by Peter Quinn
“Sometimes,” Dunne said, “a decade is a lifetime.”
They listened to the trio of Negro musicians play elaborate, looping improvisations over Body and Soul, expert and sad even if it wasn’t Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Parker. If it didn’t relieve the dim smokiness of the room, at least it made it feel appropriate.
Wine launched into a story about the late actor John Garfield. They’d both been fans of his. A kid from the streets of New York, he’d possessed the same tough presence as Jimmy Cagney, the genuine article, the kind that can’t be faked. Garfield’s fame as a film star, earned in movies like Body and Soul, had been overwhelmed by his death in flagrante delicto. Dunne expected a funny anecdote. Instead, Wine related how on the night Garfield’s little girl died, his friends had called in a panic, unsure of where he was and afraid he was going to kill himself or somebody else. When Wine finished talking, they sat and drank in silence.
For the third morning in a row Dunne woke with the same painful, distracting half-buzz, half-ache above his left eye that reminded him why he hated hangovers. Pace yourself. A golden rule, on the job and off. He took a long swim in the pool. Same rule there: pace yourself. He left a message for Wine: Thanks for everything. Have to get back to Florida. Instead of packing the clothes he’d bought, he hung them in the closet with a note letting the maid know they were there for the taking.
With several hours to kill before his train was scheduled to depart, he sent his bag ahead to the station and took a cab to a Greek lunch shop on the Strip that Wine had recommended. He ordered a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a lamb and butter sandwich served on thick white bread with the crust cut off. After, he strolled along with no thought of a particular destination. Two blocks later he came upon a moldering Spanish-style stucco storefront in general agreement with the seen-better-days musical instrument store and dingy jazz club it was sandwiched between. Above the door was a modest, sun-blistered sign with several letters bleached and weather-beaten into oblivion: PALM REA ER AND ORTUNE TELLER TO TH STARS.
The door was locked and no hours were posted. Unsure he’d go in even if it was open, he admitted to himself he wasn’t incurious about what had happened to Merry Lane, the fallen starlet. (“Rhymes with harlot, don’t forget,” Wine joked.) He’d seen her years ago as the sensational centerpiece of “Earl Carroll’s Vanities,” the raciest review on Broadway; she was a performer with that rare and priceless combination of gorgeous looks and genuine talent. At the time Merry signed with a Hollywood studio for an outrageous sum, half the countrys population was wondering where their next meal was coming from. Her picture had been splashed all over the newspapers.
He put his face close to the chipped, rusted iron bars on the window. The glare and grime-streaked glass made it hard to see anything. He groped between the bars, swiped clear a swath of dirt and dust with one hand, and shaded his eyes with the other. Tables and potted palms were arranged around what looked like a dance floor. A counter near the door held a large silver samovar and several bottles of yellow and green liqueurs.
The dented metal door opened enough for a skull-like head, with gray stubble on chin and on top, to stick out. “Hey, peepin’ Tom, who you lookin’ for?”
“Merry Lane work here?” Dunne stepped back from the window.
“Sometimes.”
He brushed his hands together to rid them of dust and flakes of rust. “When?”
“Later.”
“How much later?”
“What’s your hurry?”
“Train to catch.”
“Need your fortune told before it goes?” The door swung open. The skull was wired by a scrawny, thin neck to a tall, spindly frame. At the top of his patched, frayed plaid shirt, a tuft of silver hair sprouted through. His oversized khaki army pants looked as though they’d been through both world wars. “What’s the matter? ’Fraid the train might jump the tracks?” He came out and leaned against the door.
“Never know, do you?”
“You do when you spot a cop creepin’ up to the window.” His mouth was full of brown teeth and empty spaces. Swollen, red-veined eyes logged the end of well-soaked nights followed by increasingly fuzzy-headed, dry-mouthed mornings, the wasted look of someone paying the price for decades of hard living, ex-boxer, ex-bouncer, now janitor, on his way to being an anonymous ex-everything breathing his last beneath the chicken-wire ceiling of some Skid Row flophouse.
