Where the God of Love Hangs Out

LIGHT INTO DARK

“It’s six-fifteen,” Lionel says to his stepmother. “Decent people have started drinking.”

“Maybe I should put out some food,” Julia says.

Lionel nods, looking around for the little cluster of liquor bottles Julia had thrown out when his father was alive and trying to stay sober, and which she replaced on the sideboard as soon as the man passed away. Lionel’s not sorry he’s dragged himself and his stepson from Paris to Massachusetts for their first trip together, but it seems possible, even probable, that this Thanksgiving weekend will be the longest four days of his life.

“It’s all over with Paula?” Julia doesn’t sound sorry or not sorry; she sounds as if she’s simply counting places at the table.

“Yeah. Things happen.”

“Do you want to tell me more about it?”

“Nothing to tell.”

After his first wife, the terrible Claudine, Lionel had thought he would never even sleep with another woman, but Paula had been the anti-Claudine: not French, not thin, not mean. She was plump and pretty, a good-natured woman with an English-language bookstore and a three-year-old son. It did not seem possible, when they married in the garden of the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, with Paula in a short white dress and her little boy holding the rings, that after five years she would be thin and irritable and given to the same shrugs and expensive cigarettes as the terrible Claudine. After he moved out, Lionel insisted on weekly dinners and movie nights with his stepson. He wants to do right by the one child to whom he is “Papa,” although he has begun to think, as Ari turns eight, that there is no reason not to have the boy call him by his first name instead.

“Really nothing to tell. We were in love and then not.”

“You slept with someone else?” Julia asks.

“Julia.”

“I’m just trying to see how you got to ‘not.’”

“I bet Buster told you.”

“Your brother did not rat on you.” He had, of course. Buster, the family big-mouth, a convert to monogamy, had told his mother that Lionel slept with the ticket taker from the cinema Studio 28, and Julia was not as shocked as Buster had hoped she would be. “A cutie, I bet,” was all she said. (The beauty of Lionel’s girlfriends was legendary. Paula, dimpled, fair, and curvy in her high heels, would have been the belle of any American country club, and even so was barely on the bottom rung of Lionel’s girls.)

Buster talks about everything: his wife’s dissolving sense of self, Jordan’s occasional bed-wetting, Corinne’s thumb-sucking, all just to open the door for his own concerns and sore spots — his climbing weight, his anxiety about becoming a judge so young. Julia thinks that Buster is a good and fine-looking man, and tall enough to carry the weight well, although it breaks her heart to see her boy so encumbered. She knows that he will make a fine judge, short on oratory and long on common sense and kindness.

“Even in my day, honey, most people got divorced because they had someone else on the side and got tired of pretending they didn’t.” Julia herself had been Lionel senior’s someone on the side before she became his wife.

“Let’s not go there. Anyway, definitely over with Paula. But I’m going to bring Ari every Thanksgiving.”

Everyone had liked Paula (even when she got so crabby, it was not with the new in-laws three thousand miles away), but no one, including Lionel, can look at the poor kid without wanting to run a thumb up his slack spine. Bringing Ari is no gift to anyone; he’s a burden to Jordan, an annoyance to little Corinne. Of course, Buster doesn’t mind; he’s the soft touch in the family, and Jewelle, inclined to love everything even faintly Buster, tries, but her whole beautiful frowning face signals that this is an inferior sort of child, one who does not appreciate friendly jokes or good cooking or the chance to ingratiate himself with his American family. It is to Ari’s credit, Lionel thinks, that instead of clinging forlornly, he has retreated into bitter, silent, superior Frenchness.

“Julia, are you listening?” Lionel asks. “On Friday I’ll fix the kitchen steps.”

Julia sets down a platter of cold chicken and sits on the floor to do Colorforms with Jordan. She puts a red square next to Jordy’s little green dots.

“It’s like talking to myself. It’s like I’m not even in the room.” Lionel pours himself a drink, walking over to his nephew. Jordan peels a blue triangle off the bottom of Lionel’s sneaker without looking up. Jordan takes after his father, and they both hate disturbances; Uncle Lionel can be a disturbance of the worst kind, the kind that might make Grandma Julia walk out of the room or put away the toys, slamming the cabinet door shut, knocking the hidden chocolates out of their boxes.

