THE STUDIO WAS NOT meant for making love. It was meant for concentration, hunched over a drafting table, the sofa there only to sit a spell until inspiration struck again. Instead, we were bent over the drafting table, and one look at the pencil cup felt like the lead had punctured my heart. I couldn't. This was Joel's sacred place, his refuge. And what was I doing? Seeking refuge in the arms of another man, a passionate man covering me with kisses, warming me in his embrace, whispering, “ Ti desidero, Mona Lisa. ” I want you.
And I wanted him, too. God, I wanted him. If I let go, let myself feel the moment, calmed the chatter in my brain that said it wasn't the right time or the right man, then I wanted da Vinci as much as I had wanted any man.
Two glasses of Pinot had helped. My chakras could not be relaxed on their own, mind you. Two glasses and I felt more dream-state than reality. And as a fantasy this, da Vinci's slow, measured concentration on my body, was divine. I knew if I let us, we could create our own masterpiece-like Gustav Klimpt's The Kiss, mind, bodies, and souls entwined.
The shower had just been a warm-up. Water had acted as a kind of buffer between us. Now we were nearly naked, nothing between us but silky bra and panties Joel had referred to as “funderwear,” strictly reserved for the one or two nights a week we (okay, I) had the energy to make love. To think, before da Vinci had arrived in my classroom, I almost threw my funderwear out. Grievers have no use for funderwear.
If da Vinci represented all Italian men, then may I say Italians make great lovers? He was slow when he needed to be slow and assertive when he wanted to make me gasp; he was soft and firm and dizzying and delicious and always, always sexy.
Within minutes, I forgot all about the pencil holder and the small sofa and the tiny studio and the house in Austin and the great state of Texas and the United States and Italy and the galaxy at large, because I was taken to that place closest to Heaven.
Bliss.
Have you ever had a guilty-pleasure hangover? I have. The next morning, after the amazing (God, did I dream it?) lovemaking in the studio, I woke up and felt different. A little more alive. A little peppy, a little less like the Ramona I had gotten used to. A little like the old, fun Ramona of yesteryear.
I breathed in deeply as Cynthia had taught, pushing my breath from my nose all the way down to my toes and back again, filling up every part of me with the breath of life. The air was ripe with sunshine. Florida sunshine on a crisp October morning in Austin. Go figure.
With unusual lightness, I got up and stretched, doing two of the yoga poses that didn't threaten to throw my back out. I couldn't be too exuberant yet, but I felt like I could even do a handstand if I tried. I had used muscles the night before I hadn't used in awhile. I started giggling, a good girlish giggle long overdue. One probably shouldn't giggle while in the downward-facing dog, but my body felt like it wasn't entirely my own. I had shared it with someone else and it felt like a part of me was still with him.
I rolled my shoulders back. The “him” might like bacon and eggs and pancakes. He could join our Sunday brunch that had been a tradition for the boys and me. I wrapped my fuzzy terry robe around me and headed out into my new life. I walked down the hallway, turned the corner and stopped dead in my tracks.
Above my head was a dangling three-foot spider. Webs hung from the chandeliers. A large pumpkin stared up at me with its gap-toothed grin from under the entry hall table. I began to panic-everything was just as it had been that last Halloween Joel had decorated. What was this? A sign from above? Was Joel angry at me for last night? Happy? No way the boys could've done it. They couldn't even reach the heavy box in the top of the closet.
Just as I felt the room spinning around me, I heard their voices and the smell of bacon wafting through the house.
“Mommy!”
“Mother!”
“Mona Lisa!”
When I came to, those three faces stared down at me. How had I not believed in magic, in the power of signs delivered in something other than words? “Is it real?”
“Is what real?” Bradley asked.
“Can you see it? The spider. Is the spider real?”
William's eyes grew large. “No, mom. The spider's not real. I can't believe you thought it was real.”
I sat up and did a 360 of the room. Yep. The decorations were all still there. Whoever did this must've taken hours. “So you're telling me that none of you can see what I see? The house is full of Halloween.”
“Crazy holiday,” da Vinci said. “But boys say lots of candy, so I trick or treat with them.”
“Mom, the house is full of Halloween,” William said.
“It's like the good old days,” Bradley said.
“I can't believe your father did this,” I said, though I wasn't sure it was out loud until I saw the expressions on my son's faces.
William's lids filled with tears. “Mommy, Daddy didn't do this.”
“ We did. As a surprise,” Bradley said.
I looked from one boy to the next, noticing how much they'd changed this year, their faces less babylike, their baby teeth being replaced by the larger ones that seemed much too big for their mouths. Even their voices were losing the cuteness they had when Joel was alive. Could he hear them? Could he hear the change like I could? How ever were they big enough to pull off decorating just as their father had done?
“I helped,” da Vinci said. “Da Vinci is tall.”
“Well, were you surprised, Mom? Did we do a good job?” Bradley asked.
I couldn't speak-the chakra stopped up again, and I patted and kissed them atop the heads, except for da Vinci, whom I only looked at with dismay, wondering if he knew what he'd done. In one fell swoop, he had replaced Joel in not one, but two ways. I excused myself to go cry in the shower, my flow completely and utterly gone.
