“My God,” I said, my voice automatically dropping to a whisper. “What are you doing here?”
“Your friend Gloria said this was when Sandy went to pick up her kids from school. Is this all right? Is Sandy here?”
I glanced behind me and moved quickly to the front of the store. I kissed him. I couldn’t help it. I was so glad and so sorry to see him. “She isn’t here, but you have to go. Really. She could be back any second.”
“I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have come. I’ve been driving around the block for half an hour telling myself not to come. But I had to see you.”
“I loved the vegetables.”
“Did you? I just didn’t know what to send. I wanted to buy you something big, like, say, California, but there wasn’t time.” He put his arms around me. It felt like heaven. “What about dinner tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said. “I can work something out, but you have to go now.” I couldn’t believe I was getting the words out of my mouth. I wanted him to stay and stay. I wanted to tell him everything that was happening. I wanted to tell him everything that had ever happened to me in my life.
“Is everything all right? You seem so upset.”
“It’s a stressful time,” I said, and then, as if to prove my point, Mort came out from behind the curtain with three spiral ledgers. He dropped them.
“Cacciamani!” he yelled. “Get your lousy mitts off my wife.”
Wife? I thought. Where was Lila?
“What’s he doing here?” Romeo asked, his tone more curious than alarmed. He kept his mitts firmly on me.
“None of your goddamn business what I’m doing here. Now get out before I set you on the curb in pieces.”
Romeo seemed to smile a little in spite of himself. “I haven’t heard that one in a long time.”
“I swear to God, Cacciamani, get out of here now. You do not want to get into it with me.”
“Of course I don’t want to get into it with you. What in the hell is your problem, Mort?”
“My problem? My problem? You’re my problem, buddy. You always have been. Except when I was here, you knew enough to stay away. Now I’m gone and you’re sniffing around my wife, ruining my business.” Mort shook the few papers he was still holding in his hands. Somehow it seemed the two problems had become conflated in his mind. Now it was Romeo’s fault that Roseman’s was sinking, Romeo’s fault that I wasn’t sitting at home. The Red Sox’s inability to play in the World Series—that was probably Romeo’s fault as well.
Romeo scratched his head. “Your business? Your wife?”
“Well, they sure as hell aren’t yours.”
“Listen, Mort, enough with the tough-guy talk. We never got along. So what? This isn’t a turf war.”
“This is a turf war, if that’s your terminology. I want you off my turf.”
Romeo took a small step away from me, toward Mort. “You don’t live here anymore, unless I’ve gotten the story wrong.”
“Let me tell you, Cacciamani, you’ve got everything wrong.” Mort came out from behind the counter.
“Look,” I said. “This is a ridiculous mistake. Mort is visiting and Romeo is leaving. Let’s just drop it.”
“I’m not leaving,” Romeo said. He looked somehow mesmerized, as if he was staring into the swinging watch of a hypnotist and couldn’t turn away. Mort was taller than Romeo, but Romeo was built like somebody who could throw an ox through a wall, or at least he could have twenty years ago.
Mort nodded, the veins coming up. “Well, good. That’s really fine, because you’re the one I’ve been wanting to talk to, anyway. You just saved me a trip.”
“Mort,” I said in a tone used to soothe nervous Doberman pinschers. “Settle down.”
“Stay out of this, Julie. You,” he said, pointing at Romeo, “need to stay away from my family. I thought I had made that clear in the past, but maybe we need to go over it again. You stay away from Julie. You stay away from my girls. You stay away from my store.”
“You can’t tell him to stay away from me, Mort, or the store.” It wasn’t that I was completely against him at that moment. He had spent the day trying to rescue my books. He was tired and hugely frustrated, and I liked to think that had this meeting taken place at another time it might have gone better.
Mort turned to me. “Are you on his side?”
“Please. Let’s just all walk away from this.”
“After everything he did to me?”
Romeo said, suddenly enraged, “Did to you? If he wants a fight, I’ll give him a fight. I swear to God I had put the past in the
past. I forgot what had happened.” He turned toward Mort. “But if you want to bring it up, I’m sure I can make myself remember.”
“A fight?” Mort said, his eyes bright as dimes. “You want to fight me?”
