Banana Rose (31 page)

On the second day I thought of ringing up Marian. The phone rang twice and then I hung up. I didn’t want to talk to her. Besides, she’d probably heard us arguing through the floor. I wanted to talk to Anna or Blue. But I didn’t call them; I was too ashamed to tell anyone what Gauguin had done. I tried painting, but my arm felt listless and all the colors looked the same.

On the third morning my mother phoned. “Nell, how are you?

Why haven’t you called? You know you should after a trip—what if you got in an accident?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Well, it’s not fine. Tell me, how was it?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Was Gauguin okay while you were gone? Personally, I wouldn’t have left. How could he possibly manage without you?”

“Fine,” I said again. I knew no other word.

She went on to tell me about the new way she’d read to make pot roast. “You add onions,
not
at the beginning, but in the middle of the cooking. Isn’t that clever? It saves the flavor.”

“Fine,” I said for the fourth time.

I stared across the living room out the window at the green siding of the duplex next door. I just wanted to get off the phone.

“Nell, is something wrong? Don’t tell me you and Gauguin had a fight.”

“Fine.”

“For heaven’s sake, what’s fine?” she shrieked.

“Everything, Mom. I have to go. The water’s boiling.” I hung up the phone.

I certainly didn’t want her to know what happened. She would die.

On the fourth night, when Gauguin came home from work he left a note on the kitchen table and then went into the bathroom.

I stepped up to the table and read it: “Nell, can I take you out for dinner tonight? How about that Italian place on Riverside? We could try it.”

He stepped out of the bathroom.

“Okay,” I said.

“Great. Let’s go in ten minutes. I’m starving.”

Caruso’s had wrought-iron chairs and tables with glass tops. It was still early and only three other tables were filled.

“You want wine?” Gauguin asked.

Yes, I nodded.

“Red or white?”

“I’m not sure.” I looked at the menu. “Red. I’ll have eggplant parmigiana.”

“Good choice. I’ll have that, too,” Gauguin said.

It felt like I was on a blind date with someone I hated. Neither of us could think of anything real to say.

“This seems like a nice place,” Gauguin offered, looking around.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

They served us our salads. There was too much dressing. My lettuce sat in a pool of vinaigrette. I speared a tomato with my fork and held it over the plate. The oil dripped off. “Umm,” I said, and put it in my mouth.

The whole meal was like that. The eggplant was lost in the dish of tomato sauce. The garlic bread left my hands greasy.

Gauguin and I hardly said a word to each other, but we kept drinking wine.

By the time the dessert menu came, I was tipsy. “I bet they fry the ice cream in Mazola.”

We both began to laugh. “This is awful, isn’t it?” Gauguin said.

Finally we had something to talk about. “Yeah, they mistook a rock for eggplant and then drowned it in sauce,” I said.

I downed the wine in my glass and poured some more. I leaned forward, putting my elbows on the table.

“You’re cute,” I said as though I had just met him.

“So are you.” Gauguin reached out his hand and stroked my arm.

I flinched for a moment and then settled into letting it feel good.

“Wanna go back to my place?” he joked.

“Maybe, but first I want to try some chocolate ice cream.”

Gauguin called the waiter over. “Let’s order two.”

We finished the bottle of wine as our ice cream melted in silver dishes.

“Nell, have we ever gotten drunk together?” He laughed.

“I don’t thank soo,” my words slurred.

He caught me by the elbow as we walked out the door and swung me around at the curb. “Nell, I love you.”

We kissed passionately, leaning against a parked car.

I looked around. People were staring at us. “Let’s go home.”

As soon as the front door shut behind us, we ripped off our clothes and slipped under the bed sheets. We groaned at the sensation of skin on skin, my breasts against his chest, his arms across my back, our legs stretched out long next to each other.

Then I froze. “I can’t,” I said, remembering Sherry.

Gauguin swallowed. “Oh, Nell, I’m sorry.”

I let him hold me for a while, then pulled back and looked at his face. “I really hurt. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.”

He nodded and was silent.

We lay naked, next to each other, for a long time. My mind was blank and felt dry, like uncooked oatmeal.

