.

It’s all coming together for Charlie G.  He has just graduated from law school, secured a high-paying job in corporate law, and started a serious relationship with an ambitious business school student.  He’s got a seat on the express train to a life of comfort and stifling conformism, but the train is derailed by the death of a twenty-two year old beauty who was romantically involved with his best friend, a thrill seeking stoner, gambler, and womanizer.  “Obviously I don’t know anything,” Charlie claims.  In fact, however, he has ties to many of the people who knew the dead girl best, including her boyfriend, her drug dealer, her sexually ambivalent sister, and her extremely wealthy former lover.  In pursuing the truth behind the woman’s tragic death, he also discovers that he has a chance, for once in his life, to take control of his own destiny, instead of following the path of least resistance.  But is it worth sacrificing everything he has built up in the last twenty-five years? 

GOD BLESS THE CHILD

I thought I had timed it almost perfectly.  Rosemarie and I were alone in the house, and she had just finished doing her laundry, which she was sorting on the living room couch.  The TV was on, as usual, even though nobody was watching it.  I was in transit through the living room, on the way back from the kitchen.  A TV commercial came on in which Ellen Degeneres, the well known lesbian TV personality, was promoting her talk show.  As I carefully transported my brimming Don Quixote coffee mug toward my room, I casually I inquired “Do you think Caroline’s sister is gay?”

“What?” Rosemarie asked.  She wasn’t paying any attention to the TV, so as far as she was concerned the question was completely out of the blue.

“Oh never mind,” I said.  But, having come this far, I repeated my offhand speculative suggestion: “You think Ava Andreou is gay?”

“I don’t think she’s anything,” she said with a shrug, continuing to fold her laundry.  “Leastways I never saw a sign of any kind of sexual orientation.  But she’s unknowable.  She’s like the most private person I’ve ever met in my life.  God only knows what’s going on inside there.  Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” I said, vaguely and ineffectually gesturing toward the TV.

Maisie has confessed to me that she doesn’t think very highly of my sister.  There is no individual unforgivable transgression that Rosemarie has committed, but Maisie’s overall evaluation of my sister’s character traits and personal inclinations has led her to conclude that she doesn’t like Rosemarie’s “style.”  Maisie advances a variety of reasons for her negative opinion.  First of all, unlike me, Rosemarie has never made an effort to hide her Queens accent.  Maisie thinks that she sounds uncultured and poorly educated.  Second, as I have mentioned, she doesn’t approve of the way Rosemarie dresses, which she classifies as “classic suburban slutty.”  As I said, I like the way Rosemarie dresses.  However, I would have to admit that some of her friends have adopted that classic suburban slutty look.

I remember dropping off Rosemarie and a couple of her girlfriends at a nightspot a few years ago.  “What you looking at?” her friend Dia asked me through the rear view mirror.

Her ample embonpoint was overflowing her undersized blouse.  “Don’t you have a jacket or something to put over that?” I tactfully inquired by way of answer.

Dia was unabashed.  “We’re not going in the back door, Charlie G.  When we walk in the club, we stop the show.  Everybody checking us out.  You see what I’m saying?”

Finally, despite being an art lover, Maisie construes Rosemarie’s pretensions to a career as an artist as the typical life ambition of a slacker, someone who’s real goal is to be a parasite, a burden to her family and to society.

I should never have told Maisie about Rosemarie’s secret dream.  She wants to move to Colorado and live in the mountains and wear cowboy boots and drive a pickup truck and ride horses.  If Rosemarie finds out I told Maisie about Colorado, she’ll kill me.  Not even my parents know.  Now Maisie refers to Rosemarie as “The Cowgirl.”  She says the only reason someone would move from New York to Colorado is to become a ski bum.  Or else to smoke pot.

