The Year of Pleasures (27 page)

“Are you doing anything special on Christmas Day?” Delores asked.

I shook my head, looked down.

“Now listen,” she said. “You might want to be alone, and I respect that. But if you don’t want to be alone, then you call me, all right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you don’t have to call me, I suppose, but I want you to call somebody. Lot of times you can feel like people don’t want to be burdened with you at holiday time, but that’s not true. Families like to have outsiders over. Keeps ’em from fighting with each other so much.”

I took a last bite of potato soup and pushed my bowl away.

Our waitress came over, a too-thin but beautiful, brown-eyed young girl whose hands had trembled as she took our order—first day, she said—and asked if we needed anything else. Both of us declined, and then when we put our money down, I saw we’d both done the same thing—tipped her excessively. “ ’Tis the season,” Delores said. “Every year I say it’s not going to get me, and every year it does.”

“I know.” In my car were two gigantic tins full of cookies. I was on my way over to Matthew and Jovani’s. At home there were seven more tins.

Jovani answered the door, visibly upset.

“What wrong?” I asked.

He motioned impatiently for me to come inside. “I’m tell you the whole story. But short! Because always is the same story.”

I followed him into the living room, where Matthew sat reading from one of his textbooks. “Hey, Betta,” he said. “What’s in the tin?”

I threw the cookies over to him, and he began eating them immediately. “Good!” he said, crumbs flying from his mouth.

Jovani wandered over to him, his hands on his hips, but declined when Matthew held the tin up to him.

“Later, when my stomach it’s not volcano,” he said.

I sat on the sofa, slid my coat off. “So what happened, Jovani?”

“All right,” he said. “You look on my face. What have you find?”

“Well, I . . . I see a very nice-looking young man.”

“Do you see on here ‘little too much enthusiasm’?”

I laughed. “No.”

“Well, that is why I’m not hire. They think I’m too much enthusiasm.”

“It’s your shoes,” Matthew muttered, not looking up. “I keep telling you, man. You can’t apply for a job, especially selling men’s clothes, wearing sneakers.”

Jovani came to sit beside me. “They are not even looking on my shoes. Only on my face, where I am too much enthusiasm. I am only happy and passionate man, and that they don’t like! They want only mannequin, to hang clothes from. To talk to customers like funeral.”

From upstairs, I heard the sound of the shower turn off. Melanie, I assumed. I looked over at Matthew, who said in a low voice, “We’re all set for Saturday, but just barely. I had to tell her we’re going to a really good restaurant in Chicago. Will your friends go along with that?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Tonight, I cook,” Jovani said. “You come, you won’t believe. We having for drink puma’s milk. We have
empada,
for main dish is
frango ensopado,
we have alongside coconut rice, and for dessert Maria bonbons.”

“Jovani!” I said.

“Inside me, many surprises,” he said. “Nobody see.”

“Well,
I
see.”

“So maybe you hire me. I make your business blow up.”

“You know,” I said, “I may just do that. I’m thinking about opening a store. But it would be a store called What a Woman Wants. Do you think you’d like to work there?”

He showed me his palms. “Am I not?” he said. “What she is want?”

I heard the stairs creak, and Melanie came into the room. She ignored me so completely I almost admired her ability. “I’m ready to go,” she told Matthew.

Matthew flipped through his book. “Three more pages to finish the chapter,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“
Mat
tie . . .”

He closed the book and went for his jacket.

“Melanie,” Jovani said. “Tonight I am cook. Would you like also to join us dinner?”

“No,” she said. “I’m busy tonight.”

“But thanks,” I said, and she turned around to glare at me.

“I was
going
to
say
that
.
”

On Christmas Day I found Lydia in the recreation room, seated in the far back, while the rest of the residents were gathered close around the piano. A tall, older man wearing a burgundy suit was playing with the unbounded voluptuousness of Liberace and singing loudly, his head thrown back. He was still handsome, still had a thick head of beautiful white hair. A sign sat on the piano:
BERNSTEIN ENTERTAINMENT.
The people sang along, in less-than-robust voices, to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

I tapped Lydia on the shoulder, and when she turned around and saw me, she frowned. I held up the tin of cookies, and she hesitated, then took it. She pointed to the hall and I wheeled her out there. Over her shoulder, she asked, “Did you
ever hear
such caterwauling? Thank God you got me out of there. Take me to my room.”

Once there, she had me station her in the corner. She wore tan pants that were far too short, revealing the same kind of gray knee-socks she’d been wearing last time I saw her. She’d gotten a new pair of sneakers, apparently; they were a startling white, massive-looking on her narrow feet. She wore a man’s green plaid flannel shirt, buttoned to the top but still loose around her neck, and her tan cardigan sweater, a bejeweled Christmas tree pinned to it. I knew the pin had not been her doing—many of the residents wore them, so the home must have handed them out. I suspected they had put it on when Lydia wasn’t looking. Now she opened the tin and looked inside. “What’s this?”

“It’s Christmas cookies. I thought you might enjoy them.”

She stared at me suspiciously, reptile-like, and I had to restrain myself from grabbing her glasses so I could clean them; they seemed to be begging me. Lydia dug through the cookies, examining this one and that. Her knuckles were huge, arthritic, I thought, and I saw that her hands still trembled. “I suppose
you
want one,” she said finally, and I said no, I’d had plenty already.

From down the hall came a man’s voice, loudly chanting, “
Orange
juice!
Orange
juice!
Orange
juice!” He went on and on. Lydia waved her hand in his direction. “Every day. He lives on the other side, with the crazy people. He’s just over here because their shower room is having problems again. If they’d hire a decent plumber, they’d get the thing fixed.” She popped a tea cake into her mouth, and through her gnarliness, I thought I saw a quick flash of pleasure. “Did you make these?”

