“You know,” she finally said, delicately scratching a corner of her lipsticked mouth with a long red pinky nail, “if I had this place? I would be out here around the clock. I would set up a desk and do all my homework right where we’re standing.”
“Homework?” The breeze brought scented wisps of her hair across his face.
“Yeah. I go to Dempsy Community College. They got a two-year program in Public Policy. Housing said that if I get the degree they’d throw me a desk at Hopewell, make me the tenant liaison officer.”
“That’s great,” Ray said, half-listening, mostly just soaking up being next to her.
“Yeah, see Hopewell, they’re so sick of the tenants bitching about this, that, the other, they decided to make some of us management. See how we like it.”
“You want to neutralize a threat? Give it a job.”
“Didn’t work on my husband.”
“Oh yeah?” Ray was all ears.
“The thing is, I never graduated high school and, they’ll let you into the college, but I can’t get my degree until I get my GED, so I’m kind of doing both at the same time.”
“Straddling two horses,” Ray said, still stuck on Husband.
“Try three. I work a forty-hour job, too.”
“Damn, that tattoo’s no lie,” wanting to touch it, her. “So where’s your other son tonight, with Carla?”
“What other son?”
“That little boy jumping on the couch at your mother’s.”
“David? That’s my brother’s boy. So’s Dante, thank God. My mom keeps picking up the ones that fall off the back of the truck.”
“Really.” Ray thinking, I can help.
“Really.”
“But Nelson’s yours?”
“All mine.”
“Does his . . .” He faltered; how to put this . . . “Does his dad live with him too?”
“Yeah, OK.” Danielle smirked. “What you’re really asking . . .” She cut herself off, briefly leaned her arm into his, just a playful bump but it made his head spin.
“He’s out of the picture,” she said.
“Out, like . . .” Ray pushing, losing control a little.
“Like three strikes you’re out,” she said, enjoying this game.
“In English?”
Danielle sighed. “There’s two institutions in this city start with the words ‘Dempsy County.’ I attend one, he lives in the other.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Guess.”
“What kind of sentence he get?” Ray assumed she meant drugs.
“Year and a day. Like always.”
Ray repeated it to himself, Like always; then let it be.
Back in the living room, Dante, for some reason shirtless now, came up to Ray with a baseball-sized rock that belonged in the bedroom.
“What’s this?” The kid offered it up to him on twinned palms.
“That’s coprolite.”
“What?”
“Petrified dinosaur shit.”
Dante let it drop to the floor. “What’s wrong with you, man!” A chip shot off the hardwood in a powdery spray.
“Dante!” Danielle snapped.
Nelson quickly, anxiously, looked to Ray, then, clucking in irritation at his cousin, stooped to pick it up.
As they left the apartment, heading for a restaurant, Ray became aware that Danielle’s perfume would still be in the air a few hours from now when he returned, just hanging there like an unmitigated longing, and there would be nothing he could do about it.
Oriente was a big red Cuban-Chinese restaurant in Hoboken, gaudy and loud.
Ray picked it not for the food, which was OK, but for the fifteen-foot papier-mâché hand suspended from the ceiling: a life-sized Chinaman complete with lampshade hat and pigtail, struggling to free himself from two chopsticks held by gigantic green-nailed fingers.
“So Nelson, what are you into these days,” Ray asked over a plate of plantains and mu shu pork.
“So Nelson, what are you into these days,” Dante aped him, once again nailing his self-conscious attempt at breeziness.
“He’s into books,” Danielle answered for her son. “His father was a college graduate, not that you’d ever know it.”
“Oh yeah?” Ray made himself smile. “What do you want to be?”
“He told me Vice President of the United States.”
Nelson glared at his mother.
“Vice?” Ray asked.
“He says being the President’s too much pressure,” Danielle answered for him again.
It dawned on Ray that Nelson hadn’t said word one since being picked up at Hopewell over two hours ago.