When I joined my clan at the table, they were busy eating our traditional breakfast, and I tried to act normal, as if the decorations hadn't bothered me or that da Vinci had not only taken Joel's job, but mine, too. I was the short-order cook around here.
I filled my plate with bacon and eggs, poured coffee and sat down at the table, prepared to eat in silence, thinking how unfair it was that I was so close to becoming a Normal only to have the Griever take over my body again.
I chewed my bacon, vowing not to give da Vinci credit for making it crispier than my own or how much I liked the Tabasco sauce in the scrambled eggs, when Bradley looked at me with a straight face and asked, “Mom, did you and da Vinci have sex last night?”
I could not tell a lie. Which is why even when it came to the Tooth Fairy and leprechauns and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, I'd always been rather vague about their existence. “What do you think?” I would ask my boys, which would cause them to launch into elaborate fairy tales about the tiny Tooth Fairy kingdom where all the fairies bring the children's teeth to polish and shine and then build themselves pearly mansions, or how Santa probably contracts with NASA, or at the very least, FedEx, to help deliver gifts quickly all over the world.
So when they asked me about sex, and in particular sex with da Vinci, which unlike those fairy tales, had actually happened, I couldn't lie. Instead, I said, “What happens between me and da Vinci is our own personal business. We like each other very much.”
I'm not sure if the boys took that as a yes, but it did seemed to satisfy their curiosity for the time being. They stared at each other, stifled a giggle, then earnestly ate their pancakes.
Of course I'd made a huge mistake. As fabulous as the night before had been, how I'd felt the stirring of my soul within me as I allowed passion to be unleashed once again, I knew as a mother I'd made a bad choice. The boys liked da Vinci, had welcomed him into our home, at our table, breaking bread together, laughing and going on as if we were gelling as a family. I couldn't believe I'd allowed it to happen-it was all so soon, wasn't it? How one day you can feel like you're living in a dark cave and the next it's filled with light and you can't believe you've managed to move that boulder all by yourself, yet the world outside of it is so bright and scary. I shuddered. I had to be careful.
“I think it's marvelous,” Barbara said six hours later as she viewed my son's Halloween displays, “If it makes them happy.” I wondered if she would say the same about me and da Vinci, but I had no intention of telling her anything was going on and I had made the boys' promise not to talk about us, either. Suddenly I was sweating bullets over a simple family meal. I wondered if my nerves had to do with something else, too.
“I think they're in love,” Barbara said, referring to Rachel and Cortland, who were a good three minutes late according to my father's watch. “Wouldn't that be lovely to have a spring wedding? Is it too soon? Oh, certainly not. It's not like a second wedding would be an elaborate affair. Now that Rachel's famous, do you think they'll cover their wedding in the society section? I bet Austin Living will want a cover story! Do you think the governor will come?”
I let my mom go on and on about her own fantasy while I prepped the tenderloin for the oven. Dad and da Vinci were in the backyard tossing the football with Bradley while William stayed on the patio playing Sudoku. I glanced at them every few minutes to make sure nothing mischievous was going on. (As if I could tell if they were talking about sex.)
When Cortland and Rachel arrived (now fourteen minutes late), my mother went on as if she hadn't seen them in ages. It might make some people feel good to be greeted like those at the airport with the signs and the tears and high-pitched sentiments, but it just made me feel sad. Grievers need more than a cheerleading section to feel good about reunions when you know the one person you truly wish to be reunited with can never happen.
Cortland surprised me, planting a kiss on my cheek and hugging me tightly.
“Oh,” I said, patting his broad shoulders. “Yes. Good to see you, too. Wow, this is festive, right?”
“Where's the birthday boy?” Rachel said, practically doing cartwheels on her way to reach Dad.
Zoe shook her head and shrugged. “He's not a boy, he's a man,” she pointed out. “But whatever.”
I winked at Zoe and she helped me whip the mashed potatoes in the kitchen. She only got a home-cooked meal when she visited me or her grandma, so helping in the kitchen was her favorite thing. And to think, she didn't have to wear makeup or sequins to get the attention she so craved.
As we were seated around the dining room table set for nine (squishing in a chair for Zoe), I could feel the palpable presence of Joel in the room. I'm not sure if it's because we were surrounded by the Halloween decorations he had so carefully hung each year or because I simply couldn't get him off of my mind.
Both Cortland and da Vinci pulled my chair out for me, one on each side, and da Vinci stiffened as though only he had the right to do so for his lady. As was ritual, Noble began the prayer and we all followed suit. Afterward, forks clanked and my mother began to take a sip of her wine, but holding it in the air, said, “I'm so glad you two are friends.”
Da Vinci nodded, lifting his wine glass to propose a toast. “To friends and lovers,” he said.
And the rest of us awkwardly joined in while my family members eyeballed me. I would shrug it off as an Italian thing. They wouldn't know the difference.
“To friends and lovers,” Cortland said, the one among them who might know the difference.
Zoe piped up, “To friends and lovers.”
