The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers_And Their Muses

by Terri-Lynne Defino

  “The older I got, the more I wanted him, and the more girls I kissed. It was nice. I liked how it made me feel. Carina Petrocelli was my first lover. I was thirteen, she was sixteen. She rode me like a circus pony whenever she caught me. I let her catch me often. My mother said I would make her a grandmother before her time. My father scolded me in front of her, but patted me on the back in private. I cried myself to sleep most nights. I didn’t want Carina. I wanted Roberto, and still I didn’t understand.

  “When we were young men, Roberto went to fight in France and I came to America. We were twenty, and still best friends. I never told him how I felt, but he kissed me before he left. Kissed me the way I’d always wanted to kiss him. It was the last time I ever saw him.”

  “Oh, Alfonse. I’m so sorry.”

  “First love.” He laughed softly. “It wouldn’t have worked out for us. Not in Italy. Not back then. We writers tell tales of that first love being the only one. It’s romantic, but rarely so. I met Cornelius when I was twenty-six. He was almost forty and already a giant in his field. At first, it was all about the writing. Mentor and protégé. It became more, quickly. In this house, our house, when it was still just a shell in need of more repair than I ever thought could be done, he promised me forever.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “He gave it to me,” Alfonse said in a rush of breath that left him light-headed. “He wanted more for me than I wanted for myself. He feared our relationship would kill my career, so he sent me away to become the great Alfonse Carducci. And I did. We always intended it to be temporary. But the longer we were parted, the less I wanted to be tied to one person, to one man. I love women. I love the feel of them and the look of them and the smell of them. But I’ve only loved Cornelius in that way I wrote about so many times. Only him. I broke his heart a thousand times over. I left him and didn’t return. Not even when he was old and sick and all he wanted was to see me one more time. I should have come to him, Cecibel. I asked him for forever and he gave it to me, but I couldn’t give it to him.”

  Words he’d never spoken. Tears he’d never cried. Freed, at last. Like the words Alfonse thought had abandoned him. Holding Cecibel in both his arms, he buried his face in her hair that smelled like the beach. Always the beach.

  “There, now.” He sniffed. “You’ve had two stories for the price of one. The first, told only once before. The second, known too well but spoken of in whispers, behind old hands.” He shifted her from his shoulder to look her in the eyes. Dim lighting softened the melted candle of her face, accentuated the beauty of the other half. Tears blurred Alfonse’s vision, let him see her whole as she might have been in another set of circumstances. Another Cecibel. Not his Cecibel. The beautiful monster who’d given him back his greatest, truest love. I’ve been writing, he wanted to say. Because of you. But he had promises to keep.

  He tucked her hair behind her remaining ear, touched her cheek. “Now I need to rest. Confession is good for the soul, but taxing. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.” Cecibel pulled out of his arms that let go reluctantly, leaned down and kissed his cheek, then his lips. Alfonse kissed her back, a little of the dirty old man always and forever lingering.

  “You’re an amazing man, Alfonse. Far more so than any of my fangirl dreaming.”

  “I’ve lived an amazing life,” he said. “If that makes me amazing, I gladly wear the word.”

  She laughed softly, took his hand, and squeezed it. “Good night. Sweet dreams.”

  “Good night. I’ll leave the light on for you, until you’re out the door.”

  The door clicked. Alfonse switched off the light. He sat upright in his bed, in the dark and the quiet, too many thoughts whirring through his head. Good thoughts. Regret was a cruel disciplinarian, but effective when heeded. Alfonse regretted much, but not everything. Not the words. Never the words. He’d sacrificed everything for them and would do it all over again.

  They whispered. The words. Aldo and Cecilia. Olivia had already taken the book to pen her part. Cecilia’s part. He’d not get it back until Enzo had his say. But his fingers itched. His brain bubbled with thoughts he couldn’t quite grasp. It was after ten. Sleep, sleep, Alfie. Whose voice beckoned? Certainly not his own. He sat up straighter, checked the shadows.

