John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“Come on, Dad,” Danny said to his father. “We’re fine to drive. Let little Joe come with us-we can’t all sleep in this apartment.”

“You’ll just have to, Daniel,” his father told him. “Joe can sleep in our room, with Carmella and me, and you and Katie will just have to find a way to fit in the single bed in your room-neither one of you is a large person,” the cook reminded the young couple.

Danny was angry, but he held his temper. It was Katie who behaved badly. She went into the bathroom and peed with the door open-they could all hear her. Daniel gave his dad a look that said, Well, what did you expect? Carmella went into her bedroom and closed the door. (Little Joe was already asleep in there.) When Katie came out of the bathroom, she was naked.

Katie spoke to Danny as if her father-in-law weren’t there. “Come on. If we have to do it in a single bed, let’s get started.”

Of course the cook knew that his son and Katie didn’t really have noisy sex then and there, but that’s what Katie wanted Danny’s dad and Carmella to believe; she carried on like she was having an orgasm every minute. Both Danny and his wife were so drunk that they slept right through little Joe’s nightmare later that night.

The cook and his son didn’t speak to each other when Daniel left with his wife and child the next day; Carmella didn’t look at Katie. But shortly before the would-be writer Daniel Baciagalupo took his family to Iowa, the cook had called his son.

“If you keep drinking the way you are, you won’t write anything worth reading. The next day, you won’t even remember what you wrote the day before,” the young writer’s father told him. “I stopped drinking because I couldn’t handle it, Daniel. Well, maybe it’s genetic-maybe you can’t handle drinking, either.”

Tony Angel didn’t know what had happened to his son in Iowa City, but something had made Daniel stop drinking. Tony didn’t really want to know what had happened to his beloved boy in Iowa, because the cook was certain that Katie had had something to do with it.

WHEN HE FINISHED WITH THE PIZZA DOUGH-the dough was having its first rise in the big bowls the cook covered with damp dish towels-Tony Angel limped up Main Street to The Book Cellar. He was fond of the young woman who ran the bookstore; she was always nice to him, and she often ate in his restaurant. Tony would buy her a bottle of wine on occasion. He cracked the same joke whenever he came into The Book Cellar.

“Have you got any women to introduce to me today?” Tony always asked her. “Someone about my age-or a little younger, maybe.”

The cook really liked Brattleboro, and having his own restaurant. He had hated Vermont those first few years-better said, it was Putney he’d hated. Putney had an alternative style about it. (“Putney is an alternative to a town,” the cook now liked to say to people.)

Tony had missed the North End-“something wicked,” as Ketchum would say-and Putney was full of self-advertising hippies and other dropouts. There was even a commune a few miles out of town; the name of it had the word clover in it, but Tony couldn’t remember what the rest of it was. He believed it was a women-only commune, which led the cook to suspect they were all lesbians.

And the butcher in the Putney Food Co-op kept cutting herself, or himself; cutting yourself wasn’t what a butcher was supposed to do, and Tony thought the butcher’s sex was “indeterminable.”

“For God’s sake, Dad, the butcher is clearly a woman,” Danny told his father, with exasperation.

“You say she is, but have you taken all her clothes off-just to be sure?” his dad asked him.

Yet Tony Angel had opened his own pizza place in Putney, and despite the cook’s constant complaints about Windham College-it didn’t look like a “real” college to him (never mind that he’d not been to college), and all the college kids were “assholes”-the pizza place did very well, largely because of the Windham students.

“Constipated Christ, don’t call it Angel’s Pizza-or anything with the Angel name in it,” Ketchum had told the cook. In retrospect, Ketchum had grown increasingly uncomfortable with Danny and his father choosing the name Angel-in case Carl ever remembered that the death of the original Angel had been coincident with the cook and his son leaving town in the first place. As for little Joe’s name, Danny had chosen it, though he’d wanted to name his son after his dad-Dominic, Jr. (Katie hadn’t liked either the Dominic or the Junior.) But Danny had refused to give little Joe the writer’s nom de plume. Joe had remained a Baciagalupo; the boy didn’t become an Angel. Both Danny and the cook remembered that Carl hadn’t been able to pronounce Baciagalupo; they told Ketchum it was unlikely the cowboy could spell it, either-not even to save his own fat ass. So what if Joe was still a Baciagalupo? Ketchum just had to live with it. And now Ketchum kept complaining about the Angel name!

The cook often dreamed of that asshole Gennaro Capodilupo, his runaway father. Tony Angel could still hear the names of those two hill towns, which were also provinces, in the vicinity of Naples -those words his mother, Nunzi, had murmured in her sleep: Benevento and Avellino. Tony believed that his father really had gone back to the vicinity of Naples, where he’d come from. But the truth was, the cook didn’t care. When someone abandons you, why should you care?

“And don’t get cute and call the pizza place Vicinity of Naples,” Ketchum had told the cook. “I know the cowboy doesn’t speak Italian, but any fool might one day figure out that Vicino di Napoli, or however the fuck you say it, means ‘in the Vicinity of Naples.’”

So the cook had called his Putney pizza place Benevento; it was always the first of the two towns or provinces Annunziata had uttered in her sleep, and no one but Tony Angel had heard his mother say it. The goddamn cowboy couldn’t possibly come up with any connections to Benevento.

“Shit, it sure sounds Italian-I’ll give you that, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.

The Putney pizza place had been right on Route 5, just before the fork in the center of town, where Route 5 continued north, past the paper mill and a tourist trap called Basketville. Windham College was a little farther north, up Route 5. The left-hand fork, where the Putney General Store was-and the Putney Food Co-op, with the self-lacerating butcher of “indeterminable” sex-went off in the direction of Westminster West. Out that way was the Putney School-a prep school Danny disdained, because he thought it wasn’t up to Exeter’s standards-and, on Hickory Ridge Road, where the writer Danny Angel still lived, there was an independent elementary school called the Grammar School, which had been very much up to Danny’s standards.

He’d sent Joe there, and the boy had done well enough to get into Northfield Mount Hermon-a prep school Danny did approve of. NMH, as the school was called, was about half an hour south of Brattleboro, in Massachusetts-and an hour’s drive from Danny’s property in Putney. Joe, who was a senior in the spring of 1983, saw quite a lot of his dad and his grandfather.

In his Brattleboro apartment, the cook had a guest bedroom that was always ready for his grandson. Tony had torn out the kitchen in that apartment, but he’d kept the plumbing intact; he had built quite a spacious bathroom, which overlooked the Connecticut. The bathtub was big and reminded the cook of the one Carmella had had in her kitchen in that cold-water Charter Street apartment. Tony still didn’t know for certain that Daniel had spied on Carmella in that bathtub, but he’d read all five of his son’s novels, and in one of them there’s a luscious-looking Italian woman who luxuriates in taking long baths. The woman’s stepson is of an age where he’s just beginning to masturbate, and the boy beats off while watching his stepmother bathe. (The clever kid bores a hole in the bathroom wall; his bedroom is conveniently next to the bathroom.)