The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  My name is Nicky Malone. Nicky is short for Dominica, the middle name of my mother’s Neapolitan mother, but no one ever called me that except my mother in her more dire moods. My full name is Dominica Magdalen Regina (confirmation name) Malone. I like the short version. It sounds like the name of the hero in one of those forties detective stories. “Nicky Malone here,” I could see myself barking into the phone, my hand caressing the fifth of scotch in my drawer, my eyes lingering on a hunk in a fedora and a pinstriped suit who, at any minute, would attempt to seduce me to throw me off the trail.

  I have two brothers, and would have had more if something hadn’t gone wrong with my mother’s insides during her last labor and deprived her and my father of the six kids they’d have liked to bring into the world. My older brother, Michael, is gay, to the eternal lamenting of my mother, who refers to Michael’s gayness as if it were a disease (“I should have seen it coming on. If only I’d made him stay in Little League”).

  Michael is dark and slim with coal-black hair. With his heavy-lidded black eyes and long straight nose, he resembles one of those beautiful, melancholy youths in Etruscan portraits. No trace of Irish blood in him. If it wasn’t for our eyes, you would not know we were brother and sister, to look at us. He’s an investments counselor—he shows people who have a certain amount of money how to make even more money by carefully, carefully playing the stock and other markets (or, as Michael would say, “developing a well-balanced portfolio that will yield sustained and steady long-term growth”).

  My younger brother, Joey, whose snub nose and mischievous grin mark him as a mick from twenty paces away, is married and has a new baby, a baby new enough that it still scares me to hold him. Since my father’s death from a heart attack four years ago, Joey has managed River Road Auto, the car repair shop that was the reason my dad brought us all down from Boston when I was five. The shop is a fancy place now: foreign cars, computer diagnostics, twelve bays with hoists, ten employees where there used to be four.

  Our cousin Johnny Campbell, who came to live with us when he was thirteen, is Joey’s head mechanic. The best mechanic I’ve ever known, and my father was pretty damn good at his job. My dad had talent and an attention to detail, but Johnny has intuition and at times pure genius. There is nothing on wheels that Johnny can’t fix. When he flexes his long fingers over the hood of a fractious automobile, it quiets itself like a horse being gentled

  Johnny is loping and kind, with long, deep-set blue eyes. His Irish half is tempered by his father’s blood, a mix of Lowland Scots and French Canadian. He’s steadier, more equable than Joey—but of the two, you’d rather cross Joey, because Johnny never forgets a betrayal.

  Johnny was in love with Louise, who is no blood relative of his. Johnny’s mother is our father’s sister, and Louise’s father is our mother’s brother. Louise was unaware of Johnny’s feelings, probably because Johnny had accidentally gone and gotten engaged to someone else and was due to marry her next June in a tasteful ceremony in some Connecticut suburb.

  That’s all of this generation that live here, although we have numerous cousins up in Boston and on Cape Cod whom we rarely see. And so, as I’ve said, Louise is the closest I’ll ever have to a sister. She knows what that means to me, and sometimes she trades on it—as she was about to do now.

  She refilled my coffee cup and gave me a second brownie.

  “Have you ever thought it might be time to do something about freeing a path for a man in your life, Nicky?” Louise said, as casually as she might have said, “Don’t bother to clear up, I’ll do the dishes later.”

  When Louise wants something from you, she always approaches the subject with a throwaway air and a deceptively mild directness. I took a wolfish bite out of my brownie and glared at her. She clasped her hands in her lap and gazed at a point just over my head, as if to encourage me to join her for a moment in reflecting on my priorities.

  “I don’t need a man in my life, Louise. I just got rid of a man in my life, remember? Having men in my life is what got me in the mess I’m in today.”

  Louise dropped the Buddha act.

  “What mess? You’re gorgeous, you’ve got a great career, a great apartment, great friends.”

  “If my life is so great, then why are you so hell-bent on seeing me paired up?”

  “I don’t mean that you need a man in some groveling sense, like it’s a terrible tragedy to be thirty-two and single. All I mean is that it’s time to try.”

  “You’re going to break into the chorus from Georgy Girl next.”

