by Luanne Rice
As Lily launched into a plan for buying season’s tickets to the Metropolitan Opera for her, Henk, and me, I tried to convince myself that Henk’s question had been urgent, not a ploy to wreck the flow of Lily’s sisterly enthusiasm. He watched her, eyes wet with adoration, occasionally reaching out to touch her hand, her cheek. And Lily basked in it. She loved him back. I could see it in the way she watched for his approval, the way she couched her idea for making me an extravagant present of the tickets in great theatricality for his amusement. I didn’t trust this new situation enough to know whether I was jealous of Lily (as she had told me Henk had prophesied) or suspicious of Henk. Maybe Margo was right and he was insecure. Maybe my perceptions were off. But I felt the caution to navigate my brother-in-law the way a mariner navigates shoal water.
Chapter 6
Joe Finnegan had volunteered to move me to Hudson Street, and I took him up on it. I phoned his office, and his secretary located him in a conference room. “Don’t interrupt him,” I told her, but she put me through anyway.
“What’s up, Tiger?” he asked when he heard my voice.
“Listen, if you’re in a meeting, I can call back later.”
“Hey, any of you guys watch Beyond the Bridge?” he asked the people in his meeting. “I’ve got Una Cavan on the line.” Then, to me, “What’s on your mind?”
“Joe, did you mean that about the moving men?”
“Joe Finnegan never says anything he doesn’t mean. I hear you had a nice visit with my mother.”
“Yes. She’s delightful.”
“She’s a real fan of yours, I’ll tell you. Spends the entire afternoon watching soap operas. So, when’s moving day?”
“Well, I thought some Saturday—”
“Okay. How’s this—me and my brothers be at your place this Saturday at eight A.M. That too early for you, hotshot?”
I laughed. “Not at all. But you don’t have to be so prompt. Don’t you have other plans?”
He lowered his voice, but not enough to keep the others from hearing. “Hey, the sooner I get you into the building, the sooner I start making moves on you. Don’t say Joe Finnegan doesn’t give fair warning.”
“Here’s the address,” I said, feeling incredibly nervous. I felt more as though I were making a date than arranging for movers. There was something exciting about any man who had that much bald confidence. I thought of the resolution I had made in Newport, already semibroken with David Hammarslough. Did it make any difference that Joe Finnegan was Irish Catholic and sort of reminded me of my father? No, in fact that made it worse.
Joe Finnegan arrived in Chelsea with two brothers who looked exactly like him, only younger and thinner. “Meet Dan and Tim,” he said, walking straight into my living room and gazing at the stacks of boxes. He wore his maroon jogging suit, and I doubted he had combed his wild hair that morning. “What do you figure, five hours to move this place?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know—” I answered, but he wasn’t talking to me.
“I say four, tops,” Dan said.
“So, where do you go to college?” I asked.
“Fairfield,” Joe answered for them. “All the Finnegan men go to Fairfield.”
“Naturally,” I replied.
“Why don’t you brew some coffee?” Joe asked. “Let us get started.”
“Because my coffeepot is in that box,” I said, pointing, “and besides, I want to help load the truck.”
Dan and Tim, gazing with boundless adoration at their brother, giggled.
“Leave that to us, Tiger,” Joe said, touching my forearm. I felt the sort of thrill I remembered from high school when Jack McCarthy would bump me in the hall. Joe winked at me, but I lifted a box and carried it past him to the street where they had parked a truck marked “Celtic Sports, Inc.”
After one hour, when my arms ached with the buildup of lactic acid, and when Joe, Tim, and Dan had finished with the cartons and started moving the heavy pieces of furniture, I sat down for a rest. With men like Joe Finnegan, I always feel obliged to lift the heaviest boxes. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a new rug to cover the living room floor. They drove it home from the store and left it in the car while they ate lunch. I remember the smell of hot dogs frying. I snuck out of the house and dragged the rolled-up rug and its horsehair mat out of our station wagon. Heaving the rug over my shoulder, I dragged it up the hill, over the rock ledge, around the garden. Then I went back for the mat. When my parents finished lunch they came outside and found me panting beside the rug. My mother gasped, scolding me for doing possible damage to my “female insides.” My father told me I shouldn’t have done it, but he did not sound convinced, and his eyes sparkled with pride.
