Come Pour the Wine (32 page)

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Well, it’s just that I feel sort of … crummy. I mean the kids growing up and all. You know when I really felt it?”

“When?”

“The day of Nicole’s graduation. I tried acting like a damned kid myself. Fixing the hamburgers and the hot dogs and putting on a big jolly show about it. But I felt like an old futz, standing there with that apron over my swimming trunks and that crazy chef’s hat. Looking at all those kids swimming, their young bodies … Well, I just felt old, over the hill.”

“If this will make you feel any better, do you know what your daughter said to me?”

“What?”

“That her father was the most handsome man she’d ever seen in her whole life. And Linda said to Nicole, ‘If I didn’t like your mother so much I’d make a play for him.’”

A broad smile, in spite of himself. “She did? You mean Linda, a fourteen-year-old girl?”

Janet laughed. “Don’t you remember being fourteen? It’s a betwixt and between age, when you don’t know how to handle all your new feelings.”

“So is forty.”

“It shouldn’t be, especially when a man looks like you,” she said, winking and tilting her head. “I believe you know what I mean?”

He knew. Off came the white silk nightgown, and he proceeded to show her—and himself. Before dropping off to sleep, she whispered, “You’re getting better with age. Keep it up.”

At nine the next morning Jason came into the living room of their suite at the Excelsior Hotel. He found Nicole dressed and ready for the day’s excursion but the door to his parents’ room was closed. That was unusual, he thought, especially when they had planned the day for sightseeing. “Where are the folks?”

“Sleeping.”

“How come? We were supposed to go to the Catacombs early.”

“The Catacombs have been here for thousands of years.”

“But we won’t. I’m going to wake them up.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Jay.”

“Why? Everything closes down here at two for their crazy siestas.”

“I know … that’s why the Italians have so many children.”

“What’s that got to do with the folks and us?”

“You know all about the birds and bees? Parents know about it too.”

“You mean,
mother and …
?”

“That’s what I mean … Okay, baby brother, let’s go down to breakfast, hop a bus and strike out on our own.”

“They won’t know where we’ve gone.”

“I’ll leave a note.”

Janet blinked the sleep from her eyes, then looked at the clock. It was late, already eleven-thirty. She hastily put on her robe and went to the sitting room, expecting to find the children and apologize for spoiling their day, but the room was empty. Then she saw the note propped up against the lamp. “Dear mom and dad, when in Rome do as the Romans do.
Molto amore.
Will be back at three. Love, Nicole.”

Janet blushed. She had been the one who’d fought for sex education in the school, she reminded herself. Well, fighting for a principle was one thing, but when it got down to a personal level and your children knew
all
about what happened behind closed doors …

She showed the note to Bill.

He laughed. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Get back into bed, wench.”

For the rest of the trip Bill was wound up like a mechanical man. He took Janet go-go dancing until the place closed, followed by cappuccinos on the Via Veneto. The next night he took the family to an Italian nightclub. Didn’t understand a word but he laughed nonetheless, caught up in the spirit of it. Go-go-go …

In Venice, he sent the children off to explore the Doges Palace while he hired an old-fashioned gondola, complete with curtains. They made love as the gondolier broke into a robust “
O sole mio.
” They laughed over how hackneyed the serenade was, but couldn’t have cared if the gondolier had sung the Italian national anthem. This was the only way to go in Venice. Go-go-go …

Bill came home feeling, he told himself, a reborn man … He beat everyone at golf, his handball improved with the lessons he took, and he decided Janet and he should drive in to the city more often to go dancing and take in the shows. Suburbia was getting a little boring, a little too predictable. Same thing week after week. Wednesdays, poker. Sundays, swimming and barbecues. Saturday nights, dinner at the country club. Boring. He decided they had to spend more time in the city. Janet went along with it.

It was the first week after their return and he had asked Janet to meet him in the city for lunch. Lunch turned out to be champagne, caviar and chicken divan, all served in a suite at the St. Regis and followed by four hours in bed.

It would be great to spend next Saturday night in the same room at the St. Regis, he told her. After they had dined and danced, of course.

