What Transpires
(for Suneeta)
Dimitri Kaasan
Lara is lying beside her father on a knoll in a city wildflower garden two months before he collapses on the kitchen floor and dies. She’s nine. It’s afternoon and they’ve just finished her aunt’s wedding rehearsal. The highway drones beyond the garden’s ivy covered sound wall. She lolls her head to the left. The wedding party, turned on its side, idles around the gazebo. Beneath its cedar shake roof a priest talks to her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Indigo blossoms, thousands of them, spangle the meadow beyond. It’s warm. The sky is clear but the air beneath it thickens, settling its weight on her prone body like the heft of layering blankets.
After forgetting about that afternoon entirely, Lara will remember it on a late Sunday morning in July as a woman of 34. She will be strolling in Kenwood with her husband, Glenn, and their four year-old, Paulie. She will be talking and Glenn will be listening and after a time they will fall silent. Even Paulie, from the perch of Glenn’s shoulders, will fall into this lull, resting his quick brown eyes and his child’s mind on what they will in these rare moments. In the quiet, Lara will look at the gardens and homes in this neighborhood that is not theirs, admiring the refinements of affluence without begrudging them. She will be on the verge of recognizing the depth of her contentedness when she says: “Let’s play Covers.”
“Okay,” Glenn will say. He will go first. “Let’s see,” he will say, and after thinking a moment he will do Patsy Cline, who he likes, singing Prince, who she likes. When it’s her turn Lara will sing John Lennon, who she likes, singing Hank Williams, who he likes. They will belt it out. That is the rule of this game she taught him in college.
On his next turn Glenn will sing a Tori Amos song in the throaty warble of Sammy Davis Jr., swaying Sammy-style as he does. Paulie will not like being jostled around while he’s up on Glenn’s shoulders and he will say: “Don’t do that, Dad.” A woman in a light blue bathrobe will appear from the side of her large Tudor house and water her azaleas with a garden hose. The woman will look at them and Glenn, noticing her, will sing even louder. The woman will draw her mouth into a disapproving frown, which will make Lara think of a frog and she will burst out laughing. Seeing his mother in hysterics will make Paulie laugh too. He will laugh and grab at Glenn’s face saying, “Don’t, Dad. Don’t,” as Glenn twists his face away and keeps singing. Watching their four-year old try to be the serious one will make Lara laugh even harder and her cheeks and stomach will start to ache. She will close her eyes and that’s when the memory of that afternoon with her father will materialize in the darkness behind her eyelids, intact and vivid. She will see her skinny girl self in a tank top and remember that the grass made her shoulder itch a little. She will see her father’s dark hair-decked feet soaking in a low bird bath carved from a granite rock, and will remember turning to her father, grazing her cheek on his arm, and then turning to look at the sky.
“Okay. Okay, I know,” Glenn will be saying when Lara opens her eyes, “how ‘bout some musicals.”
Lara will no longer be smiling. “No,” she will say. It will come out flat.
“C’mon. Go ahead, you start.”
“Yeah, Mom. You start,” Paulie will say.
“Glenn,” she will say, turning to face him. “Enough.”
Glenn will search her eyes, cocking his head a bit, like a puppy. Lara will not know what to make of the lost-then-found memory. She will accept the timing of the thing as she would a stubbed toe.
It will return about a month later. She will be in the kitchen sipping wine and watching Glenn chop red bell peppers and thinking: If a red pepper could wish for a way to be cleft open and have its seeds knocked out, it would be like this. She will notice other things about Glenn when he cooks; how he gathers a globe of energy from the space of the kitchen and pins it to a plate-sized space beneath his hands, how he stares at the cutting board as it were the opening to a deep hole in the earth, how he works fast, snatching the vegetable, hollowing it, dancing the knife around it so that it falls into quarters, sliding the knife through the true axial lines of a lopsided pepper. She will think his hands are beautiful and will want to tell him so.
“You’re quiet, Tesoro,” her father says.
“Just watching the sky.”
“S’perfectly clear, no? But feel this humidity on your skin. Soon it will lift into the sky and make big clouds. Ploofy clouds.”