“So what kind of work you do?” he asked Danielle.
“Me? Bullshit work. I’m a receptionist over in New York. You know this movie guy, Harold Krauss? The producer?”
“Does TV movies?”
“Him. I’m a receptionist at his company.”
“Really.”
“Really.” Dante again.
“You know I worked in TV for three years myself,” Ray said cautiously.
“On Brokedown High, right?”
“How’d you know that?”
“I watched it once with my mother. She saw your name in the opening credits and got all excited. ‘I know him! I know him! He lived in the building! He lived in the building!’” Danielle quoted her mother in a high hissy whisper.
Back when he was working on the show, Ray had often fantasized about people who had known him from childhood turning on their TVs and reacting to the sight of his name; but in the few instances where that pipe-dream scenario had actually become an in-the-flesh encounter, it invariably left him feeling more embarrassed and shallow than vindicated.
“You don’t want to get deeper into TV work yourself?”
“As what, a seasoned receptionist?” Danielle said with a twist of the lips. “Well, actually what I do is more interesting than it sounds. Like, three days after I got hired, OK? My boss Krauss, he buzzes me, says to come into his office, bring a notepad. I go in, he’s auditioning this actor for some movie, like a disease movie, a virus movie, or some such. I go in, he points to a chair in back, says, ‘Take notes.’ And I’m thinking, ‘On what?’
“So, the guy reads his lines with an actress, the audition lasts maybe ten minutes, Krauss gets up, says, ‘That was wonderful. We’ll call,’ the guy leaves, the actress leaves, it’s me, Krauss and this other producer, Krauss looks to me, says, ‘So what you think?’ I’m like, ‘About what . . . ?’ Krauss says, ‘Would you fuck him?’” lowering her voice on the f-word. “And I’m, in my mind, I’m, ‘How dare you.’ I mean I was shaking I was so insulted, but scared too, because I needed that job. But all I say is, ‘I don’t know. Would you?’
“And at first he’s like, his face is, ‘Who the hell are you to . . .’ But the other guy starts laughing like, ‘Hey, good one, Hal,’ and I guess that broke the tension. He never actually apologized to me but he’s been kind of, I don’t know, tasteful about things ever since.”
“Tasteful.”
“I mean he still calls me in every time he’s auditioning actors, you know, ‘Take notes,’ but after they leave, all he says to me is, ‘So what do you think?’ and all I give him is thumbs up, thumbs down. But I’ll tell you one thing I learned about movies? It all boils down to ‘Would you fuck him, would you fuck her.’ Everything flows out of that.”
“Understanding what you just said?” Ray aching for her. “That’s a six-figure salary right there.”
“Jesus, Krauss has this wife? Two weeks into the job she comes in, slips me a hundred-dollar bill and her cell phone number, says to me, ‘Any woman goes in that office, the door’s closed more than fifteen minutes, you call me.’
“I’ll take the money, but screw you, bitch, I’m not playing pussy police for her and I know he’s layin’ carpet with two of the office staff plus about every third or fourth actress goes in for a part, but she’s not
getting shit out of me. I mean, the presumptuousness of asking me to do that.”
“He ever put the moves on you?”
“Me? I don’t know, kind of. I mean, right from the jump I can tell he’s sizing me up, sees the tattoo, figures anything goes, right? Like, day two he comes out of his office, sits on my desk, says, ‘Hey, good news. I just bought the film rights to five of the Ten Commandments, got a two-year option on the others.’ You know, it was a joke, but I believed him, and I think that turned him off.”
He heard regret in her voice, like she would have been up for it if things had broken another way.
“Nah nah nah,” Danielle said, reading his eyes. “Mainly I just felt stupid about not getting the joke.”
And with that gentle correction, Ray decided he was in love.
“So, Nelson.” He beamed at the kid, who had been listlessly stabbing the same shrimp with a single chopstick for the last ten minutes. “What’s your favorite subject?”
“He’s good at everything but gym,” Danielle said.
