Bulls Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  The next afternoon five dozen lilac and purple roses were delivered to my door—no small feat for a Sunday in Manhattan. Adrian took possession of the huge bouquet, opened the card, and read it aloud just as I was coming toward the door to answer it myself.

  “‘I can’t stop thinking about you. Vinny.’ Who’s Vinny, Mom?”

  “Give me those, you bad boy. Vinny is this very nice crazy man I had dinner with last night and drinks one other time. He’s just a friend.”

  “Yeah, right.” Adrian laughed. “All your friends send you five dozen roses!”

  “Why don’t you go concentrate on your dormitory piles and I’ll put these in water.”

  I dumped all the flowers in the sink, covered the bottom of their stems with water, and went searching for some containers under the cabinets, pulling out glass vases from old floral deliveries. Five dozen roses was excessive. As I clipped and stuffed them in between the greens, I thought, Isn’t there some significance to lilac and purple roses? Vinny may have been the Dean Martin of our day, but he was anything but cavalier. I decided to Google the significances of the colors of roses, and sure enough, there it was. Lilac and purple stood for love at first sight, longing, all things mysterious, magical, and more symbolism than I was ready for on a Sunday afternoon when I was gearing up for work on Monday. Great.

  I knew I should have called him immediately to thank him, but the profusion of flowers was overbearing and, frankly, a little creepy. Hadn’t he ever heard of playing hard to get? A one-night stand? Did he think we had some meaningful relationship going now? Somehow, I was just going to have to tell him that there was a probable expiration date on this quasi love affair. In the first place, he was very inappropriate in every way. Not that it mattered. My career was reasonably secure and truly I could align myself with anyone I chose. Heaven knows, half my business associates, serial spouses almost to the last one, were married to bimbos. Vinny was inappropriate because I already knew his personality would wear thin and that he was one of those men who, although there was zero invitation on your part to be possessed, thought they owned you anyway. The roses were an omen of a proprietary claim. In their heady fragrance lurked his fantasy of a leash. Sorry, Vinny.

  An hour later my cell phone rang. It was Vinny.

  “Hey, thanks for the landslide of roses!” I said, trying to sound sincere.

  “I thought it was important to make a statement.” His voice was very serious.

  “Well, I’m not sure what you were trying to say, but you sure said it!”

  “I want to see you again.”

  “Oh! Well, sure! Yes, definitely!”

  “You sound like you got some doubt about that.”

  “What? Oh! No. It’s just the when part.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see, I’m putting my son in college and then I’m heading south for a few months…”

  “Oh.”

  “But that’s not for a couple of weeks so, yes! Let’s try to work something out. Like next week? Tuesday? I think I’m free Tuesday night?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Dinner, but let me surprise you. Figure, I don’t know, seven o’clock? I’ll pick you up?”

  “Sounds great. Let’s touch base that day just to be sure I’m on schedule…sometimes my days are a little crazy.”

  Silence. His silence implied he liked his women to be on call at all times. Another mild source of irritation for me. The only man on the planet to whom I would ever be so readily available was my son.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m here. I’ll call you from the car, and if you’re still at the office, I’ll pick you up there.”

  “Sounds great.” It did not sound great. I felt pushed. No. Not exactly pushed, just nudged. I didn’t like the feeling, but I didn’t dislike it enough to back out of our date.

  I could hardly believe it, but I saw him almost every other night over the next two weeks. It began to feel like the beginnings of some kind of demonic possession. I did not like him choosing everything I ate, or that he was annoyed when I didn’t take his calls during business hours, but for some crazy reason, at the end of the night, I could not resist him. It had become a routine. After dinner, we would have one last drink on his terrace, drunk on night air, great wine, and the sheer magnitude and diversity of life all around us in the shimmering landscape of skyscrapers, water, and Lady Liberty. Juxtaposed with all that grandeur were his white leather interiors that led to a cardio workout in his beyond-the-pale gauche round bed with the tacky mirrored ceiling. Not only had good taste taken a holiday, so had good sense.

  I continued coming home in the middle of the night and the next day more roses would arrive. The pink ones he sent to my home didn’t bother me. They were beautiful, in fact. They were feminine and tender. Then the yellow ones arrived. Okay, I thought, these are cheerful. But when I was bombarded at the office with three dozen red ones after a night of breaking the world’s endurance record for the Mattress Mambo Marathon, everybody had a comment.

  “Are congratulations in order?” David Pinkham said.

  “Yeah, who’s the poor son of a gun?” Paul McGrath said. “When’s the wedding?”

  “You two are delusional,” I said. “I’m never getting married.”

  “We used to call this a full-court press when I was a lad,” Pinkham said.

  McGrath wagged his finger at me. “Somebody’s misbehaving.” Then he winked at me and said, “Good for you!”

  Somebody’s exhausted, I thought. And I was.

  For all the good my relationship with Vinny had done to relieve the anxiety of Adrian’s departure and my return to Charleston, I also realized I had to quickly and efficiently put an end to it. That coming Saturday I was moving Adrian into his dorm room and I was leaving for Charleston on Monday. Needless to say, I had not heard from my father or my sister.