Suddenly I noticed the neon light of Mr. Steak blinking through the window into our apartment. I remembered sitting on the stoop that first evening I drove up here, how I imagined making love to the rhythm of that light. The whole place had been new to me then, with the delicacy of twilight filtering through spring leaves. Just before I arrived, I’d made love to Anna and before that Neon. The whole Southwest had been at my back as I drove, and I’d carried it with me up to Gauguin’s stoop. A surge of energy crackled in me as I lay in bed.

I turned to Gauguin. “I want you,” I said, my voice full of a new authority.

I began kissing his mouth as though I owned it, as though every inch of his body were my possession.

“Nell!” he said, first from surprise, then delight. “Nell.”

I climbed on top of him. “That’s right,” I said, “you’re mine.”

Everything’s mine, the whole world is mine, whistled through my body like a mantra. I glistened with sweat.

Gauguin was trembling. “Nell, I love you so much.”

I took him out of an ancient power and he came into my body. “I bet you do,” I snarled into his ear. “Now you remember this.”

“Yes, I will, I will.”

And then I rolled off of him and climbed through the night into a dark sleep.

T
WO WEEKS LATER
I received a call from my mother in the middle of the afternoon.

“Darling, guess what? Your father and I just got off the New Jersey Turnpike. We’re heading for Minnesota. We plan to be there in three days. Your father can’t take the heat anymore in the city—it’s been the worst summer. We know it will be cool in Minnesota—what with all those lakes and so far north. We’ll stay for two weeks “

“Mom—” I started to say how humid and hot it was in Minneapolis, but she had hung up.

They’re coming, I said to myself, and felt a sour taste on my tongue. I was afraid the heat was a pretense, that my mother suspected something was wrong because I had continued my monosyllabic conversation with her the other two times we spoke.

I immediately began cleaning the house. As I was vacuuming, Gauguin came home. “Well, well, Nell, what’s come over you?” His face lit up. “The little housekeeper.”

“Shut up,” I said, turning off the power. “My parents are coming. For two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” Gauguin sat down on the couch. “Why so long?”

“You know how they are,” I said by way of explanation. He nodded but had no idea what I meant.

Marian and Matthew were going camping in Wyoming and offered to let my parents stay in their apartment upstairs.

As soon as they arrived, I showed them upstairs and my father declared that he was boiling. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and declared, “Don’t you people believe in air conditioning?” He immediately found a little standing electric fan that Matthew had bought at a garage sale, carried it with him into the toilet, placed it in front of him, and turned the switch to high. When he was finished, he went back outside to unload the car.

“Edith, three? Three.” He turned to me, holding up three fingers. “She thinks she’s the Queen of England. One suitcase for her jewels, one for her coronation, and the third is just filled with shoes. Nell, do you know how many pairs of shoes your mother has? This whole block”—he made a sweeping motion with his arm— “couldn’t hold all her shoes.”

“Please, Irving, a woman—she
needs
things. C’mon, bring them to the second floor.” She turned to me. “Nell, it’s so good to see you.” She gave me a big hug and kiss.

“That’s why she has me around. Nell, tell me, do I look like a valet?” My father lifted the third suitcase to the curb.

“C’mon, I’ll help you.” I lugged one up the stairs. “Jesus, Mom, what do you have in here?”

“Dear, not you, too. There are things in there,” she said mysteriously. “Female things. Lingerie, jewelry, cosmetics.”

When we’d finished with the luggage, I made us coffee in our apartment.

“Where’s Gauguin?” my mother asked. She looked around her. “Hmm, things look in order.”

I stiffened. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

“Yes, that’s what you said on the phone. ‘Fine!’ ” she mimicked.

“Gauguin will be home after work,” I explained, and clenched my mug.

My mother came down that evening wearing a particularly good-looking white linen skirt with three buttons down the left side, ending in a slit by her knee.

“Was that the white skirt you wore to Aunt Helen’s last summer? I don’t remember noticing how nice it was,” I said.

^“
No, it’s a different one,” she answered.

“You mean you have two white skirts?” I asked in astonishment, emphasizing the
two.

“No”—she smiled—“I have many, but I only brought three.” I stood there aghast. “Nell, let’s walk down to a food store and fill the refrigerator,” she suggested.

“Why? I bought forty dollars’ worth before you came,” I said.