“Oh, we know you’re here,” Julia says. “We can tell because your size thirteens are splayed all over Jordy’s Colorforms. Squashing them.”

“They’re already flat, Julia,” Lionel says, and she laughs. Lionel makes her laugh.

Jordan moves his Colorforms board a safe distance from his uncle’s feet. Uncle Lionel is sharp, is what Jordan’s parents say. Sharp as a knife. Ari, not really Uncle Lionel’s son, not really Jordan’s cousin, is sharp, too, but he’s sharp mostly in French, so Jordan doesn’t even have to get into it with him. Ari has Tintin and Jordan has Spider-Man, and Jordan stretches out on the blue velvet couch and Ari gets just the blue-striped armchair, plus Jordan has his own room and Ari has to share with Uncle Lionel.

“You invite Ari to play with you,” Julia tells Jordan. “Take your sister with you.”

“He’s mean. And he only talks French, anyway. He’s—”

“Jordy, invite your cousin to play with you. He’s never been to America before, and you are the host.”

“I’m the host?” Jordan can see himself in his blue blazer with his feet up on the coffee table like Uncle Lionel, waving a fat cigar.

“You are.”

“All right. We’re gonna play outside, then.” Ari is not an outside person.

“That’s nice,” Lionel says.

“Nice enough,” Julia says. It is terrible to prefer one grandchild over another, but who would not prefer sweet Jordan or Princess Corinne to poor long-nosed Ari, slinking around the house like a marmoset.

Julia has not had both sons with her for Thanksgiving for more than twenty years. Until 1978 the Sampson family sat around a big bird with corn-bread stuffing, pralined sweet potatoes, and three kinds of deep-dish pie, and it has been easier since her husband and in-laws died to stay in with a bourbon and a bowl of pasta when one son couldn’t come home and the other didn’t, and not too hard, later, to come as a pitied favorite guest to Buster’s in-laws’, and sweet and very easy, during the five happy, private years with Peaches Figueroa, for the two of them to wear their pajamas and eat fettuccine al barese in honor of Julia’s Italian roots and in honor of Peaches, who had grown up with canned food and Thanksgiving from United Catholic Charities. With her whole extant family in the house now, sons and affectionate daughter-in-law (Jewelle must have had to promise her mother a hundred future Christmases to get away on Thanksgiving), grandson, granddaughter, and poor Ari, Lionel’s little ex — step marmoset, Julia can see that she has entered Official Grandmahood. Sweet or sour, spry or arthritic, she is now a stock character, as essential and unknown as the maid in a drawing-room comedy.

“Looks good. Ari likes chicken.” Lionel walks toward the sideboard.

Julia watches him sideways, his clever, darkly mournful eyes, the small blue circles of fatigue beneath them, the sparks of silver in his black curls. She does not say, How did we cripple you so? Don’t some people survive a bad mother and her early death? Couldn’t you have been the kind of man who overcomes terrible misfortune, even a truly calamitous error in judgment? It was just one night — not that that excuses anything, Julia thinks. She loves him like no one else; she remembers meeting him for the first time, wooing him for his father’s sake and loving him exuberantly, openhandedly, without any of the prickling maternal guilt or profound irritation she sometimes felt with Buster. Just one shameful, gold-rimmed night together, and it still runs through her like bad sap. She has no idea what runs through him.

There is a knot in his heart, Julia thinks, as she puts away the Colorforms, and nothing will loosen it. She sees a line of ex — daughters-in-law, short and tall, dark and fair, stretching from Paris to Massachusetts, throwing their wedding bands into the sea and waving regret fully in her direction.

Julia kisses Lionel firmly on the forehead, and he smiles. It would be nicer if his stepmother’s rare kisses and pats on the cheek did not feel so much like forgiveness, like Julia’s wish to convey that she does not blame him for being who he is. Lionel wonders whom exactly she does blame.

“Let’s talk later,” he says. It seems safe to assume that later will not happen.

