Julie and Romeo

by Jeanne Ray

  Al nodded and smiled at me, then he went through the doors without even stopping to ask the nurse’s permission.

  What if Romeo thought I was gone? What if he didn’t even know I was out in the lobby? All I wanted was to hold his hand, to tell him everything was going to be fine. I wanted the chance to tell him all sorts of comforting lies about how everything would turn out fine. But once Mort threw that pot of flowers I lost all of my rights, or I realized I’d never had any to begin with.

  Sandy came in next. It was starting to feel like a terrible episode of This Is Your Life. I felt that if I stood there long enough, my third-grade teacher would come in through the electric doors. “I always thought that Julie Roseman was trouble,” she’d say.

  “Dad?” Sandy asked me. She looked particularly disheveled and I wondered if she had been working in the garden. There was dirt on the knees of her jeans.

  “I don’t know. Nora and Lila are back there with him now. I’m afraid I’m persona non grata on both sides. No one has come out to tell me anything.”

  “Have you asked?”

  There hadn’t been time, exactly. “I’ve just been standing here. I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

  Sandy, never a take-charge sort of girl, went up to the nurse and asked for the status of Mort Roth and Romeo Cacciamani.

  “Are you a relative?” the nurse asked. She had seen a lot of relatives.

  Sandy told her yes.

  “Which one?”

  “Both,” Sandy said authoritatively. “Roth is my father and Cacciamani is my uncle.”

  “They’re related?”

  “By marriage,” Sandy said. “Not blood. They hate each other.”

  “Obviously,” the nurse said. She thumbed through some papers and then nodded her head. “Hang on a second.” She picked up the phone.

  “You go in and see your dad,” I said. “I can wait here.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “Eventually, yes, but not from anything that happened today.”

  “Then I’ll wait with you for a minute. Dad’s got Lila and Nora. That’s a pretty full house.”

  I wanted to kiss her. I kissed her. “How are the kids?”

  “Their life is a party. They couldn’t believe that Gloria was coming over to take care of them. She was going to take them shopping.”

  “Did you tell them about Mort?”

  “I thought I should find out what’s going on first. They don’t need much information.”

  “Okay,” the nurse said, putting down the phone and making some notes on a pad that said Prozac across the top. I wondered where I could get some of those. She looked at me. “You’re the ex-wife slash girlfriend, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “What the hell. It’s nothing serious, anyway. Many bruises for both parties. Roth looks like a concussion and two broken ribs. They’ll keep him overnight for observation, but he should be out of here with a splitting headache by morning. Cacciamani had eighteen stitches, a broken left wrist, they didn’t say which bones, and, coincidentally, two broken ribs. They’ll let him go in about an hour.” She looked at us both hard. “Is either of these bozos laying a hand on you two?”

  “Absolutely not,” Sandy said. “I swear.”

  “Well, watch them.”

  Sandy and I promised to do that and then we took our places in the chairs. “What a day,” I said. “What a horrible, horrible day.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I was just starting to like him a little, the idea of him at least.”

  “Romeo?”

  Sandy nodded.

  “That’s really nice. I’m giving him up now. This is enough. Nobody needs all of this. My love is going to kill him and I couldn’t stand that.” I felt like I was going to start crying again. I pointed to the door. “Go back there and see if your father’s awake.” Mort had ruined my life once again, but I still couldn’t help feeling vaguely responsible for his pulverized state. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be bleeding now. Of course, if it wasn’t for Mort, I wouldn’t have been dating to begin with.

  Sandy pushed out of her chair. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I would have thought I’d be wired like a radio, but in fact I was so tired I thought about stretching out over the chairs and slipping off into a coma. I hoped they would notice me in a day or two and give me a room, hook me up to a nice glucose drip. I couldn’t imagine going back to work and I couldn’t imagine going home. The hospital seemed like a fine place to set up camp.

  There was a pretty waiflike girl with long black hair and a dark purple scarf looped several times around her neck wandering through the waiting room. She would stop in front of people and ask them a question I couldn’t hear. They shook their heads and she moved on to the next group. She looked like the gypsy princess in every film that had a gypsy princess. She had those huge, sad eyes and exceptional posture. When she started to walk toward me, I just continued to stare at her like this was a movie.

  “Mrs. Roseman?” she asked.

  I looked up at her and blinked in agreement.

  “I’m Patience Cacciamani.”

  “Plummy?”

  She nodded. She had tiny gold rings on all of her fingers and one of her ears was pierced three times. On her this looked like a good idea. It was easy to imagine her as a fresco painting in a cathedral or a marble statue in the Gardner Museum.

  “My dad wanted me to tell you he’s okay. He made everybody else go out in the hall so he could talk to me alone. He wants to know if you’re okay.” She stared at me for a minute, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. “Are you okay?”

  I couldn’t understand why she was talking to me. That fact was so confusing that I could barely make out her words. “I’m okay.”

  She sat down in Sandy’s chair. “You don’t look so great, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “It’s funny we should meet this way. I had wanted to meet you, but it never occurred to me it would be like this.”

