Brotherly Love (23 page)

"In a minute," he says. "I’ll be
there in a minute."

Michael and the two men
who work for him are already headed inside, knowing that Peter likes
a little time alone after he jumps.

* * *

P
eter goes with Michael to
Jimmy Measles’s club four or five times a week. He and Michael, and
usually Bobby the Jap and Monk to watch the door.

Jimmy Measles buys everything; he will not accept
Michael’s money. Jimmy likes the customers to see him sitting at a
table with Michael, making him laugh.

Peter is there with them, of course, but he doesn’t
laugh; he doesn’t see the point. And he has noticed that Jimmy
Measles’s wife doesn’t see the point either.

She sits apart from Jimmy and his friends, under the
stained-glass window which divides the bar from the restaurant,
drinking margaritas. The diamond on her finger catches the light from
across the room. Her name is Grace.

Grace does not come to the bar to please her husband,
but, as these things go, it pleases him that she is here. It makes
him happy that Michael notices her and then looks at him, admiring
what he has.

Peter watches Jimmy showing off his wife and his
friends. Showing off his wife to his friends.

He aches sometimes, at the
size of Jimmy Measles’s misunderstanding.

* * *

T
he place itself is newly
remodeled. New furniture, new floors, new lights. A pink neon
sculpture in the window that bears a resemblance to Jimmy Measles’s
face.

He keeps a fresh carnation floating in a bowl of
water on every table in the restaurant. He has hired a $1,200-a-week
European chef named Otto and now has a menu no one in South Philly
can read.

The European chef has cut the food end of the
business in half, and where the restaurant once broke even, serving
eggs and hamburgers and chicken, it is now losing twenty-five hundred
a month, and the missing customers account for perhaps another two
thousand a month of the bar end of the business too.

And while that has been going on, the bartenders have
discovered what Jimmy is paying Otto, and are stealing more than they
are entitled to stealing like they worked for the city.

Jimmy Measles does not understand it at all. He
watches his business stall in the water and begin to sink, but he
holds on to his chef. Slow nights, he brings him out of the kitchen
into the bar and introduces him around to prove he can’t speak
English.

And Grace sits in her seat under the stained window,
sipping her margaritas, leaving lip prints on the glasses.

She knows he is in trouble, but it seems to her that
he has always been in trouble, one kind or another. In some ways she
is attracted to that, or perhaps it is the way he accepts it.

Jimmy never worries out loud. He isn’t a
complainer—not a word, even about his asthma.

But the problems have a circular feel now, as if she
and Jimmy have been through them all before.

It has been too long since
he surprised her.

* * *

J
immy Measles’s wife
studies the men sitting with her husband at the table, and finds
herself drawn to Michael. He is not the best-looking—but Jimmy has
enough good looks to last her forever—and it is not because he is
the boss. She doesn’t care about that, either.

He has no conscience. She sees that and wants it.

She gets up and approaches the table, carrying her
drink. Jimmy reaches for her without stopping his story, his hand
sliding around her waist and then resting on the rise of her bottom.

Peter stands up, offering her his chair. An act of
will—straightening his back.

He walks carefully to the bar, protecting his back,
wondering if he could take her away from Jimmy. He is not happy to be
thinking that, but it comes up when he is around her. It is something
she puts in the air.

He understands that Jimmy Measles has a way with
women, that he is handsome and knows how to touch them.

He understands certain women naturally love
bartenders—before Jimmy hired Otto and remodeled, he worked his own
bar six, sometimes seven nights a week, and made a living—and that
certain women naturally love men who remind them of their fathers, or
love men who are funny, or who buy them stuffed animals.

He knows the reasons don’t make any sense.

But this time some law of natural selection has been
broken
and she doesn’t try to hide it.

She sits in the chair she took when Peter stood up,
laughing at one of Jimmy’s stories from the
Bandstand
days, but she isn’t paying attention to the story.

Her lingers touch Jimmy’s knuckles, and then she
glances across the table at Michael, and something touches there too.
She smiles at her husband’s story, but she isn’t anybody to care
about other peoples’ stories, or stories about other people.

And she isn’t anybody to
love bartenders.

* * *

P
eter and Michael are
sitting in the car while Bobby the Jap, gun in hand, checks the doors
to the house. It is early in the morning, coming in from a night at
Jimmy’s.

Peter has boxed that afternoon and is sore and tired,
and after Michael is inside, he will go back to his apartment and lie
in the tub.

Michael closes his eyes and drops his head into the
seat cushion behind him. "Somethin’ like that," he says,
"she falls off the toilet into her own vomit, she’s still too
good for Jimmy Measles. Am I right or not?"

His eyes open and his head turns in such a way that
the streetlight catches his forehead and throws a shadow across half
his face, and in that moment Peter can see that he has decided to
fuck her.

Peter doesn’t answer. He thinks of the way she
lifts a margarita to her mouth using both hands, as if it were
something she wanted to smell.

"You think it’s possible?" Michael says.

Peter shrugs.

It is quiet a moment, then Bobby pushes through some
shrubs at the edge of the driveway, coming around from the back.

"What I think," Michael says, "you get
with somethin’ like that once in a while, you wouldn’t have to
jump off no roof to fuck up your back."

He leans closer to his cousin, nodding the way he has
always nodded when he asks Peter for something he does not want to
give up. Intruding into every corner.

