by Lou Aronica
It was quiet on the other end of the phone. It sounded like Brad was writing something.
“Do you think he’d be interested in our magazine?” When Brad said “our,” he was referring to himself and his investors. He definitely wasn’t suggesting that I was a participant in any way.
“You’d have to make him an amazing offer.”
“I think there’s room in the budget.”
“I’m not talking about money.” It didn’t surprise me that Brad had missed my earlier point. “He can get money from lots of places. He can even get money from The City – like I said I’m sure he already gets lots of it. For Mark to get on board with a new magazine, he’d have to believe that you were very ambitious, that you weren’t going to fold in nine months, and that you were going to give him the kind of editorial freedom and ability to call his own shots that he couldn’t get elsewhere.”
“We’re not going to fold in nine months,” Brad said stiffly.
“Hey, it’s not me that you have to convince.”
“The part about being ambitious goes without saying. What kind of editorial freedom are we talking about?”
“Well, no one, not even someone with Mark’s ego, is going to think that management is going to give him carte blanche. But he’s going to want to know what your basic parameters are, and then he’s going to want to know that he can do essentially anything he wants as long as he stays within those parameters.”
It was hard for me to believe that Brad understood what I was talking about. To him, a magazine’s editorial content was what you included to break up the advertising. That such a thing could affect a career decision more than money was not something he could easily comprehend.
“And this guy would be a marquee name, right?”
“I’m guessing the reverberations would be huge.”
“Then I think we could probably give him a lot of room to move around in. Along with all of the salary and perks, of course.”
“Look, it’s worth a shot. He might even be up for this kind of challenge.”
Brad was quiet again. He was definitely writing something. “How’d you like to pitch him for us.”
“Huh?”
“He’s a friend of yours, right?”
“I’ve known him since I’ve been writing professionally. I’ve never been to a barbecue at his house or anything.”
“Do you think you could sell him on the magazine?”
Two thoughts came to my mind at the same time. The first was, I’m not entirely sure that I’m sold on the magazine. In fact, I’m not even sure I know what the magazine is. The other was my father saying, “So if he hires one of these guys, do you get a finder’s fee?” It didn’t seem right to bring up the latter with my brother-in-law, even though he was making it abundantly clear through his tone of voice that this was a business conversation.
“I think I’d need to be a whole lot better prepped on the direction of the magazine before I could do it.”
“But you think you could do it?”
“If you’re asking if I think I can deliver you Mark Gray, who the hell knows? Like I said before, he’s gotten plenty of offers. If what you’re asking is whether I can pitch him aggressively, yeah, sure, once I know what I’m talking about. But why do you need me?”
“You said he’s a friend of yours. And I’m guessing you speak his language. Believe it or not, I’m actually aware of the fact that I don’t.”
I found the admission a little disarming. Perhaps the shakeup surrounding his severance had actually released some humility into his bloodstream.
“I’d be happy to sit down with Mark for you.” I said. “But as I told you before, I’m going to have to know a lot more about the magazine than I do right now, or you won’t stand a chance with him.”
“That’s very do-able. How about your having dinner with me and my partners on –” he hesitated for a moment, presumably to consult his calendar “– Wednesday?”
I pretended to look at my calendar, though I already knew that Marina was going to be out with an old high school friend that night. She had invited me to tag along and I passed, and she actually tried to talk me into it before I convinced her that I really didn’t want to go.
“Yeah, Wednesday is good.”
“I’ll set it up with my partners,” he said, and I could hear him writing on the other end. “And Jess, thanks for not asking me what’s in this for you. I appreciate that you’d do this as a favor. But we’ll talk about what’s in it for you on Wednesday.”
It promised to be an interesting dinner. Of course the subsequent conversation with Mark would require me to be an Olympian-level pitchman. It would be diverting, to say the least. A diversion seemed welcome.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There are a number of things that I never wanted to be in my life. I had no interest in being a doctor or a lawyer or a financial analyst. I didn’t want to be a bricklayer or an ice hockey goalie or a cowboy. Of course I didn’t want to be a serial killer or a child abuser or a politician. But of all the things I didn’t want to be, the thing I wanted to be least was a cliché.
Yet in the couple of weeks that had passed since my return from California, I was becoming more of one with every passing moment. Man finds girl, they have great time together, their relationship deepens, she tells him she loves him – and man starts to retreat emotionally. It’s the third or fourth definition of the word “cliché” in Webster’s.
Of course it wasn’t exactly like that, and of course I had given huge amounts of advance warning, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I didn’t want Marina’s telling me she loved me (and my telling her that I loved her) to disconnect us from what had been the most natural relationship in my life. But the truth was that it was just about all I thought about when we were together. And what I thought about saddened me deeply: that this event had signaled the final act of our affair. We’re in love. Love dies. The show’s big, weepy ballad was probably less than half an hour away.
