37
Rob wanted to know what I was doing that night, did I have plans. It was late April.
“Not really,” I said.
“Fine,” Rob said. “I’ll be over in twenty minutes.”
I came down to sign him in and found him sitting on the security desk, sweet-talking Juanita the guard. Under one arm was a record album, and in his hand was a paper bag.
“Right outside Bedford,” Juanita was saying.
Rob repeated like he didn’t hear right, “Bedford?”
Juanita’s walkie-talkie hissed at her hip. “That’s right.”
“Bedford Falls, like in the Jimmy Stewart movie? The Christmas movie?”
“Actually, just plain Bedford.”
He creaked his neck around. “You had me goin’ for a minute there. Bedford Falls. That’d be like meeting somebody from Mayberry.”
I signed Rob in. Beyond him, through the doors to the street, there was a pull to the night. Like a puppet being lifted to a stand, the earth was coming alive to spring.
I asked Juanita if Rob was giving her a hard time.
“Not at all, honey,” she said.
“Me?” Rob exclaimed. “She’s the one telling me she’s from Bedford Falls!” I pulled him off the desk by his sleeve. He leaned down to her. “You wanna know something? I’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life a dozen times, but I’ve never made it through Miracle on 34th Street once.”
We boarded the elevator, and the heavy doors knocked closed. It was the first time I’d seen Rob since the previous summer in Montauk. Though I had changed and he had changed, there was a place we shared that was enduring. In that region, we observed the need for caution. In that region was Rourke.
“Ever chew tobacco?” he inquired, staring ahead.
I said that I hadn’t, staring ahead too.
“You’re in for a night.” He shook the suspicious-looking paper bag, dangling it like a mouse he’d caught. “Elephant Butts, it’s a type of chew you can’t get down here. Charlie Cutlass drove it down from Oswego. I ever tell you about Charlie Cutlass?”
I shook my head.
“Sad story. Tell you later, over a good stiff drink. Remind me.”
We were sitting on the floor by my bed, chewing tobacco, listening to a Richard Pryor album. Rob had obviously come to tell me something or ask me something, and that something had to do with Rourke. Behind every situation is a picture, and I got the picture as best I could: Rob felt bad for me but Rob stood by Rourke’s decision to take off. I could not speak of what had happened without seeming to blame Rourke, and Rob could not speak without seeming to betray him. I would not compromise their friendship by speaking of feelings, yet my silence had the very effect I’d hoped to avoid. Maybe there was more; I really wasn’t sure.
From the moment he arrived, Rob’s eyes would not rest long on me. I thought he would have kissed me hello. He couldn’t even kiss me. Every day I dealt with the business of my handicap, I’d become used to it, but it was new to him. I was sorry for the shock of seeing me changed. Denny had recently given me a photograph he’d taken of me from my birthday party senior year, to show me how different I looked now. The change was unsettling. My face was still my face, and yet it seemed like all the life had gone out.
“Where’s your friend tonight?” Rob asked.
“Which friend is that?”
“Which friend,” Rob repeated flatly. He spit into a paper cup, the tobacco juice shooting in a streak between his top and bottom teeth.
I stood to flip the album. I was incredibly high from tobacco. I felt like someone was tossing me sideways into the wall, only there was no someone and no tossing, just the wall. “He’s away. Somewhere.”
“Somewhere my ass. He’s golfing in Palm Beach with his parents. Tough life.”
“I don’t know. I don’t like Florida.”
“You’d change your tune fast enough. That family travels in style. Five stars all the way. For breakfast there’s oatmeal, fruit cups, trays of bacon, the papers, a swim. Then sun. Later it’s shopping, tennis, a massage, another swim. You pop a button off your slacks or spill hollandaise on your dinner jacket, and they got a Polish laundry lady and a tailor in the closet of your suite. Waiting, like elves. They come out when you’re gone and pick lint.”
I dropped back down to the floor, crashing shoulders. “I wouldn’t trade places with them.”
Rob looked at me and smiled. He slapped his thighs. “Right. Who needs margaritas and white sands when we’ve got everything right here—chewing tobacco, Richard Pryor, industrial carpet, and a couple cans of—what is this crap we’re drinking?” He hunted for his soda.