  “I just think you’ve felt bad about Jeremy long enough.”

  “Felt bad? That’s for when you miss a lunch appointment or tap someone’s bumper, Louise.”

  “You know what I mean. He’s still looming way too large.”

  “Ma put you up to this, didn’t she, Louise?”

  To my mother, my being unattached at this advanced age was a dire circumstance, as if I had leukemia. In fact, a life-threatening illness would have been preferable. In that case, she would be “poor Mrs. Malone, bearing up so bravely” and not the failed mother of a daughter who might now never get married. Sad, sad, sad.

  For years my mother had been trying to get me to young-adult dances at her parish, St. Ignatius, and when I got too old for those, to Catholic professional singles groups where I might meet some nice Timothy or Patrick who’d soon convince me that birth control was an invention of the devil. Now she was resorting to Louise and her half-baked clearinghouse for lonely hearts. She must be really desperate.

  I wasn’t ready yet to consign my romantic future to the tender but muddleheaded mercies of my cousin. I’m not gorgeous by any means, despite Louise’s encouraging words, but I get my share of Saturday night dates and sidewalk glances. What’s most noticeable about me is my hair. It’s auburn with gold strands twining through it, and it’s thick and long and wavy. Providence must have given me good hair to make up for my cup size, a B on a good day.

  My eyes, a legacy from my Italian grandmother Antonella, are so dark a brown they look black. My skin is creamy and pale and without a freckle, though on the debit side it’s a paleness with olive undertones that can look sallow if I wear the wrong color (Grandma Nella again). My legs are long and I’m five foot seven. I’m not every guy’s type—not like Louise, who has the classic appeal that comes with being blond, petite, and reasonably stacked—but those whose type I am, I am indeed, if you know what I mean. Surely fate had something better in store than Louise’s wifty maneuverings.

  “You promised me that you would think about dating in the fall,” said Louise.

  “Isn’t it against your yenta code of ethics to rush me?”

  “Sometimes we all need a little karmic shove.”

  “Spare me, Louise.”

  Louise knew that I didn’t fall for her pose of New Age nanny to the lovelorn. Having survived the brainwashing of the Catholic Church, I wasn’t about to succumb to the mush of self-help lingo, Horatio Alger pep talks, and warmed-over Transcendentalism she served up to the despondent and discouraged who sought out her advice. What’s more, Louise and I had had the same English teachers. So I could spot every borrowed line in the superficially profound patter that worked with her clients. With me, she couldn’t get away with cribbing from Matthew Arnold or Edna St. Vincent Millay, or, God help us, Christina Rossetti. I knew all her sources.

  “This karmic shove is coming from my mother, isn’t it, Louise?”

  Louise does not like to lie, so her avoidance of this question was all the corroboration I needed.

  “What if I at least prepared a roster of possibles for you? I’ve had some great men sign up recently. Good, solid men. Men you could count on.”

  “I’m still convalescing, okay?”

  Louise assumed the expression of the sympathetic Mother Superior counseling Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, and said, “ ‘Let us grieve not, but rather find strength in what remains behind.’”

  “Louise,
that’s from Wordsworth, whom you know I can’t stand, and it’s ‘we will grieve not,’ and that poem is not about breaking up with someone who screwed around on you, it’s about Wordsworth’s stupid childhood.”

  “It still applies,” said Louise.

  “You know, your clients may think you’re so wise, but really you’re just exceptionally well read.”

  Louise looked hurt, but shelved her feelings for the moment.

  “You don’t have to go through the preliminaries,” she said.

  “Boy, my mother must really be in a hurry to get me on the market.”

  This ready-set-go approach was a departure from Louise’s usual playbook. Louise normally put her clients through an intense “pre-dating” course of preparation. I wondered why her customers put up with it, but I guess they figured that Louise was like a personal trainer: anyone who made you work that hard must be good.

  Louise’s methods had proven so successful that, had she wanted to, she could have bought a nice Edwardian condo in Kalorama, rather than the seedy apartment she rented on Capitol Hill. She could have afforded a reliable car instead of the old Chevy Cavalier that broke down six times a winter. But Louise was uncomfortable with her comparatively recent security. She still feared that Custom Hitches would collapse, or that the IRS would find fault with her scrupulously honest tax returns.

