“What I’m saying is, I guess,” Lou Turcotte said, “we need more money. Not boatloads. Just a little. Few grand. You know anyone who’d want to invest, that’d be just terrific. Maybe you yourself want to invest? Something to think about. Get that producer credit. Looks good, someone’s considering you for a role down the line, they look at your resume, they say, ‘Oh, she’s a star and a producer. Sign her up. That’s special.’”
“Breathe, Lou,” Alessandra said.
“You think you might want to invest?”
“I can’t, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Keep your eyes and ears open. Maybe you meet a rich doctor, maybe he wants to put down a few grand, more than that. We get twenty grand, we’re set. The things I could do for twenty grand. The bells and whistles.”
“You change the title yet?”
Lou paused. Alessandra could hear him shuffling through papers. “I’m thinking Brooklyn State of Mind,” he said.
“That’s terrible, Lou.”
“Okay, I’ve got a whole list. We’ll find something else. For now, I’m gonna work on finding investors. I’ll touch base soon.”
Alessandra closed the phone. She took a long drag off her cigarette, the cheap tobacco burning the back of her throat. She’d spoiled herself with the pack of American Spirits and now it was back to the bottom shelf. She was sitting Indian-style on her bed with the window open a crack to air out the smoke. She thought about Conway ripping the phone cord out of the wall mount. Looked like a kid throwing a tantrum but with some genuine psycho action behind his eyes. He’d been an inconvenience up to that point, but now she was afraid he’d cross the line, keep coming back, begging, maybe get violent. One perspective was you had to feel sorry for him, no matter what. And maybe she should’ve been nicer, more understanding. But she had no patience. Not an ounce. She was almost thirty.
She turned on her laptop and plugged in her headphones and listened to her favorite Deer Tick song, “Twenty Miles,” on repeat. She blew smoke out the window.
When she heard a thumping over the music, she looked up. Someone was knocking at her door. Conway, she thought. Stormed back into the house and just came up to her room. But it couldn’t be. The knocking was gentle, not harried-weird, no pathetic edge to it. She got up and opened the door, deciding it was probably just her father, checking on her.
Stephanie was standing there, tears stitching her eyes. “Your dad let me in, said come on up.”
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Alessandra said. She put an arm around Stephanie’s shoulder. Stephanie was wearing a tattered XL St. John’s sweatshirt. She’d put make-up on again, poorly, and it was running down her cheeks.
“It’s nothing.”
“Come in.”
Stephanie sat on the edge of the bed and put her elbows on her knees and dropped her head in her hands. “It’s really nothing. I just . . . I had no one I could talk to. My mother, my mother’s just a total nut. I can’t . . . I mean, I can’t even be around her right now. I had to call in to work.”
“Did something happen?”
“I don’t know. I mean, nothing I didn’t want to happen. It just wasn’t, it wasn’t, nice.”
“What are you saying, Steph?”
“Just. Nothing. Really.”
“You can talk to me.”
Stephanie looked up, her cheeks zippered with inky mascara. “Me and Conway, we did it.”
“You did it?”
“Like we went all the way.”
“I know what you mean. When did this happen?” Alessandra sat next to her and rubbed her back.
“Just,” Stephanie crying again, hiccupping, “this afternoon.”
Alessandra made the chronology in her head: Conway having sex with Stephanie and then coming to see her. Disgusting.
“I guess,” Stephanie blubbering, “I guess I sort of threw myself at him. I’ve always liked him, and I wanted the experience, and I wanted it to be with him. Because what if it never happened? Or what if it happened with someone I didn’t care about? I wanted it to be Conway.”
“Was he rough?”
“He wasn’t, I don’t know, he wasn’t rough per se. But he wasn’t gentle. It was, he was, I don’t know. He wasn’t thinking about me, I know that, which was okay, I told him not to, but it still hurts.”
“Oh, Steph.”
“And he didn’t use, he didn’t use protection. He said he’d,” her voice going to a whisper, “pull out, but he didn’t.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“But what if? I could just hear my mother. ‘Puttana! Disgraziata!’”