On Hudson Street, after we had unloaded the truck, I passed out beers. “This is monkey piss. You should drink Guinness,” Joe advised.
“Thanks for the information,” I said.
“Ahh, don’t listen to Joe. He’s full of gas,” Tim said. It was the first time I had heard him speak. He and Dan started a little punching match.
“This beer’s fine. We drink it by the keg up at school,” Dan said, landing a punch on the side of Tim’s head. Boys horsing around always made me nervous; I’m afraid of things like ruptures, brain damage, lawsuits. I looked at Joe.
“These two clowns don’t know what’s good. They haven’t lived yet, have they, Una?”
I smiled at Joe. “We’re not that much older.”
“Sure we are. You’re an old broad. You’d better face it.”
Irish humor, especially among athletes, is often a series of insults. I let it ride. “Are you the oldest?” I asked.
“Damn straight. Me, then two sisters, then these jokers.”
“Really? I have two sisters.”
“No boys?”
“No.”
Joe shook his head. Dan and Tim, alarmed, stopped fooling around. “Oooh, your poor father,” Joe said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I had all girls.”
I remembered that he was divorced. “Do you have kids?”
“No, thank God. She couldn’t. At the time it was terrible, but now it’s a blessing. I’d never have gotten divorced if there were kids. You just don’t walk away from your own flesh and blood.”
“I can think of circumstances,” I began.
“No way. No circumstances. What the hell are circumstances compared with a kid?” Joe finished his beer. He shot a look at his brothers. “You two better get going. Get ready for your dates tonight. You got dates?”
“Yeah,” Tim said. “Remember Marianne?”
“Oh, kid. Get rid of her. She seems like a dope. Ma can’t stand the sight of her. Una, you got a phone?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you find a phone, Timmy, and you break your date with her. She’s a royal loser.”
I handed Dan and Tim fifty dollars each. They protested a bit, but Joe told them to keep their mouths shut since I was a big TV star and could afford it. When they had left, Joe turned to me with tears in his eyes. “It’s up to me to keep those two in line,” he said. “The old man died last year.”
“Really?” I said, moving closer to him. “My father died a year ago January.” The bond was becoming stronger by the minute.
For the first month I lived in my new place, I saw Joe Finnegan only in the lobby. With Delilah the focus of a new plot twist, I was busy filming every day. Joe was busy because the NCAA basketball playoffs were under way and the baseball season would soon start. One morning we met at our mailboxes and he told me that his business boomed whenever anything of national sporting interest occurred. They sold more tennis rackets during the U.S. Open, more basketballs when the Knicks won, more baseball bats during the World Series. I related that to my own life: according to Chance, more people bought our sponsors’ products during periods when Delilah was threatened by or rescued from a violent experience.
Delilah had been rescued from the fur trapper by Beck, and now she was safely home in Mo
oreland, where she had mysteriously earned the credentials to become a psychotherapist. Little did she know that one of her patients, a reporter who worked under Beck at the Mooreland Tribune and had been referred to Delilah by Beck, was madly in love with him. Yet another cub reporter, out to bash Delilah. For that first month, I was too exhausted to unpack many boxes.
One rare night when I was home before nine, I sat amid brown cartons, eating Chinese food out of the box, watching a movie on television, when someone knocked on my door. Instinct told me it was Joe. I hunched in my seat, trying to decide whether or not to let him in. The TV’s sound was turned low; he had no way of knowing I was home unless I answered the door. But then the telephone rang and gave everything away. I cannot listen to a telephone ring and ring without answering it. It is different from someone knocking at the door. A knock at the door brings a visitor, while a ringing phone brings news, good and bad, from home.
“Hello,” I said into the receiver, and instantly Joe called, “Hey, Una, what gives?”
