Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  Five years later I was spending money I didn’t have on a seminar that was telling me to put ten percent into advertising. I still thought there was some piece of information out there that would make all the difference. If only I knew what I should be doing, it would all turn out okay. My hips were getting stiff in the folding chair and my coffee was cold. All around me desperate losers like myself were taking frantic notes. Fortunately I had taken a spot at the back of the auditorium and so I could creep out without too much embarrassment. I pushed open the heavy metal fire door and slipped into the hallway. It was empty except for an orange bench on which sat one Romeo Cacciamani.

  The first time I saw Romeo in the Sheraton, I was amazed to find I no longer hated him. The second time I saw him, I was considerably more amazed to find my heart jumped up as if there had been a tiny trampoline installed in my chest. Was he waiting for me?

  He glanced up at me and then looked down at his hands. “Oh,” he said, his voice disappointed. “You’ve got coffee. I was going to ask you if you wanted a cup of coffee.”

  I looked at him and then at the white cup in my hand. There wasn’t a trash can, so I dug it into the sand of a very clean ashtray. “I’d like a cup of coffee,” I said.

  chapter two

  ROMEO CACCIAMANI HELD OPEN THE DOOR OF THE downtown Boston Sheraton for me and I stepped outside into a beautiful late spring day. There were a million things that should have been going through my head: Why has he asked me for coffee? Does he want to talk about what happened with the kids? Does he want to talk about business? Is he going to tell me he hates me in the fine tradition of his family? But in truth the only thing I was thinking was, Wouldn’t Mort just die? Please, God, let Mort be in Boston for the weekend. Let him be in a coffee shop across the street watching me smile and shake my hair out in the sunlight while Romeo Cacciamani looks on attentively. Let Mort see everything and think that we are wildly in love and that I am planning on signing over every last petal I have to this man. Nothing would kill Mort faster.

  “Starbucks okay?” Romeo said, looking down the street.

  I told him that was fine.

  We found a table among the full-time students and unemployed writers who believed that coffee shops were libraries. Romeo paid for my light grande latte decaf and got himself a cup of black coffee. I found myself wishing I had asked for black coffee, too.

  “Two bucks for a cup of coffee,” he said, sinking into his chair. “Why didn’t I think of that one? I’ve got plenty of coffee.”

  “Beanie Babies,” I said. “I should have come up with those.”

  “We sell them at the store,” he said. “I hate them. People call all day long, ‘Do you have Spots? Do you have Gobbler?’ We had to put in an extra line so the flower calls can come through.”

  Not only had I not thought of making Beanie Babies in time, I hadn’t even thought of selling them. “So business must be good.”

  He glanced down at our mutual stack of small-business folders. “You know how it is.”

  The thought seemed to depress us both and for a while we just sipped our coffee in silence.

  “I’ve thought over the years maybe I should write to you,” Romeo said. “It’s the kind of thing you think about, but then, who does it? And then I saw you today and I thought—”

  But he stopped, not saying what he thought, and after a while I was too curious to wait politely. “What would you write to me about?”

  “Oh, all of this.” He gestured an open hand at the table, and for a minute I thought he’d wanted to write to me about coffee. “The family stuff, the thing between our families.” He stopped and shook his head. “Sandy. I wanted to write to you about Sandy. Or maybe I should have written to Sandy. I look back on all that and I think I just didn’t … I didn’t handle that whole thing so well. All the yelling and Camille crying, all the back and forth. I still think they were too young to get married, even though Camille and I weren’t too much older than they were when we did it. It may have been okay to bust up the wedding, but I don’t think we should have busted them up. That was about us, not about them.”

  It was a terrible night, freezing cold and pouring down rain. Tony Cacciamani had actually brought a ladder to our house like Sandy was some sort of hostage. She was going to climb down the ladder and they were going to get married, but the ladder fell and there was Sandy, hanging off the sill of her second-story bedroom window, screaming. We had said it was all a Cacciamani plot, that Tony was really trying to kill Sandy.

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. And it was, but it made me sad to even think about it.

  He nodded. “A long time. I have one daughter. I don’t know if you know that. Plummy. She’s the last one. She’s at Boston College now. Such a smart kid, Jesus, I wonder where she came from. She’s not like anybody else in the family. But when all that happened with Sandy and Tony, my Plummy was just a little girl, barely even walking around. I didn’t know anything about girls then.”

  I was remembering Sandy, sixteen years old, up on her bed crying and crying and Tony Cacciamani calling the house all the time and Mort hanging up on him. Mort told Sandy he had never called her. Then we sent her off on a foreign-exchange program to Sweden and she got such a terrible case of mono that the host family sent her back to us two months later. I never thought about it anymore. It was a dark chapter in my parenting history. “I understand,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about this.” Anyone who knows me knows that “We don’t have to talk about this” is a very simplistic code for “Stop talking about this.” Romeo did not know the code.

  “What I mean to say is that now Plummy is a young lady, grown-up, very pretty like her mother.”

  I nodded, though in my memory Camille was not so pretty.