“You can get a Morning-After Pill. It’s still soon enough. You can probably get one pretty easy.”
Stephanie put her head back in her lap. Alessandra rubbed her neck and shoulders. She took her brush off the nightstand and ran it through Stephanie’s hair. Poor girl had probably never had her hair brushed. It was full of knots and tangles.
“I feel awful,” Stephanie said. “How can I ever go back to church? How can I look at Monsignor? Puttana. That’s all I am.”
“Don’t say that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I did. I did a lot wrong. I should’ve known better.”
“He shouldn’t have taken advantage—”
“He didn’t. I practically had to force him.”
Alessandra put down the brush and worked on separating a clump in Stephanie’s hair with her fingers. “Your hair, it’s . . . it’s tough.”
“I’m a mess, I know.” Stephanie stood up, ripping her hair out of Alessandra’s hand, and started to pace, taking off her glasses and wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. The whites were bloodshot, streaky. The pupils pretty, Alessandra noticed, brown, mocha almost. Stephanie’s face was square-shaped. Pimples under her chin. Peach fuzz glowing on her ears. Poor, poor girl.
Alessandra said, “You’re not a mess.”
“What can I do? This is gonna be my life until I die?”
“Tell me more about Conway.” Alessandra wanted to know the dirt, wanted to know exactly what kind of degenerate scumbag she was dealing with. “You sure it was consensual?”
“I told you. It was. He didn’t want to. I had to convince him. I told him pretend I was—” Stephanie stopped talking. Stopped pacing.
“Pretend you were what?”
“Another girl.”
Alessandra chewed on this. Didn’t take much figuring. “Me?”
Stephanie nodded, and there was something in her nod that made the whole goddamn world just seem like a double-awful place to Alessandra. All of Stephanie nodded. Her mustache. Her pimples. Her clumpy hair. Confessing. “I didn’t mind. I closed my eyes, too.”
“Steph—”
“I wanted to feel like you for a little while. Nothing weird. I just wanted to know what it was like. To be pretty. To have someone want me.”
“He went along with this? He pretended?”
“I think so. I felt like you. I felt like he was with you and like I was you.”
Alessandra was skeeved out, wanted Stephanie to leave, but she couldn’t tell her that. She couldn’t tear this girl down any further.
Stephanie said, “You’re upset? Please don’t be upset. I couldn’t take that on top of everything else.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You are.”
“I’m, it’s, I . . . I just want you to be okay, I want you to feel better. I don’t want you to feel bad about yourself. There’s no reason.”
“I’m a puttana. Even worse.”
“Stop saying that. Please.” Alessandra stood up. “I hate that word, always hated it. You’re no puttana,” struggling with the word, something her father used to say about girls up on Eighty-Sixth Street, girls on the bus in short skirts, any girl showing skin. “You’re not that, so stop saying it about yourself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You think I felt that way when I left Amy’s house this morning?”
“I don�
��t . . . I’m not . . . I don’t know. Did you?”
“Course not. Why would I? Feel shame? Over doing this very human thing. Anybody makes you feel guilty about this stuff is just trying to keep you down. Your mother, she’s gonna think you’re what, a whore? Fuck her, Steph. Really. Fuck her. You don’t need that. Nobody needs that. You’re just a human. You did what you needed. Fuck your mother. Fuck Conway. You’re a beautiful person,” Alessandra laying it on thick, “you really are. I don’t say that lightly. You need to start feeling that about yourself. Fuck Conway for not realizing that.”
Stephanie laughed, spit dangling at the corners of her mouth. She said, “Fuck my mother,” almost choking on it, and then she stomped her feet. “And fuck Conway. That chooch.” She paused. “I drank a lot today, too. I’ve never done that.”
“It’s okay.”
“I hope I’m not pregnant.”
“You’ll get the Morning-After Pill.”
“That’s not, you know. Morally, I’m not sure I can.”
“You’ll do what you have to do then.”