She smiled and agreed, but wondered if this room wasn’t going to become a home away from home. Uneasily, she packed an overnight case and left the children with Kit for the weekend….

No doubt about it, Bill was reliving his youth … or trying very, very hard to. But time, as they said, stood still for no man. Including Bill McNeil….

This year Janet gave Bill’s birthday party at the country club. He would have been grateful had she not given him that honor. He was less than enthusiastic about blowing out forty-one candles … it looked like the night Mrs. O’Leary burned down Chicago. But like it or not, birthdays rolled on.

And so did anniversaries. Difficult to believe, thought Bill … the years were slipping away so fast … so damn fast…. Nineteen had come and gone, and this time he felt a shiver go through him. He’d fought against it, he really had, but try as he might, the idea,
the fact,
of marriage, of being, as they said, “hitched,” weighed, pulled heavily. But as always he was a man given to overlapping guilts, and to acting them out in a fashion hardly likely to give Janet an opportunity to know and help resolve them. Never go to bed mad, went the conventional wisdom … and so when really angry—the anger turned inward to become guilt—conventional wisdom also prescribed especially dedicated lovemaking … as though the flesh could cure all the ills of the heart … Well, for all his restlessness, Bill was really not a very unconventional man, and so this night he pursued it with a special passion, the better to blind himself—and Janet—to all their misgivings. Love conquers all….

L
OVE CONQUERS ALL? NOT
quite. Certainly not Bill’s increasing dislike of the commute between New York and Westchester. Or the overwhelming restlessness he would feel after dinner as he sat in his den trying to read the afternoon newspaper.

One evening he put down the paper and watched Janet as she worked on her tapestry—which she did almost every night now … it was her unknowing escape, though they didn’t discuss such notions. How could they … ? Good Lord, he thought, it took so little to make her happy. Didn’t
she
get bored, doing the same things over and over? Even watching her pull that piece of yarn up and down through the tiny holes in the canvas drove him nuts.

“Janet?”

“Yes,” her eyes still intent on her needlework.

“Now that the children are grown up I’d like to move back to the city.”

She looked up at him, said nothing.

“What do you say, Janet?”

What did she say? She shook her head, slowly, startled by his abruptness. “You mean just like that? Nicole is graduating from high school in June. We can’t pull her out of school now, and she’d be pretty upset about being split up from Mark Weiss. And Jason’s on the football team. What about all the friends they grew up with? It wouldn’t really be fair to the kids to uproot them now.”

“Janet, I wasn’t too keen about moving to the country, but I did because you wanted it, because it seemed the best place when the kids were young. But it’s different now. And as for Nicole and Mark, I thought we’d gone through that and she wasn’t going to see so much of him. She’s too young to be so serious. The move would be a good thing for her.”

“Would it really? And us? We’ve made our lives here—”

“Well, times change and so do people.”

“Of course they do. I believe that’s called life, and I’m not fighting it …” She thought of adding, Are you? Then thought again and said nothing.

It was the way they were….

In the weeks that followed, Bill tried to pretend that everything was fine, that everything would continue as before. The perfect family, living in complete contentment. But the perfect family caught on to the pretense. Conversation around the dinner table became stilted and at times there was total silence.

It was Nicole who finally brought the issue out in the open. One night as they sat through yet another silent meal, she looked at her father, then at her mother. The tension between them was obvious, and she was beginning to feel anxious about it. To her knowledge her parents never fought … But then, it wasn’t normal for married people not to. They must have kept their arguments behind closed doors. So she could only assume that something serious had happened, something they couldn’t resolve and that was making them act indifferently to each other. And it was getting worse all the time, affecting all of them now. If they were upset, why didn’t they just say so, maybe even talk about it? After all, she was eighteen and Jason was old enough to try to understand. And what he didn’t understand wouldn’t hurt him.

Finally she spoke up. “I don’t know if the two of you realize how … well … how uncomfortable this is for Jason and me … we’ve been sitting here night after night as if we’re waiting for the roof to cave in. What’s going on?”

