Writers & Lovers(19)

‘Oh.’ He looks down at his fingers, which are wringing the neck of his napkin. ‘I’m a little stuck.’

‘On what?’

‘A story.’

‘What’s it about?’

The question clearly pains him as well. ‘A sort of art heist in the Golden Horde in 1389.’

I want him to be joking, but he is not.

‘Wow. How long have you been working on it?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three years?’ I don’t mean for it to come out like that. ‘It must be more of a novella by now.’

‘It’s eleven and a half pages.’

This is a detail Muriel hasn’t shared, more peculiar and intimate and, to me anyway, more horrendous than his wife’s infidelity. I don’t know what to say.

‘Are you waiting tables tomorrow night?’ he says.

‘Yeah.’

‘The next night?’

‘Yup. Most nights. Why?’

‘I’m trying to ask you out.’

But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.





August arrives and Iris becomes a wedding factory: rehearsal dinners, receptions, and an occasional small ceremony on the deck. For these events the restaurant is closed to the public, and we pass around oysters, crab toasts, stuffed figs, and risotto balls along with flutes of champagne on special silver trays. When we finally get the guests seated, we slide salads then entrées then desserts in front of them. We water and wine them. There are long periods of time when we line the wall and watch the wedding party, each with our own particular cynicism.

Our waitstaff isn’t young. We’re mostly in our late twenties and thirties and however old Mary Hand is. Only Victor Silva is married. Dana thinks all the bridesmaids are snots and tends to pick fights with them. Harry believes every groom is closeted and hitting on him. Mary Hand hangs out with musicians in the corner, making sure they get a full meal and all the drinks they want. I always say the couple is too young. They never seem to know each other very well. They look at each other warily.

Not one of the events in August makes me feel like getting married is a good idea. It was nothing I ever aspired to, anyway. My parents were married twenty-three years and never made it look appealing.

‘I liked her hair,’ my father told me once when I tried to find out why he cut in line at a golf club on Cape Cod to meet my mother. She was staying with a friend from junior college, and he was in a tournament. He’d been on the minor league tours for nearly a decade, he told her, and if he didn’t qualify for the PGA that year, he was going to quit. My mother asked what he’d do then. ‘Marry you,’ he said.

My mother told me he wooed her with wanderlust. He could teach golf anywhere. He was a better teacher than player, he confessed to her. They could spend a year or two in the south of France, Greece, Morocco. Head over to Asia. There was a lot of interest in golf in Japan, he said. After that maybe Cuba would have opened up again. Maybe he could bring her back there to live, he told her. She quit college to marry him, but he surprised her after the honeymoon by buying a house north of Boston. He got a job at the high school, and they never left. Instead of love and the revolution, instead of traveling the world, she became a radical in our conservative town, distributing flyers and hiring vans to go to protests against discrimination, Vietnam, and nuclear power. Sometimes she and Caleb were the only people in those vans.

She started going to St. Mary’s to help her stay married, to remember loyalty, to understand the will of God. But what she found after six months at church was Javier Paniagua. He was the new cantor, twenty-six to my mother’s thirty-seven. He played folk songs on the guitar and supervised the playground after mass. I remember his first day, when I was eleven, because I was allowed to play outside longer after Sunday school. Normally my mother called to me from the edge of the parking lot, and I went to her immediately. She was tense and impatient back then and would grit her teeth and try to yank my arm off if I kept her waiting. But that day she crossed the patch of dead grass and sank her heels in the wood chips to ask him about a song he’d played. She told him she’d known that song as a girl in Cuba, and this caught his interest.

At first my father was amused by my mother’s churchgoing. He liked it better than the protesting. He even went to mass with us on Christmas and Easter. After a few years, though, he grew annoyed. He called the church St. Fairy’s and made fun of Father Ted, a flushed man in his fifties who looked like Captain Stubing on The Love Boat. Father Ted wets the bed, he’d say, trying to get me to laugh. He never understood the real threat was the curly-haired kid with the guitar.

Javier was at St. Mary’s for nearly five years—I don’t know what he did on the days that weren’t Sunday or when their affair began—until he was diagnosed with cancer, the same leukemia that had already taken two pilots he’d dropped chemicals with over South Vietnam. When treatment in Boston failed, my mother drove him to his family in Phoenix and stayed until they buried him a year and a half later.

My mother came back in the late spring of my sophomore year of high school. She rented a small house on the outskirts of town. My father and I had moved in with a woman named Ann by then, and they didn’t object when I went to live at my mother’s. She wasn’t familiar at first. She wore blue jeans and beaded belts and cried a lot.