“Tab.” I’d taken it from Ellen’s refrigerator.
He shook his head. “Jesus. Tab. I’m happy as a clam.”
“Don’t forget the girl,” I reminded him.
“No,” he said. “Who could forget the girl.” This was followed by a hapless interlude. Rob kept looking around, nodding serially like one of those hard dogs in the rear windows of cars from the boroughs. “So,” he said, “who does this roommate think she is anyway, one of the Gabors?”
——
The main thing to do at Gulf Coast is drink jalape?o martinis. Rob ordered two and he removed his hooded gray sweatshirt. Underneath was a denim vest, and under that, a T-shirt: Fantini Brothers Construction. If I had my way, I’d tear this f*cking building down.
The bartender said, “Seven bucks.”
Rob gave him a withering look, then paid. “I gotta get you to Pinky’s out in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg,” he proposed to me. “My cousin owns it, so I drink cheap. It’s worth the trip. None of this three-dollar-and-fifty-cent pepper water served by actors. When’s your birthday?”
“November.”
He shook his head. “Too far. What’s the next holiday?”
“Easter?”
“Nah, Easter passed.” Easta. “Tell you what, though, next year we’ll get a couple bunnies and go to Pinky’s. My mother makes up baskets for the Sunday School kids. I’ll get her to make you a basket. With that shredded crap, that nest crap. Girls like that. What do you call it?”
I shrugged. “Shredded nest crap.”
He eyed me. “You think I’m kiddin’.”
“I don’t,” I said, laughing.
“You’re gonna back out on me, aren’t you? I’ll be sittin’ there alone with a beer and a bunny basket, and I’ll be lucky to leave Pinky’s with my nose on straight.”
Denny was late as usual. We’d called him before leaving the dorm. He and Rob had not yet met, though they’d heard about each other. Just in case, I prepared them. I told Denny that Rob was not a bigot despite the fact that he might look like one, and I told Rob that Denny was gay-ish.
“What’s that mean, gay-ish?” Rob wanted to know. “Don’t he know by now?”
“It’s probably better if you don’t mention it.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure, I getcha.” Rob nodded and pointed. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was he got, and got so vividly, but I decided to let it go. Apparently Rob forgot his promise because the second Denny walked in, Rob said, “Hey’ya, kid, how’s curtain-making going?”
“Just fine, sweetheart,” Denny snapped back without missing a beat. “I’m knitting you a Speedo for summer.” He folded his new blue trench coat over a stool. It was the same coat John Lennon used to have. Denny was still in mourning from Lennon’s death. He kissed me and sized up Rob’s outfit. “What happened? Did you have to change a few tires on the way over?”
Denny gestured for a new round by snapping his fingers in the air then making a lasso with his left index finger. Denny was a lefty. Every now and then he would fly into a panic. “Lefties die sooner than righties. No wonder! It’s the stress!”
He acted slightly more gay since moving to New York, which may have been belated self-expression, or something more formulated and political, or just a time-saving transmission of preference. I was confused about whether to be glad for him because he was finally able to express himself, or concerned that he was losing his individuality and imitating others. He had a lot of new friends. “FIT is filthy with fags,” he’d say.
Rob couldn’t deal with the cost of drinks at Gulf Coast, and Denny couldn’t deal with the “film crew” atmosphere, so we walked west across Twelfth Street, then turned up Tenth Avenue to head to some dive in Chelsea called Stecky’s. On the way, Denny said he had started dating someone named Jeff. Denny wasn’t with John anymore, which was too bad because I liked John. They’d been together for two years.
“John gave me cooking lessons for Christmas,” Denny complained. “Can you believe it? How sexist is that?”
I shrugged. “Cooking’s okay.” I didn’t see anything wrong with cooking lessons. Denny was actually a lousy cook.
“I hope you used the lessons before you split up. That would be a tremendous waste,” Rob said.
At Stecky’s, we each grabbed a stool and pulled up to the bar. The minute we sat down, Rob started asking the bartender about his handlebar mustache.
“How long’s that thing?” Rob inquired. “You know, after a shower? Is it down to your chin, or what?” He flipped up his hands. “Just curious.”
