DURING THE BLEAK FIRST FEW months after I was asked to leave Archer Street and then hit with the world’s swiftest divorce, I fell into the habit of both calling L at odd hours and appearing at our old house without invitation, usually after a meltdown at the casino. I wanted nothing more than to explain myself, she wanted nothing more than to have space, and these were frustrating and unsatisfying times, to say the least.
I tried a variety of tactics during this period. Aside from the incessant calls and visits (most of which led to neighbors turning on their porch lights or peeking out from behind bedroom curtains), I wrote lengthy letters heavy on nostalgia; I also tried the obvious (mix CDs), the obvious with a twist (flowers to her at work, which I delivered in a gorilla suit I rented from a Manhattan novelty shop), and the less obvious (walkie-talkies). For my troubles, I was either ignored or threatened with restraining orders. Having felt I was being punished for not telling the complete truth about what I was up to while she was taking care of her mother, I overcompensated by trying to tell the truth about everything else, especially my family. I overshared. This was also a poor decision, as it did not have the desired effect (making me appear more forthright in the present), but rather the opposite (making me appear more duplicitous in the past). I said and did all kinds of things I shouldn’t have said or done, though the worst had to be the night I went over to her house with the newspaper article about the fifteenth anniversary of Rosario Nuñez’s death. I don’t know why I did it, though I guess on some level, I was looking for sympathy. How I thought I could achieve that, I can’t rightly say. It wasn’t a time of great clarity for me.
Momentarily out of credit options, I had spent a wintry Sunday in my room at the motel, taking the collar on an entire slate of NFL games and breaking one in a series of lamps I had to have LaLa in housekeeping replace without telling Maurice. Dawn was in one of her brief bimonthly periods when she wasn’t talking to me, and most of my old friends weren’t speaking to me because they had sided with L (or I wasn’t speaking to them because I owed them money). After watching the Broncos blow a sure cover by giving up fourteen points in the final ninety seconds to the Chargers, I stormed out of my room and walked to the deli to get some fresh air and a newspaper. On the front page of the Bridgeport Post was the familiar face of a girl I had known years earlier, when I went to prep school in the area. As I think I said before, after my mother died, the old man sent me to a variety of prep schools in Jersey, where I excelled at sports, didn’t study, and wasn’t invited back for one indiscretion or another. It was decided that a change of state and scenery (along with some Jesuit priests) might do me some good, so I was sent to a place in Connecticut called St. Ignatius Academy that was roughly forty miles from where L and I ultimately wound up living. It was a boys’ school, so there was nothing to do but play hoops and lacrosse during the week and hang out with girls on weekends. We divvied up our time between a group of local girls from Bridgeport we had met at the Wonderland of Ice skating rink, and some private school girls whose parents had a brownstone in Manhattan. The Bridgeport girls were mostly Italian or Puerto Rican, and they were always eager to hook up with a prepster, since most of the academy boys were from good families and drove nice cars and weren’t anything like the guys they’d grown up with, most of whom wore wifebeaters and liked to race Bondo-caked Firebirds up and down State Street all night.
Friday nights in the winter were reserved for swimming with the Bridgeport girls. A couple of us would be sent down to the Wonderland of Ice, and we’d round up whoever wanted to come back to Hank Acker’s parents’ place in Greenwich and go swimming in their heated pool. It was covered by an enormous nylon bubble and sat behind a main house that had the dual luxury of twenty-two rooms and no parents, since Acker’s father was a diplomat of some sort and always off in Brussels or Geneva or wherever it is mannered people practice diplomacy. Everyone would smoke dope, drink Four Roses, and skinny-dip before pairing up until it was time for the girls to get back to Bridgeport. Sometimes P. J. Cassill gave them a ride in his van, and sometimes they took the last train back from Greenwich station.
