Where the God of Love Hangs Out

by Amy Bloom

  “Julia, are you listening?” Lionel asks. “On Friday I’ll fix the kitchen steps.”

  Julia sets down a platter of cold chicken and sits on the floor to do Colorforms with Jordan. She puts a red square next to Jordy’s little green dots.

  “It’s like talking to myself. It’s like I’m not even in the room.” Lionel pours himself a drink, walking over to his nephew. Jordan peels a blue triangle off the bottom of Lionel’s sneaker without looking up. Jordan takes after his father, and they both hate disturbances; Uncle Lionel can be a disturbance of the worst kind, the kind that might make Grandma Julia walk out of the room or put away the toys, slamming the cabinet door shut, knocking the hidden chocolates out of their boxes.

  “Oh, we know you’re here,” Julia says. “We can tell because your size thirteens are splayed all over Jordy’s Colorforms. Squashing them.”

  “They’re already flat, Julia,” Lionel says, and she laughs. Lionel makes her laugh.

  Jordan moves his Colorforms board a safe distance from his uncle’s feet. Uncle Lionel is sharp, is what Jordan’s parents say. Sharp as a knife. Ari, not really Uncle Lionel’s son, not really Jordan’s cousin, is sharp, too, but he’s sharp mostly in French, so Jordan doesn’t even have to get into it with him. Ari has Tintin and Jordan has Spider-Man, and Jordan stretches out on the blue velvet couch and Ari gets just the blue-striped armchair, plus Jordan has his own room and Ari has to share with Uncle Lionel.

  “You invite Ari to play with you,” Julia tells Jordan. “Take your sister with you.”

  “He’s mean. And he only talks French, anyway. He’s—”

  “Jordy, invite your cousin to play with you. He’s never been to America before, and you are the host.”

  “I’m the host?” Jordan can see himself in his blue blazer with his feet up on the coffee table like Uncle Lionel, waving a fat cigar.

  “You are.”

  “All right. We’re gonna play outside, then.” Ari is not an outside person.

  “That’s nice,” Lionel says.

  “Nice enough,” Julia says. It is terrible to prefer one grandchild over another, but who would not prefer sweet Jordan or Princess Corinne to poor long-nosed Ari, slinking around the house like a marmoset.

  Julia has not had both sons with her for Thanksgiving for more than twenty years. Until 1978 the Sampson family sat around a big bird with corn-bread stuffing, pralined sweet potatoes, and three kinds of deep-dish pie, and it has been easier since her husband and in-laws died to stay in with a bourbon and a bowl of pasta when one son couldn’t come home and the other didn’t, and not too hard, later, to come as a pitied favorite guest to Buster’s in-laws’, and sweet and very easy, during the five happy, private years with Peaches Figueroa, for the two of them to wear their pajamas and eat fettuccine al barese in honor of Julia’s Italian roots and in honor of Peaches, who had grown up with canned food and Thanksgiving from United Catholic Charities. With her whole extant family in the house now, sons and affectionate daughter-in-law (Jewelle must have had to promise her mother a hundred future Christmases to get away on Thanksgiving), grandson, granddaughter, and poor Ari, Lionel’s little ex–step marmoset, Julia can see that she has entered Official Grandmahood. Sweet or sour, spry or arthritic, she is now a stock character, as essential and unknown as the maid in a drawing-room comedy.

  “Looks good. Ari likes chicken.” Lionel walks toward the sideboard.

  Julia watches him sideways, his clever, darkly mournful eyes, the small blue circles of fatigue beneath them, the sparks of silver in his black curls. She does not say, How did we cripple you so? Don’t some people survive a bad mother and her early death? Couldn’t you have been the kind of man who overcomes terrible misfortune, even a truly calamitous error in judgment? It was just one night—not that that excuses anything, Julia thinks. She loves him like no one else; she remembers meeting him for the first time, wooing him for his father’s sake and loving him exuberantly, openhandedly, without any of the prickling maternal guilt or profound irritation she sometimes felt with Buster. Just one shameful, gold-rimmed night together, and it still runs through her like bad sap. She has no idea what runs through him.

