He walked up Lafayette Street now, where the Orthodox Jews lived. It could be such a nice street, but they let it rot, turned it into a shantytown of dirty Jews on sloping porches, weird ringlet hair and top hats even in boiling heat, a whole clan of them camped out in the middle of the East Side.
He felt the weight of family life and all its messy complications, all the burdens that children brought, and how lost he would be without them, but he was lost now, and his daughters were strangers who could not console him. He had felt this way only one other time in his life, like he’d woken up and all the colors were off, everything smudged and soupy. It took a year, maybe two, to regain his composure after God pulled the rug out from under him, took his daughter away, but once the world looked crisp and clear to him again, he felt certain it would always be that way. Now he felt trapped in one of Eliza’s paintings, in blobs of undefined, unnamable shades that swirled together to make a big beige universe.
The Basset Hound insisted on meeting him at the “new fancy coffee place on Broadway,” as she called it. In the past hour, downtown had swelled with tourists, and Belly had to push his way through as he headed south toward Washington Street. He remembered now that it was Dark Tuesday, the track’s one day off, and there was nothing for trackgoers to do but head downtown and shop.
He pressed the doors open to Café Newton. It was as if War Bar, his second home, had never lived in this space, had never existed. The walls were two-toned and matched the furniture, everything in the place some muddy autumnal shade that reminded him of Eliza’s paintings. There were pictures of other coffee shops in the chain on the walls, every one of them exactly the same. Any evidence of the space’s former life was gone now, and it gave him a sick and floating feeling, that gravity was no longer holding him down.
“It’s two bucks for a regular coffee,” he said as he sank into a purple velvet chair. “And they got pussy furniture here.” The Basset Hound had her hair all piled up, thick black glasses on, all businesslike. “Plus, you know, this place used to be my bar.”
“I know,” she said.
“I lost my bar, and it’s a fucking cappuccino palace. These are sad times for downtown Saratoga.”
Bonnie laughed.
“What?”
“The way you say it, Saratoga. You say it like a local. Sera-doga.”
“I am a local. My family’s been here for three generations. You carpetbagger types are the ones ruining it with your twelve-dollar coffees.”
“But it’s packed in here, Belly. I don’t think people mind.”
“These aren’t people, though. They’re tourists.”
She took a sip and got a little milk foam on her face. He had the urge to lean over and lap it up.
“You know what’s wrong with this place?” Belly asked. “You want an example of how fucked up the world has gotten since they sent me away? Hillary Clinton is our governor. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Senator,” Bonnie said.
“Whatever. Same thing. Hillary Clinton.”
“I voted for her.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“What do you want to drink?” she asked, getting up. “I told you I’m buying.”
“Whiskey,” he said, but she just stood there. “The cheapest cup of coffee they sell. Light and sweet.”
While she was at the counter, he glanced around, again dreading and yearning to be recognized. None of the faces focused on him. No one turned to take him in. Bonnie came back with a mug of bitter-smelling coffee, and as she sat down she asked him, “Why do they call you Belly?”
“Oh, you know. Christmas Bells, hell’s bells, Hell’s Angels, Big Fat Bellies. You know.” It always disappointed people when he told them how he got his nickname, a departure from “Billy,” just for slipping in and out of the house so often that the bells his mother hung on the door to monitor him were always ringing. She used to say that Belly’s favorite sport was ringing people’s bells, riling them up until they lost their tempers or until he did, and then he would bask in the glow of that victory—“The bell tolls for thee,” his mother would say. Then, “Get back in here, Belly.” Then his father would unhook the bells from the doorknob and whip them across Belly’s shoulders, and then Belly stayed away altogether so the bells would finally stop ringing.
“You look so different from what I pictured,” Bonnie said. “The way Ann talked about you I thought you’d be bigger. I thought you’d be as big as your name.”
“In prison they called me Rosie. After Pete Rose? ’Cause he was in for gambling.”