On Saturdays we’d all take Metro-North into the city and meet up with the private school girls at Trish Van Pelt’s parents’ place on the Upper West Side, which was always at our disposal. We’d play drinking games, and the girls would give us a hard time about what they jokingly referred to as our “Friday-night socials.” James van Clive, who drove a red 911 and was the de facto leader of our group, would say things like “Well, if you prudes put out, we wouldn’t have to go fishing in muddy waters,” and I guess that was the crass truth behind the split weekends: The private school girls never gave it up, and the public school girls did. It was that simple.
Me, I liked the Bridgeport girls better, since they were more like the ones I’d grown up with in Jersey. They wore tight designer jeans and lots of eye shadow and listened to Prince (those girls could dance), while the private school girls wore turtlenecks and hair bands and Top 40’d you to death (those girls could not dance). Sometimes I’d go down to the Wonderland of Ice by myself and skate around with Rosario Nuñez, who had black hair and blue eyes and was by far the most beautiful girl we knew. James van Clive was desperate to hook up with her, and I remember riding around with him in his Porsche, listening to Pearl Jam, and him slapping my leg and saying, “Goddammit, Parisi, she’s the only Puerto Rican chick I ever met who won’t put out. You gotta help your boy out.” Van Clive looked and acted like every character James Spader ever played in the eighties. His hair always looked like he had just gotten in from a day of sailing, he always wore black Ray-Bans, and his parents were filthy rich. Not getting what he wanted was entirely foreign to him. If he decided you were going to help him get a girl he wanted, then you were going to help him get a girl he wanted. He’d loan you his ride, give you cheat sheets he bought for biology tests, hook you up with the best weed, and invite you to Newport to go sailing in the summer when school got out. For that, he expected a favor when he asked for it.
I remember a couple of very distinct things about Rosario Nuñez. One was that she had a deaf little brother. There were a couple of nights when she couldn’t go skating on account of having to babysit for him, and I’d go over to her mother’s place on Wood Avenue and sit with her. She sang him songs, which you could tell he liked, though I have no idea why, because he was deaf. It mystified me, but it was nice to see anyway, and it was the first time I discovered that you could spend hours watching a pretty girl do just about anything (L was living proof of this, as I probably spent a good four hundred hours of my life just watching her sleep, in sheer amazement). The other thing I remember about Rosario is that she was, without question, the most graceful ice-skater you ever saw in your life. Her long, silky hair would just kind of whoosh behind her when she’d jump in the air and do a spin. I think she could have been an Olympian if someone had pushed her in that direction, but that doesn’t happen a lot in Bridgeport.
Van Clive was one of those guys whom girls knew better than to like but did anyway, and Rosario was no different, though she was different in that she wouldn’t sleep with him. She told me one night that she wanted van Clive to respect her and asked my advice on how to best handle the situation. Being privy to what the guys from the academy really thought about the public school girls, I knew the chances of van Clive taking a Puerto Rican girl home to Newport to meet his parents were roughly the same as him getting a summer job working the fry bin at the Milford Burger King. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, so I didn’t. Instead, I told her I could definitely see things working out.
In the spring, she asked him to her prom, and he said he’d go if she would go to our mixer with him. This was highly unusual, since everyone invited private-school girls to the mixers, and van Clive always went to functions with a girl named Emmy Banks who went to Miss Porter’s. No one said anything about it until one afternoon when we were hanging out at Devil’s Glen in Weston, a rock quarry we’d cli
ff-jump at during the day and sometimes take girls to at night, since it was secluded and you could sit and drink beers without the cops busting your chops. There was a dangerous leap off what was called Running Rock, where you had to get a running start and clear another rock face that jutted out into the water. Van Clive had badgered everyone into trying Running Rock that day, and we were tanning on a flat rock below it when a little hanger-on named Royce Petersen said, “Hey, Jimmy, what’s up with you slumming with that Puerto Rican chick?”
