“Don’t sell yourself short.” I touched my glass to his glass.
“No really,” he said. “It’s you. It is absolutely you.”
I felt drunk after two sips and it had very little to do with the sake. Then a black lacquered tray arrived, covered in slabs of raw fish perched on top of tiny bricks of white rice. Some pieces of fish were tied down with little bands of seaweed as if they were so fresh there was a chance of them swimming off. Suddenly the thought of having to eat my dinner seemed so much more frightening than having a date that I didn’t feel nervous around Romeo at all. To celebrate I popped a piece of salmon in my mouth. It wasn’t bad. The eel I spit discreetly into my napkin, as I did the abalone, which was a little bit like biting into a human ear.
“I used to do that, too,” Romeo said. “You get used to it.”
“That one?” I said, pointing with one chopstick. “I’d get used to that?”
“Anything,” he said. He stretched his arms across the table
and for a second he touched my hands. Then he took his hands back again. “I still can’t believe I’m having dinner with you.”
“It’s pretty unbelievable,” I said, wanting his hands back.
“I have to tell you, you didn’t bump into me by accident at that seminar.”
“What?” I put one hand casually up on the table just in case he wanted it.
“I was walking through and I saw this woman, this beautiful woman. I only saw her for a second but, I don’t know, I felt like I knew her.”
I wasn’t loving this story.
“So I circled back around so I could see the name tag, only you didn’t see me.”
“Me?”
“Then I came back a third time. I practically walked right into you.”
“I hadn’t seen you before.”
“We talked for a minute and then you were gone.” He snapped. “I completely lost my nerve. I thought, Well, that’s it. But even though I had every intention of leaving, I found myself sitting out in the hall and waiting for you. Do you ever just have a feeling about something, you know you’ve got to do it no matter what?”
“Not until recently,” I said. I picked up the bottle of sake and refilled Romeo’s glass.
“I’d like it if we could get to know each other better. As people, you know, not just as Rosemans and Cacciamanis.”
“I think that’s a fine plan,” I said. “So, tell me about your children.” Children were always a big part of the story.
Romeo smiled and leaned back in his chair. He liked his children, I could tell. “Oh, let’s see. Camille and I started early. Joe, the oldest, he’s forty. He owns a trucking company and he’s doing okay for himself. He’s married and has three kids. Then there’s Raymond, he’s still single. He works with me in the shop. He’s the one who’ll take things over—he has a great touch with flowers. Nicky is in the Air Force, stationed over in Germany. He married a German girl about five years ago and now they have two kids. Then there’s Tony.” He sighed. “You remember old Tony. He’s thirty-three now. How old is Sandy?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Tony works for the World Health Organization. He’s over in Ecuador giving out vaccinations.”
“Did he ever get married?”
Romeo shook his head. “Nope. I have to tell you, I think I really screwed things up for Tony.”
“How do you mean?”
“I think Tony was in love with Sandy, and not just kid stuff. I don’t think he ever got over all that.”
I thought of poor Sandy at home with her kids and their Happy Meals, her nursing books and her homework. She never got over it herself.
“Anyway, Alan I told you about. He and Theresa are home with their three. And then there’s my Plummy. She’s twenty. It was such a wonderful thing for Camille to have a girl. She’s a real treat.”
“And a real surprise, it sounds like.”
“Five boys, we thought we were all through with that. We
thought we had the whole rhythm thing down, and then Plummy. But you’ll never hear me complain about that one.”
“And you named her Plummy?”
“No, no, we named her Patience because Camille said that’s what it took to get a girl. The boys all called her Plummy. I don’t even know who started it. They’d say, ‘Isn’t she just Plummy.’ I think they picked it up from the Beatles. The boys were all crazy about her.”
I liked the idea of all those children, of a house full to bursting all the time. All their friends, their boyfriends and girlfriends and then later their children. All of the flowers for all of their weddings. “It sounds nice.”
“Camille made it nice. She was a wonderful mother. I think back on all the things she had to do. I didn’t understand it until she was sick, until I had to start doing them myself. She protected me from a lot of things, you know. She took care of us.”
