by Norman Green
“Is okay,” the driver said, watching her in his rearview mirror. “I wait. I don’ mind.”
“Suit yourself,” she told him. The guy might just be looking for a return fare, she thought, maybe he just doesn’t want to drive back empty. Still . . . “Right up here on the corner,” she told him, even though she was still a few blocks away from her destination. She paid the driver, exited the cab, and walked into the lobby of a high-rise apartment building, where she gave the doorman five bucks and had him direct her to the back door.
She preached it to her son, Frank Junior, all the time, you don’t know these people, don’t go assuming they’re your friends. You have to watch where you’re going, and you have to watch your back. Don’t be going places where you don’t belong . . . She came out on the broad wooden boardwalk that ran along the Brooklyn shoreline. There was a wide expanse of sand between her and the dirty waters of Lower New York Bay. The smell was the same one she got near her mother’s house in Bensonhurst, a hint of the ocean, a touch of decay. She wished it was lighter out so she could see better because the landmass of Staten Island did not extend this far south and in the daytime there was nothing to mar your view of the clean horizon. She walked across the width of the boardwalk, leaned on the railing, and stared out at the lights winking off the water. It seemed endless, particularly at night, but even in the day the sea seemed to stretch away to infinity. That, she knew, was an illusion. You could only see so far before the curve of the planet dropped the surface of the water below your sight line. She had noticed, as a child, that when freighters left the port and sailed away, the hull of the ship would drop out of view before the superstructure. You think you’re looking at forever, but your mind is simply extrapolating the emptiness of your immediate future. There is always something more, something you can’t see, it might be just out of your vision but still be close enough to be in your lap tomorrow. Sometimes you gotta hang on to that . . . She was in the middle of reading a book by a famous neurosurgeon. “Confabulation” was his word for the way the brain papers over the gaps in what it can see, how it fills in the holes with what may or may not approximate reality. It amazed her, last night when she read it, and it continued to amaze her now, the idea that the human condition requires that you become so adept at bullshitting yourself that you lose the awareness that you are doing it . . .
“Excuse me, Miss . . .”
The guy took ten years off her life, she turned, he was only six feet away, his stocking cap in his hand. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, Miss, please . . .”
“Look, buddy, I’m broke,” she said, relieved that he was only a panhandler.
“Oh, please,” he begged, bending forward at the waist, twisting his cap in his hands as if trying to strangle it. “If you could only help me just a little, I am so hungry . . .”
So thirsty, more like it, she thought, but the guy’s tears seemed real enough. Against her better judgment, she fished a buck out of her pocket and handed it over.
The guy made a great show of gratitude. “Oh, God bless you, Miss, God bless you . . .”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Tell your story walking.”
“Tonio.” Alessandra said it softly, but he should have heard it. If it had been his real name he would have reacted. “Tonio!” she said, much louder, and he turned. He was the youngest, the one Al thought still might be worth something. He was coming out of a bodega about six blocks from Palermo Imports, he had a case of beer under one arm and a bag full of sandwiches under the other. He looked at her face and his eyes went wide with surprise.
“Hey,” he said. “Alicia . . . What do you do up here, all alone?”
“I’m not alone, Tonio, I’m with you. What’s the matter? Don’t you think I can take care of myself?”
His eyes dropped from her face to her chest, and he shrugged. “America,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“You don’t like it, do you? You think I should be on a leash? Tied up in someone’s backyard, like a dog?”
“No, no, I don’t say that. I don’t say nothing.”
“Come on, Tonio,” she said. “You and I are friends. Aren’t we? Come on, talk to me.”
He glanced at her face again. She noticed how dark his eyes were, how long his lashes were, he almost looked like he wore eyeliner and mascara. She wondered how long he would last in an American prison. “They think you are police,” he told her.
She was surprised at that. “Police? Come on, Tonio, do I look like a cop to you?”
He looked down at his shoes. “I know nothing of police.”
“Can I ask you something, Tonio? If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”
He didn’t look up.
“What happened to Frank, Tonio? Frank Waters. Great big guy.” She held a hand up over her head. “About so tall.”
“I don’t know anything,” he said, and he backed away, edging along the brick wall of the building that housed the bodega.
“Come on, Tonio. You must have heard something.” She stepped up, backed him up against the wall, got up in his face. “I thought you liked me, Tonio.” She put a hand on his chin, tilted his face up until he made eye contact. “I thought you and I could be friends, Tonio.”
He struggled to maintain his grip on the beer. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “I need to go now,” he said. “They, they wait for me.” He ducked, escaped her like a boxer getting himself out of a corner.
“That looks heavy, Tonio,” she said. “You need me to carry it for you?”
His face went white. “No!” he said, and he glanced around to see if anyone was watching him talk to her. “No. I can do it.” He took a step backward. “You should stay away,” he said. “Um, Raffi, he’sa hate you. He kill you if Paolo lets him.”
“You think so? Is that what happened to Frank Waters? Did Paolo let Raffi kill him?”
Tonio swallowed, took another step back. “Don’t come back,” he said, his eyes pleading. “Please.” He turned and fled.
“Hello, Mr. Stiles,” Sarah said.
