The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  Several times I’d considered dropping by the school to watch her teach, even just for a moment. But it seemed a line that I shouldn’t cross. It was almost certainly best to spare Marina the teasing that would surely follow from the girls who would want to know everything about her boyfriend.

  We left the restaurant a few minutes later. Marina’s story had taken the edge off for me, and it felt great to drive quietly back to her house, holding her hand tightly.

  “I really do love the scarf,” she said as we turned into her neighborhood.

  I gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m glad. Six months is a pretty big deal.”

  “Hey, it’s just a hundred and eighty days, one day at a time, right?” she said in a tone that was just a little sharper than I was accustomed to hearing from her. I looked over at her and could see that her eyebrows were arched and that her face held the slightest hint of a smirk. But then she smiled and kissed my hand.

  It got quiet in the car again. I wondered if I should be saying something else. Should I tell her how much I appreciated being with her? Did she know that this was the third-longest relationship of my life? Did that matter in any way whatsoever?

  Even though I didn’t have that Big Book of Proper Romantic Behavior, I knew that everything I wanted to say to her would almost certainly come out wrong. I wanted to tell her that the time we’d shared and whatever time was left between us was precious to me. I wanted to tell her that, while both of us were too smart to be fooled by the implications, what we had in this relationship was fulfilling and soul satisfying. I wanted to tell her that she had made a place in my mind and in my heart that would last long after our affair had faded. I knew she would understand what I meant by all of these things and that she probably felt the same way, but it just didn’t seem like the kind of thing one said under these circumstances.

  I was still trying to think of something to say when she turned to me and announced, “I figured you were only good for two dates, maybe three.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see she was smiling when she said it, though I also knew that what she was really saying was “Let’s skip the profundities, okay?”

  We got to her house a minute or so later.

  “Are you sure it’s all right for you to spend the night here?” she said as we walked to the door.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m just a little worried because of that thing that happened the last time.”

  Since my father had moved in, Marina hadn’t spent the night at my house because I felt a little awkward about it. I’d spent several nights at hers, though far fewer than I had in the past, because I didn’t want to leave my father alone regularly. A couple of nights ago, I got home in the morning to find my father in a panic. He hadn’t remembered that I told him I wouldn’t be coming home, and he seemed disoriented over where he was. It was the first time I had seen him like this. We all had serious concerns over his physical condition, but his mind had always seemed absolutely sound. I watched him carefully after that, but it seemed to be an isolated incident. Since then, he’d seemed sharp and capable.

  “He’s fine,” I said. We walked into the house and I took her in my arms. “He’s also gotten between us way too much already tonight.”

