To Fell the Linden Tree

Chapter 8 – To Fell the Linden Tree

He never officially moved in. It happened gradually, and then he was there all the time. At first Delilah was happy just to have a man around, someone who could talk in full sentences, diminish the loneliness, and gratify her sexually whenever it pleased her. She was blinded by Giambone’s blood proximity to stardom. He even cooked, preparing a meal for her each night when she returned home, and plying her with a couple of vodkas to loosen the knots in her shoulders. His soft hands felt good after the physical rigor of her workday and commuting in L.A. traffic. When they first met he told her he was between jobs. He expected a call shortly from Arthur, his buddy at Universal, a carpentry foreman who used Giambone’s sweat from time to time building sets on the back lots.

She wasn’t too concerned. Giambone came with a pedigree. She might have preferred it if he were a lawyer, a doctor, an entrepreneur, an actor with steady work. He had little money, but he appeared sane, healthy and considerate. And being the brother of angry rock legend Jack Giambone was like having a huge insurance policy, one she was counting on if times got mean. With a successful brother like that, there was no worry.

Giambone wanted to succeed, too. Just not the way Jack had. He wanted to be recognized by others as having made significant contributions, but he didn’t want to work too hard for them. He wished to be regarded more for his knowledge than his accomplishments. He did what he could to avoid the failure that comes with risk. He ventured as little as possible, engaging life mostly as a passive observer. It was the high road, he thought, with none of the venal trappings or ethical problems of ambition. Without having to act, he was assured of avoiding defeat, the grim acknowledgment that he was a negligible consciousness inhabiting a superfluous body. He preferred a role as a keen spectator of the human folly of getting ahead. 

Giambone had reached the age of 42. He did not want to get ahead. He was happier looking into the sky and watching the moonrise, or observing the way a cat pawed a beetle in the grass. He wished to live peacefully without reminders that he had greater potential. He dreamed of a garden where it was pretty and there were pools of water, and sunshine, and soft grasses to walk upon, and flowers of rich colors and textures, jasmine, honeysuckle and thyme, and long, graceful trees offering cool shade, under which a barbecue sizzled with juicy tender steaks, pink on the inside, and there was plenty of whiskey to wash them down, and voluptuous women, naked and compliant, in whom he lodged a robust erection that rose sprightly on every occasion for sensual indulgence. He wanted to live in a perpetual salon of art and ideas, in which he and friends incapable of deceit might profess to one another recondite verities about the nature of creativity, or the brilliance of Henry Miller, his favorite writer. He wanted to be Henry Miller, living in Paris in the 30’s, smoking cigarettes, living off his friends, eating rich, meaty food in lively bistros, and fucking in capacious bordellos filled with feisty, good looking women spilling out from insular, wall-papered warrens, pungent and over-heated, and, of course, where there was much wine drunk, lots of wine. Giambone sauntered through wistful daydreams, longing for a bohemian paradise where he had artistic, masculine companionship, friends boisterous and daring, and saucy women admirers whose purpose was to inspire and love the coterie of men surrounding him – he, Giambone – always there at the center, the feted impresario and arbiter of moveable feasts. This was what he ached for, the smoky truths that came from good wine, simple, earthy food and virile conversation, with a solid, wet fuck at the end of the day.

Yet for every one day on which Giambone imagined the possibilities of life as a Left Bank flaneur, there were weeks at a time when it was an effort to muster the will to affect the most simple tasks, days when he languished in the hazy realm of a mind arrested by indecision and self-doubt. He suffered the slightest details with insistent repetition, deliberating the rewards and pitfalls of walking to the corner to buy a loaf of bread. Should he peel an apple or eat it whole? Each action he proposed was accompanied by a new sense of futility. He sat for hours in a chair, drenched in a washed-out warm light that filtered through the drawn blinds. The sun’s heat lulled him into a drowsy inertia, until the Santa Ana winds tugged the branches of the holly tree standing desolate on the parched front lawn. The shadows of the tree’s sharp leaves slashed at his eyes until the reverie that enchanted him fell away like brittle wafers of rust from a ship’s creaking hull.

