Welcome to Paradise

by Laurence Shames

  Exercise, he decided. In sweat was sanity and peace. Always had been; always would be. He'd take a good long run.

  He pulled on a jock; there was youth and vigor in the feel of the straps against his butt. He almost touched his toes a couple times, then put Fifi on her leash and headed out the door, past the topless woman doing yoga on a towel, past the European threesome already giggling over thimble muffins, past the desk clerk, dozing with his hand around a mug of coffee.

  He ran up Elizabeth Street, crossed the road that had brought him into town. He tried to think of his grimace as a smile, tried not to notice that none of this was easy anymore. His knees and spine didn't cushion his brain the way they used to. His eyeballs bounced. He sucked air past the lingering tickle in his lungs, past the weight of last night's pizza, and kept on going.

  He reached the county beach, traced out its zigzag path, then headed north along a row of condos. Fifi's paws made a pleasant ticking on the pavement, and, for a while, it hurt less as he went. He remembered what it was to win, to break into the open with a football spinning toward him and the goal line chalked on matted grass. The sun got higher and seared his hairline. Without breaking stride he pulled off his shirt.

  At the beginning of the long promenade that led on to the airport and the houseboats, he began to feel that he should turn around. His temples throbbed; there was a squish in his sneakers that might have been blood from his blistered feet. But his course was just reaching its most beautiful, with the green water of the Straits stretching away toward Cuba, and emerald-tinged clouds stalled above the Gulf Stream.

  So, mouth parched and ankles clicking, he pressed on. Young women passed him effortlessly on Rollerblades. Old hippies scudded by on junky bikes whose fat tires hummed against the concrete. He plodded along and his thoughts whooshed by like distant traffic. Sex. Archaic ball games. Sales pitches finding their apotheosis in commissions. Mostly he just wanted to keep on moving. Beyond worries, explanations. Past the need to figure stuff out. Onward to the time when this eerie and unsettling vacation would be over and he could ease himself again into the womb of the familiar.

  *

  It wasn't that Big Al Marracotta didn't know he'd been a prick. He knew; but he'd started on a downward spiral and he just couldn't turn the thing around.

  Over breakfast in their room, he watched Katy sulk, and he dimly understood that something different had come into her sulking. It was no longer a ploy. She wasn't doing it for attention or to get her way. She was doing it because she felt lousy and wanted to be left alone. She sat there with her bathrobe pulled in tight across her collarbones. She hadn't bothered to smooth her spiky hair, and her gaze floated without focus toward the curtained window.

  Big Al looked down and stabbed his eggs. He knew the situation could still be rescued. He could apologize, and she would understand. But there's no way he would do it. An apology conferred status, gave a certain power to the person receiving it. He wasn't starting down that road. What about the next time he acted like a scumbag—would she throw it in his face? Would he have to apologize again? Till respect was whittled away to nothing? No way ... Not that he absolutely had to apologize. Not in so many words. He could probably get things back on track and still stop short of that, just sort of slide around it. Tell her he had a lot on his mind; she'd fill in the rest. .. . But why give her that much information, that much satisfaction? Start confiding in someone, and they started feeling close, and that bred expectations, and that made the whole thing a big pain in the ass.

  The little mobster gnawed at buttered toast and realized he was getting mad at Katy. Last night he'd been a bastard; he had to justify it somehow, so today he was digging in his heels. He slurped coffee and turned a hard eye on her. He decided she wasn't that pretty. Her eyes were undramatic and when she pouted her mouth looked sharp. She was moody, sometimes she was lukewarm in the sack, and when vacation was over he'd probably break up with her. Enough already. Be a sport, pay a couple months' rent on the studio in Murray Hill, and have it over with.

  Thinking that, he felt restless in advance. He pushed his plate away, said, "Come on, let's take a drive or somethin'."

  "Fine," said Katy, even more eager than he to be out of that hotel room.

  As if it were her fault, he added, "I mean, Christ, we been here days and haven't seen a thing."

  She almost answered that, then realized there was no point. Silently, she blotted her mouth on her napkin and moved off someplace private to get dressed.