As a sign of how confused this all made me, I still hadn’t told Marina about my father’s having been engaged to Gina. There was no way to do this without talking about how much that information had shaken me up. And doing that would lead to my talking about why it shook me up so much, and that was a conversation I wasn’t equipped to have. So I reserved a story I would have run to Marina with just a few weeks before. I pulled back.
What a cliché.
“So he hasn’t said anything to you?” she said as we walked through the downtown streets after dinner one night.
“No, nothing.”
“Isn’t this driving you crazy? It’s driving me crazy. I wonder what’s going on. I’ll bet the next story is going to be huge and he’s working up the energy to tell you. I wonder what it could be.”
We walked quietly for a while. We stopped into a convenience store because Marina remembered that she needed to buy a birthday card for a fellow teacher. While we were in there, we saw a photograph of an actress on the cover of Rolling Stone, which led to a lengthy conversation about the actress’s best and poorest roles. It was very easy to talk about this and I found myself participating with gusto. There was no unsafe ground here. I could have any opinion I wanted, I could disagree completely with anything Marina said, and she would do nothing more than question my taste. We both loved movies and we both respected each other’s opinions, and therefore we could debate endlessly with no downside. The same would have been true if we were discussing the death penalty, or excessive uses of force, or the role of religion. The fact is, the same would have been true if we were talking about the delicacy and perishability of romantic unions. I just had stopped being able to understand that. It didn’t matter that we loved each other before we told each other that we did. It was the saying it that triggered this in me. Yes, that was ludicrous, but I had no way of understanding that just then.
The conversation about the actress continued all the way back to the car when I told Marina that my
favorite of the actress’s movies had been a mother/daughter drama she’d done about five years before.
“Oh, God, remember that one. I’ll bet you were bawling like a baby when she decided to move to New York at the end.”
“To tell you the truth, what I remember best were the amazingly short skirts she wore in just about every scene.”
Marina slapped me on the shoulder. “Yeah, right. That’s just like you. You like this movie the most because she showed a lot of leg in it. Did you start crying before she said goodbye to her brother or after?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t cry during the movie. I just remember the skirts.”
“Yeah, and Bogart had great pecs in ‘Casablanca.’” She took my face in her hands. “I know you like movies where you can get all worked up. That’s one of the many reasons why I love you.”
I put my head against her forehead and then pulled her closer, but I didn’t say anything. When I pulled back, Marina gave me a brief curious look and then got into the car.
We didn’t talk for a few minutes after I started driving. I hadn’t intended to avoid telling Marina that I loved her while we were standing outside, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. I was as baffled by it as I’m sure she was. But one of the things that I loved about her was that she didn’t allow things to hang in the air.
“What was that about back there?” she said when we got to a traffic light.
I turned to her. “What do you mean?”
She tilted her head. “You don’t do coy well.”
“It didn’t mean what you think it meant. It just got stuck in my throat. That’s all.”
The light changed and I started to drive again. Marina turned to look out at the road.
“And what did you think I thought it meant?”
“I thought you might have thought that it meant that I didn’t love you.”
“Jess, I wouldn’t need for you to not tell me you loved me for me to know that you didn’t love me. I know that you love me. I also knew that it was bound to get ‘stuck in your throat’ sometime around now.”
I turned to her briefly. “How did you know that?”
“Because you’ve been just a tiny bit more reticent about everything lately. I figured at some point you’d own up to it, but now’s as good a time as any for me to say this to you.”
“What’s that?”
“Stop. Just stop. Nothing changed. I know that you think it did, but it didn’t. Did you think that I started loving you the first time I told you? Do you think that that’s when you started loving me? Of course not. We’d both been feeling it for a long time before then. And everything was fine. We still have the same relationship we had before. We’re still taking it day to day. We’re still acutely aware of the odds. I could have told you I loved you a month after we started dating, but I thought it would scare you too much. Maybe I should have waited a while longer. I love you. I didn’t ask you to marry me and I didn’t ask you to revise your entire worldview. But I do love you. Get over it.”
I reached over for her hand. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I should feel stupid for feeling the way I had the previous couple of weeks, relieved that Marina had broken the ice, or just glad to be completely honest with her again.
“I love you,” I said. “You just amaze me.”
“Yes, you’re a very lucky man.”
I kissed her hand. “I’m fully aware of that.”
I would tell her about my father’s engagement the next day.
~~~~~~~~
That Saturday, Marina left the house very early to attend a teachers’ conference on Long Island. I slept until around 9:30, and when I walked into the kitchen I saw my father sitting on the patio. It was mid-March and the sun angling in through the kitchen windows made it feel as though the temperatures had climbed into the eighties. They hadn’t, but it was obviously warm enough for my father to take his coffee outside.
“The first spectacular day of the year,” he said as I walked out to join him. He was right about that. It had to be in the low seventies already, and it was cloudless and beaming. I hadn’t been out back since the last snowstorm nearly a month before, and it was nice to see that the ground appeared dry and that some buds were showing up on the bushes that rimmed the patio.