  “I think I have a better understanding now of how it must have looked from your side. If Plummy were to tell me she was getting married to anybody, much less a Roseman … Well, it’s just more complicated when you have daughters.” He leaned in toward me, almost whispering to keep the writers from listening in. “When you have boys you think that all the world’s problems come from girls. You start thinking bad things about all the girls. Then you have a girl, and man, you start to take another look at all the boys out there. The world starts looking like a dangerous place.”

  That made me laugh. I tried to snap myself out of the past. “Kids are going to make mistakes,” I said. “Big mistakes. All we can do is teach them what’s best and then stand by to bail them out.”

  “Well, that’s what you did. You protected your daughter. That’s what I would have said in that letter I didn’t write to you.”

  “We didn’t do such a great job ourselves, you know. We weren’t exactly models of civility. Mort said some awful things about Tony, about you. God, I remember the screaming that went on then.” I tried to remember what I thought about Romeo Cacciamani all those years ago when he and his wife sat on our couch. Was he nice? Was he bright? Did I think he was a good-looking guy? I wasn’t sure. Was it possible that he had simply become such a good-looking guy in the last fifteen years?

  “He hated us. That was for sure. Mort Roseman’s daughter sneaking off with a Cacciamani.” He shook his head. “That’s powerful stuff.”

  “Roth,” I reminded him. “Mort Roth.”

  Romeo shrugged.

  “I hated you, too,” I said, and then was, for the second time since we had met, horrified by my own sudden inclination toward candidness.

  But as far as Romeo was concerned I hadn’t confessed anything more serious than a dislike for decaf. “Cacciamanis and Rosemans,” he said. “Very bad blood.”

  I saw this as my opportunity to get the answer to a question that had been bothering me for years, one that I could never ask my father or mother or husband because it was surely too obvious and I was too stupid. “Why do we hate each other?”

  “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth.” Romeo took a long drink of his coffee, not seeming to mind that it
was still steaming hot. “After Tony and Sandy got together, I could say it was because of what happened to them, but certainly I hated all of you a long time before that. My parents hated your parents. Whew!” He shook his head. “Now that was hate. My mother crept into your parents’ yard one night and poured salt on the roots of all your mother’s roses.”

  “She killed the roses? Are you kidding me? My mother always said it was some kind of Cacciamani curse.” They had simply withered up, every last one of them, and after that she couldn’t make a single thing grow there. Finally my father bought some flagstones and just covered up the dirt.

  “It was Cacciamani table salt. Maybe the same thing. One time, I must have been in about the eighth grade, and I had gone to a birthday party and you were there. I didn’t talk to you or anything, I knew better than that, but at dinner that night I told my father that I thought you were sort of cute and he dragged me to the bathroom by my collar and washed my mouth out with soap. Ever had your mouth washed out with soap?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s disgusting. Truly.”

  I tried to assume the least coquettish tone possible. I tried to make my voice sound like Dan Rather’s. “So you thought I was cute?” I had some attributes left, but it had been a long time since anyone had used the word cute in conjunction with my name.

  “I was at that age. I was trying to hack my father off, even though I didn’t know it would hack him off that much.” He took another sip of coffee and looked out the window. “But yeah, I thought you were cute then. Actually, I think you’re cute now.”

  Let me establish something here: Things had not been so hot between me and Mort in the years before he left. We had been in a long decline. Since Mort, nothing. I was not proud of this. It was not the way I would have wished for things to happen, but that’s the way it was, and I had no idea what to do about it. I had no time to do anything about it, not between working around the clock and taking care of the house and helping Sandy out with her kids. I would need so many seminars on dating that I would never have known where to begin. And yes, there were times that people flirted with me, a man coming in to buy flowers for his wife, the lonely trucker who brings me my flowers. I wouldn’t have done it and they probably didn’t mean it, anyway. But a real compliment, a genuinely kind word from a seemingly nice man, well, that hadn’t happened for a very long time. It was like a faint song. Something sweet and far away.

  “I don’t remember you at a party,” I said. “I wish I did.”

  He waved his hand. “I was a very cool kid.” He smiled. His teeth lapped over one another a little bit, but they were nice teeth. “I came and stood around the edges for a minute, then I left. That was my style.”

  As much as I wanted to see where this might go, I couldn’t get my mind off the salt. “So why did your mother kill our roses?”

  “That part I could not tell you. I always thought you knew. The way they said the word Roseman around our house, you would have thought there had been a whole bunch of murder and extortion somewhere along the line.”

  “I don’t think my parents killed any Cacciamanis.”

  “What about your grandparents?”

  “Jews in Lithuania. They didn’t get to Italy much. I hear the train service was very bad. But your mother is still alive, can’t you ask her?”

  “Salting the roses is what I know she did; the things I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to know. My mother is a tough lady. She would be capable of some pretty serious stuff. If she hasn’t told me by now why she hated the Rosemans, she’s never going to tell me.”

  “What about your kids?”

  Romeo drummed his fingers on the top of the table. He had nice hands, thin and strong like maybe he played the piano. He still wore his wedding ring. “I’m afraid that one is my fault.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about it. Mort and I didn’t exactly talk you up to our girls over dinner.”

  “They hate us?”