Who said these things? People screamed, they bullied, but fighting was something done only in the movies.
“If that’s what you’re looking for, come on.”
No sooner were the words out of Romeo’s mouth than Mort had the cyclamen in his hand and was hurtling it straight at Romeo’s head. Mort had been state-ranked in baseball when he was in college, and in all his years in Somerville he played on a softball team. He could pitch a crumpled-up paper towel through a window. They called him The Arm.
It was a clay pot. I was especially sorry about that. It hit Romeo on the left temple and exploded into a fan of dirt, petals, stems, and terra-cotta shards. Romeo went down.
I hardly knew which way to go. Did I comfort Romeo or try and take Mort out? For all his fits of rage, I had never seen Mort strike another person. He didn’t even spank the girls when they were little. I knelt beside Romeo. His head was bleeding spectacularly and I was trying to brush the dirt out of his eyes. I loved him. It was one of those moments in life when you’re sure.
“Mort, you stupid son of a bitch, you could have killed him!”
I thought he was on the floor for the count, but at the very mention of being killed, Romeo, bleeding and coated in potting soil, rose up from the ground and flew at my ex-husband like a creature with wings. I don’t believe his feet once touched the floor until he got his hands around Mort’s throat and started beating his head into the counter. Mort somehow pulled up an
arm and landed a hook on the exact spot where Romeo’s head was already split open.
Romeo, reflexively, brought up his knee.
I hadn’t seen many fights in my life. A couple of brawls in Harvard Square. Two teenaged boys in the street outside my store once. I called the police then. I was wondering if I should call them now. It never occurred to me that intelligent grown men still fought, and yet there I was watching it as if the whole thing were taking place underwater. I thought that fighting had rules. There were certain things people restrained themselves from doing. I was wrong. They were slugging, pulling. I think I saw Mort bite. The Siberian irises had been overturned and mashed into a soggy purple smear on the floor. They knocked over the card rack and smashed the African violets. “Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop it!”
With that simple command they fell apart, rolled away from each other limp and panting, bloody and dislodged. They were ready to stop. They had only needed someone to ask them. They lay on my floor amid the dirt and the blossoms, both of them unable to stand. In less than a minute they had both been ruined, the store had been ruined, I had been ruined. I went to Romeo, whose whole head was covered in blood. Both his forehead and his lip were bleeding now and his left hand was turned at an unnatural angle. He said my name and tried to touch his face to see if anything was left. There was a bright red pool forming under his head.
But it was Mort who really concerned me. At first glance, you’d say he was the better looking of the two. I think most of the blood on him was Romeo’s, but there was a horrible swelling
on the side of his head where the skin was taut and shiny yellow. I couldn’t get him to respond to me. He lingered in a mumbling, half-conscious state and then slipped out of it. I put my head down on his chest and listened to his heart.
Romeo dragged himself into a sitting position, wincing at every inch. “Dear Mother of God,” he said, looking at me listening. “Tell me I didn’t kill him.”
“You didn’t kill him,” I said. “But I’m calling an ambulance.”
Time happened in a dream. The hospital was very close, and yet it seemed like the second the phone was in the cradle, the ambulance guys were rushing through the door. Because I had told them, when asked over the phone, that the cause of injury was a fight, they sent the police as well. Blue and red lights flashed brightly through the window of the store, and Ginger, the woman who runs the dress shop next door, came over to see if I’d been murdered.
“Do you know these men?” the young officer asked me as two paramedics started working on Mort and the third applied pressure to Romeo’s head.
“Ex-husband,” I said, pointing. “New boyfriend.”
He nodded and closed his book.
“We’ve got a concussion here,” the paramedic said of Mort.
“This one is losing a lot of blood,” Romeo’s paramedic said. “We’ve got to get going.”
I thought he might put up an argument, but Romeo simply slumped down into the man’s arms and allowed himself to be hoisted onto a stretcher. They already had Mort’s limp body tied onto a gurney, and side by side, like bunk mates at camp, they were slid into the ambulance. I got in between them for the short
ride, just to make sure nobody woke up and tried to get things going again.
