The Greeks of Beaubien Street (21 page)

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“I guess we have the honor of taking your brother home tonight,” Liz said. She was glad; having Nick in the car would make it impossible for them to fight all the way home. And it might even be interesting. She felt that she and her husband would not be able to go forward from this moment without change.
But what
? Fortunately, menopause had reduced her libido so that it was almost as non-existent as John’s was. Infidelity wasn’t an issue;
there was no way in hell this body would be exposed to a new lover
, she thought. So trying to work out their sexual problems didn’t seem like such a big issue any more. Were they just destined to exist this way until death? They were going in the same direction toward the end, and although side by side, on different paths. They didn’t really have anything in common or any common interests. It was sad. Just then, Nick knocked on the locked store door. John unlocked it and let him in.

“You just missed your wife,” he said.

“Would you mind dropping me on your way home?” Nick looked like the cat that ate the canary. He glanced over at Liz and smiled.

“Boy I’d like to slap that grin off your face,” she said. Nick laughed at his sister-in-law.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get in line,” he replied.

“Come on children, I’ve had enough drama for one night.” John led the way back upstairs. “Something tells me you aren’t going to be welcome here, so we better get our stuff and clear out before we are escorted out.

“I’m just glad your mother isn’t alive. Could you imagine?” Liz said.

“You’re all heart,” Nick replied.

“Well, in case you didn’t notice, your wife is my best friend, and now what the hell am I going to do? I guess I’m taking her side.” They got to the apartment and John shushed them. Laughter and talking could be detected through the thick wood. John turned the knob and opened the door. Everyone was sitting around the dining room table in approximately the same places they were half an hour ago when Gus asked Nick to leave. They turned to look at the group coming through the door. Nick put his hands up.

“Don’t yell, I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” he explained.

“We’re taking him home,” John said, the reason evident. No one said anything, but it was clear they had moved on. Liz thought
all of that bad news and the family is so stinking shallow that they can start a card game.
She couldn’t wait to get home and call Joan. She remembered her own dilemma with the Zannos family. Her wealthy English family tried to accept John’s, but gave up after a few years. Liz always felt like her in-laws were talking trash about her because they would speak in Greek when she was around, purposely leaving her out of the conversation. She would go to the family functions under duress and be bored to tears. She finally came to the conclusion that they were never going to treat her like they treated each other because she wasn’t Greek.

None of the brothers had married a Greek woman aside from Gus, and look what that got him. Paula felt like she was excluded, too. Peter’s wife Joan was openly hostile to her in-laws, refusing to come to most gatherings. She hadn’t come for this funeral dinner either. “Why the hell would I purposely expose myself to a bunch of rude inlaws?” she complained. “You both should refuse to go,” she advised Liz and Paula. Joan and Peter’s two girls were never in attendance. Except for Liz and Paula, they barely knew their dad’s side of the family. Anna was the only one who seemed to have been accepted by the rest of the family.
Oh well, it’s over and done with
, Liz thought, relieved.

Liz began to relax as soon as John pointed the car toward home. Hopefully, she would never have to venture into Detroit again. She loved Eaton Rapids; its proximity to Lansing took care of any needs she had to visit a big city. A Greek Orthodox Church was close enough for them to go on Sunday. There was a Greek restaurant in town and if John needed Greek food they simply drove half an hour and picked some up. She’d survive the separation from family if only John could.

Nick was complaining about Paula before they crossed the city limits. Their marriage should never have taken place; it was based on lust, and when that dissipated he wasn’t able to stay faithful to her. But it wasn’t too late for her to gain some self-respect. Appalled, Liz could only think how it would affect her if Nick and Paula got a divorce. Paula and Joan were her dearest friends. Although they lived over an hour from each other, the three couples saw each other weekly and sometimes more. They often went to church together, spending Sunday at Liz and John’s sprawling country home. Broadway plays at Wharton Center in Lansing, movies and dinner in Brighton, weekends skiing in Vale or gambling in Las Vegas, they loved being a group. Every vacation was spent together, weeks during the summer at the family compound on Lake Michigan and Christmas in Detroit with Gus in spite of the women not liking the family. Liz and John’s lives without children were woven together with Nick and Paula’s for more than thirty years. Joan and Peter’s two daughters were more important to Paula than her own sister’s children. If it happened, if after all the years of marriage Nick would leave Paula or vice versa, it would leave a huge, empty hole.