But Maisie is mistaken about my sister.  Because Rosemarie is gifted, and she has been ever since she was a child.  She is a true artist, with an artist’s vision.  When she gets inspired, she enters a trance-like state, and when she comes out of it, she has created something beautiful.  Anything with her hands.  Once she was going to a friend’s seventh birthday party at Jones Beach.  “Rosemarie, we don’t have a card to go with Lisa’s present!” my mother yells.  She puts crayon to construction paper and ten minutes later there’s a scene at the beach with water, sand, sun, a lifeguard stand, and kids running around, chasing seagulls.  The seagulls are taking off and each gull looks like the numeral seven, and the flock in flight forms a “V” that looks like the numeral seven.  Suitable for framing, I swear to God.  When she came home from sleep away camp one summer she brought with her a dozen pieces of pottery that she had thrown, all of which looked like museum pieces.  As I mentioned, she designs and sews about half of the clothes that she wears.  When she was little, she would design clothes and accessories for her American Girl doll, a popular doll that’s large and lifelike, about two feet tall.  Right now, while she’s finishing up (at a decidedly deliberate pace) her bachelor’s degree at City College, she’s working at an after school crafts store in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  She started a class for the kids called “Designing for Your American Girl Doll.”  They added a second weekday class when the first session ended and they’re begging her to do one on Saturdays.  After she graduates, when she gets enough money, she’s going to open her own sewing and crafts store.

So don’t you worry about my sister.  She’s going to be all right.  I’m the one you need to worry about.  I’m the one who has lost his way.

“Cop out,” was my sister’s comment when she heard that I had taken the LSATs.

“Thanks for the support,” I said.  “A simple ‘good luck’ would have sufficed.”

“I thought you were going to be a shrink,” she said.

“That was until I had my dream,” I replied.  “Sigmund Freud came to me and told me I would be a lousy psychiatrist.”

“But a lawyer!” she chastised me.  “Doesn’t get much lower than that.”

“And then William Kunstler appeared,” I went on.  “He said ‘Come!  Come join us!  We’ll do great things together.’”

But she was right.  It was a cop out.  Or, as I see it, a failure of the imagination.  As I have said, it’s a very common ailment among us graduates of Bayside High, not knowing what to do with our lives.  Even Caroline.  With so much going for her, she still couldn’t see the point of finishing up her communications degree from NYU.  And it was the same with me when I was going into my senior year at SUNY Albany.  I was completely off track, going nowhere.  That’s why I need Maisie so badly.  She has it all planned out.  That’s why I rely on Keith, who didn’t even have to go to college to figure out how to make a living or what he wanted to do with his life.  Me?  I was lost.  I knew that I did not want to work with my hands.  That narrowed it down quite a bit.  Not a dentist.  Not a construction worker.  Not an airplane pilot.  Not a garbage man.  It helped, but it didn’t give me a lot of direction.

But a psychotherapist, sitting in my little office all day, holding my patients’ hands and listening to their problems?  I couldn’t really see it.  I just couldn’t bring myself to invest the effort required to put together the graduate school application.  Worse than my concerns about the claustrophobic working conditions was my fear of failure, that what I would be doing didn’t even work.  I read one outcome study which found that an hour per week chatting with a sixteen-year-old female high school student was more effective against depression than weekly sessions with a licensed therapist.  Why go through four or more years of postgraduate training when all I needed was a cheerleader uniform?

I knew that I did not want to struggle like my father, who always felt that he was “behind the eight ball” financially.  I realized that what I needed was something white collar.  So I went to law school.  Can’t get much more white collar than that.  But it wasn’t as if I had found my calling.

Rosemarie stopped folding her laundry and examined me in silence for several seconds.  By bringing up the Andreou family I had opened the door to her own line of speculative inquiry.  “You think they’re gonna nail Deck?  Everybody thinks it was his shit.”

“That’s what everyone thinks.  I don’t think they’ve got any proof,” I replied.

“You’re not in any trouble with this, are you, Charlie G.?”  Even my own sister calls me Charlie G.  Everyone except Maisie.

“Of course not!” I assured her, my voice continuing to rise in pitch.  But I suddenly realized that I was actually in a lot of trouble, at least inside my mind.  At least with respect to my allegiances.

“’Cause you know, no matter what, you can always talk to me about it.”

“Sure, Ro,” I mumbled, in response to her offer of support.

