The second time my ribs were cracked was in a prison riot. They were busted by the rifle stock of a guard who was nominally on the same side. But he had reason to hate me and took his opportunity when it came his way. Ribs take a while to heal. So I had to wait for that, and then the opportunity. It took four months. Until the night we met outside his favorite bar, I felt a kind of shame and guilt.
It was something for Glenda and me to argue about, like me issue of public versus private school.
The first time on a squash court can be frustrating and downright bewildering. But Yogi, the tall, goodnatured Sri Lankan pro, made it fun for Wayne. I was grateful for that. After the lesson I got on the court with Yogi and he was merciless. Even though he’s good at teaching midgets, playing down that far frustrates him. Then Wayne and I played.
On the subway home, Wayne got very serious.
“I’m not sure I like my name,” he said.
“Oh, what’s wrong with it?”
“I don’ know … are people stuck with their names their whole lives, forever and ever?”
“They don’t have to be,” I said, “but I don’t see anything wrong with Wayne.”
“Wellll,” he weaseled around.
“Come on, well what?”
“Welllll,” he hemmed and hawed, “it’s not real tough.”
“‘What do you think would be tougher?”
“I don’ know.”
“Come on, kid, what do you have in mind?”
“I was thinking, maybe Rocco, but that might be too tough.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty tough. How about Angel? I know a lotta tough guys named Angel.” I did. And Jesus.
“Awww, come on, you’re making funna me.”
“Maybe I’m teasing a little bit. Just a little. Now tell me what you have in mind.” “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but only if you’re serious.”
“OK, I’ll be serious.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. Cross my throat and hope to choke and all of those things,” I said.
“Well, Rocco is too tough, you know, so I was thinking, maybe Anthony.”
What do you do with that? Ruffle his hair? Give him a hug? Punch him lightly on the upper arm, yeah, that’s the tough thing to do.
The Korean fruit stand on our block had a fine display of early summer flowers. I instinctively went to buy a bunch for Glenda, then wondered if I was doing it by way of secret apology. Worse, if she would see it that way. Then I thought, I would have done it anyway, and stopped mind-fucking myself and spent the whole $4.98 with a smile.
Just before we went to the door, Wayne said, “Don’t tell Mom, about changing my name. I don’t think she’s ready for it.”
Glenda greeted the returning squash players with hugs and kisses. Mine was a lot sexier, but Wayne didn’t mind.
In spite of his workout, Wayne didn’t want to finish his dinner; he wanted to rush up to his friend in 26D who had a new video game. He asked, as he did about every fourth day, if we could get a dog. Dogs, he explained, were always glad to finish leftover burgers. I would have liked one also. It was the sole positive association I had with marriage. But not in the city, and probably not until Wayne’s intermittent sense of responsibility came in longer bursts. I was drifting into commitment. Irrevocable, householding, even suburban commitment. I wondered if I was afraid of it and if fear had led me down into the valley of heavenly thighs. Maybe I was just intermittent.
In any case, I said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I only like big dogs. And a big dog might eat you up. So we can’t get one until you’re big enough to fight him off.”
“How big?”
“Very, extremely huge.”
Glenda nodded emphatic agreement. She looked at me with an expression that said, “That logic should hold him.” Wayne said a thoughtful, “Oh,” as if it did.
“You have been gone a long time,” Glenda nibbled on my lip when the door slammed behind Wayne. The dishes were going to wait and we waltzed to the bedroom. She “ummmed” as I lifted her sweater. She lifted her arms up and I pushed her back on the bed with her arms trapped over her head. She mixed giggles and yums when I nibbled her belly. I attacked her bra and her nipples popped up to say hello.
“It’s been too long, I need my piece.”
I moved from her nipples to her lips. Between kisses I said, “C’mon, you had your vibrator.”
“That’s not the same,” she blushed, “as having you inside me.”
