domain; she was the only one who could really get it going, and after she died, it sat cold. Its square black mouth seemed, in this moment, to be the very medium through which she’d been sucked away from us; and him, too. The long corridor to the underworld.
I moved nearer to Deirdre, and I said I was sorry. I’m not exactly sure what I was sorry for. Not for my accusations, which I felt, at their core, were true. More for upsetting her—for just being me, I guess, insensitive, defensive, emotionally retarded me.
Deirdre slumped toward me, and I let my arm fall tentatively around her. Having just fought, this physical nearness was unnerving. I smoothed her hair, which at the roots was a nondescript, mousy brown, so plain compared to the fiery red of mine. Slowly she emerged from her tears. Soon enough we were telling old stories, and laughing a little, remembering funny things about Dad and his bearing in the world, like the way he used to insist he was six feet tall, though he fell short even in shoes, or the way he shined those shoes every Sunday night, lecturing me on the importance of starting the week with your best foot forward. She told me how the dementia, before it got terrible, actually made him docile, even sweet, in his dependence. We talked about how much he loved our mother, how she had protected him from the world, how he had never gotten over her.
“Since he’s died,” Deidre said, “I’ve missed her all over again.”
“I can’t let myself,” I said. “I sometimes forget I ever had a mother.”
She looked at me with puzzlement, then blew her nose one last time and threw a damp, crumpled tissue onto the coffee table, where it bounced against the crumpled tissues already there. I walked her to the front door, and we said good-bye awkwardly, like strangers on a descending airplane who’d spoken too intimately and would never meet again.
“I do wish you could stay longer,” she said.
“I’ll make a point of coming back soon, to help out with Nana and the house.” I doubted either of us believed this.
Standing alone in the hallway, listening to her minivan move down the street, I felt myself very far away from all of them—physically far away, even from Nana, asleep upstairs. I phoned Woody, but got only voice mail; I phoned Brady, Ian, Colleen—my closest San Francisco pals. I left messages for them all: “Get the margaritas ready. I’m coming home.”
Back in the sewing room, I lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window while I packed my bags. It didn’t take long; I hadn’t brought much with me, and the only thing I was adding to my load was the knife set. And, of course, that shoebox.
I shuffled through the box one more time, mesmerized by the photos. Rusty and Danny, in front of that Chevy: my father, pale skinned and broad chested, pulled in close by his impossibly good-looking friend. Two boys with nothing but adventure ahead. I heard the click of the ignition, the roar from under the hood, a doo-wop song on the radio.
And that head shot: Dean Foster’s eyes beckoning, his lips drawing sensuous curves into his skin. Eyes and lips working in tandem, conspiring to ignite desire. My reporter’s instinct felt it as a dare: the primal male friendship of my father’s life, covered in secrecy, a forty-year silence so total there had to be a good reason for it. How to reconcile this discovery with the memory of my father as he’d lived, a man I’d never known to have close friendships with other men, who had failed to find any connection with his only son, who’d always been, to use Woody’s words, emotionally unavailable? A shiver skipped down my spine, like a stone disturbing the surface of deep water, and in the second it took to shake off the sensation, I knew what I would do: I’d look for Danny Ficchino. If he was still alive, I’d find him. I’d find out why he had been erased from our family’s history.
I found myself wishing I had tried harder to interest Deirdre in this. Her curiosity would make things easier; she could go through the rest of Dad’s belongings in the attic. Plus, we’d have something new in common, a project to get excited about together. This wish—that his death might afford us common ground again—flared at the edge of my thoughts like a shard of glass catching a beam of light. Flared, then dimmed. My sister’s needs, I knew, were more practical right now. She had a husband, a child, a house to manage; she had our grandmother’s future to consider; she had Carly Fazio in human resources ready to sign her up. If I truly wanted to be closer to her, I would have come home last year, not last week. If I wanted to delve into an obscure year from our father’s past, I would have to go it alone.
4
I was so excited to see Woody again, to get away from New Jersey and that house crammed full of the past, the money talk and the old arguments. Riding to the airport I was giddy with anticipation, not to mention making choices based on my impending inheritance—springing for a seventy-dollar car service rather than a thirteen-dollar bus ride to Newark.
The flight was delayed because of winter weather. I called Woody to break the news, and then I did what I always did when stranded in airports: I cruised the restrooms. It’s an old habit left over from when I lived in Jersey City with my boyfriend Nathan. Back then—this was 1990 or ’91, and I was only a year out of college—I used to lurk in the men’s room in the underground transit station at the World Trade Center. The World of Trade Center, Nathan dubbed it, because of all the white businessmen in suits sucking off rough-trade Latinos wearing wife-beater tank tops. Nathan and I were nearly obsessed with one another, a love marked by demonstrative gestures (he was once arrested for spray painting NO ONE LOVES JAMIE MORE THAN NATHAN on a subway-platform billboard) and public displays of drama (the spray paint was to mark the spot where we’d had a screaming match a week earlier). But we were in our early twenties, so naturally we were always itching for sex with other people, too. Sometimes we granted each other permission slips for a night or a weekend. Young and queer, why should we limit ourselves? But inevitably one of us got jealous—usually Nathan, a brooding, wild-haired, motorcycle-riding college dropout with a Slavic gloominess—and we’d argue for a day, or two, or seven. I was proficient in foot-stomping retreats and door-slamming exits. He called me the Red Tornado. Détente would come in the form of sweaty makeup sex. Permission slips were revoked, new limitations imposed. Having strayed and reunited, fought and fucked, we’d sing our own praises, young enough to see our love as different than, better than, all other love. Nathan would write me a poem. Or seven.
And then it would start all over again.
After high school, after Eric, I had avoided the touch of men. College was relatively sexless for me—a couple of girlfriends, a couple of furtive liaisons with boys. By the time I got to New York, I was ready. I discovered that pale blue eyes, freckled shoulders and red hair were a currency with an appeal that ran deep, if not necessarily wide. I learned how to court admirers. I figured out how to work it. Nathan was less of a prowler than I, but not blameless. He preferred going home with someone he’d met at a bar, which I thought of as unnecessarily entangled—you had to converse, and spend money on alcohol, and exchange phone numbers, and in the end you were more likely to let emotions seep in, perhaps deciding this new someone was more interesting than your boyfriend. I preferred the quick and anonymous; no talking beyond Thanks a lot, man. That was hot. I wanted bodies, not biographies. For a while the World of Trade men’s room was unbelievably hopping, with sex acts so blatant you’d feel bad for the poor commuter who had stumbled in needing to pee.
The day I was flying back to San Francisco, I’d been coupled with Woody for over a year and a half, a year and a half of monogamous nesting. I’d been a model partner. Woody’s previous boyfriend had run around behind his back; cheating was the one thing Woody couldn’t abide. I didn’t even flirt with other men in front of him. Plus, having emerged from my slutty years without contracting HIV, it seemed ungracious to tempt fate.
So what was I doing in Newark Airport Terminal C, lingering a little too long at a urinal, looking over my shoulder at every guy who walked in, hoping one of them would make eye contact?
I zipped up and splashed cold water on my face. Before anything could happen, I got away from the temptation conjured up by the piss-and-ammonia stink of a public toilet.
In my carry-on luggage was my father’s