The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  ~~~~~~~~

  Gina’s mother had never embraced him before. She nearly wrenched his back when she did it after he and Gina announced their engagement. He was relatively sure that Mrs. Ceraf would accept the news enthusiastically, but he wasn’t at all prepared for how enthusiastically she responded. It actually hurt a little the next day.

  Of course Gina could not return home from Italy to tell her parents that she was engaged, as her fiancé was not supposed to have been with her on the trip. They talked at first about elaborating on the illusion by having Mickey “pick Gina up” at the airport and proposing then, but ultimately Mickey suggested that something critical was missing from that scenario. In spite of the very un-traditional woman he was marrying and the decidedly un-traditional way in which he had proposed, he wanted to maintain a critical part of the engagement tradition. He needed to ask Gina’s father’s permission.

  “If he says no, does that mean that I need to give the ring back?” Gina said.

  “Do you think he’ll say no?”

  “Of course not. I think he thinks you’re a good catch. But if he did say no, what would you do?”

  Mickey pretended to think about the question for a moment and then he shrugged. “Ask someone else to marry me, I guess.”

  Gina punched him on the arm and then glanced again at the ring on her finger.

  “I suppose that would be okay as long as I got to keep this.”

  “And people call you a socialist. You are going to take that off before you go home, right?”

  “For the only time in my life, yes.”

  Talking to Mr. Ceraf had been as much of a formality as Mickey expected, and three days after Gina returned from Italy, his future mother-in-law nearly broke his back. Two weeks later, the Cerafs hosted a lavish engagement party for Mickey and Gina in their apartment.

  It was the first time that the Sienna family and the Ceraf family would be meeting, an occasion that gave Mickey some pause. There were huge cultural differences between the two families. Mickey wasn’t at all sure how they would blend. Like with asking for Gina’s hand, however, Mickey shouldn’t have been concerned. Gina’s parents made the entire Sienna clan feel welcome. When Mickey saw his mother trading sewing tips with Gina’s aunt, he knew that everything was going to be okay.

  There were easily two dozen people at the party that Mickey had never met before. He had been to a number of family functions during the months he had been with Gina, but this occasion introduced an entirely new layer of relatives – each of whom drove home the point that he should be counting his blessings. Mickey thought it was a little funny that anyone thought that he needed to be told how special Gina was, but he accepted it all in the spirit in which it was intended.

  “She’s our jewel,” said Gina’s paternal grandmother.

  “A spitfire from the day she was born,” said one uncle.

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll just let her have her way,” said a cousin. “The rest of us figured that out a long time ago.”

  “I’m sure you think you realize how lucky you are, young man,” said another uncle. “Let me just tell you right now that you don’t know the half of it. Gina’s a one-in-a-million girl. I wish my son had even a small percentage of her zest for life.”

  Mickey smiled and glanced over at his future wife, who was at that moment less than ten feet away from him experiencing some level of teasing from some older cousins.

  “I understand what you’re saying, sir. I’ve been pinching myself regularly since the day I met her.”

  At that moment, Gina’s father sidled up next to them.

  “What are you filling my future son-in-law’s head with, Malcolm?”

  “Just making sure he knows what a prize he’s getting, Dan.”

  Mr. Ceraf clapped Mickey on the shoulder and said to his brother, “And what about the prize my daughter is getting? Have you ever seen my Gina so head-over-heels about anything? I’d say that Mickey here either has her hypnotized or he’s going to be one heck of a husband.”

  Mickey felt himself blushing. Mr. Ceraf had been unremittingly complimentary since he’d asked for Gina’s hand. Mickey felt a little guilty about concealing the actual timing of the engagement from the man. At the same time, though, he knew that he would do everything in his power to be the kind of husband to Gina that Mr. Ceraf hoped he would be. In the end, he figured, that mattered much more.

  Toward the end of the party Mickey made his way over to the bar to get a drink for Gina. Carl was there and raised his glass toward him as Mickey walked in his direction.

  “Brother-in-law,” Mickey said as he touched his glass with Carl’s. “Who would have ever thought we’d wind up being family?”

  “Not me,” Carl said, shaking his head. “I would have thought you stood a better chance of marrying my mother than my sister.”

  “Gee, thanks for the compliment.”

  Carl put his arm around Mickey and walked him toward a relatively quiet corner.

  “It’s not you, Mick. I just never thought for a second that Gina would get so serious so quickly. Even when the two of you started seeing each other almost every night, I figured it would pass. Gina’s never given any indication before of being the marrying kind.”

  “I guess she just had to meet the right man.”

  Carl offered a little laugh. “I really just never thought it. I always thought she’d be too caught up in trying to do something big with her life. First woman president, maybe. It’s hard to imagine her cooking dinners and taking care of babies. You have to understand that it’s not her nature.”

  Mickey was surprised to hear Carl talking this way. He thought that Carl knew both him and his sister better than that.

  “Is that what you’re worried about? Do you think I’m going to saddle Gina with a half-dozen kids and a long list of chores?”