  “The night’s young,” she said, kissing me deeply.

  ~~~~~~~~

  There were very few things about Marina that I found annoying. That she woke up every morning to the Beatles’ “Getting Better” was one of them.

  “You’re going to have to explain to me at some point why you bothered to spend the money for an alarm clock with an iPod dock if you were only going to listen to the same song all the time,” I said groggily.

  She reached over to switch the music to a talk radio station. This was all part of her ritual and its logic was completely elusive to me. “How else would I be able to wake up to it?”

  She snuggled into my embrace. That this was also something we did every morning we were together more than compensated for having to listen to a minor Lennon-McCartney composition.

  “I’ve missed this the last few days,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said, kissing my neck. “Do you really think your father would be weird about my sleeping at your house?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been very good at predicting his reaction to anything so far. I think I might be a little weird about it, though. There’s just something strange about the two of us together like this while my father is sleeping down the hall.”

  She kissed me again. “That’s cute in an uncharacteristically puritanical kind of way. If I were a different kind of girl, I might even think you were trying to hide me from him.”

  We lay in bed for a few more minutes with me stroking her hair and her brushing my upper arm with her fingernails. I was in absolutely no hurry to get up. When the radio announced that it was 6:45, Marina propped herself on one arm.

  “We have to get into the shower,” she said.

  “Call in sick. You haven’t called in sick once since we’ve been together.”

  She moved over my body to get to the bathroom. “That’s because I actually take my job seriously.”

  “I can’t believe you’re blowing me off for Kendall Blevins.”

  She turned back and kissed me on the cheek. “He’s more dedicated to me. Go put the coffee on.”

  Once Marina was out of bed, I had no trouble getting out myself. I went down to the kitchen to make coffee before returning to the bathroom to shower with her. There was a very clear pattern to our mornings. After this we’d have a quick breakfast together before climbing into our cars and heading off in opposite directions. It was all very comfortable and comforting. Marina had organically introduced me to a way of starting the day that left me ready for whatever challenges awaited.

  She wore the scarf I bought her. I was glad both that she did it and that she seemed happy to be doing it.

  “Write something brilliant with your new pen today,” she said, kissing me, as she was got into her car.

  “I’m working on a piece about haggling with contractors.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Save the pen for something else.”

  I leaned over and kissed her again before getting into my car. While waiting at a traffic light, I reached over and took the pen from its box. It was a beauty with a rosewood case, brass clip, and a gold-plated nib. It would be one of the most impressive in my collection.

  Six months. We’d been together for half a year and still everything seemed both fresh and familiar. We fell into natural patterns. We seemed to know when the other was looking for a big night or some quiet time with a glass of wine. We always seemed to want to see the same movies. Even our newspaper reading behaviors were complementary.

  I suppose the thing that made it easiest was that we were both completely willing to let the relationship unfold a day at a time. I thought for another second about the way she had used the phrase the night before, and wondered if perhaps I was missing its implications. I decided that she was just teasing me.

  It amazed me that we didn’t have a ponderous conversation about our future at a landmark moment such as last night. On our half-year anniversary, Karen and I even talked about it during intercourse, alternating gasps of passion with images of a domestic future. Of course two months later, on our last day together, we didn’t exchange a single word.

  I thought about Larry, the guy Marina had been involved with for four years. I never met him, but I had a vivid picture in my mind. By the time Marina and I started dating, she’d been split from Larry for more than a year, but he still dominated our early conversations. From the way she described it, Marina had surrendered all of herself to the relationship. He was the first guy she had dated for any real length of time and she didn’t hold anything back. She became best friends with his sister and she made dinner for his parents once a week. She redecorated his house and let him reinvent her wardrobe. She even left her first school district a year short of tenure because he compl
ained that it was too far away from where they lived.

  Larry asked Marina to move in with him after they had been together for only a month. Three months later, they were engaged. Marina went into full bridal mode, scouting places for a reception, tearing photographs of dresses from magazines, visiting bakeries and florists, even going to other people’s receptions to listen to their bands. The wedding date itself remained elusive, though. First it was the next May. Then September. Then the June after that. Through it all, Marina approached the relationship as though she and Larry were already married. Sure, there were rough patches and times when Larry’s business trips backed up on one another and it seemed that she never got to see him. Whether he was around or not, though, there were always Wednesday nights with his parents and the daily phone conversations with his sister. She was a full-fledged member of the family.

  It took four years for Marina to learn why the wedding date never arrived. Each postponement marked a point when Larry was starting another affair. It turned out that Larry was in love with falling in love, and while it appeared that he genuinely cared about Marina (certainly enough to keep her around), he couldn’t resist being seduced by a new romance. Marina believed that some twisted sense of devotion actually allowed him to convince himself that he truly wanted Marina in the long term, and so he kept postponing the marriage without canceling the engagement. My own opinion was that he knew he could keep Marina standing by as a backup.

  This was of course based on nothing other than my affection for Marina, but it is supported by what ultimately happened to them. One night, Larry came home and confessed all the other relationships. He also announced that he had met his soulmate and that, much as it devastated him to say it, he could no longer be with Marina. Interestingly, Larry and the soulmate lasted only four months before she walked out on him. Larry was smart enough not to ask Marina to take him back.

  I was only the second guy Marina dated after Larry. It took her close to a year to even consider the notion of going out with anyone. I have to believe that if she knew we would be together six months later, she would have avoided any contact with me at all. Like everything else about us, though, the circumstances just fell into place. Neither of us wanted anything more from the other than what we were already getting, and as a result, we got much more than we expected. For what must have been the thousandth time, I told myself how lucky I was to have discovered her.