I knew what pleased her and the items that satisfied her. I did them. Something inside me was aware that I would rather have waited until dinner had settled in my stomach. Which is, I suppose, the difference between infatuation and a relationship.
Later, I went down to pick up milk and coffee for the morning. I called Christina from a pay phone. Our actual dialogue was hesitant and inane. Her voice enveloped and caressed me.
After Wayne went to bed, Glenda asked me about the case.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not there, and it sort of is.”
“There’s something going on inside your head. I can feel it,” Glenda said. “Do you have a thing for your client?”
“Oh, come on!”
“I suppose she’s some hot young number. Wealthy, young, clothes-horsey,” Glenda teased. And probed. The only reason I was not terrified by her intuition was that she had been equally paranoid when there was no cause.
“How is Sandy these days?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see her this trip.”
“How could you pass it up? I suppose her tits are as big and gorgeous as ever.”
“I don’t know,” I protested. “The time I did see her I kept my eyes devoutly above her neck and ordered her to wear bulky sweaters.”
“If you didn’t have such sexy shoulders,” Glenda said, “I would have thrown you out a long time ago and let all those evil women devour you.”
“You just love me for my body, is that it?”
“Of course. Your character is nothing to boast of. And your manners, I certainly can’t take you home to mater.”
“You could take your husband home to mater.”
“Mater adored my husband. But then, she never went to bed with him.”
“Are you suggesting I take your mother to bed, just to create a good impression on your family?”
“She is not your type.”
“What is?”
“Big bosomy things like Sandy. Or hot young numbers like Christina Wood.”
“What,” I said with mounting irritation, “is making you go on like this?”
“I wish I could trust you.”
“I don’t know what my next step is going to be,” I said, offering up a different piece of meat for her to chew on. “I would love to talk to Charles Goreman. But I have to be patient with that. Everything I hear about him is that he’s tough and smart, so if I hit on him before I have some kind of opening, he’ll just blow me off.”
“Couldn’t the lawyer, what’s his name, Haven, introduce you?”
“Over & East is about the biggest legal meal ticket in New York. So I better have a damn good reason before he will want me to go and upset them.”
“You’re really concerned about this, or are you just changing the subject?”
“I think maybe it offends me, that there is, I don’t know, an upper circle, a rarefied sphere, where crime isn’t crime … that sounds like something right out of my father’s mouth … I don’t even know if Wood was murdered, with malice aforethought, I mean. But if he was, the wall around it is going to be high and wide, and if I find out whodunit, there’s gonna be a high wide wall to keep me from doing anything about it.”
She stroked my hair. I stood up and paced, naked.
“Do you know Stew McCarthy?”
She looked blank.
“Judge Paul Stewart McCarthy, the judge who sentenced Wood. The judge who was on my Corrections Department investi
gation,” I explained.
“You liked him,” she remembered.
“Yeah, I’ll tell you one thing. I understand why he wanted to send Wood up the river. All day long, he sits there. The stupid hopeless junkies, the petty slime, parade through the courtroom with their desperate nickel dime crimes. The law commands us to send them to hell. And make no mistake, Attica is hell. Then comes Edgar Wood. With his money and hotshot lawyers and connections, he is damn sure positive convinced that prison is not the price that he will pay. Prison is just for the slobs, the lumps, the dopes and dopers.
“And the judge,” I went on, “who knows what he has been sending them away to, and in spite of everything, feels it. He feels it. He sees Edgar Wood and for the sake of the soul of Judge Paul Stewart McCarthy, McCarthy must send Wood away. Otherwise he is living a lie. Otherwise it’s not justice, it’s just … something else.”
“Tony,” my woman said, “it’s all right.”
I stood, silent, as she sat, also silent. Both of us were surprised by the depth of my feeling—the furious puritan I had tried to bury years ago, when I saw the harm and horror that it, like any passion, could cause. I had buried it, and with it guilt, knowing that I had been as guilty as anyone I had put away.
