“You know what? We’re trying to fix this place up, all right? I realize I am now surrounded on all sides by rich people who are making Spring Street look like Main Street at Disneyland, but I can’t quite keep up. It’s hard when your husband works a million hours and you have three little kids. But of course you wouldn’t know about that.”
“That’s what happens, I guess, when you have that ’50s life. The housewife thing and all.”
“Fuck you, Eliza.”
“Don’t talk to me that way, Nora. I’m your sister.”
“Don’t give me that high-and-mighty crap. You’re not any better than me.”
“Than I,” corrected Eliza.
“Fuck you. Really.” Nora flicked her cigarette onto the driveway. “And eat a cheeseburger or something. You’re too thin.”
“I don’t eat meat.”
“If you’re moving to the South, you better learn. They lynch vegetarians down there.”
He heard Eliza protesting, trying to smooth things over. Poor Eliza could never hold her own against Nora. He thought he heard her cry.
Belly rescued the two remaining beers still strangled in plastic and took to the couch. He turned on the TV to a Jeffersons marathon and turned it up loud, loud enough to hear outside on the side porch. He cradled the two beers against him as he finished the other and when Nora came in she stood in the archway with her arms folded above her pregnant midriff and they did not look at each other. She stepped through the room and headed up the stairs and they did not exchange a single word.
When the house was quiet he climbed to the second floor and walked down the hallway to what had been Bonnie’s room. Only now did it occur to him that this little bedroom at the back of the house must belong to Jimi, that the boys were doubling up to make room for Bonnie, and now for him. On the walls were pictures Jimi had drawn, second-grade scribblings with pictures of the perfect family, a mom and dad and three boys all holding hands, and a whole astronomical motif of stars and suns and planets and galaxies swirling around him. He could feel Bonnie’s presence lingering in the room, the nutty scent of her perfume. He looked at the bed where she had been sleeping and he could not lie there. He returned downstairs, to the couch, to the television, the one spot in the whole house where he felt safe.
Belly finished his beers and sang along with Moving on up, to the East Side, and when he heard Eliza leave he tried again to call up the numbers in Loretta’s phone number. They returned, all seven digits, and he felt so giddy he leapt from the couch, forgetting his old man hips. He ran to the phone, he forgot to be nervous, he didn’t care anymore, but when he dialed an angry triad of bells announced to him that the number had been changed. No forwarding information was available.
His heart pounded in an unnatural way, the way it did at the end of a long night of cocaine, but he would not be deterred. He knew where she was, where she always was, the glitzy bar she preferred in their last years together, when so much money was coming in and she no longer needed to bother with War Bar, or the riff-raff of Ruffian’s. He walked downtown, to Casey’s, in an old bungalow on Throop Street, strewn with tiny white Christmas lights and fancy folks with rainbow shades of martinis—pussy drinks—and he went inside.
Loretta. Loretta sat at the bar, her diamond cross swinging around her neck, three shot glasses lined up before her. And that, too, scared him and made him feel safe. He remembered he was supposed to summon some fury at her, there was some business, maybe, they were supposed to transact, but all information scattered when he saw that woman, his woman, alone at the bar.
He sat down next to Loretta and she didn’t see him. She was leaning toward a younger man on her left, a handsome young man, a man far too young for her, but he was leaning toward her, too, a goddamned human teepee, and he caught a word or two of their whispering. “My house,” and “later,” and “when,” and “good,” and “I hope so,” and even though he was over her, man, was he over her, the bitch, he wouldn’t take her back if she begged … something terrible happened. His heart descended into his stomach and sat there, malignant, he felt the infection all through his veins. He missed her. He missed her beautiful body wrapped around his, the seamlessness of their fit. Before Loretta, he used to get a blow job twice a year—on his birthday and New Year’s Eve. Only Ann was born one New Year’s Eve, foiling his plans from the moment she got here because, yes, he was going to make Myrna do it, nine months’ pregnant and all. Myrna wouldn’t even have regular missionary sex on the Christian holidays, not even the ones that were more about candy than God, not even Easter. He used to say, “What do you think—Jesus is going to see us doing it from all the way up there in the sky? Christ is risen, but not my dick.” Sometimes, Myrna used to hit him back.