“I did.”

“Well, I never saw the reason for all the fuss.” She pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve and honked her nose.

“Well, one reason is that it’s kind of nice to give them away. The other reason is that they taste good.”

She nodded, pushing the handkerchief back inside her sleeve. “I suppose they do.” She replaced the lid. “Now. What else do you want?”

I laughed. “Nothing.”

She was still for a moment, then asked with some irritation, “Why do you keep coming back? You’re not going to get a thing from me. And you can’t like me.”

“Well, Lydia, it isn’t easy, but I kind of do.” We had a neighbor, when I was growing up, who was generally regarded as impossible. Ball Man, he was called, for the way he would confiscate anything that landed on his lawn. He was an emaciated old guy, stoop-shouldered, bewhiskered with gray stubble, and bald but for a few strands of hair that sometimes were pushed over the top of his head but most often hung at the sides. He wore the same outfit all the time: a T-shirt tucked into too-large dress trousers that were belted high on his waist, and run-down slippers. I saw him only when he came out for the newspaper and the few times he left the house, when he wore a sport coat over his T-shirt and a battered hat with a feather. He fascinated me. I tried to no avail to win him over, leaving butterscotch brownies in his mailbox, ringing his doorbell to ask if he’d like me to pick something up for him at the store, or to rake his leaves, even asking him unlikely questions about whether he’d like to help send our fifth grade to Washington. ‘No!’ he would say. ‘Beat it! Don’t come around here anymore! Stop ringing my doorbell!’ I never got anywhere with him, but I never stopped trying. “She ought to be a psychiatrist,” my father said about me. Instead, I married one. He could do all the work; I could hear all the stories.

Lydia rolled herself closer to her bed. “I’m tired.”

“Would you like me to call someone to help you?”

She flung the tin of cookies onto her bed. “Do you think I’m incapable of calling for a nurse? I’ll call for a nurse when I’m ready. But for now I’ve . . . got a little time.” She looked away, then back at me. “Now. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. What do you propose we talk about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s just play a round of gin rummy.”

“I can’t do that.”

She sat back in her chair. “Why not?”

“I never learned how to play it.”

“Well, what can you play?”

“Just crazy eights.” It was true. But for that, I had never learned any card games. John had once tried to teach me bridge, but it felt too much like math. And I’d kept looking out the window.

“Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And I hear stupid things all the livelong day, believe me.”

“Why don’t you teach me the game?” I asked.

She frowned, then reached up to rub one eye. “Get the cards. They’re in my top drawer. There’s some candy bars in there, too. If you’d like.”

“Not right now, thanks.” I opened her drawer and pulled out a deck of cards. Beneath a pile of Hershey bars, I saw one of the letters I’d brought—she’d kept one. I closed the drawer without comment.

“I’ll deal,” Lydia said, looking fiercely at me.

I handed her the cards. “Okay.”

“Thank you,” she said, and quickly cleared her throat.

I sat back in my chair and watched her deal the cards, and inside I felt the spread of a great satisfaction. I knew I would be hard-pressed to explain it to anyone but John. Others might call this futile, a waste of time, masochistic, even. John would call it acknowledging the fact that people truly are all connected, and that we are, at least in some sense, meant to care for one another—all the time, not just in times of catastrophe. He would call visiting a bitter old woman a risk worth taking. I felt as though we were doing it together.

“Hire me, too,” Lorraine said. We were driving back from the airport, and I’d told her I was going to hire Jovani if I could ever find a store to rent. He had suggested putting in a wine-and-dessert bar—a sort of female equivalent to a cigar bar. He would manage it. Also, he would sell his artwork there.

“I mean it,” Lorraine said. “I’m ready for a radical change.”

“Really, you’d come here and help me?”

“I would.”

For a moment, I allowed myself the luxury of thinking of Lorraine perhaps even moving here, becoming my roommate once again, going on buying trips with me to Italy, to Greece, to France. But I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment—what were the chances of her doing that, really? It was one thing to help a friend; another to move permanently.

“You should wear that tomorrow night,” I said. She looked stunning: a white sweater, elegantly cut tweed pants, soft brown Italian leather shoes.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I brought a dress. And some killer heels—they’d better have the sidewalks clear. Should I wear my hair up or down?”

“Up,” I said, at the same time as she said, “Down.”

“Do both,” I said. “Start out with it up.”

“Good.” She looked at her watch. “I really can’t wait to meet him.”

“Matthew?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s adorable.”

“You
said.
”

Saturday night Lorraine waited impatiently in the living room for Tom to pick her up. Her black dress was cut low both in the front and in the back but otherwise was quite simple. She wore large diamond studs and a beautiful gold-and-diamond bangle bracelet. (
Real?
I asked, and she said,
That
guy was a
good
one.)

When the doorbell finally rang, I opened it to a nervous Tom, who became even more nervous when he saw Lorraine. For her part, she gave me a tight smile on the way out. I knew what it meant:
When I get back, I’m going to kill you for making me spend time with such a schmuck.
As I shut the door after them, I was already preparing his modest defense.

I made a simple supper of soup and salad, then settled down to read. But I couldn’t concentrate; I kept having visions of what I hoped would happen. Finally, at eight-thirty, I called Delores and asked if she’d like to go to a movie. No answer.

I bathed, changed into pajamas, lay in bed and looked at magazines, listened to a couple of CDs, fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep, woke up. At one-fifteen the front door opened, and I heard a car drive away. I turned on my light.

Lorraine came up the stairs, then into my bedroom, holding her shoes in her hand. Her hair was down, her cheeks flushed. “You’re awake,” she said. “Good.”