The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  It wasn’t until I was in New Jersey again that I began to realize that the person who I really wanted to celebrate with was Marina. It was she, after all, who had asked to read everything I’d written the entire time we were together. Even things that couldn’t have possibly interested her any more than they did me. It was also she who helped me practice my pitches and offered me encouragement when they didn’t go as planned. And then of course there was the part about her simply being the first person I thought about when I thought about celebrating anything.

  I seriously considered calling her, if for no other reason than because I thought she would be pleased to hear about this. She knew how important this kind of work was to me and I was sure that she would be happy for me. But then I thought back on that one conversation we’d had since our split. How clear Marina had made it without saying anything of the sort that she wasn’t interested in the occasional casual talk. Of course she would be happy for me and she certainly wouldn’t do anything while we were on the phone to make me feel it was inappropriate to give her this news. But somewhere along the line, we’d both realize how artificial it was and we were both likely to be feeling empty. For the first time, I began to understand that while our relationship could survive (and even perhaps thrive) on the notion of an indefinite future, it couldn’t even exist on the notion of no future. I had been fooling myself all along, believing that we would segue from romance to lifelong friendship.

  It was sobering to think about, and it drew me out of my reverie. Of course there were other people I could call to celebrate with. Friends, fellow writers, people I knew in the industry. There was even the old guy at home. But the thought that I couldn’t include Marina on the list changed the tenor of things for me.

  By the time I got off the highway and started driving toward home, I had begun to recover. I drove past my favorite wine shop and decided to double back to buy something indulgent, settling on a Barolo the owner recommended. I stopped into the specialty market next door and bought chanterelles and heirloom tomatoes and then at the fish market down the road for fresh tuna. Even if it wasn’t quite the same thing, Mickey and I were going to enjoy ourselves that night.

  The only problem was that my father seemed to have spent the hours I was away practicing surliness. With everything that had happened during lunch, I’d forgotten the tension between us when I left that morning. Unfortunately, while I was busy staking out new territory in my career, he was probably on the phone with Aunt Theresa and maybe even Matty bitching about something that I had done to offend him, though he wasn’t bothering to tell me what it was.

  I called to him when I got in the house, telling him that I had great news. There was no reaction from him, so I continued into the den. He was there working on the computer, and he barely looked at me when I entered the room.

  “I had that lunch today with Brad and the editor he hired, Ed Crimmins. They wanted to offer me a position on their staff.”

  This caused him to glance up at me. This was the point at which I remembered what it had been like around the house for the past week or so.

  “I turned it down,” I said, which caused him to turn back to the computer screen with a tiny smirk on his face. “But then we got to the great part. I pitched them on a ten-part feature series and they went for it.”

  He took his hand off of the mouse and turned toward me. “That’s good.”

  “Very well understated, Dad.”

  “Is there money in it?”

  I slapped my hand to my forehead. His lukewarm response was precisely what I didn’t need at that moment. “Money. Damn, I knew there was something we forgot to talk about.”

  He turned back to the computer and started typing something.

  I continued. “Of course there’s money. Pretty decent money, actually. Not as good as if I were doing a multi-parter for Vanity Fair, but that’s next year’s agenda, not this year’s. You might even have to make some investments for me.”

  “Congratulations,” he said with the faintest trace of emotion.

  I was beginning to feel deflated. “I knew you’d be thrilled. Listen, I know you’re about to suggest that we celebrate by going to a fabulous restaurant and your treating me to champagne and four-star cooking, but I really don’t want you to go through all of that trouble.”

  “Why isn’t Marina taking you out to celebrate?”

  I paused. This was definitely not the right time to tell him about my splitting with Marina.

  “Same reason that she hasn’t been around the other nights lately. The play and stuff.”

  I knew this wasn’t really working anymore (and just in case I didn’t know it, his scowl at my last comment made it clear), but it seemed to at least keep the lecture at bay.

  “Look, Dad. I have a really nice bottle of wine, some tuna, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m really buzzed about this deal, and I’d appreciate it if you would help me mark the occasion.”

  “So we’ll mark the occasion,” he said and then clicked onto another web page.

  I spent the late afternoon calling a few friends and fellow writers and beginning to scour the web for subjects for the series. The former allowed me the opportunity to share some of my excitement and receive some applause. The latter gave me the chance to begin to dig in and realize how right this project felt to me. Both brought my spirits close to where they had been when I’d walked into the house a few hours earlier. This was a good thing, because dinner was enervating. I attempted to stimulate conversation, but my father was decidedly not in the mood. I wound up drinking most of the Barolo by myself while we sat silently at the dining room table.

  My father’s one gesture toward me was his offering to wash the dishes. While he did so, I read a magazine in the living room. When he was finished, he looked in.

  “I’m going to see what’s on television,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

  I sighed and put down the magazine.

