The Girl She Used to Be

by David Cristofano

  “Better performing than a good Scudder fund?”

  He glances at me casually. “I have no idea what that means. But I can tell you there is really no guarantee of anything. Ever.”

  “Who would dare override a win for a race the Bovaro family had predetermined?”

  Jonathan giggles and shakes his head, seemingly thrilled that the memory he’s recalling actually occurred. “Two years ago, my dimwit brother, Peter, wanted to move all the family’s actions toward fixing races across the country. He was obsessed. If he could’ve influenced the lawmakers in New York to change the road markers from miles to furlongs, he’d have created a political action committee. Anyway, he fixed a race at Belmont, and it was gonna be a huge payoff, the biggest yet. All the jockeys were in on it—a very difficult and risky venture—and we were looking at a quick mid-six-figure payout.”

  He giggles again, like there is some sibling rivalry behind the reverie.

  “On the second turn,” he continues, “the horse pegged to win slips and falls against the rails and sprains its ankle. Suddenly, all the jockeys back off and start looking at one another, like, what do we do now? No one—and I mean no one—wanted to be the guy bringing his horse across that finish line. The other eight jockeys pulled back on their horses and they all sort of strolled past the finish line in what was the slowest finish to any seven-furlong race held at that track. It was the talk of all the sports shows in the city and before you knew it, investigations were coming from every direction. And that was the last the Bovaros ever set foot near Belmont or Aqueduct or any other racetrack in New York ever again.”

  So far, the Bovaros have turned out to be utter failures in the areas of music and the equine. Jonathan is emerging as the star player on a team of bunglers. “I didn’t realize crime was so complicated.”

  “You have no idea. That’s why it’s organized crime. Without the organization, we’d never get anything accomplished.”

  A breeze pushes us forward and my sundress flitters and the chill reminds me of how little I am wearing. We walk a few paces before I ask, “You ever get involved in any wrongdoing beyond the laundering?”

  He looks my way quickly, like he’s going to frisk me down for a wire, but it seems like it’s nothing more than a default reaction. He turns away and quietly answers, “Sure.”

  I swallow and ask hopefully, “Carting?”

  He smiles but makes a face like I’m cute for asking, and that I’m now old enough to know there is no Santa Claus.

  “Trash has never really been my thing.”

  “Running numbers, maybe? Which I could totally respect, by the way.”

  “No numbers.”

  I gulp again. “Murder?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “I know. But I need the truth, Jonathan.”

  He shakes his head a little. “I have never taken a life.”

  “What about—”

  “We’re here!” He points toward a seafood restaurant a few paces in front of us.

  “We’re where? We’ve passed this place five times already. Suddenly it’s our destination?”

  “Look, I’ve never murdered anyone, okay? Besides, no family is in the murdering business, per se; it’s more of a required action when other business dealings go awry, like firing an employee.”

  “Permanently.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  “What, you’re justifying it?”

  “Absolutely not,” he says, “just explaining why it happens.”

  Jonathan keeps looking over his shoulder at the restaurant; he’s preparing for another segue.

  “Have you ever wanted to murder someone?”

  Jonathan grunts a little and wipes his face. “Sure. Haven’t you? What do you really want to know, Melody? Have I ever beaten someone within an inch of his life? You bet. I’ve done what needed to be done, to protect myself, to protect my family. That’s what you do for the ones you love! It’s what I would do for you.”

  A few people turn and stare, but keep walking. His comment about beating someone within an inch of his life is offset by the fact that he sort of said he loved me. I step closer and say, “Tell me the story.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitate. “Because I have very intense feelings for you, okay? And I need to know this side of you. I need to know what you’re capable of.”

  He stares at me for a long moment, then looks down. “There was, uh… one guy in particular. Turned out very badly.”

  “Who?” I silently pray that the name he utters is Gregory Morrison, that I have already seen the worst-case scenario, that I can finally move on.

  “Maybe we should get a table in the restaurant and—”

  “That’s fine. If you want to slurp down some crab bisque and sip a nice Pinot Grigio while you tell me how you dismantled someone, that’s just super—but I want to hear a name first.”

  Jonathan shifts in his spot a little. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and studies me, like he’s slightly more convinced I might be wired. He glances at the folks around us, then farther and farther away, all the way to the top of Federal Hill, where I imagine he expects to see an unmarked van, envisions federal agents sitting inside who are listening to our conversation, ready to descend.

  Really, why else would I be so obsessed with having Jonathan tell me who the guy was. Wouldn’t the actions be the more important details?

  I turn his face back to mine. “Jonathan, I would never get you in trouble, okay? Now, for the first time, I need you to trust me.”

  He licks his lips a little and says, “Gregory Morrison.”

  I close my eyes and I hug him and whisper, “Thank you.”

  He returns my hug and buries his face in my hair, but it’s only a few seconds before I can feel him looking around again.

  We make our way to the hostess of a large but cozy seafood restaurant with window views of the harbor and the Baltimore skyline. She smiles and welcomes us, and before Jonathan can utter the word two, he’s reaching into his pocket and pulling out bills. I grab his hand and shove it back into his pocket, give him a look like he’s nuts.