“That’s exactly like I was, except I wasn’t even good at gym.”
“You hear that?” Danielle asked him, Ray fending off irritation, the boy not needing a translator.
“How much money you got?” Dante asked him.
“On me?” Ray was sick of this kid.
“Can you buy me something?”
“I’ll buy you a beer.”
“I’ll drink it.”
“Dante, shut up,” Danielle snapped.
“Was I talking to you?” he shot back in a high railing voice.
“He’s like the demon seed, this one.” Danielle palmed her forehead.
“Oh yeah? You’re like the watermelon seed, you big booty bitch.”
Nelson covered his mouth again, swallowing another howl as Danielle snatched Dante clean off his seat and had him dragged halfway to the restrooms before Ray could react.
Now that he was alone with Nelson, some of the kid’s wallflower vibrations made it across the table, had Ray tongue-tied for a long moment.
“Nelson, I tell you, when I was in school? The only good thing about seventh grade was that I was finally done with sixth. And the only good thing about eighth grade? I was finally done with seventh. What grade are you in?” trying to get him to verbalize at least one word.
Nelson held up seven fingers, Ray wondering if the kid had a speech defect.
“When I was in seventh grade, a lot of our classes, we were set up in squares of four, you know, four desks in a block, the students all facing each other. They still do that?”
The kid nodded yes.
“Anyways, in seventh-grade math? I was such a pain in the ass, I was so disruptive, the teacher took my desk out of the square and put me alone right under the blackboard, you know, facing the whole class, so she could keep an eye on me, keep me from contaminating anybody with my behavior. Can you believe that?”
“That’s like . . .” Nelson began, then quickly shut himself down, Ray surprised by the thrill he felt just getting the kid to say those two words.
They sat in silence for another moment, Nelson studying his untouched food and Ray wondering why he always resorted to sad-sack stories of his own childhood to get on the inside with kids.
Danielle and Dante returned to the table, Dante flinging himself sullenly in his chair, his downturned lips tight as a drum, a residual sparkle of tears in his lashes.
“I swear,” Danielle said, “I told my sister-in-law when she was pregnant with this one, ‘Do the cops a favor, swallow a pair of handcuffs now.’”
The waiter dropped a check on the table but left before Ray could give it back to him with a credit card.
He pulled the gold AmEx from his wallet and left it face up on the tab.
Nelson glanced at the card, then did a double take, abruptly leaning forward and gaping at it fish-mouthed.
“Ma!” More a gasp than a word.
Snatching the card off the bill tray, he buried his mouth in his mother’s hair, a cupped hand shielding his whispered words from the table.
Danielle nodded, took the card from Nelson and carefully placed it back on top of the check.
“You know what he just said to me?” she asked softly, tapping the oval-framed profile of the AmEx centurion. “He just said, ‘Ma. That’s one of the guys who killed Jesus.’”
Near ten o’clock, he pulled the car in front of Carla’s building, Danielle in the passenger seat, Nelson and Dante in back.
Directly overhead, the PATH train tore apart the night. Ray sat there thick-witted, adolescent, wanting to kiss her at least—but the presence of the kids made it unthinkable.
Even so, there was a swollen moment of inaction, of expectation, of avoiding each other’s eyes . . .
Dante opened his door and hopped out, followed by his cousin, neither one of them saying a word to him or even looking his way.
But Danielle remained in the car, frowning at her nails, working something out. Ray began to lean across the stick shift.
“You don’t want to come upstairs.” It was a statement, not a question, and it checked his timid progress.
“No, I guess not.”
He ducked down and twisted his head up in order to see if Carla was on fifth-floor window patrol up there, but he couldn’t get low enough.
With nothing to lose, he tried to kiss her again, get his nose up in that vanilla-scented hair.
“Wait here.” She opened her door. “I’ll be down in five.”
She disappeared into the building without a backward glance.
