City of Margins

by William Boyle

  “It’s nothing bad. It’s all good. Trust me. It’s good news.”

  She pushes open the screen door and waves him inside. He smiles and nods and walks past her and then waits for her to lead him down a long hallway through a living room with a broken TV and a plastic cover on the couch and a deep green shag rug into a kitchen that smells strongly of chicken cutlets. He watches her as she walks. Barefoot. Behind her knees, the soft creases there. She’s got killer legs.

  “Don’t be staring at my ass,” Josephine says. “I get enough of that shit during the day.”

  “I was, I’ll admit, admiring your legs,” Nick says, chirping a little burp into his palm. “I’m sorry.”

  She turns around. “Legs I can deal with. Ass and boobs, you keep your eyes to yourself.”

  His eyes now are drawn to the shape of her under Bart Simpson.

  “Nick?” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Sit down.” She points to the kitchen table. A stack of scratch-offs is rubber-banded together next to a sugar bowl and a clutch of ripe bananas. “You want some coffee? I think you need some coffee.”

  Nick sits. “That’d be fantastic. Thanks.”

  Josephine goes over to the stove. She reaches up for a percolator in the cabinet over the range hood, and he watches her as she stretches, on the tips of her toes now, the muscles in her legs sinewy, collecting the pot with both hands as if she’s stealing a baby bird from its nest. She gazes over her shoulder at him and notices him noticing her again. He looks down at the table, at the sugar bowl, at the scratch-offs.

  “Tell me what you want to talk to Antonina about,” Josephine says.

  “Is she here?”

  “She’s in her room.” Josephine runs water in the sink and fills the pot. She then spoons some Folgers into the basket, drops the basket into the water, and secures the lid. She gets it going over a high flame on the stove. She comes back to the table and sits across from Nick. “Coffee should only take a few minutes.”

  “Oh, that’s great.”

  She puts her elbows on the table, clasps her hands together, and rests her chin on her knuckles. “I’m waiting,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For you to explain yourself. What do you want with Antonina? You know, my daughter doesn’t need any shit right now. She’s had a tough year. She’s been down in the dumps.”

  “She has? I’m sorry. She’s such a pretty kid. I’d guess she was happy.”

  “Pretty isn’t everything.” The percolator rattles over the gas. She gets up and turns it down. The coffee settles to a steady perk.

  There’s a sound of movement from behind the door at the back of the room.

  “That’s the stairs to the attic,” Josephine says. “That’s where Antonina stays now.”

  Feet clomping down the steps. The door thrown open. Antonina’s standing there, framed by light from a bare fluorescent bulb hanging over her. She’s wearing combat boots and a wool skirt and a purple crop tee. Her hair’s cotton candy pink. Leather and silver-stud wristbands. Black lipstick. Eyes heavy with mascara.

  Nick stands up. “Hi there, Antonina,” he says. “You don’t know me. I like the look.”

  Josephine shakes her head. “Don’t encourage her, okay?”

  “You’re that teacher from OLN. What do you want?” Antonina says.

  Josephine stares daggers at him, anxious to know what the hell his deal is.

  Nick turns down the corners of his mouth. “I am that teacher. I’m also a writer. I’m working on a movie script. It’s my dream. Write a script, get it into Martin Scorsese’s hands or something like that. I mean, I’m just in the beginning stages, but I need to talk to you.”

  Antonina struts over to the refrigerator and opens the door and takes out a Coke. She pops the tab and drinks some.

  “I’m basing the main guy on Donnie Parascandolo.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk about that piece of shit,” Josephine says. She’s still perched by the stove. She pours coffee in a Harrah’s mug and hands it to Nick. “Black?” she says.

  “Black’s great,” Nick says. “Thanks.” He accepts the mug and blows down into the steam and sips the hot coffee.

  “What can I possibly tell you?” Antonina says.

  “Donnie picked my mother up on the Belt tonight. She’d broken down. He was being a Good Samaritan. You believe that? Took me a second to realize who he was. When I did, I thought, ‘This is so interesting.’ I remembered his reputation. I remembered the stories I heard around school about him hitting Mikey with the bat.” Nick’s talking animatedly to Antonina, but he’s also addressing Josephine, the coffee mug balanced over his palm. He fears he’s slurring his words. It doesn’t matter. “I’m the guy to write about him, to dissect the psychology at work.”