She took out a long, thin notebook and wrote down what he said. She told him, “The way she talked about you I thought you’d be, I don’t know, less delicate. Less handsome or something. She never said you were handsome.”
Belly thought about last night with Maybelline, about the little rings of fat on her stomach and hips that sipped open and closed as he entered her. He pulled her from his memory and put Bonnie back in, that smooth line of her long torso, endless legs that could envelop him.
“Should I call you Rosie, too?” she asked.
“It was the Chinese guy who called me that, Mr. Chin. I was in good with the Chinese because they’re into the whole horse-racing thing, and they knew I was from Saratoga. Plus, I did it the Chinese way, without even knowing it. The Chinese have it all figured out.”
“How do you mean?”
He wished he would stop talking. He wished she would put her mouth on his to shut him up. “Because the Chinese have their own organized-crime scene, believe me. But what they do is they agree on one guy to take the fall for the whole thing, and while he’s in jail, they take care of his family until he gets out. Then you got nine hundred other guys in there, and they’re all criminals. You can’t trust anyone there except the Chinese.”
Bonnie was nodding and writing and furrowing her brow.
“What?” he asked.
“So you took the fall?” she asked. “You took the fall, and the NYRA folks were supposed to take care of your family?”
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to broadcast how brave he’d been, and how quiet, and how he’d kept his mouth shut in service to his daughters, and how his mean Nebraskan mistress who’d brought him into the bookie business had stranded him there and absconded with his last reserves of laundered bills. He did it for his family, and they would never know. He wanted Bonnie to turn into Woodward and Bernstein and uncover the truth and tell his children, that they might finally forgive him.
But he just said, “Coffee makes me jittery. Let’s go down to Caroline Street and get a drink.”
“Do you really think we should? It’s only two o’clock, isn’t it?” she asked, but her question went up at the end, and he knew she’d come along.
Outside Ruffian’s the blare of some strange mix of Irish and reggae music halted him. He cut the air in front of Bonnie with his outstretched arm. “Let me wear your sunglasses.”
“Why?”
“Just because. Hand ’em over.” She took them from the top of her head and put them on him herself. He noticed she had very short fingernails.
“What’s a girl like you got these cop sunglasses for?”
“You don’t want anyone to recognize you?” she asked.
“Yes and no,” he said, leading her to the back. “Maybe after a drink or two.”
They sat at a plastic table on the patio. The pretty little waitress from the night before came to the table. “What’s the best drink for a man just out of prison?” he asked her.
“I’d say Jack Daniel’s,” she said, refusing to react. Maybe this kid knew who he was and didn’t care. Maybe she wasn’t from here, and hadn’t heard of him. “What you had yesterday.”
He nodded. “One for me and whatever the lady wants,” he said, though he knew he couldn’t pay for it.
“JD it is,” said Bonnie.
It was hot, but the alcohol cooled something in him. He leaned back against the chair with the
backs of his knees flat against the seat and his legs stretched out before him. He took out a cigarette and counted the remaining nine in the pack, his dwindling supply.
He looked at Bonnie and she was smiling at him. “You got kids?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“I didn’t think so. Not with a body like that.”
“I have a dog,” she said. “Tron.”
“Like the video game?”
She nodded. “I used to have two dogs. The other was Pong. But he’s gone now.”
He couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Pong is gone and Tron is not.”
He thought she’d smack him but instead she held up her glass. “To Tron and Pong: one’s gone, one’s not.” And they drank. The waitress brought the next round and they drank to other pets past, each round for a different pet, and Belly’s mother had taken in many a stray cat in her day and so there were many rounds, and when enough hours had melted away they had a toast to his sweet old bitch Seaver.
The girls had named her. A fine mutt she was, half black Lab, half beagle. She would wander all over town by herself, visiting the various families who gave her treats, showing up at the bar around dinnertime for a burger. She was the only woman in his life who could take care of herself. He loved that dog. He missed her every day.
