Aloft (9 page)

"You can't marry Richie" is what I muster. "You just can't.

Can't."

Rita waits for the reason, the angle or argument, though soon enough she realizes there is none coming, just this obtuse plea from her just freshly aging former lover, who is limply waving a serrated grapefruit spoon.
Can't.
She wants to scold me, throttle me, certainly say hell all and scram, but she doesn't yet move, God bless her, she doesn't bolt.

"You make me so tired," she says, slumping back a little.

"You should leave me alone."

"I was trying."

"You have to try harder. Otherwise, I can't see you. I won't."

Her meaning:
Ever.

"Don't marry Richie," I say, though sounding funny to myself, like I'm a lamentable young man in an old summer-love movie, flesh-and-blood wreckage. "Marry me."

Rita giggles, then laughs, out loud, with enough hilarity that the jelly roll gang hunched at the lunch counter turn around half smiling, to see what the joke is all about.

"I'm serious, Rita. Marry me."

Rita stops laughing. She glares, then picks up her handbag
A . L o F T

and walks out. I head outside after her, calling her, but she ignores me and quickly gets into her car, which she never locks.

The windows are never rolled up either, and I stand right over her as she tries to get the old motor going,
karumph, karumph,
and if you didn't know any better you'd think I was a rapist or stalker or three-eyed space lizard, the way she's cranking that thing. I can tell she's flooding the engine, but I say nothing. Our waitress has followed me out, waving the check, but I'm not paying attention because this is a not-yet-depleted moment in what seems to be my increasingly depleted life, and I'm telling Rita to stop trying to leave as the waitress keeps saying, "Hey, buster," and tapping my arm, and finally Rita steps out of the car and whacks me hard on the chest, not quite open-handed.

"She's talking to you, Jerry! Listen!" Rita digs a ten-spot from her bag and gives it to the waitress, who shoots me a kickin-the-shins smirk if there ever was one. Rita shouts, "What's the matter with you?"

"I'm serious," I say, feeling the stamp of her hand bloom hot on my skin. "I really am."

"Doesn't matter," she answers, now getting back in the driver's seat. She tries to roll up the window, but it only goes three-quarters of the way. "You think our not getting married is still the issue, don't you?"

"It's not not, is it?" I say, the idiot in me inappropriately focused on the unexpected palindrome. This is an excellent way to get into trouble. Though I rally "I realize that it's not the whole problem."

"And what, in your mind, is that?"

"C'est moi,"
I say, though maybe a bit too eagerly. "It's me.

It's all about me."

Of course this is accurate enough, though rather than
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illuminate or chart a new course, this mostly deflates the moment, which seems to be a growing skill of mine.

Rita says, as if she's been holding her breath forever, "Fine, then."

"Can you come out of there now?"

Rita shakes her head. She looks down into her lap, slips her sunglasses on, and starts turning the engine over again, now going
badank ba-dank
I'm sure it will soon quit entirely, but then somehow the damn thing rumbles to life, all muscle and smoke, spirit ghost of Dearborn. She clicks the car into reverse and tells me to watch my feet.

"Don't do anything yet," I say, "at least not until after the weekend. Theresa's flying in, and we're having a get-together at Jack's. Why don't you come? Everyone would love to see you."

"Pm sorry, Jerry."

"I'll pick you up on Saturday afternoon."

"Please don't," she says, backing it out.

"I'll call you!"

She mouths a big
No
and gives a tiny wave, like she's peering out the window from two thousand feet. Then she squeals rubber to accelerate out onto the jet flows of the Jericho Turnpike, and is gone.

