Aloft (33 page)

And that's exactly what I do, though giving his machine a last few screaming redline revs in neutral before shutting it down right at the front entrance. But after I shove the keys through the slot (cut into the brick façade rather than the door), and turn around to leave, the front door opens and who's there but Richie, in a dingy off-white bathrobe, Saturday afternoon unshaven, his half-height reading specs perched on the end of his narrow nose. Really, he looks sort of terrible, not in the least Waspy and upmarket, suddenly bent over and darkish like any other of us newly aging New York Guidos, and for the first time since he was a kid I feel as though someone (if not Jerry Battle) ought to cut him a break.

"What's the big idea?" he says, holding out the keys to me. "I don't welch on my bets."

"Relax, Richie," I say, standing on his pea-stone driveway. "I just don't want it anymore."

"That car was the bet. You can't have a different one."

"I don't want a different one. I'm not trying to trade it in here. I'm giving it back to you."

"Why don't you sell it, then? Sell it and pocket the cash. It won't bother me. Who's that in your car?"

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"My daughter."

"Your daughter?" Richie waves, and Theresa waves back.

"She's a beautiful woman."

"She's pregnant, and engaged."

"Well good for her. Congratulations, Jerry."

"Look, I'm giving back the car. I'm not going to sell it."

"Well, I can't take it back," he answers, suddenly sounding not in the least like he's from the old neighborhood.

"Why the hell not?"

"My colleagues all witnessed the match. They verified the terms. I entertain them and others in the firm here regularly. If they saw the car around I couldn't possibly explain to them why you'd ever give it back."

"You can hide it in the garage."

"I'm not hiding anything."

"Tell them I'm a nice guy."

"Nobody's a nice guy."

"Tell them I was trying to trade it back to you for Rita."

This stops Richie for a second, as he absently jiggles the keys.

"That they might believe. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Rita's not mine to trade."

"I know that."

"No, you don't," Richie says. "We broke up last week. She was here earlier this morning, to pick up the last of her things."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not."

"I don't believe you."

"Well, what the fuck do you think this is?" He reaches into his robe pocket and shows the diamond ring, the one with the stone as big as a hazelnut.

"What happened?"

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"I don't know. After you came by that day it all went to shit.

But I'm not blaming you, Maybe she got sick of me. Maybe she didn't like my friends. Maybe she still loves you."

Something Jerry Battle can always hear. And I can't help but ask, "Did she say that?"

Richie's smarting, which I've never quite seen from him, and before I can mercifully retract the question he says, "Not exactly. I'll say one thing. It's amazing what certain guys can get away with. I don't see why she'd even speak to you, with how you strung her along and wasted her youth. But maybe the long-term dodge is the most effective kind."

"She never said one word about wanting to get married."

"Well, even I know that doesn't mean a damn thing," he says, shaking his head. "You have no idea how lucky you are, do you, Jerry? You've always had steady attention from the girls, and I'll be honest and say you're also not a terrible guy, and so it's no surprise you got plenty of ass. With me, I always knew I'd have to make a shitload of dough to get a pretty woman to share my bed."

"Hey, Rich . , ."

"That's okay, I know what I look like. It got me focused early.

I've taken nothing for granted, women or money or anything else. I'm not bragging here, I'm just saying how these things don't come easily to guys like me, and maybe people assume I wouldn't want to be anyone else but a partner at a top law firm with a big house in Muttontown and five Ferraris."

"Six, now."

"Okay, six. I'm not saying I want to trade places, but I'm not early-retired like you, I'll still be working seventy hours a week five years from now I'll croak in the saddle, looking right over Park Avenue. And I'll grant you there's always some hot ambi-A L O F T

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tious broad wanting to have a wealthy guy for a boyfriend but it's no guarantee of having the love of a beautiful, good woman like Rita."

"Which I don't have either," I remind him, "plus no big bank account."

"You got Rita still thinking about you, you big dumb fuck.

