Spanish Disco (21 page)

I was there.

I wish I could say that we had another moment. A deathbed moment of recognition. But I consoled myself that we had what we had. A lifetime of closeness. He drifted off to sleep, and I held his hand while he took a last breath. One last deep, struggling breath. Then a groan. Then beeps and echoes of hospital machinery. Then nothing. I had signed a DNR order. He was gone.

Lou was there for the two days my father struggled to breathe in the hospital. We never spoke Roland’s name. We
didn’t talk shop. We talked about my father and how he loved me. We talked about how my father had even tolerated my first husband, my last boyfriend, my temper, my rebelliousness.

“He saw himself in you, Cass,” Lou said. “You’re talented, but even if you were a shy, retiring housewife with a ditch-digging, beer-swilling husband and a minivan full of screaming brats, he would have loved you.”

Even as Lou said it and I smiled at the ridiculousness of
me
being a housewife, I knew it was true. I was loved simply because I was born.

We cremated him. I didn’t want an open-casket wake. I didn’t want to look at a piece of waxen corpse and think of him in a box. So we cremated him. Just Lou and I were there beforehand. We didn’t say prayers. Just words. “I miss you. I love you,” I whispered before they took his body to be burned. For Lou, simply, “Say hello to Helen for me.” I thought of scattering the ashes in the ocean. That seemed romantic to me. But my father hated the beach. Hated the sand and the stickiness and sweat. And after years of watching him slip away from me, I wanted him close. So I told them I wanted to take him home…to José and my apartment.

After they burned him, I returned to my apartment. It suddenly felt claustrophobic to me. Because now I had no other purpose. I would go to work; I would come home; I would drink coffee; I would drink tequila; I would stay up too late; but I would not now have Stratford Oaks. I wouldn’t have somewhere to go and someone to love and
care for. Maybe Maria was right. She needed her baby, Roland Riggs. My baby had died. Now I had no one. Only José.

Of course, I’d never had a pet my whole life, let alone a rabbit. But it was strange how José seemed to sense my grief. It washed over me like storm waves hitting the rocks on the beach, throwing me into the undertow until I could come up for a gasp of air, only to find myself swallowing my grief again like so much saltwater. José would hop over to my bed, which I refused to leave, and I would pick him up and let him sniff my shot glass of tequila, to which he’d shake his head back and forth and sort of sneeze. Then we’d watch TV, and José would come up to my face and nudge it.

After days of not answering my phone, and days of tequila and rabbit sniffles, I realized I was in sorry shape.

“José, with my track record in the romance department, I always assumed I would end up one of those batty old women with fifteen cats and a library card. Not that I ever would have a cat. But it’s a cliché. Old lady with lots of cats. Kind of like ‘fucks like a rabbit.’ Cliché. However, and no offense to you, José, an old lady with a rabbit and a fifth of tequila by her bed watching re-runs of
Gilligan’s Island
is far more pathetic. Old lady with a rabbit. It just sounds bad.”

José took no offense.

Over the weekend, Roland called. I picked up the phone, though I had ignored Lou’s calls for several days.

“Cassie?”

“Hmm?”

“I heard about your father from Lou. I’m very sorry. Very sorry. Grief can keep you a prisoner.”

“You have a little experience in that department.”

“Years and years I wasted, Cassie. Don’t let it consume you. Go to London.”

“London? I don’t think so.”

“Then go to Paris. Go to the moon. Just don’t go where I went.”

“I’ll think about it, Roland.”

“How’s José?”

“About now? My best friend.”

“That and a fifth of tequila, right?”

“We did get to know each other pretty well, didn’t we?”

“Well…don’t forget Maria and me. And Lou.”

I found myself welling up. “I won’t.”

After I hung up the phone, I cried into José’s fur. I missed my Daddy. Even if it meant just holding his hand and him never recognizing me again. Sometimes in life, you take what you can get. Sometimes what you can get isn’t enough.

30

T
he cock that roared raised its proverbial head and called me. My ex-husband, the now semifamous rock star John Dillinger called late one evening. Assuming it was Lou, and knowing he’d hound me endlessly until I picked up the phone, I answered on the third ring.

“Cass, love?”

As if in a dream, I felt myself transported back to my early twenties, to that girl I used to be.

“Johnny?” I smiled, picturing his blond locks standing straight on end, which was how he used to wear them.

“I heard about your old man. Obit in the
New York Times,
sweetie. So sorry. Absolutely sucks like fuckin’ eggs.”

With poetry like that, how did I ever leave him?

“Thanks, Johnny.”

“Are you okay?”

I stared at my bedside table of unwashed glasses with half-finished tequila at the bottom of each. José rested on my stomach, sleeping.

“Okay is a rather relative term in my life right now, Johnny. No…I would not say I am particularly okay,” I sniffled. “I’m drinking like a fish and talking to a rabbit, which is far too complex to explain right now. But to answer your question, no. But it’s not like you can do anything. Not like anyone can do anything.”

“I know. Sometimes just knowin’ someone cares though…you know. It can help. I could fly down and cheer you up. Take you down to South Beach and party and forget it all for a while.”

I breathed deeply. Memories of his immense endowment flooded my mind. “No. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’d sleep with you, you know. For old times’ sake and all that. We never could resist each other. And I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Couldn’t hurt.” I pictured his lopsided grin as he said it. Twice after our divorce, we ran into each other in Manhattan bars. Years apart did nothing to dim the sexual spark between us, and we raced home to my apartment both times and fucked. With us, it was never making love. It was five or six times a night, intense and fiercely physical. And when morning came, each time, I rolled over and thought what a mistake we made. He rolled over and grinned, but I knew he thought the same thing.