My sister and I have a longstanding sibling rivalry and we spend most of our time together putting each other down, especially when my parents are present.  Our permanent feud, however, is modeled after my parents’ constant bickering, which I see as a sign of their love.  One theory I’ve come up with is that their fighting is a psychological defense against their overdependence upon each other and their fear of being separated.  Similarly, between me and my sister, underneath it all, there is a powerful, unbreakable bond.

When I was a kid, starting around the time I was five years old, I had a recurring nightmare.  It began after my father and I watched a program on television about the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California.  For over a century, dinosaur skeletons have been exhumed from the bubbling black oil, a roped off pond right smack in the middle of a modern, bustling major metropolitan area.  During the television show, my father offered one or two comments that might be characterized as lacking in sensitivity but were intended to broaden my understanding of the process of evolution and the inevitability of death.  “We came up out of the goop, and we end up in the goop,” he said.  Or something to that effect.  In my dream, Rosemarie falls into the tar pit and I attempt to rescue her.  I grab her hand and try to pull her out, but she is being sucked down into the boiling asphalt, and I am being pulled down with her.  I usually wake up just before I actually fall in.

It’s thicker than water, even thicker than blood, that inescapable primordial gene pool that we share.  Maisie might be smart as a whip, but her instincts aren’t always that good.  She doesn’t realize that, just because it’s OK for me to make fun of my sister, it might not be OK for her to make fun of my sister.

Anyway, the point is that my sister and I know each other well.  Plus she’s got her feminine intuition.  “Everything OK with you and Maisie?”

“Yeah, we’re still on track,” I said dismissively, taking a sip of coffee.

“On track!” she mimicked.  “On the express train to hell!”  According to my sister, I am merely one piece in a jigsaw puzzle that Maisie is busily assembling.  And once it’s complete, Rosemarie predicts, I will find that it isn’t a very pretty picture to be a part of.  “Has she popped the question?” she rather intrusively inquired.  In addition to the barefaced impudence of her question, I was further galled by the implicit reversal of sex roles.

“The issue has been broached,” I replied, seeking to maintain a lawyerly distance.

“So we’re never going to have another good Christmas?” was what my sister extrapolated from my response.

The Giacometti family gets very excited about Christmas.  My father lost his mother to cancer when he was about seven years old.  He doesn’t like to talk about it.  But on the anniversary of her death, some time in October, Lenny lights a candle.  And at the family dinner table he always makes the statement “I wish you guys could appreciate how lucky you are.”  Or an almost identical statement, after which my mother gets up, stands behind his chair, leans over, and gives him a big hug and a little kiss on his cheek.  Then Lenny presses his lips together and nods his head several times, all of which appears to make him feel a lot better about the whole thing.  And that’s about it.  Unfortunately, it is absolutely impossible for us to appreciate how lucky we are.  We’ve never known anything else.

Anyway, my father lost his mother when he was young, his family was not well off, and it sounds as if the loss was felt most acutely on many an unrelentingly grim Christmas day.

But he compensates for those years of deprivation by spearheading a day of equally unrelenting, undiluted Christmas cheer, during which any trace of negativity is banished from the household.  Even more so now that we kids are older and there’s no one to take the presents seriously or whine about what they didn’t get.  Everything is great.  The presents are great.  The cookies my mother baked are great.  The ham is so delicious, even better than last year.  The tree is so gorgeous.  Rosemarie did such a great job decorating it this year.  It is the only twenty-four hour period, other than the anniversary of my paternal grandmother’s death, during which my parents prove that they are in fact capable of holding their tongues and denying themselves the catharsis of a good argument.  It’s simply a day when we all leave behind all the crap that was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow but we choose to ignore it and focus on whatever there is to celebrate.

But to a rational, analytic, coolheaded outside observer our primitive ritual might well be perceived as silly and contrived.  And I thought that Maisie was a good sport and made a genuine effort to get into the spirit.  She wore a red scarf and a sweater with green in it.  She brought presents for everyone, even though she had been instructed not to do so.  And she was highly complimentary about Lenny’s Christmas lights and the superabundance of decorations inside the house.  But it was definitely a mistake to invite her over.  Within a half hour after she had been boisterously received at the front door, I could tell from the expression on her face that all the noise and merriment and hilarity were just getting to her.

