Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  “Marimekko,” I said, remembering it all in one hot rush. Fred naked beside me, inside me. Kissing so much that my chin got red and chafed. Eating peanut butter on crackers so that we didn’t have to leave that bed.

  “We’ll go to Maine again,” Fred was saying. “This time I’ll take you for lobster at this place right on the wharf—”

  “You promised me that last time,” I chuckled.

  “Lobster is overrated,” Fred grinned. “I’d probably not let you out of bed this time either.”

  “Except this time I’m married,” I reminded him. Glancing at the wedding ring on his finger, I added, “You’re married.”

  “Luau Hut or Ming Garden?” Fred asked. “Mai tais or chicken wings?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “We go to the Luau Hut and have mai tais,” he said, “I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

  I thought of Jim back home in the dark living room. Funny, that room was anything but alive. It was death. It was Michelle’s pictures on the mantle. It was the smell of bourbon and sweat and grief.

  I said, “Luau Hut then.”

  I said, “And you’d better keep your promise to misbehave.”

  * * *

  Pressed against the side of Luke’s Restaurant after too many shared mai tais served in fake coconuts, I gave myself over to something I’d forgotten ever since the morning that Michelle died: pleasure. Upstairs from Luke’s, the Luau Hut glowed. Against the wall, Fred kissed me in that way I’d forgotten people kissed. I found myself pressing against him too, meeting his tongue, whispering into his mouth, “Don’t stop.”

  “Where can we go?” Fred asked, pulling back from me just enough so that our lips almost still touched.

  “Your car?” I suggested.

  I was drunk and stupid on mai tais and the promise of love. So much so that I forgot I hated Fred, forgot how he’d broken my heart twice, forgot my husband sitting in the dark crying.

  Fred took me by the hand and led me down Westminster Street, down Snow Street, to the almost empty parking lot where his Mustang sat, waiting for us. The attendant’s booth was empty, though a bare bulb burned in it. What time is it? I wondered as Fred pulled me past it, so eager, so ready, his excitement fueling my own.

  And then I was in the car, squeezing into the backseat with Fred following. He was kissing me, kissing me hard. I’d decided to keep my legs bare, and despite the cool April chill that had descended on the city, I was glad now for that.

  Fred was saying all the right things. He’d thought of me so many times over the years. He remembered my smell.

  “Oh, Barbara, this feels so good.”

  “Shut up,” I said, pulling him closer. If I could have swallowed him whole, I would have.

  “Shut up or I’ll kill you,” I said.

  * * *

  “Tell me about her,” I said when we paused in the kissing.

  “Not now,” Fred said.

  “Now.”

  Fred sighed. “She’s crazy. She . . . drinks too much. She falls down and embarrasses herself. She rages at me, at the kids, at her miserable life. Then she passes out, and when she wakes up she acts like nothing happened. She makes us waffles and sausages like nothing happened.”

  “Oh, Fred,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “And Jim?” he asked.

  “Did I tell you his name was Jim?”

  Fred laughed and poked me on the nose. “You did have a lot of mai tais, baby.”

  “Jim is sad,” I said. “Terminally sad. Sometimes I’m afraid . . .” I shook my head.

  “What?”

  I hadn’t said out loud what I was afraid of—that one day I would come home and find Jim had shot himself. That Jim would decide he’d had enough of grief.

  Instead of answering, I turned and kissed him.

  “This is ridiculous,” Fred murmured. “We’re adults, making out in the backseat of a car.”

  I thought of the signs the college kids held. Make Love, Not War. My head hurt from those mai tais, my mouth tasted foreign.

  Fred looked at me, took my face in both his hands. “Would you ever leave him? Would you?”

  “Ouch,” I said, trying to move free of his grasp. But he held on tight, his thumbs digging into my flesh. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Would you?” he asked again. His eyes searched mine.

  Could I leave Jim? He was there when Michelle was born, cradling her in his arms like the precious thing she was. And he was there beside me when she died. Funny how life and death were so similar, his face holding almost the same exact expression at both.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  Fred’s jaw set.