  “Life is different for a woman after she gets married,” Carl said. “I guess you don’t understand that any more than Gina seems to. I like you, Mickey and I think I’ll like having you as my brother-in-law. But you aren’t going to be able to contain Gina. And even if she let you do it, it would be a terrible shame if you did.”

  “You’re just going to have to wait to see, Carl. I have no interest in containing Gina. And we haven’t even talked about having kids yet. Believe me, the last thing in the world I would want to do is prevent Gina from being everything she was meant to be. We’re going to do it together.”

  ~~~~~~~~

  The pasta on his plate had lost its appeal. Mickey looked up at Jesse and felt the tears in his eyes. That was the first time that had happened. These stories were getting harder and harder to tell.

  “We were going to conquer the world together first. There would be time for kids later. We were supposed to conquer the world together.”

  Mickey put down his fork and took a drink of water.

  “I’m going to get a little air,” he said, standing up. “Get the check, will ya?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “He nearly cried,” I said to Marina that night. “The only time I’ve ever seen him cry was at my mother’s funeral and he was almost in tears this afternoon telling me about something that happened at his engagement party with Gina.”

  We were sitting in a movie theatre eating a huge bag of popcorn for dinner. Not nutritionally sound, but a great guilty pleasure and a necessary one considering that we were both running late that night.

  “He seems to be getting more and more emotional every time he tells you about her. What do you think that’s about?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all part of the mystery. It was strange enough seeing him transform before my eyes while he was telling the stories. Now this.”

  I wasn’t being entirely honest with Marina, something that, in spite of my best intentions, was happening with greater frequency these days. There were some big issues that I needed to resolve in my own mind before I could work them out with her.

  I wa
s almost certain that my father’s getting more emotional was directly related to the way in which his affair with Gina ended. For the first time, I started to feel angry with Gina, blaming her directly for breaking my father’s heart. This was paradoxical in any number of ways, but I couldn’t help it. Just looking at him struggling to keep the tears in his eyes at lunch made me want to rail against someone.

  I’d spent the entire afternoon – time that I’d intended to dedicate to preparing for my interview – preoccupied with how things ended between them. What did she say to him? Was the conversation with Carl Ceraf a clue? Did she leave a letter on the kitchen table for him saying that she needed to do more with her life and that she was heading off to fight for women’s rights in Kenya? Or did it all come down to one explosive moment when my father tried to hold on too tight and she burst away from him. There was no question in my mind at this point that she had been the one to break it off.

  I also began to wonder if perhaps the entire purpose behind my father’s telling me this story wasn’t to send me a message at all but simply to unburden himself. Surely the message, if there was one, could only serve to underscore conversations I’d already had with him – in which he had taken an entirely contrary position to my own. Because what was coming across loud and clear from the tale of his life with Gina was the message that not only does even the most intense love fail, but if you give yourself over to this love entirely, it has the power to scar you for the rest of your life.

  I had been distractedly eating popcorn for several moments when I brought myself back to the movie theatre and Marina.

  “Anyway, the whole trip into the city sort of screwed up my schedule. I didn’t get nearly enough background work done on AnnaLee Layton.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “I’m not seeing her until three tomorrow. I should be okay. I just hate leaving anything to the last minute.”

  Marina nodded in commiseration. “My lead in the play broke her leg.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re speaking metaphorically, huh?”

  “I wish I were. Jerry and I spent most of the afternoon rearranging parts and moving stuff around. I think I’m being punished for the hubris of thinking that this year we’d put on a show where the audience was paying attention even when their own kids weren’t on the stage.”

  “I’ll take that as an object lesson.”

  “Meanwhile, I think it’s going to put a little bit of a crimp into our weekend. Jerry was pretty insistent about our getting together at some point to work out all the new details.”

  “Sounds like he has a Bob Fosse complex. Actually, if you could pull it together for Sunday afternoon, that would be great. In a surprise move, Denise and her family announced they were coming over again.”

  Marina was quiet for a moment and looked away toward the movie screen. “So you wouldn’t mind if I set this up for Sunday afternoon?”

  “Not at all. It would be perfect actually. Get two things out of the way at the same time.”

  Marina nodded and reached for the popcorn. It was abundantly clear that I’d said something wrong. Before I could ask what was bothering her, the house lights dimmed and the trailers came on. I offered Marina some popcorn and she took the entire bag out of my hands. That too didn’t seem to be a good sign.

  The movie was eminently forgettable, which was unfortunate since I’d been looking forward to it. It was one of those concepts that made a great paragraph, translated into an intriguing trailer, and then proceeded emptily out of the projector. It’s entirely possible that I wouldn’t have enjoyed “Citizen Kane” this evening, though. That little exchange just before the lights went down was nagging at me.

  “Listen, do you think you could drop me home tonight,” Marina said as we got into the car.

  “What’s going on?” Since I’d come back from California, we’d spent most nights at my house, and it was clear that I wasn’t being invited to join her at hers.

  “Nothing, I’ve just got a bunch of papers to grade and another parent conference in the morning. I should have said something to you earlier.”

  In which case we would have arranged for both of us to stay at her place.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” She looked at me with the kind of expression that said she was working overtime to convince me.

  “You don’t seem fine.”

  “I’m fine, Jess. You know, we don’t have to do everything together.”

  I decided to drop it, because I didn’t know how else to address it and Marina was being uncharacteristically closed. Considering how long we had been together, this was surprisingly uncharted territory. I drove her home, kissed her in an approximation of the way I always kissed her (what is it about the disequilibrium of one partner in a relationship that can make the other so unsteady?) and then took off for home. It was only when I got most of the way there that I realized what had set Marina off. I hadn’t invited her to dinner with Denise. In fact, I not only hadn’t invited her, but had made a point of how convenient it was that she had something else to do.

  While part of my mind worked at chastisement, the rest wondered at how I had so naturally excluded Marina from a family event. We’d managed to circumvent Christmas because she had flown home to spend the holidays with her parents. Other than that, there hadn’t been terribly many times when any part of my family had been around. Matty had come in for a couple of days a few months back, I hadn’t seen Darlene since the Summit After the Fire, and Denise showed up with about the same frequency as the equinox. Marina hadn’t been to these functions in the past, and I wasn’t in the practice of including her.

  This was the convenient explanation, if not the actual explanation. If everything had been as it should be, I would have naturally invited Marina. If everything had been as it should be, I would have assumed she would have been there simply because we were always together on Sunday afternoons. In fact, if everything had been as it should be, I would have checked with her to make sure we didn’t have any other plans before confirming the date with Denise.

  But everything was not as it should be. It couldn’t be, because, whether he’d intended this (which was extremely unlikely) or not, my father’s story of his romance with Gina was causing me to seek out every potential pitfall in my relationship with Marina. What was going to scuttle us? Was she going to become too needy? Was I going to tire of speaking my heart and resent her for asking me to do so? Was there some unanticipated event waiting around the corner that we were going to react to so differently that it would drive us in opposite directions?

  I didn’t want to be so close to her that I’d be talking about her decades from now with tears in my eyes. I didn’t want a story about how we’d just missed or about how we’d burned brightly for a brief while before the bitterness set in. The fact was that, while I wasn’t paying attention (or, more to the point, while I had been blithely believing that my eyes were fixed clearly on what was in front of me), I had gotten to precisely the place that I’d promised myself I wouldn’t get with another woman: the point where it would really hurt when it was over. That little gesture that Marina had made just before the movie started was the kind of thing I’d convinced myself I’d never see with her. I’d even started to believe that I could acknowledge being in love with her and still not worry about what happened when things went wrong. It was monumentally naïve.

  As I pulled into my driveway, I realized that I was rapidly getting to the point where I was going to have to do something definitive. Whatever the hell that was.