Simultaneously Denny started in on the trivia question written in blue wax on the bar mirror—“Who was the Triple Crown winner before Secretariat?”
“It’s a tough one,” the bartender said. His name was Billy. “It’s been up for a couple days.”
“Call your dad about the trivia question,” Denny suggested to me.
“That’s right. Get him on the horn,” Rob said. He asked Billy for a phone, then he nudged me. “You never mentioned parents. I figured you came from swans.”
“You mean storks,” I said as I began to dial.
“No, baby, I mean swans.”
Dad picked up.
“Hi, Dad. It’s me.”
“Yeah, hi!” he called out excitedly. My father always calls out on the phone, like he’s talking into one of those candlestick jobs. It’s a wartime habit, like hoarding canned foods. The basement of the shop is full of canned foods. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I’m at a bar with Denny and Rob. What’s up with you?”
“We just got back from dinner with Ralph Russo. He’s got neck cancer.”
“Neck cancer?”
“That’s no name for a horse,” Rob said into my ear.
“First, he had polyps,” Dad was saying. “They biopsied them. Now he has to get that operation. You know, the hole and the battery-operated thing. The wand. Poor bastard.”
It didn’t feel right to mention the trivia question considering Ralph Russo’s condition, but the whole crowd at the bar was kind of hanging over the counter, watching.
Dad didn’t have to think. He just said, “Citation, 1948.”
I asked Billy, “Is it Citation?”
Billy said, “Bingo!”
Denny took the phone to say hello, then Rob took a turn, saying, “You’ve got one hell of a trap brain and one sweetheart of a daughter.” A few more people grabbed the receiver to ask Dad if he had any tips on tomorrow’s races. When I finally said goodbye, my father sounded cheerful. I was glad we’d called. “Bye, Dad. Say hi to Marilyn.”
“All right, then,” he shouted. “Have a good time.”
Billy gave us a round of highballs even though the prize was for one free drink. “Technically, soliciting recruits isn’t legal, but I’ll let you slide. I was just about to wipe the board anyway.”
When Johnny Mathis came on the jukebox and Denny heard the slow beginning notes of “Chances Are,” he grabbed me. “C’mon, honey, let’s go dance.”
Denny was big, but he wafted when he moved, and when he held me close, it was like flying—my feet hardly touched the ground. His Uncle Archer had taught us all the dances from Saturday Night Fever. We must have seen the movie about fifteen times.
“Seventeen,” Denny corrected, and we dipped. The bar and the liquor bottles drifted obliquely. “I still have the stubs.”
I’d forgotten how confusing it is to touch a body that is an attractive body to which you are not necessarily attracted, to be near your opposite but not your match. All the things that click on in your head have to click off. My breasts were bearing into his chest, my hands were holding his biceps, and I could feel his penis through his pants, which was a nice feeling and not intimidating, because his body was his own and not something he hoped to share with me. Denny finished up, singing sweetly through the end, then we kissed and bowed and the people at the bar applauded.
Rob whistled from his tilted-back chair, saying, “Man. I gotta get you down to the Criterion.”
Denny wiped his brow. “What’s that?”
“A club down in Jersey, for fighters. What are you, six-one?”
“Six-two.” He squeezed the skin around his wrist. “But I’m fat. I need to lose ten pounds.”
“Nah. You just need to make muscle. Somebody light on his feet like you would make good money as a sparring partner. A lot of guys are powerful, but they’re dead weight. Fighters need to practice moving. So long as you don’t cry or anything.”
“Denny wouldn’t cry,” I said.
“Let me tell you something, angel, they all cry,” Rob said. “Right at weigh-in. You’d be surprised what the thought of a ruptured spleen’ll do to a guy.”
It was about two in the morning when Denny decided to take off, which was a record for him. I’d never known him to stay in one place for so long. Before he left, he and Rob exchanged numbers. When Rob wrote, he hung over the table, parallel to it, focusing his might on the task at hand. It was beautiful, his aliveness, his connectedness, his focus. Like he really wanted to make a friend. And Denny, looking on with a tender fascination, watching the careful letters take shape. I remember thinking, if anything ever happened to damage either one of them, it would destroy my faith in living. As I formed the thought, I realized that’s exactly how they felt for me.