His inertia didn’t compromise his imagination. He could picture himself removing his bathrobe and reaching in the dresser drawer for a pair of socks, or the bedroom closet for a pair of slacks. But the idea soon kicked up a tiny squall of disappointment and regret when he recalled that his pants were old, or that he hadn’t bought any new clothes in years. His wardrobe was like an emblem of his failure. To dress himself and walk out the door into a public street was like a mournful descent. Plotting his course fatigued him. He was wearied by the prospect of being seen by someone who might judge his condition and his steady progress away from success.

To be without ambitions should have made things easier, but Giambone could never relax. There was always in him a germ of discomfort knowing that he was not and would not amount to much in the world. He could never entirely accept his fecklessness, accommodate himself or submit to it fully to the point that he could enjoy being a man who just breathed, ate, defecated, laughed, cried and slept. That was what he wanted. He wanted to be content in his mediocrity. He wanted to live peacefully without reminders that he had greater potential, greater powers that he was not using. He wished that he was not troubled by some inner insistence that he was wasting something that had been given to him.

And yet meeting Delilah and falling in love with her was changing him. A kind of happiness was emerging, and a vague feeling that there was a purpose to his love. In the beginning it was simply a sense he had of being safe and secure and, more importantly, of wanting to please her, but without knowing what lied beyond this burgeoning sense of responsibility.

At least for the time being he was safely berthed, lodged with Delilah in her tiny two-bedroom Craftsman on the poorer side of Sunset Boulevard. This in itself was a great relief to him. Delilah wasn’t bad off. She’d done it on her own for years, getting by in what Giambone liked to call her fractured town, with its plightful geography of anguished dreamers, the living embalmed and sun-spotted lizards in shoe-polish toupees. Last year she’d made $50,000, she told him, most of it under the table. Not a lot in L.A. but enough to survive; enough to pay the rent, car insurance and her gym membership, with some left over for play. She didn’t trouble herself with Giambone’s unemployed status. Not in the beginning. There were mitigating factors that compensated for the dearth of money. And at first he didn’t scare her away by asking for any of hers. Only when she’d fallen in love, after the first month or so, did he come to her for a few bucks now and again, for gas money, or enough to buy the Drum rolling tobacco he smoked, or a bottle of Jack Daniels. She could afford that. She understood it was unseemly to ask his brother. She was in love and wanted him to be happy. Soon he’d get a job. Universal was tight after a bad year at the box office. It was the nature of the business. Things would improve in a couple of months. Until then, he said, he could find some piecework to keep him going, odd jobs from friends he knew. He’d look into that. And eventually he’d have to tell her that he and Jack hadn’t spoken in years. It was a little thing about money. A small family wound that had grown malignant. Soon she’d learn that he could get no closer to Jack than the average fan. Not even that. Jack’s bodyguards had strict orders to toss him on his ear if he ever approached. And Jack’s house in Malibu was an impenetrable fortress. It was like having no brother at all. Giambone didn’t need him. He was no charity case. Jack was an aging rocker who’d sold out. Giambone would never sell out.

The question of money bothered Delilah less than the fact of Giambone’s bathrobe. He wore it constantly; from the time she left in the morning until she returned home hours later, after a full day of personal encounters with demanding clients. She found him sitting in the same room, in the same chair where she’d left him before noon, a cigarette burning between his fingers, a glass of wine in a plastic tumbler on the table next to him, rereading for the umpteenth time The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, or The Rosy Crucifixion. It wasn’t even a quality bathrobe, made from plush Turkish cotton or cool Japanese silk. It was polyester, or acrylic, or acetate; some chemical fabric dyed in a smudge brown, tawny yellow paisley, likely purchased from Target or the 99-Cent Store. It barely covered him. No matter how often he adjusted the fold or tightened the cinch, it came undone every time he shifted in his chair, exposing his genitals, which he fondled as long as they were there, unconstrained and open to view, not in any earnest attempt to arouse himself, but as men do because they can, the way a woman absently coils her hair around an index finger while lost in thought at a traffic light.

