Destiny? Curse? Mutation? What a Bonjour man must do

Tying the Knot : Extract from The Bonjour Gene: A Novel

By Julio Marzán

    Face up on Anthony’s bed, Michael Bonjour listened to the mandolin trio tuning up amid the engagement party bustle in the many rooms of the Carmelo house. A sick stomach had given him a good excuse to stay upstairs in his future brother-in-law’s bedroom and not have to greet the arriving guests, mainly from Cindy’s family. Except for Anthony, who studied law at Stanford and couldn’t make the party but sent a gift, the entire Carmelo clan would soon invade the house and vast backyard to toast to Cindy’s happiness. From his side, there would only be his mother and his brother Vincent, partly the reason why Michael was feeling sick.

    For days he had been dreading the arrival of Vinnie and that predictable fraction-of-a-second when the Carmelos all register his younger brother’s darker skin. Michael’s anxiety over that, as well as over countless more things spinning in his head at that moment, had kept him from eating anything for breakfast or lunch, so the two vodkas on the rocks downed by noon had been heaved up well before the first guests buzzed at the door. The petite Mama Sylvia Carmelo fed him some chicken broth before sending him up to rest in Anthony’s room to recover in time for the party. When he got up from the kitchen table, Cindy’s dad took the opportunity to quip that “Michael had turned white as a New England Yankee,” and diagnosed the stomach problem as a fear of tying the knot.

Mama Sylvia’s broth did pacify his stomach, but after lying down for almost an hour he was still unable to relax, and he could hear the extended Carmelos chiming at the door and filling the house. They had come to publicly celebrate this engagement even though they privately whispered disapprovals that could be felt through the walls.

    The engagement’s public announcement at the highest decibels in the Providence Sunday paper, with a 3´´ x 5´´ portrait of Cindy, was kept from him as a surprise. He took the clipping out of his shirt pocket:

Ms. Cynthia Carmelo, of Providence, is betrothed to Michael Bonjour, of Riverdale, New York City. Ms. Carmelo, a graduate of Providence College, is the daughter of Louis and Sylvia Carmelo. Mr. Bonjour is a graduate of Manhattan College, son of Jean McCartin and the late Edgar Bonjour, from the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York City. Ms. Carmelo is a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University. Mr. Bonjour is an executive trainee with Westminster Bank. Mr. Carmelo is founder and president of Pope Costume Jewels in Warwick. Mrs. Bonjour is a graduate of New York University and is presently office manager of the Manhattan law firm Dunkin, Hayes.

High-heeled steps passed by the bedroom door. Knocking on the door to Cindy’s bedroom, her middle-aged cousin Nancy asked when the bride-to-be would make her appearance. The door opened, and Nancy expressed exuberant admiration at how gorgeous her cousin looked. Nancy’s daughter Rebecca, the hairdresser, pointed out to her mother the special touches she had given to Cindy’s hairdo. Nancy reiterated how simply great Cindy looked.

Nancy’s voice lacked the sarcasm she customarily leveled at Michael. For the past three years, at some point when she spoke to him she would inevitably reiterate the first thing she said when they were introduced: that his light brown hair and fair complexion weren’t anything at all what she expected when she’d been told that Cindy was seeing “a Puerto Rican guy.” From Nancy’s reaction, Michael deduced that the only detail about him that made a deep impression with the Carmelos was that he was “a Puerto Rican,” when he was really also half Irish.

    Nancy was the constant reminder of the odorless yet noxious fumes emitted by the entire Carmelo family, murky signs that he had denied to himself for three years but that as the date of this formal engagement approached increasingly became clear as vodka. There were the afternoon drives with Cindy along the coast, taking in the fishing boats, the dunes, the overcast New England skies, on the way to their dropping something off for her father at the jewelry factory. As those stops were always short, Michael never minded waiting in the car. Only recently did it strike him that Cindy never thought of inviting him up to show off the family business. The full implication of his sitting in the car only flashed into his mind that morning.

