by T. C. Boyle
Someone honked a bicycle horn. The greengrocer—Wilson—came out from behind a display of muskmelons and threw a pan of water in the gutter. “You’ll have to get rid of it,” O‘Kane said.
Giovannella stopped dead in her tracks, Giovannella the fury, Giovannella the lunatic. The candy melted out of her eyes. “What did you say?” she demanded. “I think my hearing must not be so good.”
The fat-ankled woman from the Goux Winery waddled past them with three kids in tow. A man with a panting dog almost ran into them. People were everywhere, swells ambling up the street from the Potter, women shopping for groceries, kids darting in and out of alleyways with balls and hoops. “Not here, Giov,” he said, and he wanted to take her by the arm and steer her someplace, someplace quiet and out of the way, but he couldn’t do that, because she wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore—she was Giovannella Capolupo and he had no right to touch her. In public, anyway.
Suddenly she lurched away from him, her face twisted and ugly, and broke into a clumsy trot, fighting the weight of her skirts. He gave it a minute, inconspicuous Eddie O‘Kane, just another guy out for a Saturday-afternoon stroll, and then made his way up the street after her. By the time he got going, she was already a block ahead of him, still kicking out her skirts in an awkward trot, her head bobbing like a toy on a spring, people stopping to turn and stare after her. O’Kane quickened his pace, but not so much as to attract attention.
He caught up with her in front of Diehl’s Grocery, a place that catered to the carriage trade of Montecito—O‘Mara smoked hams from Ireland in the window, jars of curry and chutney from India, pears in crème de menthe, the sort of place that had no business with O’Kane or he with it. But there was a line of limousines parked out front, one of them Mr. McCormick‘s, which meant that Roscoe was around somewhere, and Sam Wah stalking the aisles inside, inspecting ginger root from Canton and curls of candied melon from Cambodia. Giovannella was standing at the window, her back to the street, staring at a perfectly stacked pyramid of tangerines. He saw her face reflected in the glass, her lips puffed with emotion, eyes like open wounds, and felt something give inside him. “Giovannella,” he said, “listen to me—can’t we talk?”
In the smallest voice: “I don’t want to talk to you, Eddie.”
Sam Wah’s face suddenly loomed up in the window, caught between two pink-and-brown hams, and Sam smiled a gap-toothed smile and O‘Kane waved, and then, whether the whole world was watching or not, he took Giovannella by the elbow and led her down the alley and into the next street over. They walked in silence, out of the commercial district and into a residential area, neat houses with deep-set porches and roses climbing up trellises. They found a place to sit on the knee-high roots of a big Moreton Bay fig tree that spread out over an empty lot like ten trees all grafted together. There was no one around. He took her hand and she gave him a sidelong look that seemed to have some conciliation in it, but with Giovannella you never could tell. Sometimes when she looked her softest she was about to explode, and when she exploded she could do anything, throw herself in front of a streetcar, jump off a building, rake your eyes out.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that, what I said back there on the street.”
“Eddie,” she said, surrender, forgiveness and reproach all in two syllables and one tone, and she took hold of him with a strength and intensity that was intoxicating and terrifying at the same time and kissed him, forcing her tongue into his mouth, again and again, crushing him, tearing at him, till finally he had to put his hands on her shoulders and come up for air.
“I’m not going to have my son raised by some wop shoemaker, that’s all,” he said.
That only made her hold on tighter. She was a woman drowning in the surf and he the lifeguard sent to rescue her, her nails like claws, every muscle straining to drag him down, and she wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him get his face clear, no neutral zone here, no calling for time out, her lips his lips, her nose his, her eyes and her breath. “Oh, yeah?” she said, and her voice was dangerous. “And what about the son you already have—whos raising him? Huh? You tell me. Who’s raising him, Eddie?”
Rosaleen was raising him, and if she had some man in her life, he didn’t know about it. He sent her money, when he remembered, and she sent him silence in return. No letters, no photographs, no nothing. But if he pictured her, and he did once in awhile, lingering over a beer when nobody was around, a mournful tune playing on the victrola, he pictured her alone and waiting, a photo of handsome Eddie O‘Kane on the wall above her bed.
