The Side of the Angels (26 page)

Well, maybe that was the point of holidays with our families, to remind us that the rest of our lives wasn't so bad. I smashed the ice cubes into dainty fragments, the way my mother prefers. Surely there was another Nicky Malone somewhere, living out the adulthood I'd been supposed to have, getting ready for this blessed season in the leisurely way in which people who have their lives under control get ready for the holidays.

I could see this alter ego pulling the hand-painted family ornaments out of tissue paper, piping icing onto the gingerbread mansion she was donating to the school auction, hugging her husband for shoveling the driveway of their restored Victorian in Glen Echo, on a bluff overlooking the river. Somewhere there had to be some doppelgänger
Nicky Malone whose mother approved of her, whose ex-boyfriends sent fond Christmas cards instead of snarling at her over her desk, whose closest female cousin went to Sunday Mass instead of winter solstice celebrations held at dawn in vacant lots. When I caught up with that other Nicky, that impostor, I was going to slap her silly for grabbing the life I was supposed to have and putting me through all this.

D
INNER WAS
a strained affair. Johnny and Louise weren't speaking to each other. Joey and Maggie were openly curious about their quarrel. Michael sat calmly, removed to whatever distant corner of his mind he takes refuge in when the rest of us fight. My mother said a prim grace and then got up twenty times to check the progress of the apple pies warming in the oven and the coffee perking in her elderly, plug-in electric pot that would someday ignite and catch the whole house on fire.

I babbled on about the strike in order to make conversation. Maggie chimed in with reports on the baby's progress and the optometrist's shop of which she's one-third owner, contributing anecdotes about the eyeglass frames she had to talk people out of. The turkey was praised repeatedly.

We have our salad after dinner, in the Italian manner. As we were finishing, the doorbell rang. My mother raced out from the kitchen, patting herself down. That should have told me, that nervous, girlish tic. A minute later she led Jeremy into the room.

“Houston, we have a problem,” said Joey.

“Look who dropped by,” said my mother in a false, hostessy voice.

I had been picturing him, in my bitter thoughts, as being commanding and Byronic and sexy as ever. Jeremy had the kind of looks that always made you think of him as standing at a cliff's edge, gazing toward the horizon while wind ruffled his heavy curls off his noble brow. It would have been too easy if he'd shrunk to the proper proportions, if he'd dwindled and gone seedy. He hadn't. In my current discouraged and melancholy state, Jeremy looked damn good.

“Hello, Jeremy,” I said, standing up. Now I perceived why Ma had
wanted me to show up with proof of my housewifely prowess in the form of pastry. She knew Jeremy was coming by for dessert. It was a marvel that my mother could think for one moment that Jeremy could be fooled, at this stage of the game, by any show of domestic talent on my part.

He hovered uncertainly in the doorway of the dining room, being stared at by Johnny, Louise, Maggie, and Joey. Only Michael seemed unflustered.

“Sit down, sit down,” my mother said. “We were just having dessert.”

Everyone bustled around, with far more fuss and business than the production of dessert plates and forks warranted. Jeremy and I sat side by side, as if we were at the children's table.

He said to me under his breath, “This wasn't my idea but I couldn't think of another way to see you.”

“So you enlisted my mother? Great move.”

“It was an act of desperation.”

He shifted in his seat. My mother's dining room chairs are a heavy pseudo-Spanish oak style with black leather seats from which you can hear guest's thighs unpeeling as they rise from a meal during the summer months. My mother had thought they were the last word in elegance when she and my dad purchased them in 1975, and she still thought so.

The murky light from the wrought-iron chandelier (bought to complete the Moorish-Spanish motif begun in the chairs) shone down on Jeremy's heartbreaking cheekbones, his deep green eyes, his lovely wide mouth. I felt a stirring of desire, but it must not have shown in my expression. I knew that because, as my family hunted up the good silver teaspoons at Ma's direction, and trotted out milk and sugar in my mother's wedding pitcher and sugar bowl that hadn't been used for years, Jeremy continued, too softly for anyone to overhear, “Haven't I told you I was sorry? Haven't I shown you I'm sorry? Didn't you get my lilies?”

“I don't need another apology, Jeremy.”