The minute he said it, we all knew it was trouble, since it wasn’t six months earlier that Petersen had made the mistake of continually calling him “van Clove” for his penchant for smoking perfumed cigarettes, and van Clive had broken his elbow with a tennis racket out in front of the quad. This time van Clive yawned, got up, flicked a cigarette in Petersen’s face, and dragged him by his feet across the rock, whipping him into the shallow water and holding him under for a good five seconds before letting him go.
“Nobody’s slumming, you fucking runt,” he said as the kid flailed around and gasped for air. A couple of seconds later, van Clive helped Petersen out of the water and let him drive the Porsche home in apology, and the issue was forgotten until the next Monday back at school, when Acker asked him about it in the cafeteria in a more respectful manner.
“Shit, I’m not going to that bitch’s prom,” van Clive said, swigging from a carton of chocolate milk and putting his hand on my shoulder. “My boy Ray’s gonna stand in for me when I tell her I have to go back to Newport for a family emergency. He doesn’t mind that class of people, right, Parisi?”
I just shrugged, said, “Whatever,” and then broke into an imitation of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs that everyone liked, because I was just learning then how to get along, and understanding that people were just how they were, and nobody changed anybody’s mind about anything, so what was the point of getting too involved in things? So I ignored him, pretty much, and ended up taking Rosario to her prom. I picked her up on Wood Avenue, and after she got over the disappointment of van Clive canceling, we had a good time. After the dance, we went up to Devil’s Glen and drank some High Lifes. I thought maybe I had a chance with her, to be honest, but she was too into van Clive. I remember she asked me if she could trust him, and I said, “Sure, everybody trusts Jimmy.”
She told me how excited she was to come to a St. Ignatius mixer, how jealous all her friends were, and I was starting to feel sorry for her, knowing what I knew. So when she called the next week to thank me for going to the prom with her and seeing if I wanted to come babysit, I said I was too busy with school, which wasn’t true, because we never studied. Cheating was so rampant that even the good kids did it. The fact that they let me graduate is a testament to the institution’s lack of quality control. But I was feeling guilty, and when given a choice between being forthright or avoiding the situation entirely, I made the easy choice and either lied or didn’t take her calls.
A week later, van Clive was a no-show at the academy mixer. He showed up later at Acker’s afterparty with Emmy Banks, who was still fuming because van Clive was three hours late picking her up and never called to tell her he was having trouble with his Porsche. When I asked if he had called Rosario to cancel, he smiled and said, “C’mon, Parisi, what do you think I am?” and we all went swimming and hung out until the sun came up and the nylon dome started to glow in the early light. I remember sitting on the diving board and him telling me I was his best friend and the only person he could trust. He said he was tired of the States and might go overseas for a while.
That Monday, he was gone. Word was his parents had sent him to school in France, though no one knew for sure. A day later, a group of kids cutting class from Staples High School found a pair of red dress shoes on Running Rock, and when they climbed down, they found Rosario Nuñez lying facedown in the shallow water. I cried all day, and for some reason decided to call my father, who told me to stay out of things (a sentiment he followed up in a letter delivered the next day). When the cops came to St. Ignatius to ask questions, I was to answer honestly but not elaborate. The son of immigrants, my father was always in awe of old money. He said rich people were good to know and bad to cross. A smart person, he said, knew to mind his own business in life. He did not consider me a smart person, which was why he felt the need to put pen to paper and remind me to shut my mouth. All he wanted was for me to finally graduate. I’d be legal soon. He could be rid of me.