Lionel watches his niece and his sister-in-law through the kitchen door. He likes Jewelle. He always has. Likes her for loving his little brother and shaking him up, and likes her more now that she has somehow shaped Buster into a grown man, easy in his young family and smoothly armored for the outside world. He likes her for always making him feel that what she finds attractive in her husband she finds attractive, too, in the older, slightly darker brother-in-law. And Lionel likes, can’t help being glad to see on his worst days, those spectacular breasts of hers, which, even as she has settled down into family life, no longer throwing plates in annoyance or driving to Mexico out of pique, she displays with the transparent pride of her youth.

“Looking good, Jewelle. Looking babe-a-licious, Miss Corinne.”

They both smile, and Jewelle shakes her head. Why do the bad ones always look so good? Buster is a handsome man, but Lionel is just the devil.

“Are you here to help or to bother us?”

“Helping. He’s helping me,” Corinne says. She likes Uncle Lionel. She likes his big white smile and the gold band of his cigar, which he always, always gives to her, and the way he butters her bread, covering the slice right to the crust with twice as much butter as her mother puts on.

“I could help,” Lionel says. There is an unopened bottle of Scotch under the sink, and he finds Julia’s handsome, square, heavy-bottomed glasses, the kind that make you glad you drink hard liquor.

Lionel rolls up his sleeves and chops apples and celery. After Corinne yawns twice and almost tips over into the pan of cooling corn bread, Jewelle carries her off to bed. When she comes back from arranging Floradora the Dog and Strawberry Mouse just so, and tucking the blankets tightly around Corinne’s feet, Lionel is gone, as Jewelle expected.

Her mother-in-law talks tough about men. Every thing about Julia, her uniform of old jeans and black T-shirt, her wild gray hair and careless independence, says nothing is easier than finding a man and training him and kicking him loose if he doesn’t behave, and you would think she’d raised both her boys as feminist heroes. And Buster is good — Jewelle always says so — he picks up after himself, cooks when he can, gives the kids their baths, and is happy to sit in the Mommy row during Jordan’s Saturday swim. Lionel is something else. When he clears the table or washes up, swaying to Otis Redding, snapping his dish towel like James Brown, Julia watches him with such tender admiration that you would think he’d just rescued a lost child.

Jewelle runs her hands through the corn bread, making tracks in the crust, rubbing the big crumbs between her fingers. Julia’s house, even with Lionel in it, is one of Jewelle’s favorite places. At home, she is the Mommy and the Wife. Here, she is the mother of gifted children, an esteemed artist temporarily on leave. At her parents’ house, paralyzed by habit, she drinks milk out of the carton, trying to rub her lipstick off the spout afterward, borrows her mother’s expensive mascara and then takes it home after pretending to help her mother search all three bathrooms before they leave. She eats too much and too fast, half of it standing up and the rest with great reluctance, as if there were a gun pointed at her three times a day. In Julia’s house there’s no trouble about food or mealtimes; Jewelle eats what she wants, and the children eat bananas and Cheerios and grilled cheese sandwiches served up without even an arching of an eyebrow. Julia is happy to have her daughter-in-law cook interesting dishes and willing to handle the basics when the children are hungry and not one adult is intrigued by the idea of cooking.

Buster will not hear of anything but the corn bread — and — bacon stuffing Grammy Ruth used to make, and Jewelle, who would eat bacon every day if she could, makes six pounds of it and leaves a dark, crisp pile on the counter, for snacking. Julia seems to claim nothing on Thanksgiving but the table setting. She’s not fussy — she prides herself on her lack of fuss — but Julia is particular about her table, and it is not Jewelle or Buster who is called on to pick up the centerpiece in town, but Lionel, who has had his license suspended at least two times that Jewelle knows of. Jewelle packs the stuffing into Tupperware and leaves a long note for Julia so that her mother-in-law will not think that she has abdicated on the sweet potatoes or the creamed spinach.

In bed, spooning Buster, Jewelle runs her hand down his warm back. Sweetness, she thinks, and kisses him between the shoulders. Buster throws one big arm behind him and pulls her close. Lucky Jewelle, lucky Buster. If Jewelle had looked out the window, she would have seen Lionel and Julia by the tire swing, talking the way they have since they resumed talking, casual and ironic, and beneath that very, very careful.

Lionel cradles the bottle of Glenlivet.

