Underworld

  But the eyes also looked away and that was the same and the twisty smile, the little turn at the end of the mouth. Some things the same. The tits the same, the ass and tits and bush, and the slub of folded tongue when he kissed her.

  Looks that he couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to mean.

  And the other smile, where she smiled privately at the two of them together, or whatever she was smiling at, smiling to herself like it was three days later, after the fact, and she was walking down an aisle at the A&P thinking what they’d done, but it wasn’t three days after the fact, it was still the fact, and she had his balls in her hand, squeezing slightly.

  A naked woman was amazing.

  He’d never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked across the room, all these ways and walking toward him too and different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn’t bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she’d been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn’t have curves and swerves but was good-looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth.

  He took her stocking off the floor and fitted it over his head. She smiled and looked away and seemed to want to say something and then changed her mind. He jammed it down so he was looking out at her more or less through the heel of the stocking. He pantomimed pulling a gun out of a shoulder holster and pointed it at her.

  “Everything you own. Mine or die.”

  “It’s hard to be serious about this, considering what you look like.”

  “Hey. Lady. This is what they do.”

  “Holdups, you mean?”

  “That’s right. But I have to say. They must need money pretty bad to wear this on their face.”

  “Well, it’s used. They don’t wear used stockings, do they?”

  “I don’t think these guys are finicky. They wear whatever’s lying around.”

  “I have to admit you’re a changed man.”

  “You think you’d recognize me if you came in the house and I was standing here in this mask?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t recognize you without the mask either.”

  He pulled off the mask and sat on the mattress. She went to get some water and he watched her walk out of the room, the way her ass barely jounced, and he held the stocking around his dick and then tossed it away.

  The warm fusty sort of slightly tired smell, the nylon cling of the odor still in his face, sad, tired, day-old, hers, and close to him, and something he knew about her that made her less strange.

  But she was still strange. She was something you didn’t want to tell your friends about and that was strange. And she was something you didn’t have to tell yourself was really happening. It just happened. It happened bang and that was it, with Whistler’s fucking Mother hanging on the wall.

  He watched her come into the room.

  He said, “You know, my brother when he was a little kid, he was somewhere watching a girl taking a pee, a small girl that was a neighbor’s kid probably, and she dropped her drawers and wiggled up onto the seat and had herself a pee, and my brother’s watching this and then he goes out to a room full of grown-ups, as I later heard the story, and he waits for them to stop talking and then they finally stop talking and they look at him and he says, Mary Feeley has no birdy.”

  She handed him the glass. It was one of the longest speeches he’d ever made, Nick, not counting jokes he sometimes told. Then she reached for his bunched pants on the floor and felt in the pockets for a pack of cigarettes.

  They sat on the mattress, knees touching, smoking and sharing the water.

  “You know why I smoke Old Golds? I wouldn’t tell this to just anybody.”

  “Bullshit. Why?” she said.

  “That’s the cigarette that used to sponsor the Dodgers on the radio. Old Gold. We’re tobacco men, not medicine men. The Dodgers were my team. Were. Not anymore.”

  “This is a big privileged secret you’re telling me.”

  “That’s right. Now you have to tell me one of your secrets. Could be big, could be small.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nick.”

  “Nick, you can’t come here anymore. It’s too completely crazy. No more, okay? We did it and now we have to stop doing it.”

  “We can do it somewhere else,” he said.

  “Nowhere else. No. I don’t think so.”

  Never mind the body. He’s never looked at a woman’s face so closely. How he thinks he knows who she is from her face, what she eats and how she sleeps, from the lookaway smile and the uncombed hair, the hair over the right eye, how her face becomes everything she is that he can’t put into words.

  “Nick Shay,” he said with a little stab in it, a touch of vengeful intent, because she knew about the chess lessons of course, and would recognize Matty’s last name, and would know Nick was the older brother, and would feel the close-knit danger of the thing.

  But she didn’t seem to give a damn. The way he didn’t give a damn that she was someone he knew’s wife, she didn’t care that he was someone’s brother.

  “Then I might as well,” he said.

  “Yes, I think it’s time.”

  He picked up the pants and got dressed and left her naked on the mattress, seated sort of leaning to one side, legs together and bent, blowing smoke away from her face with the hand that held the cigarette, and he didn’t even think of looking back.

  7

  * * *

  Rosemary sat in the law office over the bakery, filing documents in an old cabinet, and her boss came in, Mr. Imperato, returned from a rare morning at the criminal courts. He was a shambling man who told jokes expertly, who rose to the occasion of a joke. He was bald, flat-footed and carelessly dressed and he was forgetful in his work, sometimes, but when there was a joke to tell he heard the music of the spheres. He never botched a punch line or missed a pause. He did voices and accents, men, women, talking birds, unfalteringly, a quickness rising to his eyes.

