All This Talk of Love (7 page)

For any other girl, Frankie would shower and spritz on a little cologne. But the Professor likes him raw.
I want to smell the sleep on you.
So he wastes no time and starts on the cover letter, writing and rewriting the first sentence, until he hears Anita’s heavy footsteps on the stairs.

“Your company coming today?” she asks as she blows by his open door on the way to the kitchen.

“Yup.”

“Don’t worry. Just grabbing an apple.”

“Do what you gotta do.”

And that is his typical encounter with Anita. She is the flash in the hallway, the disembodied voice from the other side of the wall. A full-time nursing student, part-time roofer, part-time waitress, and nascent lesbian (unconfirmed), she spends little time at 25 Stowe. She knows about his walks from his predawn arrivals just as she’s leaving for the hospital. She knows about him and the Professor from coming home sick one
Th
ursday afternoon and catching their naked bodies scampering from the kitchen. If not for the fact that the Nursing and English Departments never overlap, and closeted Anita values discretion, the Professor would have ended their relationship the day Anita saw her. Or so she says.

He doesn’t know how long Birch has been standing in the doorway—arms folded, shoulder against the dusty frame, sunglasses flipped up onto her head—before she deadpans, “Well, aren’t you a sight.”

Th
is is her view: Frankie barefoot and cross-legged in his desk chair, wearing boxer briefs and a Jockey A-shirt, chewing his fingernails, his nose an inch from the computer screen.
Th
e tattoo on his left biceps—a Chinese character that, according to the artist, means both “resistance” and “pleasure”—winking at her.

Quickly he closes the document and shuts down his weary Mac Classic.
Th
e Professor lets drop her black leather bag, places the sunglasses on the bureau alongside her rings and hair clip, unzips her boots, and stands behind him rubbing his shoulders. “You’re such a
worker,
” she says as she pulls his shirt straps down over his arms. “It’s very sexy to me.”

Th
at’s all it takes. Before the screen goes dark, she’s got him stretched out on the futon and burrows her head in his armpit. He is always naked before she is, as she makes it a struggle for him to unclasp her bra and peel off her formfitting jeans. Her skin smells of pencils. Frankie used to pretend he didn’t see or feel the hair on her legs; now he’s come to like the extra warmth of it, its whiff of perversion. For a long time he thought she didn’t shave for feminist reasons, but it turns out she’s just lazy.

Th
e third time’s the charm today, and by two thirty they’re sitting at the kitchen table, two bowls of Rice Krispies loaded with raisins and sliced bananas between them. He keeps plenty of her favorite cereals and add-ins on hand, in all varieties, as well as the full-fat milk she prefers. Under the table, her right foot pokes around for a while and eventually finds a home on his crotch.
Th
is part, the candid free-form talk of literature and department gossip, is his favorite, less predictable and enervating than the sex. Today she reveals that Professor Audrey Wang, hired to bring some diversity to West Hall, will apparently not get tenure, and that a second-year transfer, Max Bradford, “creeps everybody out” with his glass eye. She does not mention the Fanon chapter, on which he’s desperate for guidance, or Dr. Lexus’s memo.

“And next week, I’m on that fucking panel in Chicago,” she says. She lifts the bowl to her lips and drinks the rest of the milk. “Are you going to that, too? I keep forgetting.”

“No,” he says. “
Th
ey rejected my paper.”

“
Th
e gothic thing?”

“Yeah. It’s not done, so—”

“
Th
ey’re idiots,” she says. “I’ll take a half-baked Frankie Grasso paper over their overwrought bullshit any day.” She smiles. “You’re lucky, though. Now you won’t have to go. I’ll end up writing my talk on the plane like I did last year.”

“It would have been good for my CV,” he ventures. “And it looks like a fairly decent lineup.”

She shrugs. “I guess. To me it reads like yesterday’s news.”

“Still,” he says, “I’ve never been, so I guess I have a glamorous notion.”