“You drink a lot these days,” Julia says in the neutral voice she began cultivating twenty years ago, when it became clear that Lionel would never come back from Paris, would improve his French, graduate from L’Institut de Droit Comparé, and make his grown-up life anywhere but near her.

Lionel smiles. “It’s not your fault. Blame the genes, Ma. Junkie mother, alcoholic dad. You did your best.”

“It doesn’t interfere with your work?” It’s not clear even to Julia what she wants: Lionel unemployed and cadging loans from her, or drinking discreetly, so good at what he does that no one cares what happens after office hours.

“I am so good at my job. I am probably the best fucking maritime lawyer in France. If you kept up with French news, you’d see me in the papers sometimes. Good and good-looking. And modest.”

“I know you must be very good at your work. You can be proud of what you do. Pop would have been very proud of you.”

Lionel takes a quick swallow and offers the bottle to Julia, and if it were not so clear to her that he is mocking himself more than her, that he wishes to spare her the trouble of worrying by showing just how bad it already is, she would knock the bottle out of his hand.

Lionel says, “I know. And you? What are you doing lately that you take pride in?”

Julia answers as if it’s a pleasant question, the kind of fond interest one hopes one’s children will show.

“I finished another book of essays, the piano in jazz. It’s all right. It’ll probably sell dozens, like the last one. You make sure to buy a few. I’m still gardening, not that you can tell this time of year.”

“Buster says you’re seeing someone.”

“You have to watch out for Buster.” Julia turns away. “Well, ‘seeing.’ It’s Peter, my neighbor down the road. We like each other. His wife died three years ago.”

“No real obstacles, then.”

“Nope.”

“How old is he? White or black?”

“He’s a little older than me. White. You’ll meet him tomorrow. I didn’t want him to be alone. His daughter’s in Baltimore this year with her husband’s family.”

“That’s nice of you. Your first all-family Thanksgiving in twenty years — might as well have a few strangers to grease the wheels.”

“It is nice, and he’s only one person, and he is not a stranger to me or to Buster and Jewelle,” Julia says, and walks into the house, thinking that it’s too late in her personal day for talking to Lionel, that if she were driving she would have pulled off the road half an hour ago.

Julia starts cooking at six A.M. Early Thanksgiving morning is the only time she will have to herself. The rest of the day will be a joy, most likely, and so tiring that when Buster and Jewelle leave on Friday, right after Corinne is wrapped up in her car seat and Jordan squirms around for one last good-bye and their new car crunches down the gravel driveway, Julia will lie down with a cup of tea and not get up until the next day, when she will say good-bye to Lionel and Ari and lie down again. She reads Jewelle’s detailed note and thinks, Poor Jewelle must be thirty-one — it’s probably time for her to have Thanksgiving in her own house. Julia had to wrestle the holiday out of her own mother’s hands; even as the woman lay dying she whispered directions for gravy and pumpkin pie, creating a chain of panicked, resentful command from bedroom to kitchen, with her daughter and two sisters slicing and basting to beat back the inevitable. Julia managed to celebrate one whole independent Thanksgiving, with four other newly hatched adults, only to marry Lionel senior the next summer and find the holiday permanently ensconced, like a small museum’s only Rodin, at her new mother-in-law’s house. Julia can sit now in her own kitchen, sixty years old with a dish towel in her hand, and hear Ruth Sampson saying to her, “My son is not cut from the same cloth as other people. You treat him right.”

After this last, unexpected hurrah, Julia will let go of Thanksgiving altogether. She’ll arrive at Jewelle’s house, or Jewelle’s mother’s house, at just the right time, and entertain the children, and bring her own excellent lemon meringue pies and extravagant flowers to match their tablecloths. If things go well, maybe she’ll bring Peter, too. As Julia pictures Peter entering Buster’s front hall by her side, the two of them with bags of presents and a box of butter tarts, she cuts a wide white scoop through the end of her forefinger. Blood flows so fast it pools on the cutting board and drips onto the counter before she has even realized what the pain is.

“Ma.” Lionel is behind her with paper towels. He packs her finger until it’s the size of a dinner roll and holds it up over her head. “You stay like that. Sit. And keep your hand up.”