  “What,” he says, “it’s impolite to tip a hostess?”

  She grabs two menus and walks us to the back of the restaurant, far from the windows, a few steps from the kitchen.

  I sit. Jonathan does not.

  He starts reaching for those bills.

  “Sit,” I say.

  “But—”

  “Sit.”

  “Is there a problem, ma’am?” the hostess asks. I tell her we’re fine; she nods and walks away.

  I look up at Jonathan and say, “It’s just a table.”

  “You deserve better. You deserve the best—”

  “Sit.”

  Finally, he does. And I can tell he wishes we’d gone to Little Italy after all, where a young, amorous couple would be sniffed out and given the highest priority.

  “Just a table,” he mutters to himself a few times.

  The waiter arrives, a guy named Herman, who has the build of a young boy and hair making an aggressive exit from this world. He introduces himself and asks if he can get us something to drink. He makes the mistake, however, of glancing at my chest for a few seconds and I can see Jonathan begin to seethe.

  “First the table and now this?” he says to me.

  “Jonathan, it’s just a—oh, for Pete’s sake.” I turn to the waiter and say, “We’ll share a bottle of Chianti.”

  The waiter tries to pretend it didn’t happen. “We have several different—”

  “Just go. Run along, Herman.”

  The waiter backs up a few paces, then scurries away like a rat.

  “This is all wrong,” Jonathan says. “I just want the best for you, Melody. The best food, the best table, the best waiter—preferably one who isn’t lecherous.”

  His intense concern for the quality of my day and this meal has me further persuaded he thinks they may be my last. I’m bankin
g on his Italian heritage being the real motivator. I reach over and touch his hand. “You’re here, so I have the best table, the best window, the best waiter. It’s the classiest meal I could ever imagine.”

  Someone drops a tray of dishes in the kitchen and the sound reverberates to our table. There is some brief arguing.

  Jonathan grips my hand and sighs. “If you’re sure.”

  Herman returns with the wine and shows the label to us.

  “Ruffino,” Jonathan says. “Acceptable, but predictable—sort of like you, Herman.”

  “Yes, sir,” he answers, staring straight ahead like a plebe who’s one day into basic training.

  “Leave us.” Jonathan snags the corkscrew from Herman’s hands just before our waiter hurries off, then opens, pours quickly. We hold up our glasses and he says, “To the best table in the house.” We smile and we clink and we drink.

  I wait for him to continue the story he started outside but he stares at me, like he’s trying to hypnotize me. It doesn’t work.

  “Gregory Morrison,” I say.

  Jonathan rolls his eyes and takes another drink. “Greg Morrison was one of a bunch of guys who used to hang around my neighborhood, thought he was real tough. We never paid them any mind; they were just neighborhood kids. Then one night, my brother and I catch him and his buddies trying to break into one of our establishments. My brother confronts them. Well, it’s like six of them and only me and Peter, so they start talking it up all cool, like they’re going to rough us up. My brother, he likes to throw our name around, and when he does this time, all the kids turn and look at Greg, as if Greg is the one who’s going to decide how this goes down.

  “Now, the proper thing for Greg and his buddies to do would have been to apologize, to show respect. I know that sounds corny and all, but it’s true. We would’ve let them all walk away. All anybody wants is some respect, you know? Not just the Mafia. Some respect and a decent white clam sauce, which is getting harder and harder to find in New York.”

  “Greg Morrison.”

  “So Greg stares at Peter and tells him to his face how he’s gonna hurt him. Well, Peter turns to me and laughs, like he’s sort of been looking for some action anyway, and starts rolling up his sleeves.”

  He stops again, like nothing else happened. This is getting old. I kick him under the table and he picks up where he left off like a malfunctioning tape recorder.

  “So things get very ugly. Peter gives him a pretty good pounding. Nothing major, just an old-fashioned beating.”

  “You can’t beat an old-fashioned.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty easy. His friends did nothing. Just watched—and learned.”

  Like the friends of the frat kid in West Virginia.

  Like the friend of Marcus at the hotel bar.

  I’m feeling a connection here, but the story seems to have come to a nebulous end. I’m hopeful that all Jonathan did was watch, and fail to prevent Greg Morrison from getting beaten. “So you never actually harmed Greg yourself?”

  “Well, not that time.”

  I sigh.

  “See,” he continues, “the whole time Peter is going to town, Greg just keeps saying Peter is going to pay, that our family is going to pay for this.” Jonathan starts playing with the cork from the wine bottle, and I can see the tension increase as he starts breaking off chunks of the cork with his thumbnail. He stares at his wine-stained fingers, so entranced in the memory he converts it all to present tense. “I go to my folks’ home one evening, about a week later, and I find my mother rocking in my dad’s arms on the couch and she is weeping and my dad is… he’s, like, staring into the distance with tears running down his cheeks. He has this look I’ve only ever seen him have a few times, and I know someone is going to have to die.”

  “What’d happened?”

  He clears his throat and drops the cork and wipes his face. He looks me in the eye and says, “Greg Morrison raped my mother while she was putting groceries in the trunk of her car. Just shoved her body in the trunk, lifted up her dress and…”

  One thing is certain: To have raped the matriarch of a crime family, Greg Morrison had to be either a sociopath or the stupidest man on earth.