He took a breath and leaned next to her, and he said what he said to her the very first time they met: “You’re one of the few Catholics I’ve seen who looks like she can really enjoy pleasure.”
She looked up. She turned away from the young man, not so handsome, Belly saw now, and drunk, and no match for her. Loretta was looking at him, glassy eyed and painted, her lips a little too full, the skin on her face a little too tight. She had had work done. On her face. Loretta’s perfect face was taut and flat and covered in a beige glow that hid her freckles, so taut a smile barely broke through. She wasn’t surprised to see him. She nodded at him and raised her glass and said, “Needlepoint it on a pillow for me.” He loved that line, that first thing she ever said to him. That line alone made him look at her again, made him monitor her glass and keep it filled that whole first night, keep her anchored to the bar so he could keep looking at her.
Now she poured the shot down her throat and the skin there was looser and lighter and looked so old. She pushed one of her shot glasses over to him.
“You can take the girl out of Nebraska,” he said, and she laughed. He could still make her laugh. The only woman he could ever make laugh. He remembered now, how she had that hold on him. She was like a superhero, a drunken superhero with a gambling habit and plastic surgery.
Belly downed the shot.
He thought about the first night they met, at the bar, this beautiful redhead letting the bouncer buy her beer, newly divorced and in a new town and so indifferent to him that he had to have her. He’d told her a joke—what had he said?—and she’d laughed, and when she laughed she opened her whole mouth, he saw all the way back to her uvula, and seeing that little teardrop of flesh at the back of her throat made him feel so close to her, that prairie-fed girl he’d only just met.
“Jesus Christ, I think I’m in love,” he said to her reflection now, and she tilted her head down and smiled.
“Join the club,” she said, and lifted her drink up to toast without turning to look at him.
He remembered the way she looked that night, more than twenty years ago, with dark red hair and freckles splashed across her face—he loved freckles on grown-up skin and he liked her skinny body. He’d said to her that night, “You’re the kind of thin only ladies with no children can be,” and he was so wrong. She took a picture of her fourteen-year-old son from her wallet, a gangly boy with a greasy mullet and a splotch of acne stuck to his jaw. He remembered thinking that the boy was just too trashy for his girls, his beautiful girls. He knew he should never put the boy in the same room as his girls. But then he did. He did it for Loretta. Two years later, he gave Darren the keys and sent him to fetch his daughter and while he sat in the faux-cow-covered La-Z-Boy with Loretta’s mouth and legs and arms all around him, Darren was swerving through town, twirling his daughter through the sleek, humidified streets. He was coming and she was going and it was all Loretta’s fault.
He looked at Loretta now and her hair was bleached to the moon, and makeup hid the freckles and he had never seen a chin job up close. It did not look right. It looked plastic. It looked like somebody took the beautiful woman he used to love and rolled her in Saran Wrap.
“What are you up to?” Loretta asked him, and she could
not have seemed more bored.
“I’m out,” he said.
“That I see. But what are you up to? What’s the plan?”
He shook his head.
“New bar?”
“No. I can’t.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “Still under house arrest?”
“It’s not house arrest,” he said. “It’s probation.”
“Whatever.”
“It’s for a year.”
“The old man’s going to have to get himself a job.”
He nodded. “Got any contacts?” It was surreal, this conversation, this interaction he’d waited four years for, and now they were shooting the shit like old buddies.
She eyed him from the side. “None. I’m out of the loop. I’m a good girl now.” She lifted her left hand and showed him the giant diamond sparkling below her knuckle, below the bubblegum pink of her nails.
This was all too much. Too much information. Too much news. He wanted to drink it away. If he drank, the truth would fade into the background, into the low hum of bar chatter and the pounding bass of classic rock that surrounded them. It would leave with the tourists at the end of the month and he could have everything back the way it was.
Loretta nodded at the bartender and he placed more glasses and more booze before them, and she pushed another shot toward him and said, “Don’t get a DUI.”