“You’re up early. The Band-Aids are in my bath room.” Her fingertip is throbbing like a heart, and Julia keeps it aloft. It’s been a long time since anyone has told her to do anything.

Her bathrobe always lies at the foot of the bed. There is always a pale-blue quilt, and both nightstands are covered with books and magazines and empty tea cups. The room smells like her. Lionel takes the Band-Aids from under the sink: styling mousse, Neosporin ointment (which he also takes), aloe-vera gel, Northern Lights shampoo for silver hair, two bottles of Pepto-Bismol, a jar of vitamin C, zinc lozenges, and a small plastic box of silver bobby pins.

When he comes down, Julia is holding her finger up, still pointing to God, in the most compliant, sweetly mocking way.

“I hear and obey,” she says.

“That’ll be the fucking day.”

Lionel slathers the antibiotic ointment over her finger, holding the flap of skin down, and wraps two Band-Aids around it. It must hurt like holy hell by now, but she doesn’t say so. With her good hand, Julia pats his knee.

“I was going to make coffee,” she says, “but I think you’ll have to.” And even after Jewelle and Buster get up for the kids’ breakfast and exclaim over the finger and Jewelle prepares to run the show, Lionel stays by Julia, changing the red bandages every few hours, mocking her every move, helping her with each dish and glass as if he were some fairy-tale combination of servant and prince.

At one o’clock, after Peter has called to say that he is too sick to come and everyone in the kitchen hears him coughing over the phone, they all go upstairs to change. They are not a dress-up family (another thing Jewelle likes, although she can hear her mother’s voice suggesting that if one so disdains the holiday’s traditions, why celebrate it at all), but the children are in such splendid once-a-year finery that it seems ungracious not to make an effort. Corinne wears a bronze organdy dress tied with a bronze satin sash, and ivory anklets and ivory Mary Janes. Julia knows this is nothing but nonsense and conspicuous consumption, but she loves the look of this little girl, right down to the twin bronze satin roses in her black hair, and she hopes she will remember it when Corinne comes to the dinner table ten years from now with a safety pin in her cheek or a leopard tattooed on her forehead. And Jordan is in his snappy fawn vest and white button-down shirt tucked into his navy-blue pants, and an adorable navy-blue- and-white-striped bow tie. Lionel and Buster are deeply dapper; their father appreciated Italian silks and French cotton, took his boys to Brooks Brothers in good times and Filene’s Basement when necessary, and made buying a handsome tie as much a part of being a man as carrying a rubber or catching a ball, and they have both held on to that. Jewelle has the face and the figure to look good in almost everything, but Julia herself would not have chosen tight black satin pants, a turquoise silk camisole cut low, and a black satin jacket covered with bits of turquoise and silver, an unlikely mix of Santa Fe and disco fever. Julia comes downstairs in her usual holiday gray flannel pants and white silk shirt. She has turned her bathroom mirror, her hairbrushes, and her jewelry box over to Jewelle and Corinne.

“Do you mind Peter’s not coming?” Buster says.

“Not really.”

Lionel looks at her. “You must miss Pop,” he says.

“Of course, honey. I miss him all the time.” This is not entirely true. Julia misses Lionel senior when she hears an alto sax playing anything, even one weak note, and she misses him when she takes out the garbage; she misses him when she sees a couple dancing, and she misses him every time she looks at Buster, who has resembled her for most of his life, with his father apparent only in his curly hair, and now looks almost too much like the man she married.

Buster puts his arm around her waist. “You must miss Peaches, too.” He’d met Peaches only a few times when she was well and charming, and a few more when she was dying, collapsed in his mother’s bed like some great gray beast, all bones and crushed skin, barely able to squeeze her famous voice out through the cords.

Julia would like to say that missing Peaches doesn’t cover it. She misses Peaches as much as she missed her stepson during his fifteen-year absence. She misses Peaches the way you miss good health when you have cancer. She misses her husband — of course she misses him and their twelve years together — but that grief has been softened, sweetened by all the time and life that came after. The wound of Peaches’s death has not healed or closed up yet; at most the edges harden some as the days pass. She opens her mouth now to say nothing at all about her last love; she thinks that even if Lionel is all wrong about what kind of man Peter is, he is fundamentally right. Peter is not worth the effort.

