Family Honor

Chapter 48

Rosie and I were in one of Rosie’s favorite spots, a bench beside the swan boat lagoon in the Boston Public Garden. It was kind of late in the fall for sitting on a bench outside, but they hadn’t drained the lagoon for winter yet, or put the swan boats away. Rosie could make eye contact with a dozen squirrels, and at least that many ducks, and not have to risk actually attacking them because she was on her leash. I liked to sit there when I felt stifled by things, as I did today. There was something about being outside in the sunlight with the dog that made my head clear. Rosie sat beside me. I had her leash looped over my wrist, but she seemed perfectly content leaning against me and focusing on the wildlife, her head moving fractionally as the squirrels hopped and the ducks glided, through whatever field of vision her black watermelon-seed eyes provided.

Brian was no more. He hadn’t said it, and I hadn’t. But I knew. He might be around for a time, if I changed my mind, but Brian’s interests would be directed elsewhere. Which was healthy of him. I remembered the moment with Richie, too.

It was Julie’s night out every Thursday. Michael took the kids, and Julie and I and sometimes Spike, on the rare occasion when our plans appealed to him, would go to an art exhibit or a book signing or maybe a musical evening at the Longy School in Cambridge, stuff that I found mostly boring, and Spike usually found insufferable, but stuff which reassured Julie that she was still an intellectual who had not been lobotomized by marriage and children. It was Spike’s view that this grim dedication to what he called intellectual boot camp would lobotomize us all, but though less often than I, he went with her because, less intensely than I, he loved Julie. This night, after a particularly grueling poetry reading in the basement of a church in the Back Bay, the three of us went to the Ritz bar and ordered martinis as an antidote to the stale cheese and warm white wine we had desperately ingested at the church. The relief we all felt was nearly tactile, though Julie wouldn’t admit it, and we didn’t press the point because we were kind. But the martinis went down really well, and the sum of it was that I came home to find Richie standing in the driveway with the dog’s leash in his hands. The dog was inside. To this day I don’t remember why he had it.

“Where have you been,” Richie said.

As he spoke, he snapped the dog’s leash tight between his hands and let it loose and snapped it tight.

“Out with my friends,” I said.

“You’re supposed to be home here with me,” he said.

The leash snapped tight and loosened. I doubt that Richie was even aware of what he was doing. He was ferociously contained and when he was very angry it squeezed out around his containment in odd ways.

“Every minute,” I said.

Snap.

“I’ve been waiting for three hours.”

The leash snapped. Did he want to snap it around my neck? No. Richie would never hurt me.

“I have the right,” I said, in the dignified way that you can achieve only if you’re drunk, “to be with my friends when I want to be.”

“And I have the right to have you come home when you’re expected and not make me think about whether it’s time to call the cops or not.”

“Oh, don’t be so silly,” I said.

“To worry about you is silly?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“To want you with me is silly?”

“No. But if you do it too much it’s...” I couldn’t think of a word... then it came... “suffocating.”

Richie stretched the leash as tight as he could, as if he were trying to pull it apart.

“Suffocating? Loving you and wanting you with me is suffocating?”

Had I been sober, maybe I would have modified it. It wasn’t quite what I meant. But it never is in fights like that. And I wasn’t sober.

“Yes!”

Richie shook his head like a horse beset by flies.

“All I ask is that I may love you and you love me back.”

“And you define love, and you judge the terms in which I love you back? And if I don’t love you in the same way you think you love me, I get yelled at?”

“I’m talking about the way I feel,” Richie said.

“And I’m talking about the way I feel. Why do we have to feel exactly alike? Why can’t you feel your way, and I feel my way?”

“All I want is to be loved the way I love,” Richie said. He was snapping the leash again.

“Well, maybe you can’t have that.”

“That’s what marriage is,” he said.

“Maybe you married the wrong woman, then.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, “maybe I did.”

Still holding the leash he walked away from me down the driveway and disappeared into the dark. When he came back I was in bed, and I pretended to be asleep.

Beside me, Rosie spotted another dog on the other side of the lagoon, and jumped down barking and snarling and gargling, just as if she would really attack it if I let her, which she wouldn’t. But it was a dazzling display, and several pedestrians stepped hurriedly out of her way as she strained on the leash.

“At least I know you don’t want to strangle me with it,” I said, and got up and steered her back toward Boylston Street.