At the Empire Diner, Rob and I sat at the counter.
“I was driving over tonight,” he said, “and I heard some crackpot on the radio saying how she broke her back and the doctors told her she wouldn’t walk for a year. She prayed to God to get well so she could pay the mortgage on her house. A couple weeks later, she’s walking. ‘God granted my wish,’ she says.” Rob shook his head. “When did everything get so literal? Where I come from, you pray for hard times to get better and they do, not because God pays the mortgage, but because your family and friends lend you money.”
He took a bite of cheeseburger, buckling the splayed wedge into his mouth. “When my mother prays, you can hardly hear. It’s like a slow leak in the faucet. She would never pray for anything specific. She asks for help becoming a better person—more compassionate, more patient, whatever. Every day she stops in church. The priest comes by the house—dinner, coffee, holidays. My grandmother makes him pasta e fagioli to take back to the rectory. If I go over to pick up the used Tupperware, he comes out with a shopping bag full to the top with containers. God isn’t supernatural—God is like, the street, the neighborhood, the way things are. If you’ve got pressing questions about it, you don’t go talk to the priest. You become one.”
The waitress collected our plates. She was pretty with bangs and short black braids. Rob stopped her, and picked the remainder of my tuna sandwich from the plate.
“Growing boy,” he explained with a wink, then he ordered coffee and cake for us.
The door opened and three guys walked in. Rob looked over his shoulder and shifted instinctively to block me. Lots of people say, Over my dead body, but with Rob, it was true. And unlike with Denny when we were dancing, Rob was my opposite. I couldn’t help but wonder if my perfume distracted him as much as the way he chewed his ice distracted me.
He set his elbows on the counter. “You believe in God?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“When we were in college in L.A., we heard shit like, I don’t believe in God, I believe in an all-powerful, all-loving being. All-powerful, all-loving being? What is that? Same as God, only no rules!”
The waitress returned with dessert and coffee. The cake was circle-shaped and flat like a soggy disc.
Rob threw up his hands. “What happened?”
“Pineapple cheesecake,” she said. “It gets wilty.”
“It looks like you dropped it onto the saucer from midair.”
“It happens to be very popular. You guys got the last two pieces. I can take them back and resell them.”
“Nah. I’m just giving you a hard time because I like those braids.” But as soon as she turned, he stopped me from taking a bite. “Watch it with creams,” he warned under his breath, “They go rancid very easy.” He tested the cake and gave it his reluctant approval. “You remember my brother Joey?”
“The firefighter.”
“Yeah, right. The firefighter. He recently dragged a couple kids out of a fire. Dead.” Rob sucked back a sip of coffee and gestured to the side of his skull like he was screwing in something invisible. “He’s all f*cked up now,” he said. “My father thinks he needs counseling. Counseling—I mean, you gotta know my father. Not exactly the therapy type. But Joey can’t sleep, can’t eat; he sits up all night staring at his sons. So tonight I’m listening to this lunatic on the radio, thinking of my brother running into a burning building. Where was God for those kids? Or for their parents? Or my brother? And—”
Rob glanced up and noticed the clock. It was almost 4:30 in the morning. “Shit!” He half-stood and polished off his coffee, going, “Shit, shit, shit.” He looked at the check, threw down some cash, and waved. “C’mon, c’mon. Gotta go see Uncle Tudi.”
Rob had a tight bouncy walk. He leaned forward as if his torso were connected in a line to his legs, and he walked with purpose, though it was rare that he had one. He pulled me by the wrist down Tenth Avenue into the meat district, past the hookers and queens and the stalled and steamed Impalas. Girls in sheer baby doll dresses and boys like girls in zipper-back shorts and vinyl boots riding up brawny thighs. At the loading dock for Falco’s Meats, Rob pulled something folded from his back pocket, opened it up, and checked it over.
I took another look at the prostitutes. They were like lost sentinels, flecking the concrete horizon with bioluminescence, leaning to solicit the occasional passing car just like they do on Starsky and Hutch. At first you are not sure they’re there, they go so slow, but if you wait, they appear, like decorative fish caught in a choke of algae, bobbing out with omnidirectional eyes.
