Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [36]
It wouldn’t work, of course. I went into the kitchen and started brewing some strong coffee.
I knew Lopez had told his parents he was interested in someone, but I didn’t know he had told them my name. I wondered if they had dragged the information out of him during his father’s birthday weekend, or if he had told them voluntarily at some point. I knew he was close to his family. He might roll his eyes when his mom phoned, but he spoke with her often, and they seemed to have a very open, frank relationship and lots to talk about. And his affection for his father was obvious when he spoke about him. He was also clearly fond of his brothers.
By contrast, I only talked to my parents in Wisconsin about once a month, and I talked to Ruth, my married sister in Chicago, much less than that. There was no hostility between me and my family, we just didn’t have that much to say to each other. None of them had ever disapproved of my becoming an actress and moving to New York, but they didn’t understand it, and I knew they thought of it as a madcap phase I’d recover from when I matured.
One of the many things I liked about Lopez was that he wasn’t an actor. (I like working with actors, but dating them is an exercise in masochism.) But something else I really liked about him was that he seemed to understand that acting was my vocation, it was who I was and always would be. In the same way that I could see that being a cop was more than just a job to him—it was who he was.
I frowned as I thought about Max’s doppelgänger theory and wondered how much to say to Lopez about last night.
“No, I’m not going to stop seeing her.” I heard his raised voice in the bedroom as he got exasperated with his mother. “Oh, really? Well, then maybe you shouldn’t have brought me up on all those stories about how you defied the family to date Pop!” After a moment, he said, “I don’t see how it’s different . . . Yeah? And what makes you so sure I’m not going to marry her and raise three ungrateful sons who won’t give me grandchildren?”
“Oh, I was so right not to attend his father’s birthday party,” I muttered in the kitchen.
I gathered from Lopez that the desire for grandchildren had dominated his parents’ agenda lately. His two brothers had each come up with creative ways of getting their folks off their backs. The eldest had told his parents he was gay, and the middle brother announced he was becoming a priest. They were both lying, but it took the subject of marriage off the table for a while.
And Lopez, the youngest, had told his parents he was interested in an unstable Jewish woman with unsavory friends (i.e. Max).
I didn’t doubt that Lopez’s attraction to me was sincere. He was a dedicated cop and it was clear that dating me wasn’t good for his career at the moment, so I didn’t think that being in my apartment today was a casual choice for him. But I knew it was nonetheless convenient for him that he was seeing a woman whom his mother wouldn’t want him to marry. And just in case she decided she could cope with a daughter-in-law who wasn’t Catholic, he’d been holding back the shocking news that I was an actress. He was saving that tidbit for an “emergency,” he’d told me.
Well, it looked like the cat was out of the bag now. According to today’s tabloids, I was a chorus girl with ties to the Mafia. (And since there was a sense in which this was perfectly true, I felt depressed again.) So now Lopez was getting an earful in my bedroom about his taste in women.
“All right, enough,” I heard him say wearily to his mother. “Give it a rest, would you? Look, I have to go . . . Because I have things to do . . . Of course I’m trying to get you off the phone. Is it going to work?”
“Last year, I played Kate in The Taming of the Shrew in summer stock,” I grumbled to myself. “But do the tabloids mention that? Nooooo.”
The scent of fresh-brewed coffee was filling the apartment when Lopez finally came out of the bedroom, looking sheepish.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“I’m just glad it wasn’t my mother