The Boy Who Granted Dreams

  But after that first day she went back to look at the ocean every morning for a week, as if to remind herself that it existed. She sat on a bench in Battery Park, watching the ferryboats come in, always crowded with passengers. She thought that someday she, too, would be brave enough to leave the house and be sure of finding her way back. She sat on the bench, rocking Christmas on her lap, gripping the Coney Island ticket that she’d bought with her whore’s wages. She watched the seagulls wheeling in the sky and wondered if they flew to the tops of skyscrapers. She wondered what they saw and what they must think of the human zoo that teemed far below them.

  The following week she was in the car with Sal, on the way to Twenty-Fifth Street, between Sixth and Seventh, where the brothel was.

  “Did you ever go to Coney Island?”

  “Yeah.” That was all he said, as usual.

  For a little while Cetta kept looking straight ahead. She was always surprised at how the city landscape seemed to mutate, as if they’d crossed over an invisible frontier. The stifling hopeless downtown streets, the shops with faded and drooping awnings, the dusty display windows, the mud underfoot, all suddenly vanished. Everything became brighter, more luminous. The men strolling past wore gray suits and white shirts with starched collars; silk cravats, hats that weren’t shapeless; they smoked long fragrant cigars and held newspapers folded over twice to reveal the sporting columns. Horse carts yielded to automobiles; the glass shop windows lost all their dust; their awnings were brightly colored or striped, with elegant lettering. Cetta couldn’t say at what point the city decided to change. She only knew that at a certain moment she was drawn to something shining, off to her right, as they were going north. Instinctively she turned to look and saw the sign: “Fisher & Sons — Bronze Powders.” The light was reflecting off the samples of metal objects being refinished. A gleam of gold. And when Cetta looked ahead, through Sal’s windshield, the city had changed.

  “Is it fun?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Coney Island,” and her hand went instinctively to her purse — the first purse she’s ever owned, black patent leather — in which she kept the ferryboat ticket.

  “Depends what you like,” rumbled Sal’s deep hasty voice.

  Silence fell again.

  Cetta gazed up at the El tracks. The clattering train covered the sound of the engine and the boys shouting out front page headlines. The vibration shook loose something in Cetta, like a glass balanced on the very edge of a table that gets shifted just enough to make it fall to the floor.

  “Sal, you boring like a dead man!” she exclaimed, still looking straight ahead, gripping the unyielding handle of her patent purse.

  The car screeched to a stop in the middle of the street. Cetta fell against the dashboard. Behind them another car honked furiously. The driver shouted something at them as he passed them.

  Sal turned towards Cetta, thrusting a large black finger at her. “Don’t never compare me to no dead man,” he growled threateningly. “I don’t need no bad luck.” He started the car again.

  Cetta felt tears burning her eyes, she didn’t know why. She forced them back. When they pulled up in front of the brothel, she climbed out quickly, without saying goodbye to Sal, without even hearing the music coming from Twenty Eighth Street between Sixth and Broadway, where at least ten pianists were pounding out the latest songs.

  “Hey, you,” said Sal, leaning out the open passenger door.

  Cetta stopped, one foot on the first step, and looked back at him.

  “Come here,” said Sal.

  Cetta turned back, unwillingly, her lips pressed tightly together. Ma’am — as all the resident whores called the woman who managed the bordello — had told her never to disobey Sal, ever, not for any reason.

  “You sixteen, right?” Sal asked her.

  “I’m twenty-one but I look younger,” she recited mechanically, thinking he was testing her response to some future police raid.

  “Hey, kiddo, ain’t nobody here but you and me,” said Sal.

  “Yes, I’m sixteen now,” Cetta said proudly.

  He nodded slowly, looking at her. “I’m comin’ tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. You be ready,” he said at last. “An’ leave the snotnose with Tonia an’ Vito,” he added, slamming the car door.

  Cetta turned away and climbed the steps to the door, entering the building.

