Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [53]
“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