“Why don’t you talk to McCarthy?” she said after a while.
“Why?”
“Well, when I was on jury duty, it seemed that a lot went on in court that didn’t go into the record. Not just the intonation and the way people looked at other people, but things that were actually said.”
“Smart lady,” I said, and got back into bed. I snuggled beside her. She turned out the light. I was home and settled into a deep, quiet, dreamless sleep.
15
TAIL
“WHEN DID YOU GET back?” Joey D’ asked me.
“Yesterday afternoon,” I claimed.
“That’s not the way I figure it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I was talking to Gino, and he thought you must be back, and then you checked out of your motel, day before yesterday. But that wouldn’t make me suspicious, and it could all be explained. What nails you, kid, is that shit-eating grin on your face. That only comes from doing fresh stuff.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, my father?”
“Then I’m right,” he said.
“Or maybe my mother.”
“Tony, you are a stupid shit. I know you. You need some goddamn roots. You ain’t no good when all you got to take care of is yourself. When you don’t have a home, you go doing every stupid thing that a stupid man can find. I don’t want to watch you snort stuff and pop pills, I don’t want to go find you in gutters and bail you out.”
“You’re not my wife, you’re not my mama, so fuck off,” I yelled at him.
“OK, but I’m gonna say what gotta be said. I’ll do it calm, no yelling. I helped you get straight once, or half a dozen times, depending on how you count it. Maybe ’cause your father and me, we were friends. Maybe ’cause I think that when you’re not looking for oblivion you’re a smart kid and a good partner. But I’m older now. I’m tired. I ain’t got the patience to baby-sit no more. You’re older now and you should know better.”
“OK, I heard you. Now, let me ask you something. Why is it, I get laid, just once, it’s supposed to be the end of the world? Since the world began, Joey, when was there a time when guys didn’t want something on the side? Back in Sicily, where if you fucked around with a girl, her husband and father would kill you. If you fucked a guy’s wife, he would kill everybody. In the Bible, they punished adultery by stoning people to death. So even with that kind of overreaction did you ever once hear of someplace where adultery became extinct? You know when a piece on the side will become extinct? When men and women are born without the parts to do it with,” I said with an appropriate gesture.
He laughed. Thank God.
“It’s just I like Glenda, and she’s good for you, and I don’t want you to blow it.”
“You know what, I like Glenda too, and I agree with you, she’s good for me. Now that group therapy is over, let’s pretend this is an office again.”
“Sure. By the way, I think you done good down in D.C.; at least you didn’t embarrass me and they think you do a good Al Pacino.”
I brought him up to date. The thing that pleased him most was the billings we were racking up, courtesy of the Wood estate. Then he asked me to cover a surveillance for him that night. A divorce thing, an easy tail.
“My grandchildren,” he explained, “are visiting their grandmother. They’re four and five now.”
I said that was OK. I called the judge. He couldn’t see me till the next day anyway. I called Christina. I talked to her machine. Then my mother called me. I told her I was alive, that Glenda was healthy, that Wayne was larger and learning to play squash. We made a dinner date. Christina called me back. I jumped in a cab.
She was on the phone when I got there. But it started without waiting anyway. When I began to stroke her hair, she arched against me catlike. I bent and kissed her forehead, her cheek, her ears. She put her hand over the phone and offered me the heat of her mouth. Ignition. She stood and leaned her back into me. My arms went around her, and my hands found the flesh of her waist and belly. She said a few strangled things into the phone, hung up and we went to bed.
There have been enough women in my life to have stopped the count sometime back. I’ve done most of the things that I’ve conceived while masturbating. And ever since the first, the worst I’ve had was good. But Christina’s sexuality and mine were better custom-cut than her father’s Savile Row suits.
In the sweating and sounds that weren’t words, I heard a voice say, unexpected and unbidden, “I love you.” It was my voice. She held me harder. Her arms clamped around me to force my body into the sink of hers.