“You mean fluffy.”
“Yes. And if the clouds get heavy enough, it will rain down on us.”
“I know about that, Dad.”
“Oh,” he says, and looks up at the sky, too, smiling. “Babbo forgets how smart you are.”
Then, as if distilled and dropped by her father’s words, she feels two small cool drops, one on her forehead, one on her collarbone. She turns to him.
“Hey.”
“S’for horses,” he says.
“No. Dad. I felt a rain drop.”
“No.”
“I did. Really.”
She will return from her reverie to the knocking of Glenn’s knife on the cutting board. “It’s quiet in there,” Glenn will say, without looking up from the onions. “What’s he up to?”
It will take her a moment. “What?”
Glenn will hitch his chin in the direction of the living room. “What’s Paulie doing in there?”
She will feel hollow. She will set the wine down and peek around the corner into the living room, where Paulie will be stacking his plastic animals into his dump truck.
“Looks like a plastic animal party,” she will say, this time containing from her voice and her eyes the stun of the uninvited memory. “The lion’s offering juice to the giraffe.”
Glenn will nod. “I was thinking,” he will say, “we could give him leftover turkey burger and get him to bed nice and early.”
“Okay,” she will manage to say.
The onions will cause Glenn to sniffle and wipe his red-rimmed eyes in the crook of his elbow. He will flash Lara a water-eyed smile and look like the star of some gay melodrama. He will lift the lid from the steaming pot of saffron rice and gingerly pluck something from the top.
“Cashew?” he will say, holding it out to Lara.
She will say, “No thanks,” and shudder a little.
Glenn will be reading in bed when Lara walks in. She will sit on the edge of the bed and stare at their bedroom wall. Glenn will slide up behind her and fold his arm around her waist. “Could you just wait for a moment?” she will say. “I’m going to be with you. If you would just wait.”
She will not mean for these words to sound like those of someone in retail. But they will, and Glenn will be hurt. He will not make love to her, but instead will kiss her face and shoulder and say good night. She will feel unaccountable relief.
After lunch on Monday she will stand in line at the Coffee Kart in the atrium of her downtown office building. She will be telling an anecdote about her supervisor to the co-worker standing beside her, when that co-worker, a voluble divorcee named Lydia, will interrupt her. “Hold that thought,” Lydia will say.
“What? What is it?”
“Watch how Freddy looks at you when you get your coffee.” Lydia will whisper, squeezing Lara’s arm and fixing her stare on the Coffee Kart man from Trinidad. He is the lust object of at least three of Lara’s co-workers. She suspects this has mostly to do with the fact that Freddy supplies their coffee; that it’s a vague pleasure principle at work on bored, pre-menopausal technocrats.
Lara will roll her eyes. “Knock it off.”
When the customer in front of Lara moves to the sugar station Freddy’s face will appear, smiling at her. She will like the creases around his dark eyes and the chestnut color of his lips.
“Good morning,” he will say.
Lara will feel Lydia’s purse nudge her lower back. This, combined with Lydia’s incitement, will fluster her. “Uh, hi. Just a small coffee. Please.”
Freddy will take her money and hand her a coffee poured from an air pot. He will smile at her again as he hands Lara her change.
“See? See?” Lydia will say, as they walk to the chairs near the water fountain. “What did I tell you?”
Lara will shrug. “Big deal,” she will say, “A smile. That’s customer service.”
“Yeah? What about the way he mentally undressed you when you walked away. That was more like wanting to service a customer.”
“Probably more like a cultural tic.”
“Puh-lease.”
Lara will try to remember what she was saying about her supervisor.
“I guess he takes care of his severely retarded son on his own,” Lydia will say. “You wouldn’t know it the way he smiles.”
“Have I ever mentioned Glenn, my husband,” Lara will say. “Why don’t you ask Freddy out? You’re obviously in heat.”
“He doesn’t look at me the way he looks at you, gorgeous. How’s that husband of yours anyway?”
