City of Margins

by William Boyle

  “What are you doing in Coney Island?” Ava says, finally asking the question he imagines has been on her mind all morning. “You take off, you’ve got this big script idea—why are you here? You said research. What research?”

  Nick doesn’t want to get into it with Ava again. He knows it’s not the best idea to bring up Captain Dunbar.

  But she intuits it. Ava’s so goddamn sharp. “You’re going to see the cop that Don punched, right?” she says. She drops her cigarette, and it falls into a slat between the boards under their feet. “I was looking at the Daily News you left out. I know how your mind works.”

  “Yep, I’m going there.”

  “You’re just stirring up trouble. Phil Puzzo, what he does, he loves those mobsters he writes about. It’s a very different thing. And he writes books. You don’t even know what you’re doing. What do you know from a movie script?”

  “It’s easy. It’s all formatting. The dialogue’s what’s important.”

  “And you’re just going to use Don as a model?”

  “Exactly. He should be flattered, really. He’s my Jake LaMotta, you know?”

  “You’re nuts.”

  They start walking again, not far from Sea Crest now. Ava clams up. Nick’s not sure what else to say either. She turns to him, kisses him on the cheek, and then heads down the ramp from the boardwalk to West Twenty-Fourth. He watches until she turns into the parking lot and then keeps on walking.

  Dunbar lives on Mermaid Avenue between West Thirty-Fifth and West Thirty-Sixth. It’s strange to think that he’s so close to Ava’s work.

  Nick stays on the boardwalk for a few more blocks and then heads down his own ramp, walking first up West Twenty-Eighth and then turning onto Surf. A man comes out of the corner store, pumping at a scratch-off with a nickel, cursing under his breath. Nick continues along Surf and then makes a right at West Thirty-Fifth. He’s never been this far toward the western end of Coney Island. There’s no reason not to be where everything is. This is all low-income housing, senior centers, bodegas, little two-family places with concrete front yards.

  As he turns onto Mermaid, keeping his eyes open for Dunbar’s address, he’s thinking how stupid he is. In his excitement, he wasn’t even thinking about Dunbar probably not being home. Oh well. He’s come this far.

  The place where Dunbar lives is a boxy house with gray siding. A silver Mercury Grand Marquis is parked in the front yard behind a chain link fence, eating up the whole space. There’s some scattered debris from Fourth of July fireworks on the ground next to the car.

  Nick opens the gate and climbs the steps to the upstairs apartment. He rings the bell.

  From behind the door, a man’s voice: “Who is it?”

  “Sir, my name is Nick Bifulco. I just wanted to talk to you for a sec.”

  The door opens. Dunbar is standing there in his undershirt and basketball shorts, barefoot, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. He’s maybe in his late forties, hard-looking, fit, his eyes heavy and tired. “You know what time I got off work last night?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You got some balls knocking on my door this early, whoever you are.”

  “I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “What’re you selling? Just get it out of the way. You a Mormon or whatever? You gonna hit me with that let’s talk scripture shit?”

  “I just wanted to ask you about Donnie Parascandolo.”

  “Jesus Christ. What is this?”

  “I’m a screenwriter—”

  Dunbar’s raucous laugh cuts Nick off, his coffee sloshing up over the edges of his cup.

  Nick withers a little.

  “I’m sorry,” Dunbar says. “Go ahead.”

  Nick, looking down at his shoes now, says, “Donnie’s from my neighborhood. I’m writing a script where I’m kind of using him for the main guy.”

  A woman comes up behind Dunbar. She’s probably a little younger. She’s wearing an oversize Miami Dolphins jersey and nothing else that Nick can see. She’s got dreadlocks.

  “Who’s this?” she asks. Her accent’s Jamaican.

  Dunbar, more awake now, laughs again. “He says he writes movies. He’s writing a movie about Donnie Parascandolo.”

  “That’s the guy who punched you?” she asks.

  “Damn straight. He’s a good subject, I guess.”

  “You want to know why I think he’s a good subject?” Nick says.

