"I can see it in Art," she said, turning to run a slender finger along the ridge over my left eye, and I thought: Oh, no. "He has Jennifer Jones eyebrows."
"And you," said my father, mocking and flirtatious, "have the eyebrows and the nose of the young Joan Crawford. In, say, Grand Hotel."
"That's my ninth-favorite movie in the whole world," said Phlox.
"She ranks everything," I said. "She has it all figured out."
"I can see that," said my father, and from his tone one knew that he thought her either delightful or the most frivolous young woman he had ever met. Then he glared at me again, for one instant.
Over the main course he explained the Diaspora and carbon I4 dating (which Phlox just as easily could have explained to him) and gave a short history of Swiss banking. Cannoli were accompanied by coffee and an embarrassing account of my first visit, as a small child, to the ocean, which I had mistaken for a vast expanse of fruit juice. My father was wonderful. We laughed and laughed. Everything was exactly as it had not been when I first presented Claire. Phlox kept administering gentle squeezes of delight to my thigh, under the table.
At last she rose and excused herself, with a downward look of modesty which seemed to suggest that we shouldn't hesitate to discuss her while she was away. And although I was in terrible doubt about my father's feelings just then, and although I knew better than to expect him, even under the best circumstances, to comment on her before he'd passed a night of careful and jovian consideration, her blush, her murmured farewell-for-now, her lowered eyelids, all seemed so confident that nothing ill would be said about her in her absence that I risked it.
"Isn't she nice?" I said.
"Mm." My father stared at me, his big eyebrows knotted over the pink top of his nose, and I saw the muscles gathering along his jaw. I began to recoil even before he spoke.
"What's wrong with you? I don't understand you." He pitched his voice high and spoke quickly, but not very loud. I knew that it wasn't Phlox who had upset him. My father was hurt, and extremely hurt, or this, too, would have waited until the next day.
"I'm sorry, Dad."
"Don't you remember your mother? You were almost thirteen years old when she passed away." He wiped his fingers angrily on his napkin and threw it down.
"Of course I remember her, Dad, Of course I do. Dad, can we please not talk about this now? I don't care if you make me cry again, but I'd rather not do it in front of Phlox."
"Don't you tell her anything about your mother? Obviously she must have asked you; she practically interviewed me." I hoped this wasn't some kind of insult. "What did you say when she asked you all those things she just asked me?"
"I-" My chin shook. I watched the red light of the restaurant wink across my water glass. "I don't know. I told her… I didn't feel like… going into it. She understood. And… you and I never… talk about it, do we? So why… Tomorrow, Dad, please."
I felt as though I were attempting to hold down all the blind pale things that lived in the black waters of my gut, and that if he asked me one more plaintive question in that wounded tone of voice it would all be over. I studied as deeply as I could the drops of condensation on the glittering sides of my glass. Then I heard feet along the thick carpet behind me, and my father made an odd sound, a short cluck. I let go my breath and turned to face Phlox and comfort. Instead there was a fat stomach.
"Art!" said Uncle Lenny Stern. "Joe! Art and Joe, father and son, man to man, hey? Hee hee. Man to man!"
"Uncle Lenny," I said, managing to remember to take his hand, which was sweaty as ever. It didn't occur to me that perhaps I was still expected to kiss his scratchy cheek. He wasn't really my uncle, after all. "I must be dreaming."
He laughed again; however, I was, for a moment, half-serious. I thought I must be dreaming a horrible transformation dream in which my blue-and-white-flowered Phlox had become a short, giggling, egg-shaped Jewish gangster. What my father had said to me, indeed, was what he often said in my dreams. But then, behind Lenny, I saw a section of Elaine Stern-her shoulder, I thought-and, behind her, part of Phlox, who stood, eyebrows raised, mouth open, watching as this tremendous woman and her attendant miasma of White Shoulders engulfed me. Aunt Elaine's kisses always hurt one's face; I used to call her the Pincher.
"Actually," said my father, "it isn't quite man to man. Introduce your friend, Art."
He pointed to Phlox, and there was a general whirling around.
"Uncle Lenny Stern, Aunt Elaine, this is Miss Phlox Lombardi. Phlox."
"Oh, isn't she gorgeous!" said Aunt Elaine. She crushed the back of my neck in her fingers. "And how do you like this handsome young man, eh? A prince!" She shook my head like a pompon.
"They aren't really my uncle and aunt," I said.
"I like him very well," said Phlox, and she held out a limp, pretty hand to one of the most notorious lieutenants in Pittsburgh organized crime. We made space for them at our table, which was wrecked, strewn with napkins and spots of red sauce, and two menus were brought, and more coffee. I leaned over to Phlox and whispered that we weren't going to be free for a while yet.
"That's all right," she said. "They're fun."
"Please," I said. I sat back and watched my Uncle Lenny; I hadn't seen him for a long time. He drew my father into a discussion of mutual funds and waved his arms around. His skin was Florida brown; as he got older he spent less and less time in the city of his birth, and the FBI listened in on more and more long-distance calls from West Palm Beach. I knew I was not the only one in the restaurant who watched him. I turned around and saw a couple of dark-haired men at a far table, probably brothers; they nodded to me, and without even thinking I sought out the bulges under their jackets, an ancient reflex of mine, and in the next moment I underwent the equally ancient fantasy of running around to the other side of the table to strangle Lenny Stern. I didn't want to kill him, really. It was a just a ten-year-old's desire to see a little shooting.
Elaine asked Phlox a bunch of questions about her "people," then recited an impressive list of Pittsburgh Italians with whom she was "like that," laying one finger over the other. It developed that Phlox's maternal grandmother was the aunt of a woman whose home and card table Elaine had graced with her giant presence many times in the I950s. At this revelation, my feelings, interrupted at a crisis moment by the new arrivals and held in dazed suspense for the past ten minutes, began to wriggle and stretch and prickle, like frozen toes under a stream of warm water. They were very mixed. I found it strangely pleasing that, beyond all the new and crucial connections between me and Phlox, there could also be this old and silly connection of families; I felt the lover's shocked but unsurprised love of anything that appears to suggest the whimsical engines of destiny.
And yet this link also confirmed that Phlox was now hopelessly mixed up with my family. She'd met not only my father, which I hadn't wanted, but Lenny Stern, and if she just turned around she would also see Them, the two ugly men with guns, who were the lion and the unicorn of my family's coat of arms. I gripped the edge of the table. All of the people I spent time with and loved, rather than helping to take me out of the world into which I'd been born, were being pulled into it: Phlox, the cousin of some dead Mafia wife.was eating a dinner paid for by the Washington Family; the fat, powerful man slapping my father's sleeve and eyeing her across the table was, though distantly, Cleveland's boss; and now-I remembered with alarm- Cleveland, too, was threatening to come into contact with my father. I might have doubted that he would do it, had he not been Cleveland. The more I thought on these things, the more I felt the heavy food sliding slowly and murderously, like pack ice, through my stomach. There are bead people, who suffer from sudden migraines, and there are stomach people, like me.