  “I can sleep when I’m dead, and that’ll be soon enough.” Tossing aside the blankets, he swung his feet to the floor and regretted it for the way it dizzied him. Alfonse walked slowly to his easy chair, had to stop and rest. Arms flopped to his sides, his hand landed on the familiar spine of a passion-creased book. He pulled Cecibel’s copy of Night Wings on the Moon from the seat cushion. His words. Hers. Never again.

  The garbling rush between his ears cleared. Words formed. The right words, at last. His beleaguered heart thumped more happily than painfully. Plucking a pen from the side table, Alfonse obeyed the call of his greatest love, as he always had.

  * * *

  Cecibel walked the quiet halls of the Pen. Meandered with no intention of going to her own room, to sleep. Alfonse’s story played over and over again. Roberto. Cornelius. A man forced to live against the longings of his heart. Why he’d told his story to her, that night of all nights, was no mystery. He was dying, and soon. She sensed it the same way Olivia did, as Alfonse must. The unburdening revealed him, at last, for who he was. Cecibel couldn’t cry. He’d entrusted the only-once-told tale of first love to her. An honor, his heartbreak. This confession, even now, he’d felt the need to make. She would cherish it the rest of her life.

  She sat in the library a moment or two, looked into the cleaned dining room waiting for breakfast. Past Dr. Kintz’s office, the utility room, Sal’s room, her own, she walked through and out of the building entirely.

  The sea air rushed up to greet her, a happy puppy left alone all day. It scooted up her skirt and tossed her unbound hair—unbound, but not concealing, cascading, instead, down her back and not over her left shoulder. Free.

  Her feet trod a path well known, her nose followed the scent. To the sea. Always the sea. Cure for all things. All things but one. Jennifer had died to the sound of the ocean, its scent more familiar than flowers or grass. All those times Cecibel found her, she’d been at the beach. A last-ditch effort to soothe the demons breaking her from inside. Mighty ocean. Ancient womb. It hadn’t been any more successful than she.

  Sliding on her heels down the dunes, Cecibel took off her hoodie. She set it on the sand well above the tide and sat. Legs curled up, arms wrapped around them, she listened, listened to the oldest song in the history of the world. The tones unchanging, the continuous symphony never repeated, silenced by familiarity.

  She couldn’t think coherent thoughts. Not now. Instead she let them fill her along with the sea-crashed symphony. Salt spray dewed her arms, her shoulders, her face half ruined but only half, after all. A monster revealed was a monster vanquished, in old fairy tales.

  Upon the moonglade cast upon the black and glistening sea, dancers danced as they had before, in the car, in dreaming safe and dreaming strange. Cecilia, in movie-star finery, her dress throwing foam as she spun into Aldo’s arms. Or were they Enzo’s? Olivia twirled all alone, hands raised to the stars. Switch and Judi, Sal and Richard, Dr. Marks—they all stomped and splashed like children on the surface of the water, never sinking past the soles of their feet. Alfonse held Cornelius. They swayed slowly out to sea. Alfonse looked back, his hand reached, but Cecibel couldn’t get there quickly enough and they were gone.

  And there was Jennifer, not tragic, but as she’d been before heroin took away her pain, dispersed it in a circle around herself. She stood apart from the others gathered, looking straight into Cecibel. Eyes smiling, lips parted to show the gap between her front teeth, the one she’d whistled and squirted water through when they were kids. No “I’m sorry.” No forgiveness of any kind asked. Just that smile before she turned and walked away.

  Cecibel tried to follow her, but arms, strong arms, held her bac
k. A gentle voice told her no. She’d done that once before. It was time for a new story now. Their story, a cliché of rising from the ashes, of building something stronger on the ruined foundation of the past, couldn’t start that way.

  Your focus determines your reality, Tatterhood.

  Didn’t we agree to never speak of that movie again?

  It had a few good moments.

  No, it really didn’t.

  The arms became a hand, that hand attached to a man she needn’t dream of when he waited patiently for her in the waking world that wasn’t the past, his or hers, only part of it. She was ready. She was ready. But Cecibel slept contentedly on. In the solitude of crowded dreaming. In the perfect silence of the sea.

