The Greeks of Beaubien Street (20 page)

“I love you, dad!” she exclaimed loudly. “I changed my mind, I don’t need to know.”

“I love you, too, but now that it’s out, we need to keep going, we need to have everything out in the open. It’s not what you think. Just hear me out.” He looked at his family and knew that what he would reveal would change everything. Nick and Paula would no longer be welcome at the store. Christmas in the city would be minus two people, maybe more if sides were taken. John and his wife Liz socialized with Nick and Paula. So did Pete and Joan. They would probably be the first to leave. But Gus was daydreaming, seconds ticking by as he delayed the inevitable.

“Nick and Christina had an affair and Christopher is Nick’s son. I have loved him like he was my own child. It was sad and unfortunate, but Chris and I loved each other and wanted to be together. She didn’t love Nick. It was a silly flirtation that got out of hand. My brother is a formidable man. I’m sure Christina was swept off her feet by his attention. I don’t know how Paula found out, but it’s clear she must be lashing out at Jill because she is hurting.” He looked down at his daughter, sitting with Alex’s arm around her shoulders.

“When you were born two years later, it healed us. You were all that we needed to justify our marriage. Thank you for that. I am so sorry that you had to find out about Christopher in this way. Please forgive me.” Jill pushed her chair back and reached out to hug her father. She wasn’t an emotional woman, and no one in the room had ever seen her cry, even when she was a small child. But her eyes filled with tears as she held her father, imagining the strength it took to remain in a relationship with both his brother and her mother. The betrayal must have been horrible. She never, ever had received even an inkling of suggestion that there was any trouble between her father and mother or Gus and Nick. She couldn’t speak, not trusting her voice.

The rest of the family sat silently, wheels turning wildly in their brains, trying to think back in history and see if there was a sign they’d missed. Maria finally stood up, pulling the waist band of her dress down from under her ample bosom, and said what they needed to hear. “Good riddance. Paula Mac was getting on my last nerve.” The elders started laughing, but Jill wasn’t there yet. She was thinking about Paula and some of the things she said to her over the years that may have meant she was on to her husband, or just jealous of Christina. The milling around began once again after its rude interruption. Maria came around the table and tackled her niece with a hug.

“It doesn’t make any difference. I hope you will come to realize it. No father ever loved a child more than my brother loved his kids,” she said. Jill nodded her head in acknowledgment as her aunt and father embraced. The others looked on, moved at the exchanged, but determined that the momentary loss of sanity by Nick and the late Christina wouldn’t be the topic of conversation. There were card games to play.

Liz motioned to John to follow her; she wasn’t finished with the intrigue and wanted to interrogate her husband. They went down into the darkened store together, John reluctantly following his wife.

“Did you know? You talk to Nick every goddamned day. You had to know he was screwing your sister-in-law!” She was angry and irrationally jealous.

“I wasn’t the one doing it
so don’t get pissed at me!” John whispered. “No! I didn’t know. I suspected, but Nick wouldn’t tell me. Nick was despondent after the baby was born. Do you remember?” He thought about his brother and sister-in-law and tried to remember. “I saw them together. It was innocent enough, they were in her car. Do you remember that big tank of a Buick my dad bought her so she could drive to Plymouth every day? They were sitting in it, just talking. It wasn’t like they were hiding; it was parked right there on Antoine. It must have been on a Sunday because we were here; you were with Paula and I was driving in from visiting someone uptown. I waved at them - they saw me and waved back. They must have gotten out and walked back to the store right away because after I parked, we all walked in together. I never thought anything about it until later.”

John looked at his wife, who shook her head
no
. It figured her husband was so naïve as to think those two would be in a parked car together and not think it was suspicious. She didn’t remember anything about Nick after the baby being born because she was so traumatized by not being able to have her own child. What she remembered feeling was raging jealousy against Christina while she was pregnant. She’d even had a glimmer of pleasure when the baby was born in such bad shape. For years afterward she would feel horrible about it, chalking it up to immaturity and heartbreak. Out of nowhere, it occurred to her that Gus, Peter, and Big Andy were the only boys who had children, and that only Andy and Gus had boys. But it wasn’t Gus, was it? It was Nick after all. Andy would be the only one to carry on the family name with Greg and Danny.

