The Realm of Last Chances (26 page)

He washed his coffee cup and last night’s dishes and read for another couple hours before going upstairs to take a shower. When he got out and dried off, wrapping the towel around his waist, he stood beside the bedroom window, pulled the curtain back a few inches and peered out.

She and her husband were on the sidewalk in front of Vico Cignetti’s. Cal had a grocery sack in one hand, a guitar case in the other. She held a domed cake plate. Just as they stepped into the driveway, she looked over her shoulder toward his bedroom window, as if she knew he’d be standing there, and for an instant they gazed at each other. Then Kristin bowed her head and followed her husband inside.

vico was that rare man
who looked at home in the kitchen. He wore his checkered apron with aplomb, and when she remarked on its unusual pattern—rectangles overlapping squares, eight or ten different colors bleeding into one another—he told her he owned an entire collection. “Wanna see?” he asked, then threw open a floor-to-ceiling cabinet stocked with mops and brooms, dustpans and brushes and an impressive array of cleaning solutions. Mounted at the back was an apron rack, displaying a colorful assortment: black and white, green-and-gold checks, even a frilly little thing with a blue heart sewn onto a pink-and-white-checked background. “My daughter made that one for me on my sixtieth birthday.”

“Very nice,” she said, though the thought of him actually wearing it was incongruous at best. It belonged on a ten-year-old girl.

She deposited her cake plate on the counter and asked if she could help.

“Sure you can,” he said. “Pour yourself a glass of wine and provide scintillating company while the goons watch the Pats.”

“All right, I’ll be happy to.”

“Try that Barbera.” He gestured at an open bottle. “In the world at large, it’s got a less-than-stellar rep. In my house, it’s king. I started drinking it on my tenth birthday. I got up that morning, and my dad sat me down and handed me a glass. ‘Vico,’ he said, ‘you’re a man now.’ I’ve loved it ever since.”

She poured herself a glassful and took a sip. It tasted awful. “This is wonderful,” she told him.

He was busy trimming Brussels sprouts. “I’m going to roast these,” he told her. “See, most people don’t know it, but
when you boil or steam them, you lose almost all their cancer-retarding properties.”

“I didn’t know they had any.”

“Well, most people don’t. At my age, though, you learn to pay attention to anything that might prolong your time here. I don’t know what comes next, but I’ve got a feeling finding good Barbera there might be tough.”

While she sat at the kitchen table, watching him make deft slicing motions, he gave her the story of his life, all of which, he said, had been spent in Massachusetts. A graduate of North Shore State, he’d taken his first job in Gloucester, handling accounting for the Community Pier Association. “Did that till 1980 when my marriage broke up, at which point I decided I needed a change of scenery. So I moved down here and opened my own accounting firm, and it was still going strong when I retired. I sold it for a nice sum of money.”

To keep up her end of the conversation, she remarked that her assistant lived in Gloucester.

“Yeah? What’s her name?”

“Donna Taff.”

He laid his knife down, turned around and crossed his arms. “Jesus Christ. Hard Taffy works for you?”

“Hard Taffy?”

“That’s what … look, you probably don’t want to hear this. And I probably shouldn’t tell you.”

“Of course you should.” She figured a story was forthcoming about Donna’s stern, take-charge manner.

“Well, if you insist.” He refilled his wineglass and plopped down at the table, propping his chin in his hands and leaning forward conspiratorially. She saw the hearing aid stuck in his ear. “She and her husband, Charlie, used to be the biggest swingers in Gloucester.”

“
My
Donna?”

He winked. “She might be yours now, but she was a community asset back then. I bet she still is.”

She’d heard quite a bit of strange news over the last few days, but this was the only piece that made her need a drink. She took a big swallow of the ghastly wine, then another. And then she took another. “Donna must be sixty now,” she protested, the Barbera burning her nostrils.

“I’m sixty-five. And I imagine if I saw her this minute, a couple decades would melt right away.”

“So you had … encounters with her?”

“It was the seventies, and Gloucester’s a fishing town, and in that business it’s always boom or bust. You get busted, you want a little boom. Yeah, we all messed around.”

“Is that why your marriage broke up?”