Silence, as everyone but Nicole carefully avoided looking at one another.

“Well,” Nicole said, “are we going to talk about this?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s between your mother and me,” Bill told her. He wasn’t going to blame Janet and make
himself
look like a martyred husband. Children have to have some illusions. Still, it was damned hard not to think of Janet as selfish, thinking only about herself and the
family …
He’d made plenty of sacrifices for the family—eighteen years of commuting, eighteen years of suburban life that had been regimented down to the last boring minute.

Nicole was exasperated now. “But things that happen in this family aren’t just confined to the two of
you.
Not when it affects
us.”

Bill glanced at Janet, then quickly looked away. “Since you insist … I think it would be good for us to move back to the city, and your mother disagrees.”

“And
that’s
why we’ve been under this much strain? All because of a house?”

“It has nothing to do with a house.”

“Then what?”

“It’s a question of … cooperation.”

Nicole stared at him, her expression changing from surprise to disapproval. “In other words, your idea of cooperation is for
you
to make the decisions, uproot our family and move where you want. Suppose you decide on Tahiti? Should we all give up a life we’ve known so
you
can be a beachcomber?”

Bill was shocked at Nicole’s tone. “You’ve never spoken to me like that before and I very much resent it, Nicole.”

She reddened … there was, after all, no one she loved more than her father. Everyone knew that. “I’m sorry, dad, I really am, but I just don’t understand. This is our home, and you always seemed to love it here as much as we do.”

Janet sat absolutely still, feeling as if the earth were crumbling beneath her. Why hadn’t she seen it before? From the very beginning Bill had played the role of country squire so well that he’d even managed to convince himself for a while. Certainly he’d convinced her. But the truth was that he’d made the move to Westchester only for the sake of his family. That was the
role
he was expected to assume, and he’d played it for eighteen years. Now he could no longer manage it. The feelings he’d suppressed had reached the boiling-over point. Whatever he felt surfaced and he couldn’t control it.

Jason looked as bewildered as Nicole. “I’m not going to take sides with who wants what,” he said, “but I’m not going to move and give up my friends … if you and mom want to move to the city, then do it. But I’ll live with Aunt Kit.” He got up, ran to his room, locked the door and stared at his trophies. Stared hard to keep back the unmanly tears.

Janet went after him and knocked on his closed door. “Jay, may I come in?”

“No, mom, I want to be alone—”

“Please, darling.”

When she walked in he was sitting on his bed and angrily wiping away his tears. Janet sat next to him, not quite knowing what to say. Bill’s feelings counted, but so did theirs. There had to be something that would satisfy them all …

“Okay, mom, you’re here. What do you want to say?”

“Just this, Jay … people change … time changes them. But we’re still a family. I’d like you to come back inside so we can work this out—”

“Work what out? Didn’t you hear dad?”

“Yes, but people have to make compromises, Jay, and find the solutions.”

He didn’t move.

He looked so much like his father, Janet thought, the same chestnut hair, the same planes to the face, although the eyes were a deep blue like hers and Nicole’s. He even had some of his father’s stubbornness, though in recent years it had often been turned against Bill. Jason had grown up idolizing his father, just as Nicole had, but when he reached adolescence there had been sudden and unexpected tensions between them. Or maybe not so unexpected. It was probably the all too common rift—temporary, she hoped—that opened between father and son when the son began to be his own person and sensed that his father was resisting the change, as if it were a threat, a challenge.

She bit her lower lip. “You want us to come to an amicable agreement, don’t you, darling?”

Without looking at her, he got off the bed and followed her back to the dining room.

As Janet sat down she said, “You’re right, Nicole, we’ve spent the best part of our lives here and have a million wonderful memories. You and Jay have made friends you’ll have all your lives. But you’re both getting grown up and you’ll soon be making your own lives, whether you realize it or not. I’ve thought a lot about this”—she looked at Bill—“and I hope we can agree that maybe the best solution for everyone is if we keep the house until Jay graduates. After that, I feel my place, my life, is with your father.”