    He stared at the clipping that announced to all Providence Cindy’s engagement to someone she never got up the courage to introduce to her father’s employees. This didn’t so much pain him as leave him pissed off both at the pretension of these Yankee wannabees and his own blind arrogance not to have realized that despite his being an attractive young man, embarked on an M.B.A., an executive trainee, and basically a middle-class person, the Carmelos dropped their chips with the common American herd of goofball mythology, seeing him as a “racial” embarrassment.

    This crashing consciousness of the family’s pathetic vision of him made the idea of marrying Cindy revolting, a suicide drowning in the wide bay of the Carmelos’ hypocrisy, which Lou lorded over him under the guise of Yankee moral superiority. Moral superiority, sure, like intentions to have the wedding officiated by Lou’s brother, Cindy’s uncle Vittorio. Now there was a great example of a Carmelo contradiction. After dinner last week with the family, this priest, who couldn’t control his eyes from grabbing Michael’s butt wherever it wandered, also couldn’t restrain his impulse to comment on how today’s young men wore such tight pants that revealed “their cute behinds.” That the Carmelos found him so colorful—“tolerate him; he’s my uncle,” as Cindy played lawyer—especially grated against Michael, who had to endure Lou’s lectures on the immorality that, presumably influenced by “Others,” the younger generation was raining down on his beloved country.

    Vittorio, at least, was no hypocrite and flaunted his gayness with panache, unlike his brother Lou, for whom any allusion to sexuality, even in jest, was sinfully intolerable as if he had taken a New England vow of chastity. The pinnacle expression of Lou’s wacko morality engraved itself in Michael’s memory on the night that the big huomo invited Michael and Cindy to see the Broadway production of Cabaret. Horrified at the choreography that depicted Third Reich decadence, throughout the entire first act Lou mumbled and writhed in shameful disgust until Joel Grey’s act-ending dance, peppered with gestures of grabbing women’s crotches, became the last straw. As the curtain came down, Lou shot up and ordered that they all abandon their choice center seats in the second orchestra row and walk out. The hypocrisy of this trainee WASP, this Italian American Cotton Mather, whose first lakeside New England home was torched by some pureblood Puritan who didn’t want any Saccos or Vanzettis for neighbors, galled the hell out of Michael.

    Their phony acceptance of him, Michael realized just then, was what unconsciously provoked him to present himself as someone considerably more politically radical than he was in fact. Intuiting that Lou’s invectives against Fidel Castro were really a mode of venting his dislike of Latins, including the one in his living room, Michael found himself defending Cuba and justifying Latin American revolutions against Yankee imperialism, a posture that prompted Lou’s blurting out feelings previously kept in check by his Florentine better nature.

But Michael’s darkest offense was committed inadvertently. He once mentioned to Cindy that if he had the financial opportunity he wouldn’t mind settling in Puerto Rico. He meant if they were ever rich and could afford a seaside home, as he didn’t know much else about the place and saw it as just a big beautiful beach. But Cindy, still in her rebellious phase against her parents, flaunted that possibility. Well, the thought of “foreigner” grandchildren mortally wounded Lou and set off a chain reaction. His anti-Communism and xenophobia melted in the cauldron of his general prejudices against those “who come here to mooch off America” and his specific dislike of his future son-in-law. After Cindy’s ill-advised celebration of possibly living somewhere else, any family conversation that even just grazed against some topic of international news would provoke Lou’s erupting in a paean on democracy directed, of course, at Michael.

The June night that the Carmelos met his mother should have served to foreshadow this nauseous moment of truth in Providence. His mother had the clarity to decipher the codes in the Carmelos’ words and tone, but he was too rebellious and steeped in denial to admit to himself that his mom was right. The meeting took place in Manhattan. Lou invited Michael and his family for dinner at the Waldorf, where the Carmelos arrived with Cindy, who had just finished her masters in education and moved back home. Having not seen her in almost two weeks (although they talked on the phone daily), Michael expected to feel more attraction than he did, but he didn’t give the matter a second thought just then. At the oval table, he sat between Cindy and his mother, facing Lou and Mama Sylvia beside the empty chair that would have been for Vincent, who insisted he had to study, something far more important than being gawked at by jerks less engrossed in his being about to graduate from Columbia and deciding on a law school than his being the darker of the two brothers. Understanding his feelings, their mother didn’t pressure him.

