by Lou Aronica
I nodded. Again the words to stave off this eventuality eluded me. I couldn’t summon them, even though my conscious mind begged me to do so. There was that other voice inside of my head. The stronger voice. The one saying that this was the way it was always going to be.
Marina opened the car door and left without saying anything else. I watched her enter the house before I backed out of the driveway.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Over the next couple of weeks, the garden seemed to blossom in inverse proportion to the barrenness I felt inside. The shoots had taken on form, stalks rising, leaves sprouting, the first tiny buds appearing. Nature obviously didn’t discriminate. If the soil was good enough, if the water was plentiful, if the sun provided sustenance, the plants would rise. Even if they were being nurtured by Mickey Sienna of the black thumb and his son Jesse of the black heart.
Since I’d split with Marina I felt a persistent dull ache. It was like the onset of the flu: the jitteriness, the reduced appetite, the slight numbness at the tips of your fingers. That feeling that you’re a quarter of a step behind the rest of the world. I called her once. Not with any particular agenda in mind, but with the hope that something would simply emerge, as it did so often when we were together. She was very cool on the phone. Not chilly, just cool. Resolute. As though she was saying, “If you don’t have anything meaningful to say to me, then let me get on with letting you go.” Since I couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say, the conversation ended quickly. I wasn’t calling to see if I could get her back. As out of synch as I felt without her, I knew that our starting up again was only going to get us to a place where I would have the same feeling six, nine, eleven months down the line. Making a move like that to forestall the inevitable not only wasn’t appealing, but would have been a sad abuse of Marina’s spirit.
For any number of reasons, I couldn’t get myself to tell my father about our breakup. I knew he was going to take it badly, both in terms of lecturing me, and also in terms of grieving the loss himself. My father had embraced Marina as completely as I had ever seen him embrace a person, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy for him to let her go. I even imagined his seeking her out and continuing his relationship with her around me. I made numerous excuses for why Marina wasn’t staying over, taking advantage of his not knowing that the play had been the week before. The pretense reached its absurd pinnacle when I actually spent the night in a motel so he would think that I was staying at Marina’s house. I’m not sure what I was waiting for. He wasn’t going to forget about her. At some point, I was going to have to tell him. It just never seemed to be the right time.
He must have sensed something, because his demeanor was devolving to an earlier stage in our relationship. Whether it was because he missed the leavening influence that Marina had on him or because he was perturbed at my denying him her company, I wasn’t sure. But our exchanges were more monosyllabic these days, and he hadn’t said a word about Gina for a long time. This just added to my overall sense of malaise. I had gotten into a very pleasant rhythm with him and hadn’t expected to fall out of it. I found myself doing all kinds of things to please him – suggesting games to play in the evening, making his favorite dishes for dinner, attempting to plan excursions. His not playing along made me feel chastened, like I was being punished for bad behavior.
Still, I kept trying.
“Hey Dad, look at this,” I said, kneeling by a zucchini plant. We had been weeding and watering, and when I looked up I noticed the smallest tip of a yellow bud peeking out.
My father crept over. As the soil in the garden became packed down, he was having increasing trouble spending time there on his knees. At last, he leaned over to where I was kneeling and examined the tiny bud.
“Hmm,” he muttered.
“This is a big moment – the beginnings of our first zucchini flower. Don’t you find this a little incredible?”
“We did everything the guy in the nursery told us to do. You didn’t expect to get some flowers?”
“I still find it very exciting. I can’t believe you aren’t excited about this. Hey, have you ever eaten zucchini flowers? They’re great in a tempura batter.”
“Can’t say that I have. I haven’t eaten roses or daffodils either. Does that make me a bad person?”
I glanced over at him. Since I was feeling guilty about not being truthful with him, I figured I deserved a little abuse, but he was very quickly reaching his quota. He held eye contact with me for a second or so and then moved away. As he stood, I saw him hesitate and he seemed a little disoriented for a moment.
“What was that?” I said.
“What was what?”
“That thing that just happened. What’s wrong?”
He glared at me, as he had done every time I questioned him about his health. “Nothing is wrong.”
“I want you to see Dr. Quigley.”
“So make an appointment.”
“You’ll go if I make an appointment?”
He looked at me with even more heat in his eyes. “I said make an appointment.”
He walked back to the house and I followed him. He looked fine, but I just wanted to make sure that nothing was going on. When he got into the house, he grabbed his coffee mug and poured himself another cup.
“When do you think your girlfriend is going to be able to have dinner over here again?”
“She’s been really busy, Dad. I’ve never seen her so busy. I’m not sure when things are going to lighten up for her.”
He simply stared at me.
“I’ll see what I can do, okay?” I said.
He didn’t say anything in response. After a minute, I said, “I’ll see” again and walked out of the room.
~~~~~~~~
That afternoon, I had lunch scheduled with Brad and Ed Crimmins. It required getting over “the flu” for at least a couple of hours. Even though I had no idea what Brad and Ed wanted to talk about, I knew that I couldn’t possibly play in Ed’s league if I was distracted.