It was mildly unsettling for Delilah to see Giambone implanted in her armchair when she came home each day. She felt as if she were walking into the lobby of an SRO, or the community room of a psychiatric hospital, were it not for the familiar objects she had placed around her living room to decorate and make it like a home, her home. Now it was all put slightly off-center, the picture tilted and set vaguely askew by the inmate/lover installed in the middle, his hand on his testicles, absorbed in his book and himself.

But mostly she was pleased to see him. She still carried with her the fresh image and tactile memory of their recent lovemaking. And it was just plain good to have a man in the house, the smell of him, the lower register of his voice, the bass thunder of his laugh. Even the taste of tobacco or whiskey he left on her lips, substances she normally avoided, even these were intoxicating in the beginning. They were the things that signified him, his masculine presence in a home that had long been without the blunt, taut substance of a man, the thick and grizzled rootedness of him.

Yet her tolerance was exercised. She might have been more amenable to his habits if they weren’t accompanied by a kind of distraction Giambone seemed to suffer each time she walked through the front door, as though she were interrupting him, giving her reason to fear that he would much prefer spending time with his books, with his tobacco and liquor, than time spent with her. Usually he had sense enough to put these down, to stand up and greet her, but she could tell it was done with effort, as though an act of will were required for him to leave off his solitary pleasure and commit his attention to her. She didn’t like the feeling that she was disturbing someone when she walked into her own house. It was her house. She was not a guest. Why should her presence be upsetting to another, especially when he was there at her invitation? He should celebrate her return. She wanted to believe that he’d been counting the hours and minutes before her arrival with keen anticipation.

Giambone was stubborn about a lot of things, and he was persistent in his stubbornness. But he was not insensitive. He could see that Delilah was perturbed to find him still in his bathrobe. But it was his stubborn temperament that made him resist changing anything for her. What he needed was her acceptance, her willingness to embrace all that he was. He wanted her to acknowledge his brilliance, his intelligence and wit, and to be thankful for having his stimulating company. Giambone believed these should be enough for any woman. And he knew she was lonely. In exchange for her financial and material support, he would provide inspiration, fascinating observations and commentaries about life, politics, art and religion. He knew how to cook. He was an excellent lover. He would even clean from time to time. And she could always count on his skill in household repairs. It was a fair exchange. And when she found herself pregnant, he would be the stay-at-home dad, schooling the child there, freeing Delilah from the drudgery of motherhood so she could continue her work as a personal trainer, a job that was important to her, to them both. This was Hollywood. There would always be people who needed to look good. Her services were in demand. With him at home raising their child, she would have the freedom to grow her business, increasing her annual income on which they could all comfortably live.

He believed in this scenario. In a strangely pragmatic assessment of his own capabilities, Giambone understood that he was constitutionally deficient in the role of breadwinner. He felt guilty about it, but he couldn’t change. And he wanted a woman like Delilah who recognized this about him without needing to discuss it. A woman who understood and accepted him for what he was – an interesting, basically loving and kind man who drank. Like Henry Miller. Or the image of that man whom Giambone had conjured in his mind, conveniently forgetting that Henry Miller had also produced something on a regular basis – even then he’d worn out his welcome with a long line of women.