  Sal watched her, thinking: She’s a little kid. Then he put the car in gear and headed for Moe’s, the diner where he spent most of his day, in the company of other tough guys like himself, lounging in the back room, talking about what was going on in the city, who was dead and who was still breathing; who was on the way up and who was headed down; who was still a friend and who had become an enemy since yesterday.

  Cetta came into the bordello dressed in her everyday clothes, the plain drab things she always wore. She went straight to the costume room, undressed and put on the bustier that lifted her breasts and showed her dark nipples; then the garter belt, the green silk stockings she loved, and then her favorite dress, the dark blue one with little gilt spangles scattered across the silk-like random stars in the night sky. Like the dress the Madonna wore in the procession back home. She was strapping her feet into high-heeled shoes that made her look taller, when she felt a tingling in her left leg. Instinctively she hunched over, lowering the shoulder her mother had bound, not even four years ago. It seemed like a lifetime.

  Cetta hit her leg with her fist.

  “Why you do that, eh?” asked the fat woman in charge of the wardrobe.

  Cetta didn’t answer her, didn’t look at her. The “dressmaker,” as everyone called her, was someone to be avoided. Not one girl ever confided a single thing to her, she was too bitter and venomous. Best to stay out of her way. Cetta stood still until the tingling passed. Then, as she left the dressing room, she smiled at her own image reflected in the mirror. What they said was true: America was a magic place. Her leg was almost completely healed. No one ever noticed that she limped. With her first wages Cetta had gone to a shoemaker — not on the Lower East Side, but in a neighborhood where nobody knew her — and had him add half an inch to the heel of her left shoe. That was all. And her leg was straight again.

  When she came into the parlor — the big room full of armchairs and divans where the girls waited for a client to choose them — Cetta was, as usual, in a good mood. She greeted the other girls and sank back in a chair, showing off her legs in their sheer green stockings.

  Two girls, Frieda the Kraut, a big tall blonde, and Sadie the Countess — who was supposed to belong to a noble European family from who knew where — were guffawing together. “So? How’d it go with Sal?” asked Frieda. The Countess closed her eyes and sighed. They laughed together. They saw Cetta watching them.

  “Ah, you do not know what you’re missing,” the Countess purred.

  ”He has not tasted you yet?” asked Frieda, sounding amazed. Next she put a hand on her breast and opened her mouth, for Cetta’s benefit.

  “With Sal you never miss … what’s missin’,” another girl, Jennie Bla-Bla, contributed. That was her nickname because she always talked too much.

  “Bla-Bla, I swear to God you’d manage to say the wrong thing even if you had a nigger’s prick in your mouth,” opined Ma’am, toying with an auburn lock that had escaped from its pins. “That’s your weakness, girl. Someday that’s going to land you in trouble.”

  All the girls laughed.

  “All I meant was …” Jennie floundered, trying to justify herself. “Oh, well, fuck it, you-all know what I mean!”

  “Fock it!” echoed the Countess.

  And the girls laughed even harder.

  “Just pay some mind to what you say,” Ma’am said reprovingly.

  Jennie sulked for a moment; then she too burst into laughter.

  Cetta didn’t understand why they were laughing. She tried to smile but she knew she was blushing. She hoped no one noticed. The girls were always talking ab
out Sal, in mysterious phrases. Or that’s how it seemed to Cetta. She had tried to study him, to understand why they were all so crazy about such a rough ugly man, with those hands forever stained black with grease. And every time she asked the girls to tell her why, they answered her in some vague way. “Once he tastes you, you’ll understand,” they told her. Nothing more. But her curiosity didn’t go beyond that. Sex didn’t interest her. She was a whore; that was her job, which was something else.

  The only thing Cetta really regretted was not getting to sleep in the big room the other girls shared. Those moments created an intimacy among them that Cetta didn’t share. In those moments, dropping off to sleep and awakening, none of them was a whore. They were just girls. And they became girlfriends. Cetta didn’t have any girlfriends. Her only friends were Tonia and Vito Fraina. But she had Christmas, she consoled herself whenever she felt sad. When any of the other girls got pregnant a doctor with no name came and scraped the baby out of her belly with a knife.