The piece on AnnaLee Layton had offered the only real respite from my preoccupation over losing Marina. Slowly, AnnaLee opened up during interviews and I think I ultimately wrote a powerful article that would move and perhaps even motivate a number of readers. Mark Gray seemed to like it and, just as Aline Dixon had before him, suggested that he might have another commission for me in the near future. I went from that to a quick piece about cardiovascular exercise that I had gotten a month before, but then after that decided that I needed a little time to think about the direction of my career.
The trip to California and the time I spent with the Hayward people had caused me to reconsider the way I approached writing. I brought something different to the last two feature pieces than I had brought to any previous assignments. At the same time, the other events in my life over the past year had influenced me at least as much. The rise and fall of my love affair with Marina. The changes in my relationship with my father. The story of Gina. All of these things that hadn’t been there a year ago were in my head now and it’s foolish for any writer to ignore the effect of the life they are living.
I had decided articles about hanging draperies and preventing gingivitis were in my past. They had been the journalistic equivalent of waiting tables for me, and it was time to perform without that kind of day job. The problem was that it was unrealistic to expect the Mark Grays and Aline Dixons of the world to consistently decide I was the ideal writer for an assignment. I was going to have to develop my own pitches, seek out my own stories. And there was the complication. For whatever reason, I was dreadful at the pitch. I almost never had the inspiration for a feature piece that an editor wanted to embrace.
As I drove into the city, I thought about why Brad and Ed had set up this lunch. I figured they would offer me an article or two as a gesture of appreciation for indirectly getting them together. I was sure that Brad would be able to sell Ed on that much, though I doubted that Ed would be particularly willing to enter
tain this nepotism in anything but a cursory way. Maybe I’d get a few sidebars, perhaps a couple of thousand words on something.
We met at an Indian restaurant in Chelsea near the new magazine’s offices. Both the restaurant and the location of the offices were interesting choices, as they were considerably less elegant than Brad’s usual. They suggested not only that he knew the difference between working for a corporation and working on his own, but also that he was serious about making the magazine profitable. Again, I was impressed at his dedication.
Traffic through the tunnel was more onerous than usual and I was the last to arrive. I saw Brad and Ed before they saw me. They were laughing over something and speaking to one another as though they’d been associated for years. I wouldn’t have expected them to get along so casually, though I was quickly coming to expect that I didn’t really know what to expect with my brother-in-law. With this came curiosity about him and my sister. I’d always imagined that they made a decent partnership because they were so monomaniacal. If Brad was in fact much more three-dimensional, what did this say about their marriage? Was it possible that there was more going on between them when they were alone together than I could see from the outside? I still couldn’t envision my sister as being warm and cuddly with anyone (this was, after all, a woman who went back to work a week after giving birth to Marcus), but seeing Brad in a new way required me to think of Denise differently as well.
As I walked toward the table, Brad saw me coming and stood up to shake my hand.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “The tunnel.”
“Been there. You know Ed, right?”
I reached over to shake Ed’s hand.
“Hey Jesse, good to see you,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, I guess it has. It’s pretty exciting seeing the two of you hooked up on this new venture.”
“I know I’m excited. Your brother-in-law has some big plans. It’s nice to be part of them.”
Brad gave a modest shrug and then suggested that we look at the menus before “getting down to business.” When we took care of that, Ed reached for a pappadum in the basket that was sitting in the middle of the table and then gestured toward me with it.
“Brad told me about the pieces you’d done recently for Food and Living and The City so I got copies of both of them.”
Since neither had been published yet, this meant getting them from the inside. It always surprised me when I heard about this kind of thing happening. I suppose there had never really been a reason for anyone to do this with me before.
Ed continued. “There was good work in there. You’ve grown as a writer.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s always nice to see when that happens.”
“I appreciate your noticing it.”
Brad leaned forward in his chair. “I asked Ed to take a look at the pieces because I didn’t want him to be uncomfortable in any way about what I was suggesting we do with you.”
I looked over at Ed, who nodded and then took another bite of pappadum. I looked back at Brad.
“We’d like you to give serious consideration to coming on board as a staff writer,” Brad said.
I’m sure the surprise showed on my face because Ed stepped in quickly. “You know what we’re trying to do with the magazine. We’re trying to cover a lot of ground and do it in a way that won’t bore the crap out of people. It’s going to be fast and furious around the offices, and we need some writers on the staff who have the kind of range that you have and can take on different kinds of pieces at different times while doing a good job with all of them.”
I was flattered. I was also stunned. I hadn’t imagined for a moment that they would be talking about a staff position for me. Certainly, if Ed was worried about the appearance of nepotism, the last thing he’d want to do is put Brad’s brother-in-law on the staff, which meant that he truly believed I had something significant to contribute.
“You’ll be good with us,” Brad said. “Ed really wants to open things up and do things in a new way. There’s going to be a ton of energy in the room all the time between the print edition and the digital edition. I think you’ll enjoy it. And I think you’d be great at it.”