  “Antonina shouldn’t have been there that night,” Josephine says. “She was fifteen. Mikey Baldini got all out of whack when he went upstate. Sonny would’ve kicked the shit out of him, given the chance. I don’t think much of Donnie, but I don’t have a problem with him hitting Mikey that night, that’s for sure.”

  “He probably picked up your mom because he’s trying to fuck her,” Antonina says to Nick.

  “Your mother does look nice,” Josephine says. And then to Antonina: “Watch your mouth, okay?”

  “I think he might have some interest in Ava. I was just over at Donnie’s. Don’s.”

  “You were over there?” Antonina says.

  “I was over there. Around there. Whatever.”

  “You think he’s gonna let you write a movie about him? That’s pretty stupid. And dangerous. He’s not a good guy. I’ve heard other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like him breaking arms for Big Time Tommy Ficalora.”

  “Keep your nose out of it,” Josephine says.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Nick asks.

  “Just around,” Antonina says.

  “I think you should leave,” Josephine says. “Sonny’s gonna be home soon. He won’t like that you’re here. He’s got brass knuckles. He likes to use them.”

  Nick plucks up one of the scratch-offs and tries to write his number on the back with a golf pencil. The pencil won’t write on the card. He finds something else to write on, a yellow Post-it notepad.

  “You’re pretty wasted,” Antonina says.

  “I’m not being untoward here,” Nick says. “You think of anything I could use, just call me and let me know. You talk to Mikey lately?”

  “I haven’t seen Mikey since that night.”

  “You need to go,” Josephine says to Nick.

  Nick puts down the mug on the table, some coffee sloshing out and puddling around the sugar bowl. He places his hand on his chest, taking a poetic stance: “Donnie’s the neighborhood in a nutshell. I’m the guy to write about him, about this place. We’re talking real-deal stuff. This is history, and we can record it.”

  He staggers down the hallway and out the front door, leaving it open behind him, almost ripping through the screen door with his elbow and then letting that door clatter shut. He stands out front and considers Mary in glass and Sonny’s motorcycle.

  When he turns, Antonina’s standing behind the screen, her face crisscrossed with shadows, her hair like a neon light in a bar window. She looks like maybe she wants to say more. She bites her lip and closes the door.

  ANTONINA DIVINO

  Antonina is on the fire escape outside her attic window, smoking, with her Walkman in her lap. She’s listening to a mix her best friend, Lizzie, made her. It’s got Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, This Mortal Coil, Cowboy Junkies, Patti Smith, Television, Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, the Fall, and Echo and the Bunnymen. It’s the best mix anyone’s ever made her. She’s finishing up “Tarantula” by This Mortal Coil on Side A now. It transitions into Cowboy Junkies doing “Sweet Jane.” Lizzie is so good at transitions. Antonina can just picture her, perched over her tape deck, ready to poun
ce. Lizzie loves making mixtapes, staying up all night with a pot of coffee, her tapes and records spread out on the bed. Antonina’s tried. She doesn’t have the patience. She always fucks something up, cuts off a song too soon or has too jarring a transition. It’s an art she hasn’t mastered.

  She can’t believe that teacher came over asking about the night in the schoolyard with Mikey. He probably watches a lot of Woody Allen movies and thinks he’s got a shot with her. Fucking freak. He must be thirty. Not that she wouldn’t date an older guy, but it’s sure as shit not going to be a loser teacher from Our Lady of the Narrows.

  A script? The dumb piece of shit probably watched Mean Streets one time and thought, I could write something like that. Antonina loves Mean Streets. It’s her favorite movie, hands down. De Niro in that movie. Jesus. She loves when he comes into the bar in his boxers, when he’s introducing the Jewish girls from Café Bizarre to Harvey Keitel.

