Object Lessons

  “Your father will outlive us all, Tom,” Celeste said.

  “I think you’ll outlive us all, Celeste,” Tommy said, and suddenly he smiled. “Let me see your ring.”

  Celeste held out her left hand so he could see the heart-shaped diamond perched above her big knuckle. It was twice the size of the ring she’d had before. Even in the half-light, Tom could see that it was pale yellow, and he thought again of the shadow a buttercup made beneath your chin.

  “That’s great,” Tommy said. “Beautiful. It must have cost a fortune.”

  Celeste smiled. Faintly, from the front of the house, a car horn sounded twice. “That’s for me,” she said, getting slowly to her feet.

  “Bring him in,” Connie said. “I have cake in the house.”

  “Sometime,” Celeste said. “You can’t rush these things.” She turned to Tommy and laid one hand, the nails as slick as patent leather, along his hot cheek. “Be nice to your wife,” she said, in a throaty, intense sort of voice, and Tommy had a heady feeling of déjà vu. Instead of having to root around for it for days, the memory came back to him instantly: Celeste at his wedding reception, shiny in bright blue, dancing with him, looking up to say, her eyes filled with tears, “Be nice to my cousin.”

  “I’m always nice to my wife,” he replied now. “When I can find her.”

  “Be extra nice to her,” said Celeste, and before Tommy could get the last word she had kissed him, and was gone, a cloud of L’Air du Temps lingering over the lawn chair in which she’d sat. Tommy realized it was a new scent for Celeste, perhaps in honor of the new husband. He leaned over and picked up her beer bottle. The top was red with lipstick. He carried the bottle into the kitchen.

  Connie followed him. “Tom,” she said. When he turned she was standing by the stove, smiling, a misty look in her eyes. It was the booze, he told himself, but still he was excited.

  “I have another surprise for you.”

  “What’s that?” he said, running his hands up and down her arms, his fingers encircling her tiny wrists. She pushed her hands into his pockets and his breathing changed, but she only took out his car keys and held them in front of his nose.

  “Ta da,” she said, and he could tell now that the beer had really affected her. The last time he remembered hearing her say “ta da” was when she came out of the bathroom the first night of their honeymoon in her negligee. He wondered for a moment how she was keeping the beer down in her condition.

  Connie walked out the front door, the keys still held in front of her like a carrot on a stick, and he followed. She opened the passenger door of the station wagon and said, “Get in.” Then she slid in on the other side and turned the key in the ignition.

  “Where’s the thing that makes the seat go closer?” she said impatiently, slurring her words a little.

  “Are you nuts?” Tommy said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The seat slid forward with a jerk, and Tommy’s knees were pinned against the glove compartment. When the lights came on, he saw the grass edging the driveway all sharp-edged and clean, like one of those arty nature photographs. Connie put the car into reverse and backed down the driveway. The bumper hit the street solidly.

  “Why does it do that?” she asked, jamming on the brake and adjusting the rear-view mirror.

  “This is not funny,” Tommy said. “You’re going to kill us both. It’s bad enough that you don’t know how to drive, but you’re drunk to top it all off. Just stop.”

  Connie dug in the pocket of her shorts and handed him a square of cardboard. It was a temporary license from the Motor Vehicle Bureau. It said that Concetta M. Scanlan had brown hair and eyes, did not need corrective lenses, was five feet tall and weighed 103 pounds. Tommy thought she was probably a little heavier than that by now.

  Connie was cruising silently down Park Street, holding a little too far to the right, staring a little too intently out the windshield, the way Tommy remembered doing when he had first learned how to drive. At the corner she turned left and went around the block. She went around the block again, and then a third time, before pulling back into the driveway. Part of Tommy noticed that she cut it a little too wide on the turns, but he thought that would iron itself out in time. The other part was so enraged that he could taste the metallic tang of adrenaline on his tongue.