When she came in she didn’t smile right away, seeing him in the bathrobe, with his book and a glass of whiskey in his hand.  He laughed, not sheepishly but less than defiant. He stood up then and welcomed her home with a great, warming hug. And she succumbed to him, ready to overlook the meaning of the bathrobe. She didn’t want to scrutinize too deeply. She was in love. But she was no teenager. She wasn’t about to fall for just any man, and especially anyone who seemed dangerous, or about whom every visible piece of evidence seemed to suggest heartbreak and strife. Giambone was different. He was smart in an eccentric, non-academic way. Unlike a lot of men, he loved to talk. He was ready to offer his unsolicited opinion about anything that came to mind. He was an expert lover. And there was money in his family. She wasn’t mercenary in the cold-blooded sense, but if there were some prospect of material improvement, and all that was required in return was to love someone to whom she was attracted, there was no harm in that. So it was not difficult for her to be warmed by him when he took her in his arms and began kissing her face and the soft skin of her throat and the tender areas behind her ears. It was the kind of intimate touch that had been missing in her life. It had little resemblance to her work, to the physical touch of her clients, men whom, unless they were astonishingly handsome, she never kissed. Only a lover’s kisses were sweet and welcome and soothing. She had become adept at drawing a nearly impervious line between her job and sex with a lover. They were entirely different.

Giambone tried to smother and overpower her silent objections with an onslaught of affection. He loved her body and she loved his. It was only a matter of seconds, of her pliant limbs taken in by his, enfolding themselves around her, of the transfer of heat between them and the wet penetration of their tongues, and he inhaling the scent of her, distilled by her long day, made pungent and cured by her body’s sweat and the choreography of repetitive motions, only a matter of seconds until he had an erection and her hand was on it and the two of them fell together and she took him inside her, and from them came the deep gusts of their breath and the rutting cries of his burrowing in and her disintegration.

One evening after sex on the floor, next to a small table where Delilah kept framed photos of her parents and grandparents, and after she had showered and rinsed the residue of the oils, breath and sweat of Giambone and the others from her resilient but still soft skin, the same thought rose up again in her mind. It could not be subdued any longer by his sensual mastery of her. What had he done all day? What had he accomplished, she wanted to know. Was it anything of substance? Something that might be touched? Or deposited in a bank vault? Through him she must find a way to leave off living by acting the dreams of others; from making people happy whom she loathed and who cared little for her beyond their allotted time. Must she ever tell him? She hoped he would not make it necessary. He was a Giambone. She was with a Giambone. She was so close now to what she always wanted.

Giambone was in the kitchen, with his bathrobe untied and open at the center, her secretions and his own lingering on his heavy and deflated penis. He sang along to a duet with Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker that spun around the CD player, and busily set himself to chopping garlic, onions, basil, rosemary and tomatoes, while the water for the linguine heated to a boil on the stove. A bottle of Chianti stood open and breathing on the counter. Delilah’s kitchen was small but comfortable, with a little nook to the side and three windows forming an alcove to let in the southern daylight. Her walls were decorated with ironic pictures and framed postcards that were meant to amuse her guests. Taken as a group they stood as a mildly arch critique on the way men and women behaved toward each other in the 1950’s, or they lampooned the corny and obsolete consumer products that had come and gone in another less savvy era. They were references to an archaic American wholesomeness that was meant to be seen as quaint and endearing, if fairly ridiculous. In some ways the droll collection of images showed a semi-conscious appreciation in Delilah’s own life of the ground she’d covered from innocence to cynicism – from Girl Scout, to high school varsity swim team, college dropout, denizen of Hollywood dance clubs, cocaine 12-stepper, and, finally, full-service masseuse and gentlemen’s club entertainer. If she and America were not thoroughly cynical, they were at least no longer burdened by their naiveté.

Giambone smiled when she walked in the kitchen. She was barefoot, wearing a white, loose fitting T-shirt with no bra. A pair of tight, Lycra cycling shorts emphasized her muscular legs and bottom. Her hair was coiled and pinned to the top of her head. She was still full and satisfied from their fucking. She had showered and smelled of lavender from the lotion she used to moisten her skin. Giambone set down the knife on the cutting board and reached out to fondle her. She laughed and pushed him away.

“Keep those stinky garlic hands away from me,” she told him.