“That’s none of your business,” he said.
A breeze came up and scoured the ground, scraps of paper suddenly pasted to the roots of the tree, branches groaning overhead. Still she clung to him, her breath hot in his face, the smell of her skin, soap, perfume. “You’re my husband, Eddie,” she whispered, “you’re the one. Be a man. Take me away someplace, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Or back home to Boston, I don’t care, I’ll go anywhere with you.”
“This is my home. Mr. McCormick—”
“Mr. McCormick. Don’t tell me about Mr. McCormick.” She pushed away from him, her eyes dilated and huge, hair falling loose at her nape and whipping round her shoulders. “It’s only a job, Eddie—you can get a job anywhere, a big strong man like you, an American born here and with an education too. Where’s your three o‘clock luck you’re always telling me about? Trust it. Trust me.”
But the curtain had fallen in his mind. The play was over. “You’ll have to get rid of it.”
“Never.”
“I’ll arrange it. I’ll ask around. He—whatever his name is—he’ll never have to know. Nobody will.”
Suddenly, and he didn’t know quite how it happened, they were boxing. Or she was boxing and he was just trying to fend off her blows. They struggled to their knees, then their feet. She swung at him, just like Rosaleen. “I hate you,” she sputtered, gasping, swinging, her voice dead calm between one ratcheting breath and the next. “It’s murder you’re talking about, you son ... of a bitch, murder of an ... innocent soul ... How can you even ... think of it, and you a ... Catholic?”
She stopped swinging then and stood there rigid, but he kept his hands up, just in case. He glanced round to see if anybody was watching, but the lot was deserted. Her eyes were wet. She made a noise deep in her throat and he thought she was going to start crying on him, but she snapped back her head in a sudden fierce motion and spat down the front of his shirt, a glistening ball of Italian sputum that hung there like a jewel on a string. “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” she demanded, and still she wasn’t shouting. “You stinker,” she hissed. “You pig. Don’t you have a heart?”
Well, he did. He did have a heart, but he wasn’t going to start a war with all of Sicily and he sure as hell wasn’t going to have somebody named Guido Capolupo raising his own flesh and blood, and so as soon as Giovannella had turned her back on him and fled across the lot in her stiff-legged skirt-hampered trot, he went up to Menhoff’s to see what he could do about it. He figured he would have a beer and a whiskey to ease the throbbing in his head and the sourness of his gut—though he didn’t need the stuff, not really, not like his old man—and maybe make some discreet inquiries, that was all.
Menhoff’s was pretty lively that afternoon, and that helped him get over his initial shock, glad-handing people, putting on a face—he even shot a couple games of pool. But for all that he was in another world, aching all the way down from his grinding molars to the marrow of his bones, and why use chalk on the cue when he could powder it with the dust of his own teeth? He’d been planning a picnic at the beach with a girl he’d met at a party the week before, but he knew he couldn’t go through with it now, and he rang her up and begged off in a blizzard of promises and lies. Giovannella was right—abortion was a dirty business, as foul a sin as there was. And he was a Catholic still, though he didn’t go to Mass anymore, except for Christmas and Easter, and he believed God was wa
tching him and judging him and holding him in contempt even as he sat there at the bar and lifted a beer to his lips. But what was the alternative? He tried to picture himself in San Francisco, a place he knew only from postcards, Giovannella swelling up till her navel was extruded and her tits were like balloons and her legs lost their shape, and what then? Living in sin. A baby that was a bastard in the eyes of the church and society too. And then another baby. And another.
He’d been with Mr. McCormick eight years now, longer than he’d been at the Boston Asylum and McLean put together, and he was making good money, and putting some of it in the bank against the day he struck out on his own, and whether it was in oranges or oil or even one of these new service businesses sprung up in the wake of the automobile, he didn’t know anymore. But he wasn’t about to leave Mr. McCormick. It was a question of loyalty—he wanted to see him improve, he did; in a way he’d staked his life on it—and even with Hamilton leaving and this new man, Brush, coming in, he knew he was going to be at Riven Rock for a good long while yet. But Giovannella. Giovannella, Giovannella, Giovannella. He could just let it go, turn his back on her and let the shoemaker raise a little O‘Kane like one of those hapless sparrows the cowbird preys on, shoving its egg right in on top of the nest and nobody the wiser. He could. But it would hurt, and he’d already had enough hurt from Rosaleen and Eddie Jr.