“He’s good.” Lara will say. “Really good. We both are.” She will pause a moment to consider the freshness of this truth. She will decide that the memory of her father, the way it ruptures and chills her closeness with Glenn is too bizarre, too much of an anomaly, to share with this co-worker. “You know, it’s weird. It seems like Glenn and I don’t fight anymore,” she will say with the upward lilt of a question. “We hardly even have those stupid little spats old couples are supposed to have over money and burnt toast and crap like that. For the first time we’ve started to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to each other. I never thought it would happen. I think Paulie’s brought us together somehow.”
“Stop,” Lydia will say, “I’m trying to keep my lunch down.”
It will happen again that Saturday night. Paulie will be at Glenn’s mother’s house. Glenn will have cleaned the kitchen and bathroom and Lara will have vacuumed all the downstairs rooms and caught up on laundry. They will have cancelled the dinner and movie idea and instead ordered Chinese and will be playing Scrabble in the warm light of the dining room’s fake Tiffany lamp. She will hold one of her three ‘I’ tiles by its diagonal corners, turning the cool smooth piece between her thumb and forefinger while Glenn surveys the board.
“Rain? From the blue sky?” her father says.
“I really did. Two drops. Do you believe me?”
“Of course, Tesoro.”
She smiles and looks again at the sky. The pleasant acrid tang from her father’s armpits combines with the smell of grass and dirt and the sweet spiciness of freshly laid cypress mulch. Perspiration, she thinks. Perspiration. Transpiration. Precipitation.
“Babbo?”
“Dimmi, Tesoro.”
“Why is Grandpa giving away Natalia?
“It’s an expression. A long time ago a man would ask a woman’s father for permission to marry her. You know, still today men do this in some parts of Italy.”
“That’s dumb.”
He chuckles. “You think so?”
“Yeah. Did you have to ask Grandpa Henry if you could marry Mom?”
“No. I just took her,” he says, and winks.
She will no longer see this as an anomaly. But neither will she understand why the memory, pleasant in itself—almost pastoral in its sweetness—drags her down. Aren’t the bereft healed in the joyful remembrance of those they’ve lost? She had read this on the program of her father’s memorial service and had believed it. Her mother, with acid reprimands, had barred the mention of her father from the house. She would have barred the thought of him if she could have. Lara knew that this was why her mother’s heart had dried.
Glenn will be rearranging his Scrabble tiles when she returns to the moment. There will be a brightness in his eyes that plants in Lara a burr of panic. And in this state she will see the evening, his desire to sit face to face with her, as evidence of his undiscriminating love, but a love more appetite than emotion, ravenous love, always waiting, always circling love; scavenger love. She will fear that no matter how much she offers herself to him, he will chose when and where to close the distance and he will pick her bones clean. If the darkness of this revelation were to take hold of her limbs she would walk out the door, so she will shunt it from her body and the darkness will enter her face, her brow, and Glenn will ask, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she will say. “Fine. I just feel like going to bed all of a sudden.” The moment she says this she will regret it.
“You do, huh?” he will say, “Shall I take that as a hint?”
No, she will think, eyes wide, face stiff.
Glenn will rise and walk to her side of the table and kneel on the floor to nuzzle the back of her neck and she will sense, on the verge of tears, that his humid breath comes from the bloodied snout of an animal.
“Come on upstairs,” he will whisper in her ear while she sits rigid, arms folded under her breasts. When he says, “Or do I have to drag you?” she will almost scream.
In the darkness of the bedroom he will undress her from behind, kissing and nibbling her shoulders. The buckle of his jeans will graze the skin over the bony ridge of her pelvis and send a ripple of goose bumps over her whole body. Her eyes will be open, but she will try to move with him. He will slide his hands over her legs and hips and stomach, and will whisper: “You’re all woman.”
When she hears this she will startle both of them by laughing. The laugh will shatter her fear. Again, she will feel relief.
His hands will stop moving. “Is something funny?” he will say, tentative, almost laughing, too.
She will pinch her lips in her teeth and shake her head.
“What then?”
She will imagine Glenn in the grocery checkout perusing a pulp romance and mouthing the words you’re all woman. She will try to stifle the laugh rattling from her nose.
“It’s not nothing,” he will say. “Something’s funny.”