"What do you think?"
he says "It ain’t like Jimmy’s somebody we know .... "

* * *

I
n the end, without saying
a word, Peter agrees to Michael’s fucking Jimmy Measles’s wife.
More precisely, he begins to take Jimmy with him to the fights every
Wednesday night at the Blue Horizon while Michael stays at the club
with Grace.

Which is the same thing. Peter does not lie to
himself about that.

Jimmy is always anxious to go—too anxious to go—but
the Blue Horizon is hot and close, and full of black people and
smoke, and in that combination Jimmy Measles sweats and worries, and
cannot seem to catch his breath.

Week after week, Peter finds himself preoccupied with
Jimmy’s breathing, and distracted from the lights.

Why do I care if he can breathe?
he
thinks.

But he knows. Jimmy Measles has attached himself to
Peter—when they are drinking he sometimes shows him pictures of his
dogs—and in that attachment is a contract, and obligations that
Peter is just beginning to glimpse.

Sometimes, he thinks, it’s
like having a dog of his own.

* * *

R
eluctantly, Peter quits
the Blue Horizon and takes Jimmy Measles to the lights in Atlantic
City instead. It ruins the atmosphere for Peter, but improves Jimmy’s
breathing.

And feeling more comfortable, Jimmy settles into a
ringside table and begins, with his first drink, to negotiate a blow
job. Some nights, he asks half a dozen times before he finds a
prostitute who will go upstairs with him and take his money.

To Jimmy, everybody in Atlantic City looks like a
hooker. Jimmy’s interest in the fights themselves never grows
beyond the violence of the knockdowns, but he likes being with Peter
and he likes Atlantic City, and if the idea ever tugs at him, what
his wife and Michael are doing back in town, it never shows.

It tugs at Peter Flood, though.

In its way, what Michael said is true: Jimmy Measles
isn’t anybody they know. But Michael meant only that Jimmy was a
Jew. Peter takes him out of town and gets him drunk, spends so much
time with him now it’s like a bad job, and all through the night,
everything Jimmy does or says is to cover up something else.

And Peter allows that and encourages it.

It’s what makes it possible to take him out of town
while Michael is with his wife.

He doesn’t know Jimmy
Measles, and he holds the door against the day that is no longer
true.

* * *

T
wo months pass and
Michael and Jimmy’s wife become habitual, more than once a week
now.

Peter leaves his cousin at the club with her, Monk
and Bobby sitting in the bar, and takes Jimmy Measles to Atlantic
City every time one of the casinos offers a card. He believes he has
seen every four-round fighter on the East Coast.

And she takes Michael across the street.

Monk and Bobby move their drinks to a table near the
window to watch the house. At closing time, they get a sandwich and
wait in the limo.

In the morning, Peter comes out of his apartment,
showered and clean, climbs into the waiting limo and smells Jimmy’s
wife all over Michael, and cheese steaks and onions all over the car.
And suddenly confronted with what he has done, Peter sometimes tries
to talk Michael into quitting Jimmy’s wife, saying that keeping
regular hours with her is a careless way to do business.

And even if careless business isn’t his
concern—what he is thinking about is the way it feels when Jimmy
Measles gets drunk and shows him the pictures of his dogs or calls
him his pal—the warning is real.

The Italians remain split into factions, the old and
the new. The old men are faithful to the old rules; they worked for
Constantine and, twenty years after his death, still powerless, they
claim the unions as their own, the way they were before Constantine
was killed.

They want nothing to do with drugs or Atlantic City
or any of the businesses held by the men who took their place. The
men who took their place, who own the streets, smile at the old
Italians now, and overlook it when one of them drinks too much and
shoots a roofer or an electrician.

They are sympathetic in a wary way, knowing the old
men are not harmless.

The men who own the streets do not smile at the
Irish, though. The bargain that was struck with Phillip Flood has
lasted so long that all the men who made it are dead, and the jobs
are the real source of power in the city—the men who own the
streets see that now—and eventually they will try to take them
back.

And Peter reminds Michael, this morning in the limo,
that it is careless to take the Italians for granted.

Michael leans across the seat, smiling at him, and
pats him on the knee. He says, "They’re dyin’ of old age,
Pally."

Peter looks out the window. To his knowledge, Jimmy
Measles’s wife is the only woman his cousin ever liked better the
second time. She is the only one he doesn’t talk about, sitting in
a booth afterwards at the Melrose Diner, discussing if she liked to
swallow it or not.

She is different, but Michael never says anything
about what she does, or has him doing.

The closest he ever comes
is once at the racetrack, holding eight hundred dollars’ worth of
winning tickets in his hand while the tote board flashes the word
inquiry in front of his horse’s number, he turns to Peter and says,
"You ever wondered while you was fucking somebody if there was
hidden cameras in the room?"

* * *

A
week later—also at the
track—Michael asks Peter if he thinks he could keep Jimmy Measles
in Atlantic City all night.

Peter covers his eyes.

"You got a headache, Pally?"

"Yeah I got a headache and it’s got a name."

"He ain’t so bad," Michael says.

"After he gets his blow job," Peter says,
"there ain’t anything left he likes but to drink champagne. He
doesn’t play craps, he doesn’t want to go to the shows; he wants
champagne.

"And with Jimmy and champagne, there’s always
a point waiting for you where he’s gonna do something—paint a
happy face on his dick and show it to the keno girl or throw glasses
into the fireplace, even if there isn’t a fireplace. The only thing
distracts him is if somebody remembers him from
Bandstand
."