The Side of the Angels (39 page)

“So you wanted it to happen?” I inquired.

“Shut
up,
Nicky. I don't know why you're wearing that outfit, but clearly you have someplace to go, so why don't you go there?”

“We both have someplace to go,” I said, taking Louise's arm. “Unless you think Louise lounges around here in formal wear every night. Come on, Louise.”

Johnny looked alarmed and desperate.

“Louise,” he said entreatingly. His expression would have melted me, but Louise was made of sterner stuff.

“No,” she said. “I don't think I can listen to you right now. You act as if I'm an idiot. You condescend.”

“I left Betsey,” said Johnny.

“I don't see what that has to do with me,” said Louise, and walked out.

I had to pity my cousin Johnny as we left him in that parlor. He had a lot of explaining to do, and Louise would probably make him crawl. Then again, if a man takes a woman for granted for years and years and the only price he pays is a little minor groveling, he's getting off lightly.

T
HE AUDITORIUM OF
Sts. Jude and Rita parochial school was glowing with Japanese lanterns, dozens of them strung along the walls and bobbing up high in the rafters. The lanterns were coral and pale yellow, with delicate flower patterns. They cast a soft glow on the shabby hall with its liver-colored linoleum and cinderblock walls. The auditorium doubled as a lunchroom during the week, but Margaret had somehow purged the odor of stale milk and pink crystal disinfectant that hung over every school cafeteria I'd ever visited.

“I decided not to go with a Christmas theme,” she said as she greeted me at the door and handed me a carnation dyed in local's signature sky blue. She waited while I pinned it to my bodice. Its size and awkward droop made me look like someone's grandmother at a high school graduation.

“I thought these colors would be springlike and hopeful,” Margaret elaborated.

“It's lovely. The whole place is lovely,” I said, and meant it.

The ugly square folding tables on which the kids ate lunch were transformed with pale green tissue tablecloths and simple, elegant centerpieces consisting of varying sizes of white and pink candles set on mirrors, so that the light reflected gently up into guests' faces. In the side room where the volunteer mothers usually served pizza or hot dogs once a week, Margaret had arranged long trestles of food and drink, including two giant turkeys sent all the way from Jennings, Mississippi, by the poultry workers union Tony had helped organize down there ten years earlier.

Some of the parish teenagers were circulating with hors d'oeuvres. I grabbed a chicken dumpling and a crab-stuffed mushroom. Food on
moving trays always makes me feel greedy and frantic. I'm ashamed to say that I gobbled down a spare rib, a miniature quiche, and a mozzarella stick before I looked around for Tony.

“I should have known you'd be scarfing down the appetizers,” he said when he found me.

He was wearing the navy blazer he'd bought for his brother's wedding six years earlier, and his one pair of dress pants, a fine dark-gray wool purchased for his first interview with the Toilers.

Tonight his dress shirt was so bright a white that I concluded it had been purchased for the occasion, and his dark red tie was nearly impeccable, except for a tiny unraveling thread hanging down to his waist.

“What took you so long?” he said. “You look like something in that dress, by the way.”

I blinked. What was this all about? The man hadn't given me a compliment since I'd walked in the door seven weeks earlier.

“You, too. I never thought I'd see that blazer off the hanger again.”

“Hey, be nice to me. I've been asking where you were for twenty minutes.”

“Johnny showed up. Louise's picture turned up in the
Montgomery County Record
.”

“Swift of him. It didn't occur to him before that she might be up here with you?”

“I might have misled him about that.”

“And now they kissed and made up?”

“Nope. She's over there.”

Louise was dancing with Bill, the security guard, looking up at him with a limpid, admiring gaze, one of the most useful tricks in her impressive repertoire.

“I promised Lester I'd drag you out on the floor,” said Tony. “He's afraid no one will dance.”

“Where is Lester, by the way?”

“Up there.”