  I can tell Jonathan is fighting the retrospection, that he does not want to show this side of himself.

  “The whole time,” he says, “Greg just kept repeating, ‘Tell your boys payback is hell.’ ”

  I gulp and bite my lower lip. I touch his hand gently; it’s shaking. “I don’t know what to say, I…”

  Herman starts heading our way. I wave him off.

  “My father put my mother down for a rest in their bedroom and told me he needed to stay with her—and that I needed to go make things right.”

  I hold my breath. “And did you?”

  He sits up. “You better believe I did. I went to Morrison’s scuzzy little apartment and kicked in his door. He was just sitting there in a stained La-Z-Boy with a pistol in his hand, waiting for me or Peter or whoever. He held it up, pointed it at me, and said, ‘Payback’ and pulled the trigger—but nothing happened. God knows why, but nothing left the barrel of that gun. I jumped on him and the gun went sliding across the floor. I picked up a chair from his kitchen table and smashed it over his head.” He snaps his fingers. “Out immediately.”

  I wait a few seconds. “And that’s it?”

  “No. I sat in his apartment for over two hours, waiting for that piece of crap to return to consciousness.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he needed to live through what I was gonna do to him, the way my mother had to live through what he did to her. I wanted to make sure he would never forget, for the rest of his life, the mistake he made.”

  “For screwing with a Bovaro?”

  He leans forward and his face goes completely flush. “For messing with my mother, Melody. This has nothing to do with my family’s name or my family’s history. I would’ve done the same thing if my name was Schwartz.”

  I sigh again, but this one is a sigh of relief. It turns out Jonathan’s one bad act—or at least his worst act—was not because he was a Bovaro at all; it was because he was a human being.

  We sit in silence for a minute before a thought occurs to me. “So, your dad was proud of you, I guess?”

  He laughs a little, cracks his knuckles. “He was livid.”

  “Livid? Why?”

  “He wanted Morrison dead, gone forever. He wanted to send a message to the entire community that if you ever mess with our family you will die.”

  “I’m surprised your brother didn’t go back and finish the job for you.”

  “Oh, he wanted to. And my dad wanted him to, as well. It was the source of many arguments we had as a family.” He goes back to playing with the cork. “But I told my father and my brothers and the other ‘made’ men that if we killed Morrison, he’d be forgotten in a month and someone would fill his place. But this way, with him being a living, breathing example that people would see day after day, the event would never be forgotten.”

  It was a good argument. Jonathan is either very smart or very lucky. I’m glad he’s on my side. “But what if he heals?”

  “He won’t.”

  “Well, it’s possible that—”

  “He won’t.”

  I watch Jonathan and the tension slowly leaves his hands, then his face, then his body. He is transforming back to the guy I have fallen for, from the Hulk back to David Banner, and I can see that in his own violent, perverted way, he has made peace with what happened. And, having convinced his family not to kill Morrison, I feel he might actually be able to pull off the greatest swindle in Bovaro history: presenting me to his family and asking that they let me live in peace—with amnesty.

  Herman returns for our order and he approaches the table like it’s wired with explosives. “Can I, um, take your order?”

  We play with our menus, opening them for the first time. I can feel Jonathan watching me.

  Jonathan smiles at Her
man and says, “She’ll have the best of everything.”

  I chuckle. “Make that two.”

  Herman must’ve been scared to death that he’d fail the crazy couple seated by the kitchen, so he takes Jonathan’s “everything” comment rather seriously. He has two additional servers come over to our table and cover it with an array of dishes from every section of the menu: mussels; scallops; lobster tails; three different blue-crab dishes; fresh littleneck clams, still steaming, with a bowl of melted butter at their side; two different bowls of pasta, including their version of a Chesapeake Alfredo—which is essentially regular Alfredo with Old Bay dashed on top; and a massive bowl of Caesar salad, which Herman nervously prepares table-side.

  I lean over the dishes a little, trying to catch the aroma of the garlic rising from the mussels, and my left strap falls from my shoulder. Herman pauses his salad-making as he attempts to catch a glimpse down the front of my dress.

  Jonathan snatches one of the utensils from Herman’s hand and whispers, “Guess what I’m gonna do with this?”

  Herman nods and says, in a quick falsetto, “Let me know if you need anything else,” and scampers off.

  “What,” Jonathan says to me. “I was just gonna finish tossing the salad, is all.”

  I sit back and fix my strap. “I’m not that hungry.”

  Jonathan puts the salad utensils down. “Me either.”

  “I’m nervous.”

  “Me too.”

  We both swallow.

  “Why are we nervous?” I ask.

  He bites his lip, then answers, “Because that’s how you feel when you’re about to experience one of the best moments of your life.”

  Or: one of the last moments of your life.

  But the truth is hard to deny. I’ve entered one of the manic cycles of my bipolar interplay with Jonathan. He’s got me convinced again that his plan will work and that some great ending is hours from unfolding. Or maybe I’ve convinced myself. Either way he’s right: The nervousness—for the moment—is anxious pleasure.