    During the appetizers there truly appeared to exist some hope for this union, but by the main course the malocchio was operating full strength. Mama Sylvia sustained her character of the warm, understanding embodiment of equanimity. She even did a splendid job at showing no reaction that Mrs. Bonjour, although nearly her same age, looked twenty years younger than she did, even though that fact was obvious to any human with a working set of eyes, among whom figured Lou. Michael was proud of his mother’s looks, her jet-black hair and green eyes and youthfully kept figure. Also in contrast with the laconic Mama Sylvia, his Irish mother talked a blue streak and kept Lou in stitches with her mildly risqué jokes. If the Carmelos had expected Jean McCartin to be daunted, they were wrong; she did what she pleased, as when she married his father.

    Edgar Bonjour’s name was never mentioned, and any mention of it would have made Michael want to slide under the table and crawl unseen out of the Waldorf. But his father’s ghost haunted every second of the evening. If the Carmelos should mention his name, how was anyone going to explain his father’s getting involved in drug dealing and being murdered in a motel? Temporary insanity was how the family publicly interpreted the tragedy. In telling Cindy, grasping at a scenario that made sense, Michael embellished that his father had accumulated debts and simply went nuts in trying to get out of the hole. This spin, Michael figured, provided a financial, logical explanation that cleansed the story of its Latin irrationality, turning his father’s downfall into a materialistically rational Anglo-American tragedy, one that would sit well with Cindy’s parents. But did the Carmelos really buy his explanation, and were they now about to deal that “other” card?

    His mother circumvented invoking her husband’s name in her rendering of the decent upbringing that a generalized parental “we” had given both her sons. But at one point that “we” provided a window through which Mama Sylvia could satisfy, in her benign, unthreatening manner, her curiosity to know how a young, intelligent, vibrant woman ever made a choice of husband so mined with social liabilities, although the question was varnished more innocently, “How did you and your husband meet?”

    To answer that question, his mother first detoured the Carmelos through her Bronx upbringing and her years on Soundview Avenue where, as the population shifted and her mother remained widowed and too poor to move, in time she befriended Puerto Rican girls. From them she learned how to cook, walk and especially dance.

    Of her Latin dancing and playing music in the house, Michael shared his father’s embarrassment, but deep inside they were both secretly proud of her. Now her flaunting it as part of her shrewd response to Mama Sylvia made him doubly proud. Her brief autobiography had laid a base of self-confidence for when she got around to describing how she had met Edgar at New York University, in an English class, and that, being attracted to him, she found herself showing off how Latin she could be. Then, letting the Carmelos know that she knew the true nature of Mama Sylvia’s ostensibly innocent question, she proceeded to zing them by appending that after she discovered the quality of person he was, Edgar surprised her by letting her know that her acquired Latin mannerisms were superfluous because he wanted her for herself and felt—just like herself, she underscored—that as an American he had outgrown paying any mind to the social stigma other people made of his ethnic background.

    “His ancestry was actually French,” she surprised them. Lou, curious, said nothing but wrinkled his eyebrows. She told them that a woman from a corporate branch in Chicago once called her, having seen her name in a company newsletter. The Chicago woman was a French Canadian whose parents had emigrated from France, and the name Bonjour had attracted her attention because her parents had always said that only one French family bore that name. To this his mother explained that Bonjour was actually her married name and that her husband’s family was from Puerto Rico, but that he had told her in their family it was always said that only one family bore the name Bonjour. Not waiting for a reaction, his mother also made a point of noting the loveliness of Mama Sylvia’s earrings, which Lou had gotten for her from a wholesaler from Florence.

    As his mother spoke, from the corner of his eye Michael noticed that Mama Sylvia took glances at him. He fancied that maybe Mama Sylvia was trying to extrapolate what percentage of his active ingredients came from this interesting woman, his mother. He thought this because his mother seemed to be making everybody feel good about this engagement, going as far as underscoring how happy and relieved she was that Michael had chosen to marry a girl so charming, generous and intelligent as Cindy—an enthusiasm that took Michael by surprise. His mother had never expressed such favor toward Cindy, who blushed and pressed his hand.