  19

  Carlo Ganucci was surprised how readily Tony Eggs had agreed to sit down with Nicky Scotto. He thought he'd say a flat-out no, or at least demand to be persuaded.

  Sitdowns were a nuisance. It was always someone bitching, and in the end you didn't give them what they wanted, and they went away madder than they were before; or you granted what they asked for, which almost always meant that someone else got mad and started looking for a meet.

  So when, the evening before, the consigliere had passed along Nicky's request to get together, he'd done so in the offhand manner of a man expecting a terse and bothered refusal. But Tony Eggs had not seemed bothered. In fact he'd almost smiled. Dry lips twitched briefly back from yellow and insecurely rooted teeth, and his eyes took on a gratified gleam. "Good," he'd said.

  "Good?"

  "Good. Tell 'im ten tomorrow morning."

  Now it was the appointed time, and Nicky Scotto, plucking at his cashmere turtleneck and smoothing the lapels of his slate-blue mohair suit, had just walked into the social club on Prince Street.

  He was trying to look casual and confident. He waved to a couple of goombahs playing poker in a corner, kidded with the lackey behind the coffee counter. But when his espresso was handed to him, he couldn't quite keep the cup from chattering against the saucer. He squeezed it hard to hold it still, before moving to the inviolable table at the rear, where the two old men were sitting.

  He waited for a nod from Tony Eggs, then almost daintily hitched up his trousers and joined them. Raising his demitasse, he said, "Tony. Carlo. Thank you for your time. Salud."

  He swallowed some coffee, struggled to put the cup down cleanly. A silent second passed, and he quickly understood that no one was going to help him keep the conversation going. Carlo Ganucci looked sleepy and feeble, the thin skin sallow and papery around his eyes. Tony Eggs appeared as inclined toward chitchat as a tree. Nicky cleared his throat, made a theatrical gesture of blowing into his hands, and said, "Fuckin' freezin' for November, huh?"

  Neither old man answered that. Tony Eggs pulled his tongue down from the roof of his mouth. It made a clicking sound that seemed very loud.

  Nicky tried again. "Okay, why I'm here, the reason, it's about the market."

  Nobody responded. Carlo looked down at his crumbling yellow fingernails.

  "I'm really happy to be runnin' it again," said Nicky. "Wanted to thank you for the opportunity."

  "Who said it's an opportunity?" Tony Eggs Salento rumbled forth at last.

  This flustered Nicky. He reached for his espresso cup, put it down again, tried a couple times to get a sentence started. Outside, horns honked and cabbies cursed each other.

  Tony Eggs, suddenly loquacious, went on. "Hey, Nicky, how much that suit cost?"

  "Eighteen hundred." He tried to keep the pride out of his voice, almost managed. He loved that suit. It wasn't just the money he'd been able to pay for it. It was that the guy who made it was in great demand, and wouldn't tailor clothing for just anybody.

  The old boss pursed his lips. His own suit cost two- fifty off a downtown rack, and he'd had it twenty years. "Do me a favor," he told his young lieutenant. "Take the jacket off and stomp it."

  "Excuse me?"

  "If you'd like this meeting to continue, put the jacket onna goddamn floor and walk all over it."

  Nicky licked his lips, glanced from underneath his brows at one old man and then the other. Maybe this was some kind of a test, or better yet a joke. But he s
aw no whimsy in their eyes. He waited an instant longer for a reprieve that would not come, then stood up, hesitated, and finally slipped out of his jacket and dropped it to the floor. For a moment he regarded it with heartbreak and nostalgia, as though it were a dying pet. The old linoleum was dusty and cracked, with tarry fissures that would claw at a gray silk lining. And who could say what unspeakable residue of fish slime or dog shit might be clinging to his shoes?

  His legs trying their damnedest to hold him back, he sidestepped onto the swath of custom-tailored mohair. He made a weak, little grinding motion then stepped off again.

  "More," said Tony Eggs.

  "More?"

  Gingerly he stepped again onto his jacket; then, with a perverse and mounting energy, a cresting wave of debasement and inchoate rage, he stomped the precious garment. He marched on it, he ran in place; he improvised a cha-cha, launched into a sort of demented Mashed Potato. His chest grew warm, his face flushed. He ground his heel into a sleeve, heard a seam rip open under the unsprung fury of his war dance. A drop of sweat broke free from a sideburn and trickled down his cheek, and he kept jumping on his jacket for several seconds after Tony said to him, "Okay, Nicky. Now siddown."