“Well, I saw some space in your fridge, and I thought we should fill it.” She got up from the couch. “You look a little thin. Are you eating?”

“Of course I’m eating.”

“C’mon, please your mother just this once,” she pleaded.

“Okay, okay. Maybe we should take the car,” I said.

“No, I’ve been in a car too long today, and besides, in Brooklyn we walk everywhere.” She was looking toward the door.

“This isn’t Brooklyn.” I got up. “We could walk to the Northtown Co-op.”

“Fine, fine.” She was out the door.

While squeezing every cantaloupe in the pile of eighty, my mother asked, “So, Nell, how is it?”

“What? I got a bag of cherries,” I said.

“No, marriage. Good? Yes? You like it?” Bingo! Edith found the perfect melon and held it up like a prize.

“Yes,” I said, and reached for the round fruit in my mother’s hand. “Hmmm, it smells good. Mom, you’re an expert,” I said, and hoped she didn’t notice my avoidance.

She looked at me hard. “Nell, you must give a hundred percent. Your father, he’s a baby. I give and give. That’s the way.”

“Not mine.” I pushed the cart to the check-out line.

When we got back, Gauguin was sitting in the living room with my father.

“Hi, Nell,” he said, and then kissed me on the cheek. He hugged my mother and welcomed her.

We all went into the kitchen and cut the melon into eighths. We ate down through the salmon-colored meat to the green, flipping the rinds in the wastebasket and then replacing the lid to keep the flies away.

“Boy, this is a hot summer,” Gauguin said.

We turned on the news. The announcer said that all over the country it was hot. “Chickens and old people in Texas are dying on the spot because their blood is literally boiling. Stay out of the sun!”

“Oy,” my father said. “Chickens dying in Texas. I am so hot! Edith, I’m exhausted. Let’s go to bed. I’m even too hot to eat dinner. Please, let’s go upstairs.”

My mother’s mouth hung open. “No dinner, Irving? Are you okay?”

“I drove all day.” He headed for the stairs and my mother reluctantly followed.

Gauguin and I went to bed early, too. That night it was so hot, I didn’t even have the energy to think about Sherry. That was a relief.

My parents had been with us a week when I drove with them out to Stillwater, a town built on the bluffs of the St. Croix River. The town was considered very quaint with its cobblestone streets. Within a half-hour, my father was panting and sweating from walking up the steep hills.

“Let’s stop here and have something to drink.” It was a sidewalk café called The Parsley. White wrought-iron tables with large red-and-green umbrellas were set up on the sidewalk all the way to the curb. We chose a table near the street, because it was in the shade of a maple.

“Would you like to see a menu?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, please,” my mother responded.

“Edith,” my father growled under his breath, “we only stopped for a drink; some ginger ale or a Coke.”

My mother paid him no mind. She looked at the list of selections. The waitress went to serve a table near the door.

“Just as I suspected. They serve fiddledeedee here too,” my mother announced.

The waitress returned. “I’ll have a scoop of peach ice cream.” My mother nodded, closing the menu.

“I’ll have a Perrier,” I said.

“Nell,” my father groaned, “don’t order a Perrier. I’m begging you. It’s a rip-off. They put water from the Hudson River in green bottles and call it French. Then they add bubbles and people like you order it for two dollars a glass.”

I turned to the waitress. “I’ll have ice and lime with my Perrier, thank you.”

My father looked up at the waitress with a martyred expression. “No one listens to me. I guess all I can afford to order now is a coffee. Black.”

My mother was about to place the first spoonful of ice cream in her mouth when we heard a tremendous roar around the corner. We all looked up. Suddenly the street was filled with motorcycles. Harley-Davidsons, Sportsters, and 1200s pulled up at the curb right in front of us. Men and women in black leather, snapping gum and sucking on unlit cigarettes, dismounted from their equine machines. One man had a scar from his forehead down his nose to his chin. In sleeveless jean jackets, other men exposed swollen biceps, tattooed with American eagles, skulls and crossbones, Nazi swastikas, and “Joan loves me or else.” One woman in skin-tight silver pants and purple high-heeled leather boots stepped away from her man as they left their bike and crossed the street. He shot out his arm, grabbed her long black hair, and jerked her to him. “Where do you think you’re going?” he sneered.