The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

“So are you nervous about your appointment with the mayor today?”

  “I’m not meeting the mayor. Just some of his staff. I’ve met most of them already.”

  “But the mayor could stop in, couldn’t he?”

  “I’m fairly sure the mayor is in Montauk for the weekend. To the best of my knowledge, we weren’t invited to go with him.”

  “Once he gets to know you, he’s going to invite you to all kinds of things.”

  Gina laughed. “Thank you for having so much faith in me, but I doubt that the mayor will ever even know I’m alive.”

  “Really? You don’t think he’ll notice when you become Governor?”

  Gina laughed more loudly. “This is one of the many, many reasons why I’m marrying you.”

  Mickey kissed Gina’s hand softly. When they finished lunch, they walked slowly down the street toward Gina’s apartment building. Mickey wasn’t in any rush to let Gina go, even though he knew she had something important to do. When they got to her door, the doorman greeted them and then discreetly turned his head as they kissed goodbye.

  “Dinner is at seven tonight?” Mickey said.

  “That’s when my aunt and uncle are supposed to arrive. Are these events getting a little tiring for you?”

  “Do you mean would I prefer to be out with you on a Saturday night dancing cheek to cheek? Of course I would. But I think it’s nice that your mother is so excited about our getting married.”

  “She just wants to show you off and brag a little about the great catch her daughter made.”

  They kissed again, slowly, in denial that there was anything else in the world that needed to happen other than this very kiss. At last, Gina pulled away.

  “I love you,” Mickey said. “Save a place at the table for me.”

  Gina smiled. He’d been saying that to her every time they parted for the past few months. It all started one Wednesday when, after several nights out in a row, Gina informed him that she just wanted to spend a nice quiet evening with a home-cooked meal.

  “Come on over around 6:30. Mom will make something fabulous, I’m sure, and then my parents will make a great show of ‘leaving us alone’ in the den.”

  “Think we can get rid of Carl as well?”

  “We’ll just kick him out. I think it might be time to inform him that you already know about the tutu incident. He’s going to be devastated when he realizes that he doesn’t have anything left to blackmail me with.”

  When Mickey arrived, Mrs. Ceraf answered the door.

  “Mickey, how good to see you,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “But I’m a little surprised. Gina told me she was going to be having dinner at home tonight.”

  “Well, she is.”

  Mrs. Ceraf seemed confused.

  “Were you on your way somewhere?”

  Now it was Mickey’s turn to be unsure of what was going on. “I can be.”

  Just then, Mrs. Ceraf’s hand shot up to her mouth and her face flushed.

  “Oh, my, you’re coming to dinner as well.”

  At that point, Gina came to the door and kissed Mickey on the cheek.

  “Gina, you’ve embarrassed me,” Mrs. Ceraf said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t tell me that Mickey was coming to dinner.”

  Gina looked at her mother with a mixture of disbelief and consternation.

  “Mom, Mickey and I are together every night now. When I said I was staying home, I assumed you knew that I meant we were staying home.”

  Mrs. Ceraf became more flustered. Mickey was certain he saw tears in her eyes.

  “Mickey, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Let me set another place at the table.” She ran off to the dining room and Mickey didn’t see her again until dinner. Even then she still seemed contrite. Mickey found the entire thing amusing.

  “Is everything all right, Carla?” Dan Ceraf asked when he sat down and saw that his wife was not only out of sorts, but had given herself barely more than a forkful of fish. Mickey realized right away that she had only bought enough for her husband, her two children, and herself. He wanted to offer her some of his, but he wasn’t sure how she would react.

  “No, everything is not all right, Dan,” she said, eyes downcast. “I’m afraid I’ve given our son-in-law the impression that he isn’t a member of our family.” She looked up at Mickey. “Mickey, I’m so sorry.”

  “It was an honest mistake, Mrs. Ceraf,” Mickey said.

  “No, Mickey,” she said. “It was thoughtless of me. You will always have a place at our table.” At which point, she started to cry.

  Mr. Ceraf put his arm around his wife and turned to Mickey.

  “I don’t presume to know what this is about, Mickey,” he said, “but you’re already family. I hope you know that. Once you entered Gina’s heart, you became family forever.”

  Mickey wanted to laugh at the extreme way at which his future in-laws were reacting, but at the same time he was touched. Still, it didn’t prevent him from teasing Gina about it every time they parted. It was his playful way of reminding her to keep him in her heart while they weren’t together.

  Gina turned toward the apartment building and blew Mickey a kiss.

  “You have a place at my table forever,” she said before going to get ready for her appointment at the mayor’s office.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Mickey had been staring at the picture for a couple of minutes without speaking. At last, he said, “I love you. Save a place at the table for me.” Jesse had no idea what that meant, but it obviously had significant meaning for his father because he smiled and continued to stare lovingly at the photograph. Finally, he brought the picture to his chest and looked up at Jesse without saying a word. Jesse got up from the bed and kissed his father on the forehead.

