“Come and have some iced coffee,” Gina said, reaching uncertainly for his arm. How could she have done it, she thought, looking at his thin hair matted with sweat, the lines deepening in his face, the heightened color in cheeks that seemed to burn with fever. She began to feel remorse. No, she couldn’t be drawn that way into regret. If she didn’t harden herself against him, she would always be bound to him. She had had her revenge. It wasn’t sweet; but it had made the point, all the same.
Nino, sunk in his dizziness, looked at her without recognition, or even, for a moment, surprise. Leaning on her arm, he moved with her into the coolness, the dry frigid air sending a shiver through his body, shocking him into humiliation and sorrow.
“What’s this?” he asked, sitting at the chair she held out for him.
“Iced expresso. Better than amphetamines,” she joked, adding cream to her huge goblet filled with coffee. “All you have to do is sip, and it sends”—she groped—“a rush of energy into your veins.”
She was looking at him steadily, her clear dark eyes probing his. When had she seen him? he wondered. How long had she known he was following her? It was incredible.
“I’m always willing to try something new,” he said, aiming for a casual tone. He took a long drink. The black coffee, slightly bitter, smoothed the lump in his throat. The coolness of the place was steadying. To be cool! That it should seem like such a luxury to sit down, to rest, to drink. He should throw it in her face for humiliating him like this. She knew he had nearly killed himself for her; because of her he was dizzy, weak. The waiter was putting another iced coffee in front of him. She must have signaled for it. How self-possessed she was, the little bitch. He watched her, adding sugar and cream to the coffee.
“Why don’t you save yourself the trouble and just order coffee ice cream?” he asked her mildly.
“This way it comes out just the way I want,” Gina said. The waiter brought them two sfogliatelli. She was really doing it up, he thought. He should crack her across the face with his cane. It would serve her right! But you only did that to a girl her age for one reason, and he wasn’t about to do that in public. Not in this neighborhood, where everyone would know what it meant.
I’ve got him now, Gina thought. He looked awful. It ought to teach him a lesson, not to try to follow me. It was one thing to demand you acted a certain way at home. It was his, after all, rotten as it was. But quite another to think you could dictate everything else. It was a question of freedom. She hated him when he was dictatorial; but now she realized she found him more troublesome when he was pathetic. Since she felt she had won, she was prepared to be kind. Up to a point.
“What a coincidence that we decided to go for a walk in the same place at the same time,” Gina said, smiling sweetly and touching his hand.
“Not really,” Nino said smoothly. “You’ve already made it clear it was no coincidence at all.”
He was turning it all around; never say die, Nino, right? Her resolve against him was so saturated with shame and wariness it was rapidly retreating to diplomacy. “I was looking for Columbus Park,” she lied.
“But you didn’t find it,” he pointed out.
“No,” she agreed. “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t find it because it isn’t here,” he pointed out. “It’s been west and south of here—between Baxter and Mulberry—since the 1890s, when they leveled the ragpicker settlement to build it.” My God, would she have been willing to walk all the way past Canal?
“Amazing how many slums and cemeteries have been turned into parks,” she choked out.
“Amazing how many parks are turning into slums and cemeteries,” he countered.
“Oh, sure. It’s one big burial ground.” So he wasn’t willing to give up. What a dope she had been to think he might.
“Not really,” he said. “Not really. What makes you say that? Do you feel ready to go? Is this your idea of putting your life in order?”
She ignored him and sipped her coffee.
“Where were you going?” he demanded softly, gripping her arm.
Gina tightened her face into a smile. “It’s just what you said, Nino. I was just going out with you, in my own way.” She looked him in the eye.
He looked at her coldly. The enormity of her gall was hard to take in. To think that she could do this to him—drag him around by the nose, and then, when he was exhausted, humiliate him with kindness! She was forcing his hand. He shook his head. If she could do this, she could do anything. He would have to assume that she had. He had no choice.
