City of Margins

by William Boyle

  “It’s bugging me where I remember him from.”

  “Probably just from around the neighborhood. You see people walking on Eighty-Sixth Street forever, their faces register as familiar.”

  “Could be, yeah.”

  “Leaving me these cigarettes was such a nice gesture.”

  “Okay, Ava, I get it. You’re in L-O-V-E.”

  “Stop.” She exhales in his direction.

  He swats the smoke away. “I’m trying to work here.”

  “How’s Alice?”

  “Probably mad at me. She wanted me to come over.”

  “You should get a car. Sal and Frankie have a few new used ones in.”

  “Maybe,” Nick says, rubbing the bridge of his nose, straining to make sense of what he’s seeing on the page.

  Ava never would’ve guessed that he’d become a teacher. He always enjoyed reading, but she didn’t think he had the personality to stand in front of a group of kids. It takes a certain kind of person. Nick’s loose around her and Alice, but he otherwise keeps to himself. She’s never seen him teaching. She wishes she could. She’d be proud to see him standing up in front of a chalkboard, shaping young minds. Her husband, Anthony, never would’ve guessed Nick would become a teacher either. He wanted Nick to work for the city like him. Nick couldn’t do that. Teaching gave him days that ended by three.

  “Well,” Ava says, rising, cigarette still clutched between her fingers, “I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Slip out of that power suit,” Nick says.

  “Work’s nothing but a headache. That Rosemarie’s always on my heels. I avoid her. She needs to be able to do something without my say-so.”

  “That’s Mikey Baldini’s mother, right?”

  “Yeah, you had him in school, remember?”

  “I did. Wasn’t much in the brains department.”

  “And then the stupid car. I swear.”

  “At least you met good old Don.”

  Ava lurches across the table, slapping playfully at Nick with her cigarette hand. Ashes fall on the paper he’s reading. “You’re such a screwball,” Ava says.

  “Watch it!” Nick says, laughing. “I don’t want to set these papers on fire. I mean, I do, but I better not.”

  Ava’s bedroom is off the kitchen. After Anthony died, she bought a new bed, a full mattress and a different frame. She couldn’t stand the idea of sleeping in their bed alone. She had Nick wrap the mattress in plastic and put it in the basement and then disassemble the old frame and put the pieces in boxes. Nick thought she was crazy. It was a perfectly good bed. He didn’t understand. This new bed isn’t even terribly comfortable. She bought it at the cheapo mattress place on Eighty-Sixth Street.

  She goes into the bedroom now and sits down on the bed and takes a long drag off the cigarette. She unbuttons her shirt but doesn’t take it off and kicks out of her shoes. When she’s done with the cigarette, she’s going to rub her tired feet and then she’s going to take a cold shower. She likes cold showers on summer days. But she wants the cigarette to last a little longer. Unfiltered.

  Thinking about Don, how she likes his voice and his face and his hair and the cigarettes he smokes, has her feeling guilty. She tries thinking about Anthony instead. She looks around the room for traces of him. A coiled gold chain on the bureau. His rubbed-raw rosary in an envelope next to that. Their wedding picture up on the wall. Taken in the parking lot of St. Mary’s. She was twenty. It was the summer of 1962. A wedding picture in a parking lot then looked better than a wedding picture in a parking lot could ever look now. The cars were long, shiny, clean. It was the old church, the one that burned down six years later. Anthony was in a classic tux. He had a Sinatra thing going. She was so young-looking, so unbelievably young-looking, with the veil comb clamped in her dark hair, her gentle face, her pretty dress. She was lucky to get married when she did. Before the fashions changed and everyone looked psycho. The ’70s and ’80s, those are wedding pictures no one wants to see. Mustaches and velvet. Big shoulder pads. Hair and glasses you couldn’t believe.