  Cetta didn’t think about men. Taking them into her body didn’t bother her. It was just something that happened.

  “She’s just a child,” Ma’am said, pointing Cetta out to certain clients. Their faces would light up, they’d bring candies into the room and offer them to her as if she were their little granddaughter, making her lie across their knees while they pulled up her skirt and spanked her. They told her she’d been bad and she mustn’t do it again. They made her promise. Then they’d pull out their member and put it into her mouth, already sweet and sticky with caramel.

  “She’s a big whore,” Ma’am said to some of her other clients. And these men didn’t say a single word to her, they shoved her into the room, not bothering to undress her. They had her lie on her stomach, naked buttocks showing. Cetta could hear them working on themselves until they were ready. Some of them used the lubricant that was always there on the bedside table, courtesy of the house; but most of them would stand over her, spit between her buttocks, spread the spit with a finger, and then penetrate her.

  “She’s such a sensitive girl,” Ma’am would tell yet others. These were the ones who wept after they’d made love to her because they had constrained her to the humiliation of being a prostitute, because their base instincts had soiled her. Or they would lie on her breast and talk about their wives, who had been like her, once upon a time, so young and submissive. Or they wanted to do it the dark, and they called her names that meant nothing to Cetta, names that long ago must have meant a great deal to these men.

  “She’s your slave,” Ma’am murmured to others, before adding, “but don’t ruin my merchandise, hear?” And these men would tie her to the bed; draw a knife between her breasts and in between her thighs. Pinch her nipples with clothespins, snarl out orders, and make her lick their shoes.

  “I’m afraid she’ll have to punish you,” Ma’am told others, smiling. And then Cetta tied them to the bed, scraped a knifepoint across their chests, and along the base of their testicles, pinched their nipples with clothespins, barked orders at them, made them lick her shoes, and then she put a high heel down their throats.

  Ma’am knew what each of her clients desired. And Cetta would become whatever Ma’am wanted her to be. That was what a whore did. But she never thought about it before she arrived at the brothel. And she forgot about it as soon as Sal came to take her home. Because Cetta possessed her own interior world that kept her far away from everything. Not sheltered, but far away.

  She never questioned why things happened. She hadn’t asked her mother when she’d crippled her. She hadn’t asked the man with the wooden leg why he raped her, nor the ship’s captain who had made her pay for the voyage by letting him fuck her. Nothing and no one had been able to break her. Cetta simply wasn’t theirs. She belonged to no one.

  The next morning, at eleven o’clock, Sal pulled his car up to the sidewalk, forcing a street vendor to move his wretched merchandise out of the way in a great hurry. Cetta, who had been waiting on the stairs, smiled at the vendor as she came past him, resting a hand on his shoulder. She got into the car. Sal backed up and crushed the cardboard suitcase full of shoelaces that the man had been offering for sale.

  “Why you do that?” Cetta asked, turning back to look at the poor man with his ruined wares.

  “Because you looked at him,” Sal replied.

  “You jealous?”

  “Don’t talk shit.”

  “Then why?”

  “You looked at him.”

  “I not understand …”

  “Listen. If you smile at him after I make him move it’s like you was tellin’ him he was right. Sayin’ it in front of me. And so it’s like you was tellin’ me I was wrong, in front of him. And him or some other piece of shit might get it into their heads to could say it to my face. So I had to make him understand who’s in charge here.”

  Cetta stayed silent for a few moments and then she began to laugh. “Sal, I never hear you say so many words before!”

  Sal kept on driving. But they weren’t going towards the brothel.

  “Where we go?” asked Cetta.

  “Coney Island,” Sal answered. He parked by the sea wall, pulled two tickets out of his pocket, identical to the one Cetta had been keeping in her patent leather purse. He got out of the car. “Get movin’,” he said rudely. “That ferry ain’t gonna wait.” Then he took her arm and hurried her to the landing stage. He shoved past the people standing in line, elbowed a path through the crowd, gave an evil look at a sailor who had risked scolding him, and thrust Cetta into the maw of the iron whale.