  Nora hated. Nora with her Lexus and her cell phone, her tax attorney husband and blisteringly hot real-estate career, Nora hated the Cacciamanis with a passion that would rival anyone in the family. She was a daddy’s girl. She would walk out of her best friend’s wedding if the Cacciamanis had done the flowers. Sandy hated them, too, but for her own reasons. Sandy hated them because she really did love Tony. She named her little boy Tony, which I thought was a very questionable move, but I never said a word about it. “They hate you.”

  “My boys, they act like boys. They get a grudge and that’s it, real Cacciamanis all of them. Plummy I’m not so sure about. She does her studies, she dances, she works in the shop. I don’t think she’s got time to hate anybody.”

  You hear people talk about someone lighting up. I’ve always thought it was a silly turn of phrase, as if we all came with concealed electrical cords, but when Romeo spoke of his daughter he actually seemed to throw off light.

  “So you don’t seem to hate me and I don’t seem to hate you,” he said. “What do you think happened to us?”

  I explained what had happened, at least to me. How I hated along the family lines but then things changed for me. I told him about Mort. I told him that if someone had asked me how I felt about the Cacciamanis while I was eating my shredded wheat this morning, I would have said something awful out of the sheer reflexive habit of it all, but that when I saw him, just another failing small-business owner like myself, it all seemed to be gone.

  He was a good listener. He held very still when I talked and looked right at me. “I understand,” he said. “When Camille died—” He stopped for a minute, tapped his cup against the table a few times as if hoping to say it in code. “Well, I changed my mind about a lot of things. I would have been happy to have her forever, to go on hating the Rosemans like always, but it didn’t work out that way. I lost Camille and I lost all my energy for trivial things. I inherited her good sense when she died. She willed it to me.”

  “That’s quite a gift.”

  “Quite a gift,” Romeo repeated slowly. “So really, it’s not so different. We both lost the person we loved and the hate just went with it.”

  “It’s not the same. I didn’t love Mort. Not like you loved Camille.”

  “Nobody loves the same way, but you loved Mort. You must have. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stayed with the idiot for so many years.”

  I laughed and Romeo laughed and then he put his fine slender hand over my wrist and patted it. It was not a sexual sort of thing—I certainly recognized it as a friendly gesture—but it was nice, a little touch.

  He picked up our cups and my crumpled-up napkins and put them all in the trash. When we stepped outside the sun was still bright and the air was crisp and as sweet as hyacinth. Romeo Cacciamani raised up on his toes a couple of times and bounced a little. “The lecture on self-employed retirement accounts starts at three,” he said.

  “So what, I could contribute for another five years. What good is that going to do me? I don’t have any money for a self-employed retirement account. Besides, I’m never going to be able to retire.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “Too many kids.”

  “How many kids?”

  “Six. The five boys and Plummy.”

  I whistled.

  “So, no more lectures. I guess it’s back to Somerville.” He looked down the street as if he were expecting a car to pull up and take him home. “You drive?”

  “Are you crazy? Parking was a fortune. I took the bus.”

  He nodded and again he scanned the street for his ride, looking as far away from me as possible. “Ever walk to Somerville?”

  “From downtown?”

  He nodded. “I noticed your shoes. You wear sensible shoes. You could walk in those.”

  I had given up on sexy shoes back when the girls were born. I was extremely, irrationally flattered to think that he had looked at my feet. “I’m a florist,” I said. “I stand up all day.”

  “But you told your family you were going
to be at the seminar till at least five, right? You have plenty of time still.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever walked that far in my life.”

  “It isn’t that bad. You walk that far every day just around the store. I do. Let’s say we give it a try and if it doesn’t work we split the cab back.”

  There was no sign of rain and I had had the good sense to leave my folders on the table in Starbucks. There had been a freak snowstorm in April, but every last bit of slush and gray ice had melted away. The sidewalks looked clear and dry, appropriate for travel. I nodded. Where had I come to in my life that walking from Boston to Somerville could seem like an act of wanton recklessness? “Sure,” I said. “Hell, yes.”

  And so we started back, out of the shadow of the Prudential Center and off toward Mass. Ave. We made the very, very long trip over the Mass. Ave. bridge, where the sky reflected pink light into the Charles River and off to the right the last of the day’s sailboats skated across the water. Who knew that walking to Somerville could be such a beautiful thing to do? I have not been to Paris, but I can’t imagine it’s a whole lot better than this. It was a longer trip than we expected, and when we started to get tired, Romeo suggested we stop in La Groceria and have a plate of spaghetti for dinner. They had a very nice bottle of not so expensive Chianti. What was funny was we didn’t much talk about our families. We talked about movies and a hospital show on television that we both liked. We talked about growing up in Boston and the trips we had taken and the trips we had always meant to take. After dinner we walked for a long time without saying anything at all. It was pretty, looking at the houses at dusk, all the warm orange light coming from the front windows. I liked to imagine the people inside, to wonder about how their lives had turned out and whether they were happy or disappointed. It didn’t bother me, not talking to Romeo. I never felt that we were two people who had run out of things to say, but that we were two people who knew each other well. Two people who had nothing but time.