  Chapter 34

  Paterson, New Jersey

  December 31, 1959

  Aldo

  In all his travels, across the world, he’d never seen a woman nearly as lovely as Cecilia in a lacy bathrobe, rollers in her hair and a dab of overlooked cold cream on her chin. Sprawled naked on his bed, Aldo watched her at the vanity mirror scrubbing away all evidence of him. Soon she’d replace it with the domesticated mask she daily wore. He didn’t care. Not when every day the mask went on lighter, came off easier. She was his and always had been. His Cecilia. His one and only love.

  “This is the last time.” She said it without turning around, as she did every day for the last eight. Cecilia couldn’t look at him and lie, but apparently the mirror fell for it. “I mean it, Aldo.”

  “Okay.” Only it wasn’t. Cecilia might believe her own lies but Aldo didn’t. Not for a second. She told him she could never leave her husband, her children, but every day she did. She showed up at his door and met him kiss for kiss. Body to body. Skin to skin. Sweat mingling, staining one another with scent and sex. How did her husband not smell it on her? Or did he and not care? Cecilia wouldn’t talk about him, not to say she loved him or never had. She wouldn’t talk about the future any further than what time she had to leave their bed to brave the world without him. What she did outside the hour or so she gave him, Aldo didn’t want to think about. Husband, children, family. Holiday events that never ended in their vast Italian family. Domestic bliss. He’d save her from all that. Yes, he would. Aldo would show her the world.

  “Your sister has been spending a lot of time with my brother.” She pulled curlers from her hair, shook it into coiffed waves. “Have you noticed?”

  “It’s hard not to.” Aldo got off the bed, still naked, and wiped the cold cream from her chin. “Makes this easier.”

  “Does she know? Did you tell her?”

  “Of course not.” Yet. She’d find out soon enough. They all would. “She’s going to your father’s party tonight as Nicky’s date, you know.”

  Cecilia glanced up at him in the mirror. “My brother is an idiot. Thinks only with his dick. As if Tressa would let him do anything to her with it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s a lady,” Cecilia told him. “She’d never let him touch her.”

  Aldo stood behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. In the mirror, his bare torso, his hands, her face looking up at her view of him in the glass. “What does that make you?”

  “A whore.” She said it without flinching.

  “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”

  “A woman who fucks a man who isn’t her husband is a—”

  Aldo descended upon her lips, snatched the words from them like an eagle at a fish. He crushed them in his talons, kissed her breathless. Drawing her from the vanity, back to the bed, he made quick work of the lacy bathrobe, devoured her lips to ankles. He pushed into her and she groaned. Her lips parted. He bit the swell of them. Tenderly. “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” she gasped. “I love you, Aldo.”

  He moved slowly. Cecilia squirmed underneath him.

  “Again.”

  “I love you.”

  Faster. “You were mine first, Cecilia.” Deeper. “We promised forever.” Deliberate. “A promise we kept. There is no shame in that. No wrong.”

  “Stop talking and fuck me.” Legs hitched around his hips. Aldo’s brain liquefied. He thought no thoughts, only felt every glorious bit of her moving with him. Cecilia bit his shoulder, his bicep. She arced her body to his, breasts pressed to his chest. Before he lost his mind completely, Cecilia pushed him off her, flipped him like a wrestler, and pinned his shoulders down.

  “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you.”

  “Again.”

  Her hair fell in disheveled curls, framing her tiny, round face. Cheeks crimson. Sweat beading lip and brow. Eyes—those fathomless eyes—pulling every molecule of his soul out of his body and into hers. Aldo lifted her hips, maneuvered himself back inside her. Cecilia’s head tilted back, robbed him of her face, those eyes. He took her chin in his fingertips, turned her back to him. “I love you, Cecilia. Forever.”

  He moved in her, and she in him. Gazes locked. Tension building. Sex crashing in a silence they’d never shared before. This was it. The moment beyond all other moments. Aldo and Cecilia. Cecilia and Aldo. The two of them, together. Inseparable by time, distance, and circumstance. It was written in the stars.