My parents are not self conscious and they were going to continue to belt out those Christmas carols even if it was the Pope at the front door.  Maybe especially if it was the Pope at the front door.  And Maisie was well within her rights when she chose not to sing along with Bing Crosby; I had given her full permission to refrain from participating in the choir.  But Rosemarie and I could not help feeling sufficiently embarrassed to be inclined to disassociate ourselves from the mindless idiocy.

It was at the dinner table that things got a little nasty.  It certainly did not help that Lenny kept asking her “So how do youz guys celebrate Christmas in Joisey?”  He was scandalized that Maisie’s family would exchange presents on Christmas eve and thereby forfeit the full day of jollity that he relished more than any other in the year.

Now if the biggest embarrassment in Maisie’s life is her birthplace in Englewood, New Jersey, then the second biggest embarrassment is the fact that she has never been to Europe.  That’s part of the reason it was so tragic that her relationship with her travel agent Lewis ended prematurely, because Maisie had begun planning a whirlwind tour of the Continent.  (It occurred to me that, since one of my mother’s favorite topics of conversation is how Lenny single-handedly demolished her meticulously arranged trip to Italy, she and Maisie could have a real bonding experience complaining about how men always botch up your travel plans.  However, that is an issue that my mother would never raise on Christmas.)

My mother was egging Rosemarie on to tell Maisie about her wonderful junior year abroad.  “I don’t know why we had to pay rent for an apartment in Madrid.  She was practically living in the Prado Museum,” Lenny quipped.

Rosemarie dutifully gushed about the horizons that her overseas travel and foreign studies had opened up for her, and, lowering her voice almost to a whisper, segued into a stirring, lovingly detailed recapitulation of her sacred pilgrimage to the Picasso museums in Madrid, Malaga, Barcelona, and Paris.

Maisie broke in on Rosemarie’s effusive homage to her art god.  “It’s interesting the way the world’s perspective on an artist can change.  Many art scholars have begun to see Picasso as something of a chameleon.  He was very good at bringing to fruition the ideas that others had developed.  But almost all of his work was essentially copied from, or at least based on, stylistic advances that had been made by others.  It’s been said that, a hundred years from now, he’ll be considered a far more minor figure than he’s currently credited to be.”  And she listed a slew of examples of his contemporaries whose ideas and innovations had purportedly been stolen by Picasso.  Rosemarie looked stunned, in utter disbelief at the audacity of the sacrilege that she was hearing.

My mother took the opportunity to launch an ad hominem attack upon the artist’s character: “I read an article that said that he was so mean to his girlfriend that she killed herself.”  I guess the psychic news in the supermarket tabloids was a little light that day.

Maisie was glad to see that my mother was catching on.  “A lot of people associate Picasso with Cubism.  Personally, I’d say the movement he was most consistently associated with was Sexism.”  She smiled at her own conceit.  “Or maybe Misogynism.”

“And even his own children didn’t like him,” my mother added.

“He definitely had feet of clay,” Maisie nodded.

Lenny weighed in.  He didn’t care about Picasso’s character but he thought that his art was crap.  He felt that much of the artist’s work would better appeal to his sensibilities if it were more representational.  “Just a bunch of doodles as far as I’m concerned.  I can never tell what it is he’s trying to paint!”

The treachery of her own parents finally roused Rosemarie from her state of shock.  “He was the greatest artist of the twentieth century!” she sputtered.  “He was a genius who revolutionized painting and sculpture and the use of form and how art is conceptualized and perceived.  Just in terms of creativity and originality and breadth of imagination and sheer productivity…”

“I’m not arguing against his productivity,” Maisie allowed.  “But if he can be considered great, that greatness lies in his technical proficiency and his ability to perceive the changing zeitgeist and rapidly incorporate those changes into his own output.  He was around for quite a while so it’s not surprising that he left so much behind.  I’m merely saying that that body of work was, for the most part, highly derivative.  Throughout his life, he was very much a product of his time.”

