City of Margins

by William Boyle

  “What are you doing in Coney Island?”

  “Research.”

  “I’m sorry about our fight.”

  Nick sips some coffee and then stands back up. He walks over and reaches out and takes Ava’s free hand. Her other hand’s wrapped around the coffee cup.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Ava says.

  “Let’s dance,” Nick says.

  “You’re still bombed.”

  He tugs on her hand until she gets up. He pulls her into a tight embrace, puts his right hand on her back and his left hand in her right hand, and they rock back and forth slowly. He smells stale, his breath a blast of something rotten, the booze seeping through his pores. He puts his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed. “This is a celebration,” he says.

  “Okay, enough,” Ava says.

  “You remember when I was a kid and I’d stand on your feet and we’d dance?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I try that now?” He steps on her feet, stomping her toes, trying to keep the dance going.

  “You’re being stupid,” she says, disengaging, kicking her feet out from under his, curling her stinging toes inside her slippers. She sits down and goes back to her coffee. “I wish I’d never broken down on the Belt, that’s what I wish.”

  “Do you?” Nick says. “Don’s sweet on you.”

  “Just shut up, Nick. Just please shut up. It’s too early for this.”

  DONNIE PARASCANDOLO

  Donnie’s pissed himself. Happens every now and again. He wakes up with the front of his jeans and the bed around him all wet. After popping that dumbass Dice at the Wrong Number, he did two more shots and drank a few more beers and watched as Dice and his buddies eyed him but never made a move, eventually disappearing into the night like the scared little shits they are. When Donnie got home, he played Super Nintendo for a while and then he just passed out in bed.

  He doesn’t usually remember his dreams, but now he remembers one he had about his parents. They were in a hospital. They were the only ones in the hospital. He was young in the dream, first or second grade, but his parents were old, both wobbly with dementia. His mother opened her mouth to talk to him and her teeth were all little buttons and then her eyes became bigger buttons. Not channel-changer buttons. Like buttons on a shirt. His father had the same button eyes and button teeth. All the walls around them became see-through, and he saw dripping pipes, mice, crawling things, shadows. No wonder he pissed himself.

  He goes into the bathroom and takes off his pants and boxers and hangs them on the shower rod. Even the bottom of his shirt is wet. He takes that off too and avoids looking at himself in the mirror over the sink. He brushes his teeth with his finger. The foamy toothpaste comes away pink with blood. He spits in the sink and then leans over and sucks up some water from the tap, rinsing forcefully until he feels some relief in his sore gums.

  He heads out to the kitchen in only his socks and looks in the refrigerator. A bottle of orange juice with no cap on the top shelf. He downs it, spilling some on the floor, and tosses the bottle in the trash.

  He searches for his cigarettes in the living room. Figuring they must be in the cushions of the couch, he feels around and comes out with a business card for a phone sex line and a crusty battery and a stale hunk of bagel. He pushes his hand down deeper, and sure enough, there’s the case, lodged snugly against a flat part of the base. One cigarette left. How many did he give to Ava? His yellow Bic’s on the table. He lights the cigarette and thinks about turning on the TV. Instead, he just sits, smoking, staring up at the ceiling.

  Ava’s floating there, smiling at him. He thinks about doing nice things for her. He knows she’s got work today. He could brew some coffee and walk over to Flash Auto and check in about her car. He can just imagine Frankie nudging him and saying, “You fucking Ava Bifulco?”

  And he’d say, “I’m trying, man.”

  Donnie doesn’t have much money, but he’s got some of what his parents left him. A little over five grand, last he checked his Williamsburgh Savings bank book. He didn’t give a fuck about his pension. He didn’t want anything from the force after they strung him up for the Dunbar thing. Whatever money he makes on his jobs with Pags and Sottile is cash, and he keeps it in the house. He’s probably got about three grand under a floorboard in his bedroom. Donna doesn’t ride him for alimony. He’s thinking about his money now because he’s thinking he should buy Ava something. Not a big something. Just a way of letting her know he’s thankful he met her. Maybe a used car from Flash. They’ve got an ’84 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera for two grand. It’s gray and long, and he can just picture her behind the wheel. Maybe that’s too much too soon.