“How was Gus able to hide it all these years? It is mind boggling,” Liz admitted. Never a big fan of her husband’s extended family, she felt a little compassion for her quiet brother-in-law. “No disrespect to Gus, but he certainly is no match for Nick.” The moment the words were out of her mouth she regretted it. John looked her questioningly.

“Now what the hell does that mean?” he asked his wife. “Nick is such a stud? Jesus, Liz.”

“Well, not
is
.
Was
. He
was
such a stud. Don’t tell me you guys didn’t notice that Nick always had an audience.” She had to face it, the secret was out. Better to deal with it now rather than wait until the ride home. Eaton Rapids was a long car ride from Detroit to be made in silence.

“Men don’t think like that, sorry to disappoint you. But evidently, you saw something that I missed. Did Nick ever hit on you? I don’t mean now, I mean back then. When we were kids.” Liz had to hide her smile. Gus and Christina were the babies of the family and she, John, and Nick, the elders. Her husband still saw her as an eighteen year old in spite of her gray hair and crow’s feet.

“No dear, try to remember what we were doing at that time of our life. We were still working full time jobs. Nick and Paula lived two hours away from us. He always treated me with respect, if not a little apathy. Maybe that was a good thing.” Liz turned to look at her husband. They had been married all of their life and as far as she knew, he had been faithful to her as she had been to him, except some flirtation with someone she worked with, but it never amounted to much, and definitely nothing harmful. Why did married people succumb to affairs? She knew what her motivation could have been; her husband was ignoring her. Day after day, she tried to engage him in any way she could, but he wasn’t interested. She gave up on getting pregnant when he rebelled against the advice of the doctors and wouldn’t cooperate. It was too embarrassing to admit to anyone, let alone her gynecologist, that her husband didn’t want to have sex as often as they were supposed to be doing it. Liz never understood it. Her friends talked like their husbands were stalking them around the clock.

“I just remembered that Paula told me Nick was
insatiable
. Those were her exact words. She said they did it every night.” She looked at John. “That’s probably why I was so jealous of her. If you remember, we weren’t breaking any records in that department at the time.”
There, I said it. The pink elephant that was our lack of sex life.

“Why’d you stay with me?” Liz said, repeating her thoughts. John was gazing out the back door onto the alleyway. The moonlight illuminated the area and there was a cat sitting on the top of the dumpster. He didn’t want to, but he had to respond. He felt like they had reached a place in their life together in which there was no turning back. He looked at his wife. It was an ancient argument. Why didn’t they have sex more often? He could never give her an answer that satisfied her. He didn’t really know himself. She was attractive, in good shape, clean. He was in love with her but after all these years, what did that mean?

He just wasn’t that interested. He felt like she was never satisfied with him. No matter what he did, it was never enough. The smallest stumble turned into a huge fight, with curse words thrown at each other, or worse, silence. They could go for days without speaking to each other. Is this really the way they would spend the rest of their lives? They were newly retired. It had gotten worse since Liz was home all day. He quit working first and had a routine he liked; now she was there expecting him to perform all day. They had to run errands together, and do projects, plan trips, fix up the house. He didn’t want to do any of those things. He wanted to be left alone. He could see clearly for the first time in years. Why’d
did
he stay with her?

“My family didn’t get divorces,” he said in answer to her question. She looked at him confused, having forgotten already what her last words to him were. “We were taught that unless you were miserable, you stayed with your spouse until you died. That’s why I stayed.” He knew they had to be truthful to each other and it would be the only way that they would survive this disclosure. She was unhappy because he didn’t love her the way she wanted, and he wasn’t capable of it. He didn’t know why. “I don’t know why I was unable to give you what you needed,” he said, repeating his thoughts. “I lost interest in sex. I couldn’t get you pregnant; maybe that was the reason.” He remembered that each month he would pray that her period wouldn’t come, but then it did, and she would be so depressed, practically inconsolable, and it was his fault. He thought with a start,
the same thing happened to Nick and Paula.
But it wasn’t Nick’s fault after all. Nick had gotten his brother’s wife pregnant right away. He wondered how Paula found out. He’d muster up the courage to ask Nick, if he was still around. Their car was parked out back so it didn’t look like they had gone home yet in spite of Gus asking them to leave.