“I’ll be right there,” I called to Joe.
Margo was on the line. “Hi. I miss everyone,” she said. “Now I know how you must have felt when Lily and I both lived in Providence.”
“But I hardly ever see Lily. She’s busy with Henk.”
Silence on the line. “You hardly ever see her?” The concept was as strange to Margo as it had been to me when Lily had first moved to New York and never called.
“I’ve only been to her place once, and she’s only been here once.” For the first time since the dinner, I wondered what had happened to the Metropolitan Opera tickets.
“Do you talk on the phone a lot?”
“Never. I work all day, and Henk’s home at night. She doesn’t like talking on the phone when she can be with him.”
“Jesus. I can’t believe it. I was picturing you two running all over the place together. I pictured Henk practically adopting you, calling you both ‘Liebchen.’”
“No, that’s not it at all,” I said quickly, trying to ignore Joe’s light tapping on the door, his voice calling “Una, Una,” over and over. “How’s everything with you?”
“Fine, I guess. I’m going out with someone now. He went to Brown, and now he owns an inn at Watch Hill.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“You know—the typical. He was in Providence trying to steal a chef away from the Market Café, and he came up to Brown to take a stroll down memory lane. We met in the library.”
“Oh, that’s romantic,” I said, delighted by the shy excitement in Margo’s voice and by her idea of a typical meeting.
“It’s pretty great. His name is Matt Lincoln. You’ve got to see the inn—there is a room in the turret, and you can see out to Martha’s Vineyard.” Joe’s tapping had become loud knocking, and Margo heard it. “Is there someone at your door?”
“Actually, there is. I’d better answer it. I miss you, you know.”
“I know,” Margo said. We blew kisses to each other through the phone. I envisioned New York in relation to Providence, and hated to think how much water our kisses had to travel under in order to reach each other.
“Ooooooooo-na!” Joe called again. I pulled the door open to find him standing in the hall, dressed in his jogging suit. His red curls straggled damply across his forehead. “Got a beer for a dying man?” he asked, one hand over his heart.
“It’s not Guinness.” I stood aside and let him in.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, looking at the piles of boxes. “My brothers and I busted our gonads to get you moved in here, and you haven’t even unpacked?”
“Haven’t had time. Mind if I finish my dinner?” I gestured at my Chinese food.
He shook his head. Then he helped himself to a beer out of my refrigerator and sat at the end of my sofa that wasn’t piled with books. “Haven’t seen you around much, kid,” he said.
I marveled, watching him down half the beer with one gulp, the way he had the day he moved my stuff. Beer trickled from one corner of his lips. “Just ran to Wall Street and back,” he said.
“My brother-in-law would approve of that, but not of the beer.”
“Who, the heart surgeon?”
I nodded.
“What a crock of shit. Those guys are always telling people what they can and can’t do, but they don’t know everything. What they know is how to collect the fee.”
I must have sighed, because Joe suddenly leaned forward and peered into my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’m tired. It’s been a long week.”
“Oh yeah?” He placed his beer on my bare oak floor. “You just relax and let Uncle Joe do his thing.” Joe had a particularly crass way of expressing himself, but I was succumbing to his charms. I had no idea of what “his thing” was, but I was willing to let him do it.
He cracked his thick knuckles and slipped off my gray kneesocks. Then he began to slowly massage my feet. Facing me, he propped my heels on his knees. His thumbs circled the balls of my feet, pressing down to the bone, then touching so lightly that it tickled. He ran his fingernails down the calloused skin from my toes to my heels, then brought them back up along the soft, tender skin in my arches. I continued to eat dinner. With squarish chopsticks, I maneuvered a pea pod into my mouth. A bit of sauce dripped on my shirt, but I hardly cared. Joe popped all ten of my toes.
“You have a high arch here, Una,” he said softly.
I stared at my small foot sandwiched between his rough hands. His thumbs rubbed my ankle bones. “Really?” I said stupidly, buying time. Joe’s red hair was drying in corkscrew curls. He was gazing at my foot, his mouth half open. I could see the tip of his pink tongue.