My boys glanced over and I gave a quick shake, a silent signal for them to stay out of the toast.
My father added, “Hear, hear,” and we clinked glasses and began an otherwise normal meal except for the question mark hanging above us like a chandelier: “Who exactly among us are friends, and who are lovers?”
“No problem,” Rachel said as she stuffed my family videos into her oversized bag after dinner with the promise she would have her editing team transfer the outdated formats onto DVDs, as well as host them on a server.
“I'll give you the photo discs as soon as I print them out,” I told her, hesitant to hand over so many pieces of my and Joel's life together at once. After all, Rachel wasn't known for her organizational skills, and she had lost too many of my things over the years to keep track.
“Ooh, I know!” Rachel said, snapping her fingers together. Her bright ideas always arrived with a thunderclap. “Why don't you, me, and Mom have a scrapbooking party?”
I shrugged, internally cringing at the thought of a) spending the day cutting out construction paper with my sister who would be filling her book with more pageant pictures while I laid out my soul with the last pictures of Joel, and b) ever finding the time to do something so crafty and creative.
“You know you can do scrapbooks online now,” Cortland said, and Rachel beamed at him as if he were a brilliant anesthesiologist, which I'm sure he was.
“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.
“Well, since you already have your digital photos on your computer, you can go to a web site where they have design templates, and you just drag and drop your photos onto the pages and order it and they'll ship it to you.”
“Are you serious?” Rachel gasped. “And here I've been spending all that money on glitter and fancy stickers for Zoe's books.”
“I'm not very technically inclined,” I told him, embarrassed to admit I barely knew how to use e-mail, let alone do something important on the web.
“If you have time, I could show you now.”
Rachel shrugged. “Oh, she has oodles of time. I'm going to go out back and talk to the birthday boy. When you two are done, I'll bring out the cake. Think Daddy will mind I had the baker put sixty-nine candles on the cake?”
“Better than the numeral kind,” I said, recalling one of my mother's most embarrassing moments; it was when Rachel was in junior high and I was in sixth grade and Rachel asked Mom and Dad at the dinner table what it meant to “69” someone. Besides choking on her chicken, Mother did nothing to satisfy Rachel's curiosity, so Rachel did what most junior high girls would do and went to her girlfriends, who had asked older siblings what it meant.
“God, Mom's such a prude,” Rachel said. “And speaking of, I want to hear more about the whole ‘friends and lovers‘ thing when we're not in mixed company.”
Cortland raised a brow, but before he could excuse himself, she turned on her heels, leaving us in the kitchen alone, her last statement still hanging in the air, but I was unwilling to respond to it.
“It's really none of my business,” Cortland said, and I swatted the air where she'd left it.
“Nor hers,” I added, and we went into Joel's office, which I couldn't stop referring to as Joel's office, probably because I only used it when trying and failing to e-mail his ex-girlfriend. He hadn't spent much time there, as he preferred his garage studio with the drafting table.
I pulled up the pictures, willing myself not to cry, then let Cortland pull up the web site memorybook.com, where I selected a simple design with photo edges and creamy backgrounds.
“Nice choice,” Cortland said. “Now you just have to decide what cover shot you want to use.”
I sifted through hundreds of photos, amazed that I didn't mind Cortland sharing the moment, but I couldn't decide which was cover-worthy because every one featuring Joel felt cover-worthy to me, even the ones where he had devil-red eyes or where his head had been lopped off due to a bad camera operator (me).
“Here, we can fix those red eyes,” Cortland said, taking over the mouse, blowing up Joel's picture until it filled the frame to life-size. How had I forgotten about that tiny mole on his left cheek or the way his five o'clock shadow grew in faster on his chin than the rest of his face or how the corner of his eyelids rose when he smiled?
And his eyes! Flecked with gold and brown and green, and even the blue of the ocean was in there. When Cortland removed the red eye, Joel looked nearly perfect, lopsided grin and all. I had to look away. I swallowed hard, then realized with surprise that what I felt right then was not grief, but love. For the first time when I viewed Joel's picture, I didn't feel sad at all, but simply happy to see him. Greetings-in-an-airport sort of happy.
“You okay?” Cortland asked, putting his arm lightly around my shoulder, and I nodded.
“I want the picture of the four of us at the beach in Galveston for the cover,” I said. “Then I'll just go from there in chronological order. They all have to go in. This might take me weeks.”
“Well, in that case,” Cortland said, pressing a button that zipped all the photos, the green bar steadily beeping across the screen.
“What did you just do?” I said, starting to panic that he'd messed up my album.
Then the screen blinked: Done. Your Griffen Family Album is complete and ready for viewing.
I flipped through the pages, one click at a time, my heart nearly lifting me right out of my seat, and when I was finished, I clicked “Order” for three hardback books, one for each of us. “The boys will love it,” I said, beginning to tear up.
Cortland rubbed the back of my neck with his hand, and when I looked up at him, tears in my eyes, I saw that he had tears in his eyes, too. Whatever I was feeling I had passed along to him, but I also saw something else, something that a woman never wants to see in the eyes of her sister's boyfriend, and yet I liked it all the same.