We ate green tea ice cream for dessert and drank tea out of little cups. We talked about the flower business, who we ordered from, where we got the deals. We laid out every trade secret we had, both of us, and I learned more over dinner than I ever had from a seminar. I told him how I wanted to do a little wedding planning on the side. That was the thing I was really good at, big parties, organization. Romeo said he admired that. He said he was crummy at organization. Romeo had hired on too many members of his family, and while he said his product was good, he had a tendency toward disorder. He once missed an entire wedding—bridesmaids’ bouquets, altar decorations, reception centerpieces, all of it. He had it marked down for the next week.
I, on the other hand, after five years on my own, still didn’t feel like I had a handle on what I was doing, and every month the revenues slipped. One thing that I discovered was that we were both going broke.
It wasn’t exactly a lighthearted conversation we’d stumbled into, but still I felt like singing when we left the restaurant. Romeo said he would drive me home, or at least he would drive me to the end of my street and let me walk home from there. When we got to the end of my street, he pulled over and turned off the car. “No one ever told me Rosemans were such good company,” Romeo said.
“When we’re not selling the dried beaks of nightingales.”
“When Camille died I thought, That’s it. I’d known her since eighth grade. We were each other’s family. I thought, There’s never going to be enough time to get to know somebody like that again.”
“Sure,” I said. From a distance I could see my house. All the lights were off. My own family safe asleep.
“But the thing is, I do know you. That’s how I felt yesterday. That’s how I felt tonight. I’ve been hearing stories about the Rosemans since I was born. They weren’t the right stories maybe—” He stopped and drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “In the end a Roseman and a Cacciamani are all the same thing.”
“All the same thing,” he said. He had a way of repeating what I said and I liked it. It made me feel like he was really listening. And then Romeo Cacciamani did something truly miraculous. He leaned over and he kissed me. It was just on my lower lip at first,
and then my upper lip. Little kisses, and after each one he’d pull away from me like it was over, that was it, but then he would come back for more. He put his hands on my face and ran his thumbs beneath my eyes, then he kissed my eyelids, first right, then left, then my forehead, and then the part in my hair. I put my hands on the back of his neck and kissed his mouth, his neck. This was the part that no one told me while they discussed the evils of the Cacciamanis. No one said they were such good kissers. I was dreaming, sinking, swimming in a warm dark river of kissing, kissing hands and chins, every kiss soft. I could smell the soap on his skin and the fabric softener in his undershirt. I could smell his hair and taste his mouth, which still tasted like sake and rice. Oh, Romeo, this makes it all worthwhile, all those nights of working late and coming home alone, crying over the books and the roses that came in with brown spots on every petal, the worrying about Sandy and Nora and the children, the anger at Mort, the missing my parents, all of it lifted off of me and was washed back by the sea of tender kissing, maybe not forever but for now, and frankly, what else was there? I was lighter in that moment. I was my best self, loving and gentle and kind. It was so good to see that woman again, so good to hold another person in this way and be held. If a giant asteroid fell on us at that moment, parked in a car at the end of my block, the touch of Romeo Cacciamani’s tongue against my teeth, mine would be counted as a happy life, a good life.
I kissed him again. I knew nothing about time, but after a time we decided it was late enough.
“Can I walk you down?” he said.
“Better not.” I leaned forward and kissed him again.
“We’ll manage this, right? We’ll find a way to do this.”
“I have every intention of it,” I said. I put my hand on his hand and then let myself out of the car. I had walked all the way from Boston to Somerville. Tonight I felt like I could walk past my house and keep heading west. I could walk to Rochester, to Cleveland, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. I could walk all the way to Iowa and through Nebraska, over the Rockies until I got to Oregon, and even then I wouldn’t stop if I didn’t want to. I could go into the ocean, I could swim. I was that sure of myself tonight. I could go on forever.
I WENT UP THE STAIRS TO MY ROOM IN THE DARK.