They sat outside at Ruffian’s and watched the sun climb up the sky and start to descend like a child on a slide. He gave her back the sunglasses and she wore them in the late-afternoon orange glow. The sun and the whiskey baked them both into fine, fermented fixtures on the patio.
“Where’s your dog now?” he asked Bonnie.
“She’s home with Ann.” The sound of his daughter’s name felt like a change in the weather. “Jimi’s allergic.”
“I know that,” Belly snapped.
“Besides, Eliza always brings her crazy dog over to Nora’s.”
“Didn’t even know she had one,” he said, but his speech was slurred, his brain was slowing.
“Eliza’s the kind of person who gets a dog and doesn’t train him just so she’ll have something to hate. She has to be so nice to everyone all the time, she needs that kind of outlet.”
The way she insulted his daughter just made him want her more. “You married?” He was heavy now with beer and whiskey and want.
“Not really.” She fingered the gold band on her right hand.
“What does that mean, not really?”
“Not legally,” she said.
He took a big gulp of JD. “So that means you’re free for sex?”
He could swear her ears perked up like a dog listening for its owner’s call. “Definitely not.”
“Hey, sorry, I’m not trying to offend you.”
She waved the topic away. “Can I ask you something? You haven’t really talked about it, but I wanted to know, what was prison like?”
He motioned to the waitress for another round. “It was long,” he said. “The older you get, you know, the faster time passes, but it was just a really long time in there.”
“Was it scary?”
“No,” he said. “A little. No. Not really. It’s just, you know, drug dealers and a few fraud types. No murderers. It’s not the worst. The thing about jail is it’s incredibly boring. It’s so boring. But they had a really good gym, and sometimes we saw movies, and I got a work release so I didn’t have to do much. I played a lot of basketball before my hips gave out. It could have been worse. The hardest part was they tried to turn me into a morning person.”
“How’d you get out early?”
“I was up for parole and they said yes.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. I kept my head down and my mouth shut the whole time. It wasn’t hard to do. It’s not like TV in there. It’s much slower than that.”
Bonnie nodded and sipped and wrote some more and he wondered why she wanted to know these things and what she would do with what he said and if he ought to say something else, something endearing maybe, or something about how he’d reformed or what a good and solid citizen he planned to become, but he said, “What am I going to do now?” and she stopped writing. He lit a cigarette: he was down to five.
Bonnie said, “My mom told me she knew you. She used to know you. My mom said you were an excellent tango dancer.”
“I was,” he said. “Who’s your mom?”
“Denise Annolina. We used to live on the West Side.”
“That explains why I never saw you around. I would have remembered a body like yours.”
“I went to Emma Willard,” she said. “To boarding school.”
“Oh, yeah.” He grinned. “All girls.”
The Basset Hound crossed and uncrossed her legs, her smile bloomed in benign tolerance, and somewhere in there, in the movement of her knees, he was hit with a memory. One of those late ’80s parties, mounds of coke on coffee tables and mirror balls and Donna Summer and he walked in on this girl peeing—not this Denise woman, but some other dark-eyed Italian beauty from the other side of the tracks. She just looked at him with these huge brown eyes and stood up, her panties still around her knees and leaned back against the tank and he unzipped his jeans and screwed her right there above the toilet. She had big stretch marks on her stomach from pumping out the kids, and her loose flesh jiggled the whole time.
He exhaled a thin line of smoke. The past would never come back again. He’d have to watch it like a late-night movie, a rerun, a dramatization of a life.
“Anyway,” he said now, “I can’t remember anything before 1986. The last time the Mets won the World Series. The one good thing about 1986.”
“You know, it wasn’t all bad. Ann said you had a few good times.”
“Oh, did she?”
“Yeah, she used to talk about this trip you all took to Florida, to spring training or something.”
“Oh, that,” he said, and he leaned back and drank.
“Yes, that,” she said. “That’s your one happy family memory. You should try to hold on to it.”
He looked at Bonnie, at her taut body and her droopy face and he asked, “How do you decide who’s right for you?”