“You were tickling me,” she will lie.
“When?”
“Before.”
“And you’re laughing now?”
“I’m sorry,” she will say turning around. “Okay? Please?” She will kiss him deeply. “Here,” she will whisper, lowering herself to her knees. When he sighs in the darkness she will see the sighing face, and then the body, of Freddy.
That Monday, Lara will hand Freddy two dollars for a small coffee, along with a note asking for his phone number. His smile will soften and she will recognize in that smile fear and loneliness. He will hand her his business card. She will call him when Glenn is out of town for a conference, and in the green and brown room of a Holiday Inn Express she will be surprised by how easy it is to be give her body to another man. When she comes her right foot will cramp into the shape of an arching cat. Afterwards Lara will tell Freddy that she cannot do this again. Freddy will understand. The elevator bell down the hall will ring and open for Freddy while Lara sits on the hotel bed and massages the sole of her foot and weeps.
The memory of that day with her father will stop and Lara will, over the course of a year, return to herself. At the end of that year her best friend from high school, Tina, will move back to the city after living in San Francisco for eight years. When Tina walks in the door Lara’s eyes and then arms will reach for her friend and she will hug her hard, burying her chin into her friend’s shoulder. It will take Lara a moment to notice Lloyd, Tina’s husband, standing behind Tina holding his knit cap. She will smile at Lloyd and hug him, too. Lloyd used to be Glenn’s boss. Glenn introduced Lloyd and Tina, and then Lloyd took Tina to the West Coast.
Glenn will come out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a dishtowel and hug the guests and offer them drinks.
“Oh, God,” Tina will sigh, “do I need one.”
“We’re a little shaken up from the ride over,” Lloyd will say.
“Still shaking’s more like it,” Tina will say.
“What happened?” Lara will say. She will participate in the evening’s conversation, behaving normally and thinking normal thoughts, because this is the practice that has boxed and sealed away the squalid image of her in a hotel bed with a stranger inside her.
“We almost ran a kid over,” Tina will say.
“More of a teenager,” Lloyd will say. “A very drunk teenager.”
“Holy shit,” Lara will say.
Tina will walk into the kitchen and Lloyd will follow to the counter where Glenn will pour their drinks. “We were on Franklin, going the speed limit,” Lloyd will say. “A little slower, ‘cause of the packed snow. And the kid just stumbles out of nowhere. Actually, from between two parked cars. I hit the brakes and we slid for about ten feet and I swear I stopped within an inch of his kneecaps. It was like slow motion. His two friends were still slap boxing on the sidewalk when we came to a stop. And the kid? He just slowly turns and looks at us like we were driving up to hand him his lunch box or something. Then you know what he does?” Lloyd will do a little falsetto hoot. “He looks at us through the windshield with this idiot glazed grin and waves. He actually waves at us. He was nearly flattened with his hand up and that stupid look on his face.”
“Can you imagine if we’d hit him?” Tina will say, “what we’d be doing right now?” They will file into the living room with their drinks. Lara will be thankful that her old friend has not become the kind of woman that demands a house tour.
“I don’t want to think about it,” Lara will say.
“You know,” Glenn will say, “Lara was once run over by a car.”
Lara will say look sharply at Glenn. “Hit,” she will say, “I was hit.”
“Oh my God, Lara,” Tina will say. “When was that? I never heard about this.”
“Neither did her mother,” Glenn will say.
Lara will tell Lloyd and Tina about how, when she was eleven, she chased a stray kickball across the driveway of her school parking lot and ran right into the path of a blue station wagon. She will recount the same details to Lloyd and Tina that long ago she recounted to Glenn; how the grille of the car hit her square on the hip, how she’d flown and landed and how the sounds of the playground sounded shallow as she lay there on the warm asphalt with her head on her forearms. She will not tell them, as she once told Glenn, how she’d waited to be lifted into the sky to join her father, how the woman who’d hit her had run and crouched over her, grabbing her by her scraped elbow saying “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus…” while looking around like she was tracking a fly, how furious she’d been to have her ascent interrupted by this woman.
“I didn’t tell my Mom because I didn’t even bump my head,” Lara will say.