He liked it when she resisted and bossed him in a playfully severe voice, as though she were a martinet in a school for boys. He wanted her even more. He resumed his chopping, smiling broadly, feeling himself fortunate, almost regal, in the pleasure he obtained from their domestic arrangement – the sex and affection, the playful teasing, cooking together in the kitchen, preparing a meal to be shared, drinking wine. He was convinced, finally, that he had found a home, his true home, the one he’d searched for since his mother died. His contentment relaxed his usual fears, made him expansive and soulful, as though he were under protection, and more at liberty to say the things that came into his mind, confident that she would accept them without contradiction. It was an affliction of hope she revived in him.

“You know,” he told her, “I think the linden tree in the backyard may have a parasite; it’s losing its leaves. Don’t you think that’s strange, at this time of the year? Maybe you want to tell the landlord.” 

Giambone offered this information to Delilah as a gift. It was his way of contributing to the welfare of the household. He considered it a positive masculine contribution. It was appropriate for a man to know something about trees. Trees were the realm of men. Feeling like a privileged messenger from this male-bound region, it was his duty to make others aware, the ones who did not have the same proximity to this esoteric knowledge. He wanted to hear her say how glad and relieved she was that he had brought it to her attention, this important and meaningful problem that was confronting them at the very threshold of their home. His home now. She had let him into it and he inhabited it with her. It was a reconnoitering, swift and still descending.

Delilah filed through the mail that was left for her on the kitchen table. She stood up and walked over to the trash container and threw away the introductory offers for book clubs, low interest credit cards, and various appeals for endangered fish and fowl.

“I didn’t even know I had a linden tree,” she said, half distracted by a letter that had come from her mother. “Which tree is it?”

Moving to the sink she looked out the window. She seemed surprised there were any trees at all. She never went into the backyard. It had always been a forlorn and mildly dreadful place to her. Trees and shrubs and grass and flowerbeds were all complicated organisms that demanded too much attention. And there were insects. She didn’t care for them, and harbored an exaggerated disgust of spiders and snails. She preferred an environment she could control, where there was little resistance.

The yard was overgrown and had been left to its own devices during the three years she’d lived in this house. Giambone had taken to spending afternoons idling there in the garden. Yet he didn’t feel compelled to correct anything he found amongst the prolific tufts of mondo grass, the tightly seeded yellow flowers of monewort, or the lush coyote bush that poured over terraced walls of rough hewn stone. He saw it as a sanctuary. A tranquil place where he could marvel at nature’s heedless revolutions, its slow and steady encroachment. To try and marshal this force, direct or tame it, was not anything he considered doing. It was too beautiful in its present chaos. The death of a linden tree was deserving of concern because it meant the loss of something beautiful. But he also understood that it was meant to be; that sickness and death, organisms preying on other organisms, were a part of life. He could intervene, but then, why? The parasite that was killing the tree may very well be protecting some other plant or species of insect that played a beneficent role in the natural cycle. Man was always intruding, trying to correct what could in fact be perfect. Some things were meant to die against his expectations or desire. Often they were beautiful. Sadness at their passing was frequently misplaced, he felt. He told Delilah about the dying tree mostly from a desire to have some stake in the affairs of the house. It demonstrated his involvement, his consciousness of the environment around them. He wanted to assure her that he was participating and vigilant. He liked the idea of being set up in a home together with her. He wanted to establish some proprietary interest, and to be recognized by her as an authoritative partner in the enterprise of a shared and mutual domestic concern. He wanted to stay on.

The fact that the tree was not enough to merit Delilah’s serious concern irritated Giambone. It was as though what mattered to him was not something she cared about. He took it personally, as if he and the linden tree, and the entire backyard, were integrally related, were in fact one and the same organism, or at least in sympathetic harmony. It hurt him that she didn’t share his appreciation for the tree, nor even pretend. She was absorbed in something else. She looked at the letter from her mother.

“Why is she writing to me,” she thought aloud. “She never writes. She always calls.”