  “Hey, you don’t have to come,” he said.

  I looked at him. There was a sourness to his expression that said the invitation was purely ceremonial, something he did out of habit. I picked up the magazine again. “I think I’m going to stay here.”

  He shrugged and walked away. I once again thought about calling Marina. The last thing I expected on a day like this was to feel sorry for myself, but that was the way things were playing out. I had no one with whom to celebrate the biggest event of my professional life. I wondered if this was one of the reasons why people stuck it out in relationships even after they knew they were going nowhere. Just in case something really good happened, they would at least have someone to enjoy it with even if only for one night. Certainly in partnerships such as the marriages Darlene and Matty had (I was no longer sure about anything when it came to Denise and Brad) there was room for that much. I’m sure my sister-in-law Laura did a great job of celebrating Matty’s latest promotion even if she did go to bed right after the sitcoms ended the next night.

  Ultimately, I realized that the combination of unexpected melancholy and three-quarters of a bottle of wine would lead me to a conversation with Marina I’d feel squeamish about for a decade or so hence. I told myself that I would call her tomorrow, if for no other reason than I thought she would actually want to know about it. I read for a while longer and then decided to call it an early night. I passed my father in the den on the way to my room and told him I was going to bed. He just nodded his head in my direction.

  About ten minutes later, I was just getting into bed when he came into my room.

  “I can’t decide what it is,” he said. “Do you think my mind is too feeble? Do you think I’m stupid? Or do you think I don’t care? Which one is it?”

  “I’m gonna need just the tiniest of clues about what we’re talking about.”

  “Do you really think I’ve been buying that garbage about Marina being too busy to come over?”

  I got out of bed and threw on a t-shirt. I wasn’t going to have this convers
ation with my father while wearing only boxer shorts. I was hoping the time it took to get the shirt would be enough for me to think of something to say, but that turned out not to be the case.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid,” I said.

  “Which leaves one of the other two choices.”

  “It doesn’t leave any of the choices. I just didn’t know what to say to you. I knew you liked her and I knew you weren’t going to take it well.”

  He gave me an expression I hadn’t seen since I was ten. I prepared for him to ground me. “Well what the hell happened?”

  “Things happened, Dad. Things. We got to this point where we couldn’t keep going the way we had been going and it all fell apart.”

  “Did you break up with her or did she break up with you?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I want to know just how much you contributed to this unbelievable mistake.”

  I threw up my hands. “Gee, thanks for your support. And do you want to know something, Dad? You actually made a fairly significant contribution to ‘this unbelievable mistake.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “All that stuff about Gina, the great love of your life. Just further evidence that love always flames out.”

  He looked at me as though I had just told him the sky was orange.

  “You are such a moron,” he said bitterly.

  “Why am I a moron? I got your little allegory, Dad. Gina was a special woman. Marina was a special woman. Their names even rhyme so there must be some cosmic significance to it all. But you keep forgetting that I know how your story ends. There’s that little thing about my mother that sorta gives it away. Unless the point of all of this was to tell me that you’ve been living a secret life for the last fifty-something years.”

  He looked at me with absolute contempt in his eyes. “You have no idea how my story ended.”

  With this, he walked out of the room.

  I should have gone after him to further explain my reason for breaking up with Marina. I should have gone after him to force him to tell me the rest of his damn story, enlighten me as to why it was taking him so long to do so, and, even more to the point, reveal his message for the ages. I should have even just gone after him to allow him to vent over losing Marina himself.

  I should have done just about anything other than get back in bed to stew for a couple of hours.

  Just as I should have done just about anything other than walk into the kitchen the next morning to say, “I’m going to the library, I’ll see you whenever.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I found my father on the floor near his computer when I got back to the house that afternoon. The doctor later told me that at that point he’d been unconscious for less than an hour. The doctor put him on life support, determined that he’d had a stroke, and told me he wasn’t sure when or if he would come out of the coma. I called Dr. Quigley, my father’s regular doctor, to tell him that he wouldn’t be coming in for his appointment the next day.

  I let Darlene, Denise, and Matty know. Darlene and Matty told me they would be there in a couple of days. Denise surprised me by coming to the hospital that very night. She came to the ICU where my Aunt Teresa and I sat by my father’s side. She took one look at him lying in the bed unconscious and began to cry. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her cry before, not even at my mother’s funeral.

  When she calmed a bit, she turned to me. “What are they saying?”

  “They don’t know what’s going to happen. There was a lot of damage and there isn’t a lot they can do for him. They’re planning to move him to a private room tomorrow morning.”

  She reached out for my father’s hand and put her head on his chest for a moment. Then she sat back and made a visible effort to pull herself together. She looked over at me and patted me on the leg.

  “Brad told me about the magazine assignment,” she said with a weak smile. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. I was out researching it, which is why I wasn’t home when this happened.”