  “Not particularly,” Dunbar says, dabbing at some coffee that’s spilled on his shorts. “There was a pattern of behavior there,” he continues. “It wasn’t just him getting drunk and punching me. A lot led up to that. We gave him a shot to get help. He wanted no part of it. That’s why he got the boot.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What do you want to ask me?”

  Nick draws a blank. What does he want to ask? He should’ve prepared something. He guesses he should ask for details, what Dunbar can remember about what happened, about anything that led up to it. “What do you remember?” he says.

  “He had some grudge against me, I don’t know why. He cold-cocked me at the bar. That’s it. He’d been off the rails, like I said. Listen, I get it. I wouldn’t ever say he was a stand-up guy based on what I knew of him, but when his kid killed himself, that was the end. We’ve all got ghosts. Typical self-destructive bullshit. But I get it. What I’m laughing at isn’t him. I’m laughing at you. You come to my house, you say you write movies. Look at yourself. You want to know what Donnie looked like the night he clocked me? Not so different from how you look now.”

  Dunbar closes the door in Nick’s face.

  Nick stands there for a minute. He can hear the woman talking behind the door. When he finally leaves, he doesn’t feel so much dissuaded as energized. Dunbar’s a character too, a tough motherfucker.

  DONNA ROTANTE

  Donna is taller than Mikey by a couple of inches. Standing this close to him, she’s noticed for the first time that she’s looking down on him.

  “I’m not short,” he says, as if reading her mind. “You’re just tall.”

  She’s about to speak but hesitates and then finds what she wants to say: “Mikey, this is nuts. You feel a bit of a connection with an older woman, you figure what the hell. Maybe you think I’m desperate. I’m not desperate.”

  “I don’t think you’re desperate.”

  “Maybe you think I’m cheap?”

  Mikey swallows hard. “I think you’re pretty and kind, that’s it. You want me to go?”

  “Let me flip this,” she says, going over to the turntable and flipping the Neil Young record on the platter, dropping the needle gently onto “Human Highway.” It was nice of Mikey to bring her this record, a gesture she appreciates.

  “I’ll go,” he says.

  “It’s okay. You can stay longer.”

  He goes back to the couch. She sits on the floor cross-legged, her usual listening position, picking up the little Casio keyboard that was Gabe’s and fiddling with the keys. Its batteries are dead. She doesn’t look up at Mikey.

  “I like this song,” Mikey says.

  “Me too,” she says.

  “Do you want to come to my house for my birthday dinner later? It’s not really dinner. We’ll probably eat at two. Like a Sunday.”

  She laughs a little. “What?”

  “It’s stupid. Forget I said it.”

  “It’s not stupid. It’s just, what would your mother think?”

  “Who cares?”

  “She’d think I was your date. She’d think I was some Pamela Smart type. I’m twice your age.”

  “There’s something between us, I can feel it.” He gets down on the floor and moves next to her. There’s space between them—he doesn’t make a move to touch her.

  “You’re impulsive, that’s it.”

  “Tell me you don’t feel anything.”

  “You’re a stranger.”

  Mikey scooches closer. “It okay if I ki
ss you?” he asks.

  She reaches out and touches his sagging earlobes, the slightly visible tattoo under his beard. Twenty-one. She knows how college is. He’s so handsome. He’s probably slept with a hundred girls.

  In some way, she feels inadequate. She stayed home for college. She didn’t live in dorms, didn’t go to parties. She only slept with one guy before Donnie, and Donnie sure as shit didn’t know about it. The guy’s name was Gianluca Giove. She doesn’t remember much about him. It wasn’t a good experience. It happened in the back of Gianluca’s parents’ Pontiac Catalina station wagon, parked right there in their garage. Gianluca kissed like a bulldog. His hands were rough. His breath smelled of cheese. She was seventeen, and the Beatles were on the radio in the car. It was 1971. She felt terrible on her walk home. Sad, empty. She went to her room and cried for six hours straight. She feared pregnancy. She feared her parents finding out. She feared everyone calling her a worthless puttana. Gianluca moved on to Marie Antonaci. She met Donnie the next year. After that, it was Donnie and only Donnie.

