Russell Andrews: Icarus

"You're usually behind a tree or a statue or something. Kind of lurking."

A nod. Misery in his eyes, definitely misery.

"Can you speak?" she asked.

He nodded again and she laughed. "Do all girls make you this nervous?"

This time he shook his head.

"Only me?"

Nod.

"Good," she said, and smiled, and the smile practically knocked him backward it was so wonderful. "Would you like to join me and my friends?"

He shook his head again. Just barely.

"It's hard to keep asking yes-or-no questions." When he shrugged, she said, "Because you're a snob and you think they're assholes? My friends, I mean. Is that why you don't want to sit with us?"

He nodded. The unhappiest nod of his life.

"Hmmm. Well, I kind of agree. So do you mind if I join you?"

He shook his head. The happiest shake of his life.

After she signaled the waiter for a drink, a dark beer, Caroline said, "Don't you want to know why I'm sitting with you?

He nodded.

"Because I love this music. And my friends don't get it. And I could tell you do, just by watching you. So I wanted to sit with someone who got it. Do you believe that?"

Another nod.

"Good. As long as you know that's the only reason. Because otherwise I don't think you're at all interesting or different, you're clearly just like everyone else I know, and on top of that you're not at all handsome."

"Do you like Italian food?" he asked. The first words he ever said to her.

She looked at him, as if surprised that he really could speak, then she nodded.

"You want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?"

She looked at him again, this time not surprised, but it was a long look, searching for something. And whatever it was she was searching for, she found, because she nodded again. A firm and decisive nod.

"What's the matter," he said, "can't you speak?"

This time she smiled another one of her smiles and shook her head, a long, slow, gentle, lovely, absolutely perfect shake.

They were together almost every minute after that. But it took four more months before he would know that he was truly in love with her, that he would have to marry her.

It was the day she met Dominick Bertolini.

– "-"-"AFTER JACK'S MOTHER died, Jack moved into Dom's two-bedroom Hell's Kitchen apartment. It was the most natural thing for both of them. They were good company for each other and they each provided a necessary and comforting tie to the past without ever having to talk about it.

In his early teens, Jack went to work in Dom's meatpacking plant on Gansevoort Street, spending most of his afternoons and evenings in the meat district. It wasn't a strange environment for Jack, just the opposite – it was where he felt most comfortable, where he felt grown-up. Doni paid him good money and young Jack had an affinity for the work. He was strong enough to lift and carry whole sides of beef, strong enough even to hack through just about anything. The blood didn't bother him. It was simply part of the job, something to deal with. The fact is, he liked the cold rooms, the sawdust on the floors, the stark walls, the carcasses hanging from hooks, surrounding him. He loved being around Dom, listening to his stories of the old days in New York, the saloons, the personalities, the infamy that had followed him around when he was young. It was most definitely a man's world and Jack was comfortable living in it. And he stayed there quite happily until he was old enough to move eighty blocks uptown and go to college.

But it took Jack quite a while before he could bring Caroline downtown to meet Dom that first time, to see the other side of his life, which she knew nothing about. Even after several months of dating, he was nervous about it. It was an alien world to her, as alien as her world, as she described it, would be to him. If hers was a world of privilege and refinement, his was dominated by sweat and hard work and the need to survive. He was afraid to bring her there, he told her. And the fear was not that she wouldn't like his world – that would not make him happy but he could deal with it – it was that she would cause him to dislike it also.

She didn't say anything when he told her this. Just said that she understood. Then, after a few months, they were having lunch – his treat, a Coke and a souvlaki in Central Park – and she turned to him and said, "Are you ready?" He knew immediately what she meant and he thought for a moment, then nodded and said, surprised, "Yeah, okay, I'm ready." But he prepared her first.

He couldn't do this to her without preparing her. So first he told her about his own past, told her more about himself than he'd ever told anyone.

Jack explained to Caroline that he had come to terms with the tragedy that cast such a long shadow over his youth. He'd had to come to terms with it – because he'd lived through it and because he knew he had to keep on living with it. It was what had happened, the way Little League or broken arms or divorce had happened to other children. But when she began to ask questions, tentative and careful but never embarrassed or awkward, and then to touch his arm gently and probe, as if it were her right to know everything there was to know about him, he admitted that sometimes he still awoke in the middle of the night, horrified at the images that flitted before his eyes: standing there frozen with fear, unable to help his mother; the lunatic dangling him from the shattered window; Dom pulling him up to safety. When he couldn't sleep it was often because the guilt overcame him. He had lived and she hadn't. She had moved to save him; he knew that's why she was running to him before the madman had stopped her. But he had not had her strength or will. He had not saved her. He had let her die and he would have to live with that forever.

That night, after they had made love on the single bed in his cramped dorm room on 115th Street and Amsterdam, he could see she'd been thinking about what he'd told her, and he thought she was going to say something sappy, try to make him feel better by saying It wasn't your fault or You can't save other people or You were only a boy or one of the other meaningless phrases that so many people had thrown out to him, trying to be kind, over the years. But she didn't say anything like that. Instead she murmured: "You said that your mother had something she wanted to tell you that day. Did you ever find out what it was?" Jack nodded and said, "Dom had proposed. She was going to tell me they were getting married." Caroline rubbed his shoulder with the heel of her palm and kissed the side of his neck, then she buried her head in his chest and told him that this is what she knew: when wounds healed, it wasn't as if they'd never existed. They left scars and those scars lasted a lifetime. She told him that he would never be the same person he was before his mother died, he was somebody different, somebody new. She also told him that she loved this new person. Then she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

The next day, Jack called Dom and told him he was bringing someone over to meet him.

"Oh, Christ, is it a girl?" Dom asked.

"Oh, Christ, of course," Jack responded.

"You don't wanna do this, Jackie. This ain't my best thing. What am I gonna talk to her about – hanger steaks?"

"Just charm her with your natural wit," Jack said. "But try not to use the words 'fuckin' and 'asshole' in the same sentence too often, okay?"

"Nothin' but trouble," Dom told him. "You know that? You give me nothin' but trouble."

Jack and Caroline went downtown straight from Goldman's psych class. They took the Broadway line to Fourteenth Street, walked the two blocks west from Seventh Avenue.

"What I'm going to tell you," he said, holding her hand, "Dom told me when I was eight. It's something I've known and lived with my whole life. He was a nervous wreck, told me it was a big secret he was sharing with me, and I'm still not sure why he told me when he did, but I remember he really wanted me to say something afterward, so I looked at him and said, 'Thanks.' He was kind of thrown and he said, 'That's all you got to say?' and I said, 'What else is there to say?' I never saw anyone look so relieved. He just told me, 'Yeah, I guess that's right.'"