  It was Friday night and Vinny and I were meeting for drinks. Afterward, I was going to have dinner with my son. Vinny and I were seated at a sidewalk table at La Goulue, one of my favorites for a change.

  “So? Why can’t I meet your boy?”

  “Because it’s not necessary, Vinny. There’s no reason to complicate his life.”

  “How would that complicate his life?”

  “Look, I never get my son involved with men I date. I like to keep my private life private.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry! Like I’m not part of your private life? What is this, Betts? Doesn’t any of this, I mean, what we’ve been to each other, doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Vinny had been a diversion, a curiosity, a way to pass the time and exorcise the extraordinary stress under which I labored. He was also erotic in ways I had never known. The admission of his insignificance, however, would have been unkind and vulgar, and it would not have been entirely true. I would have loved to fall in love with someone—Vinny, Tom, Dick, or Harry. I just did not. Perhaps I could not. Naturally, I felt a certain amount of tenderness toward Vinny—probably a mélange of desire, loneliness, and fear of what waited for me in Charleston. But I did not love him. No, I did not love Vinny and never would.

  “Oh, Vinny,” I said, and sighed.

  “What?” Vinny the Heartbreaker’s cold heart of a hunter had fallen into the flames.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking.”

  He just stared at me and I watched his jaw set like a plaster mold. Vinny was getting angry.

  “You’re a wonderful man,” I said. “A really wonderful man…”

  “But?” A vein in his temple began to twitch.

  “But timing is everything, isn’t it? Look, we’re not children here. You know, I’m leaving for a few months, my son’s starting college…”

  “So? I can’t fly down there to see you? You won’t be coming back? What are you saying? That I’m some kind of summer fling?”

  “No! I’m saying that the time to bring my son into this relationship is ver
y far away.”

  He calmed down immediately because what I said implied that perhaps there was a future for us. “Too soon?”

  “Yeah. Too soon. What’s the rush?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He leaned back and drummed his fingers on the table. Then he smiled. “So you wanna grab a bite tomorrow night, after your boy is installed in his dorm?”

  I thought about it for a moment and realized I might need the company. So, even though I recognized that accepting his invitation was a willful act of selfishness, I said, “Sure. Why not?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Empty Nest

  In raising Adrian, I had done everything right and everything wrong. I had been his champion in all academic and social arenas, made sure he stayed in excellent health, dressed him well, and loved him with all my might. And I had robbed him of eighteen Father’s Days and every other kind of experience a boy has with his dad. How could I live with myself?

  Adrian was taping boxes closed, packing up his life, the things that mattered most to him. Books, DVDs, CDs, socks, school supplies, sweaters, linens, a small assortment of kitchen and bathroom items, a reading lamp…

  “I don’t have a rug for my room,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not going to college in Siberia, you know. And it’s still hot outside.”

  We were both churlish and moody, unlike our normal selves. I knew that he was anxious to have the day over and done. By supper time he would know so much more about his immediate future and what it would require of him. Where were his classrooms? Would he get the professors he wanted? Would he like his roommate? Would he fit in? Could he handle it—a huge campus and so many strangers? And I was on the doorstep of a big bummer.

  “True,” he said. “I guess I should just wait and see what the deal is. I mean, I doubt if the floor is like just cold cement. I need a bulletin board, too.”

  “You can get one at the campus store, don’t you think?” I said. “I’m gonna call the garage for the car.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m taking my clothes on hangers because I doubt if they have hangers.”

  “Good idea. Put a rubber band around the necks of everything so they don’t go flying all over the road.”

  “Duh,” he said. “Already thought of that.”

  “Right,” I said, and thought this was not the moment to give him a reprimand for slinging a duh in my direction.

  I didn’t know what it was the moment for, except to press on as though it were a normal occurrence for my son to be moving out.

  It was time to get the car. Our building was considered by Manhattan standards to have white-glove status, although it did not have a garage. I rented space around the corner, and because of the sheer volume of cars they juggled like sardines in their mine shaft of an underground garage, I always gave them about thirty minutes’ notice when I wanted to liberate the Toyota. So I rang them and then called Sam the doorman to ask the superintendent to bring a dolly up the service elevator.

  “He’s not on today,” Sam said. “Had a family christening or something. I can lock the front door and bring it up in a minute. How’s that?”

  “That would be great, Sam. Thanks.”

  I hung up the house phone and stopped again. Adrian had his expected level of reasonable anxiety, but I was beginning to panic. All at once I felt like something vital to my survival was being torn right out of my chest by the bare hands of a monster. I was not ready to let Adrian go. I didn’t want to start hyperventilating, but I was already short of breath and could feel sweat on the back of my neck as I stared at the blue and gray tiles on my floor. My face was flushed and I wanted to sit right there at my kitchen counter and have a good cry. I cleared my throat and struggled hard to maintain self-control.

  “Adrian? Bring the boxes to the kitchen and let’s start stacking them up. Sam’s coming with the dolly.”

