I envied the days before everyone had a camera phone, when a man could take his goomah (translation, literal: godmother; colloquial: mistress, side piece) out to a sit-down dinner without having to worry about a surprise Facebook tag waiting for him on his MacBook like served court papers. The president of the United States of America had an affair with the most famous woman in Hollywood and there was zero evidence of it happening—a freshman cheerleader gives me a box of brownies in the hallway and I’m being interrogated worse than a Jew in Spain!
And I wasn’t a cheater, either. I was so content with Maria that I viewed other girls with monk-like indifference, even the freshman Ukrainians with their tight asses and the perpetual beauties like Julie Fischer and Jenna Tisch. It was rumored that Julie had been blowing Aaron Podhoretz when he was home from college and he’d unloaded a glob right on her forehead—she didn’t seem so special after that.
“Victor, I want to leave,” Maria said, glaring into my soul. “One of those… African-American guys…”
“No, they’re Haitian.”
“One of those… Haitians kept talking about his gun and it’s vulgar.”
“Oh, Henri? He doesn’t mean his penis; he’s talking about his nine-millimeter. Henri is always strapped.” My clarification didn’t change her mind.
But that was back before Joey died, when the DeVallo residence was serendipitous bedlam, not the bleak, backwater opium den it became when the techno music ceased and the Roman candles stopped firing.
Within a year of Joey’s death, Tank checked into rehab out in Colorado, Carmine got a girl pregnant, and Sonny disappeared, which was becoming an increasingly difficult thing to do.
Oh, and André? Ms. Lampedusa wouldn’t let André’s family put a candle anywhere near Joey’s on that godforsaken stretch of Route 22.
Castles were torn down overnight in the middle of my junior year. The economic crash didn’t hit everyone equally, but it hit everyone. “I think we’ll be okay,” my mother said. “You’re lucky your sister won’t be going to college.” Ahhh, the double-headed punch of a mother’s guilt. I knew it well. In one sentence I was reminded that my sister had a disability restricting her from graduating high school that was completely out of my control and that I would not be receiving a football scholarship for college.
The phone usually rang at dinner and my father would never permit anyone to answer it, but we had gotten rid of the one with the tan spiral cord that would follow my mother around the kitchen like a pet and upgraded to a cordless phone with caller ID.
“Don’t answer it, don’t answer it. We’re eating.”
“It’s Hermien Badenhorst, Silas’s mom. Why would she be calling now?”
“Oh, she’s so nice. Vito, you still hang out with Silas?”
“Should I get it?” she asked, agitated by her limbic role of the house phone answerer.
“Okay, okay. Just answer it. Did something happen between you and Silas?”
I hadn’t really spoken to Silas recently. We went to a bunch of the same parties and were definitely friendly, but he’d gravitated more toward the Jew Crew and I had drifted off with Maria.
So when my mother started with the “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I had to really focus and think if I had done something with and/or to Silas that perhaps I had lodged somewhere deep in my subconscious in a fit of Mr. Hyde–like fury.
“What? What is it, hun?” my father asked, his mouth full of cheese ravioli. “Hey, Vic, you like the ravs? Good, huh? Tell Maria—tell her she won’t find ravs like these out in Tempe.”
“Oh my God.” She moved her hand around her face—fingers on eyes to forehead to cheek—stiff and calculated like a silent-film actor. “Okay, I’ll tell him. Thank you, Hermien. How is he? And Silas? Okay. Okay, take care now.” And she hung up.
“Victor…” It was my full name, but she had tears in her eyes. This was a curveball; I didn’t know what to expect.
“Hun, what is it?”
“Victor, Mr. Shaffer, Paxton’s father—he killed himself this morning.”
“Are you serious?” I asked like a seventeen-year-old. Like a total idiotic imbecile who lacked any shred of sympathetic depth and actually, possibly, considered that his mother had the comedic aptitude to pull off such a dry joke as Your friend’s father killed himself—psych! “How?” I asked.
“He… Britney, you can be excused, sweetheart.”
“Okay, Mom?”
“Yeah, it’s okay, you can go downstairs.”
“But… why are all of the fathers dying?”
“Just go downstairs, Brit!” I screamed.
“Don’t yell at her, Victor!” my mother shouted.
Britney rushed out of the kitchen and down the steps, Marlene in hand.
“He… uh… he jumped in front of the train on his way to work,” my mother said, as if the leap had been nothing more than an inconvenience on his commute.
“Oh my God, that’s just… that’s awful,” my father said between wet chomps of melt-in-your-mouth braciole.
“Are you going to be okay, sweetheart?” she asked, as if it had been Paxton himself mangled on the tracks. “You need to be excused? You can go.”
“Go ahead, my friend. Give Maria a call. Tell her we have plenty more ravs if she hasn’t eaten yet. She isn’t going to get ravs like this out in Tempe,” my father said, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
I accepted my father’s invitation to hang with my girlfriend on a school night and texted her in the hallway while I eavesdropped on my parents’ conversation.
Text to Maria <3 <3: Hey, Paxton’s dad killed himself. Want to come over?
“Hey, hun, which one was Shaffer again? Was he the one with the Porsche and the boat?”
“I think it was a Maserati, and no, they didn’t have a boat. Paxton, the one in Vic’s grade, would go around telling everyone they had a boat.”
“I’ll have my mother send them
