, she won’t have Patrick around for such a thing.

Th
e operator comes on and demands that Allison put in more coins.
Th
is causes her to sob even louder. “Go back to your car and lock the doors,” Prima says to her, firmly. “Patrick and I will be there in an hour.”

“Oh my God, really?”

“Yes.”

“
Th
ank you so much, Mrs. Grasso.”

“You’re welcome.”

“It’s, like, an hour and a half, though, from you, I think. Just so you know.”

Prima is silent.

“I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” says Allison Grey.

Prima switches off the TV, walks over to the neighbor’s, and explains the situation to Patrick and his classmates and the parents, and soon they’re on 41 speeding toward Harrisburg.

“
Th
is is why I sent you to Boy Scouts,” Prima lectures. “So you can
be prepared.
You have to think ahead for every step you take. You have to imagine all the worst-case scenarios. You don’t just expect that the easy route’s going to open up in front of you.
Th
at’s easy to imagine when you’re a teenager, I know, but sooner or later you find out life doesn’t work that way.”

Patrick yawns. It’s tired advice. Prima’s father used to ramble on to her like this, in that blur of years after Tony.
Th
e words had the opposite effect on her then.
Th
ey made her push him and her mother further away, give up on anything safe and reasonable, throw herself harder and harder at Dante Marconi—but she prefers to think that they weren’t wasted, that they meant something later, after she’d settled down with Tom and started a family.

Th
ey’re almost to Lancaster. Prima keeps her eyes out for horses and buggies, though she’s not sure if the Amish travel at night. Patrick’s in his track pants, sweatshirt, and tube socks, his feet up on the dashboard, and she almost tells him it’s not safe, but she’s done enough lecturing for one night. To change the subject, she tries, “What do you think of Allison, anyway?”

“She’s hot,” he says.

“Not her looks. How she
is.
Who
she is. You think she’s a good person?”

He shrugs. “She’s not mean or anything. Her best friend’s Katie Campo, this big-time bitch, but Allison’s cool to everybody. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like her.”

Prima’s already aware of all this. She’s made some inquiries about Katie Campo and has since indicted Allison with bitchiness by association.

“Zach still likes Allison as much as before?”

Patrick doesn’t answer, but a certain smile comes to his face. Prima can see it even in the darkness of the car. It’s that particular smile that guards his world from her intrusions. She’ll never break through it, though she’s come as close as any mother could. She’ll never stop trying to discover the lives her children lead out of her sight, to piece those lives together from the glimpses they give her.

“I think he’s in love,” Patrick finally says, and when, in disbelief, she looks over, he’s pulling something from the pocket of his sweatpants. It’s one of those tins. He opens it, takes out a white tablet, and pops it in his mouth. He hands the tin to her. “Want an Altoid?” he asks. “I’m, like, addicted.”

“A what?”

It’s not the last thing she remembers.
Th
e last thing is the wooden fence flying at her, taking up the entire windshield, like sunlight does when you turn into it.

TH
E MAN ON
the phone is crying. It takes Frankie a long few seconds to realize that it’s Tom and that Tom is telling him that Prima and Patrick are at Lancaster General Hospital, they’ve been in a car accident, and Frankie needs to get there right away and bring his parents.

“
Th
ey’re in bad shape,” Tom says, and after he does he breaks down and another man takes the phone from him, a man who turns out to be Tom’s brother, Steve.

When Frankie heard Tom crying, he’d thought instantly of his mother. As if on cue, his mind spun out the worst-case scenarios: she’d collapsed on the dance floor, she was missing, she was disoriented, she was, in some way or another, gone. Now his head and his heart are too crowded to consider the implications of the relief—there’s no other word, he’s sorry—that he’d felt upon hearing the names Prima, Patrick. “
Th
ey’re going to be OK, right?” Frankie asks.

“
Th
e doctor says there’s a very good chance for both. But he won’t let us see them. Tom’s losing his mind. He won’t believe anything the doctor says until he can see them.
Th
e twins just got here, but Ryan can’t get a flight until tomorrow morning. I told him not to drive down from Syracuse, but I think he’s going to, anyway.”

Frankie isn’t sure he remembers the way to the Crystal Ballroom in Claymont, where his parents dance on the weekends, and it’s late—they might be on their way home already—but still he puts on shoes, throws on a jacket, and takes off to find them. He can’t just stay home and wait by the front door.

He drives fifteen miles over the speed limit, makes two wrong turns, and nearly slides into another car as he tries to read the map unfolded on his lap. When he arrives and makes his way down the wide pink staircase into the main room, which is still very much partying, it doesn’t take him long to find his mother. She’s in the middle of the dance floor, her arms around a tall man half her age, her back arched and head turned dramatically to the side, tangoing or waltzing or something. Her face is serious, full of attitude, focused on nothing but the tall man and the music. From behind a column in the foyer, Frankie watches her, letting her finish out the song, bracing himself for the scene that’s about to erupt, not wanting to wrench her from this moment of joy, and amazed that, from this distance at least, she appears no older than Prima, without a care in the world. And there’s his father, sitting at a table in the corner with a group of men. His eyes, full of pride, are fixed on Maddalena. His foot taps along to the music.

Th
ey have been married more than fifty years.
Th
ey lost a son and might now lose a daughter and their youngest grandson. One of them will soon be lost to the other. It is more than anyone should have to bear.