“I do miss Peaches, too, of course.”

Lionel has all of Peaches Figueroa’s albums. On the first one, dark-blond hair waves around a wide bronze face, one smooth lock half covering a round green eye heavily made up. Black velvet wraps low across her breasts, and when Lionel was nineteen it was one of the small pleasures of his life to look at the dark-amber crescent of her aureole, just visible above the velvet rim, and listen to that golden, spilling voice.

“I’m sorry I didn’t meet her.” Lionel would like to ask his mother what it was like to go from a man to a woman, whether it changed Julia somehow (which he believes but cannot explain), and how she could go from his father and Peaches Figueroa, both geniuses of a kind, to Peter down the road, who sounds to Lionel like the most fatiguing, sorry-assed, ready-for-the-nursing home, limp-dick loser.

Julia raises an eyebrow and goes into the kitchen.

The men look at each other.

“We could open the wine,” Lionel says. “You liked her, didn’t you?”

“I really liked her,” Buster says. He does not say, She scared the shit out of Jewelle, but she would have liked you, boy. She liked handsome, and she knew we all have that soft spot for talent, especially musical talent, and that we don’t mind, we have even been known to encourage, a certain amount of accompanying attitude. Peaches had been Buster’s favorite diva.

“Open the wine up. You let those babies breathe. I’ll get everyone down here.”

“It might be another half hour for the turkey,” Jewelle says. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry, honey.” Buster eats one of Corinne’s peanut-butter-stuffed celery sticks.

“Charades?” Julia says, putting out a small bowl of nuts and a larger one of black and green olives. Charades was their great family game, played in airports and hotel lobbies, played with very small gestures while flying to Denmark every summer for the Copenhagen jazz festival, played on Amtrak and in the occasional stretch limo to Newport, and played expertly by Lionel and Buster whenever the occasion has arisen since. Corinne and Jordan don’t know what charades is, but Grandma Julia has already taken them back to the kitchen and distributed two salad bowls, six pencils, and a pile of scrap paper. Corinne will act out The Cat in the Hat, and Jordan will do his favorite song, “Miami.” Corinne practices making the hat shape and stepping into it while Jordan pulls off his bow tie and slides on his knees across the kitchen floor, wild and shiny and fly like Will Smith. They are naturals, Julia thinks, and thinks further that it is a ridiculous thing to be pleased about — who knows what kind of people they will grow up to be? — but she cannot help believing that their mostly good genes and their ability to play charades are as reasonable an assurance of future success as anything else.

No one wants to be teamed with Jewelle. She is smart about many things, talented in a dozen ways, and an excellent mother, and both men think she looks terrific with the low cups of her turquoise lace top ducking in and out of view, but she’s no good at charades. She goes blank after the first syllable and stamps her foot and blinks back tears until her time is up. She never gets the hard ones, and even with the easiest title she guesses blindly without listening to what she’s said. Jewelle is famous for “Exobus” and “Casabroomca.”

I can’t put husband and wife together, Julia thinks, feeling the tug of dinner-party rules she has ignored for twenty years. “Girls against boys, everybody?”

Jewelle claims the couch for the three girls, and Buster and Lionel look at each other. It is one of the things they like best about their mother; she would rather be kind than win. They slap hands. Unless Corinne is very, very good in a way that is not normal for a three-year-old, they will wipe the floor with the girl team.

Jewelle is delighted. Julia is an excellent guesser and a patient performer.

Lionel says, “Rules, everybody.” No one expects the children to do anything except act out their charades and yell out meaningless guesses. The recitation of rules is for Jewelle. “No talking while acting. Not even whispering. No foreign languages—”

“Not even French,” Jewelle says. Lionel is annoying in English; he is obnoxious in French.

“Not even French. No props. No mouthing. Kids, look.” He shows them the signs for book and television and movie and musical, for little words, for “sounds like.”

Jordan says, “Where’s Ari?”

They all look around the room. Jewelle sighs. “Jordy, go get him. He’s probably still in Uncle Lionel’s room. When did you see him last, Lionel?” she says.

