Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [58]
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