Rob crammed the paper back into his jeans pocket, and we entered the building. Remembering himself, he stopped to hold the door for me.
“How ya doin’, Tommy?” he said to the guy at the counter.
Tommy flipped a wilted page of yesterday’s news. “Hey, Robbie, que pasa?”
“My uncle leave yet?”
“Nah, he’s still in the back.”
Rob parted a row of foggy plastic strips, then turned and stopped me. “You’re not gonna get sick, are you?”
“Not in front of Uncle Tudi,” I said.
Rob said, “That’s all I wanted to hear.”
Curtains of animals lined two sides of the sawdust aisle, and I held my breath as we walked toward a room in back of the warehouse. I noticed that the pigs had no conspicuous necks. Pig necks are not so noticeable when pigs are standing in a barn or at a state fair, but when they are pendant and dead, you can see how their backs slope directly up into quadrangular heads, which are kind of boxy, like dice.
At the end of the bright run was a filthy glass wall and, behind it, the hunched torsos of men playing cards. We walked into the office to see four men with eyeglasses and caps tipped rakishly over long faces habituated to a world of flesh for sale. There was a tar-coated Mr. Coffee machine and a half-eaten Entenmann’s cheese strudel. Three of the men wore smocks streaked with brown stains, where they’d dragged their freezer-swollen fingers dry of blood and guts and marrow. The fourth man’s meticulous street clothes were an obvious expression of superiority—a dress shirt, a sweater, a quilted corduroy hunting jacket. Rob kissed him on the cheek, so I figured that was Uncle Tudi. He was huge. I wouldn’t normally stare, but his massive anatomy coupled with his shameless self-confidence was mesmerizing. Like one of those giant pumpkins you see in October at country stores, he was squat and sideways-tilted. You couldn’t help but try to guess his weight—three hundred and seven pounds.
The guys nodded.
“How ya doin’, kid?”
“Hey, Robbie. What’s up?”
Uncle Tudi breathed thickly and finessed the cards beneath the bulk of his manicured fingers. Just past the knuckle of his left pinky was a solid gold ring set with a flat face and diamond chip. His cologne was a jungle about him. “Who’s the lady friend?” he wanted to know.
“This is Eveline,” Rob said, jiggling nervously, picking an end-slice of cake off the table.
“Eveline. What kinda name is that?”
Rob motioned with his head in the direction of his uncle.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just a name, I guess.”
“What kinda name? Irish, English, what?”
“I think my mother just made it up.”
Tudi creaked back unevenly in his chair. “I thought so. I never hearda that name before. Sounds modern.”
“I fold,” the guy across from him said, laying down his hand and checking his watch.
“Me too,” another said.
The one next to Rob said he was in, and he threw a five-dollar bill on top of the pool. Tudi matched him, and they showed their hands. The guy had three jacks; Tudi had three tens and a pair of sixes. He scooped his winnings.
“Maybe it’s an old-fashioned name, Tudi, like Ernestine or Lily,” the guy with the watch speculated. He swept the cards into a pile and shuffled expertly.
Tudi clicked his tongue. “If it was old-fashion, we woulda heard it before. Especially you, Tony. You’re older than dead dog shit. That’s why it’s gotta be modern. Am I right?” he asked me, peering intensely and expectantly into my face like a seaman gauging a swelling cloud. One eye was millimeters larger than the other.
“I guess—”
He interrupted me. “Where’d youse meet?”
“Montauk,” Rob answered.
Somebody said, “Montauk! She fishes?”
“I ever tell you, Pat,” one of the guys said to another, “the transmission in my car has five settings—park, drive, neutral, reverse, and ‘Montauk.’ I adjust the arm and it goes.” His flattened palm cut into the air, Bzjump.
Through his teeth, Rob said to his uncle, “At Harrison’s place.”
“At Harrison’s place,” Tudi repeated as he organized his money, lining up bills by denomination, then folding the packed knot into his shirt pocket. He coughed a little, repeating, “Harrison,” then he coughed more, and the room got quiet. He picked up a napkin and held it over his mouth, and he stayed still and everybody stayed still. I had the feeling Rob was going to get hit.