  “Smell the bread,” he said.

  “That’s the trouble with being over a bakery. I keep buying bread. My boys can’t keep up.”

  “What’d you buy?”

  “It’s for dinner.”

  “Show me. Is it round or long?”

  “Last time, remember what you did to my bread. It’s dinner bread. Get away.”

  Four or five years ago Mr. Imperato hired a private investigator on her behalf to try to locate Jimmy. The biggest secret of her life, a thing no one knew but the lawyer and the investigator. When nothing came of the effort Mr. Imperato paid the man himself and told her she could do some clerical work to settle her fee. She’d been working here ever since and he never deducted the fee from her salary because he needed someone, he said, to listen to his jokes.

  “I’m buying us a bigger fan.”

  “I think we need it,” she said.

  “I got one for home. The kids sit in front of it sometimes. The TV is on the blink. I tell Anna. They’re watching the fan.”

  “I don’t want TV in my house.”

  “You have to have it,” he said.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “The kids want it.”

  “Matty wants it. He goes upstairs to a neighbor and watches wrestling.”

  “I never miss the wrestling if I can help it. You have to have it. The kids have to have it. It’s the one thing you have to have.”

  When she went home with her bread she climbed past her floor, going up the worn steps, seeing laundry hang outside the smutty stairway windows, because there was a thing
she wanted to talk about with Mrs. Graziani, up on the top floor.

  Carmela put out a coffee ring and made coffee and they sat in the kitchen.

  “How you climb these steps every day.”

  “Three, four times,” Carmela said. “I know every step by name. I have names for the steps.”

  “And Mickey’s feeling better since the operation.”

  “If you could call it feeling better. He’s the same as he always was. I don’t know if that’s better. Because these men, all they want to do is sit in a room playing cards for seventeen hours they can play. Cards till they drop.”

  “But he had a real scare. If he can play cards, more power to him. You nearly lost him.”

  “I don’t think I could lose him if I went to China,” the woman said.

  Rosemary usually felt better after a visit with Carmela. The woman had a running argument with men, not just the husband and the sad son, Cosmo, but men everywhere, and even if Rosemary agreed with her only two percent of the time she still felt cleaner somehow, purged like confession, having a cup of coffee with Carmela.

  “I wanted to ask. Did you hear about the woman at 607? The grandmother?”

  “There’s nothing to hear,” Carmela said.

  And she made a gesture, the hand that sweeps under the chin, a sign that meant this is not a story we’re obliged to take seriously. The nothing sign. A very dismissive gesture as Rosemary understood these things.

  “So you don’t think.”

  “If I thought there was anything to it, I’d be the first to go over there and wait for him to appear and get down on my hands and knees to thank God for this miracle.”

  The woman at 607, saying her rosary in the basement room of the narrow shingled house occupied by two families and two grandparents, looked up from her beads and saw a saint standing in the doorway, Saint Anthony, and Rosemary needed guidance in this matter, a sense of how much acceptance she should be willing to risk.

  Carmela put four spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee.

  “You know what I say, Rose? Domani mattin’. In other words, sure, tomorrow morning, here he comes again, this time with an angel blowing a trumpet.”

  This reaction was a letdown. For all her endless skepticism, Carmela was a frequent figure at early morning mass and Rosemary wanted her to take the story more seriously, or to concede the grandmother’s credentials at least, long periods of prayer with a number of other old women, all in graveclothes, reciting the mysteries.

  Carmela told her for the dozenth time to get out and see people.

  “You’re still young, Rose.”

  “I’m not so young.”

  “Don’t argue with me. You need to spend less time at home and more time making friends. You give your whole life to those two boys. This Nicky, I hate to say it.”

  “Then don’t say it.”

  “I hate to say it, Rose.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “This boy has got I-don’t-know-what written all over him. You know exactly what I mean.”

  “He works hard. He hands over his money without a complaint.”

  “The other one. I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know, Carmela.”

  “I don’t know, Rose. The other one. But it’s Nicky I’m watching. I watch this boy.”

  “That’s funny because you know what? I don’t watch him. He gets up at the crack of dawn. He goes to work. He gives me his money. He gives me his pay envelope. Plus I don’t hear a word of complaint.”

  “The mother’s always the last to know.”

  “He grew up fast, Nicky. He’s a man now. He’s more responsible than someone ten years older. He grew up like lightning, this boy.”

  “I’m sorry, Rose. But him I would watch.”

  Carmela’s son had spent a year in the basket-weaving class and another year in remedial reading and a third year falling down a flight of stairs and recovering in bed, three meals a day in bed, and he lived with his grandparents now, upstate.

  And she tells me she’s worried about mine.