  She goes into the small carpeted bathroom at the far end of the bedroom, an addition that Anthony built a few years after they bought the house and had Nick. They needed their own bathroom. In the winter, it gets cold in there and she has to leave the tap dripping when it drops below freezing. The grout in the shower is moldy, the tiles scummy, but she never feels like scrubbing it clean. She puts what’s left of her cigarette in the toilet and flushes. She closes the door and takes off her jacket and pants, hanging them from a hook on the wall. She slips out of her shirt, letting it fall to the floor, standing there in her bra and underwear, looking down at her hips where the pants have cut red lines into her skin. She forgot to rub her feet. She sits on the toilet and crosses her left leg over her right leg and rubs the ball of her foot hard. She was stupid not to wear socks again. The toilet lid is cold against her thighs. She switches to the other foot and reminds herself that she needs to take a Tylenol later. The Tylenol is in the medicine chest over the sink next to her bottles of Alyssa Ashley Musk perfume. All these aches and pains. Getting old is for the birds. What will it be like in twenty years? She won’t even recognize her body.

  When she’s done with her feet, she gets up and brushes back the shower curtain and turns on the water. She barely twists the hot knob, letting the cold run heavy. She unsnaps her bra in the back and takes it off over one arm at a time, throwing it on the toilet lid, cupping an arm under her breasts. She removes her wedding ring and sets it on the windowsill. The girls at work have told her to stop wearing it, but she can’t, she won’t. She steps out of her underwear and gets in under the water.

  She takes her bottle of shampoo from the caddy and pours some into her hand, massaging it into her hair with the tips of her fingers. She closes her eyes and lets the water thrum against her. She falls into thinking about Don again.

  She imagines his hands on her.

  She imagines pushing down his pants and boxers—he must wear boxers—so they’re crumpled at his feet and touching him, taking him in her hand the way she used to take Anthony in her hand.

  She imagines him kissing her arms and her thighs and her tired feet.

  Anthony would fall to his knees and hug her body to him, kiss her belly, kiss everywhere, and it was the best she’d ever felt. Times like that made her forget about hard work and failure and death and feeling like the world was grinding her down. She imagines Don hugging her the same way.

  The cold water feels good. She opens her mouth and lets it stream against her tongue, pound her teeth.

  A thundering knock on the bathroom door.

  “What?” she says, opening her eyes and groaning. Nick, like a little kid, can’t wait.

  He says something on the other side of the door.

  “I can’t hear you,” Ava says through the water.

  She hears the door creak and feels a draft from it being open. Nick is standing on the other side of the curtain, over by the toilet. She peeks out, only her head, making sure the curtain totally obscures her from him.

  “Why are you in here?” she says to him. “Can I have a minute of peace after a long day?”

  “I figured it out,” Nick says, biting the cap of his red pen. “I was sitting there, grading essays, and I just couldn’t shake it.”

  “Shake what?”

  “Figuring out where I know him from.”

  “Who?”

  “Don. Who do you think?”

  “Please, just give me a minute to finish up and then I’ll be out.”

  Nick nods. “Sure, sure. Sorry. I was just excited.” He leaves and pulls the door shut behind him.

  She tries to get lost in the dream again, tries to let the cold water carry her away, but it’s over. She can’t get back. Nick’s made her lose it. She shuts off the water and stands there in the tub, dripping. A rack next to the shower is full of fresh, dry towels. She wraps her hair in one and then uses another to dry her body. Her terry c
loth robe is stashed among the towels. She keeps it folded away there because she’s caught Nick wearing it a couple of times when she’s come home from work. “What?” he said to her the first time. “It’s so goddamn comfortable.” The next time he just shrugged. “You don’t mess with a woman’s robe,” she told him. She puts it on and then slips her ring back on too, an important after-shower habit. Once, when Anthony was still alive, she left her ring on the windowsill and it somehow dropped behind the toilet and got lodged in a deep gap between an upthrust of carpet and the wall and it took her a while to find it though she knew it couldn’t have gone far and she was frenzied and Anthony said he’d just get her a new one if she didn’t find it and she said she didn’t want a new one, she wanted the one he’d given her on their wedding day.

  Out in the kitchen, Nick’s moved aside the student essays and replaced them with a couple of folded open copies of the Daily News. He keeps stacks of old issues under the bed in his room. He’s always looking for stories. Real New York stories he can turn into a movie script. He says he’s going to write a script and sell it for a million bucks. She’s never seen him sit down and write a word, though.