Later, in the shower together, she said, “You shouldn’t say things like that,” with her eyes, her voice, her body contradicting the words. “I’m glad,” she said, “that you have someone else. I don’t want you to be my problem.”
“Sure,” I said, and kissed her beneath the spray.
When I left we shuddered like a fabric was being torn, the separation palpable.
Joey D’ was waiting for me at Forty-ninth and Madison. He was too sharp not to notice my hair was still damp, but all he said was, “Thanks for covering me, kid,” and went off to see his ex-wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
Within ten minutes, by four-thirty, the hordes were starting to flow from the towers. I was looking for one rock in the slow rolling landslide, but my subject made it easy, trying to rush a half-pace harder than the rest of the herd. A typical adman type from Doyle, Dane: health-clubbed and tan, yet harried and drawn, with plenty of money that wasn’t enough. At least not for what his wife wanted to do to him.
He turned north. He went only half a block and turned into what was once the Arch Diocese of New York and is now a hotel, through the cobbled courtyard, into the vaulted lobby and down me marble steps. He turned left into Harry’s Bar. Diocesan wood and leaded glass separate Harry’s from the lobby, so I didn’t even have to enter to watch.
He sat at the bar, watching the door, watching his watch, trying to slow his drink but rushing it. Then she came in.
She was nothing special. Every head in the bar did not turn, dazzled by her length of leg, flaunt of bosom or swing of butt. But to him, she was the everything. He emerged from anxiety like a butterfly into the sun, and I could see the bar fade away, with it the rest of the world, as they shone for each other.
The shutter of my mini-camera opened and closed silently over the frames of ASA 1000 Kodak color negative, capturing another Kodak moment to remember in court.
He tossed a bill on the bar; they walked out; I followed. They only went as far as the elevators. I got right in with them. I exited after them. Their eyes were only for each other.
When they stopped and embraced in front of the hotel room door, I strol
led on as if I had someplace to go. When I heard the door close behind me, I turned around. I found the service closet and stepped in. I opened my briefcase, took out the microphone and recorder. I buried the tape machine in some towels. The microphone, with its tiny suction cup, went on the upper-right-hand corner of the door. The transmitter went on the top of the doorframe, stuck with double-face tape. I went back to the closet, checked if it was all operational and left.
I killed forty-five minutes in Harry’s, went up, flipped the cassette, then gave them another forty-five and collected everything. The early evening was warm; the sun slid a shaft onto the steps of St. Patrick’s cathedral down the block. I sat on the broad steps of the church and spot-checked the tape. If there was sufficient dirt, the job was done; if not, I would go back and roll another reel.
The Account Exec was thrilled. He got it up so quickly with her. And it was so nothing limp with his wife. … I fast-forwarded, and it turned to a high-pitched squeak in the earphones. … And so often! … She liked his tongue just there, just there! And slower, slower … whack! He liked his ass slapped while he put it to her. …
We had him. You gotta pay to play, that’s what the wives say. When his wife had stripped him down to his toothbrush and jockey shorts, I wondered if he would lose his tootsie too. It often happens that way. Another job, successfully concluded.
16
JUDGE
HIS HONOR JUDGE PAUL Stewart McCarthy let loose a nonjudicial pealing laugh when I finished summing up, as coherently as I could, the SEC transcripts of Edgar Wood.
“The thing that’s funny,” he explained when he was able, “is that if that was all Wood had to show when he came back for resentencing, you know what I would have had to say? … Three to five, Attica.”
“Did you expect him to come up with more than that?”
“Interesting question. Order us another round and let us cogitate.” It was more Jameson’s for him, beer for me.
“At the sentencing,” he said when he had wet his dry, “the man was extremely upset. Shocked I would say, but then they were all shocked.” He chuckled at the memory. “He promised he was going to blow the lid off. Expose the whole filthy crew.”
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