Broken for You (26 page)

"Jesus, but I love capri pants," Michael said.

"Poodle skirts are nice too," added Jerry.

"Yeah, but you can't see their lovely asses nearly so well."

"God, Michael, you're such a pig."

Michael lit a cigarette. "You're thinking the same thing, don't tell me you're not. You're up."

They were two frames away from the end of the game. Jerry bowled a split.

"You're still hookin' the ball, man. Stay straight." Michael scanned the room. Things were winding down. "Damn. I was hopin' for a bit of fun this weekend."

"You've got studying," Jerry said. "We both do."

"Idiot."

"Fine. I for one don't want to lose my scholarship and get sent back to bloody Eire."

"You're like an old woman sometimes, Jerry."

Three lanes away, Michael noticed a little girl, practicing. "It's a bit late for that one. I wonder where her parents are," he said, half to himself.

"Who?"

"That little girl down there. Lane sixteen. She's not half bad."

Jerry sat down and marked his score. "Look out, Mike, you're eyesight's goin'. That's no little girl."

"What are you talkin' about?"

"Are you blind, man? It's a woman. Your turn."

Michael walked to the throw line, hoisted his ball, and then casually glanced over his shoulder at the girl's profile. Jerry was right. When he studied her face—the angular set of her jaw, her riveted stillness—he saw that she could be anything from eighteen to thirty. But God, she was a wisp of a thing.

"Come on, man," Jerry prodded. "Move it. Let's finish this frame at least before they give us the boot."

The woman turned and caught Michael staring at her. Her face was pale, waifish, her hair short and black. Her eyes, undershadowed with faint bluish half-circles, were enormous; against her skin they were dark as roasted coffee beans. "What are you looking at?" she called defensively.

"Uh-oh," said Jerry.

"I'm not lookin' at anything, darlin'," Michael volleyed. "I'm just getting ready to send these pins to kingdom come. Maybe you'd like to come down here and have a look."

"I don't think so." She turned her back and picked up her ball. Michael bowled a spare. She bowled two strikes.

Michael stared. "On the other hand, maybe I'd better go down there instead. Jerry?"

"I'm headin' home."

"You want a ride?"

"Nah. I'll take the El. You might be needin' the backseat of your car tonight after all."

"Not so sure about that," Michael said, still staring.

"Good luck, man. I'll see you when I see you."

Michael moved his gear to lane sixteen. She paid no attention; she was back at the throw line, so still and focused that the atmosphere around her seemed ionized. He sat down in the scorekeeper's chair. He lit another cigarette.

She was wearing blue jeans and a white sleeveless blouse. From a distance, she had merely seemed skinny and small-boned—fragile—but up close you could see an undulating landscape of muscle just beneathher skin. A fierce, tensile strength. She had a tiny ass. She had a chest like a boy. She threw the ball like she was God's avenging angel. She bowled four more consecutive strikes.

When she was done, she walked over to him. She was breathing hard. She licked the sweat from her upper lip. She pulled a flask from a brown paper bag and took a swig. She offered it to him.

"No thanks."

"What's your name?"

"Michael. O'Casey."

"My name's Gina."

"You've got a lead pipe for an arm, Gina."

"I paint," she said, as if that explained everything.

"Do you paint as well as you bowl?"

She took a drag off his cigarette. "What do you do?"

"I'm a student at Northwestern."

"Not one of those fraternity boys, are you?"

"God, no."

"What do you study?"

"I'm writing a thesis on Yeats."

"That's a very good answer, Michael O'Casey."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"Buy me a beer. Recite something for me."

He could have chosen another—he knew dozens by heart—but the words that ignited his breath and passed across his lips were these:

"'When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

Thus began the courtship of Michael O'Casey and Gina Lorenzini. It was a courtship conceived in a bowling alley, against a sound track of collisions; probably that in itself should have told Michael O'Casey something. So, too, should the way Gina could drink anything—beer, wine, bourbon, whiskey—without ever seeming to get drunk. And then there was her moodiness, which in Michael's love-blindness he labeled as mysterious. Mercurial. Italian. He should have seen the signs.

But it was no use: From the moment he met his future wife, Michael O'Casey was lost.

They said good-bye in the bar and Gina disappeared into the night.

Next Friday, there she was again. And so it went on, week after week. Michael would come in with Jerry; they would find Gina already there, by herself, bowling.

"Are you sure she's worth it, boyo?" Jerry had asked. "This one is taking 'playing hard to get' to new heights."

"That's not it," Michael said. "She's not like that."

After the bowling alley closed, they would go to a bar. Sometimes Jerry joined them. He and Jerry would talk about school, she'd tell stories about the restaurant where she waitressed. They'd mostly just shoot the shit and have a good laugh. She didn't talk about herself.

One night when Jerry left early to go to the library, she said, "Take me home, Michael."

They did not have sex that night, in Michael's room. Strangely, he didn't feel like it. They didn't even make out. They drank beer, Michael read poetry, and Gina fell asleep in his arms. Eventually, he fell asleep too.

When he woke up, she was gone. She left behind a drawing of him, sleeping, under which she had scrawled, "Dear sweet Michael O'Casey, You are one of the good souls and i think you deserve a good girl but i do love the way you read poetry and hold me safe in Innisfree. Thank you and Mr. Yeats for dropping slow peace and an evening full of linnet's wings, i can almost hear them singing. You look like an angel when you are sleeping, g."