  I picked up a framed photograph of Adrian and me that I kept on the kitchen windowsill, taken when he was about twelve. It must have been some important occasion—Aunt Jennie’s birthday, I seemed to recall—and he was wearing a jacket and tie. So boyish and yet dressed like an adult. The signs of adulthood were there, like a sapling that already bore the look of the stately and solid tree it would someday become.

  I stared again at the picture, and foolishly told myself that I hadn’t changed much over the years. Each time I looked at this picture while doing dishes or chopping onions, each time I peered into it, thinking about how much my son meant to me, he was over on the sidelines, quietly growing into a young man. And now he was leaving me. As he should. It was right, yet I hated it. I was a selfish coward and I hated myself for that, too. I desperately wanted him to think well of me, but I reminded myself again that when the day of reckoning arrived, I would find myself floundering in a great lake of quicksand with no one to throw me a rope.

  Thud! Adrian dropped a heavy box on the floor and turned to face me.

  “You okay, Mom?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Just thinking, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I know. Me, too. But like you said, I ain’t going to Siberia.”

  At which point the back doorbell rang.

  “Right,” I said, and put the picture back on the sill. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Adrian picked up the picture frame as I moved to open the door for Sam.

  “You mind if I take this?”

  “Of course not.”

  A part of me was deeply moved that he wanted a picture of me, of us really, for his room, and another part of me greatly wanted that twelve-year old boy back in my arms. If we didn’t load the dolly and get out of the building soon, I was going to dissolve into a puddle. Sam’s presence was a godsend because I would never lose my composure in front of him. Sam and Adrian swung into action.

  The next thing I knew, the car was packed to the hilt, Sam was shaking hands with Adrian, wishing him luck, and we were on our way up Central Park West toward the unfolding of my son’s greatest dream. How could any mother worth her salt self-indulge in the face of that?

  I was not surprised but still very relieved to see how organized the move was. Hundreds of volunteer students wearing identical T-shirts with a Columbia logo were on hand to help with everything. After Adrian checked in and got his key, the madness of unloading began. I waited in the car while Adrian and two nice-looking kids piled everything onto the sidewalk. Then I parked the car in a garage and returned to the designated spot. By the time I arrived, Adrian had secured a flatbed trolley and it was loaded to go. I followed him across the commons to Carman Hall. I hung back, letting Adrian chatter with the volunteers who were pointing out the student mailroom, theater, and Café 212, obviously named for Manhattan’s area code.

  Should I help him make his bed? No; I decided he would look like a baby to his roommates if I did. I concluded that the best course of action would be to follow Adrian’s lead. At least that’s what all the literature on the subject of “letting go” had advised. For one of the few occasions in my life, I was heeding the advice of others.

  He opened the door of his room and pulled in the mountain of his belongings.

  “Let’s dump this stuff ASAP,” the volunteer named Jacob from Milwaukee said. “They aren’t enough trolleys to go around.”

  “There never are,” groaned Mitzi, the bubbly redhead from Cleveland. “Move-in day is a nightmare,” she said to me, and rolled her gigantic, unnaturally blue eyes.

  Cosmetic contact lenses, I thought.

  “I’ll bet,” I said, wondering if she slept around, and if she did, if she removed her lenses, and how much of her self-esteem was tied up in that shade of electric blue?

  All the cartons came off the trolley; Adrian shook hands with his roommate, George Somebody from Richmond, Virginia, who had arrived yesterday; the trolley, Mitzi, and Jacob disappeared; and I had never felt more like a fifth wheel since high school.

  “Okay! So, Adrian? What can I do
to help?” I asked, with forced perkiness.

  “I’m good, Mom. I can handle it.”

  He had no groceries, no books, and his bedroom resembled a catacomb. A very small catacomb. How would he adapt?

  “You got money?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “You sure? Do you have your cell-phone charger? ATM card?”

  “Yep.”

  “I just went through this with my folks yesterday,” George piped in.

  I wanted to say, “Listen, punk, I’m having a moment here and I don’t need your advice,” but I remained silent and just smiled serenely, remembering that my job was to make this transition easy for Adrian.

  “Really, Mom. I’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need anything. I swear.”

  “Okay, then. Give me a hug!”

  I gave him something resembling a chiropractic adjustment and I could feel he was damp with perspiration. Nerves? The heat? Probably both.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” he said.

  “Okay, then,” I said. I stopped at the door and took a business card from my wallet, handing it to George. “My cell’s on there. If either one of you need a thing…”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. McGee. I did two years at Avon in Connecticut. I’ll show Adrian the ropes, and if anything goes bad, I’ll call you.”

  He said this as though he had done a stint in the Big House rather than an exclusive boys’ school.

  “Thanks, George. Okay, then,” I said for the third time. “Love you, son. Good luck!”

  I wanted him to remember me smiling bravely on my departure so that later, when I died in a plane crash, he would remember me fondly, grateful that I had not mortified him and had let him go into the next phase of his life with some grace and dignity.