  What Donnie’s not so thankful for is meeting Nick. That’s the trade-off. The world gives you an Ava but it also gives you a Nick at the same time. He doesn’t know what the kid has up his sleeve. Coming around drunk like he did, that glint in his eye. What’s the end game in that? It’d be a shame to have to beat the fuck out of him while trying to romance his old lady.

  When his cigarette’s done, he goes back into the kitchen to look for something to eat. Something plain. There’s a half-open container of white rice in the fridge. He takes that out and sits down at the table and eats it with the plastic fork that he left in the rice. It’s hard, gnarly with age, tastes like the refrigerator smells.

  The kitchen’s in the rear of the house. He pushes back the curtain and looks outside. He can see the backs of the houses on the Bay Thirty-Fourth Street side. Fire escapes, rotted siding, shingles dangling from roofs. Movement behind windows. One of the houses is the Divinos. Sometimes, sitting here, he looks out and sees Antonina Divino out on her fire escape, smoking. She’s always changing now. With the different hair color, the boots, all the bullshit. Her window’s kind of hard to see into from here but if he tilts his head in exactly the right way, he can see her getting ready for school in the mornings. When there is school, that is. It’s summer. He wonders what she does with her days. He watches her window now and hopes she emerges. He thinks about her from that night with Mikey Baldini. In her bra. Her arms crossed over her chest. Such a little body.

  When she pops out through that small attic window onto her fire escape with her own cigarette, he’s only half-surprised. She’s wearing a purple T-shirt and purple underwear, holding a Walkman and wearing headphones with orange foam ear cushions. Her hair’s the pinkest pink he’s ever seen. Like something from a costume party. There’s a lot of color up there on that fire escape. She’s all bunched up, sitting on her ass, leaning forward, her left arm wrapped around her legs, hugging them close to her, her right arm propped up on her knee as she brings the cigarette to her lips. He doesn’t feel bad for scaring her that night with Mikey. What she learned, that was a good lesson. He bets she’s been more cautious since. He holds out hope that, in a few years, she’ll thank him for looking out for her.

  The phone rings. Now he’s expecting Suzy again, ready to chew him out, but it’s Pags this time. “It’s lined up,” Pags says.

  “Where and when?” Donnie says to Pags.

  “We’re meeting Tommy and Dice at Flash Auto,” Pags says.

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll be there in an hour.”

  “I guess I’ll get dressed,” Donnie says, and he hangs up.

  He goes upstairs to his room and hunts around in the top dresser drawer for clean boxers. He smells a pair. Good enough.

  On the floor next to the dresser is a tattered brown throw rug. Under that rug is a loose floorboard. He kneels now, pushes away the rug, and removes the slightly warped length of wood. The cash is there in the hole, wrapped in plastic. He takes more than half of his stash, probably in the neighborhood of two grand, and sets it aside to bring with him. He’s thinking it’s a sign that they’re meeting Big Time Tommy at Flash Auto. He’s going to buy the Olds for Ava. To hell with too much too soon. He replaces the length of wood and smooths the rug back over it.

  He puts on
the boxers, finds some other jeans crumpled on the floor of his closet, and gets out a softball T-shirt from when he used to play. It says OLD GLORY in white script on the front of the red shirt. They were good, his team. This wasn’t fatsos drinking beer and goofing off. This was fast-pitch, competitive as hell. A lot of the guys, they played college ball or even made it to the minors. He’s got a few championship jackets in the cellar. Shortstop was his position. He could hit some homers when he needed to. His bat—the one he used on Mikey and still keeps behind the dresser in the empty room downstairs—was much desired by his teammates for its good juju.

  Back in the hallway, the money in his pocket now, he stops outside the door to Gabe’s room. He remembers standing here, hearing music from behind the door, whatever that heavy shit was Gabe liked, and knocking like a stranger. Next would be the clatter of Gabe pressing stop or pause on his boombox, followed by a mopey “Who’s there?” Donnie would say, in a voice he could never duplicate again, “It’s Dad. How you doing, bud?” Gabe’s answer would always be one word: good, fine, or okay. This was Gabe pretty much the last few years of his life, ages eleven to fifteen. Before that, he was a kid and he had his joy, wasn’t sad all the time. Donnie barely remembers that Gabe now.