I watched Somerville spin behind me out the back window while the ambulance wailed and cried. I had one hand on each of their chests, Romeo to my left and Mort to my right. They both had their eyes closed and their breathing was labored and sharp. I knew it would never be like this again, this minute when I was able to give a little comfort to both of them.
I had plenty of blood on me by the time we got there, and a good-looking doctor helped me out of the back and then asked me if I had been hit in the fight. I said no, though all of my actions seemed to disprove my statement. I was dizzy and confused. I’d read somewhere that there were people who do very well in the moment of crisis but then fall apart once the worst of it has passed. When I thought of Romeo’s blood, I had to put my head between my knees to keep from fainting. Inside the emergency room they took Mort and Romeo off quickly. The nice policeman brought me a paper cup full of cold water and pointed to the pay phone.
“Call someone,” he said.
I called Sandy. “Listen carefully,” I said. I told her to call Gloria to come and watch the kids. Then she should call Nora and come to the hospital. “Your father has been in a fight.”
“The two of you were fighting?” Sandy said. “Fistfighting?”
“It was Romeo,” I said. It didn’t matter if she knew or Nora knew or any of them knew. It was over. No one could come back from something like this.
“How bad is it?” Sandy said, her voice tentative.
“Not bad like death. Not even bad like permanent injury. But bad.”
“How’s Romeo?”
“Um, I’d guess about the same. It’s so hard to know. I have to call his family. He’s pretty messed up.”
“Don’t call them until I get there,” Sandy said pragmatically. “They’re going to kill you.”
I wasn’t sure how Sandy planned on saving me from the impending wrath of the Cacciamanis, but it was sweet of her to think of me. I sat with the phone in my hand for several minutes before I pulled myself together and called the store.
“Romeo’s,” a voice said.
I asked to speak to Raymond Cacciamani. Despite our unpleasant first meeting, I remembered Romeo saying he was the most rational of his sons.
“You bet,” the voice said, so cheerful, so helpful. It sounded like the place was packed. It sounded like they were having a party there. “Ray-mond.”
There was a pause and I tried to keep from sobbing. A different yet very similar voice came on the line. “Raymond Cacciamani.”
I cleared my throat. “Raymond, don’t hang up the phone. There’s been an accident and your father’s in the hospital. This is Julie Roseman.” I thought it was best to put that fact at the end.
“Somerville Hospital?” he said as if he was taking an order for a delivery.
“Yes.”
Raymond hung up the phone. Personally, I would have asked
a couple of questions. With that much information, for all he knew, Romeo was dead. I was planning on begging him to come alone. I was going to tell him it was only a cut and everything was fine. Too late for that. I didn’t think there was any point in trying again.
I went to the nurses’ station and made inquiries.
“Are you a relative?” the nurse asked without looking up.
“Ex-wife to one and friend to the other—girlfriend.”
“So not exactly family in either case. Nobody’s ready to have company right now, anyway. Why don’t you just wait another minute?”
So I slumped down into a yellow plastic chair and I waited, waited for Nora and Sandy and all the Cacciamanis. Waited to pay the price for a little happiness.
A BROKEN EX-HUSBAND, A BATTERED NEW LOVER, TWO
hysterical daughters, and a whole host of raging Cacciamanis—that was what I braced myself for. What I forgot, amazingly enough, was the one thing that would truly, deeply disturb me: Lila the wife. It was understandable, I guess, in my deranged mental state that I would suppress her, and yet when she clicked through the electric doors in her high heels, I felt the last bits of whatever inner glue I had holding me together give way. Lila Roth, both bridesmaid and bride. We had met before, or if not met, passed each other in the driveway while she was helping Mort move out and I was leaving so as not to watch. She wore cutoff denim shorts that day and a red halter top. I will remember that outfit on my deathbed. It’s all transference, I know. Not one thing that had happened today could in any way be construed as Lila’s fault, and yet every fiber in me blamed her as she pounded the white tile floor toward me. Nora was close behind.
Lila was a blonde. Maybe real, maybe not. Who was I to say? I wasn’t her hairdresser. She had a certain kind of thinness that smacked of self-obsession. She was wearing eye shadow, her nails
were shell pink, she wore stockings with open-toed shoes, her teeth were bleached a toilet-bowl white. Need I go on? Not a single detail escaped me.