“Not that you remember,” Glenn will say.
During dinner Lara and Glenn will talk about the trials and joys of parenthood. Afterwards, in the living room, Lloyd and Tina, full with food and loose with drink, will regale Lara and Glenn with stories from their respective single lives.
“This was when Tina had that little place over Northeast,” Lloyd will be saying. “So, anyway, she’s been looking forever and finally she finds the perfect renter. She’s nice. She’s neat, responsible. No pets. Great references. Tina gives the girl a lease and—“ he dusts off his hands, “voilá. ”
Tina’s face will go slack with annoyance.
“Oh, don’t get pissy,” Lloyd will say when she stands.
“I’m just going to get another drink,” Tina will say as she walks to the kitchen.
“So things are going along fine,” Lloyd will say, prolonging the story so that all eyes go to Tina when she returns with her drink. “No neurotic habits. No pilfering jewelry or food from the fridge. No freaky boyfriends. But—"
“Lloyd—” Tina will say.
Lloyd will shrug. “Okay, I won’t tell them the story.”
“Hey. That’s not fair,” Glenn will say. “You’re trying to torture us.”
“No,” Tina will say, looking into her drink. “He’s trying to torture me.”
“You tell it, then,” Lloyd will say, a glint of malice in his smile. “Go ahead, Tina.” Tina will narrow her eyes at him and Lloyd will return the stare.
“It was a long time ago,” Tina will finally say. “What happened was that this girl was beautiful. I mean really, really, like, model beautiful. And I just couldn’t stand to get up in the morning and see her looking that beautiful.”
“And—“Lloyd will say.
Tina will shoot an exasperated glance at Lloyd. “And so I evicted her,” she will say, closing her eyes as if bracing for a slap.
“Correction,” Lloyd will say. “She came up with a bogus excuse to evict her, and then she evicted her.”
Lloyd will smile, pleased with himself, looking from Lara to Glenn and back again. Glenn will scratch his jaw and squirm, groping for a comment that will smother Lloyd’s wantonness.
“I know why you do it, Lloyd,” Tina will mutter.
“Do what?”
“You fell in love with my looks and you resent yourself for it. You want Glenn to know that you know how shallow and vain I am.”
“Tina,” says Lloyd.
“Tina, you know I don’t think that,” Glenn will say.
“You’re sweet, Glenn,” Tina will say. “Both you guys,” she will turn to Lara. “I’ve been watching you all night. I can tell how much you respect each other. How you communicate. You’re amazing.”
“And you’re projecting,” Glenn will say.
“I am not. It’s true.”
“If you’re going to make statements like that then at least be concrete about it,” Glenn will say.
“Hey, man,” Lloyd will say, “are you calling my vain and shallow wife dense?”
“Would you shut up, please?” Tina will say to the ceiling over Lloyd’s head. “I’m exploring what it’s like to be in a fulfilled marriage.”
“Unh!” Lloyd will say, falling back in his seat, miming a bullet to the chest.
“Okay. I’ll prove it,” Tina will say, “what were guys doing at, let’s see…ten o’ clock—“
“Please don’t ask about our sex life,” Glenn will say, grinning and glowing with fake modesty. Lara’s bowels will chirp.
“I wasn’t going to,” Tina will say. She will tuck one leg under herself and turn to Lara. “What were you guys doing at ten this morning?”
“Ten? Umm. At ten this morning we’d just finished breakfast and we were taking a walk and playing this stupid game we play called ‘Covers.’
“We sing cover songs—” Glenn will say, then shake his head. “It’s too dumb to explain.”
“So you were singing to each other,” Tina will say. “See, that’s what I mean. That’s beautiful.”
“Compare and despair,” Glenn will say. “Compare and despair.”
“Look,” Lloyd will say, having slouched for a time in silence while picking at the fraying threads of his loveseat. “None of you have been through a divorce. I have. And I’m here to tell you that we, the four of us, have it pretty damn good.” He will look at each of their faces. Lara will think it’s pure Toastmasters, but in Lloyd’s own way, heartfelt. His voice will soften. “We’re not perfect, as couples, I mean, but we love each other.” He will look at Tina. “We try.”