  “Could you leave . . .” Had he told me his wife’s name?

  “Angie,” he said. “For you, I would.”

  Twice before, I’d let myself believe that Fred and I had a future. I’d imagined a house by the ocean, and kids with his blue eyes. I’d imagined growing old beside him.

  “I don’t know,” I said again, not wanting to trust this feeling growing inside of me.

  After all that had happened, how could I let myself hope again?

  Fred turned so that he faced me squarely. There was a smudge of my new lipstick below his bottom lip. I didn’t wipe it off.

  “Then I’ll have to convince you,” he said. “Tomorrow night, Ming Garden. Chicken wings.”

  I had made that recipe at home once. The Providence Journal had run it at a reader’s request. But the wings hadn’t tasted the same.

  “Barbara?” Fred was saying. “Tomorrow?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  * * *

  To my surprise, Jim was awake when I got home, sitting in the kitchen with the table set: two plates, two napkins, two sets of silverware.

  “I made lamb chops,” he said. “They’re probably dried out by now . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I ate.”

  Jim nodded, studying my face. “I made potatoes too, little roasted ones.”

  I shrugged apologetically.

  “Wine?” he asked me, holding up a bottle. He didn’t wait for me to answer, just cut the foil from its neck and yanked out the cork.

  I took the glass he offered and sat at the empty place setting.

  “I made peas too,” Jim said. “With the pearl onions. You like those.”

  “Yes.”

  Jim sipped his wine. “Funny day today,” he said.

  “How so?”

  He hadn’t talked this much of his own accord in almost a year. It should have made me glad, but instead I felt suspicious. Maybe that was guilt.

  “Someone was poking around our life insurance policies,” Jim said. “Charlie called me and said some guy called the office yesterday, pretending to be me, asking if our premiums were paid up and what the policies paid out.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, of course I do.”

  Jim nodded. “Asked if the policy paid out in case of suicide—”

  “What?”

  “And in case we both died—”

  “Jim, you’re scaring me.” I wondered if there really had been such a call, or if Jim was trying to tell me something.

  “Charlie said, You have a copy of the policy yourself, and the guy said he’d misplaced it.”

  “But he didn’t give out any information, did he?”

  Jim refilled my wineglass. “Where have you been until almost midnight, Barbara?” he asked.

  “Down city,” I said. “I met Betty and Dorothy for Chinese.”

  “Ming Garden?”

  “The Luau Hut. I had one mai tai too many, I’m afraid.”

  “Girls’ night out,” Jim said.

  I could smell the lamb, acrid, almost like urine.

  “Thanks for making dinner,” I said. “It’s been so long.”

  “We’ll have it tomorrow night. If it’s salvageable.”

  I tho
ught about Fred. Somehow he seemed more familiar, more intimate, than my own husband. Did grief alienate people like this? Could we ever go back to how we’d been?

  “Tomorrow night . . .” I began, but I couldn’t think of a good excuse for being out again.

  “If the lamb’s ruined, I’ll make pork chops . . . All right?”

  “Yes. Either way,” I said, forcing a smile.

  * * *

  Of course I didn’t meet Fred the following night. How could I? But as I sat across from my husband, eating Shake ’n Bake pork chops and Rice-a-Roni and applesauce, I thought of him waiting under the Shepard clock for me. How long did he stand there, looking expectant at first, watching the stream of people moving toward him, thinking one of them would be me? Like Jim, Fred is a tall man, tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd; he would have spotted me right away. How often did he glance at his watch, wondering what was keeping me? How long did he stand there, waiting?

  I sipped the cold Chablis Jim had bought, and ate my dinner, and thought about Fred under the clock, maybe worried by now, maybe angry.

  Jim’s voice broke into my reverie: “I think what unnerved me the most is that I did think about it.”

  He was talking about the caller yesterday. He was talking about killing himself.