  Since they split—and for a while before they split—there’s been nothing. She hasn’t particularly thought of her body as being capable of pleasure, especially not since Gabe’s death. She got her tubes tied when Gabe was eleven, thinking one kid was enough and divorce wasn’t in the cards. She didn’t want some drunken accident with Donnie. She also didn’t know that she’d lose her one and only child.

  Yesterday, with Mikey, was the first stirring of something. She wonders again how many girls there have been, how many girls have sat so close to him and fingered his strange earlobes like this. Look at me, I’m jealous, she thinks.

  Mikey touches his earlobes now. “I kind of like them like this, all stretched out. My mother hates it. She thinks I ruined myself.”

  “What’s it called?” Donna asks. “That kind of piercing?”

  “Gauge piercing. I had these big-ass gauges in there. I had some friends who were crust punks—they got me into it.”

  “Crust punks?”

  “They live in squats, most of them. Hop freight trains. Lots of homemade tats, like this one”—pointing to his chin—“and they dress crustie. All black, studded jackets, boots. They’re usually in bands. They’ve got dogs, a lot of them. My friend Joanna had a dog named Whiskey. Their main thing is kind of saying fuck you to everything.”

  “They sound scary.”

  “Most of the ones I knew, they were okay. I wasn’t one of them, though. I tried to be, I guess, but I was a fraud. They were devoted and disciplined in their way. I don’t think most of them worried about anything. They didn’t get depressed. They just did what they did, lived how they lived. They got sick of somewhere or chased out, they were on to the next place.”

  “So, they traveled around a lot?”

  “Yep. They’d show up, usually when it wasn’t freezing, and be around for a few months, and then—unless they had a particularly good squat, like they did this one time in Rosendale—they’d be gone. College towns and cities, that’s what they like. College towns because there’s always college kids they could take advantage of, hit up for money, whatever. You’re eighteen, nineteen, you think that life is romantic, you get sucked up in it and become, really, a tourist.”

  “I went to Brooklyn College,” Donna says. “I stayed home with my folks. I worked at a jewelry store in Kings Plaza on the weekends. I was a very boring college kid.”

  “No riding the rails?” Mikey says, smiling.

  She laughs and then, out of some nurturing impulse, says, “Are you hungry? I can run to the bagel place and get egg-and-cheese sandwiches.”

  “I’m good,” Mikey says. “But you never answered me.”

  “Answered you about what?”

  “About this kiss.”

  “How many girlfriends you have?” Donna asks.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  He leans in, and they kiss. It’s a strange feeling at first, her lips on his, his beard bristling against her skin. She tries to remember the last time she was kissed. Donnie, drunk, probably a few months before Gabe died. But that wasn’t a kiss where she felt anything. It was mechanical, soulless. That’s how kissing Donnie had been for years. She didn’t feel kissed and didn’t feel like she was kissing, not like it had been in the early days of their marriage, when a kiss from him could light her up. This is that kind of kiss.

  She’s making out with Mikey on the floor in the living room, “Four Strong Winds” playing in the background. She feels like a kid. Or maybe like the kid that she never was, never really had a chance to be. She should’ve made out with more boys on the floor while listening to records before getting married.

  They kiss until the record ends. Donna wants to fill the silence with music. She pulls away and goes over to the turntable, taking the Neil Young record off the platter and putting it away. “I’m going to put something else on,” she says.

  “Okay,” Mikey says.

  “You like Bruce?” Donna asks, leaning over and thumbing through the vinyl in one of her crates. She holds up Springsteen’s Nebraska.

  “I’ve never really listened to him, to tell you the truth,” Mikey says. “I mean, I’ve heard ‘Born in the U.S.A.’”

  “You’ve never listened to Bruce?”

  “You don’t like me anymore, huh?”

  “I’m just excited I get to play him for you. This is my favorite song ever.” She takes Nebraska out of its sleeve and puts it on the platter, dropping the needle into the second groove, placing it perfectly, “Atlantic City” coming on straightaway.