“We should do something,” I said as I sat down next to him.
“I’m thinking of putting in a garden,” he said, eyes cast off to an unshaded corner of the property.
“I was thinking we could have lunch someplace with outdoor seating.”
He offered me a brief, unimpressed glance, and then turned his gaze outward again. “This backyard sings out for a garden.”
“When did you turn into Walt Whitman? And how come your old backyard never sang out for a garden? You lived there for more than forty years. Do you even know anything about gardening?”
“Last I heard, it was somewhat simpler than nuclear science. Have you heard differently?”
I laughed. I had no idea where this inspiration was coming from.
“And last I heard, gardening involved things like bending down. Not exactly your favorite act. I’m not sure you’re physically up to this, Dad.”
He sighed deeply while still looking out at the property and then turned to me again. “I am if I get a little help.”
It would have been very easy for me to say no. I could have reminded him that I didn’t have the time to dedicate to the upkeep that would certainly become my responsibility. I could have mentioned that there were any number of farmer’s markets from which to get very fresh produce all summer long. I could have told him that I didn’t like to get my hands dirty, which was largely true. But just as some voice spoke to him on this first glittering pre-spring day, something told me that in some way this was the kind of thing I had been thinking of when I asked him to move in with me.
“Not a big one, okay?” I said.
“Just some vegetables and a few herbs. Stuff you like to cook with.”
“Do you have any idea whatsoever what you’re doing?”
“None at all. That’s what nurseries are for. They’ll tell us exactly what to do.”
A couple of hours later, we were breaking ground. For the first hour, while I dug out the plot, my father did little more than sit on a lawn chair, supervise, and bring me a cold drink. Once the soil was exposed, though, he became an active participant. He raked and fertilized precisely the way the salesman at the nursery had told him to. And when I knelt down to begin planting, he knelt down right beside me.
“Isn’t this killing you?” I said.
“With all that nice soft topsoil we just laid down? It’s like kneeling on a pillow.”
“I can handle this part if it hurts too much.”
“I’m fine. I told you that I would do my share.”
My father insisted that starting with greenhouse-raised seedlings was “cheating,” so we planted seeds. I won the negotiation to keep things as simple as possible to increase our odds of success. We chose Roma and Beefsteak tomatoes, bell peppers (only after I secured his agreement that we wouldn’t pick them until they turned red), zucchini (the salesman at the nursery said we’d need to be ‘absolute black thumbs’ in order to fail with these), basil, cilantro and rosemary. I dug each hole, and my father dropped in the seeds, replaced the soil, and patted softly. Though I saw him wince a couple of times as he moved through the plot, he remained steadfast.
As we drove back from the nursery that morning, I wondered if my father was going to tell me more about Gina. He hadn’t said anything since telling me about the trip to Tuscany, and these were the ideal conditions. I also thought for a while about talking to him about what was going on with Marina. She’d eased my mind on the drive back from dinner a few nights back, but I still couldn’t help but continue to think about where we were going. In the end, neither woman came up in conversation. Instead, we talked about the family.
“So I’m having lunch with Mark Gray on Tuesday,” I told him.
“Yeah. He’s the editor that Brad is salivating over.”
“You think this magazine of Brad’s has a chance?”
I looked over at him, surprised. “You said that like you thought it might not. I thought you thought Brad was a genius.”
My father dropped some more seeds in the ground and shrugged. “Brad’s a good numbers guy. From what I can tell, he’s a good corporate guy. I’m not sure he can be a good magazine guy. There’s a difference.”
Of course, I knew there was a difference. I was a little surprised to hear my father say that he knew this, though.
“I have to admit, he kinda sold me,” I said. “The first part of our dinner was classic Brad: talking about demographics and advertiser appeal and that sort of thing. And the guys who were with him made a suit like Brad seem like a poet. But when I finally got them to tell me what the hell the magazine was, they were pretty good at answering from an editorial point of view. Especially Brad. I was a little impressed.”
“You’d better hope he never talks that way in front of your sister. She’ll dump him for breach of contract.”
I laughed. “Gee Dad, much as I’d like to defend Denise, you’ve got that one nailed.”
He shrugged, as though this admission had cost him a little something. “I love my daughter, but I know my daughter. So did you do as I told you to do and ask him what you got out of this?”
“We had a conversation about it,” I said. I didn’t feel the need to acknowledge that it was Brad who’d brought it up and not me. “Brad made some vague allusions to their ‘showing their appreciation.’ I sort of interpreted that as meaning that there might be some compensation involved if I perform a miracle and get Mark on board, and if I don’t Brad will try not to be openly hostile at family dinners.”
“You’re right; I should have made this deal for you.”
“Hey, there’s still time. 12:30 at the Union Square Cafe. I’ll keep my cell phone on.”