Wait here: Ray sitting there now, stupid with shock, trying to do the math; Carla’s daughter, but thirty years old, a mother. Down in five. He tended to get up two, three times a night, walk around, take a leak, write down the odd dream. He couldn’t, just couldn’t fall asleep without reading. Wait here. The car smelled of her, smelled like panic. She had been frowning at her nails, something else was going on with her; something having nothing to do with him. He’d come way too fast; how could he not? It would be over before it started; Ray already working on what to say after, how to make it up to her.
He was halfway across the stick shift again, lost in her scent, when she abruptly opened the passenger door, making him jerk back in surprise.
“Hey,” she said, then exhaled heavily, free of the kids, of Carla too, maybe.
“I like your terrace,” she announced, staring straight ahead.
“Yeah, no,” Ray said. “Me too.”
She had put on fresh lipstick, her mouth glistening with it.
They drove back to Little Venice in taut silence, as if the trunk were packed with nitroglycerin, both of them staring straight ahead, Ray not knowing fuck-all about what was going on in her head, and not intending to ask until it was too late.
The first time all evening Ray became truly aware of Danielle’s blackness, or her nonwhiteness, or her whateverness, was in the long moment before he could find his keys—his old-bat next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kuben, with her usual uncanny timing, opened her own door a crack as if some phantom had rung her bell, then, apparently shocked by the sight of Danielle, she just stood there flatfooted, lost in her own surprise, before finally reclosing her door without even acknowledging Ray’s presence.
There was no dirty look, no blatant hostility or disapproval, just naked disorientation; Danielle saying nothing about it, just pursing her lips and briefly closing her eyes as if exhausted.
Reentering his apartment, Danielle instantly turned it inside out with her child-free presence—her touch, her glance, suffusing everyday objects with both life and menace.
Standing with her back to him in the middle of the living room, she slipped out of her red bolero jacket and, with the languid purposefulness of a toreador, extended her arm to drop it on a chair, Ray understanding right then that whatever was about to go down would be all her play.
“Do you want a drink?” he said, just to say something.
“No thank yo
u.”
She pulled back the sliding glass door and stepped onto the terrace as if stepping into a shower, Ray easing on out after her.
For the second time this evening they stood alongside each other, leaning forward against the guard rail and staring out this time at the Statue of Liberty, glowing frog-belly white and encircled by foam-flecked waves.
Upriver in the opposite direction, the floodlights behind the financial district skyline had been turned off for the night.
It was cold, the city-borne breeze damp and acrid, still dense with dread after all this time, but the swollen silence between them was interesting enough to keep him out here like this until the sun came up.
He inched his arm along the rail until there was contact. She didn’t pull away.
He became aware of a faint tremor in his jaw.
She exhaled heavily through her nose.
“Do you think if we stared hard enough at that statue we could get it to levitate?” He had said it four times to himself before saying it out loud.
“What?” She finally looked at him, a faint smile of incomprehension playing across her face.
“Do you think . . .” he ran out of breath. “I’m no good at this.”
“Good at what . . .” Teasing him.
“The, the international playboy routine.”
“International, huh?” she said, then turned so that her back was to the rail.
She took his left hand and placed it on her belly, which was full and round and solid. She then unsnapped the top button of her jeans for him while slipping her other hand between his legs, seeking the heated outline within the folds and creases of denim.
In a daze of sensation Ray imagined he could feel the tint of her skin through his fingertips. He dropped his hand into her curls and she thrust herself outward to meet his touch; hard bone sheathed in a padding of flesh.
She roughly rubbed the flat of her hand over the thickness between his legs and there they stood, hip to hip, but facing in opposite directions, like tango dancers awaiting the music, working on each other in fiercely minute circles.
The lack of eye contact combined with the furtive urgency of their touches shrank the enormous night into a stolen pocket of dark.
She kept grinding against his fingers, until, faintly growling, she suddenly lurched forward like a drunk, bringing her free hand to his shoulder for balance.
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