“Oh yes, it’s terribly glamorous,” she says, laughing. “Pasty-faced English types in vintage suits sucking down cocktails, holding court on uninspired and irrelevant ideas. If they weren’t so blatantly insecure, you’d hate them for their arrogance. Instead you just feel sorry for them, and for yourself—because all the shit you talk about them goes double for you.” She reaches back, puts her hair in a ponytail, and suddenly looks a decade younger. Frankie’s age, give or take a few years. “
Th
at’s what you have to look forward to, my darling.”

“Still,” he says again, “it’s the life of the mind.”

“
Th
at it is,” she says, with the feigned earnestness of a shrink. She digs her foot in deeper between his legs. “But the body is more honest.”

“Honesty’s overrated,” he says. He thinks a moment. “No—not just that.
Th
at’s too glib. I think honesty might in fact be the ultimate red herring. It’s nothing beyond the literal—”

She’s making an anxious face. “Can I be honest with you now?” she interrupts.

He looks at her. She has a wide, flat nose and a jaw almost manly in its severity but the smoothest skin his lips have ever kissed.
Th
ere is a tiny hole in her right eyebrow where she sometimes wears a silver ring, and the faintest shadow of hair on one side above her upper lip. She is beautiful in an unexpected way, like the angry little sister of the homecoming queen, and sometimes Frankie wonders if her rebelliousness is as put on as her jewelry.

“Why not,” he says. Sunlight streams in from the blinds in the window above the sink, striping her skin.

“I’m really sorry,” she says, squinting. “But don’t count on that fellowship.”

TH
E TWINS’ PARTY—ANOTHER
party! Because isn’t life just a string of parties with dead air in between?—was Prima’s idea. She planned it before the confirmation, when she noticed that Matt and Zach’s twentieth birthdays fell on a Saturday.
Th
ey’d go out and drink illegally that night, anyway, so what was the harm in having them and their friends drive out from Penn State to her house, where she could supervise and the cops couldn’t bust them? Also, Zach didn’t need another arrest on his record.

Th
at first violation was just underage drinking, not DUI.
Th
e Buckley boys love their lives too much to drive drunk. In case their friends don’t love their lives, though, Prima greets each of the drivers at the front door and puts their keys into a locked drawer in the master bedroom. She’s already talked to the parents of the underage kids she knew from high school, and if they hadn’t thought the party was a good idea, they wouldn’t have let their sons come. A few of the moms do show up to check on things and deliver care packages to be taken back to the dorm in the morning.

Prima’s at the kitchen table with her parents, half out of her chair, lecturing her mother for the hundredth time on why the trip to Italy must happen, there’s no point protesting, when the front door flies open and Ryan appears out of nowhere.

“Where are those two candyasses?” he shouts. He drops his duffel bag in the foyer, runs down the hall, and hugs Prima so hard he lifts her off the ground.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asks. His next break is not until
Th
anksgiving, and he was home for the confirmation just two weeks earlier.

“I don’t miss a party.”

Ryan loves his brothers. And maybe he’s lonely, up in New York, the middle of nowhere, all by himself. He has a thousand friends and a scholarship and girls throwing themselves at him night and day, but he has a sad streak, too. Prima can’t take her eyes off him.
Th
e blond crew cut, the sandals, the sunglasses—he looks just like Tom twenty years ago. She falls in love with her men every time she sees them.

“My favorite Italians!” he says to his
nonna
and
nonno.
He hugs them, too. Any other kid would rush to his buddies. Prima notices Mary Walsh, mother of Charlie (a boy with no manners at all), watching Ryan’s respectful behavior from the living room with her jealous little mouth.

“You’re half-Italian, you know,” says his
nonno,
his arm around Ryan’s shoulder.

“
Th
at’s right,” Ryan says. “
Th
e good half.”
Th
e punch line in a routine they’ve done a thousand times.

“
Bravo
.
”

“How’d you get so tan?” asks Maddalena.