  Denise tilted her head to one side and said, “You aren’t blaming yourself for this, are you?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not for this, anyway.”

  “Don’t. Ever. You have no idea how good you’ve been for him.”

  I’m not sure that she’d ever said anything like that to me before, and it brought tears to my eyes. I squeezed her hand and then we both turned back toward my father.

  The three of us sat with him until it was nearly eleven. I told my aunt that I would drive her back to her apartment. As Denise and I split up in the lobby, she asked me what time I was planning to get there the next morning.

  “I’ll take care of the watch,” I said to her. “Come whenever you can, but do the other stuff that you have to do. I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

  She nodded. “It’s still kind of weird to me that you’ve become Dad’s guardian. Who would have thought, huh?”

  Over the next couple of weeks, my three siblings came and went. My father was making no progress, but he wasn’t getting worse, either. It was becoming clear that he could stay in this between-place for a long time and it didn’t make sense for any of them to turn their lives upside down to wait. On most days, it was just Aunt Theresa and me. I brought my laptop along and would write or read through research for a while, but then would find myself drawn back to my father’s bedside, needing to look at him.

  Aunt Theresa and I would take turns going down to the hospital cafeteria for meals. As the vigil stretched out, it became obvious that we could have stepped out of the room together, but it was just as well. I’m not sure I’d exchanged more than a couple of thousand words with my aunt my entire adult life, including the many visits she’d made to the house after my father moved in. Even before I knew why it was, I had always had this feeling that there was something missing from her. The only person I’d ever seen who could get her to lighten up was my mother. Though my father adored her, it was obvious that he tiptoed near her when my mother wasn’t around. I had never found a topic that she and I could discuss for more than forty-five seconds. None of this seemed to bother her while we sat in the hospital room. She seemed content to meditate at my father’s side, and we simply didn’t say much.

  Often, when my aunt would take her breaks, I’d go to sit with my father to talk to him. I’d always heard that patients in comas can hear everything said in their rooms, and I thought he might like this, though I was too self-conscious to do it in front of Theresa. I’d talk to him about a variety of things: about how bad the food was in the cafeteria, about how the stock market was doing, about things in the news or the progress I was making in my research. For a long time, I avoided talking to him about Marina because after all this time and even though I knew he couldn’t respond, I still didn’t know what to say.

  I hadn’t called Marina to tell her about my father’s hospitalization because, as much as I thought she might want to know, I didn’t want it to seem like an appeal for sympathy. I certainly hadn’t stopped thinking about her, though. Just as I hadn’t stopped thinking about Gina. The last thing that my father said to me before his stroke was, “You have no idea how my story ended.” The thought that I might never find out was nearly as upsetting as the thought that I might never talk to my father again about anything.

  After avoiding the subject for a long time, I began to talk to him about Gina. I thought there might actually be some therapeutic value to this. I’d seen him transport himself while he talked about her, and I thought perhaps if I could take him back to his time with her, I could actually in some mystical way pull him out of his coma. I began to speculate out loud about ways in which they might have split up. There was a piece of me that even imagined hitting on the right answer and having my father open his eyes to say, “You’re right, but you’re still a moron.”

  I’d just finished one of these sessions during Aunt Theresa’s dinner break when she came in,
smiled at me, and patted me on the hand. This was the signal that it was my turn to go down to the cafeteria. As I ate the same turkey sandwich on a euphemistically-named hard roll that I’d eaten at least a dozen times over the past few weeks, it finally occurred to me that Aunt Theresa would know something about Gina. In my mind, the man in the stories was so completely different from my father that it never registered that his real sister – who had lived through this with him – was spending more than a dozen hours a day with me.

  When I got back to the room my aunt was, as usual, holding my father’s hand. And, as usual, she smiled at me when I entered and gestured me with her eyes over to the other chair. This time, though, I turned the chair to face her, which seemed to confuse her.

  “Aunt Theresa, do you know who Gina is?”

  There was a momentary look of alarm on her face before the confusion returned.

  “Dad’s been telling me about a woman he used to be engaged to named Gina, and I just realized that you would know something about her.”

  She looked over to my father, and then turned in her seat to face me. “Why would he tell you about that?”

  “That’s one of the things we haven’t gotten to. It seemed important to him that I know about her, but he would always get so caught up in the stories that he never got very far.”

  “I haven’t heard her name – I haven’t thought about her – in probably fifty years.”

  “But you did know her.”

  “Of course I knew her. Your father and I talked about everything, and when he was with Gina, he didn’t talk about very much else.”

  “Then you would know how they broke up. I kept waiting for him to tell me that part of the story, but he still hasn’t gotten to it.”

  She seemed even more confused by this.

  “Your father and Gina never broke up. They were together until the day she died.”