Dunne approached him. The sour, damp odor from inside was more barroom than tea room. “Better trade in the old crystal ball. I’m a tourist.”
“And I’m Mandrake the Magician. Don’t need no crystal ball tell me we’re paid up full. You think you’re goin’ to do a little freelance shakedown of your own? Go on, take a walk, or I’ll let your compadres on the local patrol know you’re tryin’ to horn in.”
Dunne moved near enough to grab his collar, ball it in his fist, twist tight. An old reflex, almost irresistible. What he’d done, minus a second thought, to plenty of back-talking punks. But not a grumpy wreck like this, a geezer filled with harmless sass, the real menace gone out of him. Dunne reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, took out the travel agency envelop that held his ticket and waved it in his face, tauntingly. “Got a train to catch, pal, otherwise I’d stay and finish this conversation.”
“Ain’t no pal of yours.” Hostility yielding to curiosity, the man leaned close, as if scrutinizing a notice of dispossess or a search warrant. He squinted to make out the name on the envelope. “So go catch your choo-choo, Mr. Dunne, Fintan.”
“Congratulations, you can read. Now learn to talk nice. Might bring in some customers. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to afford a fresh coat of paint.”
“Paint my ass.” He turned to go back inside. “Got all the customers we need.” The door to the Silver Moon slammed shut behind him.
Re-pocketing the ticket, Dunne’s fingers touched his chest, registered the hard, accelerated heartbeat. He breathed deeply, exhaled slowly, and glanced at his watch. If he lingered much longer, he might miss the train. He headed to the corner and hailed a cab. It idled, waiting for the light to change. In the window of the Silver Moon, in the space where he’d cleared the grime from the glass, was a small, feminine, oval-shaped face, deathly pale, wide-eyed, with an estimating gaze, the kind worn by the very young and the very old, a cross between fright and surprise. After a second or two, it was gone.
He spent the first hour of the train trip regretting the stop at the Silver Moon. Innocent enough, motivated by curiosity, that’s all. But in the case of a career fallen as far as Merry Lane’s, maybe curiosity was just another word for cruelty. A lesson worth remembering: There are those who want nothing more than to be forgotten and enjoy whatever peace obscurity provides. In Merry’s case, better to let sleeping dogs lie, he decided, if that’s who her companion had been, and not a studio executive. He went to the lounge car and ordered a Scotch.
One afternoon soon after he returned to Florida, as Roberta was driving him back from a haircut, he noticed a black Plymouth following behind. He had the distinct feeling it was tailing them. He told Roberta to go to the next light and make a U-turn without signaling.
“What’s this all about?” She sounded more annoyed than skeptical.
“Indulge me, that’s all.”
Stopped at the light, she murmured in a voice so low he didn’t know if she was talking to herself or to him, “Lately, that’s all I do.” The light turned green. She swung the car around sharp enough that the tires squealed. The Plymouth kept going straight. “Grow up, Fin.” This time it was clear who she was talking to.
The next two weeks dragged by. On Saturday morning, when he came into the kitchen, Roberta was already dressed and was putting corn muffins in the oven that she’d made from a box of mix. As she sat down at the kitchen table to read the newspaper, she mentioned her plan to go to Miami the next day to visit Elba and her children. Did he want to come? Glancing down at the newspaper cover st
ory on the upcoming inauguration of Cuban President Batista and his country’s newfound prosperity, he replied casually, as if he’d been planning it for some time and it hadn’t just popped into his head, that he decided he’d take a trip to Havana.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat across from her. He’d told her before he didn’t care for corn muffins. He preferred a single pastry as a breakfast treat, like the ones at the little Italian bakery next to their apartment building in New York. But there wasn’t a decent cannoli or sfogliatelle within several hundred miles.
She opened the newspaper to the horoscope. Familiar routine that he knew by heart. She read aloud in a business-like voice, beginning with his sign: Virgo. Attributes: melancholy, analytical, practical, earthy, on and on. She repeated the predictions as if they contained a corn-muffin crumb’s worth of truth and weren’t the concocted mumbo jumbo of some booze hound who could no longer handle the rewrite desk.