  Something tells him to go into Gabe’s room. He hasn’t been in a while, hasn’t wanted to, but now the desire’s there. Maybe Ava’s unlocked something in him.

  He opens the door. First thing he notices is it’s cold in the room. A kind of bottled-up cold, like maybe he shut the radiator in here and forgot and this is like walking into winter. Or maybe it’s cold because Gabe’s ghost is around. Donnie believes in ghosts. He saw the ghost of his old man once in his childhood house, just shaving in the bathroom mirror, looking disappointed. Donnie doesn’t feel Gabe now, and he always figured if he haunts anywhere regularly in the house it’s the cellar, which is why he steers clear of down there.

  The mattress is bare. Donna had stripped the sheets off the morning of the day Gabe did what he did, and it stayed that way. A desk in the corner has an alarm clock that’s not plugged in, a few spiral notebooks from school, and a Golden Nugget coffee mug full of pennies, nickels, and dimes. Gabe’s clothes hang in his open closet: Dockers, dress shirts, the suit he wore to Donna’s father’s funeral.

  On the wall over the bed, a wall calendar is tacked crookedly. The tacks holding it in place are red and yellow. The calendar is open to April 1990, the month that Gabe killed himself. None of the days are marked in any way. There are no notes, no reminders.

  The dresser is positioned strangely in the corner—that was Donna’s doing. He slides open the rickety top drawer, and there’s a mound of clean white socks inside. He closes the drawer.

  What Donnie’s struck by now is how ordinary the room is. There aren’t any clues. It’s just Gabe’s room. It was Gabe’s room for fifteen years, and now it’s empty.

  Donnie takes one last look around and then leaves, closing the door behind him. He goes downstairs and puts on his steel-toe construction boots. He’s never done construction, but they’re good for kicking in heads when he needs to.

  NICK BIFULCO

  “It’s nice riding to work with you like this,” Nick says to Ava, who’s wearing a lot of her perfume this morning. “I’ll walk you to Sea Crest.”

  “I hope you don’t get fired from school,” Ava says.

  “I won’t. It’s summer. The kids who are there are all morons anyway. They sit there all day, picking their noses.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I hope the car’s okay, too.”

  “It’ll be fine. Sal and Frankie will work their magic.”

  “Their magic? That’s a laugh.”

  “You smell good.”

  “Shut up.”

  They’re on the B train, sitting in the conductor’s car. Nick’s feeling good, barely hungover, maybe still drunk. The orange seats and the windows are covered in tags. It’s only a couple of stops to Coney Island and then about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk to where Ava works. Nick will drop her off there, doting son that he is, and then he’ll try to go see Captain Fred Dunbar, who lives in a walk-up on Mermaid Avenue with his girlfriend. That wasn’t difficult information to obtain. Dunbar was right there in the White Pages. He feels like the script’s written and optioned already, championed by the great Phil Puzzo himself.

  “I just hope you don’t throw your life away,” Ava says.

  “You’re being dramatic,” Nick says.

  “What about Alice?”

  “What about her?”

  “Have you talked to her since you had your big idea?”

  “I’ll talk to her later. After I do a few things. She’ll be excited.”

  “You two should get married.”

  “We will. With all the Hollywood money.”

  Ava shakes her head. “You’re being ridiculous.”

  They get off at the Stillwell Avenue station, the last stop, coming out on Surf Avenue. They go to a newsstand so Ava can get a pack of Viceroys. Nick hasn’t been to Coney Island in a while, certainly not to visit Ava at work. Last time, he guesses, was two summers ago with Alice. An August day. They went swimming. Alice loves swimming. Nick doesn’t. She looked amazing in her electric blue one-piece. The shitheads all had their eyes on her. Nick got jealous. He drank a lot of beer. He started a fight with some juiced-up guinea who could barely string a sentence together. He wound up with a black eye. He and Alice ate hot dogs at Nathan’s afterward. She said she found it romantic that he was jealous.