    Later, on the drive home, however, his mother revealed that although she did, in fact, like Cindy, her effusive praise of the girl was meant to test how compelled the Carmelos felt to respond in kind toward Michael. That they didn’t offer more than smiles and nods told everything she needed to know, which was that if she had any control over the situation, Michael wouldn’t go through with this marriage, which did not measure up to the high caliber he deserved. “You’re lucky that I didn’t leave on their laps the reassuring legend about Bonjour men that your abuela Martina so thoughtfully laid on me. For your sake I held back many things I could have said about your father, but what matters now is that you think this out a little better, Michael.”

    But his seeing her wisdom at that moment was obstructed by a determination to finally resist her admiral’s control of him, to carve out his own identity, make this major decision on his own, an independence that came at the cost of reacting normally to so many obvious danger signs. Like Cousin Nancy’s incessant innuendos and Uncle Joseph’s fish-eye looks. Denying their antagonism, his gut reaction had hibernated until now, the engagement party, when he admitted to himself that although the Carmelos did serve him some honey, it was only vaguely sweet and more often whatever else he drank was acidic. His mother had been right all along, and had he only listened to her he wouldn’t be suffering a cosmic bellyache.

    Cindy had been walking on the beach of the Dorado Beach Hotel. As a birthday present to Lou, Mama Sylvia had convinced the two feuding Carmelo children—Cindy the atheist hippie liberal and Anthony the neo-fascist Catholic conservative—to convene in truce and take part in a two-week family vacation. While Lou and Mama Sylvia and Anthony played golf, Cindy, who had graduated that month from Boston University, spent bored hours alone, usually swimming or strolling along the shore or reading on a beach chair. On the sunny afternoon starting the second week, Michael, enjoying his mother’s graduation present of a week at the hotel, positioned his beach chair near an empty one. When Cindy returned from the water, with her brown hair flowing, her sunburned skin wet and glistening in a two-piece, he fully appreciated her buxomness and earthy, wide hips. He introduced himself and immediately loved her smile. Her smart and warm personality further contributed to her exciting him thoroughly. At the end of the week, she invited him to have dinner with her family. Everyone behaved genuinely charming, clearly pleased that Cindy had found a vacation companion. In that family context, among such obviously bedrock stable people, Michael felt comfortable, more than comfortable, seduced.

But back in New York he discovered that Cindy’s participation in that American Dream family life had been a performance. Her real life was that of a flower child who slummed in one of the few remaining old walk-ups on Manhattan’s upscaling Upper East Side. As that person, she couldn’t stand being with her parents, especially that bundle of contradictions, her father. “While always harping on being an American,” she complained, “he tries to control me totally like every Wop father.” On the other hand, the ultra–Yankee Puritan, he also expected her to be WASPily dainty and ladylike and never looking “like a real Italian,” meaning made-up or sexy. So whether out of conviction or to get even, she vehemently opposed her daddy’s politics, “his imperialist support of our raping Vietnam.” He embodied, she would repeat, why this country was becoming a drag for her to live in, why she was willing to live anywhere else if she had the chance.

    Michael gradually persuaded her to lower her guard, not be unfair to her parents, who were from another generation and who continued to finance her lifestyle and graduate studies despite having to wait months for a weekend visit. What debt she thought her father owed her Michael didn’t care to compute, but he didn’t see it as insurmountable. As his defense of her parents’ best intentions sank in, Cindy began to cast off her constant dirty jeans and boots and began wearing dresses, using makeup in moderation, and shaving her armpits, changes that gradually brought her closer to the family hearth. In retrospect, the new Cougar parked in front of the house for her birthday signaled a renewed beginning of family bonding, and Lou’s move to end their relationship.