“Booth,” he says. His puts hands on his hips, posing. “Buy ten sessions, get one free.”

She shakes her head. “
Th
ose things are poison.”

“I live in S
yr
acuse, Nonna.
Th
e sun’s out, like, four days a year.”

“You risk your health, you get cancer, then how good will you look? Tell him, Prima.”

“Mom, relax.” Prima’s no fan of tanning booths, either, but this isn’t the time to get into it.

Th
e cancer talk chases Ryan out of the kitchen. He presses himself up against the sliding glass door Prima just windexed until Zach and Matt notice him from outside.
Th
en they all four hug, the twins and their younger and older brothers in a huddle. Prima rushes for her camera, but by the time she gets to them, they’ve broken up and Ryan has his arm around some girl.

Th
e torches on the deck aren’t throwing much light, so Prima turns on the floods. Still, as the night comes on and the kids spread out onto the lawn and into various rooms of the house, she has a hard time keeping track of where everybody is. Her mother and father disappear from the kitchen. She goes upstairs to look for Tom, finds him asleep on their bed in his underwear in front of ESPN, and pulls the covers over him in case one of the kids walks in by mistake.

She sits for a moment beside her husband on the bed, her hand on his shoulder, wishing, briefly, that he were the partying type. She checks herself. He works sixty hours a week. On Saturdays he takes care of the lawn and the cars. On Sundays they go to ten thirty Mass, then to brunch in the same corner booth at Klondike Kate’s, then for a beer at Grotto’s to watch the Phillies or to his brother’s out in Lancaster to play cards. On some Sunday evenings on the way back, Tom puts his hand on her thigh, which means they’ll head straight to the bedroom when they get home. It makes her happy—thrilled, really, and, every time, relieved—to see his hand rise slowly from the steering wheel, to feel its warmth and to hold it there in her lap. No, Tom Buckley is not the partying type, but he and Prima have their own rhythms, and it’s nothing to complain about, so she shuts off the light and lets him sleep.

Ryan’s dragged the old Ping-Pong table up from the basement to the deck. He’s gathering a group around him to pick teams, and drafts Prima onto Matt’s the moment he sees her.
Th
is is the woman Prima Buckley has become: a forty-five-year-old housewife and mother of four, varsity shopper and JV gardener, playing beer pong with a bunch of teenagers. She does it for Matt and Zach, of course, not to get drunk. She doesn’t drink much anymore. She’ll have a strawberry daiquiri once in a while at the shore, but she hasn’t had more than two beers in a row since college. Even so, she’s glad Tom’s upstairs and her parents are out of sight.

“You’ve got such a nice house, Mrs. Buckley,” says the girl on the opposite team, a skinny flat-chested thing in painted-on jeans and a fuzzy pink tank top. Her squeaky voice, and her arm rubbing along Zach’s, staking a claim, disrupt Prima’s concentration.

“
Th
ank you,” Prima says. She holds the Ping-Pong ball between her thumb and index finger, aiming for the cup at the other end of the table. She prefers the bounce method rather than the direct-in-cup strategy. Everyone is watching.
Th
e handsome young men in their dark jeans and Eagles jerseys.
Th
e glossy lips of the girls. Matt. If the ball in Prima’s hand goes in, mother and son will win.

“How many square feet is this place?” the girl asks.

“Dude, she’s trying to throw,” Zach says.

Prima releases.
Th
e ball bounces once, then plops into the cup. She pumps both fists, her bracelets jangling, and Matt gives her a high five. Everyone claps.

“She’s a ringer!” says the guy on the other team.

“
Th
at’s it for me,” she says. “Quit while I’m ahead.”

“No way!” Matt says. “We’re defending champs. You gotta keep playing till somebody beats us, or you lose your honor.
Th
at’s how it works.”

Prima glances at the girl. She’s holding Zach’s hand now. “You’re really good, Mrs. Buckley,” she says. “Seriously. You really never played this before? It’s, like, all they do at U of D.”