  “You wanted to meet me?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Dad’s crazy about you.”

  “But what about your brothers?”

  She waved her hand at me, a gesture she had picked up from her father. “They’re idiots. Not idiots, really. They’re good guys one at a time, but when you put them together they’re like, I don’t know, like a bunch of moose or something.”

  This made me smile.

  “They won’t actually hurt you—I hope you know that—but they do seem to despise you. I don’t mean to be rude, but I think we should be able to speak frankly.”

  Where this child came up with this much poise was beyond me. It made me want to go out and have a couple more holes put in my ear. “I agree. Absolutely. Tell me about your father.”

  She stared off into the middle of the waiting room as if she was trying to conjure him in her mind so as to report with complete and impartial accuracy. “Stitches here,” she said, and drew a line with her finger across her own temple. I could see the flower pot landing there now. “And here.” She touched her lip. “He broke his wrist, but only one little bone, and there are two cracked ribs.” She put a hand beneath her breast and pressed into her ribs. “It must have been one hell of a fight.”

  “It was that.”

  “How’s the other guy, your ex?”

  “I hear he has a concussion. They’re keeping him overnight.”

  “That’s good. I don’t mean good that he’s hurt, but this way all the boys will be able to say Dad won. Dad doesn’t have to spend the night.”

  “That is good.”

  “It’s very difficult for me to understand men’s need to hit one another. It’s just not something that women do.”

  I nodded.

  “My family has some wicked problem
with your family. I think everybody needs to let go of their anger.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Well, you and Dad like each other. That’s a positive start, don’t you think?”

  “I did think,” I said. “But right now it’s all a little confusing.”

  She nodded and gave me a sad smile like the statues of Mary that were everywhere in this town. “I can see that.” She looked toward the double doors and sighed. “I guess I should be getting back. They’re going to be releasing him soon. We’re supposed to take the cars around back and pick him up. It was very nice meeting you.”

  “You, too. You’ll tell your dad I hope he’s okay?” Romeo, Romeo. All I wanted was to hold him in my arms.

  “I’ll tell him,” she said. Plummy leaned toward me. At first I thought she was going to kiss me, but she just brushed my cheek with the back of her hand. “You get some rest.”

  She wasn’t two steps away from me when all of her extended family started pouring into the waiting room.

  “Plummy!” the big one yelled. “You get the hell away from her.”

  “Shut up, Joe,” Plummy said without the slightest hint of inflection.

  They came toward me in a clump.

  “I thought I made things clear to you,” Joe said, pointing a finger in my direction. His face was red and he was breathing hard. I thought, If he has a heart attack, that will be my fault, too.

  “Joe,” Plummy said, “do you want me to get Dad out here? Do you want me to wheel him out and have him see you talk to Mrs. Roseman this way?”

  “Shut up,” he said to his sister.

  She walked up to him. She was taller than I had realized at first. She got her face very nearly in his face. “No, you shut up, Joseph.” She kept her voice low. “People are staring at you. They’re going to throw you out of the hospital. Leave Mrs. Roseman alone, okay? That’s what Dad told me to say. Leave her alone, or so help me God, I’m telling.”

  I wanted to be this girl. I had never in my life possessed one ounce of her confidence.

  Joe looked at me one more time, gave me one more point. “You’re ruined.” He and his pack retreated.

  Plummy looked at me and shrugged. “Forget him,” she mouthed. Then she added in a bright voice. “Bye, Mrs. Roseman.” She joined her group and followed them out the door.

  chapter seventeen

  IT WAS A VERY TENTATIVE TIME IN MY FAMILY. The things that had been said in the hospital were put aside. The next afternoon when Mort was released and went back to Nora’s, there was an unspoken agreement that we would all play nice. For Mort’s sake, and the sake of his horrible headache, there would be no tension, no bickering among us. Even when we were nowhere near him we didn’t fight as a measure of our gratitude that things had not been worse. Still, we all understood this arrangement to be a pyramid of crystal glasses balanced on a few silky wisps of spiderweb. Everyone moved slowly and with exaggerated politeness. I waited almost a week before visiting so as not to ruffle any feathers. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Julie?” Lila asked me. “I can make some. It’s no trouble.”

  “Oh, no, but thank you.” I stood on the front steps of Nora’s house balancing a casserole dish on my upturned palms. Macaroni and cheese from scratch. Four cheeses. My mother’s secret recipe. Mort’s uncontested hands-down all-time favorite. I was sure it would be swirling down the garbage disposal before I got my car started again.

  “Don’t you want to come in, say hello to Mort?” It sounded like she was singing the invitation. Don’t you want to come in-n-n-n-n-n and say hel-l-l-l-oooo?

  Actually, I did want to see Mort. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it was because since the fight I’d felt like everything in the world had changed and I wondered if he felt it, too. “Let him get his rest,” I said, the polite thing to say, the thing I knew Lila wanted to hear. “If he wants to call me later, I’d be glad to come back over. How is he doing?”

  “Oh, the doctor says he’s super. When this is over, he’ll never know it happened. The swelling in his face has gone down a lot. Really, it’s just his ribs that hurt him. He’s a little sore. We should be going home soon.”