“You can’t say why any marriage breaks up. It’s a bunch of things, and then one day they all turn into one thing and you’re at the end of your run. Kind of like a Broadway play.”

This wasn’t an easy notion for her to buy into. In her first marriage, she’d seen no evidence that anything was wrong until Philip came home and told her he was leaving. They’d had a wonderful breakfast that very morning at the local farmers’ market, croissants with strawberry preserves, and her Southern gentleman stood behind her while she finished her coffee, resting his hands on her shoulders and kissing the top of her head. “You’re a great lady,” he’d said.

She pretended to examine the label on Vico’s wine bottle. “So what did you do,” she asked, “to reach the end of yours?”

“I forgot to put the seat down on the toilet.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s hard for me to be serious, but it’s not impossible. What happened was, it’s the middle of the night, I’d had a few beers, so I go to the bathroom and do my business, then stagger back to bed. About an hour later I hear a shriek. She fell into the
toilet and couldn’t get out, and that was the end of that. We’re still friends, though, and talk every few days.”

He lifted the bottle and topped off her glass, and she took another swallow. She’d heard enough about the end of his marriage. She was afraid he’d ask if she’d been married before, and she didn’t want to lie and wasn’t about to tell the truth. “Why did you call Donna Hard Taffy if she was so …”

“Hot?”

She nodded.

Vico laughed. He had sparkling white teeth, large and well formed. “ ‘Hot,’ ” he said, “doesn’t mean soft. She could be pretty insistent.”

“About what?”

“Everything. She had no trouble telling you what she did or didn’t like. She wasn’t above critiquing your performance, either.” He drained his own glass, reached for the Barbera and poured himself another. “Isn’t this great?” he asked.

“It is. I’m not sure I’ve ever had this variety before, but I like it.”

“I’m not talking about the Barbera. I’m talking about talking. You and me sitting here gossiping about a woman who made guys do crazy things thirty years ago. Dave and Jimmy and Cal in there blissed out before the TV. Friends gathering to celebrate the holiday. That’s what I mean. This is great. It’s life. What else is there?”

She took another sip. Objectively the wine was dreadful, but right now it suited her just fine. The right wine for the moment—sharply acidic, no lulling velvet aftertaste. “You don’t regret what you did with Donna?” she asked.

“Why would I?”

“You don’t think maybe it helped wreck your marriage?”

“My marriage wasn’t a wreck,” he said quietly. “It was great till it wasn’t. As for all that stuff with Donna and assorted others … well, I’d do it all again. Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

He spread his arms wide in what she would’ve taken as a gesture of defeat except that he burst out laughing. “I can’t. I would if I could. But there’s no way I can.”

A great many facets of American life dismayed Cal Stevens. Among them, in no particular order: the willingness to accept shoddy goods and poor workmanship when better products and services were available; a preference for the most vapid pop music, played so loudly over someone else’s iPod that you couldn’t help but hear it, even if you hated it; the easy platitudes spewed from pulpits and swallowed whole by millions; the scarcely veiled licentiousness promoted by commercials, stupid movies and reality TV; the assumption that ours was the most dynamic country the world had ever known, that it would always be so, though at present one out of every ten people was unable to land a job flipping patties at McDonald’s. Nothing, however, was as repulsive to him as football.

This, in fact, encapsulated many of the American traits he hated most. It was about getting and taking, about breaking the will of an opponent, who by virtue of wearing the wrong-color jersey could only be regarded as the enemy. Many of the players seemed to operate under the assumption that the Lord was on their side, kneeling after touchdowns to thank Him for leading them through the wilderness into the Promised Land. The game was preceded and often interrupted by crashing cymbals and blaring trumpets. On the sidelines, busty young women paraded their half-naked bodies before scores of thousands in the stadium and many millions on the couch. It was the kind of spectacle especially beloved by military leaders and corrupt businessmen like his father.

Sitting there with Dave and Jimmy, who frequently hopped up to high-five each other after yet another New England score,
he kept his revulsion private, even forcing himself to grunt with feigned pleasure once or twice, though he virulently disliked Tom Brady, who reminded him of too many burnished beach boys he’d known in California. He downed a couple of beers fast, and while this produced the desired effect he couldn’t help wondering if he was really glad to be where he was or if he was the sucker who’d accepted the low bid.