She sipped from her drink and laughed. “You know what I do? I ask people what their favorite Elvis Costello song is and judge them based on that.”
“I only know that one about writing the book.”
“Everyday I write the book.”
“Yeah, that one.”
“That’ll do.” She drank again. “I live with Ann,” she said. “Ann and I are married.”
He looked at her again, the big boots, the belt buckle, the jeans worn low on the hips like a man, the short fingernails, the cop sunglasses. He could see all of this clearly while the rest of the world swirled around him. He looked at himself in the mirror of her sunglasses, his fine head of gray hair, the stubble over his cleft chin, and he could see her eyes behind the glasses and he knew she knew he was disgusted with her. He closed his eyes and thought, I will not say one more word to this person.
But she began to speak. She talked and talked, as if he’d asked her a question. Even though he kept his eyes closed, she kept talking, kept drinking, and the sun was fading in the sky like the drink was fading from his brain.
“There was this guy who used to stare at me in boarding school, at Emma Willard,” she said. “One of the kitchen boys. And there were only fifteen kitchen boys and two thousand teenage girls so it was a big deal if one of the kitchen boys checked you out. The boy would stare at me, just lock eyes with mine over the salad bar and not look away. He had these really dark eyes, black eyes, and this long stringy hair, which in the ’80s was so hot. And he played in a metal band, which was also hot.”
Was she trying to convince him she wasn’t all bad, that somewhere in her past she was a normal, healthy teenage girl?
He tried not to listen to her, tried not to picture her with Ann, and he couldn’t see Ann, he no longer knew her face, and every time he tried to trace her cheekbones
in his mind, tried to find the almond curve of her eyes or that one long hair on her right eyebrow, he could only see the heart-shaped face of his third daughter. He could not abide this so he tried again to call up Ann’s face, but it was a decade in the blurring. He hadn’t seen her since Eliza’s wedding, and he had not talked to her for a couple of years before that. He’d sent her one letter and that was the extent of their interaction. Even when they did talk, he could never understand her.
“Then one day I was standing next to him, he was refilling the salad bar, so close I could feel this tiny softness from his arm hair—lots of arm hair, he was Italian—and he turned to me and this light went on inside me and he said, ‘I’ve seen you.’ He said it so darkly. And my whole mouth was just full of this blackness, this fear, and I couldn’t look at him and I just stood there feeling his stare. And then I just shrugged and said, ‘So?’”
Belly turned over in his chair so he was staring at the concrete floor of the patio. He thought of Ann with her defiant, square jaw and her thick glasses, Ann with boys calling at the house, at the bar, boys with cars and bikes and skateboards trying to track her down, and how he used to wonder why she didn’t just pick one of them and proceed.
“The boy vanished, like on Star Trek, and I didn’t ever see him at school anymore. I don’t know if he hid when he saw me coming or what, but I could still feel his stare.”
Ann was valedictorian of her class, the class of 1987, and she gave a speech, he remembered, a short, crazy speech about how the word valedictorian was made of Victorian and edict and how they were already beyond George Orwell’s 1984 and there was no such thing as a valedictator. She gave this speech about how that word, valedictorian, means to say farewell, to fare well, that it means they should all go out and do good. She told them her sister had died in a car crash a year ago and that she would never get to go boldly where all those high school graduates were heading now. She told her classmates not to split their infinitives.
In the week after her graduation, Belly and Ann had the house to themselves. Eliza spent all her time at Henry’s and Nora was suddenly, after disappearing for a year, back in town and engaged to Phil. Most days, Belly knew, Ann was out with her friends in the state park; she said her last month of high school was “All Stoned, All the Time,” and Belly didn’t care. She’d go and suck the carbon dioxide gas from the dry crystal geyser spring in Spa Park and come back loopy and glazed and they’d sit home and watch the Mets, who returned to their role as black sheep of the National League the year after their big win; couldn’t even snag the pennant.
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