  No, it was not the average satisfying visit with the woman on the top floor and in the days that followed, warm days and cool evenings, the water truck spraying the streets and dirt and grit running in the gutters—there were many days when Rosemary walked past the narrow house, 607, and thought about the old woman, Bettina, saying the rosary in the basement room with her friends, the five joyful mysteries, Mondays and Thursdays, the five sorrowful mysteries, Tuesdays and Fridays, the five glorious mysteries, and so on, but then again they probably didn’t follow a set routine, no, they wouldn’t, these women, because there were women like that who wore monks’ robes on the feast of Saint Anthony, women and children both, brown robes and bare feet, the statue bobbing above them, and it was amazing and strange and impressive, Rosemary thought, and women like that would say their prayers without regard for schedules.

  She was too shy to knock on the door but she liked to think of the women sitting around the table, big beads the Our Father, little beads the Hail Mary.

  She didn’t have time, herself, to do this every day. She had her own form of beadwork. She had the frame and the material pinned to the edges of the frame and the needle with the wood handle that she used to string the beads onto the material, iridescent beads to decorate a dress, and she never really wondered who would wear it.

  She was too shy to talk to the grandmother, who spoke no English anyway. Thirty-five years in this country and not three words of English. But this was a mark of her faith in a way, an indication of what truly mattered. What mattered were the mysteries, not the language in which you said them.

  The fresh-air inspectors stood on the corner nearly every day, three or four or five men, and Rosemary walked past the narrow house and thought about the thing that supposedly happened there.

  Sometimes faith needs a sign. There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

  “Maybe, like, for an eighth of a second, she thought I smacked my lips. Or I clicked my tongue at her.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then she understood I had food in my teeth and I was wedging it out. The way you wedge it out with the tongue. But she looked at me and she saw who it was and she decided she rather be insulted.”

  “I can understand this.”

  “You can understand this.”

  “I can understand this because even if you didn’t insult her, you could have.”

  “I didn’t. But I could have. This is what you’re saying.”

  “I known you twenty years. And you could have.”

  “Just so I understand. I didn’t. But I could have.”

  “That’s right. Because you, I could believe it.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “But you could have.”

  “Regardless I was wedging food.”

  “Regardless Jesus walked on water. Because you could have.”

  “So this is where you’re taking us.”

  “Where am I taking us?”

  “To where I have to say something. And you know what I have to say? And I say it to you and your sister. The both of youse.”

  “Be careful.”

  “You’re gonna hear this very good. To you but mostly to your sister.”

  “Be careful, Anthony.”

  “I’ll fuck you in your heart, you fucker.”

  “Anthony. But what a mistake you’re making.”

  “You and your sister. I’ll fuck you in your heart.”

  “Who I know twenty years.”

  “And your mother for good measure.”

  “Who he thinks I’m gonna listen to this from a hard-on like him.”

  “And your mother,” he said.

  A kid went by with a baseball glove hooked to his belt, eating a melorol.

  The longshoreman stood across the street with that massive mustachioed head of his, a whal-yo off the boat about a year ago, works th
e Jersey docks, strong as a Mack truck.

  Two guys pushed a car that had no one in it.

  Nick stood in front of the grocery eating a hero sandwich and holding a beer that Donato’s wife had sold him, concealed in a paper bag.

  The fresh-air inspectors.

  Sammy Bones who ran on the field during a game at the Polo Grounds so he could be seen on TV, except nobody he knew was watching and he’s been arrabbiato ever since, like mad-dog angry.

  A girl in her confirmation outfit, a white dress and stockings and white shoes, and wearing red ribbons in her hair, and carrying white flowers in crinkly red cellophane.

  JuJu came by and took the sandwich out of Nick’s hand and looked inside.

  The old man on the stoop across the street who spreads his handkerchief dainty on the top step and then sits and fills his pipe with cigarette tobacco and the shreddings of a crumbled DeNobili cigar, the perennial guinea stinker, and whatever else he can find that doesn’t belong in a pipe.

  “You’re serious about these weights.”

  “I’m doing bench presses where my mother grabs the bar when I yell. Supine presses,” JuJu said in a slightly snobbish tone.

  “How many bites you’re gonna take out of my sandwich?”

  “I’m doing a whole program. You should come over.”

  “Hey. I work, remember. I got 7-Up I lift all day long.”

  “That’s not a program,” JuJu said.

  “I rather die than lift weights.”

  “See, now that’s an attitude where you’re only showing your ignorance of the subject.”

  “I rather die the death of a thousand cuts.”

  “Show your ignorance.”

  “I rather be ignorant. Look over there. The one in the yellow blouse. That’s a 36D.”

  “What, you measured?”

  “What kind of measured? I have a trained eye.”

  “You can tell a D cup from a C cup from this distance.”

  “I rather eat sheep stomach than lift weights,” Nick told him.

  The super’s wife looking peacefully out the window at 610, called Sister Katy. So when she got screaming raging drunk, about once a month, the kids chanted up to her, Sing it Sister Katy.