Rockaway (4 page)

“Lundy's. But that's in Sheepshead Bay. We go after shooting, sometimes.”

“Let's go. You like seafood? I'm starving.”

“You know, I've never been to Brooklyn,” she says. “I picture it like in movies.
Moonstruck
.
Goodfellas
. Woody Allen stuff.” She glances at Marty, to include him.

“I don't want to eat yet,” says Marty.

“You want to come for dinner?” Julius asks her; she hesitates, unsure whether Marty has merely postponed the dinner, or declined his inclusion entirely.

“I don't know . . . I should still get a few hours' work done.” There's spinach left, she thinks, and pasta waiting for her. I might open a can of tuna.

“Tell you what, gimme your number, I'll call you in an hour.”

“Okay . . .” She scribbles on a page of her sketchpad, rips it off, hands it to him. She wonders if Marty will be hungry in an hour.

“What's this?” Julius asks.

“The phone number.”

“This's the house number. My brother, he's married to Rose eighteen years, you think I don't know Pearl's telephone number?” Julius takes the scrap from her and passes it to Marty. “Here. You keep that.” Marty shrugs, and puts it in the pocket of his sweatsuit. He nods at her, turns, and strolls away, heading back along the shoreline toward the Rockaway homes. Julius takes out his phone. “Gimme your cell. I'll program it in mine. See? We can do this now. Look how good this works.”

Julius doesn't call until seven-thirty, at which point Bernadette and Avery have already taken over the kitchen with some kind of stew, are banging pots, bellowing at and around each other. Julius's first-person pronouns indicate he's coming to pick her up alone. She's hungry, and the yelling in the kitchen is giving her a headache. She decides to go to dinner, but also decides, at least, that she will partly stick to her resolution and not wash her hair. An assertion of indifference.

“Do you know Julius?” she inquires of Avery as he pours out basmati rice from a massive burlap sack he and Bernadette keep in the storeroom off the kitchen.

“Ah, Julius. Yes, he is uncle to Susan, I think. You are going out?” He seems very pleased, relieved almost, that she will not be having her dinner alone.

I have been eating my dinner alone by choice, she wants
to tell him, but says nothing. She just smiles, nods, and exits by the kitchen door to wait outside the house.

“We will be keeping the light on for you, yes?” he booms after her.

WHEN SHE GETS into Julius's car, a metallic gold Jaguar, she breathes in air freshly sweetened with men's cologne; it troubles her for being as unperfumed as she is, and also for its scent of expectation.

They leave Rockaway, and, as they drive across the Marine Parkway Bridge, he asks her if she's ever been married. She says no, and then decides it's blatantly rude not to return the question.

“Nope. Lived with a lady for twelve years, though. Moira. Irish Catholic girl, there you go. Should find me a nice Jewish girl. Have kids. Not too late for me, huh?”

She smiles, nods, peers out the window. “Hey, Flatbush Avenue,” she says. “I guess I am officially in Brooklyn. Looks like a big field.”

“Yeah,” he says. “We're going through Marine Park now. That's Bennett Field, over there. Lots of famous places around here. I'll drive you by Coney Island, later. Brighton Beach. Better in the day, though.”

At Lundy's he propels her to the oyster bar and announces his plan to just begin the evening here, for cocktails and appetizers. A chalkboard listing freshly caught options hangs on fishnet over their heads. Julius orders from the bartender—a guy dressed as a pirate, briskly quartering lemons—vodka martinis and a half dozen each of littleneck and topneck clams, and Wellfleet oysters. She has never heard of Wellfleet and decides to look up their classification in her book when she gets home. Julius cocks back his head and lets an oyster slide from shell to throat; she instead uses her tiny fork to rip free the oyster's last clinging shred and transfer it primly to her mouth.

“They'd make good spoons, wouldn't they?” she says, replacing the empty oyster shell in its berth of crushed ice. “I've been collecting them on the beach. I feel like I'm choosing flatware for my bridal registration.”

“What, honey?”

“Oh, nothing.” She touches her lips to her martini, and reaches for a littleneck. The oyster pirate brings her another martini at Julius's crooked finger, then, smiling, shucks oyster after oyster. She wonders if he ever cuts himself by accident. She wonders if the lemon juice from all those wedges burns.

He asks if she has any kids, and she tells him No, but she is very close to her parents. They're a very close family. Her parents are just wonderful. They're getting older,
though. She tells him her mother is in poor health now, liver problems and maybe a transplant down the road, that her father has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But early stage. They are treating it with hormone therapy, she adds, sipping her martini, and are all very hopeful.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. “Hormone therapy. They say that works great, can sometimes do the whole job. Or maybe with the radiation they do. The younger you are, that's when it's bad. But you get hit at sixty-five, seventy, you're okay, you know? Something else's gonna kill you first.” He seems contemplative and informed on this subject, and she realizes, after all, that he probably isn't that much younger than her father. “It's nice they got you to depend on now,” he adds.

“Yes,” she says. “I live, well I
lived
, just down the street. I do their shopping, take them to their appointments, stuff like that. They're fun to cook for. I like to make them special meals, healthy things, you know. Nonfat sour cream. Hide the vegetables.”