  He sat. He was breathing heavily. He looked down at his ravaged jacket, and he almost wanted to cry. Cry, or tear it thread from thread, till no two pieces of it hung together, till it was as utterly destroyed as though it had never been made.

  Softly, relentlessly, Tony Eggs Salento said, "Enough fun and games. Now we talk. ... I know why you came here, Nicky. You came here 'cause you want the market back. But here's the problem: How can you expect to get it back when you still don't understand why you lost it inna first place?"

  Nicky looked down at his hands, very pink against the green felt of the table. Carlo Ganucci gave a weak and sudden burp, the burp of a man whose innards weren't working right.

  "Why'd ya lose the market, Nicky?" Tony Eggs went on. "Not because ya didn't run it good. Because ya got above yourself. Capice?"

  Nicky tried to lift his eyes, but couldn't. His jaw worked and he felt it deep inside his ears.

  "Ya got to where ya thought that Nicky Scotto was more important than the job. The suits, the nightclubs—they gave you a hard-on, they got you laid. Fine. But, Nicky, listena me. I'm sevenny years old and I ain't been inna can in forty-five years. Why? 'Cause I wear cheap suits and I stay home at night, and I don't rub the feds' faces inna shit I'm gettin' away with. Ya see?"

  The lieutenant raised his face at last. Around his mouth and eyes, defiance and humiliation were contending, as on the face of every child who's been scolded.

  "So, very simple," Tony Eggs resumed, "here is why you lost the market. You lost the market because you acted like a dumb trash show-off punk who was bound to fuck up big time and get himself nailed. . . . Now, have I made you feel like a piece a shit?"

  There was no answer to that, so Nicky Scotto just looked around the room. Had the poker players heard all this, the lackey behind the counter?

  " 'Cause here's the funny part," said Tony Eggs. "I like you, Nicky. You're hungry. Ya work hard. Ya got potential. So now I'm in, like, a difficult position."

  Nicky moved his lips. Getting his voice to work again was like starting up a long-parked car whose battery had run down. "What's difficult about it?" he managed.

  The boss pulled on his long thin face. "I think you've learned a lesson. All things bein' equal, you deserve a second chance. But inna meantime, Big Al's got the market, and up until a couple days ago I was very happy wit' the job he was doin'."

  Hope scratched at Nicky like loose threads in his underwear. He looked down at his violated jacket, felt a sudden spartan contempt for it. Who needed fancy suits? "And now?" he said.

  Tony Eggs scratched his neck. He leaned his head forward to do so, and his throat went stringy in his collar.

  "Al made a couple judgments that sorta shook my confidence. Took vacation. Picked the wrong guy ta leave in charge while he was gone. It's not enough to fire him about. But—"

  "But what?" said Nicky.

  Tony Eggs leaned far back in his chair. So did Carlo Ganucci. The two old men took deep, sighing breaths, then, in unison, leaned forward once again.

  "Nicky," said the boss, "I'm a pretty simple guy. I've always believed that the best man for the job is the man who wants the job the most."

  Scotto pressed his ribs against the table, grabbed the edges of it with his meaty hands. "So what can I do—?"

  Tony Eggs cut him off with a shrug. "I'm not you, Nicky. I don't know what you should do. Think about it. You'll come up wit' somethin'."

  The boss looked away, and Nicky felt suddenly drained, belatedly realized that the old man's unblinking stare had been on him for a long, long time. He brought his hands in front of him, sat through a few seconds of silence before he understood that the sitdown was over. Without another word he rose to go. The rubber cups on his chair legs made ugly squeaks against the old linoleum.

  "Your jacket," Tony Eggs reminded him as he started moving toward the door.

  Nicky left it lying where it was.

  "Cold outside," said Carlo Ganucci.

  Nicky didn't turn around. With only his thin cashmere sweater for protection, he broke out into the unseasonable chill of the November morning, his mind already chewing on the question of what he had to do to get the market back.

