We All Sleep in the Same Room
Read We All Sleep in the Same Room Online
Authors: Paul Rome
This is a Genuine Barnacle Book
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Copyright © 2013 Paul Rome
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Set in Goudy Old Style
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication data
Rome, Paul.
We all sleep in the same room : a novel / by Paul Rome.
p. cm.
ISBN 9781940207193
1. Law firmsâFiction. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)âFiction.
3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)âFiction. 4. FamilyâFiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O596 W4 2013
813.6 âdc23
for my father
When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: “This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath.”
âWilla Cather,
My
Ã
ntonia
September
1
W
hen I first see them together, it's from a distance, between passing cars: Frank Gordon carrying my son, Ben, down Park Avenue South. Then they're at the corner where 17th Street meets Union Square, pausing for the light to change. Ben's arms are wrapped around Frank's neck so that Frank's face is obscured. The two of them appear to be bobbing gently up and down.
When they reach the other corner, Ben is carefully lowered to the ground, and I see for the first time Frank's face. He's Asian. Raina hadn't mentioned that.
According to Frank's resume, he graduated in May with a BFA in graphic design from SVA. This is a selling point for Raina. In another lifetime, Raina might have happily skipped communications and gone for art school, to devote herself fully to photography. This other Raina, the up-and-coming photographer, probably never would have stopped in 1984 to strike up conversation with the clean-cut young man handing out flyers to protest the lousy living conditions maintained by a few sleazy East Village slumlords. That was me, once.
Frank whispers something in Ben's ear. Then the two of them are running in my directionâBen wobbling as fast as he can. Ben runs right past me, where I've been leaning against an adjacent stairwell, and slaps his palms against the front door of our building.
“You beat me,” Frank calls. He's stopped running and now saunters
f
orward. Our eyes converge. He seems to give me an elongated once-over.
I was the one who selected Frank's reply from the dozens of others we received in response to our Craigslist post. We were scrambling. Raina had gradually, in the first June heat wave, and then decisively, as the humidity crescendoed in mid-August, made up her mind to rejoin the workforce. And with characteristic lack of hesitancy, she'd soon thereafter committed to a managerial role, a return to her very first career as art director for a lifestyle magazine. Amid Raina's drafting of cover letters, Bernadette, our reticent but trusted nanny, had given two weeks' notice with kind words and the enigmatic vagueness befitting the personality she'd allowed us to know during the year of her employment. Raina and I both agreed Ben was ready for a babysitter. Someone who could, and would, engage him rather than just change his diapers. A young man would be ideal. I was attracted to Frank's direct prose and his unadorned enthusiasm for afternoons spent in the park. You could trust a young guy with a sharp r
é
sum
é
and a name like Frank Gordon.
I swoop in behind Ben and throw him up high above my head, spin him around, and lower him to my face.
“Daddy,” he says.
I turn with son in arms and extend a hand to Frank.
“Hello,” I say. “I'm Tom, Ben's father.”
“Daddy, I want to get down.”
“Frank,” says Frank. “It's nice to meet you. I was wondering who was watching us.”
At half-a-head shorter, Frank is required to peer up at me. Brushing away locks of his surprisingly long hair, he offers a youthful smile. I unlock the door and welcome everyone inside.
Ben leads the way, attacking the stairs like a cub, using his short arms as front legs to propel himself forward. Frank follows with a wide grin, undoubtedly amused by the act of a three-year-old climbing stairs.
Raina is waiting at the landing.
“Mommy!” cries Ben, forgoing his lion-like leaps for his fastest sprint to her arms, where, nose-to-nose, they share a collective burst of joyous, incomprehensible baby talk.
“You're home early,” I say. “I thought you had a staff meeting.”
Raina's beaming, unexpected presence makes superfluous my earlier efforts in re-scheduling a partners meeting and a conference call with reps from the American Federation of Teachers. We'd discussed all of it the night before. But I know better than to say something which might affect Frank's initial impression of my wife's and my decision-making as anything other than unified.
“Yeah, there was a meeting,” she says, “but I got too impatient. I wanted to see my big guy.” She unleashes another succession of kisses upon Ben's face. Then she turns to Frank, who stands next to me in the stairwell. “How was your first day together?”