I knew the way. My lips were puffy and I kept touching them with my fingers, my tongue. They still had the goods. They could still come through for me when I needed them. After such a period of neglect, what a thrill to find they still had all their spring intact, they were still capable lips. I found the lamp beside my bed and turned it on. I sat down on the edge of the bed, bounced a couple of times. If I had been twenty, I would have gone to bed with him. I would not have known how to get out of the car after kissing like that. After twenty minutes or so I would have gone straight for the buttons like a lemming goes for the sea. But now I was older, more sensible. Theoretically, I was supposed to believe in relationships, getting to know a person, enjoying the magic of the time. I was supposed to be grateful for what I got.
So why was I sitting there on top of my bedspread thinking I was going to jump out of my skin? Why did I want to go running down the street to see if I could catch up to his car? Oh, they were beautiful things, those kisses, every one a masterpiece, but here alone in a room with a bed I wanted to put my head
through the wall, I was so eaten up by desire. Sex. I had not had sex in five years. No, let’s be honest, it had been more than five years. It was more like five years plus the last four or five months when Mort was here and we didn’t have any sex and I didn’t much care because I didn’t know he was going. And before that how long had it been? My fifties had more or less been a sexual wasteland. Those were good years that I blew, years I could have been burning down the house night after night had there been someone who wanted me, someone I wanted. So maybe tonight I had a chance and I decided what … to wait? Why? Because maybe five years and four months wasn’t long enough to get the hang of celibacy? Because I wanted to be sure, to get to know him better? Who did I know better than a Cacciamani? Because I didn’t want him to think I was that kind of woman? I was that kind of woman! Just give me half the chance. I wanted to be, I would be, but instead I got out of the car, programmed by the decade known as the 1950s. I fell facedown on the bed and bit at my pillow to keep from screaming. I could picture Sandy and Tony and Sarah running down the hallway to my room. “Mom! Grandma!” they would cry. “What’s happened to you? What’s wrong?” And what would I tell them? “Kids, tonight Grandma had the chance to make love with somebody she really, really liked. Liked more than she ever thought she was ever going to like anybody again, and she just walked away from it.” Mothers are so proud of their daughters when they say no and so painfully disappointed in themselves when they say the same thing.
So now what was I supposed to do? Sleep was out of the question, and since I only had one thing on my mind, I didn’t think reading or television was going to cut it. I thought about
calling Gloria, but she would never forgive me for waking her up to say I’d missed my chance to have sex, just as she would never forgive me for not calling if I had had sex.
There was the strangest noise outside. It sounded like hail, which was impossible considering I had just been outside and seen the clear moon. It sounded almost like little rocks hitting the side of the house. Then I realized it
was
little rocks hitting the side of the house. I looked out the window but I couldn’t see anything, so I went back and turned out the light. There on the sidewalk outside my house stood Romeo Cacciamani.
I put my shoulder onto the window frame and tugged at the handles with both hands. Damn Mort, who said we didn’t need to hire a professional painter! Damn Mort, who said he could do the windows himself! He probably knew this would happen. He knew that someday Romeo would come here at night and I’d never be able to get the damn thing open. He’d painted me in! The veins were pushing out in my forearms and I felt a distinct, hot pain in my neck. I hoped he couldn’t see the horrible face I was making as I strained against the stuck window and then beat on the edges with my palms until they stung. Helpless, trapped, I looked down at him and saw he was motioning something; he was saying something without making any noise.
Come down, he was saying.
I flew down the stairs. I took them like Tony, three at a time. I was out that door and back into the night and into his arms before I even knew I’d left the bedroom, back into the universe of kissing, except now we were kissing standing up, our arms so tightly around each other you would have thought we were in an airport and one of us was being shipped out for a particularly
hopeless tour of duty. It had been what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? But I had felt the loss of him more than I can ever remember feeling anything.
“Come inside,” I said. I kissed him, once and then again and again. “I can’t believe you came back.”
“Julie Roseman,” he said. “I didn’t know where to go.” Stop, kiss. “I just kept driving around.”