  “But I didn’t want to leave you,” he said, and reached across the table and took my hand in his. “I couldn’t . . .” His voice broke and he didn’t continue.

  Was this the beginning? I wondered. Were we starting to emerge from our fog of grief? Starting to make our way back to each other? I looked around the dining room, acutely aware of how quiet the house was. It had been that way ever since Michelle died, like it was holding its breath.

  “Could you do it?” Jim asked me.

  “Kill myself?” I said, surprised. “I don’t think so.”

  “Could you kill someone else?”

  I laughed nervously. “I admit it,” I said, “I have had murderous thoughts.”

  We chewed our dinner in silence for a bit, and then Jim said, “I think we should leave. This house. Providence. We should go away and start over.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the images of Michelle here. Here at this table smearing mashed sweet potatoes on her face. Crawling in the odd, army-style crawl she had, like Vic Morrow at the beginning of Combat. Taking her first bold steps across this threshold, nothing tentative about our daughter. She pulled herself to standing, walked into the room, then fell down hard on her diapered bottom.

  “Leave,” I repeated, opening my eyes. “How?”

  * * *

  The next night I made excuses, an overdue library book, a sale at Cherry & Webb. Jim frowned at me but said nothing. Outside, the wind had picked up and dark clouds swept across the evening sky. April had certainly come in like a lion, I thought as I walked quickly across the Westminster Mall to the clock. Foolishly, I had forgotten an umbrella. The first fat drops of rain began to fall. The mall emptied fast. Was I also foolish for expecting Fred to show up?

  But no sooner did I have the thought than I saw him, with his purposeful stride, moving toward me. He had on his London Fog, belted loosely.

  “I thought you’d changed your mind,” he said when he reached me, pulling me into a long hard hug.

  “I can’t stay,” I said, moving out of his arms. “Jim . . . he’s suspicious, I think.”

  Fred nodded. Then he took my arm and tugged me along.

  “Really,” I said. “He’s making meatloaf. I told him I was going to the library.”

  Fred didn’t answer. He just led me back to Luke’s, and upstairs to the Luau Hut. Despite my protestations, he ordered us two mai tais and a pupu platter. Once they were delivered, he lifted his glass and slid the napkin from beneath it.

  “You guys have life insurance?” he asked, taking a Cross pen from his inside jacket pocket.

  A shiver ran up my arms.

  “Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  Fred was writing something, but he laughed. “Not everybody. I had some hard luck, nothing serious, down in Buenos Aires. That’s why I came back here.”

  “So you don’t have a job?”

  “Not exactly,” Fred said. “But I do have a plan.”

  He turned the napkin around and moved it closer to me. The mai tai tasted overly sweet tonight, and I bit into an egg roll dipped in hot mustard to get the taste out of my mouth. Immediately, my eyes began to tear.

  “What is it?” I asked, coughing.

  “A,” he said, pointing to the napkin, “you do something to upset him—”

  “Who? Jim?”

  “—then you leave the house. See, you’ll be out of it.”

  “Out of what?”

  “But you leave the door open, see?” He pointed to the letter B on the napkin. “So that I can slip in . . . Don’t worry,” Fred continued, looking me right in the eye, “he won’t suffer. Hell, he’s suffering now, isn’t he? With grief? We’ll be doing him a favor.”

  “How did you know about Michelle?” I asked Fred suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “My daughter,” I said softly.

  “I ran into Simone . . . what’s her last name? Your old friend from college?”

  I took another sip of my drink, trying to make sense of what he was saying. Simone married a guy from Australia and moved there a million years ago. After one Christmas card with a picture of kangaroos pulling Santa’s sleigh, I never heard from her again.

  “How else can we be together?” he asked me.

  “But your wife . . .”

  He grinned. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. She’s agreed to a divorce. She thinks I’m a no-good son of a bitch, and she said good riddance.” Fred reached across the table and took both of my hand in his. “I came looking for you. Third time’s the charm, babe.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I stared at Fred, the man I had loved more than anyone ever. I stared at that napkin.