That counts for a lot right there. Don't try to say anything or pretend you're insulted. You're going over there now, I already can see it in your eyes. So when you see her tell her I'm not about to keep this with me. I don't need something around to pull out and depress me."

Richie takes my hand and slaps the engagement ring into it.

I try to give it back to him, because I can already see Rita's face when she sees me with it, here's Jerry up to something low-down and dirty, some sly scheme whereby she'll be finessed into opening up a half inch too much and he'll instantly squinch himself in and inhabit the gap, but Richie steps back inside and closes the door on me, and when I tell him to open up he says, with heartache and defeat, "You already bought the ring with the car, Jerry. Now go away. She's all yours."

ALL YOURS, Jerome, all yours. I keep thinking this as Theresa drives away, to do some last-minute ingredient errands for Paul, leaving me on the sidewalk in front of the deep, narrow row house Rita rents the back half of so she can have her summer vegetable garden. This is a risky strategy, I know, to have yourself left seven miles from home at the doorstep of your ex-girlfriend's without a way to get back under your own power, but at the last second before begging Theresa to stand at the door with me I decide to play this one as straight as I can, for reasons not
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altogether clear. Perhaps I'm realizing that I've been too willing to share my life's loads with loved ones, never having the stomach to endure anything alone, how after Daisy died even given the tough circumstance I leaned way too hard on my mother and her sisters for help with the kids, and on Pop, too (at least as far as my livelihood went), and then soon thereafter on Rita, especially Rita, who never said a word and soldiered on raising Jack and Theresa through the hairy messes of adolescence, despite their lukewarm attitudes and provisionally stanced love and amazing chronic underappreciation of her cooking (at least until they returned home, respectively, after a couple months of college dining). But none of this was as bad as my daily, hourly, by-the-minute want of her total participation in all things me, her Jerry Husbandry; finding expression in even the most in-significant details I somehow got her to take care of, literally right down to the level spoon of sugar she'd stir into my morning coffee, the pat of butter she'd leave melting on my toast.

Certainly I'd do any heavy lifting she asked for, but after our first couple years there really wasn't much of it, as the lawn care and hedging and the gutters and the snowblowing were contracted out, and though I could afford a housekeeper Rita ended up looking after the kitchen and bathrooms and the laundry and pressing, the only thing I did for her diligently being the food shopping, enjoying the early Saturday morning stroll down the aisles, ticking off items on the list she'd written out on the back of an old utility bill, rapt in the specter of that week's glorious meals.

One morning late in our relationship and maybe the thing that finally did us in, I returned from the supermarket to find her still in bed with her night shades on and aired some vague jackass comment about maybe getting something
done
today.

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She popped up like a viper and laid into me like she'd been itching to do daily for a decade at least, saying how the only time ever did something for her or anyone else without grousing or complaining or with a sour puss on was when there was a distinct possibility of some benefit to me, how in that way I was maybe—no, definitely—the most trivially needy, self-centered person she had ever met, that if she were verily on her deathbed and it was the lunch hour I probably couldn't help but ask her how she prepared her special egg salad with the diced black olives and sweet pickles and then bring the mixing bowl into the bedroom for a full-on demonstration.

That kind of smarted, to be sure, and as I went into a tortured and convoluted defense about trickle-down beneficiaries of a person's self-interest (I'm no Reaganite, being rabid about nothing, but still the theory has a natural attraction for me, given that the trickling aspect is just my sort of "work"), she stepped out of bed and came up from behind, tapping my shoulder, and whacked me square in the face with her pillow as I turned to make a point. It didn't hurt so much, of course, being more a shock than anything else, but this suddenly blood-thirsty look in her usually nurturing huge brown eyes did stun me into silence, and I'm not so sure she wouldn't have wielded whatever she grabbed first that morning, be it a pillow or a bat.

