John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Barbara had cut the man off, letting him know what she’d seen on the website.

Jay had taken the news calmly, looking over their skinny tag-along. The African stared back over their freshly-polished ride, no doubt trying to assess whether they might give him a Euro. Barb at first hadn’t felt her husband’s touch at her hip.

Today, he’d told her, we start over. It’s all going to be on another basis. No lying and no doubletalk.

They confronted their two oldest that evening, as soon as the boys revealed how they’d gone waltzing off to Sant’Elmo. Once more the parents asked the grandmother to step out onto the balcony, and Barbara allowed herself to bark a bit. Yet all she and Jay got for their efforts was another wild pixel chase through the Lulucita pages on the ‘net. She wound up reading not only the saint-of-fire business again, but also a number of messages she hadn’t picked up before. JJ and Chris knew where all the secrets were, a link that played a song about the Camorra, and another that called up a movie clip, or was it two clips? One moment you saw Jack Lemmon and Sophia Loren, the next Lemmon and Mastroanni. The two teenagers knew about them all, and they argued that every piece of input, in every format, was intended as a message for the family. Every word was meant for Jay and Barb and the kids. Whenever the people who’d followed Paul’s story got together to chat, not a line of agate type went by without some private high sign to the Lulucitas, a compliment or a warning or a nudge. Every posting was intended to close the gap between the person at the keyboard and the American santa famiglia , a wireless laying-on of hands.

“It’s like,” JJ said, “say we’re the Talking Heads. I mean, we’re one of the guys who used to be the Talking Heads. Say, then we visit a Talking Heads site. Hey, everybody on the site believes he’s our best friend. Everybody’s the Unknown Head.”

“Everybody thinks,” Chris said, “they’ve got some special private connection to us. Like, they’re saying their prayers, and they believe we’re listening.”

“Yeah. Like when Nerdly here prays to the girls from Victoria’s Secret.”

Jay glowered; he wouldn’t let them get started. Barbara, meantime, understood that what her sons had shown her in no way constituted a straight answer.

“All right,” Chris said, “think of it like — what Paul said earlier about staying in Naples. There’s a lot going on. There’s a whole lot out there.”

“A lot . And Chris and me, all of us, we’re just this one small part.”

The boys’ line of talk fell well short of convincing Barbara, they didn’t change how she read the message on the site or the trip to Sant’Elmo, but they did leave her impressed. John Junior especially, showing backbone and maturity. Before Naples, before so challenging a girlfriend (if you could call Romy a girlfriend), he would’ve told Mom and Pop everything. He couldn’t have stood up to their grilling. And both these teenagers, Barb had to admit, had learned to handle their parents a lot better than even so recently as during their Memorial Day excursion to Mystic seaport. The boys had figured out that today Mom and Pop would back off — without admitting anything of the sort, to be sure — so long as they could tell there’d been nothing too serious about the tryst at Sant’Elmo. The ‘rents just needed some assurance that the get-together had been quick, clean, and free of burdensome consequences. And that’s as much as they got, Jay and Barb: they could see that whatever had happened in the castle, it hadn’t left a mark. JJ and his girl hadn’t even found a place to lie down.

What Mom and Pop needed, in effect, was to post their own message, on their carefully encrypted site. Good parents , that was the message. We’re good parents .

“Yeah, think of Paul,” JJ said, following his brother’s lead. “He’s feeling pretty cooped up around here too. And then, I mean, his episodes.”

“He’s acting out,” Chris put in. “Like, with the onset of puberty, the hormone thing. It’s got to be some form of acting out”

“Hey, Paul wasn’t a saint to start with. Our brother was a normal young American. And you guys are good parents, you can see.”

“It’s Hormones 101. JJ and me, we’ve got to get him out, do something normal.”

The boys were getting so shrewd, they were practically Neapolitan.

“It could’ve been a lot worse, hey? All he’s been through.”