Since I was still smarting from being bitch slapped after Keith’s party a couple of weeks ago, I was reluctant to adopt a position that my girlfriend might interpret as overtly antagonistic.  On the other hand it was kind of bugging me the way the three of them were ganging up on my little sister.  And—more to the point—I also believed that she was being unjustly persecuted, that they were all dead wrong.  In addition, I could not help taking their criticism personally, since I considered it to be an indirect attack upon my favorite coffee mug, which sported a partial reproduction of Picasso’s Don Quixote.  Rosemarie gave it to me as a souvenir of her trip.  But I tried to raise my objection tangentially, in a non-confrontational manner that would tend to lead the discussion further into the realm of the abstract.

“For someone who’s such a rugged individualist,” I said to Maisie, “who’s such a strong believer in your ability to control your own destiny, it’s surprising to hear you say that Picasso’s artistic career was largely a product of external influences, that his works were not shaped by his own inspiration but rather by outside forces.”

“Oh I’m still a firm believer in free will,” she said.  “But I also know that great men are made, not born.”  And she patted my forearm with a knowing smile.

It was at that precise moment that I knew, by looking at the sneer on Rosemarie’s face, that my sister hated my girlfriend’s guts.

And it came as a great relief for everyone when, shortly after dessert, Maisie announced that she had a splitting headache and, begging our collective pardon, departed the premises.

So I had to agree with my sister that Maisie had put a damper on our joyous holiday celebration.  On the other hand, what woman on earth would be capable of integrating herself into the irrepressible, bizarre, ecstatic frenzy that overtakes my home on December 25th?

“You ruined Christmas,” I reminded Rosemarie.

“I was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean!” she said.  “So tell me.  Do you think…?”

But I had grown tired of Rosemarie’s interrogation.  I was the older sibling and there was no need for my little baby sister to pass judgment on my love relationships or assume responsibility for my personal welfare.  “Hey!  What’s doing with Erik Estrada?” I asked, in order to change the subject.  “He been back in touch lately?”  (Erik Estrada is what my father calls him, another TV reference.  He was the star of CHiPs, a show about biker cops, the California Highway Patrol.  But I have to admit, Eric does look like the guy.  Quite handsome.)  My strategy worked well.  A shadow spread across her face, her features hardened, and she cast her eyes downward.

Obviously I don’t know anything, but I think I know the difference between men and women.  At least with respect to their fantasies.  Men’s fantasies are simple and crude: spiking the football in the end zone, climbing on top of the secretary with the long legs and big boobs, throwing down a straight flush and raking in the chips, walking through the door with the hottest woman in the club on your arm.  All the fantasies that Keith had turned into reality, had lived.  Which I guess is why I idolize him.  Men’s fantasies are like their orgasms, which are quick and explosive and concrete.  Women’s fantasies are like their orgasms, which are far more complicated and enduring and difficult to achieve.  By the age of nine, many little girls have pre-enacted their wedding day a hundred times.  They have studied the dynamics of their own family and rehearsed, with their friends and with their dolls, the idealized roles that they would play in their future households.  Maisie has been constructing her jigsaw puzzle since she was two years old.  My sister begged me to play house with her on countless occasions.  “Ten minnis!  Ten minnis!” she would plead, but it was only once in a blue moon that I was simultaneously at such complete loose ends and secure enough in my masculine self image so as to be able to indulge the importunate child.  Yeah, I did a good job of toughening her up.  And she became cautious with men: prudent, skeptical, unsentimental, and independent.  The men she picked were that way too, guys that she could shake hands with when they went their separate ways.  And that’s how Eric was until he turned into a puppy dog, so truly happy to be in her care.  And so she had gradually let her guard down, succumbing to her fantasies, allowing herself to dream.  But Eric suddenly needed some space, and now Rosemarie despises herself and her stupidity and the corny love songs that Lenny sings off key.

“That’d be pretty hard for him to do,” she replied, “seeing as I blocked his number.”  She held a pile of laundry to her breast and slowly skated past me toward the stairs, sliding her socks across the hardwood floor the way we used to do when we were kids.  I wonder what kind of fantasies Ava has.  None, maybe.  A lioness in the jungle, following her instincts.  Rosemarie stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned back toward me.  “Blue Stone Café,” she said.  “That’s where she’s working.”

“Who?” I innocently replied.

“Who!” she mocked me—two owls in conversation—and turned to ascend the stairs.