  20

  Alan Tuschman, fleeing everything and nothing, ran farther than he should have.

  He ran till his saliva was all used up, till he could feel the separate, grinding pieces that comprised his knees, till small fillets of muscle began to quiver in his buttocks. By now he was way up near the airport. Absently he watched planes take off and land, thought about the passengers briefly trading one life for another, carrying in their luggage the people they might be if nobody they knew was watching. The sun grew higher, shadows seemed to evaporate on hot pavements. The breeze dropped and the ocean took on the fuzzy sheen of brushed aluminum. Fifi's tongue hung down almost to the sidewalk, swung like a damp pink pendulum as she unflaggingly ran.

  Just beyond the airport, the island curved, and there was a wide place in the promenade where people sometimes parked their cars, to fish, or windsurf, or just to look out at the Straits. Nearing that curve, sweat in his eyes and fog in his brain, Al saw something that at first glance made him smile. It was a new gray Lincoln, spotless but for the inevitable goo of squashed bugs on the windshield, and it had a New York license plate that said BIG AL.

  Hmm, thought Alan Tuschman. Small world.

  In the next heartbeat, though, something darker and indefinably discomfitting pressed in on him. He felt somehow crowded in his own skin. As if the basic fact of his uniqueness were being questioned. As though the borders of the little space he took up in the world were being suddenly contested.

  He didn't have long to think about it. After half a dozen more strides, he saw the tall woman he'd spoken with on the way to the beach. She was sitting on the seawall, wearing pink shorts and a lime-green top, looking out across the ocean. The big, drooling rottweiler that he'd first seen on Duval Street was lolling around her ankles.

  Al stopped running. He didn't exactly decide to stop. He just pulled up short, sucked in a breath, and yelled out, "Hi there!"

  The woman turned toward his voice. It seemed to Al that she started to smile then caught herself. Her eyes flicked toward the Lincoln then back again. Blandly, uncomfortably, she said, "Oh, hi."

  Fifi ran over and started yipping at the rottweiler, crouching on her chicken-wing back legs and sticking out her flat and tiny face. Ripper quailed, retreated behind Katy's slender calves.

  Al Tuschman, proud of his dog, said, "Don't worry. She won't hurt him."

  Katy almost smiled before erasing it again, gave Fifi a quick pat on the head. Her face tightened and her hand pulled back as the Lincoln's driver's-side door clicked open.

  Al Marracotta got out. He hadn't previously seen the point o
f getting out to look at water that you could see just as easy through the windshield, but now he did. He was on the far side of the car, and could barely peek over its roof. He secretly came up on tiptoe to appraise this sweating palooka who was talking to his girlfriend. The guy looked strong. Moisture glistened in his whorls of thick black chest hair, veins stood out in his neck and arms. But strong was strong, and tough was tough, and Al Marracotta had long ago learned that the two generally had squat to do with each other. He snarled at the interloper and turned to Katy. "You know this guy?"

  "We met at the beach." She sounded weary, maybe frightened, saying it.

  "Two minutes you're outa my sight, you're pickin' up guys at the beach?"

  Katy said nothing, looked down at the tangle of dogs at her feet.

  Al Tuschman, trying to be helpful, agreeable, said, "Hey, we said hello. We hardly talked." Then he gestured toward the Lincoln's stern. "You know, my nickname's Big Al, too."

  Al Marracotta didn't like that. He was not a man inclined to share. Not girlfriends, not nicknames, not anything. He pushed forward his chin and said, "What of it?"

  Surprised by the readiness of the other man's hostility, Al Tuschman gave an awkward and retreating laugh. "Nothing. Just a funny coincidence, that's all."

  Al Marracotta sneered and looked away. "Real fuckin' funny." To Katy, he said, "Come on, flirt, we're outa here."

  She took a deep breath then rose from the seawall. She didn't look at Alan Tuschman, but he noticed once again how gracefully her long body folded and unfolded. Still, once she'd risen, there was a stiffness and a hesitation in her step, and anyone could see that she didn't want to get into that car. The cowardly rottweiler stayed behind her legs the whole way to the door, its veiny testicles bouncing as it leaped into the backseat.