  “Ta da,” she said again, as she turned off the engine. Without a word he walked back into the house and took another beer out of the refrigerator. He sat down in the living room in his chair and switched on the television. She came and stood in front of it, her arms crossed on her chest.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Congratulations would be nice.”

  There was a long silence. Finally he said, “Where are the kids?”

  “Joseph is upstairs asleep. Damien is at my father’s. Terence is spending the night at O’Brien’s after his game, and I think Maggie is with Debbie.”

  “Oh, that’s convenient,” he said sarcastically.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Connie, turning around to switch off the television.

  Tommy just looked at her, his eyes cold, his heart pounding. He looked down and imagined he could see it pulsing beneath his damp dress shirt. The beer was making him feel tired.

  “Do you have something going with that guinea?” Tommy finally said.

  “You sound exactly like your father,” Connie replied.

  It was not, he thought, the way he had planned to bring this up. But it was the sight of her behind the wheel that had set him off, so small that it seemed scarcely possible that she could see over the dashboard or reach the brake pedal, like a little girl playing at being grownup. She was exactly the same, and yet she was entirely different. There was no need for her to be able to do this. He could take her anywhere she wanted to go. He went into the kitchen and uncapped another beer, wondering how he could have finished the last one so quickly, but when he came back she was in the same place, with the same hard look around her onyx eyes. Her face and throat were dewy with the heat, and she had faint dark circles just beneath her eyes where her mascara was smudging onto her skin.

  “The answer is no,” she said finally, breaking the silence, and there was a certain something in her voice that told him that the question had been neither unexpected nor unreasonable.

  But it never occurred to Tommy that she might not be telling the truth. She was that sort of person, black and white, who would not lie about what she had done simply because facts were facts and you had to acknowledge them. “I never would have thought this of you,” he said slowly. He could think of nothing else but clichés, and he drank his beer to stop from talking.

  “Thought what of me, Tommy?” she said, raising her hands in the air. “That I would get tired of not fitting in? That I would want to do the things that other people do? I don’t always want to be the strange one. I want to be happy.”

  “What’s happy?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, dropping her hands. “But I know I haven’t been it, whatever it is.”

  Oddly enough, he felt happy now, with just the two of them in their own living room, with his stomach full of beer. He remembered how, one evening in the hospital, his father had asked him to play a game of pinochle, beating Tom as he did all his sons. Then he had fallen back into the pillows, his collarbone like a wooden yoke beneath his pajamas, and said, “There’s nothing like a game of cards to make you feel alive.”

  Tommy looked at his wife now and he loved her, loved how the veins showed blue around her neck just above the little collar of her shirt, how her hair fuzzed out uncontrollably in the heat, how she had joined him to make a life of their own, however flawed, however constraining. He loved all the little things. He did not want her to be like other people. He would never have loved her if she had been. He thought of her pulling into the driveway with such assumed competence, but with her bottom lip caught
between her front teeth as she turned the wheel. He began to cry.

  “No, Tom, no,” she whispered, going to kneel in front of him and cradling his head on her shoulder. “No, no, no. It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.” Tommy started to choke on it, the hot salt, the booze, the grief, the loss of the father he wished he had had, the death of the world he loved.

  “I was afraid …” he began, but she didn’t let him finish.

  “I know,” Connie said. “I know. But there was nothing to be afraid of.”

  Tommy pulled away and looked at her and she smiled, inscrutable and wise. He couldn’t tell her that somehow the driving seemed like a great infidelity all by itself, the separation, the pulling away. There was nothing to be done about that now, and he couldn’t afford to lose her. He realized that she was the closest he would ever get to not being alone. His parents would die, and the children would change and leave, and there the two of them would be, in their living room, perspiring and talking in fragments.

  “I love you,” he said, and he started to cry again.

  “Yes, honey. Yes, I know.”

  “Don’t go away.”