“See, that's really something, a daughter like you. Really something.” He nods approvingly at her, and she smiles, basks a little, then waves away the compliment.

“Oh, they're wonderful. They're doing great. Really strong. They'll both probably live a long, long time, yet.” She takes a healthy swallow of martini. “Thank God.”

The shrimp cocktail arrives; a rhomboid dish of thick
crimson sauce, the shrimps clinging to its glass rim like drowning people clutching at a lifeboat.

When the check comes she pokes her hand at it, but Julius bemusedly slaps a credit card on top, away from her. The oyster pirate smiles knowingly at her and she understands, with Julius paying for the evening, that she now has a duty to be a charming, attentive companion. She needs to stop discussing stupid and unkind things like prostate cancer and oyster shell bridal spoons. The thought of the rest of the evening still to go like this exhausts her.

“You look a little like Anthony Quinn,” she tells him.

“Yeah?” he says, pleased. “Hey, see, then I got time yet. He was still having kids up till the end, right?”

“Right,” she assures him. “Never too late for a fresh start.”

Before they leave he loudly asks the manager where to go for real Italian food around here; she thinks this is meant to underscore for her that while he once was from here, he is now from Manhattan. The manager snaps up a card from a large clamshell on the counter, scribbles, and hands it to him. “Marino's,” he says. “Eighteenth and a hunnert sixty-seven. Ask for Dean. Tell him Larry from Lundy's sent yover.”

Julius gets lost. They drive through brightly lit Little Odessa, on a tunnel-like street beneath an elevated train, where they pass pierogi stands selling homemade borscht and Russian nightclubs advertising acts in neon Cyrillic letters.
That
was a great trip, she says, when I was in Russia,
and launches into the story of traveling Europe the summer after college, before she was supposed to move to Chicago for grad school, the tour meant to study Balthus's naked little girls at the Pompidou, Goya's witchy women, gouaches in the Prado—she remembers roaming careless and carefree, lightweight everything tossed in a nylon backpack, the gossamer-float sense of skimming trains—and tells him how, the funny thing of the story is, really, that her most vivid memory is standing in line for hours outside the Hermitage to get real Russian vodka, how there turned out to be a glass bottle shortage and so vodka was doled out in condoms, seriously, men rushing home with their drooping latex phalluses of booze, but Julius interrupts to point out Coney Island in an open-ended way, as if expecting her to want to ride the rollercoaster. She then tries asking questions about his work in Manhattan, his upcoming trip to Cuba, but finally realizes his constant What, honey?s and What, sweetheart?s in response means he's rather deaf. But he doesn't seem particularly ill at ease with silence, so she stops talking at all.

Marino's is on the other side of Brooklyn, and in the end it takes them fifty silent and cologne'd minutes driving through revolving strips of Ethiopian, Russian, Italian, Hassidic, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to get there. To her dismay, they are told there will be a forty-five minute wait, but Julius hands Larry-from-Lundy's card to the maître d' to give to Dean, and they are immediately seated in the
prime booth of a black and pink Art Deco room with vertical strips of mirror on the walls. Julius pre-orders the chocolate soufflé, requests another round of martinis, which, when they arrive, he announces inferior to martinis in the city. It's the vodka, he tells her, they try to pass off the cheap stuff. He lists better restaurants in Manhattan he will take her to. Over the penne arrabiata he inquires with circuitous and excessive delicacy how old she is and then seems both surprised and disappointed at almost-thirty-five; she feels briefly guilty, as though she'd deliberately sought to tantalize with the false impression of fertility and youth. She reassures him of her ability to impersonate twenty-something with the story of how she still gets carded in supermarkets when she buys wine. He seems cheered and charmed, too, by the fact that she purchases her wine in supermarkets, and promptly orders three glasses of the restaurant's finest cabernets, in order to cultivate her palate. She pretends to be able to discern a difference and insists on drinking down the three glasses by herself, to avoid his getting drunk and aggressive or getting them killed on the drive home. When she asks how old he is, he coyly tells her the year of his birth and makes her do the math.

Fifty-seven, she figures. No, fifty-eight.

“Most shells have a life span of about two to fifteen years,” she says. “The larger ones live longer, they can make it up to seventy-five.” My father is only sixty-six, she thinks.

“What, sweetheart?”

“Thank you very much for dinner,” she says loudly.

“Yeah, pretty lucky I found you out there today, on the beach,” he says, looking happy. “Thought that was probably you, sitting there. I knocked at the door, but no one was home. Pretty lucky.” She doesn't point out the lack of luck involved—that if she hadn't been sitting on the beach, she likely would've been in the house. She decides to let him think he has found something.

When he offers her a sip of his after-dinner Frangelico she gulps three times.

Her seatbelt is unbuckled five houses down from Nana's, and when he slows then stops the car she leans in quickly to peck him on the cheek; he clasps the back of her head with his abalone-thick hand, holding her face against his for an extra moment.

“You want to maybe have dinner Friday? I'll know tomorrow if Cuba's happening this week or not, I'll call you.”

She hurries into bed without toothbrushing or face-washing; his cologne, cloying and stale, she finds when she awakens in the morning, has transferred from his face to her cheek, to her pillow, to her sweater, and drifts through the rest of the house, mingling with the curry for days.