“You know what this is leading up to, don’t you, Tiger?” he asked.
I slid my foot out of his hands and planted it on the floor. Joe Finnegan, my heritage. My first-communion partner had looked very like him; the more I considered that, the more it seemed possible that the boy’s name had been Finnegan. Or at least Joe. Joe Hannigan, possibly. I twirled my fingers in this Joe Finnegan’s curls, and he stood. He pulled me out of my chair. We kissed. His mouth seemed to cover my lower face. Closing in, he pressed his pelvis against my thigh. We rubbed slowly against each other for a minute, then suddenly he lifted me into his arms and rushed me into the bedroom, like a thief stealing a sack of grain from a bakery in the dead of night.
“What are you doing?” I asked, laughing.
“Carrying you to bed,” he said seriously. Perhaps I could have taken that literal answer as a bad sign, but I didn’t.
Undressed, we lay on the sheets and admired each other in the light slanting in from the street. Joe kissed my breasts. “Are you…prepared?” he asked.
I laughed again. “Do you mean birth control?”
“Yes. Do you want me to…use anything?”
“Tell me you don’t have rubbers in your wallet?” I asked, really laughing now. Actually I felt nervous, as though we had flashed back ten years to high school or the years just afterwards.
“Of course,” he said, rolling on top of me, laughing also. “But if you’re telling me I don’t need one…”
“Give me a minute,” I said, heading to the bathroom to install my diaphragm. When I returned I lay beside him on the bed. He kissed me once, and then he was inside me before I had any idea that we were ready. He moved in slow, thrusting motions, and at intervals he whispered, “Is that okay, baby?”
“Yes,” I grunted back, trying to slide my arm between our bodies. He lay on top of me, not taking any of the weight on his own elbows. I couldn’t get a good breath. With one hand I began to lightly tickle him, and he began to squirm. He reached down to touch me, but instantly crashed into orgasm.
He gave me a look. “Did you come?” he asked.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “I didn’t need to.”
Relieved, he kissed my shoulder.
“That was wonderful,” Joe said.
/>
“It was,” I said hesitantly.
“Do you have a hard time coming?” he asked.
A difficult question. Not a hard time, exactly. But I have to get to know a person. Or I have to love him. But I’m afraid of egos. I hate to hurt feelings. I hate so much to hurt feelings that I have faked a couple of orgasms in my day. Who will ever know? That’s the way I thought the times I did it. But I knew. I lied. And honesty in bed seems crucial. So much is bared anyway, a lie seems magnified. It seems twice as harmful. But still, I am afraid of egos.
“No, I don’t always have a hard time,” I said carefully to Joe. “But my body has to get used to yours.”
“I did something wrong.” Sullen. Bad boy!
“You did not! You were wonderful, honestly. It’s very complicated.”
“Right. You went to Catholic school, and you can’t come until you’re married or at least engaged.”
No man had ever hit me with that assessment without hearing my entire history. It was a shockingly intimate moment. “That is it,” I said. “You look like the boy I made first communion with—but I’m not even Catholic anymore. I don’t even believe in God.”
“You don’t?” He pulled back a bit, shocked.
“No. You do?”
“Well, sure.” He sounded puzzled, as though nonbelief had never occurred to him. “If you’re not a Catholic, I guess you shouldn’t mind the ‘out of wedlock’ bit.”
“Listen, Joe. These things linger. My whole life, three things got drummed in: family, scholarship, and chastity.”
“Which ones do you have left?”
I lay on my back and thought about it. Leaving Juilliard, I had forsaken scholarship; messing around since the age of eighteen, I had forsaken chastity; and though I would not, would never, forsake my family, I had neither begun a new one nor succeeded in staying close enough to my old one.
“I guess I…” I began finally, feeling panicked and alone.
“You’ve always got family,” Joe said, wrapping his arms around me. “Didn’t your parents tell you that? No matter what happens, your family will always be there.”