  “Where would I go?” Connie said, and she held him for a long time. Slowly, almost in a dream, he began to undress her, there in the living room. It made him remember the first Friday night they had spent in this house, after they had moved from her aunt Rose’s. Maggie and Terence were babies, and they had stayed behind in the Bronx while he and Connie came to arrange the furniture, put away the dishes, make up the bare beds. They had had dinner that night on the floor, on a blanket, with a bottle of Rose’s Chianti for a kind of celebration, and by the time it was dark they were both drunk. They had pushed everything to one side—he could still feel the scratch of the wool blanket on his bare skin—and fell on each other right next to the dirty plates. Connie’s bra had stayed looped around her neck throughout, as if she were a corpse in a Daily News rape-and-murder story. There were no curtains on the windows and Tommy had averted his eyes, afraid to see someone peeking in. But when they were finished they walked around brazenly, their clothes on the floor, staying up way past midnight as though they both knew it would be a long time before they would have this kind of freedom again. Tommy remembered walking through the half-empty rooms with one word going through his head: Mine. Mine. He had meant his wife, too. He said it again, now, as he pulled impatiently at her shorts. Their skins stuck together in the heat, and made sucking noises when they pulled apart. As they lay side by side on the carpet afterward, Tommy realized that he had forgotten, for once, that she was pregnant. She, he realized from her response, simply did not care.

  “We have to get dressed,” she said after a few minutes. “One of the children might come in.”

  But he was already half-asleep by that time, and he only pulled on his pants and fell into his chair, his head thrown back, his mouth open. She covered him with one of Joseph’s blankets, a small square over the middle of his long body, and then she went upstairs to sleep by herself. In the middle of the night he woke up once, his head buzzing with a swarm of hangover gnats, filling his ears with noise and his eyes with little white lights, and he thought suddenly that he had been had once again. This was what his entire married life had been like: long stretches of tedium illuminated by moments, unexpected, when he knew that without her he would be lost. For weeks or months they moved through their separate lives and slept side by side as though they were two strangers who had mistakenly been assigned the same hotel room. And then something would happen and he would find himself staring at her as though he could see the soul of her, looking for an end to his troubles inside the loop of her arms, and he would be snagged with the fishhook of herself, with the barbed hook of his powerless infatuation with something that she seemed to have, some answer that she seemed to offer. She was the one, really, who had always had the power over him, and who always would; his father’s bluster was nothing compared to it. He tried to remember all this as he lay there, the aftertaste of liquor awful in his mouth. He wished he had a pen and could write it down, but instead he vowed—perhaps aloud, he thought he heard some muttering in the room—to remember it the next morning.

  When he woke again the watery blue of the sky told him that it was dawn. The pressure behind his eyes was enormous. The buzzing had reawakened him, and he pressed his hands over his ears. After a moment he realized that the noise was not inside his head, but in the kitchen, and as he took his hands away Connie appeared at the top of the stairs, her face very pale above the white of her nightgown. He felt embarrassed to look at her.

  “Tommy, James is on the phone,” she said. When he got up from the chair the room tilted a little. He picked up the kitchen phone and it was only when he actually said “Hello” that he realized he had never received a call this early in the morning, and even before James spoke Tommy knew what he would say.

  “He’s dead,” his brother said.

  21

  GATES OF HEAVEN CEMETERY WAS NICE, Maggie thought, but not as nice as her grandfather Mazza’s cemetery. It had a slight rise and fall to it, little hills and valleys crisscrossed with wide roads. Whole areas were empty, the grass stretching bright green and unbroken for a long way. There were no trees. They took good care of the lawns. Just inside the entrance there was a sign:

  NO: PLANTING AT GRAVESITES

  FLAGS

  MILITARY MEDALLIONS

  GRAVE BLANKETS PERMITTED ON CHRISTMAS, EASTER, AND MOTHER’S DAY.

  NO UNAUTHORIZED VISITORS. PLEASE RESPECT THIS PLACE OF REST.