The next week, she wasn't at the bowling alley. Michael couldn't bowl a strike for the life of him. Jerry stopped hooking his throw and bowled a 190.

When they left, just after midnight, there she was: standing in the parking lot, bareheaded, bare-legged, wearing a sleeveless blouse and skirt, shivering. She gestured to him, pulled him close, and whispered urgently, with what sounded to Michael like passion, "Come home with me, Michael. Please. Be home with me. We can walk. It's not far from here."

Michael tossed his car keys to Jerry. "You sure, Mike?" "Yeah, Jerry. Live it up."

They didn't speak. She walked with a grim urgency, hugging herself, not letting him touch her. After a few blocks, they arrived in front of anItalian restaurant. She stopped. "That's where I earn my bread and butter," she said. Then she pointed to the upper floor. "And that's where we're going to fuck." She laughed then and started pulling him up the stairs.

Inside her apartment, it smelled like oregano and turpentine. They'd barely made it across the threshold before she unzipped his trousers, pulled him onto the floor, hiked up her skirt, and took him inside her. Viscous wet dense heat baptized his cock and—
Christ, Jesus, holy Christ
—they both came at once.

They lay in the dark, blood pulsing in sync. Beneath them in the restaurant kitchen, pots clanged, dishes were scraped, somebody sang a song in Italian.

"Usually it's us boyos who like a quick bang like that," he said, once his heart recovered its own rhythm. "I hope to God you're wearin' protection."

"It's my time," she answered. "I'm bleeding."

Ah,
he thought sadly,
Catholic girls.

"Does that bother you, Michael?" Her eyes,
Jesus,
were unmined coal.

"I don't mind at all. But next time, give a man a chance to put on a raincoat, willya? We won't tell the Pope." He turned to kiss her. She rolled away and got up.

"I'll get some wine."

She went into the kitchen. He lit a cigarette, turned on a lamp, and inhaled sharply: An inquisition of faces glowered at him.

It was Gina, over and over, frozen in oil and varnish, staring from canvases that were propped against the walls and ringed the apartment on all sides. Self-portraits they were, done in a kind of Italian Renaissance style, and masterful, too, no question. The backgrounds were outdoor scenes painted in pastel blues, pinks, greens—the luminous colors of a Tuscan landscape in spring—and dotted with winged innocents: plump cherubs, butterflies, birds. But the light that gave a honeyed glow to the angels did not lend warmth, color, or succulence to her skin, which was taut and blanched and strangely without the varnished sheen that covered the rest of the painting. He imagined her scouring her painted skin with a scrub brush to achieve this effect.

She'd costumed herself in one of two ways—either as a member of the church or as some kind of sinner. But this was the only element that varied. Priests, prostitutes, acolytes, KKK wizards, and saints—all wore the same bloodless complexion, the same sourness of expression, a mask that was both damned and damning. Her dark figure was advanced to the forefront of the paintings—she was life-sized—and took up most of the canvas. But compelling as she was (she'd gotten the bottomless quality of her eyes right, that was sure) his attention was drawn to the airy landscape in the distance, toward the vineyards and rolling hills.

Was she bewitched? Was she daring him to reach into the window of the painting and take her forcibly by the shoulders? Because that was what he wanted to do: force her to stop staring at whatever it was that gave her the look of someone whose heart was being charbroiled on a spit for all eternity. She'd designed a special form of punishment by painting herself this way, dooming herself to stare out toward a hell beyond the canvas when heaven was so close, just a romp down the hill behind her. All she had to do was turn around.

Had she painted all these while sitting in front of a mirror? Yeats's "The Two Trees" came to mind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass the demons, with their subtle guile, lift up before us when they pass. Or only gaze a little while.

He stood before a painting of her dressed as a nun, the funereal folds of cloth so realistic he could almost smell the sour sweat and suffocating steam of a magdalen laundry.

"You're a believer, I see," he said, an idiotic understatement if there ever was one, but he'd been quiet for who knew how long and she had to know he was looking at all this.

Her voice came from the kitchen. "Aren't you?"

He laughed—not at her, but because he bloody well needed to. "No."

She was walking toward him then, holding out a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in another. "Maybe I'll have to convert you."

He uncorked the bottle and filled their glasses. "You'll need to spend a long time tryin', darlin'." There was a red stain on the front of her skirt, a sign overhanging the shrine where his hands and mouth and cock most wanted to go. He was hard again already.
Wine comes in at the mouth,
he thought,
and love comes in at the eye.

She stared at him, downed her drink, and then walked to her easel. She pulled away a cloth, revealing the canvas underneath. It was a half-finished portrait of him, wearing wings.

"I'm flattered," he said.

She poured more wine. "Will you model for me sometime, Michael?"

He put down his glass and started taking off her clothes. "Only if you'll model for me."

He didn't offer his thoughts about her paintings. They were brilliant, sure, and if she'd asked to hear his opinion he would have obliged her— though perhaps not in an entirely honest way.

Thankfully, though, she didn't crave his artistic opinion. All she wanted was simultaneous sexual satisfaction, as frequently and in as many ways as possible. He could give her that, by God, and something more. He'd make her laugh. He'd bathe her in light the color of whiskey. He would see to it by Christ that she'd gaze no more into that bitter glass.

After a few weeks, he took Gina to meet Maureen and her family. At that time the Schultz brood was entirely male and numbered only three.