  Louise had nothing to worry about. She had found her vocation and would continue to thrive on her uncanny intuition for what made one poor slob right for another poor slob. You had only to look around her office to know that she was a natural for her job. The rooms (the third floor of an old storefront in Woodley Park, above a yoga center and a florist’s shop) were painted a dusty, womblike pink. Wedding invitations and engagement announcements lined the windowsill. See, they mutely testified, this could be you. Dim lighting, bowls of potpourri, and faded rose brocade curtains turned the office into a scented, firelit cave, a refuge where you could confide the ridiculous dream of finding someone to love you who’d actually love you back.

  I had no interest in Louise’s offer, though. I was still bewildered, still wondering how I’d been so unsuspicious. Jeremy had cheated on me with Virginia Sprague, the head of admissions at Laurel Hill, the girls’ college on Boxwood Road where he taught modern world history and was far too spoiled with attention and admiration. Laurel Hill was a glorified finishing school for not-too-intellectual young women of good family, and Jeremy was a star on its underachieving faculty. It’s not good for a man like Jeremy to be too long in a place where he’s top dog. He starts thinking he can get away with anything.

  I’d met his honey once at a department dinner party. Virginia was cool and poised, gracious but not friendly, a forty-year-old divorcée from Charleston with a lilting Carolina accent that recalled Civil War love letters. It was funny, how she’d never lost that accent after ten years in D.C.

  “Virginia is nice, but she’s not very warm, is she?” I remembered saying to Jeremy after that dinner party. Virginia had wafted in during the second round of cocktails, wearing a lilac organza blouse so fragile and expensive that only a woman who never, ever spilled or tripped would be confident enough to purchase it.

  “She’s very closed off, isn’t she?” he’d agreed. “It’s quite unattractive.” By which I should have known he found her very appealing. Men make those immediate denials of interest solely about women who do, in fact, interest them intensely.

  Maybe it was that voice, sweet and cool as the wisteria-shaded corner of a veranda on a hot summer afternoon. Or her often-silent self-containment, so challenging to a man like Jeremy, to whom women presented confidences and confessions like bouquets. Or maybe she’d simply wandered into his enclosure just as he started to feel restless.

  Now, listening to Louise extol the virtues of a fresh start, I wondered at her faith in happy endings. I’d thought Jeremy was trustworthy. I’d thought we had something good going on, something that merited his keeping his pants zipped up at the office. What accounted for Jeremy’s straying? And what was so great about Virginia, with her outdated Grace Kelly pageboy and her cultured pearls?

  “What about the process?” I asked Louise.

  “You don’t have to go through the process. I know you well enough, don’t I?”

  She poured me more coffee, her own special almond-hazelnut blend (she uses hazelnut coffee and pours a tablespoon of almond extract on top before brewing).

  Before she sent you out on your first date, Louise cataloged your romantic history, asked you to write down your dreams for a week, and made a genogram of your extended family to pinpoint any possible “intimacy roadblocks.” If something in your past or present was getting in the way of your finding a lifetime partner, Louise would discover it faster than a drug-sniffing canine at the Miami airport sussing out a cocaine stash in a duffel bag.

  Not to worry—if you were a subconsciously reluctant lover, Louise guided you through a free monthlong “unblocking” course, with personalized prescriptions for opening yourself up to love. These ranged from juice fasting to singing lessons to spending a weekend alone in a mountain cabin “to fall in love with yourself first.” Louise even led rituals for saying farewell to past loves, in which souvenirs of the unfaithful departed were burned, buried, or, in one case she told me about, spat upon. “Nothing else really seemed to express how she felt,” Louise said. “It was incredibly cathartic.”

  On the rare occasions when a client left in dissatisfaction or gave up after encountering disappointment, Louise mourned for weeks. Once in a while she’d confide in me about a particularly difficult problem. I felt honored and pleased when she did that. It meant that Louise knew that underneath my pessimistic surface I rooted for love just as fervently as she did, though with less faith. It was like being a Red Sox fan. You prayed the Sox might make the play-offs, you cheered them through every victory of the season, but history told you that they’d never win the Series. Somehow it always ended with a heartbreaker in the bottom of the ninth.