t h r e e

TH E HOU SE TH A T Jack built is in a gated development called Haymarket Estates, a brand-new luxury "enclave" that sits on what was a patch of scrubby land a few exits east of where I live. From the Expressway you can actually catch a glimpse of the rooftops peeking out over the barrier wall, the covenant-defined cedar shake or slate tile shingles trimmed out with polished copper ice dams and gutters, the stone-faced chimneys and handcrafted lintel work fresh and gleaming, with the sole unglamorous detail being all the mini—satellite dishes looking up toward the southern 'sky with a strange kind of succor. When Jack bought the dusty .47-acre lot a few years ago for what seemed an inexcusable amount of money, he assured me that it'd be worth at least twice as much now, which has proven true despite the flagging economy, given what the last remaining parcels sold for in recent months. The heady rise in land values prompted him and Eunice to go ahead with plans for a much bigger house than they had originally wanted, not
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minding that the structure would take up most of their property, rendering it useless for any large-scale kids' play or a decent-sized pool. The proportion is really the opposite of my place, where my modest ranch house sits right smack in the middle of the property (just over an acre), so that I have plenty of trees and shrubs and lawn to buffer me from my good neighbors.

The side of Jack's house, on the other hand, is only about ten of my paces from the side wall of his neighbor's, which would be normal-looking in an old suburban neighborhood of row-type houses but feels as narrow as an olde London alleyway given the immensity of the houses. But as Jack has pointed out, who wants to be outside where it's buggy and noisy with the Expressway and in the summertime the rumble of the AC com-pressors (four for his house alone)? Jack's house is around 6500

square feet, not including the full-length basement or three-car garage, which is pretty typical of the development, or more than three times bigger than the house he grew up in. Eunice decorated the place herself, which continues to be a full-time job. You walk in to a vaulted two-and-a-half-story circular en-tryway with green marble floors inlaid with a multicolored sunburst, a double-landed soapstone stairwell rising up to the second floor. On the main level there's a media room with a widescreen television and every kind of audio component, including ones that seem not to do anything but monitor the sound, for frequency response and digital dropouts and some such. There's a separate rolling caddy for the army of remotes, which Jack has actually just replaced with a console-sized touch-screen unit that supposedly controls everything in the house, including the lights and HVAC and security system.

There's of course the French country manor living room that no one ever uses and then the "library," which is in fact pretty A L O F T

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gorgeous, lined as it is with panels of glass-smooth walnut and custom cabinetry and furnished with leather club chairs and sofas and antique Persian rugs. Jack even installed a special ventilation system in there, so he can smoke cigars with his golf buddies when they come back to play poker. The funny thing is that the bookshelves are mostly taken up by rows and rows of home and design magazines that Eunice gets each month, and then the big coffee-table art and design books, though Eunice says that they'll be getting some "shipments" of real books soon enough, as she's joined several book-of-the-month clubs, where you get twelve tomes for a penny. And there's a television, too, as there is in every room, though this one is regular-sized and discreetly tucked behind cabinet doors, maybe in deference to the dying world of letters.

The stainless-steel-and-granite kitchen is enormous, certainly, as it has to house two of everything, from refrigerators to dishwashers to trash compactors. Eunice and Jack like to entertain, as they are doing today, but on a wedding caterer's scale, which you can tell by the size of their baking sheets and stockpots, the latter being the kind you see in cartoons in which the natives are making soup of the hapless explorer. Off the kitchen is the plain two-room suite where the nanny/cook/

housekeeper, Rosario, stays six nights a week, only leaving on Sunday morning to spend a day and night with her husband and two children and mother, who live somewhere deep in Queens. Eunice, in the parlance, doesn't work "outside the house," but as far as I can tell Rosario is doing all the heavy lifting inside, plus the light duty, too. I don't blame Eunice, as it's her prerogative and privilege to spend her days poring over her decorating books and taking yoga and not toasting a slice of bread unless it's a full-blown event (when she transforms into
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Lady Sub-Zero, her tools and prep lists and chopped and measured ingredients c/o Rosario laid out on her island counter in military formation), but I wish sometimes she'd spend more casual, horsing-around time with the kids, just lollygagging, rather than scheduling the endless "enrichment" exercises and activities for them that are undoubtedly brain-expanding but must be as fun as memorizing pi to twenty-five places. At bedtime she or Jack will read them only library-recommended books and then retreat to their 1500-square-foot master bedroom suite featuring his and her tumbled-stone bathrooms fitted with steam shower/sauna and then the
lounge-in
closets that could make perfectly nice studio condos in Manhattan, Jack checking the company website and e-mail and Eunice surfing the six hundred channels for a movie she hasn't seen yet.