“‘Virgos should stay close to home and avoid new departures.’ Listening, Fin?”
“To that superstitious crap?”
“Like dreams, superstitions can reflect experience. They’ve lessons to teach.” Roberta got up and went over to the stove.
He knew instantly that not only what he’d said but how he’d said it—the irritated tone—hurt her feelings. He came over and slipped his arms around her waist. “Trip out west left me more tuckered than I realized. Few days with nothing to do is all I need.” He pulled her close. No wedded bliss without marital piss. Recipe every married couple eventually learns, or doesn’t: half cup of spats, disagreements, silences and scars; full cup of things forgiven, forgotten and endured; mix, stir, pour, bake. Let cool before serving.
She pressed her hands against his shoulders, arched backwards, looked into his eyes. “It’s as easy to do nothing here as in Havana.”
“Havana is more relaxed.”
“Maybe what you need is less relaxation and more stimulation.” She kissed him on the neck, then rested her head on his shoulder.
It struck Dunne that though neither the original Spanish explorers nor the hordes that followed had found the Fountain of Youth in Florida, Roberta did better than most. She’d closed up her successful interior-decorating practice in New York and segued into their new life with a grace and ease not unlike what she displayed on the dance floor, never missing a step, always in sync with the music. He doubted she’d ever slide into retirement’s flab-happy cycle of too much food and too little movement.
When he first met her in 1938, he thought she was detached in the cold-blooded way of those who grew up as she did, father dead and gone while she was still a small child, raised by her mother, a widowed garment worker, stint in the reformatory, early and unsuccessful marriage, illegitimate child she had to give away, time spent working as a hooker. The street was a finishing school of sorts, its graduates as soft and sympathetic as reinforced concrete, skilled in the etiquette of commercial sex, tit(s)-for-tat, you only get what you pay for, nothing more, never on the house.
Lizzie Scaccio was people’s exhibit number one. When he was still on the homicide squad, they got called to the cat house Lizzie ran on Grand Street. Two hoods in a stiletto fight over one of the girls had sliced each other with fatal precision. A double homicide. Black-haired, eagle-beaked Lizzie sat honing her talon-like nails with an emery board.“Call the morgue,” she said, “and get these shitheads outta here.” It was a busy night, she was told. Be a while before the morgue boys arrived. She made a fist with thumb protruding from the middle and flicked it away from her front teeth. Sicilian gesture that didn’t mean thank you. “Get the garbage men. They’ll know what to do.”
Roberta always had more class than the Lizzie Scaccio type, for sure. She carried herself with a high-toned style that belied her background. Beautiful, self-assured, long and svelte, she had a cool poise that he’d taken at first for a stony indifference to anything but her own self-interest. She hired him to work on a case. That was that. He wasn’t about to get romantically involved, even if the possibility existed, which he was sure it didn’t.
He admired her before he loved her. Only gradually did he discover that what he mistook as indifference was the cover she used to mask her fierce, passionate attachment to those she loved. He was almost surprised when, on a warm summer’s evening, as they dined al fresco at Ben Marden’s, he’d looked across the table at her and realized how grudging admiration had quietly, without him noticing, become something more, much more, something he resisted putting a name on because he had no intention of falling in love. Neither did she, she told him after they were married. “But isn’t that always the way with love?” she said. “It just happens.”
But Roberta wasn’t like those penny-a-piece cherry melts candy stores used to sell, hard outside, gooey center, the soft-hearted hooker of the pulps. She was practical, not sentimental. Instead of worrying whether the glass was half-full or half-empty, she found a way to fill it. When she cared for someone, it was with clear-eyed appreciation of their faults as well as their graces, and when she loved it was with a purpose and strength that never seemed to waver or ebb. Child of a Catholic mother and Jewish father, she had no interest in any faith. But though not the slightest bit religious, she approached life devoid of doubts. Her poise applied inside as well as out. Nothing seemed to throw her.