And even though there's probably no better time to go kissing up to her than now, when she's just cut loose from Richie and knocking about the house alone and maybe against all good judgment thinking fuzzily about us, this present near future of me standing here on the rickety back stoop of Rita's shotgun house holds a potentially dangerous outcome, and not because I think she might haul off and bonk me again. The reason is that she might just be tempted enough to let me have another taste,
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the circumstance of which, if it can't sustain, will certainly leave me in a desolated state. Theresa in her own stubborn manner has allowed me to remain in the rare air of some seriously aromatic denial (for which My Declining Self has been grateful, every day and every minute), but there's another part of me that doesn't care anymore if I can't help but see the loose grit and grub of this life, and risk something more intense than irritation or annoyance. It's the question of participation, again, though this time I'm slotted to practice it in a form wholly singular, unbolstered, which you'd think would be the highest manifest pride of a full-blooded American guy like me but has long been my greatest dread, save final extinguishment itself.

I can barely press hard enough to ring the bell.

Nothing happens, and I'm going to ring again, but in the next moment I find myself mincing down the steps to flee before any flak bursts erupt, already thinking of how I'm going to be walking all night to get back home, when I hear Rita say in her loamy autumnal voice, "I'm here, Jerry, I'm here."

She is wearing a loose white cotton dress, with a pretty lace pattern at the neck, sort of South-of-the-Border style, the sight of this and her dark-hued beauty reminding me of those raven-haired senoritas in the westerns, not the lusty barmaid or wiz-ened hooker but the starry-eyed young village woman who endlessly carries jugs of water and wears a big silver cross and though captivated by the stoic gringo gunslinger come to save the town remains loyal in the end to her long-suffering peasant husband. But I'm no hero, and neither she nor her people ever needed any help, and if I had a hat I'd be holding it out for whatever lowly alms might be given, a ladle of water, a crust of bread, a slip of time beneath the shade tree out back, to gather myself before at last moving on.

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"I don't mean to

bother you," I say, suddenly feeling ashamed of myself. "I don't know what I'm doing. I'll leave you alone."

"How did you get here? I don't see your car."

"Theresa dropped me off."

"But she's gone," she says, her voice riding a hard edge.

"I know. It's my fault. It was stupid and I'm going."

"I'll call Theresa at the house."

"She's gone on errands. She won't be home for a couple hours, at least."

"I can call you a taxi, then. I can do that for you."

"You don't have to."

"What, Jerry, are you really going to walk home along the Expressway? You'll get hit. You're not going to put that one on me. I'll call a cab now. You can wait right there if you want."

"Okay, then."

She, steps inside for what seems a long time, and enough for me to look around and notice that her garden is overgrown, the ground-hugging tomatoes spidery and wild for not having been regularly pinched back, the string beans and squashes too big for good eating, the basil and parsley long bolted and flowery, what almost everyone else's plot looks like late in the season but never Rita's, who kept her patch in the far western corner of my property looking like one of those serene, ultrarnanicured Japanese gardens, a miniaturized Eden of gently tended plants with their ripened issue gorgeously shining and pendant. Every summer but this one I waded daily through those rows, eating the vegetables right there, my roving live salad, Rita hardly able to make a full dish for my culling, though never in the least minding. She enjoyed the plain hard work of it (like with everything else she does), which is why the present sight disturbs me so, as
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if having to deal with guys like me and Riehie has steadily depleted her hardihood and forced her to run too long on low bat-tery; in fact as I look around it's all a bit forlorn, the small paint-flaked stoop unswept of dead bugs and leaves, the flower-pots empty save for hardened, white-speckled dirt, and I can't help but peer through the screen door to the counter of the tiny kitchen, weedy with mugs and plates, and mourn for her a little, knowing that this should be the golden period of Rita's life, being fifty and still beautiful, when she ought to be tasting the not-so-proverbial fruit of her good character and labors with a man she loves and who loves her back and is wise and generous enough not to waste another moment of her precious time.