The Side of the Angels (27 page)

“You see how we are together,” he whispered in my ear. “You can't give this up.”

Maybe it was the tinge of self-assurance in his voice. Maybe it was the thought of my mother back at home, smug and pleased to have engineered this little reunion. Or maybe it was just that mere desire and loneliness no longer seemed a good enough reason to put up with certain things. By which I meant this sense that Jeremy's love for me was the result of my passing a series of tests. If I were a little bit less intelligent, say by five IQ points, would I have failed to meet Jeremy's standards? If I were several shades less pretty than Virginia, instead of just a few, would he be kissing her in the rain right now, instead of me?

A qualm smote me. Maybe I just wanted to believe the worst of Jeremy because he'd hurt me. Maybe my ego was so bruised I couldn't be trusted to make a decision. Yes, Jeremy had cheated on me, but didn't every dog get one bite? My quickness to judge had lost me Tony.
He'd been in the wrong, and so had Jeremy, but if I left every time a man was wrong I might be single until the end of my days. I pictured myself at seventy, alone in a rent-controlled apartment, eating saltines for dinner and saving my money for scratch tickets and Aqua Net, knowing that some other woman was getting the fun of septuagenarian sex with Jeremy and enjoying his nice academic pension. What a fool I'd feel like then. On the other hand, I could easily picture Jeremy at seventy-two, making some feeble excuse about running down to the store for milk of magnesia when he was really sneaking off for a quick snuggle with some rich widow he'd met online.

“Jeremy,” I said, “I'm not ready to go back with you. I don't know if I ever will be.”

He started kissing me again, but I pulled away.

“This just distracts me,” I said.

“I want to distract you.”

“I wouldn't mind being distracted if I didn't pay for it later. Let me think about all this, Jeremy. I don't know if I'm being spiteful and vindictive toward you or if it's just that anything my mother wants is automatically suspect. Or if we've just gone too far to come back to each other.”

“I haven't gone anywhere. You have. You've gone back five years, and you're letting Tony take you over again.”

“No one's taken me over. What am I, Belgium?”

“I only know that you're different since you've gone up there and seen him again.”

“I'm different since I discovered that you'd been playing me for a fool. And seeing Tony has had no effect on me at all, except to irritate me.”

As I said this, I knew I was lying. Even if Jeremy and I had been selecting our silver pattern at Macy's, seeing Tony would have knocked me for a loop. But did Jeremy deserve to know that? I thought not.

“I'm not going to give up so easily,” he said. “No matter what temporary dream you may have fallen into upon seeing this man again.”

“I would call the past few weeks more of a nightmare. I do have a job, you know, and I'm working round the clock.”

“Think of me a little, at least,” he said. “Let me cross your mind
once in a while. That's not too much to ask, is it? And then, when this strike is over, we can talk.”

“Maybe. That's the best I can do. And it's a weak ‘maybe.'”

“I'll settle for that,” he said.

He kissed me again before he drove off in his blue Miata, a flimsy little toy car he loved with a solicitude surpassing any he'd shown me in our time together. I let him kiss me, and even told him he could call. Maybe we had a chance. Then again, maybe my weakening toward him was just one of the pernicious effects of the holiday season, a season which makes us think any love is preferable to family love. Family love takes all our energy from autumn to Christmastime, and throws us into the new year drained, dispirited, and unconfident. Romantic love at least puts a glow in our cheeks and a spring in our step from time to glorious time, and when we fail at it, the results don't hang around forever, reproaching us and sighing. Sometimes I felt that, at my final hour, when I stood before Saint Peter and the gates of heaven began to creak open upon Paradise, the echo of Ma's disappointed sigh would waft even to the apostle's ears and cause my name to be blotted from the heavenly roster.

“You didn't ask him in?” said my mother.