Giambone turned up the heat in the skillet. He used the large chopping knife to scrape the onions and garlic from the cutting board into the pan. The water in the onions cracked as it mixed with the warm oil. Giambone heard Delilah but he wasn’t listening. She hadn’t asked him yet about his day, about what he’d done. She didn’t care that a tree was dying in her backyard. He hadn’t known Delilah more than a couple of months and already he’d heard too much about her mother. He had decided he would not like her. Delilah had never spoken badly about her mother, but the woman was always there, in the background, a looming presence. It was a relationship with which he felt he had to compete. He didn’t want to compete with anyone else for Delilah’s attention. He wanted to talk about his day; about the subtle forms of life he had seen in the backyard. He wanted to read her the poem of Rimbaud he’d come across. And play some music for her, a bittersweet song Jack had recorded about him at a time when they were still speaking. The song had never been a hit, but there it was, about him, a validation of sorts that had gone out into the world. He knew it was corny to think it was worth inflating his pride, but he couldn’t resist the fact that when people heard the song they were bound to think about him. And now that he was angry, there was something else he wanted to tell her. He hated her furniture. And the tacky little tchotchkes she had everywhere, crowding every shelf and table in the house. She had poor artistic taste, he thought. He needed to educate her about aesthetics and the proper way to decorate a home. He considered himself to be an authority on these things. It was true that he had no formal training. But he believed his tastes were refined and innate. He presumed to know more about the elements of design than she did, based on the decorating choices she’d made in her home. They were tired examples of Hollywood camp; no more than trendy and sophomoric deconstructions of American pop culture. One droll room in a house was excessive; an entire house given over to it was plain self-indulgence. He was sure he was right about that.

Delilah could see he was pulling back, protecting himself from emotional exposure, from her own sudden need for distance. His silence was loud and hard-edged, but it was she now who felt more justified in being needy. She couldn’t bear the weight of his. Let him pout, she thought. Her mother was divorcing her father. After 40 years. This was why she had written to Delilah, so she could take the space to inform their only daughter, coolly, dispassionately. It had become impossible with the father. Things had been tenuous between her parents for many years. Longer than Delilah knew. And now, her mother said, on top of his drinking, her father had cancer. The mother could not endure years more of struggle with him; could not suffer the role of the nurse when she was already tired, fatigued and angry in her role as the wife. She would leave him. She wrote because she thought it the best way to break the news. She loved her daughter. She knew she would have trouble understanding. She hoped Delilah would not judge her too harshly. Her mother was torn by guilt. She was leaving a dying man. But she’d decided. It was an agonizing choice, but the best one.

Delilah sat down and read through the letter once more without speaking. She could feel Giambone calling her, as though where he stood, just a few feet from her, sautéing the onions and garlic, was a remote place; or as if she were inside a house and he outside, imploring her to open the door, like a small boy whose mother has shut him out because it’s the only way she knows to gather up time for herself, barricading herself behind a wall and locking out the world, even the ones most close to her, even the ones who depend on her, because the craving for aloneness, for peace, for burrowing in and down in the dark, is greater than any other allegiance. The loyalty to one’s self surpasses all other loyalties. Sometimes this preservation of self could only be sought in death. Delilah knew he was there waiting for her, wounded by his abandonment. But he must wait. She must absorb the words her mother had sent. She must find some solid place to plant herself until the wave passed over her and she might bob to the top for air.

He wasn’t helping. Already at this early stage together she knew that he showed little patience for her need to detach from him, even briefly. If they were together in the same room, he needed assurance that her attention was upon him. Without it, he became peevish and, at times, irascible. By now she could predict his reaction. First he brooded. Then, failing to brook her silence, he provoked himself to speech. It usually came in the form of a simple question, unrelated to his real concern, administered brusquely, his consternation forging each of the words, each syllable glazed in an acrid laminate.

“Can you get the colander for the pasta,” he said. “I need some help here,” as though she had neglected her watch upon the foredeck of the ship of state.