Around two thirty Dave’s wife showed up. Her name was Gloria, and even if Dave hadn’t already told him a bit about her background, Cal would’ve known the moment he laid eyes on her that she was Hispanic. Her short, frosty hair looked striking against her copper-colored skin.

When she said hello, he heard the Caribbean accent. “Dave tells me you’re from California,” she said. “Do you speak Spanish?”

“A little bit,” he answered, hoping to Christ she wouldn’t switch.

“My sister lives out there.”

“Where?”

“Crescent City.”

“Up on the north coast.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Once or twice.”

“I go out there every other year,” Gloria said. “The off years, she comes here.”

Dave rolled his eyes. “Seems like it’s more like a couple times a month.”

This didn’t sound bitter, just like banter. Confirming Cal’s impression, Gloria reached over and swiped playfully at her husband’s head.

She hugged Jimmy and said she was glad to see him, then Dave led her into the kitchen and introduced her to Kristin. She dawdled there before returning with a glass of red wine. She
and Cal discussed California for a few moments, and she asked if he thought he’d ever get used to cold weather and snow.

“Oh, I imagine I can handle it.”

“My parents and I came here from Cuba when I was a teenager,” she told him, “and they never did learn to cope with it. Some people are just made for sultry climates.”

“What about you?”

She laughed. “I was probably made for that too.”

“Have you ever gone back to Cuba?”

“No. It’s not that easy. And I’m not sure I want to.”

“I know what you mean.”

“How could you? You live in the country you were born in.”

“This country’s not one country,” he said. “It’s several. And this certainly isn’t the one I was born in.”

“Okay, I understand your point. But you have the same language and, overall, the same customs. I mean, it’s not like you grew up burning dolls on New Year’s Eve, right?” She laughed and laid her hand on his arm. “In Cuba, we did it as a symbolic gesture to rid ourselves of everything bad that happened over the preceding year.”

“I kind of like that,” Cal said. “Maybe I’ll buy a Barbie this year and light her up.”

Vico soon announced it was time for dinner and herded them into the dining room, where Kristin was placing an oval platter of stuffing on the table. “Sit wherever you choose,” he said, “but leave the seat at the far end for me. I’ll be running back and forth between here and Armageddon.”

“That’s not why you want to sit there,” Gloria told him. “You want to sit there because you’re the
caudillo
.”

Cal waited to see where she sat, then took the chair beside hers. He was on either his fifth or sixth beer, and his head was cloudy, but he retained the presence of mind to know what was going on, which was why he sat beside her rather than across
the table, where he could see her face. She was in her midsixties and until an hour or so ago had been nothing more than a name—
my wife, Gloria
—but she reminded him intensely of someone he used to know.

Vico brought the turkey out to cheers and set it in the middle of the table—the largest bird Cal had ever seen, a twenty-one pounder, according to his neighbor, who promptly informed them that since each person was responsible for consuming precisely three and a half pounds, they’d better dig in.

“What about the bones?” Jimmy asked.

“What about ’em?”

“Don’t you got to subtract the bones from the overall weight?”

Cal ate far too much. He didn’t really like turkey, just as he didn’t really like Thanksgiving, but he wanted to keep something in his mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Gloria employing a fair number of hand gestures when she spoke, often laying down her knife and fork. A couple times she appealed to him for confirmation—as, for instance, when she observed that Proposition 13, along with the prison guards’ lobby, was destroying the state of California, forcing people like her sister, a public-school teacher, to retire early or be laid off. Each time she turned to him, he nodded and kept chewing.

Once, when he got up to get another beer, his thigh brushed hers and he mumbled, “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I liked it.”

He pulled a beer out of the fridge, stood it on the counter, then locked himself in the downstairs bathroom. After emptying his aching bladder, he flushed and put the top down and sat on the toilet for a few moments. He wanted to keep teaching Dave—easily the best thing, he’d decided, about this new life—but he’d have to limit his time around Gloria. If he wasn’t careful, the next thing he knew he’d be suffering full-fledged
flashbacks, like the ravaged men you used to see wandering the outskirts of Bakersfield in the early seventies, the ones who’d stayed too long in the Mekong Delta.