Marty Stiles was parked in his chair in front of a south-facing window of a long corridor. It was fully dark outside and there was nothing for him to look at other than his own reflection in the glass. He stared straight ahead.
“Sarah Waters,” she said. “I work for you.”
He glanced at her, nodded once, turned to the window again. The noises of patients, nurses, and hospital machinery droned behind them.
“You’ve lost weight,” she told him.
He nodded again, just once. “I’ve taken up jogging,” he said, his voice ragged from lack of use.
“Very funny,” Sarah said. She looked around, spotted a chair in a corner, went over and dragged it next to Marty’s wheelchair, eased herself into it. He turned to stare at her.
“Miss . . .”
“Sarah.”
“Whatever,” he said. “What do you want from me?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“Sarah,” he said, louder. “Why are you here?”
She cleared her throat. “They aren’t going to let you stay,” she said.
He seemed to come out of himself just a little bit when she told him that, like a turtle poking its head out of its shell to see how hard it was raining.
“A few years ago,” she said, “my father had a stroke.” She pointed to his wheelchair. “They put him in one of those, with a motor. He couldn’t, you know, he couldn’t do for himself. Couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, nothing.” She could still feel the tightness in her chest that she’d gotten, seeing him in his reduced state. “They kept him in rehab for a while, but his insurance only covered him for so long. So then Medicaid took him out, they put him in this place.” She stared at the glass, at her reflection and his. “Not like here. It wasn’t very nice. Four residents to a room, common bathrooms. They, ah, I don’t think they paid the nurses or the aides very much.” She sighed. “One of my father’s ro
ommates would groan all day and all night long. ‘Help me,’ he’d say it a thousand times. ‘Help me, please.’ But if you asked him what he wanted, he didn’t understand you.”
“I spent twenty-two years in the NYPD.” He said it as if he were addressing the window. “I have a pension, I have insurance, I have . . .”
“Mr. Stiles?” Sarah cut him off. “No you don’t, Mr. Stiles. Not anymore. Medicaid takes away everything. They took my father’s pension, they took his Social Security, they would have taken the house and his savings, too, but my mother divorced him first so she could have something. Otherwise, they’d have left her with nothing at all.”
He exhaled. The sound of his breath passing through his vocal cords made a dry rasping sound. It did not sound like a human noise, it was more like a screen door creaking back and forth in the wind.
“She cried when she did it, even though, you know, it didn’t mean nothing. He cried, too, but he did that all the time anyhow so it’s hard to know if he really knew what was going on.”
Marty curled his upper body forward, put his head in his hands, squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger. “Maybe he just wanted to die,” he said.
“Maybe,” Sarah said. God, she thought, please don’t let me go like my father, let me go in my sleep . . . “If that’s what he wanted, he got his wish, but not right away. He had to lose everything first. His money, his house, his wife, his independence, his dignity, his clothes . . . In the end, all he had left was a bathrobe and a pair of socks.” She wiped at the corner of her eye. “Listen to me, Mr. Stiles,” she said, and she leaned in close. “We all gotta go sometime. I know that. But doing it this way, in this place . . .” She looked around. “This is not an easy way to die. You’re gonna hurt a lot, first. It’s gonna tear you apart. You gotta get yourself outa here.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” He was suddenly loud, angry, on the edge of panic.
Her father had been such a prick, but even he hadn’t deserved to suffer the way he did at the end. “Why can’t you just go home?” She was surprised at the depth of sorrow she heard in her voice.
He turned forward again. “I lived on the third floor,” he said to the blank window. “I can’t climb the stairs. I can’t drive. I can’t . . .”
“Mr. Stiles,” Sarah said, exasperated. “We’ll get you a ride home. We’ll find you another apartment. We’ll move your stuff . . .”
“We? Who’s we?”
“Me and Al,” she told him.
He gritted his teeth at the sound of Al’s name. “That fucking bitch,” he said.
Sarah ignored that. She put a hand on Marty’s arm, considered it a minor victory that he did not shake her off. “Don’t quit,” she said. “If you do, it only gets worse from here. A lot worse. You’ll just be one more stray dog at the pound, waiting for someone to give you the needle. I’ve seen it.”
He swallowed once, stared straight ahead. “Go away,” he said.
Gave it my best shot, she thought. She patted his arm before she got up to go. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Alessandra sat in her room in the dark, listening to the faint sounds coming from the taproom below. They had the television tuned to a hockey game, she knew that because she had seen it through the windows on her way past. She could not really hear it, though, maybe they had the sound turned down, or maybe its sounds blended too well with the murmur of the Brooklyn night. She thought about calling her father, pictured him sitting in his dark room up in the Bronx, and it frightened her that she was doing the exact same thing, only in a different borough. The realization hit her that she might be the same kind of person he was, and it was like being punched in the stomach. It was horrible, the idea that she might be as cold and as distant as he, so uncommunicative that she drove everyone who tried to get close to her mad with frustration. That’s not me, she told herself, I’m not like him . . .