“What do you need, then?”

“How should I know? I've been working fourteen hours a day for
the past four weeks. You're lucky I remember your name, the state of exhaustion I'm in.”

I could hear my brothers and cousins and sister-in-law conferring in low tones in the kitchen. Should they leave us alone or would that be too unnatural-looking? Drama queens, all of them.

“We're waiting for pie out here,” I called.

“You're hurt now,” said Jeremy, with a little of his old assumption that he was entitled to an easy pardon. “But you'll feel differently in another month.”

“Don't hold your breath.”

“This is about that man Tony, isn't it? The one you lived with. The one you're working with up there.”

“I bet that's comforting for you, to assume it's about Tony. And not, say, your humping Virginia on that vinyl sofa in your office. Whatever happened to her, anyway? Why aren't you spending Thanksgiving down South, huh?”

My mother chose this moment to place the pies on the table with a flourish, accompanied by a dish of freshly whipped cream.

“You do like apple pie,” she said to Jeremy, who agreed to a huge serving with a look of sickly resignation. I tackled mine with gusto. I'm like my mother in that during times of stress, we find sugar far more soothing than liquor.

My mother was tucking into her own portion. For such a tiny woman she could put away a lot of pie. Louise picked at hers, glancing sometimes at Jeremy with a look of pity, sometimes at Johnny with a look of resentment. Perhaps Jeremy could take one of Louise's cards on his way out the door. Perhaps Louise could find him a woman who combined my feistiness and backbone with Virginia's pedigree and cup size.

Maggie kept her eyes on her plate. She still felt somewhat like an outsider, thanks to my mother's frequent reminders that her daughter-in-law was an interloper who had carried away her darling baby boy. Joey once told me that before he and Maggie left their wedding reception for the honeymoon trip, Ma had remarked in Maggie's hearing, “I'm so happy for you, Joey honey. But remember, if anything ever goes wrong, you'll always have a welcome waiting for you back home.”

Ma's attitude to Maggie made me grateful that she only had
one
daughter-in-law to insult and patronize. Michael's boyfriends—the few we met—she treated differently, rather like college chums who'd arrived for a brief visit between semesters. She liked to believe that all gay men were just really good pals, that the most they ever did together was hug.

Joey said into the silence, “We haven't seen you for a while around here, Jem old boy. What have you been up to?”

“This and that,” said Jeremy. He stirred his coffee and examined his shirt cuffs.

“Watched any soccer lately?” asked Joey.

“Not every Englishman watches soccer,” said Jeremy.

“You call it something else, don't you?” said Joey. “Football? Is that what you call it?”

“Yes,” said Jeremy shortly.

“You like football?” said Joey. “Those Brazilians sure took you guys to school the other day.”

“I don't follow it,” said Jeremy. “Sorry.”

“Don't mention it,” said Joey in the faintest of fruity English accents. He seemed to take a fiendish joy in heckling Jeremy. He had once said that Jeremy made him feel as if all his grammar was wrong.

“I don't think soccer is a subject for the dinner table,” said my mother. “All that violence. Why don't you and Jeremy go for a walk, Nicky?”

“Yeah, kids,” said Joey. “You go off and have a good time.” My mother glared at him. In ten minutes, when Joey was playing “Sonny Boy” on my mother's out-of-tune piano, my mother would be wiping her eyes and beaming.

The drizzle covered Jeremy's black hair with tiny raindrops and turned his eyes an even more serious green. He looked … oh, he looked so good, and I'd been so low, so tired of the face I saw in the mirror that seemed to me to have no freshness, no bright expectation.

The forsythia and lilac bushes were bare and dripping, and no one was out, not even walking a dog. I noticed through an uncurtained
picture window that Mrs. McBride's married daughter had come to see her and had gained a lot of weight. I saw that the Luccianos had replaced their third Cadillac with an Audi, a sad move from buy American patriotism to German. It appeared that Mrs. Hanlon and her daughter with cerebral palsy were off on their annual Thanksgiving trip to visit relatives in Naples, Florida. I was glad of that, for my mother would have forced me to stop in.