Tudi shouted, “What the hell’s the matter with you, walking around with a girl this time of night? It’s meat packing out there, you moron, not the boardwalk!”
“Which one’s Harrison?” Pat murmured. “The fighter?”
The others nodded.
Tudi stood and adjusted his collar. “You got some numbers for me?”
Rob said, “Yeah.”
“Gentlemen,” Tudi stated formally. “If you don’t mind.”
We followed him to the door, and he just squeaked through by making a slight corkscrew motion with his belly. Outside, Rob exchanged the contents of his pocket for ten fifties.
His uncle perused the sheets. They were photocopies, lined and filled in neatly with numbers in Rob’s writing. “How’d it work out?”
“Good,” Rob said, sounding normal again, which is to say, confident. He always sounded confident when referring to numbers.
Uncle Tudi must’ve felt bad about yelling or good about the papers because he slapped Rob tenderly on the cheek then laid a barrel-size arm around my shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “You seem like a nice girl with a modern name. Don’t get me wrong, but don’t come down here again, understand?” His face was inches from mine; it was like kissing the moon. “I hate to think what Harrison would do if he knew Rob had you here at five in the morning.”
I promised I wouldn’t come back, and Uncle Tudi seemed satisfied.
He jerked his head to me, asking Rob, “She met your mother?”
“Not yet,” Rob sputtered, and his uncle shot him a look. Rob threw up his hands. “Whaaat?”
“Lemme tell you something,” Tudi said to me. “My sister, Fortuna, is a lady. Rob was raised decent, with manners. But he was a change-of-life baby for her. That’s why he’s spoiled.” He lifted a finger to Rob but said nothing. Rob also said nothing, then he nodded and kissed his uncle again.
Before we got to the door, Uncle Tudi called out. He was waddling to catch us. “Boneless pork,” he said breathlessly, handing me a package the size of a shoe box. “It’s nice.”
“She doesn’t have a stove, Uncle.”
“Whaddaya mean no stove?”
“She lives in a dormitory.” Rob backed away, taking me along. “You know. College.”
“Next time I see you two,” he warned as he withdrew the pork, “it’s in daylight!”
We spent what remained of the night on a stoop on Horatio Street. A jaundiced glow from the inside filled a second-story window across the way, and we watched it like a movie. Something had come over Rob, something not unfamiliar to me. A constitutional shift, sort of a shutdown. Sometimes he just stopped, like a machine idling.
“How long have we known each other?” I asked.
“One year,” he said. “St. Patrick’s Day.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “Seems like longer than a year.” That meant that eight months had passed since I’d seen Rourke.
He lit a cigarette. “Seems like a year.”
“I liked you as soon as I saw you,” I confided.
“Oh, yeah?” he said. He jiggled his knee lightly.
“What did you think when you saw me?”
“I thought you were good-looking.”
“Did you tell that to Rourke?”
“Not in those exact words.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember.”
I had the feeling that I owed him an apology. I thought to say sorry. I thought to thank him for coming. Only I couldn’t thank him, or say sorry, or say anything really, not when I would have had to look at him with gratitude in my eyes and still let him know he’d failed. He was the closest thing to Rourke, but he was not Rourke.
“How you been?” he wanted to know.
“Good,” I said. “I’ve been good.”
“You been all right?”
“I’ve been all right.”
I lied because Rob didn’t need to know details. He didn’t need to hear how Rourke stalked the periphery of my nights, stealthy as a feline in my dreams, mad as a dream cat. How my heartbreak kept me alive, keeping me whole the way your skin keeps your pieces in. You cannot live without skin. You don’t think to manufacture it, but absently you do. Every seven days it’s new again. I didn’t tell the truth because Rob might say, Try to be happy. People often say that. But it’s difficult to move beyond certain losses. Fire, for instance, as Rob had said, and death. It gets to where you can’t even talk to people who haven’t suffered as you have. I lied because I didn’t want him to know what it means to be sick. All the time, sick. I lied because he knew the truth anyway.
“I haven’t slept with Mark, you know.”
Rob drew in for the last time from his cigarette. “Not yet,” he said. “You will.”