“Could’ve been a lot worse, and crazy. Like, when you think of some of the old saint stuff. The stigmata, the visions. Could’ve been hormones, you think.”

The onus fell back on Barb and Jay — how much did they need to know? How ugly did they want the evening to get? Chris shut down the browser, so the family’s Christmas-shot screen saver replaced the site’s tormented pictography, and the mother moved to the balcony doors. Vesuvius had stained the sunset a sallow white, like a t-shirt handed down from brother to brother.

Then the door slid open. The mother-in-law stood before her, smiling and half naked. She’d recognized the end of private time.

Aurora was forever nearby, just off-screen. Barbara could see the old woman in the very face of the grandson who might now be planning something dubious with his gypsy girlfriend. Jay’s mother was the Irish one in the family, the one who’d gifted her first grandchild with puckish black eyes and laugh-ready dimples. She was a beauty, Aurora. At seventy-something her build remained catlike and her wrinkles suited the shape of her face. She’d helped herself to a bit of cosmetic surgery, to be sure, and she freely owned up to these “repairs.” Also her long widowhood had included seminars on wardrobe and yoga and toners and proteins. Barbara’s notions of old Italian women, of crones in black with faces like bark — the kind of aging she imagined for her own mother — these were the opposite of Aurora. Jay’s mother even knew which events showed her off to best advantage. She was a familiar face at high-profile benefits around New York, dolling herself up for the sake of homeless shelters or free medical clinics. Two or three times, when her dress or her companion had been right, Aurora’s picture had run in the Times Sunday Styles. Even the two-piece she wore out on the Vomero balcony provided a camera-friendly complement to her hair, a richly flowing red. Silky.

A lucky woman, she was, and getting the most out of a long widowhood. Jay’s father had suffered a freak accident for which some of the wealthiest people on earth were liable. Paul Lulucita (Jay had put off passing along the name) had strayed into a mid-Manhattan movie set, some epic about a monster loose in the city. The director had loved the look of broken power lines showering sparks over standing water. So young Jay had been gifted with an exceptional trust fund, Hollywood blood-money, and even from overseas Barbara had made sure to check the remaining investments. The retirement account had grown nicely, and it looked like they wouldn’t have to worry about the college fund any more either — not since they accepted the offer from Roebuck. More than that, some years ago now the wife had grasped the emotional impact of Jay’s tragedy, the way the sudden loss of his Dad had helped prompt the son into marriage at an earlier age than might’ve been wise. Barb understood even, thanks to the Samaritan Center, how her husband’s vaporized father matched up with her own runaway mother. The absent parents provided a relationship balance, a set of ghost parallel bars.

Or you could put it another way: you could say the relationship had been trouble from Day One. Trouble was where Aurora came in. The death of her husband had scarred her differently, very, from how it had marked her son. In the widow’s case, flirtation had been raised to the level of a credo: I seduce, therefore I am. So long as I remain more flesh than bone, I’ll go on seeking fleshy pleasures. Barb recalled when they’d first met, a high-breasted Barbara Cantasola shaking hands with the mother of her hard-bellied new boyfriend. This had been barely a year after the accident, and already the widow had a man at the kitchen table, his head slick with Grecian Formula, looking over a brochure for a spa in midtown. The movie studio responsible for her husband’s death had abandoned its project, but Aurora had no qualms about stepping in where they’d left off, the monster loose in the city. Nor was the mother shamed by her son’s quick retrenchment in family life. As an in-law, too, she flaunted her “capering.” She’d shown up at Barbara’s house with men-friends as young as thirty-three (granted, no one saw his I.D.) and as old as something close to eighty. Her one rule for the children was that she never be called “Grandma.” If the kids didn’t forget she would delight them with gifts for their saints’ days, or for Easter or Pentecost or Advent or Epiphany. It might’ve been the woman’s idea of yin and yang, getting lots of men and giving lots of toys.