  She looks over at Donnie Parascandolo’s house. It’s dark. She remembers when his wife still lived there. Donna. She works at Bishop Kearney, where Antonina goes to school. Antonina doesn’t see her much, but every once in a while, she’ll turn a corner in the hallway and Donna will be there and they’ll ignore each other. Donna obviously doesn’t like to think about living in that house. It brings back Gabe. That was tragic, him killing himself. Gabe was a year older than Antonina. They’d been at St. Mary’s at the same time together. She didn’t know him—a grade was a big difference in grammar school—but she used to see him in the gym at recess and wonder how he was the son of someone like Donnie Parascandolo. He seemed so tender, so grown-up, the kind of kid who acted more like an adult than most of the adults around. She didn’t know that from talking to him or anything. It was just the way he carried himself. Always with a book. Mature. Holding doors open for nuns when the other boys in his class were spitting on girls to get their attention or arm-wrestling for five-buck pots or taking bets on who could get Sara Desiderio to blow them in the bathroom.

  And Mikey Baldini. She hadn’t thought about him in a little while. That night was weird. He’d been back for the summer from his first year at college when they started hanging out. They met at a party over at Gina D’Aniello’s on Seventy-Eighth Street. Antonina had snuck down the fire escape one of the first times ever that night. Mikey was so different. He was from the neighborhood, but he had changed. Those gauges in his earlobes, that tattoo, his hoodie. He didn’t smell like the city. He smelled like the country. He had stories about seeing hardcore bands at dive bars in Kingston and Poughkeepsie. He had stories about crust punks he knew who rode the rails and lived in tents in the woods with their dogs. He said he’d shot heroin but didn’t like needles. Within a couple of hours of meeting, they were making out. She saw him five or six times after that. Lizzie had just lost her virginity to a guy who was in college, and Antonina figured it was her turn. The schoolyard seemed perfect. She’d pictured it happening on the cold cracked concrete. Maybe she was fucked in the head, but that seemed romantic to her. Out in the open on a summer night, all the sounds of the city around. But it didn’t go down like that. Donnie happened. After he’d hit Mikey, she didn’t know what to do. She thought she’d have to call an ambulance. But Mikey just yelled at her to get away and he ran out of the schoolyard, holding his face. He never spoke to her again, thinking she was off-limits. She sees him around now that he’s back for good and they ignore each other, too. She wound up losing her virginity in the back of an ’84 Toyota Tercel on Shore Parkway by Nellie Bly to a senior from Bishop Ford named Rico Ruiz. It was fast and awkward and mostly sad, but Rico wasn’t too much of a jerk.

  She drops her cigarette into the yard and goes back into her room. Her bed is a mess. Her floor’s covered in crumpled clothes. She’s got movie posters on her wall: Pink Flamingos and Carrie. They were getting rid of them at Wolfman’s, the neighborhood video store where she likes to rent movies, and she took them off the owner’s hands. She’s got a small TV in the corner, a VCR right on top of it. She loves movies. She’s gotten lost in them for as long as she can remember, watching anything on TV she could, renting tapes from Wolfman’s and taking them out from the library and going into the city to track down arthouse and foreign and cult movies at Kim’s Underground.

  She’s thinking about watching a movie now. She taped a few off of HBO over the weekend: Light of Day, Frantic, and Christine. She’s thinking Light of Day. She likes Joan Jett.

  Her phone rings. She’s got her own line. She takes off her headphones, stopping Lizzie’s mix, and answers, wrapping the cord around her wrist as she presses the receiver to her ear. She’s guessing it’ll be Lizzie, but it’s Ralph Sottile.

  Ralph had been a weird side effect of the night in the schoolyard with Mikey and Donnie two years ago. He’s one of Donnie’s cop pals. She’d seen him around before then. But he clearly hadn’t been okay with what Donnie did, and that was the first sign he was different. The second was he showed up outside Bishop Kearney after school one day about a week later and gave her an envelope. In the envelope was a hundred bucks. He said it was for any trouble they’d caused her. He said to call if she ever needed anything, writing his number on the envelope. She called him a few days later, and he picked her up two blocks from her house and they drove to the Crosstown Diner out in the Bronx so they were far from the neighborhood. Ralph isn’t a good-looking guy. He’s heavy, he wears tired suits, and he’s losing his hair. But he’s not bad overall.