  There is a knot in his heart, Julia thinks, as she puts away the Colorforms, and nothing will loosen it. She sees a line of ex–daughters-in-law, short and tall, dark and fair, stretching from Paris to Massachusetts, throwing their wedding bands into the sea and waving regret fully in her direction.

  Julia kisses Lionel firmly on the forehead, and he smiles. It would be nicer if his stepmother’s rare kisses and pats on the cheek did not feel so much like forgiveness, like Julia’s wish to convey that she does not blame him for being who he is. Lionel wonders whom exactly she does blame.

  “Let’s talk later,” he says. It seems safe to assume that later will not happen.

  Lionel watches his niece and his sister-in-law through the kitchen door. He likes Jewelle. He always has. Likes her for loving his little brother and shaking him up, and likes her more now that she has somehow shaped Buster into a grown man, easy in his young family and smoothly armored for the outside world. He likes her for always making him feel that what she finds attractive in her husband she finds attractive, too, in the older, slightly darker brother-in-law. And Lionel likes, can’t help being glad to see on his worst days, those spectacular breasts of hers, which, even as she has settled down into family life, no longer throwing plates in annoyance or driving to Mexico out of pique, she displays with the transparent pride of her youth.

  “Looking good, Jewelle. Looking babe-a-licious, Miss Corinne.”

  They both smile, and Jewelle shakes her head. Why do the bad ones always look so good? Buster is a handsome man, but Lionel is just the devil.

  “Are you here to help or to bother us?”

  “Helping. He’s helping me,” Corinne says. She likes Uncle Lionel. She likes his big white smile and the gold band of his cigar, which he always, always gives to her, and the way he butters her bread, covering the slice right to the crust with twice as much butter as her mother puts on.

  “I could help,” Lionel says. There is an unopened bottle of Scotch under the sink, and he finds Julia’s handsome, square, heavy-bottomed glasses, the kind that make you glad you drink hard liquor.

  Lionel rolls up his sleeves and chops apples and celery. After Corinne yawns twice and almost tips over into the pan of cooling corn bread, Jewelle carries her off to bed. When she comes back from arranging Floradora the Dog and Strawberry Mouse just so, and tucking the blankets tightly around Corinne’s feet, Lionel is gone, as Jewelle expected.

  Her mother-in-law talks tough about men. Every thing about Julia, her uniform of old jeans and black T-shirt, her wild gray hair and careless independence, says nothing is easier than finding a man and training him and kicking him loose if he doesn’t behave, and you would think she’d raised both her boys as feminist heroes. And Buster is good—Jewelle always says so—he picks up after himself, cooks when he can, gives the kids their baths, and is happy to sit in the Mommy row during Jordan’s Saturday swim. Lionel is something else. When he clears the table or washes up, swaying to Otis Redding, snapping his dish towel like James Brown, Julia watches him with such tender admiration that you would think he’d just rescued a lost child.

  Jewelle runs her hands through the corn bread, making tracks in the crust, rubbing the big crumbs between her fingers. Julia’s house, even with Lionel in it, is one of Jewelle’s favorite places. At home, she is the Mommy and the Wife. Here, she is the mother of gifted children, an esteemed artist temporarily on leave. At her parents’ house, paralyzed by habit, she drinks milk out of the carton, trying to rub her lipstick off the spout afterward, borrows her mother’s expensive mascara and then takes it home after pretending to help her mother search all three bathrooms before they leave. She eats too much and too fast, half of it standing up and the rest with great reluctance, as if there were a gun pointed at her three times a day. In Julia’s house there’s
no trouble about food or mealtimes; Jewelle eats what she wants, and the children eat bananas and Cheerios and grilled cheese sandwiches served up without even an arching of an eyebrow. Julia is happy to have her daughter-in-law cook interesting dishes and willing to handle the basics when the children are hungry and not one adult is intrigued by the idea of cooking.

  Buster will not hear of anything but the corn bread–and–bacon stuffing Grammy Ruth used to make, and Jewelle, who would eat bacon every day if she could, makes six pounds of it and leaves a dark, crisp pile on the counter, for snacking. Julia seems to claim nothing on Thanksgiving but the table setting. She’s not fussy—she prides herself on her lack of fuss—but Julia is particular about her table, and it is not Jewelle or Buster who is called on to pick up the centerpiece in town, but Lionel, who has had his license suspended at least two times that Jewelle knows of. Jewelle packs the stuffing into Tupperware and leaves a long note for Julia so that her mother-in-law will not think that she has abdicated on the sweet potatoes or the creamed spinach.