Jordan runs up the stairs.

“I didn’t lose him, Jewelle. He’s probably just resting. It was a long trip.”

Ari comes down in crumpled khakis and a brown sweater. Terrible colors for him, Jewelle and Julia think.

In French, Lionel says, “Good boy. You look ready for dinner. Come sit by me and I’ll show you how to play this game.”

Ari sits on the floor in front of his stepfather. He doesn’t expect that the game will be explained to him; it will be in very fast English, it will make them all laugh with one another, and his stepfather, who is already winking at stupid baby Corinne, will go on laughing and joking, in English.

The children perform their charades, and the adults are almost embarrassed to be so pleased. As Julia stands up to do Love’s Labour’s Lost, Jewelle says, “Let me just run into the kitchen.”

Lionel says, “Go ahead, Ma. You’re no worse off with Corinne,” and Buster laughs and looks at the floor. He loves Jewelle, but there is something about this particular disability that seems so harmlessly funny; if she were fat, or a bad dancer, or not very bright, he would not laugh, ever.

As Julia is very slowly helping Corinne guess that it’s three words, Jewelle walks into the living room, struggling with the large turkey still sizzling on the wide silver platter.

“It’s that time,” she says.

Buster says, “I’ll carve,” and Jewelle, who heard him laugh, says, “No, Lionel’s neater — let him do it.”

They never finish the charades game. Corinne and Jordan and Ari collapse on the floor after dinner, socks and shoes scattered, one of Corinne’s bronze roses askew, the other in Ari’s sneaker. Ari and Jordan have dismantled the couch. Jewelle and Buster gather the three of them, wash their faces, drop them into pajamas, and put them to bed. They kiss their beautiful, damp children, who smell of soap and corn bread and lemon meringue, and they kiss Ari, who smells just like his cousins.

Buster says, “Do we have to go back down?”

“Are you okay?” Jewelle rubs his neck.

“Just stuffed. And I’m ready to be with just you.” Buster looks at his watch. “Lionel’s long knives ought to be coming out around now.”

“Do you think we ought to hang around for your mother?”

“To protect her? I know you must be kidding.”

It’s all right with Jewelle if Buster thinks they’ve cleaned up enough; the plates are all in the kitchen, the leftover turkey has been wrapped and refrigerated, the candles have been blown out. It’s not her house, after all.

Lionel washes, Julia dries. They’ve been doing it this way since he was ten, and just as he cannot imagine sleeping on the left side of a bed or wearing shoes without socks, he cannot imagine drying rather than washing. Julia looks more than tired; she looks maimed.

“If your hand’s hurting, just leave the dishes. They’ll dry in the rack.”

Julia doesn’t even answer. She keeps at it until clean, dry plates and silver cover the kitchen table.

“If you leave it until tomorrow, I’ll put it all away,” Lionel says.

Julia thinks that unless he really has become some one she does not know, everyone will have breakfast in the dining room, and afterward, sometime in the late afternoon, when Buster and his family have gone and it’s just Lionel and Ari, when it would be nice to sit down with a glass of wine and watch the sun set, she will be putting away her mother’s silver platter and her mother-in-law’s pink-and-gold crystal bowls, which go with nothing but please the boys.

Lionel and Julia talk about Buster and Jewelle’s marriage, which is better but less interesting than it was, and Buster’s weight problem, and Jewelle’s languishing career as a painter, and Odean Pope’s Saxophone Choir, and Lionel’s becoming counsel for a Greek shipping line.

Lionel sighs over the sink, and Julia puts her hand on his back. “Are you all right? Basically?”

“I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not a kid.” He was about to say that he’s not really a son, any more than he’s really a father, that these step-ties are like long-distance relationships, workable only with people whose commitment and loyalty are much greater than the average. “And you don’t have to keep worrying about … what was. It didn’t ruin me. It’s not like we would ever be lovers now.”

Julia thinks that all that French polish is not worth much if he can’t figure out a nicer way to say that he no longer desires her, that sex between them is unthinkable not because she raised him, taught him to dance, hemmed his pants, and put pimple cream on his back, but because she is too old now for him to see her that way.