Tina will nod serenely, restored in her feelings of sweetness toward Lloyd. “It’s true,” she will say. “And think of how far we’ve come from the Dark Ages of our folks’ marriages.”
Lloyd will say: “For chrissakes we’re faithful to each other.”
Lara will blink. Glenn will be sitting forward, head bowed, elbows on knees and fingers laced. His eyes will go to Lara’s face and she will not be able to look away and will feel the heat rise to her cheeks. Lloyd and Tina will look at Glenn and Lara and then at each other and an umbrella of silence will open and rise from the center of the floor and its shadow will fall over the room. Tina will clear her throat. The refrigerator motor will bump on in the kitchen.
Lara will scrape plates from dinner, already unable to recall exactly how the night ended. She will recall that in the impossibly long final hour of the evening, Tina had quoted John Donne, that somehow this quote had lead to talk of death, and talk of death to whether Tina or Lloyd would be the one to safely drive them home. She will also recall that Lloyd had insisted at intervals “I’m fine. An hour a drink. That’s my rule of thumb,” and that Glenn had endlessly repeated, “Are you sure?” It will have been a dumb and automatic exchange; also pragmatic and grave enough to have nudged them toward the night’s end.
She will set down a dish in mid scrape when she hears Paulie crying upstairs. “I got it,” she will say to Glenn. She will take two steps toward the landing and then turn and open her mouth to say something. She will watch Glenn wipe the countertop with sweeping figure eights, and will turn again and walk up the stairs.
“It happened again, Mom. The darkness,” Paulie will say. “Can you turn on the light?”
“It’s okay, Sweet,” she will whisper, and will lie next to him. He will whimper briefly and nestle into her armpit and will soon fall into a steady wheeze. She will inhale the salt and pear smell of Paulie’s sleeping head as if it was her last breath. She will wonder if, in that house, in that room, in the orange glow of Paulie’s nightlight, it is.
She will wake to the sound of Glenn closing the door at the top of the stairs. Paulie’s clock will read 2:30. She will listen to Glenn undress and get into bed. She will wait a while, then ease herself to her feet from Paulie’s mattress on the floor and will stare at her child, cupped like a prawn around his stuffed rabbit. Outside the stairwell window a distant plume of chimney smoke will rise straight and thick into the blue moonlit air.
She will undress and crawl into bed.
“You crash next to him?” Glenn will say.
She will nod.
“He’s so fucking sweet,” he will say. Stinging water will leap behind her eyes and her nose will run and instead of sniffling she will wipe the rivulet away with the back of her hand. She will force herself to relax her throat and chest, she will breathe slowly until she knows she can speak without her voice breaking and she will say, “Why did you tell about me being hit by a car?”
“I don’t know,” Glenn will say. “I didn’t think about it. It was a story.”
Hot water will swish into the baseboard radiators and stop.
“Do you remember the first time you met my mother?” Lara will say.
“What about it?”
“Just that there I was, bringing a boyfriend home, the only boyfriend I’d ever brought home, and she didn’t even bother to put on a show. Except for setting another plate for you, you hardly registered. She just carried on. Like it was a normal family meal like the thousands before it.”
“It was a strange evening.” Glenn is not a smoker, but his breath will smell of cigarettes.
“I remember how you watched my mother as she talked about her usual things, remodeling the house, the hired work, dishing dirt on her friends and their families. Just carrying on. Then at one point I guess I got sick of listening to her and, a propos of nothing, or maybe apropos of the fact that I was her only daughter on a rare visit home from college, I told her what I wanted to major in.“
“And when you did she rolled her eyes and said: ‘Horticulture? That should take you far in the computer age,’” Glenn will say.
“Yeah. And then afterwards, while my mother watched the evening news in the den, you and I walked onto the back porch. We just stood there quietly for a long time, leaning on the railing and staring into the trees along the creek. Do you remember what you said to me then?”
Glenn will say nothing.