“Finish your pastry,” he ordered. “It’s time to go.”
“Go where? You’re not going to run my life.”
“Home,” Nino said. “I’ve had enough walking.” He signaled for the check and paid it. “Thanks for your hospitality.” He grinned.
He held the door open, ushering her into the street. The thickening evening air, rising from the hot street in steamy fumes, enfolded them.
It had been a perfect morning, Alex thought, running his nails through Gina’s hair as he stretched beside her under the light sheet. In his mind he could see the cables of the bridge, the walkway rising out of the steaming traffic, the wind coming up, blowing the noise away. On the Brooklyn Bridge, the wooden walkway climbed above the traffic, suspended, separate, hanging. If you looked down, you could see the water shimmering between the slats of wood. The moving cars were a blur of color. In the distance the ferries to Staten Island came and went, looking like the round-bottomed ships of a hundred years before. Governor’s Island faced them; beyond it, to the right, stood the Statue of Liberty. The sunlight glinted and shone on the river. The hot wind whipped the whitecaps, and blew through the cables crisscrossing toward the arches.
She had been restless all the while. He had motioned her to a bench, but she wouldn’t sit down; she kept reaching in all directions, her tense hands curling around the cables as if she were ready to climb. She probably believes she can fly. The truth was, her energy often irritated him. She could fly over his moods as though they didn’t exist. She always seemed to have an unswervable, hidden purpose of her own. They had been lovers for weeks now, and she had never asked him anything much about himself. Not that she talked about herself. It wasn’t that she was selfish; she wasn’t. But there were things you could say to her and things you couldn’t. She doesn’t think about herself, but she doesn’t think about me, either, he concluded. She reminded him of one of these mafiosi who takes you to lunch, tells you sincerely that he holds you in the highest regard, and apologizes that there’s nothing personal in it when he shoots you before dessert. She loved him, he could see that, but there didn’t seem to be anything personal in it.
On the bridge she hadn’t seemed to know he was there. She was revved up on the heat and light, on whatever it was that made her reach so steadily outside herself. Then, in bed, touching him, she would be so filled with everything, she would confuse him with her exaltation. She was so loving it was hard to be annoyed. Maybe I’m better off that she doesn’t ask what I feel. She doesn’t know my problems, my lows. She has no idea who I am. Hades one-upped because Persephone mistakes him for a fellow flower picker.
Gina turned toward him, and smiled, as she rolled up on top of him. She began to kiss his chest, nuzzling softly into him as she caressed his body. In the distance, he could see the luminous clock hands showing a yellow-green 8:00 P.M. as they brightened in the darkening room.
When Gina didn’t get home by seven, Nino and Laura decided to get on the BMT. They got off at Union Square and walked for a block; then, convinced they would never make it on foot to Avenue D, Laura hailed a cab. The whole neighborhood had changed.
“You don’t want to go there,” said the old cab driver. “It’s not the same neighborhood.”
“I have to go there,” Nino said, consulting the note he had made of Alex’s address. At the Motor Vehicle Bureau they had records you could trust. Now he even knew his age: twenty-six. He gnashed his te
eth.
“You better be careful,” the driver said, watching him limp out of the cab with Laura behind him. “Old people are a big target here.”
“That’s right,” Nino said. “The old and the young get it first.”
They got lost in two alleys before they found his apartment.
“It’s not even a tenement,” Nino said.
“It’s the worst place I’ve ever seen,” said Laura. “Is that the door?”
Nino hesitated, trying to decide whether he should knock with his cane or his fist. He pounded the door with his fist.
“Don’t answer it,” Gina whispered to Alex.
“Why not?” asked Alex. “It’s probably Kevin. I want you to meet him.”
“I just have a bad feeling,” she insisted. “Would Kevin bang on the door like that?”
Alex shrugged.
“Let me get dressed first,” Gina said, reaching for her skirt.