The physical enjoyment he had with her was still real. Dunne couldn’t speak for every doughboy or G.I. who went overseas, but he’d bet most came back with a different appreciation for sex than they’d gone over with, and in his experience that was especially true in the first war, the bordellos of France serving as an erotic Harvard and Yale for boys who would have otherwise never made it past grammar school. Their expectations weren’t the only thing that was raised. They discovered that there was technique involved in the give and get of lovemaking, a body of bodily knowledge that if learned and applied could make the experience infinitely more pleasurable.
From the start, part of the attraction that Dunne and Roberta felt was their shared attitude toward sex. It was as though they’d been practicing all their lives for when they found one another. He left for the Second World War intending to be faithful. While it was less of an education than the first war, his final report card wasn’t without its blemishes. He wasn’t proud of the times he strayed but felt the circumstances made those lapses inevitable, and, besides, he’d done his bit in confession. They weren’t memories that preyed on him.
Their lovemaking wasn’t as intense or as frequent as when he first returned. Though she seemed almost always amenable to his advances, the initiative came more and more from her, a studied seduction, flash of flesh, high heels, black nylons with the seams up the back.
Several nights before, after they’d made love, he fell into a vivid dream in which he drove Wine’s sporty Speedster fast as he could down a road he didn’t recognize. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror at the black car trailing behind, ahead only an enveloping, obliterating whiteness. He turned the wheel, but the car stayed on the same course. The engine emitted a high-pitched whine, a sound he’d heard before. Where? He tried to press the brake, but it wasn’t there. At that point, Roberta poked him. “Fin,” she said, “wake up. You’re shouting.”
This morning, he searched for an excuse other than the truth: lack of interest, at least for the moment. “You’re all dressed.”
She took the muffins and put them on top of the stove. “That’s easy to undo.”
“Tonight,” he said. “Be our dessert.”
She walked away, grabbed her purse from the kitchen table, and lifted the car keys from the hook by the door. “Maybe you should get involved in something besides business trips. Why not volunteer at the veteran’s hospital?”
He wasn’t opposed to the notion. But not now. Better save it for the day when the company of addled and ailing men would be inevitable, even comforting. That evening’s dance lesson put him in a better mood. They both enjoyed what followed. But the e
xtra-long nap he’d taken in the afternoon left him unable to sleep. He sat by the still-drained pool and smoked. As day neared, one bird, up before the others, sang a frantically pitched solo. It was hard to tell if it was the proverbial early bird, or lonely, lost, bored, or just crazy. Maybe a little of everything. Stars and moon folded themselves into morning light.
He dozed on the flight to Havana. He was groggy when he got off, but his spirits quickly revived. Havana always had that effect, memories of his honeymoon with Roberta, that first day on the balcony of their hotel, admiring the cobalt sky, a color so singular it deserved a name of its own: Havana blue. It was just before the war torpedoed the tourist trade and gambling came under a temporary ban, around the time, he remembered, when the Tropicana opened. They watched the movie actor Errol Flynn, obviously plastered, as he danced with a lovely Cuban woman half his age.
Drunk or not, Flynn was steady on his feet as he and the woman laughed and glided across the dance floor. In those last evenings before phony war gave way to real, everybody seemed handsome, beautiful, happy, all painted with the lush, forgiving, silver glow of the moon. Only a little more than fifteen years before, but felt as though it were fifty.
The sky over Havana was the same, but change was in the air. Construction cranes dotted the horizon. Influences from the north grew ever more pronounced. Thanks to the new passenger ferries, the once rare sight of shiny, big, fin-tailed American cars was now common on the city’s streets. Installed by coup, with a wink and a nod from Washington, the hopelessly corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista worked in league with American gangsters. They had the run of the city’s nightlife, like New York during Prohibition when Oweny Madden and his fellow bootleggers operated nightclubs, speakeasies and gambling joints, their enterprises blessed by Mayor Jimmy Walker.