  In bed, spooning Buster, Jewelle runs her hand down his warm back. Sweetness, she thinks, and kisses him between the shoulders. Buster throws one big arm behind him and pulls her close. Lucky Jewelle, lucky Buster. If Jewelle had looked out the window, she would have seen Lionel and Julia by the tire swing, talking the way they have since they resumed talking, casual and ironic, and beneath that very, very careful.

  Lionel cradles the bottle of Glenlivet.

  “You drink a lot these days,” Julia says in the neutral voice she began cultivating twenty years ago, when it became clear that Lionel would never come back from Paris, would improve his French, graduate from L’Institut de Droit Comparé, and make his grown-up life anywhere but near her.

  Lionel smiles. “It’s not your fault. Blame the genes, Ma. Junkie mother, alcoholic dad. You did your best.”

  “It doesn’t interfere with your work?” It’s not clear even to Julia what she wants: Lionel unemployed and cadging loans from her, or drinking discreetly, so good at what he does that no one cares what happens after office hours.

  “I am so good at my job. I am probably the best fucking maritime lawyer in France. If you kept up with French news, you’d see me in the papers sometimes. Good and good-looking. And modest.”

  “I know you must be very good at your work. You can be proud of what you do. Pop would have been very proud of you.”

  Lionel takes a quick swallow and offers the bottle to Julia, and if it were not so clear to her that he is mocking himself more than her, that he wishes to spare her the trouble of worrying by showing just how bad it already is, she would knock the bottle out of his hand.

  Lionel says, “I know. And you? What are you doing lately that you take pride in?”

  Julia answers as if it’s a pleasant question, the kind of fond interest one hopes one’s children will show.

  “I finished another book of essays, the piano in jazz. It’s all right. It’ll probably sell dozens, like the last one. You make sure to buy a few. I’m still gardening, not that you can tell this time of year.”

  “Buster says you’re seeing someone.”

  “You have to watch out for Buster.” Julia turns away. “Well, ‘seeing.’ It’s Peter, my neighbor down the road. We like each other. His wife died three years ago.”

  “No real obstacles, then.”

  “Nope.”

  “How old is he? White or black?”

  “He’s a little older than me. White. You’ll meet him tomorrow. I didn’t want him to be alone. His daughter’s in Baltimore this year with her husband’s family.”

  “That’s nice of you. Your first all-family Thanksgiving in twenty years—might as well have a few strangers to grease the wheels.”

  “It is nice, and he’s only one person, and he is not a stranger to me or to Buster and Jewelle,” Julia says, and walks into the house, thinking that it’s too late in her personal day for talking to Lionel, that if she were driving she would have pulled off the road half an hour ago.

  Julia starts cooking at six A.M. Early Thanksgiving morning is the only time she will have to herself. The rest of the day will be a joy, most likely, and so tiring that when Buster and Jewelle leave on Friday, right after Corinne is wrapped up in her car seat and Jordan squirms around for one last good-bye and their new car crunches down the gravel driveway, Julia will lie down with a cup of tea and not get up until the next day, when she will say good-bye to Lionel and Ari and lie down again. She reads Jewelle’s detailed note and thinks, Poor Jewelle must be thirty-one—it’s probably time for her to have Thanksgiving in her own house. Julia had to wrestle the holiday out of her own mother’s hands; even as the woman lay dying she whispered directions for gravy and pumpkin pie, creating a chain of panicked, resentful command from bedroom to kitchen, with her daughter and two sisters slicing and basting to beat back the inevitable. Julia managed to celebrate one whole independent Thanksgiving, with four other newly hatched adults, only to marry Lionel senior the next summer and find the holiday permanently ensconced, like a small museum’s only Rodin, at her new mother-in-law’s house. Julia can sit now in her own kitchen, sixty years old with a dish towel in her hand, and hear Ruth Sampson saying to her, “My son is not cut from the same cloth as other people. You treat him right.”