He was on his second round—or was it his third?—when Dolores Isringhausen walked in. She was with another woman, both of them in furs, cloche hats, bobbed hair and skirts crawling up their calves, and a whole noisy mob of people shouldering in behind them. She was from New York, Dolores, married to a rich man off playing boy scout on the Italian front, and she ran with a fast crowd. Nobody in Santa Barbara had ever seen anything like her. She smoked, drank Jack Rose cocktails and drove her own car, a little Maxwell runabout with all-white tires she’d had shipped out from the East. O‘Kane was fascinated by her. He’d sat with her a couple of times with one group or another and he loved the knowing look on her face and her glassy cold eyes and the way the dress clung to her hips, always something silky and tactile and never the stiff penitential weeds half the women in town dragged themselves around in, as if they were traipsing from one funeral to another. And she didn’t seem to have any objection to saloons, either.
“Hello, Eddie,” she said, coming right up to him at the end of the bar, the other woman trailing behind her with a pasted-on smile and an empty greeting for this one or that. “You’re looking glum. What’s the matter? It’s Saturday. The night beckons.”
As if to prove her wrong—about the glumness, that is—he flashed her a smile, all teeth, the smile of a caveman just back from clubbing a mastodon and laying it at the feet of his cavewoman inamorata, and he shifted his shoulders inside his jacket to show her what he had there. His eyes fastened on hers. “I was just waiting for you to come in and brighten the day.”
Her eyes were the strangest color—purple, he guessed you’d call them—and he saw that she was wearing some sort of theatrical makeup on her upper lids to bring them out. She didn’t respond to his overture, not directly. Ducking her head, she fished a cigarette holder out of a black bead reticule and gave him a look. “Why don’t you come sit with us,” she said, nodding toward the restaurant in back, where Cody Menhoff himself was scurrying around setting up a table for her. “You can light my cigarette for me.” And then she was sweeping across the room, the other woman right behind her and the rest of the group converging on the table with its clean white cloth and a platter of sandwiches and a Jack Rose cocktail in a tall-stemmed glass set right in the center of it like a tribute.
There were four men in her party (all jerks, and O‘Kane could have whipped any two of them with one hand tied behind his back) and three women made up to look like Parisian streetwalkers, or what O’Kane supposed Parisian streetwalkers would look like. He wouldn’t know. Not actually. Unlike these swells, with their thin-lipped smiles and their cigarette holders and racquet club drawl, he’d never been to Paris. Or to New York, for that matter.
Dolores and her friend of the vapid smile made the party nine, and O‘Kane brought it to ten. She made a place for him right beside her and as the conversation veered from the War to skirt lengths to gossip about people O’Kane didn’t know, she leaned in close and gave him the full benefit of her eyes and her husky timbreless voice: “How about that light you promised me?”
O‘Kane put a match to her cigarette and the whole table lit up, smoke everywhere, glasses already empty and the waiter bringing another round, and every one of them drinking a Jack Rose cocktail (1½ oz. apple brandy, juice of ½ lime, 1 tsp. grenadine; shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass).
“What’s the matter, Eddie,” Dolores purred, lifting her chin to exhale, her lips contracted in a little pout, “don’t you smoke?”
He shrugged. Smiled. Let his eyes climb right out of his head and into hers. “Once in a while I like a cigar with a glass of whiskey, usually late at night. I’m not one for cigarettes, though, not generally.”
“Oh, you’ll like these. Here, try one.”
And then she was touching the glowing tip of her cigarette to the one he’d plucked from her monogrammed case and he was as close to her as he’d been to Giovannella an hour ago, only this was different, this was nice, the beginning of the dance instead of the end. “Swell,” he said, exhaling. “Very smooth.”