  Maggie thought the last sentence was sort of nice, but the rest of the rules seemed harsh. Strangers strolled around Angelo Mazza’s cemetery all the time, and no one thought anything of it. Mrs. Martini left photographs of the grandchildren on her husband’s grave, weighted down with small stones. Women were always coming with pots of hyacinths or gardenias. They would kneel with their trowels in front of the headstones and dig a little hole and put the flowers in and then pat the earth around the roots gently, as though they were patting the person beneath. They never worried about the plants dying. Angelo took care of them once they were in the ground. It would have been nicer if her grandfather Scanlan could have been buried at Calvary Cemetery, but Maggie knew he never would have allowed it. She could picture him lying under his shirred white satin blanket, his black rosaries twined around his fingers in the stagy position that would never allow you to say the rosary in real life, thinking to himself, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m surrounded by guineas.” She laughed a little to herself, and her father frowned at her.

  She knew that she should feel sadder than she did, but the fact was that she did not believe that her grandfather was dead, although she had knelt before the coffin and looked down at the waxy hands, still so big and powerful looking. He had made her recite the seven deadly sins just two weeks before. She had forgotten one. “Sloth,” John Scanlan had thundered, the violence of the sound bringing two nurses to the door of his room. “And don’t you forget it, little girl.” Her grandfather had looked better, his mouth less elastic, his eyelids matching, both at half-mast. Sometimes when she would arrive at the hospital he would be sleeping, his breath rippling through his lips like that of an old horse, and when she left he would still be sleeping, even though she had sat there for an hour or two, watching the white light of the sun lay bright rectangles on the linoleum floor. Sometimes they played Parcheesi, and most of the time he told her stories about his childhood, about beating up Billy Boylan behind the garage on Lexington Avenue or being taken into the precinct house by the cops after he stole penny candy from the Greek’s place around the corner from the tenement building where his family lived. Some of the stories had been new. Some Maggie had heard before, but they were transformed. For the first time Billy Boylan got some punches of his own in, and was not simply decimated by John Scanlan’s invincible right hook; for the first time it turned out that some lemon balls had indeed been stolen from the Greek’
s. “The cops took ’em, and ate ’em!” her grandfather said loudly, as though consumption was the real crime. Occasionally the stories would be interrupted by her grandfather’s doctor, a man named Levine who was ugly and very kind, and who disliked John Scanlan very much but was always cheerful around him. When Maggie first came to the hospital, Dr. Levine and some other doctors would often enter and make her move outside, pulling the white curtains hanging from the ceiling tight around the bed. Their shoes moved at the bottom of the curtain, their shadows made a kind of mime show. But after a few weeks Dr. Levine just felt for her grandfather’s pulse, and then left. Maggie had imagined this was because her grandfather was getting better. Now, of course, she knew it had been because he was dying.

  “What?” she had said, when her father told her. Tommy was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of Pepto-Bismol, his face gray. “What? Are you sure?” She had gone upstairs to her room to think, looking out over the asphalt shingles of the new roofs to the place where the house that had burned had stood. For some reason she had thought of the picture in the Baltimore Catechism of mortal and venial sin: first the milk bottle with the little flecks of black in it, then the milk bottle dark as a moonless night, and then the bottle pure white again after confession. In some way she felt pure white.

  She had not talked to Debbie since that night. She had barely talked to her mother, only watched her walk around the house with the wary eyes of the guilty. Now her grandfather was dead. She felt as though she was bereft of any connections at all. As she lay on her bed, she felt as though she was floating, the motion in her body like the motion of Cap’n Jim’s big tug as it plied the Jersey coastline. She looked at the blackened supports of the burned house from her bedroom window, and although she couldn’t explain why, she felt that the worst was over. Down in the kitchen, she had watched her mother making macaroni and cheese, to be heated in between visits to the funeral home, and she realized that it was the first proper meal Connie had made in weeks. Maggie wondered if that meant that Connie had come back to them.