  They don’t fuck, her and Ralph. He’s never tried anything like that. He just likes talking to her about school and about what she wants to do in life. He likes giving her money. She doesn’t ask where it comes from. She’s saving the money. She figures when she graduates next spring, she can take off with less trouble. She wants to get the hell out of Brooklyn. Maybe she’ll just wind up in the city or maybe she’ll go upstate or maybe she’ll go farther. Maybe she’ll keep going until something tells her to stop. She’s not sure about college. She knows only that she won’t be trapped into going where her parents want her to go, Hofstra or Fordham or St. John’s. If she goes to college, it’ll be on her own terms. Maybe a state school like the one Mikey went to, and she can just pay her own way by waitressing.

  The weird thing is, using Ralph or not, he knows her better than anyone, other than Lizzie. She guesses she’s a stand-in for the daughter he’ll never have. Or maybe he just gets off on playing daddy.

  “Can you meet me?” he asks now.

  “Sure,” she says. “Pick me up?”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen. Usual spot.”

  She hangs up the phone and then locks her door from the inside. Her parents won’t come knocking. They don’t bother her much these days. She crawls through her open window onto the fire escape and shimmies down the narrow ladder. She has sneaking out down to a science.

  The next step is hopping the fence into Jane Rafferty’s overgrown yard. Jane’s a shut-in, seventy-something, and her yard is dark. Antonina stays close to Jane’s house and comes out on Bay Thirty-Fourth Street. From there, she books it up to Bath Avenue and then takes a quick right onto Bay Thirty-Second. Ralph always picks her up in front of a white three-family house with six Virgin Mary statues in the front garden among the tomatoes and peppers and zucchini.

  Antonina gets there first, but Ralph pulls up in his red ’88 Cadillac Brougham with its cross-hatch grille soon after. She knows about cars from her old man. She likes Ralph’s car.

  She gets in the passenger seat, pulling the door shut behind her. He’s wearing a black bowling shirt and blue dress pants. He gives her an envelope. Same routine every time. Sometimes it’s a hundred bucks, sometimes it’s more. “A little something,” he says.

  “Thank you so much,” she says, tucking the envelope in the tight little pocket of her wool skirt.

  Ralph pulls away from the curb.

  The Crosstown Diner has become their go-to spot. Depending on traffic, it can take thirty minutes to drive there or it can take tw
o hours. Ralph’s usual route is the Belt to the Cross Island and then across the Whitestone Bridge. The Bronx is the same city but a different world. Antonina had never been there before Ralph, not even to a Yankees game.

  There’s light traffic now on the Belt.

  “Look at this scumbag piece-of-shit fuck,” Ralph says, pointing over the wheel at a Ford Mustang that’s cut them off. The driver seems to be pretty short. “Can barely see over the wheel. He should sit on a couple of phone books, fucking citrullo that he is.”

  Ralph curses a lot when he’s driving. Antonina finds it endearing.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.” He reaches over and pats her knee, as innocently as a man in his mid-forties can touch the knee of a seventeen-year-old girl. “I like the new hair—I tell you that?”

  “Thanks,” Antonina says.

  “Your old man give you shit?”

  “A little.”

  She thinks about Nick Bifulco and decides not to tell Ralph about his visit just yet, if ever. What good would it do? There’s only one way Ralph would interpret Nick coming around. She’s legal in New York at seventeen, and Nick’s no doubt a scrubby little pussy-hound. And it might not be an inaccurate appraisal of the situation, after all.

  The traffic gets heavier by JFK but then it clears up. In no time at all, they’re getting off the Whitestone Bridge and Ralph is navigating his way through the streets, before turning onto Bruckner Boulevard. They park in the Crosstown Diner lot. Ralph does a couple of laps around his car to make sure it’s secure and then they’re approaching the chrome front of the diner, its red neon lights bright against the dark sky.

  Inside, they’re seated at their favorite booth, the blinds open so they can watch the cars out on the street. The waiter, in his black vest, his black hair slicked back, recognizes them and gives them menus. Ralph says they don’t need menus. He’s got their orders down. Chicken Française and an Amstel Light for him and a Belgian waffle and a vanilla milkshake for her. The waiter hustles off to the kitchen to fill the order.