“Here, take this,” said Alex, throwing her the silky orange kimono he had bought her.
She tied it as he pulled on his pants and called, “Just a minute.”
When he opened the door, Nino and Laura ignored him. “I thought you’d be here,” Nino said. Gina clutched the kimono around her as his cane whacked across her shoulders. “Get your clothes on,” he said. Alex took a step toward her, but stopped. She turned to him, humiliation sweeping over her like a sandstorm.
“These are your parents?” Alex said to her. “You’d better get dressed.”
It was all collapsing, the sense of privacy, safety, freedom, all falling in. She squeezed into the tiny bathroom with her clothes.
“You’ve taken advantage of my daughter,” Laura sobbed.
“I’m not taking advantage of anyone,” he said. “I haven’t forced her to come here. She wants to be here.”
“Watch what you say,” Nino said. “Remember, you’re in trouble enough as it is.”
“What would your parents say if they knew? Do you think your parents would approve of this?”
“Why don’t you ask them?” he said, dialing a number. He handed the telephone to Laura, who became totally disconcerted.
His father answered.
“My name,” Laura said uncertainly, “is Laura. Your son . . . I’m in your son’s apartment and I discovered him here with my daughter. He’s taken advantage of her—she’s very young . . .” Laura began to cry. “No, I don’t think he’s used physical force. But he’s taken advantage of her all the same. . . . If she wants to be here, it’s because he’s made her want to be here. . . . What do you mean, what do I expect you to do? I expect you to stop him. . . . You have no business telling me that. Don’t you know right from wrong? Haven’t you got any morals?”
She turned, still holding the phone. “He says if she wants to be here, there’s nothing any of us can do about it and then he hung up.”
“Like father, like son,” Nino agreed.
“You,” he said to Gina as she came out, dressed, “you get out in the hallway. It would serve you right if you got bitten by the rats. And you,” he said, poking Alex with his cane, “I’m not finished with you. In fact, I haven’t even started.” He nodded to Laura to leave and began to walk out. Gina came back into the room to see Alex. He turned away from her. “You’d better go,” he said. “All of you.”
They walked through the dark alleyway and turned on Avenue D toward Fourteenth Street. In the darkness, the slight movements of cats through garbage cans, the breeze ruffling newspapers, the crackle of wrappers tumbling down the street seemed like explosions. They were going off like grenades in Gina’s brain. She couldn’t stop seeing Alex turn from her; the angle of his head, his dismissal. The scene kept playing before her eyes. He had been glad to get rid of all of them.
“So this was the point of taking me to lunch,” she said to Nino. “This was why you came to the office.”
“So you can still talk,” Nino said. “I found out his name.”
“Why didn’t you just ask me? If you had just asked me, I would have told you.”
“Why should I think you would tell me if you hadn’t before? Why did you hide him?” he hissed. “Are you ashamed of him? You ought to be. What’s he hiding behind that beard? Why didn’t you bring him to the house?”
“Because I know how you hate everyone who isn’t exactly like you. I didn’t want you to spoil it for me, the way you have now.”
“I spoil it for you! You’re the one who spoiled your life. You have the judgment of an idiot! You expect me to approve of my own daughter becoming a whore?”
“Nino, be quiet,” Laura said. “Wait until we get home.”
“If you gave him a chance, you would have liked him. He’s very decent.”
“Decent!”
“He may not be like you,” she said, “but he . . . has been good to me. People do things differently now. This isn’t Sicily.”
“Don’t mention Sicily to me. In Sicily you wouldn’t be alive.”
“If his not coming to the house is an issue, he will come to the house.”
“The fact that he didn’t insist on meeting your family shows he doesn’t take you seriously. The fact that you didn’t insist shows you’re a fool. I could have looked him over and told you he was no good. You don’t have to ask someone like that his intentions,” Nino concluded, “because you already know what they are.”