  “Rest your knees as much as you can today, Dad.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  They say that statisticians can turn any set of numbers around to make their case. They say that political spin doctors can take almost any statement by an opponent and turn it to their candidate’s advantage. They say that a cynic can look at just about any situation and find confirmation that the world is an ugly place.

  I suppose in the end I was doing much the same thing – manipulating the information available to me to support my stubbornly held beliefs. Of course there were other ways to interpret what my father was telling me with his stories about Gina. But because there was a way to read between the lines and come to my old standby conclusion that passionate love could never last, this is what I chose to do. I don’t like what this says about me.

  Seeing Gina’s picture that morning made everything about their relationship seem so much more solid to me. While I had a 3D image of her in my mind already – one not that different from the one in the picture – seeing the photograph gave it yet another dimension. It was as though Gina had until that point existed in another universe and when my father showed me the picture, she crossed over into ours. While I suppose it was possible to imagine that he had picked up this photograph somewhere and built this entire elaborate hallucination around it, it was almost inconceivable at this point for me to doubt that Gina had been a very real person. She had captivated my father in such a way that decades, a wife, and four children later, she could still inhabit his thoughts. And she could still reduce him to tears or speechlessness because she had gone away from him.

  Things had been awkward between Marina and me since the conversation about Sunday dinner with Denise. It wasn’t that we had never had tense moments before. Certainly there had been times when we’d skirmished over something or other. It hadn’t happened often, and in most cases it had as much to do with tiredness or hunger or a rejected story pitch as it had to do with us. But there had been times. The difference here was that this got at something fundamental, something I’d chosen to ignore, or at least avoid. Both of us knew that there was no way to resolve this conflict without adjusting the very foundation of our re
lationship. And so it just lingered there while we attempted to grow new skin around it.

  Meanwhile, I spent endless amounts of time thinking about it. I knew deep in my heart that the awkwardness between Marina and me was the signal that the downturn had begun. One of the corollaries to my theory about relationships is that not only does love always die, but it never ages gracefully. It is always withered and gnarled at the end. There’s never a point at which, like a superstar athlete after one last career year, you can bow out before you can no longer compete.

  I wish now that I hadn’t gone through this process, but I began to “spin” my relationship with Marina. She was too nurturing – it couldn’t last. She was too willing to please me – she’d never keep that up. The things that I derived the most pleasure from were the things that would fade in time and leave me feeling absolutely empty. I found myself making sarcastic comments to her and criticizing her for her compassion and optimism, even though those were two of the traits I found most admirable. Though it wasn’t entirely clear to me at the moment, I had begun the process of uncoupling. I was dehumanizing the enemy.

  For the first time since the very beginning of our relationship, I had absolutely no idea what Marina was thinking. I wasn’t asking her and she wasn’t saying. Was she coming to the same conclusions about us, or was she simply hurt about the Sunday dinner thing and confused about the long silences that now chaperoned us? She could still sparkle, especially when talking about her students. She could still cajole and stimulate my father. She could still engage me in brisk debate over one of our many “safe” topics. But when it came to the end of the night, when it was just the two of us alone, she was walking on the same eggshells that I was walking on, but in a different direction. We hadn’t made love since the night of the face-off, but she would still hold me tightly as we lay in bed, still tell me she loved me before turning out the light.

  A week had passed since that conversation in the movie theatre when we decided to go out to dinner. I specifically suggested an Italian restaurant we’d gone to several times before because I thought it might help to normalize things. But things were anything but normal. In fact, they were agonizingly polite. We smiled pleasantly at one another, we talked about inconsequential matters, we didn’t challenge or tease. At one point, I found it all so frustrating, that I left the table to spend several minutes in the bathroom. Of course, when I got back, I simply smiled and asked Marina what she thought about the olive oil.

  I was stuck in neutral. I didn’t want to say anything that would provoke a confrontation that I knew could be resolved only one way. But I also didn’t want to try to make it better because I believed with absolute conviction that it wouldn’t stay better for long.

  As usual, whenever we were downtown, we took a walk afterward. I thought doing something that we had done so many times before was an indication that normal wasn’t as far away as it had seemed. But we were still simply being polite again. Neither wanted to suggest a break in the routine.

  “What’s going on with the play?” I said as we walked.

  She brightened. “I think it’s going to go great. The changes we made in the script after Patty got hurt have helped a lot. I think we probably won’t invite a reviewer from The New York Times, but the parents should have fun and the kids are really enjoying themselves.”

  “That’s really good. You’ve put so much into this, it’d be a shame at this point if you weren’t happy with it.”

  “Oh, I would have been fine either way. I get worked up about it when we’re rehearsing, but when it comes time for the show, I just want the kids to have fun and for no one to throw up on stage.”

  We walked quietly for a while, stopping at a craft store window to look at some handmade pottery. I noticed some earrings in the corner of the window and my first thought was that they would look good on Marina. My second thought was that I wasn’t sure I should be thinking that way anymore.