She looked at him. “They ought to be. They came all the way from Turkey.”
They talked through the afternoon and into the evening, and she drank Jack Rose cocktails as if they were no more potent than lamb’s milk and smoked up all the cigarettes in her case. And what did they talk about? Life. Santa Barbara. Mr. McCormick. Her husband. Italy. The War. Music. Did he like music? He did, and when they went out front arm-in-arm to climb into her car and drive out to Mattei’s for supper and the rest of the party be damned, he pressed her up against the hood and sang to her in the soft lilting tenor that was another legacy of his father:You shall have rings on your fingers
And bells on your toes,
Elephants to ride upon
My little Irish rose.
She let him kiss her then, a lingering oneiric kiss that gave him time to adjust to her—she was taller than Giovannella, leaner, her lips taut as rope—and then they were in the car and breathing hard, both of them. “That was beautiful, Eddie—the song, I mean,” she murmured, her voice husky and low, “and the kiss too, that was nice,” and then she put the car in gear and it was the first time in his life he’d been in an automobile and a woman driving, and he told her his ma had taught him the song, back East, back in Boston, where he was born.
“And the kiss?”
He took hold of her hand. She was playing a game he liked better than any he could of. “It was a hundred girls taught me that, but none as pretty as you.”
It was still light out, and as the car climbed smoothly up through the San Marcos Pass and snaked down into the farmland of the Santa Ynez Valley, O‘Kane gazed out on the world and saw it in all its lambent immanence, caught there for him as if on a motion picture screen, only in color, living color. Every bush along the roadway was on fire with blossoms, the trees arching up and away from the windscreen of the car in a wash of leaves and each a different shade of green, the mountains cut into sections like towering blocks of maple sugar pressed in a mold, enough maple sugar to sweeten all the tea in China. He was glowing with the whiskey and the anticipation of what was coming, a sure thing, the deserted wife and the husband off sitting around a campfire in one of those places you read about in the newspaper, and he sank back in the seat and listened to the engine, gazing out into all that spread of the natural earth, and didn’t he see the face of God there, God the all-forgiving, and His Son the redeemer?
Sure he did. And this wasn’t a fierce and recriminating God who would rear back and hurl bolts of lightning and cause the earth to erupt and point the infinite finger of damnation at a child-murder
ing adulterer hurrying on his way to indulge yet another sin of the flesh ... no, no, not at all. The Lord was smiling, a smile broad as a river, tall as any tree, and that smile made O‘Kane feel as if a lamp had been lit inside him. Everything would work out, he was sure of it. Of course, he was stewed to the gills, and that might have had something to do with this sudden manifestation of the Deity and the feeling of benevolence and well-being that had stolen over him in the space of a breath ... but still, there it was, and as he sat there molded into the seat beside Dolores Isringhausen with the whiskey in his veins and the slanting sun warm against the swell of his jaw, he thought maybe he’d died and gone on to his reward after all.
It was early the next morning, after they’d made love twice on the satin sheets in her bedroom, and the slow quiet cigarette-punctuated murmur of their conversation had fallen away to nothing, that he thought of Giovannella again. Dolores lay on her back beside him, sprawled like a doll thrown from a cliff, her breasts fanned out on the fulcrum of her rib cage, her legs splayed. She was smoking, the cigarette standing erect between her lips, jetting a stream of smoke straight up into the air, and he was idly stroking the hair between her legs, as relaxed as a dead man except for the accelerating spark of Giovannella in his head.
“Dolores?” he said into the silence of the room.
“Hm?”
“Do you know any doctors? Personally, I mean.”
And though when the sun came up it was Sunday, the Lord’s day, and all the faithful were trotting in and out of the churches whether they were Catholics or Protestants or Egyptian dog worshipers, O‘Kane was on his way to Giovannella’s with the stiff white slip of paper on which Dolores Isringhausen had written a name and address in her looping graceful boarding-school hand, and when he got there he waited round the corner till the shoemaker went out to do whatever it is shoemakers do on Sundays. Then he looked over his shoulder, swallowed his pounding heart, and mounted the swaybacked stairs on the outside of the building.