(Once, in the downstairs media room, I browsed all the channels one by one, pausing long enough to get a good glimpse of each, and it took about thirty minutes to get back to where I started, which I realized was like watching a TV show in itself, and not in fact a half-bad one, relatively speaking.) And as I drive past the gate (where the surly goateed guard still calls up the house to check if they're expecting me, this after about thirty visits) and turn onto the single long circular street of the development past the other not-so-mini mansions, I have to tell myself again that my son is doing more than all right, that I should be so lucky to have to worry that these bulwarks of his prosperity (not just the house but his German sedan, the luxury SUVs, the country club membership, the seasonal five-star vacations) are maybe too much for anyone to handle, and especially Jack, who's always been a bit impressionable and unsure of himself and sometimes too eager to please. Why he's like this I don't like to muse upon too much, as it more

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than likely has to do with what happened to Daisy when he was nine, though maybe this is not the whole story; Theresa (only a year younger) went through the same shitstorna of unhappiness and is totally different. Though again this may be her particular psychic response to misery and sadness, which made her become more like herself than she would have been had she been raised under neutrally pleasant laboratory conditions.

I suppose the Grandeur of Life does this to all of us, forging us into figures more like ourselves than we'd otherwise be, for better and/or worse, and so you wonder what ramifications in .

substance and detail there'd be, say, what kind of house Jack would be living in, had his mother never died, whether he would have married an altogether together woman like Eunice, whether he would have taken up the business of Battle Brothers at all. Naturally I think too of what might have become of me in that time line with Daisy still alive, if I'd be with her still, or else have gotten divorced and married Rita forthwith and had children with her. With the exception of the first six months and a few assorted days early on (the birth of the kids, a couple of anniversaries, that one Thanksgiving when Daisy practically car-bonized the bird and we ended up in the city at Tavern on the Green, jaunting afterward down Fifty-ninth Street giddy with the Christmas lights and a bottle of Chablis, the kids riding high on our shoulders), there was rarely if ever joyousness or glee, with Daisy scuttled and sunk down in the troughs of her gray day moods. Probably I dug everything a bit deeper with my attitude, which back then was one of constant irritation and stress, as the economy was in the dumper and my father hadn't yet fully retired from Battle Brothers and the kids seemed only to speak the language of lament and whine, being generally neglected and cast aside, and then that episode of the $7000

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Bloomingdale's charge. Still, I was a jerk, seriously unhappy as jerks often are, though this is no excuse for anything, and certainly not for what would become my chronic habit of abstain-ing from the familial activities of the house, in the evenings sitting alone in my study poring over the travel guides to places I wanted to go, highlighting the sights and restaurants like I was already on the tour charter, the little bottles of wine lined up on my tray.

Jack would sometimes come in and tell me Daisy wasn't in the house, and after a few times I'd stop asking where she'd gone to and just put him back to bed. Daisy would then come home at two or three in the morning wearing a fuck-me outfit smelling of cigarettes and Lancer's wine, and if we argued at all it was about her making too much noise when she came in. Jack would run out of his room crying for us to stop yelling, sometimes getting upset enough that he'd pee in his pants. It thus makes sense to me that Jack would end up being the one to feature this grand house (Theresa perfectly content with whatever post-doc-style housing she and Paul can flop in each academic autumn with their fold-up Ikea furniture), and then always gathering us for dinners and parties and taking "candid" black-and-white pictures, as if he and Eunice were trying to recast our family into one that might appear in a fashion magazine spread titled something like "The Spoils of Battle."

We'd probably be just right, too, for such a shoot, not only because we have a nice generational mix going (white-haired patriarch, sportive young parents, peach-cheeked toddlers) but also because we're an ethnically jumbled bunch, a grab bag miscegenation of Korean (Daisy) and Italian (us Battles) and English-German (Eunice) expressing itself in my and Jack's offspring with particularly handsome and even stunning results. As a A L O F T