  Ava’s still got the towel in her hair, and her robe is cinched tight. “Okay,” she says. “What is it?”

  “Have some bourbon,” Nick says, proceeding to suck down the rest of what’s in his glass and then chomping on some ice.

  “I’ll pass. And you better take it easy. You have work tomorrow.”

  Work. Nick takes the bus, but she hasn’t thought about how she’s going to get to Coney Island. She guesses the train will be easiest. At least she can get off and walk on the boardwalk to Sea Crest.

  Nick taps one of the papers on the table. “This isn’t today’s Daily News.”

  “So?” Ava says.

  “This is from last summer. A cop went on a bender and clocked his captain.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “It wasn’t big news. I just read carefully. Your man Don, he was the cop.”

  Ava scrunches her forehead and sits at the table.

  Nick turns the paper around and pushes it toward her. He taps Don’s official police picture. No smile. Hair shorter. But it’s him. It’s definitely him. “Donnie Parascandolo,” Nick says. “Now he’s ‘Don.’ Your boyfriend’s a disgraced ex-cop.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend, number one,” Ava says, taking a closer look at Don on the page.

  “The thing that made me remember was you mentioning Mikey Baldini. This is the same guy, your Don, who hit him with a bat when he was trying to get with Antonina Divino.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Word gets around in school. Gossip in the halls.”

  “When was this? Rosemarie never mentioned it.”

  “Couple years back. She didn’t know, I’m sure.”

  “Must’ve been right around the time her husband killed himself. I know the Divinos from St. Mary’s. Antonina must’ve been fourteen, fifteen. Sounds like Mikey deserved a whack.”

  “That’s why no one who knew pushed too hard to get Don in trouble, I guess.”

  She motions at the papers with her hands out. “This doesn’t diminish Don in my eyes, if that’s what you were thinking it would do.”

  “There’s more.”

  “What?”

  “The name Gabe Parascandolo ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “That was his kid. Hung himself in the cellar of their house. That’s why he and his wife got divorced. Couple of months after the kid did it, they were done. She still lives around here, too. Donna Rotante now—that’s her maiden name. Donnie and Donna, pretty cute. You know her?”

  Ava reaches for the last cigarette Don left behind. She feels shaky. This is a lot to take in. And Nick looks so pleased with himself. “I don’t know her, no,” she says. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “This guy’s something else,” Nick says. “A treasure trove. He’s my script. It’ll write itself. No more school, no more books, you know how it goes.”

  “You’re drunk,” Ava says, still holding the unlit cigarette between her fingers.

  “I sure am,” Nick says, a twinkle in his eye. “This fucker’s my meal ticket. Who better to write about this guy, this neighborhood, than me?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Your Good Samaritan has a checkered past. He ate your spaghetti. Raved about your gravy.”

  “Don’t pretend to know someone you don’t know.”

  A big self-satisfied smile from Nick. He pours himself more bourbon. “I should be thanking you, that’s what I should be doing.”

  “Think twice before you do something stupid,” Ava says, and she gets up and disappears back into her bedroom to put lotion on her legs and to watch the news.

  DONNIE PARASCANDOLO

  Donnie started introducing himself as Don after getting axed from the force but still thinks of himself as Donnie. In his head, when he talks to himself, it’s Donnie this and Donnie that, just as it’s always been. Being Don to folks he’s meeting for the first time is just a small way of distancing himself from the version of him that was in all the papers for going on a months-long bender culminating in sucker-punching Captain Dunbar at Blue Sticks Bar and getting shit-canned so majestically after refusing desk duty and blowing off therapy. Sottile and Pags still call him Donnie. They’re the only people left from his old life other than Suzy, and he and Suzy are barely anything anymore. All the cops he would’ve considered friends thought he’d disgraced himself and the department with the Dunbar thing. Oh well.