The house was quiet. I could hear the game playing behind the closed door of the den. Once in a while Joey or Johnny gave a half-strangled shout at a touchdown. My mother barely used the den since my dad's death. It had been his room, the only room in the house besides the garage where he could do just as he liked. I think one of the reasons my dad loved my mother was that deep down, my mother knew she was a bit much and that any man would have needed to get away from her once in a while to save his sanity. She never barged in on him in the den, and she never interrupted him when he had his head poked inside a car. In some ways, my mother was an extremely wise woman.

In some ways.

“Here it is, a holiday, and he's far from his family, and you don't invite him in for coffee and a little more pie?”

“Ma, he's English. They don't even have Thanksgiving, remember?”

“He didn't look good, Nicky. Is he eating? He didn't eat much.”

“How's he supposed to eat when all of you are watching him like he's a zoo panda in heat?”

“I think you're being a little hard-hearted. The man is clearly distraught.”

It was no use fighting. Instead, I put my arm around her and walked her down the hallway to the kitchen. I said, “Ma, let's talk about you for a change. Tell me about your date, about this wonderful Ira.”

In the kitchen we found Louise drying the good wine goblets with a felt cloth. We made a big pot of tea and my mother and Louise discussed the virtues of Ira Stern, a former estate planner who now only took on a few favored clients, but who was very witty on the intricacies of the tax code and the inheritance penalty. According to my mother, he danced beautifully but not too showily, he played rummy but not canasta, and he'd voted a straight Democratic ticket since Truman beat Dewey. According to Louise, he'd been a good family man, was a loving grandfather of three, and couldn't wait, he'd said to Louise during her post-date check-in call, to see my mother again.

“I think he's under an illusion about me. I think Louise made me sound too good to be true,” said my mother, who'd never been given a compliment without wanting to disown it.

“I'm a very honest person,” said Louise, “so I told him you were wonderful.”

They smiled at each other. I was glad my mother had Louise. Sometimes, affection between aunt and niece is easier than affection between mother and daughter. If it made me a little jealous, a little regretful, it also relieved me of the burden of being the sole repository of my mother's feminine hopes. If it seemed my marriage prospects were so dim that I'd need to use a walker by the time I made it down the aisle, my mother could always dream of Louise being married sometime soon in a hokey tiara veil and an eight-foot train.

I'd seen the magazines on my mother's night table, testaments to a faltering hope:
Today's Bride, Washington Bride
, and, lately,
Older Bride
. I could picture her leafing through the glossy pages with her
drugstore reading glasses on, wondering if she'd ever get to wear a tasteful georgette mother-of-the-bride dress, or weigh in with her opinion on pale pink orchids versus tiger lilies, salmon versus chicken, a limo versus my uncle Bill's Lincoln Town Car, and a thousand other mouthwatering details.

As I watched Ma debating outfits with Louise for her date tomorrow night, putting away more than her body weight in semi-frozen cheesecake, I was filled with fondness. I was lucky to have such a mother, even when she made me want to shriek with irritation. How many people in the world had someone who cared about them enough to feed them, bully them, and deceive them for their own good?

The doorbell rang. Thinking that it might be Jeremy returning, I ran to answer it, beating my mother by a nose. I didn't want her to get to him first this time. I wouldn't put it past her to offer him my old room.

But it wasn't Jeremy. Instead, standing a diffident three feet back from the door as if fearful of his welcome, was a slight man of sixty-odd, with wildly curly gray-and-silver hair and an air of being not quite sure whose house he'd planned to visit.

“Ira!” said my mother, pushing past me. She'd forgotten what she'd used to teach me, which was that you always kept a man waiting a few minutes in the living room before you made your entrance.

Somehow I'd imagined someone genial and self-assured. Someone … bigger. My dad had been six foot two. In his high school pictures he'd looked gangly, and he'd always stooped a little as if in memory of the days when his height was new to him. My dad had large hands with long fingers, and big feet; he took a twelve in shoes. In the brief space of time that I'd been aware of his existence, I'd been picturing Ira as being like my father in physical type, but he couldn't have topped my five-seven by much. He was slim but not insubstantial-looking, as so many of Louise's male clients were. The hand that shook mine had a good firm grip. He wore very hip steel-rimmed spectacles and carried a huge box of chocolates.

