It was a briefcase that only a girl would feel comfortable toting down the street. Jimmy had bought it especially as a gift for Rose. As a subtle indication to Rose that he wanted their relationship to be more than a business one.
Rose opened the briefcase. She looked at the deeds to the hotels. She read the names on the papers. She imagined what she was going to do with each one. How she would make it wonderful.
She closed her eyes and imagined the Valentine Hotel. Chandeliers sprouted down from the ceiling. The floors grew fantastic carpets. Magnolias and tulips and violets sprouted on the wall. Statues of nude girls climbed onto the empty plinths in the lobby. She opened her eyes again and smiled. She was in a good mood.
Jimmy had always been incapable of making a connection between sex and love. Sex was something that you purchased, like an Italian ice. He noticed how Rose stuck her thumb in her mouth to suck off a drop of beer. He noticed the way she shooed away a pigeon that was walking toward the shack, using just the tip of her toe. He noticed she smiled at a fat baby passing in a stroller. He was surprised at just how much her smiling at a baby got to him. She twitched her nose when she drank the beer. She crossed her ankles under the stool.
He just had to look at women and tilt his head at a certain angle and they would always blush—and it would make them have a dirty thought in their heads. And after that, getting them into bed was downhill. Many other gangsters had tried to figure out the exact degree of this angle, but they never could.
He tilted his head at Rose just to see what would happen. The sun reflected off her wedding ring and stabbed him in the eye, and for the moment he had to turn away from looking at her.
? ? ?
THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL with black hair standing out at the edge of the water. The ocean kept casting a wave like a net at her feet to try to pull her in—but failed each time. She wore a white coat and a scarf with red polka dots. She was waving at someone. It seemed to Rose that she was waving at her, though she knew that this couldn’t possibly be the case.
The driver of Jimmy’s limousine was reading a newspaper that described the Night of Broken Glass. He had spent the entire time that they were at the beach reading about how in Germany a few nights before, Jewish shops and synagogues had been raided, and tens of thousands of Jews had been rounded up. Jimmy ran the shipyards—the advent of the war was going to make him even richer than he was before. The war was frankly about to make a lot of people very rich. But nobody knew that right then, except perhaps the limo driver.
? ? ?
JIMMY LOOKED FOR AN EXCUSE to meet her backstage the next night. He came with a bottle of wine that he had been given as a gift by a politician. He said there were some details about their plan he needed to clarify. They drank the wine together. She said that she couldn’t concentrate on the numbers now that she was tipsy. Her thoughts were like corks that couldn’t stay below the surface of the water. He said he couldn’t remember the name of the street he lived on. She smiled and her teeth were purple. He was keenly aware of the fact that he was making another man’s wife laugh.
Caspar looked at Jimmy when he walked into the Romeo Hotel. “What the hell are you doing?” Caspar asked.
“I have no fucking idea,” Jimmy answered.
He went to his room to be alone. He couldn’t stop thinking of things that he wanted to do to her. He wanted to take her to the ice cream parlor that had twenty types of strawberry ice cream. He wanted to take her to visit his mother’s grave. He wanted to ride on a roller coaster with her. He wanted to go for pie with her after a movie. He imagined them listening to a record in a booth at a record store.
He imagined her in a nightgown sitting across the kitchen table, sipping coffee. Having that picture in his head made him feel almost delirious. He imagined her reaching over the table and picking up his piece of toast and eating it. He could almost hear the way it would sound.
He closed his eyes. He unbuttoned his shirt. He imagined it was Rose’s fingers undoing the buttons. He imagined it was her hand slipping down his pants. And he whispered, “I don’t have time for that now, sweetheart. I have to go to work. Cut that out!”
61
THE CHILDREN’S WAR
Pierrot woke up with a start, feeling sad for their tiny baby, somewhere in a suitcase in the Saint Lawrence River. Perhaps it had floated off to sea. Would things have been any different if their child had survived? He couldn’t imagine it now. They would be in Montreal, performing for an audience of one in a high chair. A baby makes the ordinary miraculous.
Rose was asleep beside him. She was so pale and serene when she slept, as though she were frozen in ice.