  “I’d like you to come,” Marina said when we started walking again.

  “Come where?”

  “To the play next Wednesday night.”

  I’m not sure why it didn’t dawn on me that she might ask me to do so, but I was totally unprepared for it. I knew, regardless of what she was saying, that the show was important to her, and I should have assumed that she would want me to see it. But at the same time, this was about crossing a line. Boyfriends didn’t go to elementary school plays directed by their girlfriends. More permanent partners did. If I went, I’d be introduced to colleagues who would perceive me as a very significant part of Marina’s life. You didn’t bring dates to these kinds of things.

  This seemed to be coming at the worst possible time. I was at a stage where so many of my thoughts were pointing away from a future with Marina and here she was asking me to perform a gesture that would suggest a very real future. The first thing that came to my mind was that she should know better than to ask, given how awkward things had been between us in the last week. But perhaps that was why she was doing it. Regardless, my immediate reaction was to have no reaction.

  “Is that a problem?” she asked. “Do you have something else going on that night?”

  “No, no, I don’t think so. I just think I might feel a little weird – this guy in a crowd of parents.”

  “I’d introduce you to some of the other teachers. You wouldn’t have to sit by yourself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “No, actually I kind of figured you’d introduce me to other people.”

  She turned toward me and tilted her head. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said, not making eye contact.

  “Obviously you think something is.”

  I looked at her for a moment and then glanced off down the street again. “It’s not a big deal; it would just be a little weird. I mean, how would you introduce me? ‘This is Jesse. We hang out a lot together?’”

  “’Hang out a lot together?’”

  “You get my point.”

  She began to walk down the street again. “I think I’m beginning to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The thing with saying ‘I love you,’ or going out with me and an old high school friend, or having Sunday dinner with your family, or now this. You think it all binds you to some unspoken contract. It all says that we’ve changed the rules of the game.”

  “Yeah, I guess in some way it does.”

  She stopped again and turned to face me head on. For that brief moment, I don’t think I could have broken eye contact with her with a crowbar.

  “You really think that?”

  I looked down and then back up at her. “We had this great thing. It was strong, and it was fun, and we didn’t get hung up on the implications.”

  “And you really thought a relationship could stay in that place indefinitely?”

  “I really thought that our relationship could stay in that place indefinitely. I thought you did too.”

  “Without ever evolving.”

  “I didn’t want to think about evolving. I know where evolving leads.”

  “To making something more permanent out of this.”

  “To disintegration. Come on, Marina. Look at my father and Gina.”

  Marina turned her back toward me. I thought she was going to start walking again, but she simply stood there.

  “You’re not going to do this to me,” she said after a while.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, even though I was fairly sure that I knew.

  “You’re not going to put me on hold forever. I’ve got that t-shirt already.”

  “That’s not fair. I’m not Larry, and our relationship is not like yours and Larry’s.”

  She turned back toward me.

  “No, you’re not Larry, Jess. But in some ways what you’re doing is even harder to accept. You’re not waiting for the Big Love of Your Life to come along. You’re just looking to play out the string. You want t
o be in love and have someone be in love with you without any of the unfortunate attachments that go along with it.”

  “I didn’t ask to fall in love. I didn’t expect to fall in love.”

  “And it doesn’t change anything that you did fall in love?”

  “Yeah, it does.” I looked down at the street again. “It makes it worse.”

  Marina let out a sound that was a bit like a sob and then seemed to regain her composure quickly.

  “I’m obviously in this much deeper than you are,” she said. “Let’s stop this now before it gets much too painful.”

  As much as I had been thinking about the inevitability of our breakup, I wasn’t at all prepared for it. In my mind, we would just even out again for a while and, as always, leave the big decisions for another day.

  “We don’t need to stop,” I said. “I don’t want to stop.”

  Marina looked at me with more resolve in her eyes than I had ever seen before. “I’m not asking you if you want to stop. I’ve got to do what’s best for me. I’d appreciate it if you drove me home now.”

  She walked off toward the car and I followed her. My legs felt rubbery. I was still having a difficult time comprehending what had just happened. If I had said, “Sure, what time on Wednesday?” would everything have been completely different? Did romances really rise and fall on such exchanges? I knew that they didn’t, of course. Just as I knew that as much as Marina’s response stunned me, I wasn’t emotionally equipped to do what was necessary to change her mind.

  When we got to Marina’s house, I didn’t turn the car off. I shifted slightly toward her as she removed her seat belt.

  “I’d really like to say goodbye to your father,” she said, “but I’m not sure I could handle that.”

  “He’ll probably come track you down. He’ll probably try to make his move on you now.”

  Marina smiled and then looked away. “He’s a great guy, Jess. And the two of you have really started to have a good thing together.”

  “You and I have a really good thing together.”

  “We did, I know. But I guess it’s run its course. We both knew that it would happen eventually. You were right.”