“A lot of fun,” Frank says. “We rode the subway to the park, and Ben made friends with a girl named Ella. Then he walked home five of the blocks on his own, and I carried him the rest of the way.”
Ben spreads his arms into the air while still held against Raina. The conversation has already bypassed him and his mind is elsewhere. He's mimicking a plane or Dumbo sailing through the circus tent.
“That's good,” I say. “That's good he made it that far.”
Last Tuesday, when I got caught up working late at the office with Jessie, I phoned Raina to say she ought to go ahead and conduct the interview with Frank without me. Her account over coffee the next morning was curious. She flushed. Then she reported that they had spoken for maybe ten minutes, maybe less, and when he got up to go she'd blurted out,
I can tell you're the one
. She agreed it was a bit impulsive, but she'd felt absolutely certain about him from the second he walked in, and didn't want him to accept an offer elsewhere. Ben seemed to really like him too, she told me. She said he radiated a certain honesty and warmth.
“So Ben didn't work you too hard? I mean, you're going to stay with us?” Raina says.
“So far, so good.” Frank says.
“Wonderful, I'm so pleased,” Raina says. “It's great that Ben has a new afternoon companion. Now say goodbye to Frank,” my wife instructs our son. “Tell him,
thanks Frank, I had a nice day
.”
Ben snaps out of his dream world and whispers into Raina's ear.
“You tell him,” Raina says, but to Ben's vigorously shaking head, she yields: “Okay, okay, alright, I'll ask him. Frank, would you like to come in and see Ben's trains?”
* * *
I return home with
a fresh set of keys. Ben's new companion is crawling on the carpet, pulling a train along a newly assembled track. Ben trails with another string of cars. They make chugging sounds with their mouths. Raina is stationed in the opposite corner, facing the computer while conversing softly on a Bluetooth earpieceâa recently acquired accessory that suits an art director, though not a middle-aged union lawyer. Ben stands up when he hears me enter, but then opts for the trains and sits back down. Frank waves politely.
For a minute I remain in the hallway, hesitant to disturb the tranquil scene playing out in my living room, when for a second time today, I catch Frank's gaze and again find it to be ever-so-slightly drawn out.
“I think I'll maybe catch a few winks before dinner,” I announce.
First I linger in front of an open refrigerator. It's more barren than I recall. Reminds me of how my own fridge looked pre-marriage. Three stouts capped with gold foil, a house present from one of Raina's new co-workers, are lined up in the door. The allure of good beer.
For the record, I am by no stretch an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise, nor has that label ever been pinned on me (despite a healthy familial legacy). I simply choose to abstain. I find the interference of booze upon the life of a hardworking, morally driven man to be unnecessary. To deny, though, that alcohol was involved on the final night of my very first union conference in Phoenix many years ago, spent in the company of Lily, a colleague from Athens, Georgia, which nearly cost me my marriage, would be disingenuous. Thus, my abstinence must also be viewed as a symbolic pact with my wife and with myself, representing the closure of our relationship's most bitter and now unspoken chapter.
I ought to seize my chance, before Frank goes, to rest in solitude. Raina and I share, with our son, the apartment's only bedroom. But I stand in front of the open refrigerator a moment longer. I could, after all this time, have a beer if I wanted to, without doing harm. And then there's the bottle of Johnny Walker Black, a gift from an appreciative union rep, collecting dust in the back of the cabinet above the fridge. But now, for obvious reasons, is not the time.
To be welcoming, I ask Frank if he wants one. He deliberates. The trains stop. From the opposite end of the room, Raina, who'd seemed lost in work, pivots her head in my direction. Somehow my question has been understood as a trick, a test requiring a correct response.
“Or anything else?” I offer. “Seltzer, juice, water?”
“I want juice, Daddy.”
“How do you say it nicely?” Frank asks Ben.
“Daddy, I want juice, please.”
“I'll take some water,” Frank says. “Thanks.”
“Daddy, I want water.”
* * *
It's my ninth birthday.