He drank and said, “I won’t,” and he and Loretta sat facing the mirror behind the bar, not looking at each other, not looking at each other’s reflections, and inside he was on fire with nerves. Four years, four years he’d been waiting to see her, to hear her voice again, to place his mouth on the salty skin above her collarbone and drink in her smell, and now she sat next to him, the coldest thing in this heat wave, not even talking to him. Not offering help, not offering her hand or her heart or her body or his money or her connections or her time or even her attention. He could not remember why he loved her, if he ever loved her at all. For the first time in his whole life, he wished Loretta would ease herself away. He wished he could close his eyes, just for a moment, sip a quick breath of darkness and open to find his wife on the barstool next to him, the life they maybe could have had without the four children suffocating them, and then the three children tearing them apart.
When he’d met her that night, his midwestern refugee, she’d told him the story of how she came to live in Saratoga, how her daddy took her to the races when she was little and all her life, all her youth in Omaha she had dreamed of this beautiful town—she came from the Saratoga neighborhood of Omaha, went to the Saratoga school; it was destiny.
He emptied his glass again, fast, and his new best friend, the bartender, took good care of him. He would not be thirsty tonight.
He wanted Loretta to talk to him. He wanted to hear the same story she told him all that time ago, hear her smooth voice cure the creases inside him, hear how she begged her husband to move them out of Omaha, anywhere but there, and he’d bought her a house in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and moved her ten miles across state lines.
To Belly, who had only twice traveled out of the tristate area and never got anywhere close to the Mississippi, it had sounded so exotic. Council Bluffs. She’d said to him, “Council Bluffs is to Omaha as Ballston Spa is to Saratoga,” and he’d said, “Oh,” and then she’d told him how she tried so hard to get her husband to follow her but he’d just let her go.
Now Loretta put on fresh lipstick and blotted her mouth on the cocktail napkin. He loved it when a woman did that. He picked up the napkin with the stamp of her lips on it. The night they first met, when the conversation finished, he took her to his office behind the back room of the bar, put one foot up on the tufted leather admiral chair, and slid her down his knee, the back of her head resting on the bull’s eye of the dartboard, and he’d had to reach and pick out three darts so their flights didn’t catch in that red hair. He looked at her now and he couldn’t remember how the two of them had got there, what he had said to make her melt.
“What kind of name is Council Bluffs?” he asked her now. “What does that mean? God, that’s a strange word. Bluff. Bluff. Say it. Bluff. It’s a horrible word.”
“You’re drunk,” she said, and he nodded. “Mormons. They wanted it to sound official to keep all the brown people out.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Saratoga is the only town that makes sense.”
Maybe he and Loretta would be friends. Maybe he would meet her most nights at the bar and they could talk about geography, and he wouldn’t have to do anything to her, to anyone. He wouldn’t have to lay a girl down and perform the impossible task of making love to her, or making her love him. He just wanted to drink and talk and listen and stare, and maybe he wanted Loretta to put her hand on the small of his back, her fingers cold from the ice clinking in her glass, and let the temperature lower in that one small square of his body.
Their glasses were empty, painfully empty. Without liquor before him, he would have nothing to say to Loretta. “What are you drinking?” he asked.
“I was drinking Glenlivet,” she said and her good taste in booze made him achy. “It was a top-shelf night, but I moved down to Bushmills. Then JD. Now I’m on Early Times.” She lifted a glass to him. “I love Early Times.”
The bartender refilled their shot glasses again, and Belly sipped from his this time. He remembered when certain regulars would show, their hard times plain upon their faces, and something coming off them, something radioactive, that alerted him to their drinking needs. He called those times Night of the Big Whiskeys, or sometimes fifty-whiskey nights. He’d refill their glasses until they couldn’t recognize themselves, call Spa City taxi, and send them on their way. He used to feel sorry for them, and now here he was in his own fifty-whiskey night. It was too loud and too hot in here, and now he looked at Loretta, swimming in her drunkenness, and he put his hand on the counter and inched it down toward hers, but she curled her fingers around the glass and she lifted it to her perfect, painted, plastic mouth.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Why?” He felt small, he felt he was shrinking and Loretta was so big, so much big blond hair and so colorful, such a beautiful bird he couldn’t catch.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
He flattened his fingers on the sticky bar and asked again, “Why?”