Gina groaned. She couldn’t say what her own intentions were, much less his. Nino was great at ruining things by pushing them to a crisis, forcing you to make choices. It was like running a race in which the hurdles were raised and raised until you finally tripped. No matter how much you practiced and trained, you could never win because the hurdles would always loom higher and higher. It taught you your limitations, gave you a sense of the boundaries of your feelings. Would you marry him? Would you spend the rest of your life with him? The questions, raising the prospect of eternity with Alex, were making her realize how little she wanted anyone “forever.” What about Alex’s intentions? He wants to “improve” me, she thought wryly. To play Svengali to my Trilby, Pygmalion to my Galatea. He wants to free me from the burden of my working-class practicality. He wants to show me that the only thing that matters is having a good time, now. Nino had certainly loused that up for tonight.
She could see how wounded Nino was by the sight of her in Alex’s place. Well, he brought it on himself by going there.
“You don’t know what his intentions are,” she said. “You don’t know him at all. Give him a chance. He never came to the house because I wouldn’t let him. Despite what you think, nothing happened between us.”
Nino stared at her. “Because I don’t have a good leg, it doesn’t mean I don’t have one to stand on. If you’re lucky, nothing irreversible happened. If it did, I warn you,” he said, lifting his cane and resting it against the right side of her face, “you’ll have to keep it, raise it. You won’t get a dime from me to do it. Then maybe you’ll learn your lesson.”
“You have nothing to worry about,” she said, pushing his cane away, but actually it was the first time it had occurred to her that she did.
“You have no shame,” he said. “Look at you.” Her face was dead white. “You’re pretty calm. You don’t feel affected. You talk, but you forget what to say, how to apologize, how to repent for sneaking around.”
“It’s an open question which one of us is more of a sneak,” she said evenly.
“I’m your father,” he said. “It’s my job.”
When they reached Union Square she hesitated at the edge of the subway stairs. If she turned and ran, she could go back. He would want her back, alone.
“Hurry up,” said Nino, banging his cane on the sidewalk. “Do you think I’m going to take a cab? I’ve already spent more than you’re worth tonight.”
She stiffened. It was easier to hate him than to feel humiliated by him. Nino had hurt her, but not as badly as Alex. He had been upset by her parents’ barging in. How could he not be? Bu
t she had been shocked by his look of pettish disgust. He had behaved as though she and Nino and Laura were droning insects who had startled him out of a sound sleep and driven him to retreat under his covers. There was something cowardly in his air of being too fastidious to deal with them. Dialing his father, getting rid of her along with them—he had taken the easy way out.
She had never put into words what she saw in Alex. Initially she had been attracted to him because he seemed so polished and yet so relaxed and amused. He had a kind of self-assurance she hadn’t seen in anyone before. He was older than she, but that wasn’t it. He had an aloof superiority that wasn’t connected with anything real, like money or possessions or achievements. It was an air of knowingness, of being part of an elect who knew it all and never had to get upset. Nino was always upset about something.
Alex never sweated for anything. Yet he could work meticulously at his Chinese. He had majored in mathematics, but had never gotten his degree. He didn’t need to know Chinese to be a mathematician. The difficulty of the language seemed to make it all the more important to him. She loved to watch him work on his ideographs. Yet she noticed that with all his apparent interest, he was still working on the same chapter, perhaps even the same page. A lot of what he did seemed to have become an end in itself, a diversionary tactic to ward off the finality of a decision about what to do with his life.
I’m being hard on him because he hurt me, Gina thought. I care for him because he is always interesting to me. He made me realize how lonely I was. She had always had friends, but never anyone who could unleash such intense feelings of joy and intimacy. Sometimes, with other girls, she could talk about going to school. Her friend, Nancy, was brilliant, but even worse off than she. Her father worked hard, but there were nine kids in the family and all the boys would get to go to college before she would. She had wanted to be a doctor, but had won a scholarship to nursing school and had taken it, just to get away.
The Right Thing to Do Page 9