“We were never lovers. We had sex,” she says, but this is not what she believes. They were lovers that night as surely as ugly babies are still babies; they were lovers like any other mismatched and blundering pair. “We were heartbroken and we mistook each other for things we were not. Do you really want to have this conversation?”

Lionel wipes down the kitchen counters. “Nope. I have never wanted to have this conversation. I don’t want anything except a little peace and quiet — and a Lexus. I’m easy, Ma.”

Julia looks at him so long he smiles. He is such a handsome man. “You’re easy. And I’m tired. You want to leave it at that?”

Lionel tosses the sponge into the sink. “Absolutely. Take care of your finger. Good night.”

If it would turn him back into the boy he was, she would kiss him good night, even if she cut her lips on that fine, sharp face.

“Okay. See you in the morning. Sleep tight.”

Julia takes a shower. Lionel drinks on in the kitchen, the Scotch back under the sink in case someone walks in on him. Buster and Jewelle sleep spoons-style. Corinne has crawled between them, her wet thumb on her father’s bare hip, her small mouth open against her mother’s shoulder. Jordan sleeps as he always does, wrestling in his dreams whatever he has failed to soothe and calm all day. His pillow is on the floor, and the sheets twist around his waist.

Julia reads until three A.M. Most nights she falls asleep with her arms around her pillow, remembering Peaches’s creamy breasts cupped in her hands or feeling Peaches’s soft stomach pressed against her, but tonight, spread out in her pajama top and panties, she can hardly remember that she ever shared a bed.

Ari is snuffling in the doorway.

“Come here, honey. Viens ici, chéri.” It is easier to be kind to him in French, somehow. Ari wears one of Buster’s old terry-cloth robes, the hem trailing a good foot behind him. He has folded the sleeves back so many times they form huge baroque cuffs around his wrists.

“I do not sleep.”

“That’s understandable. Je comprends.” Julia pats the empty side of the bed, and Ari sits down. His doleful, cross face is handsome in profile, the bedside light limning his Roman nose and straight black brows.

“Jordan hate me. You all hate me.”

“We don’t hate you, honey. Non, ce n’est pas vrai. Nous t’aimons.” Julia hopes that she is saying what she means. “It’s just hard. We all have to get used to each other. Il faut que nous …” If she ever had the French vocabulary to discuss the vicissitudes of divorce and future happiness and loving new people, she doesn’t anymore. She puts her hand on Ari’s flat curls. “Il faut que nous fassions ta connaissance.”

She hears him laugh for the first time. “That is ‘how do you do.’ Not what we say en famille.”

Laughing is an improvement, and Julia keeps on with her French — perhaps feeling superior will do him more good than obvious kindness — and tries to tell Ari about the day she has planned for them tomorrow, with a trip to the playground and a trip to the hardware store so Lionel can fix the kitchen steps.

Ari laughs again and yawns. “I am tired,” he says, and lies down, putting his head on one of Julia’s lace pillows. “Dors bien,” the little boy says.

“All right. You, too. You dors bien.”

Julia pulls the blankets up over Ari.

“At night my mother sing,” he says.

The only French song Julia knows is “La Marseillaise.” She sings the folk songs and hymns she sang to the boys, and by the time she has failed to hit that impossible note in “Amazing Grace,” Ari’s breathing is already moist and deep. Julia gets under the covers as Ari rolls over, his damp forehead and elbows and knees pressing into her side. She counts the books on her shelves, then sheep, then turns out the bedside lamp and counts every lover she ever had and everything she can remember about them, from the raven-shaped birthmark on the Harvard boy’s shoulder to the unexpected dark brown of Peter’s eyes, leaving out Peaches and Lionel senior, who are on their own, quite different list. She remembers the birthday parties she gave for Lionel and Buster, including the famous Cookie Monster cake that turned her hands blue for three days, and the eighth-grade soccer party that ended with Lionel and another boy needing stitches. Already six feet tall, he sat in her lap, arms and legs flowing over her, while his father held his head for the doctor.

Ari sighs and shifts, holding tight to Julia’s pajama top, her lapel twisted in his hands like rope. She feels the wide shape of his five knuckles on her chest, bone pressing flesh against bone, and she is not sorry at all to be old and awake so late at night.