  After this last, unexpected hurrah, Julia will let go of Thanksgiving altogether. She’ll arrive at Jewelle’s house, or Jewelle’s mother’s house, at just the right time, and entertain the children, and bring her own excellent lemon meringue pies and extravagant flowers to match their tablecloths. If things go well, maybe she’ll bring Peter, too. As Julia pictures Peter entering Buster’s front hall by her side, the two of them with bags of presents and a box of butter tarts, she cuts a wide white scoop through the end of her forefinger. Blood flows so fast it pools on the cutting board and drips onto the counter before she has even realized what the pain is.

  “Ma.” Lionel is behind her with paper towels. He packs her finger until it’s the size of a dinner roll and holds it up over her head. “You stay like that. Sit. And keep your hand up.”

  “You’re up early. The Band-Aids are in my bath room.” Her fingertip is throbbing like a heart, and Julia keeps it aloft. It’s been a long time since anyone has told her to do anything.

  Her bathrobe always lies at the foot of the bed. There is always a pale-blue quilt, and both nightstands are covered with books and magazines and empty tea cups. The room smells like her. Lionel takes the Band-Aids from under the sink: styling mousse, Neosporin ointment (which he also takes), aloe-vera gel, Northern Lights shampoo for silver hair, two bottles of Pepto-Bismol, a jar of vitamin C, zinc lozenges, and a small plastic box of silver bobby pins.

  When he comes down, Julia is holding her finger up, still pointing to God, in the most compliant, sweetly mocking way.

  “I hear and obey,” she says.

  “That’ll be the fucking day.”

  Lionel slathers the antibiotic ointment over her finger, holding the flap of skin down, and wraps two Band-Aids around it. It must hurt like holy hell by now, but she doesn’t say so. With her good hand, Julia pats his knee.

  “I was going to make coffee,” she says, “but I think you’ll have to.” And even after Jewelle and Buster get up for the kids’ breakfast and exclaim over the finger and Jewelle prepares to run the show, Lionel stays by Julia, changing the red bandages every few hours, mocking her every move, helping her with each dish and glass as if he were some fairy-tale combination of servant and prince.

  At one o’clock, after Peter has called to say that he is too sick to come and everyone in the kitchen hears him coughing over the phone, they all go upstairs to change. They are not a dress-up family (another thing Jewelle likes, although she can hear her mother’s voice suggesting that if one so disdains the holiday’s traditions, why celebrate it at all), but the children are in such splendid once-a-year finery that it seems ungracious not to make an effort. Corinne wears a bronze org
andy dress tied with a bronze satin sash, and ivory anklets and ivory Mary Janes. Julia knows this is nothing but nonsense and conspicuous consumption, but she loves the look of this little girl, right down to the twin bronze satin roses in her black hair, and she hopes she will remember it when Corinne comes to the dinner table ten years from now with a safety pin in her cheek or a leopard tattooed on her forehead. And Jordan is in his snappy fawn vest and white button-down shirt tucked into his navy-blue pants, and an adorable navy-blue- and-white-striped bow tie. Lionel and Buster are deeply dapper; their father appreciated Italian silks and French cotton, took his boys to Brooks Brothers in good times and Filene’s Basement when necessary, and made buying a handsome tie as much a part of being a man as carrying a rubber or catching a ball, and they have both held on to that. Jewelle has the face and the figure to look good in almost everything, but Julia herself would not have chosen tight black satin pants, a turquoise silk camisole cut low, and a black satin jacket covered with bits of turquoise and silver, an unlikely mix of Santa Fe and disco fever. Julia comes downstairs in her usual holiday gray flannel pants and white silk shirt. She has turned her bathroom mirror, her hairbrushes, and her jewelry box over to Jewelle and Corinne.

  “Do you mind Peter’s not coming?” Buster says.

  “Not really.”

  Lionel looks at her. “You must miss Pop,” he says.

  “Of course, honey. I miss him all the time.” This is not entirely true. Julia misses Lionel senior when she hears an alto sax playing anything, even one weak note, and she misses him when she takes out the garbage; she misses him when she sees a couple dancing, and she misses him every time she looks at Buster, who has resembled her for most of his life, with his father apparent only in his curly hair, and now looks almost too much like the man she married.