He became authoritarian. His words were tempered by an ill-concealed exasperation with her, with what he attributed to her incompetence, her failure to scrutinize and predict and respond to his needs, more urgent than her pedestrian worries. He’d been alone all day. He was happy to see her. He wanted to be met with joy. Could she be so easily distracted from him? By a mere letter? A letter from her mother? He distrusted the mother. He was suspicious of her designs. He distrusted their relationship. Two women conspiring. When Delilah was thinking about her mother, where was he left? Could she turn from him, ignoring his sunny nature, his seductive brilliance? It was an insult. He felt slighted. He was there for her, fully attentive, thoroughly generous, wishing to heap himself in large portions upon the plate of her rapt and eager consciousness. She must be hungry for news of himself, for the day’s subtle and rich disclosures, uncovered by him in the hours since they had parted.

“You don’t have to snap at me like that. Why must you bark orders? Can’t I read a letter from my mother? She’s divorcing my father. He has cancer. He’s dying and they’re divorcing! Am I supposed to pretend it’s an invitation to a tea party? What’s wrong with you?”

“How was I supposed to know that,” he said defensively, believing he was under assault for having made a simple mistake. He became angry. She was so quick to accuse him of being insensitive.

“You could’ve have told me,” he said, raising his voice, “instead of sitting there acting strange and withdrawn. Why do you shut me out like that? Is there something wrong with me? What have I done?”

“Just because I’m quiet for two seconds does not mean you’re being punished, Tony.”

She was fuming. Was he so thick-headed? Did he not hear what she said? Her father was sick and her mother was leaving him. Was he so insecure that he couldn’t allow her to absorb and recover from this news? The life of her parents was disintegrating. The way he was behaving, she might as well have said, “Your bathrobe disgusts me! I want to burn it!”

He couldn’t react. He couldn’t hear her. There was nothing but the clamor of his own fear, the pining for the reassurance that his life was not a catastrophe. What were her parents to him? No one. It made no difference to him that it was from them she had come. It was they who had influenced and formed her at the very beginning, and continued to love her despite their growing differences, despite the choices she’d made. None of this occurred to him. There was in him, she saw, a vast and parched territory of the mind that lay between the critical perception of his own longings and the sensitivities of others, as though the others had no relevance, they didn’t count but for what they might contribute to his own life. Her parents didn’t exist. Her relationship to them was an abstraction that he couldn’t penetrate, as if she had been conceived and produced in vacuum, as if she’d had no life until he came along and lifted her off a shelf, like a packet of seeds just waiting for water and light, a tiny water monkey to soothe him and pay tribute to his gardener’s green thumb.

He hated her when she became histrionic. He was mad because of the ease with which Delilah could attend to her inner life while he was right there with her. She was a Californian. If they had to attend to their selves, other people were expendable. One’s self came first. This was the cardinal rule of the religion of self-augmentation and improvement. The apotheosis of the individual. It made him lose any sympathy for her and the divorce of her parents. He didn’t care. She wasn’t concerned about him. As soon as something demanded her attention, off she went, leaving him behind. It was a selfish act, he thought. It told him much about her character. He had glimpsed this about her before.

She was crying now; sitting at the kitchen table sobbing, with her shoulders convulsing and not a sound, no sound at all, issuing from her clenched mouth. In the tight Lycra shorts wedged between the lips of her vagina and the cheeks of her buttocks, her libidinous persona no longer made an impression on Giambone. She was just a little girl crying. The sexual aspect of her being disappeared. Everything that Giambone associated with her sexual nature, every body part, lost all erotic significance for him. He was disoriented by the change. She was a body made whole by shaking, suddenly riven with sadness, given over to a quiet and stately lamentation. She rose from her chair at the kitchen table, gathered up the letter from her mother, looked briefly at Giambone, with her eyes reddened and watery, her face squeezed tightly, as though she were holding something back, keeping down what wanted to come up, keeping it down because she couldn’t bear the ignominy that came from showing too much emotion, looked at Giambone with a queer mixture of contempt and longing, and left the room. She walked into her bedroom and closed the door.