Liz suddenly knew she had to try to keep them together. She turned around in her seat in the front of the car and looked at her brother-in-law. He was still handsome in spite of his age. The comment about him being unable to stay faithful to Paula had thrown Liz; she never had a hint that her brother-in-law was a womanizer and Paula had never said a word to her about it. Liz had based some of her dissatisfaction with John’s lack of libido directly on Paula bragging about her husband’s constant sexual advances.
Was it a lie?
Liz felt awful about the way she had treated John that evening. She reached out a hand and patted his arm. He glanced at her and smiled.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to make amends
, she thought. But she wanted to say something to Nick first.

“No offense, but you’re getting a little old to be out there, don’t you think? I mean if I were you, I’d sweet talk your wife into staying with you. At least you’d have someone there waiting for you when you get sick of running around like a pig,” Liz said.

“Boy, you really know how to hurt a guy,” Nick said. But he laughed. She was probably right. He was thinking that getting a divorce, selling the house he and Paula lived in, dividing up all of their crap, trying to find another place to live and starting all over sounded exhausting. “How about I take it under consideration?” Nick asked, reaching over to squeeze his sister-in-law’s shoulder. It would be difficult for the two couples to end their constant companionship. Liz put her head back and had a sigh of relief. Her thoughts in conflict again, no matter how bad it could be between she and John, nothing would be worse than being alone.

Chapter 27

On an unremarkable cloudy Saturday afternoon during autumn years before, Gus Zannos was about to receive about the worst news a husband could get. He and his pregnant wife were walking on a path near the rose gardens on Belle Isle, a small island in the middle of the Detroit River. He had taken a rare break from the store at his wife’s insistence. Christina needed to get out of the apartment and away from her in laws, she told him. In addition, she had something to tell her husband, something that she didn’t think her in-laws should hear and they were always there lurking around. Belle Isle was their favorite place to go, close enough yet out of town. Its lovely gardens and parklands were planned by Fredrick Olmstead who designed Central Park in Manhattan. As much as he loved it, Gus would never again step foot on Belle Isle after that day.

“The only problem with living in town is not being able to have a garden,” Gus said, bending over to smell the roses. “Nick and Paula’s; now that’s a garden,” he said, referring to his brother’s perfectly groomed flower beds. “Paula sure has a green thumb.”

“I am not interested in gardening at all. Getting my hands all dirty. bugs and worms. Ugh,” Christina sniffed. She was standing in back of her husband’s bent over frame. Suddenly, she was choked up with regret over her treatment of him, having taken his gentleness for granted. Gus stood up and brushed his hands off on his pant legs, turning to his wife noticed her flushed and teary eyed. He took her arm.

“What’s troubling you?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” He looked away from her face and seeing a bench off the path in a copse of trees, led her there for some privacy, away from the other strollers. He grabbed her hand and pulled her down to sit next to him. She was shaking and visibly upset
.
What could it be?
Is something wrong with the baby?
he wondered. Christina looked at his face, into his eyes. Gus was a good man, kind and honest. They’d been childhood playmates and good friends before they got married. She started sobbing, so uncharacteristic for her, confusing Gus. He put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off and leaned forward, with her head in her hands.

“Chris, you’re scaring me,” he said. “What the hell is wrong?” She turned her head to look at him, mascara smeared under her eyes, her nose running.

“I slept with Nick,” she said. Gus took his arm off her shoulders and leaned forward so he could see into her eyes. Gus was thinking, the wheels turning in his head and his wife knew what was happening. If she kept her mouth shut, he would figure it out for himself. She didn’t need to say another word. He straightened up and looked off at the rose gardens again.