  “You come straight here, and I’ll meet you under the clock.”

  It felt like a dream. My whole life—Fred and Jim and even Michelle—all of it.

  “We wait until the insurance pays off, then we go.”

  “Go where?” I asked him. A plan was taking hold.

  “Anywhere,” he said, smiling. “Where do you want to go?”

  I shrugged. “Hawaii?”

  “Sure, I like that.”

  “Kiss me,” I said.

  He leaned in.

  “Not like that,” I said, and I moved to sit beside him in the red booth.

  “Like this,” I said, kissing him until he couldn’t catch his breath.

  * * *

  The rain was cold and hard.

  The next evening, I stood nervously under the Shepard clock, my umbrella clutched tight in my hand. The wind tugged it, and I couldn’t help but think of how Fred had saved me.

  I felt like I waited forever before I spotted him approaching, his head bent beneath his own umbrella. I could make out those ridiculous sideburns, the mustache. His London Fog was belted tight against the storm. Already his wing tips looked soggy.

  “Is it done?” I asked him when he reached me.

  He lifted his face. He was still beautiful, I thought.

  “Done,” he said.

  “Do you think—” I began.

  But he held up one finger and pressed it to my lip. “Believe me,” he said, “they won’t be able to recognize him.”

  I nodded, trying to steady myself.

  “It’s time to call,” he said.

  I went to the phone booth and stepped inside. I dialed 911.

  “My husband!” I said, trying to sound panicked. “I came home and found him. He shot himself! He’s dead!”

  I broke into sobs, real ones, as if everything I’d had in me all this time was finally freed. The woman calmed me, asked for my address, said help was on the way.

  When I stepped out of the phone booth, he reached into his insi
de pocket and pulled out the airline tickets, just enough so I could see them.

  “Honolulu,” he said.

  I thought of mai tais on the beach. I thought of the ocean pounding the shore, washing away memories and pain and grief.

  “The flight leaves at nine. We have plenty of time to get to Logan.”

  “Kiss me,” I said.

  My husband bent his face to mine and kissed me. We had not kissed in longer than I could remember and it felt good, right.

  Jim hooked his elbow in mine, and we walked together through the cold April rain. I thought I could almost hear the faint sounds of the song “Michelle” playing in an empty house.

  THE VENGEANCE TAKER

  BY ROBERT LEUCI

  Olneyville

  While there are several names in this story from the public record, this is a fictional tale. The story is completely a creation of my imagination. —R.L.

  Tommy Boyle, restless for life, a young man of twenty-four who had learned to live on his family’s connections, his nerves, and his boundless energy, made his way from his three-room apartment in Olneyville Square to the Federal Hill section of Providence. Once there, Tommy would borrow money, twenty thousand dollars, from a man some referred to as the Old Man, others called him George. His name was Raymond Patriarca, a mighty Mafia don and bon vivant. Tommy was hoping to launch a spectacular diner with the borrowed money. It was money for which he would pay a vigorish 20 percent weekly, a loan shark’s interest, collected with a half-smile and a baseball bat.

  A brutal world the don lived in, but of course it didn’t seem that way to Tommy Boyle. Tommy had set his mind on being rich and famous—if it took a Faustian committment to the don, then so be it. It was uncontrolled enthusiasm, a twenty-four-year-old grafter’s vow.

  A product of the state’s thriving special-education program, Tommy had a natural inclination for business, according to his friends. Blond and well-built, his ice-blue eyes burned with a fierce desire to accomplish great things. Some suspected that at times he suffered minor emotional disturbances. Tommy was, they said, a dreamer. He could be accident prone, forgetful. Sometimes he would pass into a kind of trance for twenty-four hours straight with a blankness in his eyes that many found alarming. His father had warned him to be especially careful, that things among the gangsters had started to go funny. All the mobsters, it seemed, had lost their sense of irony. But Tommy remained positive. Borrow money, pay it back with interest, simple.