Then Giambone could hear the sobs. She felt more free to let them come up in the privacy of her room, outside his seething, impassive presence. They were little peeps and wails that trailed into the kitchen like an atonal counterpoint to the low sizzle of his onions and garlic simmering in the virgin olive oil. He picked up the bowl containing the diced tomatoes and sliced mushrooms. With his hand he scooped out the ingredients and let them fall into the skillet. The tomatoes felt cool and heavy against his skin. The juice of them trickled between his fingers, leaving their seeds to cling there like they were seeking some warmth from his body. He rinsed his hands under the faucet, took up a wooden spatula and evenly distributed the contents of the skillet. Little pockets of air poked through the mélange and let white plumes of steam rise up, blanched with the aroma of the cooking vegetables. Everything on the inside bubbled. The sound assured Giambone that what he was doing was good. Preparing food. Preparing the meal that they would eat together. The colors in the skillet, the milky pearl of onions, the tomatoes’ soft and pale reds, the brown bone earthiness of the mushrooms and dark forest green of basil sprinkled over the top, all were blended in a way that reassured Giambone, fortified him, comforted him the way his mother’s meals had when he was a boy, and made him understand that what he was doing was the right thing. It was what she had done. It was a gift of her love. He loved Delilah, he thought, and the recognition of this love gave him pause. It softened him. He could feel a tenderness in him rise up that moments earlier he had banished, out of fear, from his certainty that she had treated him unjustly. He could see that she had been unthinking, but not malicious. And as he recognized this, the words divorcing and dying resonated. When she first mentioned them, they were without meaning. They were common words, powerless against his indignation.

He felt ashamed. Predictably it rose up, the old Catholic guilt that he could never escape, guilt that was not always inappropriate nor misplaced but always reflexive. He had failed her, he could hear someone from a long time ago tell him. Who was it? His father? Some priest or nun? He had been selfish. Even though he could not feel, could not locate in himself the feeling aspect of what it meant to respond to the news she received, he understood that such words had the power to crush a person’s daily resolve to stand against the world. Such words conveyed events, realities that threatened a feeling person’s balance, perhaps maiming them with blows from which they never recovered. He had been unsympathetic when sympathy was required, even if he had trouble understanding the meaning of death, truly comprehending it in a way that causes a deep sorrow, an effortless grieving. He knew he must somehow find it in him to be generous to her, to comfort her the best he could, even if it meant faking it. He understood now that he had an obligation, where before he could not see through his own aggrieved mind, could not see beyond the slight and insult he thought had been made against him. He was wrong, he supposed, and he should go to her.

His own mother once died. He didn’t cry then, or ever, about her death. He viewed it in his mind like any other episode of his childhood that happened long ago – his first baseball glove, a fist fight with the neighborhood bully, his father’s remarriage, his brother’s early and lasting success. It registered but there was no feeling related to the image of his mother’s face. She was preserved in a ghostly detachment. He had been young. He no longer remembered how he felt. He couldn’t imagine crying over the loss of anyone, not even his own father, whom he respected, whom he might even say he loved, out of respect. But he doubted he would shed any tears when the man finally departed. He wondered at his capacity to feel anything, whether he had ever been able to feel deeply about anyone. He had a glimpse of it with Delilah just now. His guilt had moved him to identify to some degree with what was happening to her. Somewhere in himself he must find a place that could respond to another person’s grief, or even his own.

He finished the wine in his cup. It warmed him and made him feel everything would be alright. Her sadness would pass. They would be okay together. He stirred the linguine in the boiling water and poured another glass of wine. Everyone has to face loss, he thought. People die, trees die, parents die, and new things come and take their place. He might cry if Delilah left him. It was rather early to know that. It was time to eat. He took a fork and tested the pasta. It was just right. They would eat together, drink together, and make love. That’s how he saw it. They would awake in the morning and see how it all shook out. Giambone swallowed more wine, cinched up his bathrobe, and walked to her room to tell her it was time to eat. He guessed he should be the one to call the landlord. She had other things to worry about. He figured that linden tree ought to be cut down soon, before it weakened, fell over, and somebody got hurt. It was something he could do for her and she could thank him for that.