“You just stared straight ahead with your eyes looking really far away and said, ‘Lara, our only job is to survive our own upbringing.’ Then you turned to me, and I remember this very clearly because I was admiring your profile and loving the way your lips stick out. You turned to me and said: ‘and if we turn out to be nice people, then that’s a bonus.”
“I still believe that,” Glenn will say. “What about it?”
“You’re so earnest, Glenn. Did I ever tell you how earnest you are?”
“That’s an odd thing to say. What’s on your mind, Lara?”
“I didn’t see it then, but I’ve come to understand something. I see now that I’m your project. I have been for a long time, maybe since that night on the porch. Your project was to mold me into a kind person. From the moment you understood who I was, your mission has been, by God, to make me into a kind, good person. A happy person.
“Pretty sleazy of me, isn’t it?”
She will sigh. He will roll so that his back faces her. She will wonder if he’s going to sleep. The ticking of the radiators will fill the room. “Is this the part where you tell me you’re not a nice person,” he will say, weary, “and the reason is because I failed in my goal to—to mold you into a nice person. That I should’ve known, because I saw the way your were and because somehow that night you warned me and I saw what a bitter person your mother was, and so it’s my fault you’re not a nice person, and since not-nice people do not-nice things you’ve cheated on me? Is that what this is?”
“Tonight—what happened…” she will say. “That was a lousy way for it to come out.”
“Tell me, Lara, tell me a way it could’ve come out that wouldn’t have been lousy.”
“You knew. Didn’t you?”
Now the ticking radiators will stop and she will hear only the blood pulsing in her ears. “I feel sad for you,” he will say. “That’s what I feel right now, Lara. So sad.”
“And that’s what it’s always been about, Glenn. You feeling sad for me. Sorry for me. Thus, your project.”
“You forget I’ve had my own project to work on. I’ve had myself. And in case you haven’t noticed, Lara, I’ve changed. I’ve worked hard, and it’s paid off. I’m a fundamentally happy person. A happy and pretty fucking kind person, too.”
“Congratulations.”
He will suddenly and violently roll toward her and she will start. He will almost straddle her. One of his hands will pin her elbow under the bed sheet and pinch a nerve. She will wince. “C’mon, Lara. If you’re going to do it, do it right,” he will say in a hoarse whisper that sprays flecks of spit on her face. “Give me the lurid details. Tell me everything. Go ahead. I can take it.” Glenn will seem to deflate as suddenly as he exploded, falling to the bed as an elephant would fall to the strain of a thousand ropes.
“What do you need to know?” she will say.
He will sniff. “You don’t get it.”
“It happened once,” she will say, “almost a year ago.”
“Go to sleep, Lara,” he will say.
“Will I ever get married?” she asks.
“Probably you will,” says her father. “I hope so.”
“Will he be as handsome as you?"
“Maybe even more.”
“I don’t think so,” she pauses. “Will he be funny like you?”
“Whoever he is, Tesoro, he will take good care of you. He will make you happy. He better.”
“Or else what?” she says.
“Or else Babbo will come and wisp you away from him.”
Whisk, she thinks, and pictures herself, still somehow a girl, being carried away under her father’s arm, grinning.
She feels a drop again, and looks up at the sky. “There, Dad. I felt it again. A drop of water.”
“Again?”
“I did.”
“S’a bird maybe?”
“No. It’s rain. From a blue sky.” She feels more drops and her father chortles. More drops. Now she sees him twitch slightly, and she looks down at his legs. One foot is resting in the birdbath. The other is propped in the air on his knee. He is flicking his big toe against his second toe, scattering a few droplets at a flick. She looks at her father and he meets her glance with a howl.
“Dad!” She slaps him wildly, lovingly, on his arms and chest.
“I’m sorry,” he says, gasping. “I couldn’t help myself.” He turns to her. “Forgive me.”
She crosses her arms in mock disgust. After a while she rolls to her side and props her ear on her hand. “Babbo?”
“Si?”
“I don’t think I want a guy to make me happy some day.”
He hugs her close and kisses her on the head. “You don’t worry about some day, Tesoro. Right now it’s just you and me and Mamma. Okay?”
She looks into his eyes then back into the sky.
“Okay.”