  He’s thinking this because it was still kind of strange to be Don with the woman he picked up on the Belt and her son. It was strange to be in their house. He’s not even sure why he picked her up in the first place. The old him might’ve done that, sure. Before Gabe. The old him was good like that, had, at least now and then, the tendencies of a gentleman. The new him, not so much.

  The woman, Ava, there was something about her he really liked. The way she wore that suit and smoked his cigarettes. She was a few years older than him, probably fifty or so, but she actually looked his age or even younger. She stirred something in him. That Italian thing. She was hot like the mothers of some of his friends were hot growing up. He wanted her hands in his hair. He wanted his head on her chest. She was the kind of woman to nurse you back to health. He didn’t know that when he stopped, but he wonders if something was guiding him. These few years since Donna left him, he’s only had Suzy, and he’s sick of Suzy with her broken front tooth and that mascara dripping down her cheeks. He’s no prize, he knows that. Booze-riddled. A disgraced ex-cop. But he can still get it up when he wants to, and Suzy’s a dead-eyed lump. Ava’s got him daydreaming about balling for the first time in a while.

  He’s on his couch in his boxers, cigarette case and a pint of scotch on the coffee table in front of him next to the phone, the home screen of Super Mario World on the TV. He took the cigarette case off some weasel in Bay Ridge whose arm he had to snap. The weasel said it was a family heirloom. “Fuck your family and its heirlooms,” Donnie told him. He likes the case a lot. It brings him comfort. It’s the thing that really got him started smoking.

  The scotch at Ava’s went down smooth, and now he’s stuck with his usual cheap shit. He takes out a cigarette and lights it with his Bic. He blows smoke at the ceiling.

  The phone rings. He picks it up, hoping it might be Sottile or Pags about the new job they’ve hopefully lined up. Post-force, he’s been doing more and more work for Big Time Tommy, with and without Pags and Sottile. Mostly it’s strong-arm stuff. Occasionally, it’s a drop. One time, he trailed this drug kingpin’s mistress to keep tabs on who else she was screwing. Big Time Tommy was pissed at him over Giuseppe. He’d only wanted the bum kneecapped. He’d killed a couple of other guys for Tommy in the time he’d been working for him, before Giuseppe, but it was always sanctioned, and the guys were always bigger, more obvious scumbags. Donnie had
earned back Big Time Tommy’s trust over the last couple of years with loyalty and silence and quality work. He’d knocked off a few guys since, and shit always went down by the book. Only Big Time Tommy could hand down a death sentence. Having a purpose other than being police felt good. But he was sure Big Time Tommy wouldn’t be happy if he knew about Donnie clipping dough off the top from his collections. Donnie’s racket: Make the chump pay a little extra, and what’s extra becomes his. Dough adds up like that. And it’s not stealing from the Ficalora crew, per se.

  It’s Suzy on the phone now. “Where are you?” she says.

  “You know where I am,” Donnie says. “I picked up the phone where I am.”

  “What are you doing home?”

  “I live here.”

  “I thought you were coming over here. I rented a movie.”

  “I’m too drunk to get back in the car.”

  Silence from Suzy. “You fucking piece-of-shit fuck,” she finally says. “I’ve thrown away a lot of time on you. I’ve stuck with you. I want company, you can at least give me company.”

  “Where’s your vibrator? You out of batteries?”

  “Jesus Christ. Don’t you get exhausted with yourself?”

  “I am tired, Suzy.”

  She slams down the phone on her end with a huff. He can picture it. She’s probably sitting there on the sofa in her HILL VS. HEARNS T-shirt and a pair of his boxers he left behind one night, her legs unshaven, no deodorant on, bowl of potato chips next to her, cradling that stupid little stuffed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer she’s got. And she expects him to come over and throw a lay on her.

  Now, Ava in that suit, that’s something he could get excited about. She’s probably all clean curves under there. Soft, well-maintained.

  It’s getting dark out. The kind of sad late-summer dark that pushes in through the curtains and takes over a room. The only light is from the TV. He drops the butt of his cigarette into an empty Bud can on the coffee table. It sizzles in a forgotten last sip of beer. Smoke gushes up from the mouth. He reaches for his scotch, unscrews the cap, and slugs some more.