“I’m sorry I’ve wasted so much of your time.”
“It’s not a waste.”
“How are you? How’s—what’s her name?—how’s the girl from Queens?”
“I haven’t talked to her again yet.”
“I might have to throw up.”
“That’s okay. Bathroom’s down the hall.”
“My mouth already smells like puke and I haven’t even thrown up. You think that means I’m pregnant?”
“You wouldn’t be sick so soon.”
“I’m gonna use the lavatory.” Stephanie left the room and walked down the hall. Alessandra heard the door open and close and then she heard Stephanie retching, like she was sticking a finger down her throat and trying to make herself throw up, almost like vomiting would cancel out the chance of pregnancy. Alessandra pictured what Conway was doing now. Guy was dirt. Such a shame. She had no doubt he’d been fucked up by Duncan’s death, but she didn’t feel pity for him now. To do what he did to Stephanie, that was just a dirtbag move, dead brother or not. And it bothered her to think about him picturing her like that. Just so sickening. And then to come to her house, angry, like she owed him something.
Stephanie came back out, and she said, “I can’t puke. I feel like I have to, but I can’t.”
Alessandra tried for a laugh, but it came out more like an exhausted growl.
“You smell that?” Stephanie said. “I smelled it when I was in the bathroom. Now I really smell it.”
Alessandra got a whiff of something—maybe—a smell that reminded her a bit of California in the summer. Something burning. Like when you blacken bread in the toaster oven and it rinds up into heat-smoky curls.
Stephanie went to the window and opened it. Dampness swirled in, carrying a hard burning smell. “Something’s on fire.” She pressed her face to the glass and tried to see over the rooftops.
Alessandra came up behind her and made out a billowy trail of smoke behind the telephone wires. It was coming from what seemed like a few blocks away. “There it is,” pointing, “what’s that, two, three blocks?”
“Oh yeah,” Stephanie said. “More,” wiping her mouth and then her eyes, “four maybe. Let’s go check it out.”
“Steph, I think you should go home, get some rest.”
“I’m going over there. Gotta see whose house it is. Could be Mr. Nicola’s. That old pyro. That’s right over by Conway’s house, too. Maybe God struck him down, smote him.” Stephanie scrambled out of the room, saying, “Come on.” The gossip in her pushed the Conway stuff out of her mind. Stephanie was not-so-secretly like every old bag in the neighborhood: up in everyone’s business.
Alessandra followed her, rolling a for-the-road cigarette as she walked. She was curious.
Even her father wanted to know what was going on. He followed them out of the house, struggling to lock the front door, as Alessandra pulled on one of her mother’s long coats over her shorts and T-shirt.
“You’re gonna get sick out here,” her father said.
“That’s a myth,” Alessandra feeling the dampness in her bones. “You don’t get sick from weather.”
“‘Myth!’ Listen to this one. Now she’s a weatherman.”
“I think that’s true,” Stephanie said. “I think I saw it on TV one day.”
“Oh, bullshit!”
They walked up the block, following the smoke. Sirens were screaming, the fire department fast behind this. Could be a car, Alessandra thought. Could be anything. She remembered, as a kid, guys starting a fire in the middle of the avenue out of abandoned sawhorses, blocking traffic, throwing fireworks into the blaze.
“It’s probably that Henry Nicola’s house,” her father said. “Bastard’s a menace.”
As they got closer, it didn’t take Alessandra long to realize that it was in fact Conway’s house. She looked at Stephanie. Stephanie’s expression said she’d realized it, too. Her father said, “Frankie. I hope he’s okay.” Alessandra was thinking about Conway—snapped, all the way off the deep end—but now she thought of his poor old father.
Two fire trucks were pulled up on the curb outside Conway’s house. They had a nearby hydrant open, going full blast. Firefighters scrambled around, unspooled hoses, hooked one to the hydrant and another to the truck. Alessandra watched their black boots, their greasy jaws, their spiderwebby jackets. Fifty, sixty people stood on the sidewalks, in robes, pajamas, work clothes, watching, huddled together. A couple of cops, chests puffed out, kept the crowd back. An ambulance buzzed down the street the wrong way, parking close to the trucks.