  She smiled at me, even though no one was there to see it. I smiled back. That’s how good we were being.

  “Mother?” Nora called out. “Is that you?”

  “I’m just dropping off a casserole.”

  “That’s so nice. Don’t you want to come in?” Nora was wearing shiny black leggings and an ironed white T-shirt. She was off to Pilates class.

  “I need to get to work. Tell Mort I hope he feels better.” Notice I said “Mort” and not “your father,” so as to not make Lila feel excluded. I went down the steps, turned and waved. Nora and Lila stood at the door, waving back at me. What a pretty pack of Stepford Wives we made.

  I hadn’t talked to Romeo all week. I sent him a get-well card—who knows if he got it? He sent me a note saying that he would call as soon as the dust settled. But this was a Sahara sort of dust. It swirled and blew 365 days a year. In fact, it never settled, not even for a minute. Then every day after that there was another note from him, saying that he loved me, saying that he missed me, saying that he was getting awfully good at writing me letters and wasn’t it lucky that it was his left wrist that was broken. I sat on my bed and read them and cried and cried. I was ruining his life, ripping up his family, and getting him punched, and that wasn’t the thing to do when you loved someone as much as I loved Romeo. We both knew that the right thing to do was to walk away. I understood how much I loved him then, when I knew I was going to walk away.

  I didn’t talk about Romeo, though I thought of nothing else. It would have conflicted with the Geneva Accord of Good Manners. At home Sandy was so nice to me, you would have thought I had a terminal illness. She worked harder at the store, harder around the house, harder at school. She arranged for baby-sitters and left fully prepared meals in the refrigerator. In the evenings she took Tony and Sarah over to see Mort, and all her reports were glowing. “He looks fantastic,” she said. “You’d hardly know that anything had happened to him.”

  I imagined the same was true of Romeo. I imagined that everyone was getting back to normal, except for me.

  Gloria was helping out all over the place—at home, at work. She had bought a couple of new outfits that she thought would look good in a florist shop, drawstring pants made out of natural hemp and loose linen jackets covered in a cabbage rose print. She looked more like a florist than I ever did. She had gone in with her spare set of keys the night of the fight and cleaned everything up. She swept all the evidence into plastic garbage bags and took them out to the Dumpster.

  “You can’t keep working for me like this,” I said. “It’s too much.”

  “I like it,” she said. “I haven’t had a job since Buzz and I got married.” Buzz owned an insurance company.

  “But nothing’s wrong with me. Everyone’s acting like I’m the one who was in the hospital.”

  “Well, technically, you were in the hospital. The waiting room is in the hospital. It takes a toll on you.” She put down a bucket of baby’s breath. “Julie, you’ve got to call him. You’ve got to straighten this out.”

  “Nothing to straighten,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  “He loves you.”

  “I’m destroying his life. I won’t do it anymore.”

  And so I continued to make my way through the fog. I spent so much time thinking about things I shouldn’t have been thinking about that I completely failed to notice what was going on around me. It was Gloria who called the obvious to my attention a few days later.

  “Julie?”

  “Hmm?”

  “There aren’t any flowers.”

  “Hum?”

  “Well, you know this is a flower shop, and people come here to buy their flowers, but there aren’t any flowers coming in. They’re going out fine, but they aren’t coming in.”

  “What?”

  She put her
hands on my shoulders and turned me around so that I had to look at her square in the face. “There are no flowers.”

  I sniffed the air. With a couple of good sniffs I could take a pretty accurate inventory. Gloria was right. We were down to a handful of carnations, some leatherleaf ferns, one bucket of home-grown gladiolus. “Oh my God.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you. I kept thinking you’d notice. I kept thinking they’d show up.”

  I thought about Mort. Get on the phone, yell at somebody. I ran past Gloria and took my place at the desk. I called the first number, but there was no one to yell at. The receptionist put me on hold and left me there for fifteen minutes. When I called again, she sent me back to hold. When I called back a third time, she hung up on me. My second distributor at least did me the courtesy of telling me my account had been canceled before he hung up on me. I called people I used for special occasions and was told they no longer delivered to my neighborhood. I called people I had never used before and was told they were no longer taking on new accounts. I called to check on my order of one thousand gardenias for next Saturday’s wedding and was told there was no record of such an order. Everywhere I went I hit a wall, and the walls just kept coming, taller, thicker, and closer together.

  “How bad is it?” Gloria said.

  “Very bad.”

  “Very bad like an enormous screwup or very bad like a Cacciamani?”

  “The latter.”

  “You have to call him,” Gloria said. “I’ll call him. He wouldn’t let this happen to you. He doesn’t know about it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “But Romeo didn’t do it, and he’s not going to be able to undo it, either. Joe runs a trucking company. He’s got roots in the business that spread all the way to Idaho.” I tossed my pencil down on the table. “I’m wrecked,” I said. “Simple as that.”

  “No,” Gloria said. She had tears in her eyes. She was taking this hard, as I would take it hard once I was able to grasp what had happened. “You have to fight.”