  But it was one thing to cheer for the home team, and another to be shoved out onto the field after a disastrous spring training.

  “You have nothing to lose, Nicky. There are three great guys I can think of offhand that I know you’d have a terrific evening with, and that alone would be a boost for your confidence.”

  “I don’t know, Louise. I somehow don’t have the courage for meeting a lot of new men right now.”

  “I’d hold your hand every step of the way.”

  “You can’t come on a date with me. You can’t feed me the right lines while I make chitchat over dim sum. I promise, Louise, when I’m feeling up to it I’ll give it the old college try, I really will.”

  “Then I won’t push you.”

  “I’ll tell my mom you did your best.”

  Louise smiled.

  “I can handle Aunt Maureen,” she said.

  They understand each other, Louise and my mother. In fact, if my mother could have chosen a daughter, she’d have chosen someone like Louise, someone who, like my mother, was as delicate-looking as a calla lily and as tenacious as bindweed.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I know you mean well. Unlike my mother, who’s just bossy.”

  “Go to your meeting.”

  As I was dusting bits of brownie off my skirt, there was a perfunctory knock, and our cousin Johnny ambled in. I noted Louise’s expression: initial joy, followed by an immediate reining-in of the thousand-watt smile. On Johnny’s face, I could discern no emotion other than easygoing affection, but that was Johnny. He played his cards close to his chest.

  “Cousinettes,” he said, his nickname for us together.

  “What brings you here in the middle of the day?” I asked.

  “The same thing that brings you here. I wanted a decent lunch.”

  He scooped some chicken salad into a folded-up piece of wheat bread and began eating, hanging over the table so as not to mess up his clothes. Today he was unusually dressy for Johnny: spot
less jeans, his only good blazer with a black T-shirt underneath, and clean sneakers. Over his arm was the classic and becoming charcoal-gray tweed coat that Louise had persuaded him to buy at a flea market in Salisbury, Maryland. Before Betsey came along, Louise picked out most of Johnny’s clothes. Now he would occasionally appear in something suburban and cutesy, like a pine-green cable-knit sweater with snowflakes dancing across the chest, and we would see Betsey’s hand.

  His light brown hair, as usual, was flopping into his eyes. At the shop he had to tie a twisted bandanna around his head to keep it back.

  “I came to ask Louise if she’d go shopping with me,” he said. “Betsey’s parents are coming to town this weekend and I need to look nice.”

  “What’s wrong with what you’ve got on?” I said.

  “They want to take us out to dinner. Betsey said no sneakers. I thought Louise might want to advise me on some nice dress shoes.”

  It was always Louise, and still Louise, whom Johnny turned to for advice on how to get on in the real world. At the garage, Johnny knew exactly what to do. But outside the shop, he constantly struggled with a void of information about how regular life should be led.

  Johnny came to live with us a week before his fourteenth birthday because his mother drank. She was also, even more scandalously, divorced. In the months before he came to us, the nuns at Johnny’s school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, noticed that he was arriving at school every day without a lunch, his uniform unpressed, his hair growing longer and longer. The parish priest investigated, a family conference was held, and Johnny was taken in by my mom and dad.

  If my parents had suspected the situation earlier, he’d have been rescued from neglect years before, but Johnny’s mother was a charmer, Dad’s adorable, flighty little sister, Peggy, who knew how to keep up appearances—until one day she couldn’t anymore. Johnny’s dad was notable only for his spotless record of absence and his reluctance to contribute to his son’s financial support. The result of this haphazard upbringing was that Johnny, although he put up a good front, still guessed a little at what regular people did about things like buying dress shoes. And Louise was the only one he allowed to assist him with the things he didn’t know. It had always been that way. It was Louise who’d told him what flowers to get for his high school girlfriends on Valentine’s Day and how much to spend on them, Louise who drilled him for tests and proofread his papers when he was getting his BA in business administration at Towson State, Louise who ordered him his first business cards when he became co-manager at the shop, Louise who encouraged him in the aw-shucks politeness that was such an asset with his customers and his lady friends.