  She left without speaking another word to him. No kiss good-bye or warning of a last time. He’d see her at the party in her parents’ house, later on. She never asked him not to come, and he’d never once considered skipping it. Tressa had insisted, in any event. She couldn’t go without him, even as Nicky’s date. Because she was his sister, because he loved her, and for more reasons than he cared to think about, Aldo let her think he was doing it for her.

  Beautiful, sweet, smart, cunning Tressa. Without knowing her more than these last few days, he knew Dominic Giancami Jr. was not her kind of man. Enzo Parisi fit the bill, in fact—yes, please—if he would. Educated and sophisticated. Good-looking. Nicky was that. Good-looking. If a girl was into that Latin-lover thing. But he was rough around the edges and as far from sophisticated as Aldo himself.

  He wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror, inspected his chin. Lathering up, Aldo squashed the thought that maybe Tressa liked Nicky for all the wrong reasons. That maybe, if he’d been nicer, more available, a better brother, she’d go for a man worthy of her rather than one just like him.

  Clean, shaved, Aldo slicked back his hair. He’d have to cut it before reporting back for duty. No commander would suffer a seaman with long hair, let alone an admiral’s personal chef. Salfrank had made it very clear that he’d accept no less than neat, orderly, regulated crewmen from head chef to dishwasher, no matter their rank.

  Aldo would accept nothing less from his crew either.

  The galley on board the USS Opal awaited him. Gleaming white and steel. Everything new and top-of-the-line. Aldo had a brigade de cuisine at his disposal, just like any chef in a Parisian restaurant. On a smaller scale, of course. The ship wasn’t a big cruiser, or a destroyer. More like a yacht. A very big one. The meals served upon it would be elegant, significant, and frequent, prepared for officers and dignitaries, royalty from time to time. They would taste his food and marvel at his skill, his impeccable palate, his artistry. And he, a man not even thirty.

  Prepping for the mess, feeding a hundred men at a time, was one thing. It took a lot of sweat, perseverance, but little skill. Yet the abundance of food always surrounding him, day in and day out of his existence in the galley, had allowed him to experiment with the many ways one could prepare a potato, a carrot, a tough piece of beef. No longer forced to take what he could afford and like it, Aldo didn’t. His palate elevated. The nuances of that lowly potato when roasted rather than fried, when treated with butter and herbs and salt, opened up a world of flavor wherein food was consumed with the eyes first; it changed his whole perspective. It was the difference between dining and eating, between drinking Chianti from a crystal glass and straight from the bottle, between food to sustain and food to experience.

  I
t was the difference between frying dogs at Falls View, and creating masterpieces on a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.

  He looked again into the mirror, and saw not Aldo Wronski who’d left Paterson behind, but a chef. A sailor. The man he’d become away from this place. Did Cecilia see it? See him? Did she even know he was a chef? He couldn’t remember if he’d told her, or about the plum assignment he’d gotten in European waters. They didn’t talk, Cecilia and he. They sweated and fucked and growled words of love, undying and real, but they didn’t talk. They didn’t need to. Had they ever? Aldo couldn’t remember for the life of him.

  Only a little after three o’clock. Too many hours to kill before the party, and Tressa was out shopping for a new dress to wear. The woman could shop, and did so anytime she wasn’t with either Nicky or Aldo himself. Aldo had attempted to go with her once and ended up wanting to claw his own eyes out of his head before viewing yet another dress that looked just like the last seventeen she’d tried on. They had breakfast together every morning and dinner every night, even those evenings Nicky joined them, or rather, Aldo joined Nicky and Tressa. She guilted him, both times, into tagging along.

  “I won’t go out with him at all if it means leaving you to have supper on your own.”

  And that had been that, no matter what either of the men had to say about it. Thankfully, Tressa occupied her days between breakfast and dinner with shopping and new friends, with lunches and teas he sometimes attended. The girls flirted with him, a man in uniform, and he flirted back, biding his time until he ditched them all for Cecilia and an hour or two of bliss.

  Now time was winding down. Soon it would all change. This limbo between Christmas and New Year’s would trip them all into a future none of them had seen coming before the Giancami Christmas party. Tressa would be disappointed, but would get over it soon enough, he was certain. Cecilia, on the other hand, had a choice to make, and Aldo had no doubt what the outcome would be.