And amazingly, it
was
Lester, right in front of us on the auditorium stage, playing the saxophone accompanied by bass, piano, and percussion. A sign on the music stand read “Lester Sinclair and the Swingtime Boys.”

“Lester plays?”

“Incredibly well,” said Tony. “We were all surprised. Except Margaret. She met him in the music store once when her kid was buying a clarinet, and when she heard he was musical, as she put it, she went to one of his gigs.”

“He plays for money?”

“He does a weekend thing with these guys, apparently. Small clubs, weddings, reunions. He brought a date tonight, too. Some woman he met on the strike. She used to see him every day on her way to work, when he was standing out on the traffic island. Lester said that a few weeks ago she started bringing homemade muffins for him out of solidarity, and they got to talking.”

Close to the stage at one of the small, intimate tables Margaret had set in clusters around the dance floor sat a skinny, lank-haired young woman in draggled black chiffon, looking up at Lester with unmistakable adoration.

“Talk about meeting cute,” I said.

Kate and her husband were sitting at the table with Lester's date. Kind Kate, who never overlooked the stranger in the group. Look how good she'd been to me. Her husband, whom I'd never seen before, was a large, hearty guy with a head of hair almost as red as mine, and a big mustache. He had his arm around her and she leaned back into it with the casual affection of a happily married woman.

There was such an air of earned, relieved joy in this dolled-up auditorium tonight that I felt my throat close up. Clare was there, being congratulated and hugged and actually looking as young as her age in a blue jersey skirt and top. Mae Carroll and her gang of octogenarian agitators were there, and our state senators and the mayor and the editors and reporters from the
Winsack Eagle-Gazette,
and Frankie and Paul, our landlord and printer, who might finally get paid now. Even Lester and his unsuspected talent made me feel sentimental. Shorn of his hunting cap and boots, and with a proper haircut, Lester didn't look half bad. He looked a little like Buddy Holly, in fact.

The band embarked on “They Can't Take That Away From Me,” putting a little swing into it as their name promised. Tony dragged me
to the edge of the floor, his preferred spot from of old. Three other couples were twirling smoothly in the center, showing off dancing class moves. Tony did what he always did, an imprecise two-step varied by unexpected attempts to spin me out and back again.

“Not bad, Malone,” he said, as I corrected for his enthusiastic double twirl with a bit of neat footwork.

“You're awful friendly tonight.”

“I'm a friendly kind of guy.”

He spun me out again and pulled me up close to him, cradling my hand in his, holding it against his chest.

“Why the silence this last week, Tony?”

“I like to have things all sorted out in my head before I present them to you.”

“Present them to me?”

“I have a clear, logical thought process. Unlike some people I could name.”

“I guess we've forgotten who helped you through your taxes that August when it looked like you weren't going to make even the extension deadline because you'd lost the Schedule C and couldn't make sense of the mileage deduction.”

“I'd have figured it out sometime that night.”

“You'd have been chasing the mail truck down the street, just like you did every year before you met me.”

“Then you'll be happy to know that after we broke up I finally went to one of those quickie places that whip them up for you for a hundred dollars. Now shut up and dance with me.”

We made it through “In the Mood” and “I'll Be Seeing You,” during which I looked around the room and got embarrassingly choked up, though I tried to hide it by pretending to sneeze.

“I hate the leaving part, too,” said Tony.

“It gets to me. All the stories I won't know the endings to.”

“I think Kate will keep you informed.”

“If we can keep in touch.”

“You have no trust in people.”

“And I'm proved right a gratifying amount of the time.”

“You talk such a good game, and you're such a marshmallow underneath.”

I was about to hotly contradict this smug statement when he said, “I want to talk to you for real.”

He led me out of the hall, out into a corridor with a steep stairway that led up to classrooms and the principal's office. Even here Margaret had been at work. The stairway was lit up and down with more coral and yellow lanterns. Crepe paper carnations were entwined in the stair railings.

“For all of us who didn't make it to our senior prom,” said Tony.