“Because it’s over.” She drank some more. “It’s so over. It’s been over for such a long time and I don’t want to talk about it.”
She took two cigarettes from her purse, her long, light cigarettes and she lit them both in her mouth and handed him one, and he tried to touch her fingertips but even those she took away from him.
He said, “You have my money and my heart.”
Loretta laughed, a mean, choking laugh. “They’re both long gone,” she said. “You’ll never get them back.”
He gripped the lip of the bar with his hands. “Where’s my money?” he asked. “What did you do with it?”
“It’s not cheap with a quadriplegic son, let me tell you.”
“You got insurance money for that,” he said. “What did you do with it? You owe it to me. You owe me.”
She laughed again. “Nobody owes you anything,” she said. “You did what you had to and so did I. Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” She blew a long line of her smoke at her own reflection in the mirror. “Because that’s what you’re going to get. Nothing. Expectations are just resentments waiting to happen.”
Belly started to shake. He pressed his wrists against the bar and watched his palms wobble. He clamped his fingers down on the polished wood to keep them from hitting her. “It’s bad luck to be a bitch,” he said.
She waved her diamond ring at him. “I don’t need luck anymore, Belly, I’ve got money.”
“My money and my heart,” he said again, digging his nails into the wood until his fingertips turned white.
“Oh, poor fella. Had to sacrifice a few years of his pitiful little life in exchange for wha
t—how many thousands did you take in? How much of that money did you blow on coke? On cars? You want me to feel sorry for you?”
He laid his head down on his hands and he refused to cry. He said, “Yes. I want you to feel sorry for me.”
She drank. “Sue me,” she said. “I dare you.”
Belly watched as his own shaky hand reached for Loretta’s windpipe, as it clasped the chicken skin of her neck and pressed. She watched him, and he watched her; it was like they were dancing. His hands were eating at her jaw, his fingers were sipping from her larynx and then when she smiled, she floated away.
“I dare you,” she whispered. There was no fear in her eyes and he loosened his fingers and let them rest on her collarbones. She reached up and pulled his knuckles to her hairline, rubbed them against the hidden scar from her facelift. “Just let it be over. Let it be done.”
He thought of all the times he hit his wife; he hit Ann, and Nora, and Eliza, and he never hit Loretta, and he never hit his third daughter, but that did not absolve his hands, and right now, with those guilty fingers, he was capable of murder.
She said, “I got the needlepoint line from Mel Brooks. You know that routine, about how you take the M from ‘Midwest’ and add it to ‘moron’ and you get ‘Mormon’?”
Belly took his shot glass and slammed it on the bar. It shattered. He yelled, “I thought you made that line up. You said you made it up.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m used to disappointing people.”
And then there was trouble, chaos, the bouncer lifting Belly from his seat; suddenly Belly was so small, and he stumbled toward home, wherever that was. A long beige Cadillac raced down the street, two teenage boys leaning out the window. “Go home, Grampa!” they screamed. And he should. He was a grampa and he should go home, alone, with no mistress and no money, all the stars in the sky laughing at him and all he wanted was to sleep.
CHAPTER 5
HE OPENED his eyes and it was still dark. He knew right away that he was not in his pod, not in his cell, where the lights never completely dimmed. But his pupils were too dilated and the walls were too far away and he had to piece together again what was real, right there in the dark. He was home; he was back in Spa City, but he was not home. He was back in Saratoga, but it was not the same town; he had no home. He was staying with Nora. It was Nora’s home. And Eliza did not live there anymore. And Ann, he could not remember her, maybe she had never lived there at all. Maybe she was never real. And daughter number three, she was here, she was sitting next to him on the couch with a cup of hot tea and a chunk of potato bread to mop up the alcohol making the rounds inside him, she was studying, she had fallen asleep on the couch with her glasses tilted over her closed eyes, and he took off the glasses and set them down carefully on the end table. He covered her in the red, blue, and purple afghan knitted by his great-grandmother, spun and dyed herself from her very own sheep, he stood there and watched her safely sleep.
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