But she didn’t call him. It’s only because he’s even worse on the phone than I am, she told herself. I can have the whole conversation without him anyway, both sides, without troubling him at all: Hey, how are you? Great. You? Yeah, okay. Ahh, how’s work? Eh, well, you know, it’s work. Yeah, mine, too. You need anything? No. You? No, me neither. Okay. Take care. Yeah. See you.
Thanks for calling . . .
Sure.
It’s as much your fault as his, a small voice told her. You two are peas in a pod . . . It angered her, the same as it did when she looked in the mirror first thing in the morning and sometimes saw his face looking back out at her.
God, please. I’m not like him, I can’t be.
And I’m not calling TJ, she thought. It’s his turn.
She could call Anthony, he’d be glad to hear from her. Anthony was her aunt, in a way. He’d been her uncle Roberto’s partner for as far back as she could remember. He’d be happy to hear her voice, and being the soul of conviviality and good manners he would make up for all of her awkward silences, he’d fill her in on everything that was going on in the old neighborhood, tell her about everything he’d done to the house since Tio Bobby’s death, inquire solicitously after her health and love life . . . But he knew her too well, he would know how desperately lonely she was sometimes. Next week, she thought. Next week, when I’m in a better head, I’ll call him. I promise.
She could call Sarah Waters . . .
Sarah would be happy to hear from her, too, Sarah liked talking about as much as anyone Al knew, Sarah would ask her when she was coming out to the house, she would promise to cook veal and peppers. Sarah would bitch about her mother, it was funny how the two of them seemed to be always at war. That seemed more the rule than the exception, it seemed that most women Al knew had the same sorts of problems getting along with their mothers, they all labored along under the weight of that maternal disapproval and disappointment . . . Al could feel the truth of it, she could sense the approximate size and density of her own mother’s unmet expectations, knew that she, Al, would not have measured up, either, if her mother had lived.
And how bad, she wondered, how awful must life have been, for her to do what she did.
Jesus.
Anyway, Sarah deserves a break from you, she told herself. Leave the woman alone.
And is that where I’m headed, she wondered, will I ever get so down on everything that I would just give up and take the next exit . . .
I’m not calling TJ, she thought. The son of a bitch didn’t call me back from the last time. And why do I always have to be the one?
An old joke ran across the front porch of her memory: How do porcupines make love?
Carefully. Verry carefully . . .
Am I really that much of a prick, she wondered.
No, man, I’m not doing it, I’m not calling him.
Well, go on downstairs then, said that small voice, reasserting itself. Go on. Go sit at the bar and drink yourself senseless, if that’s what you want. Go hang out with a bunch of half-loaded retirees who are sitting together in the same room, not talking, watching a hockey game none of them cared about. Go on, why not?
She picked up the phone, punched up TJ’s cell.
“Hello?”
Woman’s voice, piano music tinkling in the background, laughing voices, loud, then fading away. Softly, softly, Al asked to speak to Jorge, in Spanish.
“I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number,” the woman said.
Al hung up.
Eleven
Alessandra Martillo chased fried potatoes around on the plate in front of her. “So tell me, Doc,” she said. “What would your wife say if she could see us right now?”
“She’d say that you’re even better looking than I told her you were.” Doc was the drummer in BandX, a group in which TJ Conrad had, until recently, played guitar. He was bald, and he wore a pair of sunglasses perched high on his shiny brown skull. “Sheila and I,” he said, “crossed that particular bridge a long time ago.”
“Did you really?”
“Yep.”
“How’d you do it?”
He seemed to consider that for a moment. “Well, I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “I mean, I’m not trying to tell you that she’s a saint, or that I ain’t a man. And most men are wired up more or less the same in that department.”
“I’ve noticed,” Al said.
“Well, if that’s true then you know that it’s a lot easier for you guys to hook up than it is for us.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “You’re a musician. You forget, I’ve seen your tour bus after a show, you guys look at more phony IDs than any bartender in America.”
“True enough,” he said, nodding, “and I admit that does change the odds somewhat, but if you and I walked out this door and went trolling for a little sumpin’, you could be smoking the post-game cigarette before I even get a sniff.”
Even if that was true . . . “Has Sheila seen your tour bus?”
Doc laughed softly. “Al, she knows where I go, and she knows what I do. Hey, listen, I could drive myself crazy worrying about what she does while I’m at work, and she could go crazy thinking about that tour bus, but there ain’t no future in it. I know she loves me, if she didn’t she’d have tossed me like a dirty paper towel by now. And I hope she knows I’m crazy about her. So for now, you know, unless proven otherwise, me and Sheila are solid.”
Alessandra poked at the food in front of her. “Don’t say anything to TJ, okay?”
“I got you, baby. I got you.” He watched her for a minute. “Did he tell you? They tried to book us into that club up in Boston, that place we were playing when I first met you.”
“He hasn’t said much of anything to me lately.”
“He wouldn’t play the gig,” Doc said. “He didn’t exactly say he was quitting, but he came damn close. The rest of the guys pitched a fit. They’re out looking for a new guitar picker right now.”
“No kidding. You think they’ll find someone?”
Doc sighed. “After what happened to the last one? Anyhow, it don’t matter, TJ is the engine that makes the train go. Without him, we’re wasting our time. But I talked to TJ afterward. Privately.”