James van Clive never came back to the United States. It was speculated that he changed his name and was living in Europe, though no one has ever confirmed that. The Bridgeport Post ran an article about Rosario Nuñez’s murder on its fifteenth anniversary, and for some reason I took that paper with me to Archer Street and sat on the stoop of my old house and told L everything I just told you. I hadn’t considered the implications of the story. Or the fact that L became obsessed with the school shooting in Sandy Hook and drove up to Newtown every weekend on one mission of mercy or another. Or that she grew up poor and was a public school girl at heart despite her scholarships and Ivy League education. I remember she sat there and looked at Rosario’s picture for a long time, and also at van Clive’s, which ran next to it, and said it was just about the worst story she had ever heard. It seemed to affect her in some profound way. If I was looking for sympathy because my prom date had been killed, I had gone to the wrong place, and afterward, when I’d call and ask if I could see her, she was fond of saying, “I don’t know, Ray. Why don’t you go swimming with Bridgeport girls instead. Maybe your grandparents can drive you.” It became her favorite thing to say. Whenever I’d suggest getting together, her response was always the same: “Why don’t you go swimming with Bridgeport girls.”
She said it every time.
The logical question, of course, is why didn’t I just tell the truth about my background from the get-go? From the very first night down the shore? It would have been so much easier, after all, and considering we were at the beginning of things, she would have understood. But I couldn’t have known that then, so to be honest, it never crossed my mind. I mean, I hated my father enough to invent a story about him being dead, and the emotion that led to me concocting the tale was still pretty fresh (it had been only a little over a year since I had seen him), so the last thing I was going to do was tell a girl I was thunderstruck by that I was the worst kind of liar, a trafficker in invented tragedy. Her own father had died in a bizarre accident before her mom gave birth, and she thought that particular kind of loss was a thing that bound us. Though it was never anything we talked about, there was no denying it was there, and it was probably an accelerant to her trusting and believing in me so quickly, this idea that we were connected through such a specific kind of loss from the outset of our lives. I can see that now. But then? What the hell did I know about that or anything else? I was nineteen. My mother was a suicide. I hated and blamed my father. And so I tried on the pose of someone who was raised by his grandparents in the aftermath of tragedy, and while I can’t really tell you why I started telling that tale, I will admit that I enjoyed the sympathy it engendered in people. It seemed like the perfect kind of lie, because it was the type of story people spoke of when you weren’t around, and a thing they would never bring up when you were. You could bask in the warmth of sympathy without ever having to answer for it. And since you never had to answer for it, you kind of forgot about it.
On the night when I could have said something, I was in a place that can’t be described as wholly of this earth. After nearly floating straight into the sky while dancing with L on the deck of the tiki bar, I went back and sat with her on the bank near the canal that ran behind the beach house she was sharing with her friends. I have no idea how we got on the subject, but I remember asking if she had ever been to DC and when she said no, I told her about some class trip I took to go see the cherry blossoms, though I had only read about them, to be honest, and had never been to DC at all. She hopped up, sa
id, “Well, let’s go check them out, then,” and before you knew it, we were driving down the highway in the middle of the night in a borrowed Volvo wagon, holding hands and listening to Dire Straits’ Making Movies on CD (the second track, “Romeo and Juliet,” would become our wedding song after she wrote the lyric “You ’n me, babe—how ’bout it?” in lipstick on the dash). It was like we had decided to be a couple without even discussing it. As if we’d been a couple all along and were just waiting to meet so we could get things started. We fell into a familiarity I would never experience again in life with another human being, and one, to be honest, that I never looked for with anyone else. I would pile up acquaintances over the years, people who felt we were good friends, but the reality is that L was the only person who ever truly mattered to me. I had managed to fit in all my life, but there, with her, was the only time I ever felt like I belonged.
We rolled down through the tunnel in Baltimore, talking and talking and talking, her saying, “I like the white hair under an old dog’s chin,” and me saying, “I like watching Woody Allen movies in the middle of the aft- ernoon,” and her saying, “I like when little kids dress up as bumblebees on Halloween,” and me saying, “I like those little leather helmets that falcons wear when they’re in training,” and her saying, “I like the fact that Scotland Yard isn’t in Scotland,” and me saying, “I like the way your freckles all seem hand-placed,” and her saying, “Maybe you can be my Paul Newman, or at least write me a novel,” and me saying, “I’ll be whoever you need me to be till the end of fucking time, and also write you a novel.”
Swimming with Bridgeport Girls Page 21