  She stands there over the turntable, alternating between watching the record spin and watching Mikey’s face for a reaction. She remembers the first time she heard “Atlantic City,” driving in a car on the way to Atlantic City for the weekend with Donnie. It was the fall of 1982. Gabe was about seven. They had a babysitter lined up in Atlantic City, a daughter of a friend of Donnie’s from the force. It seemed unbelievable that you could hear a song like “Atlantic City” while driving to Atlantic City. Donnie mostly liked it, but he was never a big Bruce guy. It was always weird to her that he loved Bon Jovi so much but was sour on Bruce.

  She and Donnie stayed at the Golden Nugget and fought a lot while they gambled that weekend in Atlantic City. The babysitter wound up being a stoner who fell asleep while Gabe watched TV. The song didn’t leave Donna’s mind. As soon as she got back home, she went to Zig Zag Records and bought Nebraska. She loved the whole album, but “Atlantic City” was one she’d just keep setting the needle back on.

  She’s thinking now—not to get too deep about it—that a line like “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back” is very different to a woman who’s thirty-nine and has lost her only child. But being twenty-one and having lost his father gives Mikey his own perspective. She doesn’t want to force that conversation. Maybe she doesn’t even want to have it. This song used to mean one thing to her. After Gabe died, it meant another. It changes shape, it gets better and more resonant—that’s what the best songs do.

  “That’s a great song,” Mikey says when it’s over.

  “You liked it?”

  “A lot. I’m a Bruce fan now.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  The record continues to play, the quiet devastation of “Mansion on the Hill.” Donna sits back on the floor. She wants to kiss Mikey again. She does. He puts his hand on her arm. She’s self-conscious about how she’s dressed suddenly—in her sweats and slipper-socks and a light sweater she got off the sale rack at Century 21. She’s wearing a bra, thank God. Her hair is pinned up. She hasn’t taken a shower yet this morning. She thinks of her body’s imperfections, all the ways she’s aged, what it would be like to take her shirt off in front of Mikey. The girls he’s been with, they still have their young bodies. She’s got this body that’s getting so old so fast.

  Mikey’s hand is under her sweater suddenly, touching her side.
His fingers are warm against her skin. His touch doesn’t feel invasive the way Donnie’s did for so long. She opens her eyes while locked in a kiss. She studies his eyelashes, the place where his eyebrows come together caterpillar-like. She closes her eyes again and touches the sleeve of his corduroy jacket, which smells of mothballs. She likes the feel of the corduroy with her eyes closed. He’s not overanxious, he’s not moving too fast, and she appreciates that. He seems content with kissing.

  Upstairs, they hear footsteps. Suzette Bonsignore is moving around, probably trudging to the bathroom. Her steps are heavy.

  Mikey puts his hand farther up Donna’s shirt now, touching her back. He moves away and kisses her chin, her jawline, her neck, her ear. He spends a while kissing her ear. His fingers play over the ridges of her spine. She takes a few deep breaths. Yesterday, she wouldn’t have thought of something like this as possible. She’s always been one of those people who thinks they couldn’t do this or they couldn’t do that, but how do you really know if something’s possible or not until it actually happens? Here’s Mikey now. This is happening. It’s real. It wasn’t expected. That’s silly—what expectations has she even had this last however long?

  Mikey backs off and looks at her. “Are you okay?” he asks.

  She gives him a tender nod. “I’m perfect,” she says.

  DONNIE PARASCANDOLO

  Donnie walks over to Flash Auto early and scouts out the Olds Cutlass Ciera, parked at the far end of the yard, away from the garage. It’s in good shape. He’ll tell Sal and Frankie to give it to Ava when she picks up her Nova. She’ll go home with two cars. Her shithead son can drive one. She’ll feel like a champ, a gambler who’s won big. She’ll probably show up at Donnie’s house and strip out of that suit of hers and screw his lights out like only an overworked widow can.

  He goes inside to the office. Frankie’s wife, Michelle, is at the desk. She’s got a calculator in front of her, the phone receiver pressed to her ear, and is writing on a yellow legal pad, saying, “Uh-huh, right, yeah.” She’s working on a parts estimate. She holds up her hand to signal to Donnie that she’ll be with him in a sec.