  Our houses were about fifteen minutes apart, and the drive back in the morning allowed me to get ready for the day. I never woke up at Marina’s in the mood to work. I didn’t know whether her mattress was just a little softer, the room just a little warmer, or that she was just a little more relaxed in her home environment, but I always felt like lingering. As I turned into my neighborhood, I would do the freelance journalist’s equivalent of getting my game face on. I’d review the work I’d done the previous day, set a target for this day, and mentally prepare a to-do list of phone calls and minor business details that required attention. By the time I arrived home, I was ready to turn on the computer and kick into action.

  On this morning, though, the smell of scorched eggs undermined my plans. My first thought was that my father had done to my kitchen what he had done to his own. As it turned out, that wasn’t entirely the case. I found him standing at the stove, attempting to flip what I assumed to be an omelet (with a metal spatula on my nonstick pan, but we won’t go into that). The eggs had barely begun to set and he was holding the pan off of the heat, which caused the eggs to run onto the burner. The burner diagonally across from him was also on, for no discernible reason. Plumes of smoke rose up from where the eggs hit the flame. There were also cracked eggshells at a variety of locations on the countertop and spatters of bacon grease everywhere.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled as I entered the kitchen. He was obviously so bent on his futile efforts that he hadn’t heard me come into the room. My voice startled him to drop the pan, inverting the rest of the eggs onto the burner.

  “What are you doing?” I repeated as I rushed over to the stove to pick up the pan, turn off the gas (both burners), and use the spatula to shovel the mess.

  “I was fine until you startled me,” he said.

  “Yeah, I noticed.” I got most of the eggs into the pan and dumped them in the garbage. “Did you want to see if you could make more friends at the fire department?”

  “I wasn’t going to start a fire. You talk to me like I’m a total incompetent.”

  “Dad, you’re very competent at a lot of things, but leaving you alone in a kitchen is like leaving a toddler alone with a chainsaw. Why couldn’t you just have cereal or something?”

  “I wanted eggs.”

  “And you couldn’t wait until I got home?”

  “I never know when you’re coming home in the morning.”

  “I come home the same time every morning I’m with Marina. She leaves to go to work at 7:45. It takes me fifteen minutes to get here, seventeen if I hit traffic.” I looked over at the clock. “See? 8:05.”

  “Well who the hell looks at the clock when you get home?”

  I cleaned off the burner and the pan and pulled the egg tray back out of the refrigerator. There were only three eggs left in there. I was sure there had been close to a dozen the day before. I could only imagine where the others had gone.

  I used the time it took me to pull out a new bowl, crack the eggs into it, and scramble them with a whisk to attempt to bring my blood pressure down.

  “What did you want in your omelet?” I said calmly.

  “I don’t want an omelet anymore.”

  “Dad, just tell me what you want in the stupid omelet.”

  He sneered. “Surprise me.”

  I started cooking and he went off to a neutral corner. Neither of us spoke again until I gave him his plate and poured myself a cup of coffee. As usual, the coffee he’d made was pallid. I suppose I should have been thankful that he hadn’t found a way to turn that process into a disaster as well.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with him while he ate, no longer quite ready to get to work.

  “It’s good, thanks,” he said after eating a bite.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He ate a little more. I could tell from the way he was approaching the meal that he had something on his mind.

  “Why haven’t I met her yet?”

  “Met who?” I said, though I of course knew who he was talking about.

  “The girl.”

  “The girl? You mean Marina?”

  “Is that her name? How would I know her name?” He didn’t do petulant well.

  “Because I’ve mentioned it several times.”

  “Why haven’t I met her?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t met her parents either. We’re not really at that stage.”

  “How long have you been going out with her?”

  “Around six months.”

  He put his fork down. “You’ve been going out with her for six months and you don’t think you’re at the stage where she should meet your father? You’re sleeping with her, right?”

  “No, I sleep in the guest room. We put on our feety pajamas and drink hot chocolate first, though.”

  He gave me the look. “If you’re sleeping with her, you’re at the stage where she should meet your father.”

  “Hmm, I’ve got some news for you, Dad.”

  “Don’t be a smartass. What I mean is that if you’ve been sleeping with her for six months, I should know who she is.”

  “Why is this important to you?”

  “It’s what you do.”

  “Really? Is there an official set of rules? My game didn’t come with any.”

  He sneered again. “Most people don’t need rules. They just know that it’s the proper thing to do.”

  I didn’t want to have this conversation any longer. I didn’t want to try to reconcile my relationship with Marina with his retro sensibility. I had absolutely no chance of succes
s, and I wasn’t even enjoying parrying with him on this subject.

  “If you really want to meet Marina, I’ll set it up. I’m supposed to see her tomorrow night. Are Thursdays okay for meeting parents for the first time, or is that exclusively a weekend thing?”

  He just grumbled again and took his plate to the sink. I assumed that meant that Thursdays were fine. I couldn’t wait to tell Marina about our change in plans. She was going to love this.

  Chapter Seven

  Mickey was never the kind of guy who ran his life like clockwork. When he was a broker, he never had distinct patterns to calling clients or checking the boards. He wasn’t somebody who expected dinner on the table at 6:30 or the kids in bed by 9:00 or a Sunday drive that commenced at exactly 11:10. Mickey believed that kind of precision made you inflexible, and if you were inflexible, you were not very strong.

  All the same, ever since Dorothy died, he found himself on the phone with Theresa at precisely 9:05 every morning. He convinced himself that there was nothing prescribed about this. Theresa liked watching those morning shows and they ended at nine. He didn’t want to disturb her, and he also knew that she’d need a few minutes to wash up the breakfast dishes afterward. So to Mickey, he was simply calling Theresa “first thing” and nothing more.

  Theresa had come into the world five years after Mickey, the last of Michael and Anna Sienna’s four children. Between Mickey and Theresa had been Paulie, who had been sick from birth and passed away before Theresa was born, and Teddy, who died in Okinawa. As the only girl, Theresa was Anna’s partner and a bauble for her father to adorn and admire. By the time she was four, she would spend hours in the kitchen with her mother, making pasta, kneading bread, mixing meatballs, and endlessly stirring the sauce. When the meals were ready, before she would sit at the dinner table, she would run to her room to change into one of the dozens of lace-trimmed dresses that her father just couldn’t help but buy her.