  When the siren howled that the ferry was leaving, Cetta gave a start. As if she were awakening from a dream. And she had to bite her lips so that she wouldn’t weep tears of joy. Just like the ones that had come into her eyes the first time she tried on her whore outfit.

  But by the time the ferry left the shore she was already back inside the dream, inside unreality. She wasn’t thinking about anything, she was almost not seeing anything. She was holding tightly to the rail at the prow, staring at the water that was being split in two, foaming. She kept holding on tightly because she was afraid she might turn into a gull and fly away, and she wanted to stay where she was, with her feet pressed against the vibrating iron. Against the first gift she had ever received. She couldn’t even manage to think about Sal, she didn’t even feel grateful. She stood there with the wind ruffling her heavy dark hair, and tried to smile. Just for an instant, all at once, she turned back to make sure Manhattan hadn't disappeared. And she looked forward again, seeing the coast of Brooklyn on her left, with the open sea ahead of her. And suddenly she laughed. And she hoped that nobody heard her, because she wanted that joy to be hers alone. Out of a kind of avarice, out of fear she might waste it.

  And finally it was there: Coney Island.

  “Throw,” Sal told her, handling her three cloth balls to fling against a pyramid of cans. “In,” he told her, pushing her towards one of the cars in the House of Horrors. “Some kind of crap for kissin’ in the dark,” he told her, hurrying her away from the Tunnel of Love. “Eat,” he said, thrusting an enormous shrub of cotton candy to her. “Have fun?” he asked her after an hour.

  Cetta felt drunk. The crossing on the ferry, standing at the prow, gripping the guardrail instead of closed up in the hold; the beach she saw when they were almost there; the crowds strung along the shore, around places where bands were playing; brightly colored electric trams; the music coming out of dancehalls at the water’s edge; shops that sold striped bathing suits; the entrance to the amusement park. She was holding a plush bear that Sal had won sharpshooting. Her pockets were full of caramels, taffy, licorice whips, all-day suckers, and sticks of hard candy.

  “Hey, did you have fun?” Sal asked again.

  Cetta looked at him, dazed, then shifted her gaze, and pointed to the rollercoaster without speaking.

  Sal stood unmoving for an instant, then he took her arm, went to the ticket booth, paid for a ride, and handed h
er the ticket. World’s Highest Ride was printed across it. People were screaming from the cars.

  “By myself, I’m too scared,” said Cetta.

  Sal looked up at the rollercoaster. He gave a furious kick to a lamppost, turned around and went back to the booth, shoved an amorous couple aside and bought another ticket. Then he sat beside Cetta in the little car.

  Cetta smiled while they were going up. But when they reached the edge of the first precipice, she was sorry she’d wanted to try the rollercoaster. Her eyes were wide, she could hardly breathe, she clutched Sal’s arm and screamed with all the breath in her body. Sal didn’t move. He didn’t react. He only put one hand on his hat, to keep it from flying away.

  When the ride was over Sal said, “Hey, stupid, you made me go deaf.”

  Cetta thought he looked very pale.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he grunted, and after that he didn’t say a single word to her.

  Even when he saw her shivering on the return voyage, he didn’t say anything to her and he didn’t put his jacket around her, either. Then, after they came back to the car, Sal drove across Manhattan, over the East River to Brooklyn, and took her down a street lined with straggling trees, in Bensonhurst. The houses were smaller, two or three stories high. Everything looked different from the Lower East Side. It seemed like a village. Sal had Cetta get out of the car, and, still holding her arm, took her into one of these houses. They went up to the second floor. Sal pulled a bunch of keys out of his pocket and opened a door.

  “My place,” he said.

  He pushed her onto a brown sofa, took off his jacket and the holster with his gun. He rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Take off ya panties,” he said.