  He could use a hot dog from Nathan’s right now. He wonders what time they open. Probably early. He bets nine. It’s a little after eight. Ava’s got to be at work by eight thirty. On the way back, after dropping Ava, after paying a visit to Dunbar, he’ll grab a hot dog. He’ll also call Alice. Thinking about her in that bathing suit eating a hot dog slathered in sauerkraut has his mind wandering to dirty places. He thinks of the phone sex they almost had. He’d like to tell her his big news, pour her some wine, ask her to put on that electric blue bathing suit, kiss her legs and her arms and her shoulders and her neck, kiss her through her bathing suit.

  “I could use a hot dog,” Ava says.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Nick says. “Hot dogs for breakfast is the American dream. When I make it big, we’ll have hot dogs for breakfast every day. Delivered to our door.”

  Ava laughs. She’s loosening up a little.

  They pass Nathan’s and the freak show and go up on the boardwalk, cutting a right in front of Candy’s Room, where Nick drank Schaefer beers with Alice that same summer day. It’s a nice morning. Warm and not achingly hot. The beach is quiet. A few runners out on the sand. A few more on the boardwalk. Old men sitting on benches, taking the sun, talking. It’s too early for the hustlers, for the punk-ass kids who’ll try to grab wallets and hoot at any girl they see, for the carnival barkers, for the crude weirdos, for the boys with boomboxes, for the loud-talking girls with tattoos in skimpy bikinis.

  Ava takes Nick’s arm, and they walk the way parents and their adult children at weddings walk. Slowly, deliberately, as if something might be undone forever if they step wrong. Ava’s wearing black slacks and a silk gold-braided blouse. She’s got on those big dangly hoop earrings she likes to wear, lots of rouge on her cheeks, brick-red lipstick. Nick hasn’t changed his clothes from yesterday. He brushed his teeth and sprayed some deodorant under his arms and on his pants. He looks out at the water now.

  “I forget about this sometimes,” Ava says.

  “What do you mean?” Nick says.

  “I mean Coney Island. The beach. The boardwalk. The Wonder Wheel. The Cyclone. Nathan’s. The Parachute Jump. Everything. The way I dreamed about it as a girl even though it was so close. I go to the home five days a week. It’s all right here, but I just pull into my space in the parking lot and I go into my office and I do my rounds and talk to who I need to talk to and I forget to look out the wi
ndow at all of this. I take smoke breaks in the parking lot next to a dumpster. I should go out on the boardwalk.”

  “Start today,” Nick says.

  Ava lets go of Nick’s arm and takes the new pack of Viceroys out of her purse as they pass the Parachute Jump. She peels away the cellophane, places a cigarette between her lips. She lights it from a book of matches she scored at the newsstand, puffs away Ava-style.

  “I used to have such big dreams about Coney Island as a girl,” she says. “So close and yet so far. Ten minutes by the subway. Bus is pretty quick, too. Five minutes by car. We hardly ever came as a family. Not to go to the beach, definitely not for the rides, not even for the Fourth of July most years.”

  “You and Daddy never took me growing up either.”

  “That’s different. It was really starting to be a mess when you were a kid. It changed. It wasn’t the same place it was when I was a girl. We came when we were newlyweds. We rode on the Wonder Wheel. Everything changes. Now I work here every day, and I just forget it’s the place I dreamed so much about. That’s sad, isn’t it?”

  “Pep up. I’ll take you on the Cyclone any day you want to go.”

  Another smile from Ava. A guy on roller skates zooms by. He’s wearing pink shorts and headphones and is heavily oiled up. They pass the Childs Building, the last of the beautiful old ’20s structures still standing. Stucco, terra-cotta, nautical-themed medallions, marble columns. Graffiti all over the doors and walls. Nick homes in on thick green spray-painted letters that read SAVAGE-N-PEACHES.

  Ava stops out front and drags deep on her cigarette. “You should’ve seen this place back then.”

  “I’ve read about it some,” Nick says.

  “There was a roof garden. I remember being up there and seeing a steamboat docked at the Steeplechase pier. So many people out on the beach. Once I saw this guy, missing both of his arms, and he was dancing right out front here. I’ll never forget that guy, I don’t know why.”

  “No arms will do it.”