“What are you talking about? You went to your senior prom with Mary Jo Selznak, and you got to third base with her by dawn.”

“Do you have to have such a good memory?”

“It comes in handy.”

“Sit down with me, Nicky.”

I sat gingerly by his side. He had polished his shoes, I saw. The uppers still looked disgracefully worn, but he had polished them.

“I've been an idiot,” he said.

“About what?”

“About pretty much everything.”

“Go on,” I said primly. I could see the candlelight flickering in his eyes, and was amazed that I'd ever thought Jeremy's eyes remarkable.

“If it hadn't been for Eric pulling my irons out of the fire, all these people would be cursing my name right now.”

“They would never curse your name, Tony. And Eric gave you a hand, maybe, but you kept this thing together long enough for something to break, which was the real achievement.”

“Would
you
curse my name?” said Tony.

I looked at his hands, his mouth, his hair, which was already rumpled, his irremediably scuffed but polished shoes.

“Not now,” I said.

“Do you know that I love you?” he said. “I'm not sure I've made it clear.”

“Not very clear, no.”

“How do you feel about me?”

I put my hands on his shoulders. We regarded each other solemnly.

“Tony Boltanski,” I said, “I love you, too. In spite of myself. Against my better judgment. With incredible stupidity and a complete lack of attention to what has happened between us in the past, I love you.”

He kissed me. I had longed to truly kiss him for weeks, to kiss him without the hampering presence of motel pillows, bum knees, pizza delivery boys, and MBA girlfriends of ambiguous status. This night, this kiss—we'd earned it. It was more thrilling, more knee-weakening, more truly passionate, than our first one five years before in that New York hotel room. What was lost was not only found again, but it had transformed itself. Our first passion, back in New York, had been the passion of hopeful lovers, fairly young lovers who were confident that nothing within our own human control could part us. We were not as young now—though we were “still young”—and we were not as confident, and it made love doubly precious. Ours to have, ours to hold on to. Ours also to lose.

He pulled away from me for a moment.

“Had to make sure it was you,” he said. “Finally. It's been such a long time.”

We hadn't lifted a finger to help things along, God knew we fell far, far short of deserving this second chance, and yet here we were. Here we were again. It seemed to me that until that moment, I hadn't understood the meaning of the word “glory,” because that was the only word that described this feeling. Glory, glory, and again glory.

“I could kick myself,” said Tony. “I should have been braver five years ago.”

“So should I. We've wasted time.”

“Suzanne. That was nothing, Nicky.”

“Weren't you pleased that she was so handy to make me jealous with?”

“If I was, she got her own back,” said Tony. “You should have seen the letter she wrote me from New York.”

“As long as I get my own back,” I said.

His hand on my neck was cool and the callus on the right thumb that had always been there was still there. We kissed for a long time.
I thought I had missed him. What had I known? How had I breathed and eaten and slept, when I'd missed him so much?

Minutes later, I said reproachfully, “You've been pretty hard to read.”

“The truth is, I knew I had feelings for you even before that night at the motel. Pretty strong feelings. I was a mess.”

“You never let on.”

“That night we kissed, I told Suzanne about it on the spot. I told her I couldn't shake you. You were like the flu or something.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Hey, you were getting deliveries every other day from that Jeremy, that joker. You never said a word about not planning to take him back.”

We forgot about Suzanne and Jeremy for several minutes, until a stray noise from the dance floor caused us to pull apart.

“Tell me the rest,” I said. “About what happened with Suzanne. I need to know.”

“Don't you always?”

“Tell me.”

“Suzanne was upset, but she asked me to think hard about it. She asked me to give us a little time, as she put it. She said she thought we had a good beginning to build on. She said maybe I was just carried away by memories. But even before she'd reached the airport, I knew she was wrong, and I called her on her cell phone.”

“How'd she take it?”

“As she put it to me, she doesn't like not getting things she works for.”