A man came and took their coats. And while doing this, he very quickly and subtly patted them down for weapons. Rose found herself rather liking the way the strange man’s hands felt on her body. They made her feel dangerous.
The walls inside were covered in white tiles. There were large, circular wooden tables. The waiter threw the red tablecloth up into the air as if he were a matador gracefully challenging a bull. Jimmy and Rose sat at the big table by themselves.
The other heads shuffled in shortly afterward. One man was enormous. He ate beautifully. He twirled the spaghetti around his fork perfectly. He puckered up his mouth as though he were about to give a kiss and then dabbed it with a napkin. There was a squat man. His face was round and his features all seemed to be squashed up together within a very small area. Another man kept making jokes that weren’t funny. Another had a receding hairline that made him look intelligent and like some sort of scholar, but when he spoke, he had a thick Bronx accent and used the word fuck at least twice in every sentence.
A man in a pin-striped suit arrived, apologizing that he was late because he had just come from a funeral. The way he said it, Rose wondered whether that meant he had been at a funeral parlor seeing off a beloved aunt, or out on the side of the highway burying someone in a shallow grave.
They were all rather frightening and intimidating. But Rose liked that this was the sort of company she was now keeping. She knew that she could not even for an instant reveal any form of self-doubt, or any hesitation, or be in any way threatened by the men who were sitting around the table. In other words, she was not to show any signs that she was a girl. They made small talk among themselves, and Rose joined in as if it were perfectly normal for her to be there. The gangsters didn’t really understand Canadians—everything they did seemed to be ass-backward. Perhaps the women ran the show up there. There was no way the gangsters were going to turn down Rose’s plan. They nodded that McMahon would go. It had to be soon too because he was pestering Jimmy about bumping off Rose.
The noodles on her plate looked like a ball of yarn thoroughly messed up by a cat. She couldn’t eat a bite because she was so nervous. She smiled.
? ? ?
AFTER EVERYONE LEFT, Jimmy and Rose walked down the street to the boardwalk. The ocean was right there in front of her. She’d never seen the ocean before. It was so vast compared to the rivers she’d seen. The sand resembled brown sugar. The seagulls leaped up and down as if they were at the ends of yo-yos. The waves made the sound of someone biting into an apple. When they crashed, they were a hundred thousand chorus girls raising up their dresses at once. And then the water receded again like the train of a jilted bride walking off into the distance.
Jimmy couldn’t stop glancing at her. Her hair immediately seemed to curl. Her cheeks, which always seemed to turn bright pink when she was out in the cold for too long, were suddenly all rosy. While he was looking, his eyes turned a brighter blue. It was something the ocean did to blue eyes. It turned them on as though they were lightbulbs.
They were both dressed more formally than everybody else on the beach. Their careful outfits looked absurd. The sand kept trying to get into her shoes. And the wind kept trying to knock her hat off.
A woman walked by in a long green wool coat, a striped headband tied around her forehead with a big bow at the back. She looked as though she were off to fight a dragon, Rose thought. She resembled a warrior. Her four children followed her at an increasing distance. She turned and called back to them by their absurd nicknames: Cricket and Frog and Booboo and Bird. They all laughed and hopped and skipped, but didn’t really hurry up at all. When we were free and easy, that was when we felt like ourselves. That’s what children with mothers feel like, Rose thought: free and easy.
? ? ?
JIMMY AND ROSE SAT AT the counter of a hot dog shack on the boardwalk and ordered pints of beer. After taking a sip of her beer, Rose had a white mustache on her lip. She felt a hundred pounds lighter. She wondered how that could be, and then she realized that it was because she had very temporarily lifted her business concerns and efforts off her shoulders. The beer was making them happy, like children at a birthday party. The beer made their words come out of their mouths like carbonated bubbles.
Jimmy kept looking to Rose for some sort of encouragement. She hadn’t come out here with him to discuss love. He knew that. He had just been trying to convince himself that the situation was otherwise. Jimmy handed Rose the petite briefcase. It wasn’t the ordinary kind of briefcase that a man might be in possession of. It was a dainty, thin black briefcase with a black handle in the shape of a swan biting its tail. Two clasps on either side of it made the swan’s golden wings.