“Sex isn’t everything,” John said. “You make it sound like we wasted our life because we didn’t do it every minute like my jackass of a brother. I didn’t leave you because I loved you, but you were miserable. You were the unhappy one, not me. So let’s be sure to keep the story straight.” Liz was getting a headache. They had talked in a circle. They wouldn’t resolve anything either way. It was an old marriage. They would probably die together, unless he found a younger woman to love. She could always pray for that.

Chapter 26

Nick and Paula Zannos were walking in front of the Greektown Casino fighting about Christina. It was a first; after all, Christina had been dead for over twenty five years. The purging felt awesome, in spite of being frightening to witness. People stepped off the curb into the street to give the big couple room. Both tall people, they had a commanding presence even in the out of doors, and especially when they were yelling at each other.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Nick hollered. “You couldn’t tell me that you knew first? Give me a chance to explain?”

“What’s there to explain?” Paula yelled back. “You fucked your brother’s wife! Jesus Christ, Nick! You betrayed me for over thirty years! How many other bastards do you have out there?” He tried to pull her into an alley they were passing, but she was almost as strong as her husband and wouldn’t yield. “Stop it! I’m not going in there!” So he pushed her against the brick of the building.

“Stop it, Paula. We’re not going to solve anything like this.” He kept her shoulders pinned against the brick. He hadn’t looked at her up closely for a long time, not to really see her. She was a beauty in her youth, peaches and cream complexion with huge blue eyes that stared through him now with a knowledge that no man wants his wife to have. Age was showing on her face. He wasn’t attracted to her anymore. She’d known he was a player all along, just didn’t think he would stoop to betraying his own brother. Her head dropped down, her chin to her chest. She had looked the other way for years, and now this final travesty. That pathetic man-child that she had defended at every opportunity was her husband’s son! How was it possible? As much as she hated to give in to self-pity, she allowed it and started crying.

“God damn you, Nick. This is really the last straw. I want a divorce. I am so finished with it! You can hire someone to wash your fucking clothes and clean the house. I’m through.” She pushed away from his grasp and he let her go. “I’ll take the car; get one of your brothers to take you home.” He stood and watched as she walked back toward the store. He felt a strange vibration of excitement and horror. He was caught, that was the hardest part. But now that it was out in the open, he could begin living.

Getting a divorce at their age wasn’t going to be easy, but it wasn’t unheard of. He thought of the old joke about the couple in their nineties who went to the divorce lawyer. “Why’d you wait so long?” the attorney asked. The old couple responded, “We were waiting for the kids to die.” Only Nick and Paula didn’t have kids. His parents were gone, and they were the only people who would have been hurt by a divorce.

Nick had a child however. His son, Christopher. He drove from Brighton to Plymouth almost every day to see him, an hour round trip. It was that devotion to her nephew that finally tipped an unhappy, lonely Paula off, throwing her into a frenzy of investigative probing until she found the proof she sought: paternity testing Nick had done himself when the science became faster and easier. Along with the test results, she found letters from Christina that Gus surely didn’t know existed, and receipts for Christopher’s care amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. How could a state cop pay those bills? He didn’t even bother hiding them; she wondered if he didn’t want her to find the stash.

Paula ran to the alley behind the store. She had her pocketbook and car keys; they could throw her clothes away if Nick decided not to bring them home. Getting in the car, she noticed Liz and John standing in the dark store, looking at her through the window. She waved, but didn’t stop and they didn’t come after her. She would think later how grateful she was for that. They let her keep a little of her pride.