I tried. But it was difficult sometimes, to believe in the vaunted unhappiness, or to see it as the central thing about them. They were vivid, even in their voiced dissatisfactions, and they stuck together in a way I admired.
Emma, in her forties, was pregnant then, tired out by the series of miscarriages that had come between Bobby and George and this late, last child. She sat with her sisters Carmela and Lucy on the couch. Carmela and Lucy had both been wild girls, and they had married the sorts of men wild girls married, sailors and musicians. They owned small houses, packed with children, and not until that night had there been any indication that one day these lives would prove to be inadequate. But here, in this house, came the first suggestion of the movement of history and, with it, a kind of panic.
As soon as we entered, they tried to pull my mother down with them, onto the couch, to assert that nothing really had changed, but my mother resisted their entreaties, moved past them, toward John. He rose from his BarcaLounger. He smelled of aftershave and wore a smoking jacket, with patches of suede at the cuffs. He had a large, smooth head, a businessman’s head (he ran a fleet of trucks), with surprising blond hair—surprising, anyway, for an Italian—brush-cut, so that you could see the scalp through it. He planted a soft kiss on my mother’s cheek, and then looked at my father, who remained at a distance, as if asking him to come closer, to stand with him in a kind of solidarity of success.
The two other uncles, Mike and Tony, were gathered around the pool table, where Bobby and George, the former roof pissers, posed for the rest of us, their hair pomaded and combed back off their short foreheads. They looked like the dark, wrongful heirs in Shakespeare, who carry small knives concealed. They held pool cues, and pretended they knew the game, but after a while John and my father came and took the cues away from them and began shooting.
My father was a very precise athlete, a man who wasted no motion. He knew how to hold the cue, and his shots did what he wanted them to. He looked unsurprised afterward, even a little bored. John was clumsier. Once, after a particularly bad shot where he scratched the table, he leaned down and rubbed at the nap, and said to my father, “Meola’s bought a lot up here. Did you hear?”
“The dentist?” my father asked.
“Yes.”
My father made a motion with his mouth that was like shrugging.
“And Doc Semenza,” John said, preparing his next shot.
“So we’re up here with the hoi polloi,” my father said.
Someone, one of the uncles, had put on a record, Dean Martin, and when Dean Martin lapsed into Italian, Uncle Mike, who used to sing in a band that played at weddings (he worked for John now), began to sing along. At first John seemed amused by this, but as it went on, a kind of annoyance started to come into his face. Lucy, Mike’s wife, picked up on this, as though John’s shifting moods were setting the tone for everyone, and she shouted out, “You gonna get me something like this, Mike?” and then, glancing at John, as if for his approval, added, “In a pig’s eye.”
There were children in the room besides Bobby and George and me, five of them, some of them younger, and though they behaved in a respectful manner, every once in a while one of the smaller ones had to be reprimanded. This always came out louder, more angry than it needed to be. And every once in a while Carmela or Lucy would shout something insulting to one of their husbands, as though once that particular theme was introduced, it became a favorite.
Displaced from the pool table, my cousin George was leaning against a bank of windows, his hands behind him, staring at me. He had never much liked me, so his stare was unsettling, some hint of a challenge beneath it. That was the party: George staring at me, and bursts of noise followed by quieter pockets in which the only sound was that of my father and John moving around the pool table, the tops of their heads, my father’s smooth black hair and John’s bristly blond, lit by the glow of the lamp over the table. It was in one of these quieter moments that Lucy grabbed me, pulled me up close, and shouted, “So what are you gonna be when you grow up, huh, Luca? A fighter pilot?”
It had no meaning as a question, it was just Lucy’s way of bursting through the uncomfortable silence of the party, but they all reacted as if their ears had been cocked. John, my father, the uncles all laughed, and then when the words “fighter pilot” were repeated, a second wave of laughter followed. George narrowed his eyes and looked me over again. He moved across the room toward me, turning once, to glare at the others. He hadn’t laughed, the only one. When he faced me again, he said, “Come on. Come with me, fighter pilot.”
We went upstairs. He flicked on the lights that illuminated the living room, a deep, long room full of soft furniture, pastels, and light wood, a room full of turns and nooks, with, at the end, a great stone fireplace. My father had described this room to us; he had come back from his first viewing of John’s house and tried to make us laugh by describing the ornate furnishings, the sheer exuberance of John’s yearning for a life beyond that which he knew. That was when the word “Versailles” first entered our vocabulary, and my father began referring to John as “Louis the Sixteenth.” The memory of this derision stood between me and the room. I might have looked at it my father’s way, and his way alone, if I hadn’t been aware of the concentration with which George, standing next to me, was looking at it, a concentration that altered his breathing, made it reverent, and for a moment created a kind of intimacy between us.
He led me down the hall and opened the door to Bobby’s room and allowed me to look in. “Bobby’s room,” he announced. Then he opened another door. Inside was a crib and pink walls. “If they don’t have a girl, they’ll go apeshit,” George said.
George’s room was identical to Bobby’s. Both were brown and nearly bare, with only a bed and a dresser and a desk situated near the window. There were paintings on the walls, of boys catching footballs, boys playing golf. George sat at his desk and folded his hands. A neat pile of books lay on the corner of the desk: Geometry and Physical Science and Animal Farm. They had the overused look of books given to students in the lower depths of the high school, which was where George had always resided. The design of the room seemed a deliberate attempt to wipe clean the slate of George’s previous life, to make of him a more ambitious boy, a scholar. George drew one hand up, to pat his pomaded hair, and a shadow of trouble crossed his features.
George’s room was on the corner of the house, so he had two windows. He got up and went to the one that faced the side yard, the woods. His hands were in his pockets, and because of the light over his desk and the fact that there were no curtains yet, I could see the reflection of his face in the window, and the way he was looking at me.
He was short, shorter than Bobby, and less good-looking. Bobby was the handsome one, with a face like Fabian’s and a tall body in which he moved like a swimmer.
“So, welcome to our new lives, Luca,” he said.
He turned to me, and his face made a beckoning motion before he lowered his brow. He was thinking something over, whether or not to make some request. I said nothing, offered nothing. It was all too new, this sort of power shift between us.
“How old are you, Luca?”
I said eleven, soon twelve.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched his hair again. He looked at his school books, sullen and mistrusting, then reached under his bed. He