Eyeing the Hanlons' bright green front door, I remembered with a sudden, vivid rush of dread the scores of times during my childhood when Ma would drag me along on uncomfortable visits to Mrs. Hanlon and Marcie, who was my age. Ma would invent reasons to help Mrs. Hanlon in the kitchen, leaving me alone with Marcie in the living room. I would sit on the edge of the sofa stammering out nonsensical chat into the silence, hoping desperately that the grown-ups would come back soon.

If I had brought up this memory with my mother and asked her why she had forced these frightening times with Marcie on an impressionable child, my mother would have been truly perplexed. Shouldn't children be taught charity, compassion, generosity? Surely such things were a matter of overcoming a ridiculous and unkind squeamishness, a squeamishness Ma (a strong-stomached Christian) didn't feel and couldn't imagine. Ma would hold Marcie Hanlon's hand and watch figure skating while Marcie drooled and her head lolled sideways, all the while eating Mrs. Hanlon's horrible raisin cookies and drinking her watery coffee with her other hand. I admired my mother's practical goodness, but did she have to expect that everyone else be good in exactly the same way she was?

The leaves were matted and slick under our feet. Once Jeremy slipped and I grabbed his elbow to keep him from falling. He frowned and pulled away.

“Can we talk?” he said.

“I need to sit down if we're going to talk. I ate too much pie.”

We took a path through the neighborhood park, which the citizens' association had wrested from the grounds of a huge department store. Hard won, the small enclosure was lovingly tended. There were swings, and an abbreviated jogging path that curved in
on itself, and a ten-plot community garden pegged out with sticks and string.

It was funny how you could tell the personality of the gardener from each plot. One was measured out neatly in red brick, with an orderly stack of clay pots and a watering can hanging ready for spring. Another was sheeted over in dark green plastic, with four bright pink wind whirligigs staked at the corners to keep the plastic down. My favorite was the small square at the exact center of the garden, still glowing with the embers of the last chrysanthemums and marigolds. There were no flowers in Winsack this late in the season, and I hadn't realized how much I'd missed seeing the last of them here.

The picnic benches were warped and puddled, and speckled with bird droppings, so I wiped off a swing with a corner of my jacket and sat down. Jeremy stood above me, leaning on one of the iron poles of the swing set.

“You have ten minutes,” I said.

“Virginia is over, Nicky.”

“She is, is she? Funny, I know when she's over, but I had no idea when she began. And why is she over?”

“We had nothing in common, really. She's not, actually, a very deep thinker. She doesn't have your wit, your perception.”

“So you want to get back together with me because, compared to fluffball Virginia, I'm Dorothy Parker? That's really flattering.”

“How long are you going to keep punishing me, Nicky?”

“Oh, Jeremy, I'm not punishing you. I mean, I
was
punishing you but not anymore. Now I just want my mother to stop nagging me about you.”

“That's all I am to you, one more thing your mother nags you about?”

“Of course not. You had really lousy luck, in a way. If I hadn't found out about your fling with Virginia, we might still be together.”

“I think we would have been. I really do, Nicky. I know that this fellow, this trades unions organizer, has you a bit thrown off balance right now. Your mother told me.”

“How would she know? There's nothing going on between Tony and me. And we don't say ‘trades unions' over here.”

He ignored this childish dig.

“I think that when you consider it rationally, you'll realize that we should have another chance.”

“Jeremy, we had great moments, especially in bed, and I learned a lot from you about the Spanish Civil War and the economics of the fifteenth-century silk trade. Can't we leave it at that?”

“I still want you,” he said, and took my hand. “I still think we have a lot to offer each other.”

“I don't want half a loaf,” I said. “I want … abundance. We don't have that. We'll never have that. It's not your fault. We're just mismatched.”

“Mismatched? Can you really say we're mismatched?”

He leaned down and kissed me, holding my head gently between his hands and tilting my chin up. My mouth opened under his. He kissed me with passion and infinite patience, ravishingly perfect kisses. I struggled to my feet but once I was standing up, I didn't pull away. He had never conveyed such yearning, not even in our first months together, and it was sweet and warming. He held me tightly, reaching under my jacket to slide his hands up my back. It was intoxicating, kissing him. It always had been. I forgot, for those minutes, that you can't live on champagne.