“You shouldn't have,” said my mother, clutching the candy to her chest. My father was not one to bring presents home. They didn't have much money for most of their marriage, and my mother was not
a good receiver even on the biggest occasions. You could always tell when a gift disappointed her, and most gifts did, as her tastes were picky and exact. She would utter a die-away “Oooohhhhh,” the essence of lukewarmness, and set aside the box in which the ill-chosen item was wrapped with a palpaple air of marking it down for a “return to store” errand.

Ira's chocolates, though, were a big hit, and so, clearly, was Ira himself. She whisked him into the living room, plied him with coffee and brandy, and offered him the first chocolate out of the box before selecting one herself with the deliberation of a five-year-old girl.

“You made it home,” said Ira, smiling at me. I felt hulking sitting on the couch next to my mother and him, like a big Raggedy Ann doll on a shelf with a china shepherd and shepherdess. I'd never noticed before just how much my mother had to crook her neck to talk to my dad, to dance with him. Next to Ira, she finally seemed to be in the proper scale. This made me uncomfortable somehow.

“I made it home, but I'm going back tomorrow.” My mother hadn't known about my imminent redeparture, but she barely blinked.

“Well, you're fighting the good fight up there, I hear,” he said, with the mildness of someone who didn't need to tout his political opinions. A rarity in this town.

“So you still believe in the good old cause of labor?” I said. “A lot of people get in my face when they hear I work for unions.”

“Oh, please,” he said. “My mother almost named me Eugene, after Eugene Debs. My sister is Emma, after Emma Goldman.”

“My second-grade diorama depicted the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti,” I said proudly. “Right down to the little electric chairs.”

“She was awfully morbid as a child,” my mother said, giving me a look that I didn't at first recognize. And then I realized that it was the same look I used to give her when she'd hang around the living room making polite chat when I had a date. I retreated to the kitchen, a little dazed.

Louise was in there nursing her tea and listening to a tape of Hub's last concert.

“His music never ceases to amaze me,” she said. “It's so fresh, so completely original.”

That it
was
music, I had to take on faith. I am not a big admirer of the school of vocal artists that includes Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but I will admit that at its best, it signifies something, even if I don't understand precisely what. Hub's stuff was a feeble imitation of those guys, his vocals reedy and thin, almost lost in the feeble, folksy guitar chords. No matter how nasty the words of Hub's songs were, his voice just ambled plaintively on, like a cat mewling persistently outside a bedroom window at three in the morning.

The squirrel song was followed by one called “Nuclear Winter,” a departure from Hub's usual style, which consisted solely of his instrument making an effect like a tortured sitar.

“He has a real talent,” I said to Louise. I did not say what I felt the real talent was for, so I wasn't lying.

“He'll never sell out, either. They wanted one of his early songs for a commercial for children's vitamins, but he wouldn't do it.”

I reflected silently that it is easy not to sell out when you know where your next forty years of meals are coming from.

“You think he's a spoiled rich kid,” said Louise. “I know Johnny does too.”

“Rich doesn't mean spoiled,” I said. “Not always.”

But the truth was, I much preferred someone who'd had to scheme and compromise to make it, like Ron, to a stickler like Hub, who had pristine artistic values paid for with someone else's money. I knew that Ron was a fast-talking sleazeball who would be distracted by a waterfront
real estate opportunity on his way to save a drowning man. It didn't matter. Whatever marginal virtue Ron possessed, he'd earned every scrap of it.

“And you and Tony?” said Louise, as the last song on Hub's tape skidded to a close. “How's that going?”

“Me and Tony, nothing.” I told her about Suzanne.

“She sounds kind of coy and disingenuous. Tony was never coy. He may be too chicken to bring up the past with you, but he's not coy.”

“The past is the past. He's moved on to a more sophisticated type.”