I laughed out loud. “Maybe…Maybe not, though. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure Cassie X. Sure,” he said, calling me by my nickname, “X,” from the little-known fact that my middle name is Xavria.

“Johnny, was I really a terrible wife?”

“Terrible? I don’t know. You can’t cook worth a fuck, you refuse to clean. You’re moody, insensitive, drink too much, heaven help the man who speaks to you before you’ve had your coffee. You smoke too much—”

“I gave up smoking.”

“Well, point one for Cassie X., then. No…you weren’t a terrible wife. You always made me laugh. When you weren’t hurling plates at me. And we were great in the sack, Cass. We always had that. Nothing quite compares.”

“Come on. I read the gossip rags on occasion. I know you were rumored to have bedded two supermodels at the same time.”

“I plead the fifth.”

“There…see.”

“But I didn’t love them, Cass.”

“I’m sorry I made such a mess of our marriage.”

“Listen, Cass, we were just combustible, you know. Can’t live with ya…can’t live without ya. Mostly though…”

There was a long silence as he collected his thoughts, and I sensed he was going to chicken out of telling me whatever it was.

“You can tell me, Johnny.”

“It was the time you had the flu. You know. That did it. That broke my heart.”

There was another silence, and I tried hard to remember what the hell it was he was talking about.

The flu. It had hit me on a Friday. I tried to stay in the office, but Lou sent me home.

“For God’s sake, Cassie, you look so frightening we had a copy editor quit this morning. Go home. Go home! You’re white as a sheet.”

I looked up from my desk. “Can’t. Have to muddle through this latest book proposal from Lillian Palmer.”

“No. It can wait. Go home. You’ll get us all sick. And if I get the Hong Kong fucking flu, I promise you I will get even in ways you cannot in that young brain of yours yet imagine.”

I tried feebly to grin. “Try me.”

But in the end, I started feeling downright delirious. By the time my cab deposited me at Johnny’s and my apartment building, I knew I was running a high fever. Upstairs, in my bathrobe, I took my temperature and watched it rocket to 104 degrees. I climbed into bed. I slept. I moaned. I whimpered. So now, I could not imagine what Johnny Dillinger was talking about. What the hell did that have to do with breaking his heart?

“Okay, Johnny. I remember the flu. I remember it was some sort of Asian flu. Some hellish flu that kept me in bed for four days, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“You wouldn’t let me help you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Cassie, I have never cooked in my life. We ate takeout
constantly, but I went to the corner Korean grocer’s and bought stuff to make soup. And I cooked and I…I tried to bring you compresses and aspirin and juice. And I made you soup, and you wouldn’t eat it.”

I took in what he said and felt a gnawing in my gut.

“You know,” I finally said, quietly, “I have heard, all my life, that divorced people can boil down the reason for their divorce on a single straw that finally breaks the camel’s back. The one thing that tips the scales and makes them realize the marriage is doomed. I can remember throwing plates at you, pulling a kitchen knife on you one time—”

“We were both drunk.”

“Yes, but nonetheless, for most people that would be the defining moment. I cheated on you…one time, but…anyway, we rocked and rolled and tore each other apart and you remember that I didn’t eat your soup?”

“It wasn’t the soup. It was the act of making the soup. It was that I wanted to help you. I wanted, for once in our marriage, for you to
need
me. And you refused. You refused to need me. And I have written a hundred songs and sold lots of records because everyone, Cassie, needs to be needed, and when the person you love refuses to let down her guard, you can feel the cold and it ain’t gonna work.”

“Soup.”

“Soup.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Cassie. It was a long time ago.”

“Well…if you were here now, I’d eat your soup.”

“I’ll fly there in a minute, Cass.”

“I know. But I think we should maybe not do that, Johnny. It may have been about soup, but we really can’t be together. We both know that.”

“Sucks, don’t it?”

“Like eggs, Johnny.”

He was quiet, then whispered. “I liked your old man, Cass. He never judged me for all my tattoos and earrings.”

“No. He didn’t. He tried to love you. Even if he didn’t understand us.”

“Well, if you need anything, you call my management company in New York. They’ll see I get the message.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hung up the phone and thought about Johnny’s soup. It always came down to one moment. My father loved my mother for years after she left us. He just couldn’t get over her. And then one Christmas—I was in the fourth grade— I was scheduled to be the Madonna in St. Mary’s Holy Mother Catholic School’s Annual Christmas Pageant. Though the nuns found me a bit on the unruly side, they were taken by my then-angelic face and naturally rosy cheeks.

Dressed in a white robe, I carried the baby brother of Margaret Foley to the manger, while Billy Collins played Joseph, even though he was shorter than I was. Seated on a bale of hay in the manger set up on stage, my father said he cried at how beautiful I was. Cameras snapped. Parents
oohed and ahhed. My father looked around for my mother. She had pulled a no-show. Later she called and told him her dinner date had insisted they go for cocktails first. But it didn’t matter what she said. She could have been in an ambulance with her legs amputated below the knees by a freak taxicab accident. In that one moment, as I played the mother of God, my father stopped loving my mother.

It was his soup.

“Soup,” I said aloud to José. He looked at me, and his ears perked up. Finally, I picked up the telephone and dialed information.

“British Airways, please.”

My palms felt clammy. But the gnawing feeling in my gut was giving way to butterflies. I had to know if Michael and I could be together or if we had already experienced our soup moment.

“I’d like information on flights to London from Miami.”