My father is cajoling me to go on the ride. The sun bakes my forearms, ankles, and the tops of my sandaled feet. I'm soaked in sweat. My stomach feels queasy from the overload of greasy snacks my dad had intended as a treat. My head swarms with the foreign sights and sounds of men and women and their kids whose likes I've never before encountered. Their shrieks and laughter merge with the din of the rides thudding over our heads, and with the hucksters' ceaseless calls, beckoning one and all to their booths. The crowd presses us forward until we're at the front: The Coney Island Cyclone.
* * *
“Long day?” Raina asks
me.
It's dark out now, and it's just the two of us on the couch, talking and sipping mugs of ginger tea. Ben is on the floor engrossed in his nightly screening of
Dumbo
. In the past, the length of most feature-length films and their penchant for digression and emotive imagery, in place of a directly linear narrative, had proven problematic for him. When a character sat around for too long thinking, or a nonsensical moment occurred, he didn't become bored so much as confused, asking questions like,
What's he doing?
But since Raina's best friend, Cal, gave him the
Dumbo
DVD for his third birthday, he's doggedly stuck to the film, viewing it night after night with Zen-like concentration. He seems genuinely moved by the love between the mother elephant and her son, and I know he further desires to understand the film on every level.
“Yeah,” I say, “It was a long day.” My body's unintended expressions are always giving me away. I mean, I know Raina well after twenty-one years, but with her it's as if she sees me from the inside. She can always tell. “I had this meeting in the morning,” I continue, “everything felt long after that.”
What was amazing was that Raina knew instantly about my feelings for Jessie just by the way I brought her up. She practically knew before I did. Raina told me she confirmed her suspicions when she saw how I acted with Jessie at last year's office Christmas party.
“Meeting with the partners or a client?” she asks.
She leans back against the arm of the couch. Raina didn't even get mad about the Christmas party.
What's there to be mad about?
she'd said.
“Actually, neither. The new union rep from Allied Health Employees asked me earlier in the week if I'd meet personally with one of their members who'd lost her job. See if I thought she had a case. The catch was the union had only until this weekend to file a grievance and still be timely under the contract. I told them to file it anyway to be sure it gets in on time.”
“What happens, again, when they're late?”
“When they're late?” There was a time in our marriage when Raina had a better grasp on the tenets of labor law. Maybe she's just distracted by the new procedures and personalities at her job. Or our new babysitter. “Well, nothing good. The boss will refuse to consider the grievance, and the union member will be furious. Once a worker isn't protected under contract, the employer can't be held responsible.”
“Right.” Raina sips her tea.
“Anyway,” I say, “this woman comes into the office today all the way from Coney Island. She's one of those people who exudes a certain quality that lets you know they've had it rough, you know?”
“Sure.”
“She was about your age. Maybe younger. Mid-to-late thirties, I guess. And she was pleasant looking. Well, sort of. I mean, she should've been. All her features were pleasant, but her face expressed too many problems to be just that. Anyway, her appearance isn't what's important. There was something about herâ”
“Mommy,” Ben calls. Raina motions for me to hold my thought while she attends to him. Ben can't control his need to interrupt regularly to confirm that we're still paying attention. He has a question about why Dumbo is seeing pink elephants. He's asked each of us a hundred times before. Now the answer comes included in his question. “Because he drank the bad stuff the clowns put in his bucket?” he asks and proclaims simultaneously.
Raina kneels down and drapes her arms around his tiny chest. She's taken off her workwear, and now, in her post-dinner attireâa worn white v-neckâher breasts, braless, envelop his face. At strange moments and all varieties of circumstance, I sometimes catch myself muting the particular episode in front of me and undressing Raina with my eyes: short; thick in the center and thighs; full, protruding chest; slightly asymmetrical face; large bright hazel eyes that tilt at different degrees; a rounded nose that comes to a sharp point; a tangle of dirty-blonde curls; firm, ruddy, radiant skin.
She kisses Ben and returns to the couch.
“So tell me about the case.”
“So this womanâher name is Doreenâshe was fired in the first week of August for an incident that took place in July. She was a receptionist at a health clinic in Brooklyn, a small place on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. Now, Doreen claims she takes it upon herself to know everyone who comes into the clinic, to remember their face as well as their medical status. She said she'd found that after so many years in her field, she was able to recognize a patient's problem, almost without fail, from the moment they stepped in the door.”