“When?” he asked. And when Christina didn’t speak, his expression changed from concern, to understanding. He looked down at her belly.
Oh God
. “No,” he said. Christina looked at him. She shook her head
yes
. What could she say? “Is it his?” Her husband asked. “Are you telling me that this baby,
our
baby, is my brother Nick’s?”
Jesus Christ! What am I going to do now?
And then, the question she had dreaded: the inevitable
why
?

Gus loved her, rescuing her from her mother’s suffocating grip, but there had been something missing in the beginning, something she couldn’t define in her naïveté. His brother Nick was handsome, taller than the other men in the family. He was outgoing and flirtatious, but harmless, his family thought. Christina was swept off her feet. In a moment of weakness, flirtation led to passionate lovemaking, often in the front seat of his patrol car. But she wasn’t going to go there with her husband if she could help it.

“It just happened,” she answered. “I don’t know whose baby it is.” The ludicrousness of what she said slapped them both in the face.
She doesn’t know? Was she sleeping with him that often?
And,
Did I just admit I was sleeping with them both during the same time period?
She started crying again. “I always felt like I needed to be honest with you. I couldn’t not tell you. It sounds like a contradiction but I do respect you! I do! It was just a lapse in judgment.” But even as the words were out of her mouth, she knew she was lying to him still. She loved him like a great friend, but it was his brother Nick that she was passionate about.

The first time it had happened, they were kissing in the apartment when no one else was upstairs. Nick was confessing his love for her. He’d come to the city in the middle of the day just to see her. He was emotional, distraught, standing over her with his uniform on.

“Meet me tonight,” he said. “I’ll get a room. I’m not sure how I am going to get through the day.” His hands were gripping her upper arms, the bones right beneath the skin. His wife was plump, her arms were soft. When he hugged Paula, he collapsed into her soft flesh and she was sturdy, not flinching under his weight. Christina was a fragile china doll. He’d have to be careful not to break her if he was lucky enough to get to do it to her. He wasn’t thinking about anyone else but himself.

“I’m not sleeping with you! You must be nuts,” she retorted. She loved him too, but it would be left unsaid. Nothing good was going to come from their union. And she couldn’t bear the thought of hurting Gus. He was so good to her, so solid and trustworthy. Pulling away from Nick, she went toward the staircase to go down to the store. “Come on, before your mother notices we are up here alone.” Christina had seen the look in Eleni’s eyes before. Her mother-in-law wondered what was going on. It would be the last thing Christina intended on doing; sleeping with Paula Mac’s husband.

She went down alone while Nick waited in the apartment for his hard-on to go away. Thinking no one noticed her; Christina went directly to the tables where customers sat to wait for their take-out food or drink coffee and got busy with straightening the salt and pepper shakers. She found an empty napkin holder and took it to with her to the back of the store where the rest of the family congregated, preparing to go to Eastern Market for a shopping trip. Gus was laughing with his father. Eleni was standing to the side, watching and listening. She alone observed when her daughter-in-law came down the stairs, flushed and with furtive eyes, and then close behind was Nick, composed but troubled. They must have been upstairs together.

Concern flooded her at once. Here was a
situation
. She’d keep this one from her husband, a sensitive man, but a rigid one in his thinking. He would blame Christina for her flirtatiousness; everyone noticed how she responded to Nick. But no one saw danger in it, not even Paula. Paula was a naïve young woman, too naïve for her own good. She thought she could keep the interest of her husband and let herself go. All of the daughter-in-laws were the same: no common sense, pampered, immature. Bringing her suspicions to Paula’s attention would only cause problems, so Eleni decided she would say nothing. She’d keep watch over the young people. She glanced at Gus who seemed oblivious to it all. He was always a carefree boy and now it would turn around to bite him in the back. Unless she took steps. Should she warn him? What man could take a warning like that from his mother?
Son, your wife is messing around with your brother.