They stood across the street, as close as possible, and Alessandra felt a pang on her cheek from the burning. The flames were lighting the sky, swishy swabs against the clouds.
“I don’t believe this,” her father said. “Poor Frankie.”
Alessandra said, “I hope Conway didn’t—”
Stephanie said, “He wouldn’t.” She went and talked to a cop, wanting to know if everyone got out. She came back, shaking her head.
“What’d he say?” Alessandra said.
“Said no one’s in there probably, no one’s come out. Pop’s got to be in there.”
“They’ll get him if he is.”
“I hope.”
The firemen had their hoses going now and they were trying to keep the fire from spreading to the houses on either side but it leapt to Chrissy Giordano’s three-family frame house on the right and took a black bite out of the siding before they got it under control.
The air was heavy with smoke.
Alessandra rolled the cigarette around between her fingers, flattening it. She went around to people in the crowd, trying to bum a light. She got one from a blonde Puerto Rican lady in a pink robe with green curlers in her hair and drawn-on eyebrows. Alessandra thanked her and pulled in smoke. The lady said, “Just awful. Weird people, though.”
“Weird how?” Alessandra said.
“You know, just weird. Guy’s almost thirty, lives with his old man. That’s weird, you ask me.”
Alessandra nodded.
“I’d see that boy in the Rite Aid,” the lady continued, “picking up my prescription and I’d say to myself, I’d say, ‘Something’s not right here.’ Just the other day I was saying to myself, ‘Something’s off with this one.’ The way he was lumbering around. I thought maybe,” lowering her voice, “he liked boys like his brother. Who knew? I mean, I could just tell something was off. And now this.”
Alessandra said nothing. She remembered that: whenever something went wrong, whenever someone lost it, everybody else started talking about how they could just tell something was going to happen. It was sickening really, the way they got off on it.
“Who are you, doll?” the lady said, now wanting the straight dope on Alessandra.
“Just passing through,” Alessandra said.
The fire kept burning, spitting embers up into the air. The Puerto Rican lady
caught one on the front of her robe and palmed it out, threatening to sue.
Next to her, a wrinkled old Chinese guy with white spots on his chin perked up. He said, “Sue who?”
“The city,” the lady said. “The city goddamnit.”
Alessandra went back over by Stephanie and her father. “Crazy,” she said.
“This is my fault maybe,” Stephanie said.
“You’re not serious.”
“I don’t know.”
The firemen charged into the house with axes and pulsing, waist-high hoses, like a scene from Backdraft, except none of these guys looked like Kurt Russell or Billy Baldwin. Alessandra tried to imagine what was going on in the house’s inside parts: the firemen smashing down doors, looking for people to save, getting jumped on by flames.
It was almost an hour before one guy, a pug-nosed Irishman with grit on his face and bloodshot eyes, came out carrying a body wrapped in sheets and towels. It wasn’t Conway, Alessandra could tell somehow. Something about the way the Irishman carried the body made it clear that it was Conway’s father. And then the guy put the body on a gurney and one of the sheets dangled loose and the crowd saw Pop. He was crispy, but it was definitely him.
“Oh, what a shame,” someone behind them said.
“Poor Frankie,” Alessandra’s father said. “Didn’t hurt no one. Had no enemies.”
Stephanie wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. Blubbering again.
Alessandra wasn’t sure what she felt. Pity. Remorse. Nothing. She thought about Amy, thought about taking the train back into the city, and going to Seven Bar. That’d be sure to wipe some of this mess away. Frankie D’Innocenzio dead, Stephanie Dirello and her old man gone to pot, Firestarter Conway on the loose—Yeah, she needed respite, escape. Maybe she’d stay on Kissena Boulevard for a few days.
It wasn’t easy to get away, but she said she had to go, something came up with a role she’d been offered in an indie movie, and her father said, “Now? This time?”
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