  ~~~~~~~~

  My father insisted on having dinner against the backdrop of the shoots peeking out of our garden.

  “I’m pretty sure that when the people who owned this house put in the patio, they were thinking that the patio table would go there,” I said as we were setting it up just outside of the plot.

  “You lack imagination.”

  “There’s also that littl
e thing about its being April. It’s nice now, but it could get pretty cold by four or so when we have dinner.”

  My father put down the chair he’d been rearranging, walked over to me and put a hand on my chest. “Live a little, Jess.”

  He was in a good mood, which was helpful, since I hadn’t been in one since that difficult episode with Marina. The next night, we’d only had a brief exchange about it.

  “Look, I can’t believe I was so stupid as to not invite you to dinner with Denise on Sunday,” I said when I picked her up.

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “Of course it’s a problem. And I know that you realize it’s a problem because you were upset about it last night.”

  She glanced at me with a guarded expression as we walked to the car. “I was just overreacting because of the thing with the play. You don’t need to invite me to dinner.”

  “I’d like you to be there.”

  “That’s nice. Really. But it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. I have plans with Jerry and he’ll start to hyperventilate if I change them.”

  “I’m not getting the impression that you’re really okay about this.”

  She stopped outside of the passenger door and looked at me across the hood. “Jess, sometimes your impressions are wrong.”

  She got into the car. When I settled in next to her, she said, “I’m probably not going to come over afterward, though. Jerry and I are likely to run pretty late and it’ll just be simpler to stay home.”

  We moved on from there. The conversation made me feel like I’d just eaten a plate full of styrofoam, but I couldn’t think of another way to approach it that would be more satisfying. I drove off to the movie theatre. Two movies in two nights was decidedly not our style, but Marina said that was the only thing she was interested in doing. She stayed over, but it was almost as though she were doing it to avoid having a conversation about not doing it.

  On Sunday morning, we had breakfast with my father and read the paper for a while. I needed to make some preparations for dinner, but I didn’t want to make them in front of her because I thought it might insult her. Never once before had I needed to be polite with her.