    But Michael didn’t make that connection back then, partly because he had been concentrating on making this relationship a serious one and not taking it to where his Bonjour drives had always led him. The temptation to cheat while Cindy was away was ever present during those days of “sexual revolution,” but he resisted them, although the greatest threat came from her parents’ home, where Cindy’s lonely cousin Rebecca visited often. She and her husband had been separated almost a year. Nobody paid Rebecca much attention in part because she wasn’t one to keep up with or discuss the latest news and so stayed on the margins of family conversations. But she was also different because she made it her purpose to look sexy, like a “real Italian.” He remembered the cold New England winter afternoons when she visited the Carmelos. As Cindy chatted with her mother somewhere else in that big house, Rebecca would make coffee for herself and offer him a cup, then sit and talk about simple things, movies, funny experiences at the mall. It took fortitude to refuse her pretty attention, but his mind was focused on not doing exactly what a Bonjour man was destined to do and ruin everything. Maybe it was his distraction with that legacy that kept him from decoding the first message of underlying separation, when Michael fantasized yet again about moving to Puerto Rico: “Will I be happy in a place where I can’t speak the language, Mikey?” He was surprised but didn’t see at that time the real significance of Cindy’s shedding her internationalist pretensions and reclaiming her New England Italo-American roots. He didn’t want to see what he was finally seeing now, that when they met she had cast him in her personal psychodrama of rebellion that had performed its final act months ago, that he was now an actor without a role.

    Someone tapped lightly on the bedroom door. “Michael, Cindy’s ready, so you should be coming down.” It was Rebecca. When he didn’t answer, she asked if he was all right. Cindy, she explained, wanted him to come down and help her receive the guests. He answered that he would be down in a few minutes, then listened to her high-heeled steps fade away from the door.

He forced himself up from the bed and, on his feet, recalled Lou’s answer to his formally asking for Cindy’s hand: “I had always expected her to marry a real American. You should have figured that out by now, and although I’m sure you’ll succeed in your career, I want you to know that if you marry Cindy I’m going to make legal arrangements so that she will keep whatever money belongs to her, and if she isn’t happy she can go on her own.”

    In the bathroom, he rubbed soap over his face, then rinsed it off, pausing to stare at his wet reflection in the mirror. Countless threads of emotions converged and interwove to form a tight, irreversible decision in his eyes. The noose around the neck of this marriage was now tied, and there would be no untying it. He took the newspaper engagement announcement out of his shirt pocket, rolled it into a tiny ball and threw it into a wicker basket on the bathroom floor. His decision should mend Lou’s broken heart and, Michael imagined, return the joy in the saddened soul of every Carmelo. But the actual break should come less dramatically, weeks later when he could feign a confession that he had been behaving like a true Bonjour, maybe with “a real Italian.” For now, he would go downstairs, head to the bar, and drink into a politic giddiness.

    He put on his suit jacket and was about to open the door when Rebecca knocked again. “Cindy had sent me because she can’t get away. Everybody is asking about you. Your mother and brother have just arrived.” He opened the door. The dolled-up Rebecca was a woman he had not seen before. Her black hair cascaded in curls. Her dress revealed her legs to above her knees. She wore high heels and sheer hose that decorated the sides of her calves with a black, serpentine, long-stemmed rose of lace.

    In taking note of all those details, his eyes communicated more than he had intended, and Rebecca gulped nervously. She cleared her throat before asking jokingly if what everybody was saying was true about his being afraid to tie the knot. His sincere answer yes caught her off guard, and she proceeded as if he had spoken in jest, warning him to stop playing the prima donna, because his mother was asking for him. With that, she abruptly swiveled and started to walk toward the stairs. From the door, he observed her walk, and as she took her first step on the stairs, out of his mouth leaped a request that she wait. She stopped and paused, then finally turned. But as he really didn’t know why he had stopped her, he just waved off the request and went back into the bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the bed.

    After staring at the floor for a few seconds, head in his hands, he looked up and saw Rebecca leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, her presence like an embrace. He asked her to come in for a minute. Arms still crossed, she lowered her look and tapped one foot. After a few seconds, she sighed deeply, then offered her eyes as she requested that, as a special gift to her, he go downstairs and behave, at least in that house, at least on that day.