I smiled and looked down at my lap for a moment. This conversation was incongruous in so many different ways.
“I’m really flattered,” I said. “Really, really flattered. And I’m sure the two of you and the team you put together are going to make the magazine a heck of a place to work.” I stopped to allow myself just the briefest instant of consideration. “But a staff position isn’t right for me.”
Brad held up a hand. “Don’t react so quickly. Let us tell you more about what we’re planning to do. And I know you have the thing with Mickey, but we can find a way to work around that.”
“The situation with Dad is definitely part of it,” I said, “but it isn’t the biggest part. I’m just not a show-up-at-the-office kind of guy.” I looked over at Ed. I could tell that he was disappointed, but he didn’t seem to be surprised. Once a freelancer, always a freelancer. I looked down at my lap again and then looked up at Ed.
“I have another idea,” I said, though it was just beginning to form in my mind. Ed tilted his chin forward to show me that he was listening. “I want to do a ten-part series.”
It was Ed’s turn to show surprise, along with a little bit of discomfort. I imagined that he was wondering how he was going to reject a big project by his boss’ brother-in-law gracefully.
“I want to do a series of articles about going out on a limb. I want to profile people similar to Grant Hayward and AnnaLee Layton who take huge chances and defy the odds in order to do something important with the things they love.”
I expected to see Ed already formulating his rejection. I knew the look from the few times I had pitched things to him in the past. But I wasn’t seeing it now.
“There’s a chance, of course, that you couldn’t find ten worthy subjects,” he said.
“No there isn’t,” I said with a confidence I didn’t realize I had until that moment that. “Ten people in the entire country who care about something enough to make it happen even when it isn’t supposed to? I’ll go to England if I have to. I’ll go to Nairobi if I have to.”
“And the overall message is ‘go for it?’” Ed said.
“No. ‘Go for it’ is trite. The overall message is that there’s a reason why the odds are so strongly against things like this happening. That every step of the way there are a million things that could go wrong and probably will. That the only thing that drives these people to overcome the odds is absolute conviction in their inspiration and an unconditional love for what they do.”
Neither Ed nor Brad said anything for a moment, at which point the food came. I cursed to myself because the appearance of the waiter broke the connection and gave them the ideal opportunity to formulate a reason not to pursue this. Both of them tasted their dishes. I continued to look from one to the other, considerably less interested in my meal than I usually was.
“In a lot of ways, this is what we want the magazine to be about,” Ed said.
Brad nodded and said, “Absolutely. A series like this could not-so-subtly send all kinds of messages about our agenda.” He poised his fork in the air and said to Ed, “What did you order?”
“Same thing I always order. Stupid, I know, but I have a thing for Chicken Vindaloo.”
“Vindaloo, I love it. Can I try?”
Ed gestured and Brad reached his fork toward Ed’s plate. I couldn’t believe the way the two of them had connected. At the same time, I couldn’t believe that talk about curries was getting in the way of my pitch.
“I guess it would be a little obvious if one of the subjects of your series was Ed, huh?” Brad said after his next bite.
Ed laughed. I still hadn’t tasted my food. I laughed as well.
“Just a little,” Ed said and then turned to me. “How much have you done on this?”
“I could lie to you and say that I’ve been scouting subjects for months, but the truth is, it came to my mind while we were talking.”
“But you think you can pull it off.”
“Yeah, I know I can pull it off. I know how to find these people. And I know how to talk to them. I kinda think I was made for this story.”
Ed looked at Brad, who offered the kind of shrug that said, “Seems worth it to me.”
Ed turned back to me. “I’m going to want to know who each of your subjects are before you get started.”
“Yeah, of course.”
Ed took a sip of water and then said, “Do you think you could have the first piece done in time for the inaugural issue?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then get started.”
I smiled, glanced over at Brad, who seemed genuinely happy at this turn of events, and then finally tasted my food.
“So, do you know anyone looking for a staff position?” Ed said.
~~~~~~~~
We parted about an hour and a half later. Brad and Ed were more than willing to talk about their plans for the magazine, and I found myself suddenly more than willing to listen to them talk about them. Interestingly, though I had turned down a position on the staff, I felt in many ways as though I had just joined it. This was now my magazine as well. The financial deal we made would allow me to concentrate almost exclusively on this series for the next year. I had very clearly aligned myself with a publication that wouldn’t even exist in the public’s mind for another nine months. I’m not sure I could think of another time in my life when something like that wouldn’t have frightened me silly. For some reason, though, this just felt like the right thing to do.
When the two of them left me on the street to go back to their offices, I started toward the parking lot where I’d put my car. Now that they were out of range, I could allow my excitement to come to the surface. I didn’t do anything as ridiculous as shout out loud or leap into the air, but I thought about doing those things. I really wanted to celebrate. I wanted to buy a great bottle of wine and toast the end of my days as a word-server. I got my car and didn’t even notice the intensity of traffic going through the tunnel.
