Gargantuan (9 page)

“I forgot. I’m sorry. And how’s Hannibal?” Jane says.

“I sincerely hope you called for a reason,” I say, trying for my surliest tone, even though if anyone in the world is permitted to insult my lovers and question my taste, it is Jane.

My friend sighs, “I’m sorry, how is
Attila
doing?”

“He’s out at the track. Riding. Though all isn’t well.”

“Oh?”

“Someone tried to hurt him.”

“What?”

I relay the story of Attila’s near drowning.

“Ever since you first set foot on a racetrack you’ve been getting into very serious trouble.”

“Oh stop. It’s purely coincidental.”

“That Ariel psycho was not coincidental,” Jane says, referring to Ariel DiCello, a disturbed woman who, nine months ago, hired me to follow her boyfriend, a racetracker. It had all happened when I’d made up a little lie about being a private detective. A little lie that had ended up becoming a reality. It got me into a fair heap of trouble too.

“Okay, I admit I took the Ariel thing on voluntarily.”

“No one forced you to shack up with a jockey.”

“True. But I had no idea he was a jockey in trouble.”

“I’m sure you did. On some level.” She sighs, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you this past year. And what happened to Ed? I thought you were crazy about Ed.”

“I was crazy about Ed. Am. But he’s gone.”

“For good?”

“I have no way of knowing that.” I rein in my frustration. We’ve had this conversation several times before.

“How about asking?”

“No. It’s one of those things. I have to leave it be.”

There’s a pause as Jane mulls this over.

“Maybe it’s contributing.”

“To what?”

“To your cautionless behavior.”

“No, it’s the yoga.”

She snorts. It was at her insistence that I tried and then became addicted to yoga. My daily yoga practice has made me calmer, stronger, and less likely to smoke cigarettes, but it’s also made me strangely brave. Mastering mildly dangerous physical tricks like balancing upside down on my forearms while trying to bring my feet to touch the top of my head has made me less afraid of whatever’s waiting for me out there in the world. I now try convincing Jane that it’s this peculiar yoga-induced braveness that’s leading me into trouble. She snorts again.

I successfully change the subject by telling Jane my mother actually called me. Jane is as surprised as I was. She’s fascinated by what’s left of my family—my father died eleven years ago, and Jane thinks that my mother and sister and I are savages for failing to be close-knit. Jane spends a lot of time with her own mother and was very close to her father until he died. She’s mortified that I don’t go down to Pennsylvania to visit my mother at least once a week and has succeeded in getting me to call my mother more frequently. She had long claimed this would eventually make my mother call me for no reason. Now it’s finally happened. And Jane is triumphant. Eventually though, she brings the conversation back to Attila, asking me what I intend to do.

“I honestly don’t know. He won’t call the police and
I’m
not going to call them. I just can’t do that.”

“Please stay away from the racetrack,” Jane says.

“That I can’t promise. I won’t go tomorrow though. I have to go to work.”

“Good,” she says. She tries getting me to agree to come to a yoga class the following night but I demur.

“I might need to go to sleep early tomorrow night. I’ve had a draining few weeks with all this shacking up,” I tell her.

She snorts yet again.

“Where did you pick up this new habit of snorting?” I ask irritably.

“What snorting?”

“You keep snorting at me.”

“I do?” She sounds genuinely baffled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snort. That’s disgusting.”

We both laugh and then bid each other a good day before hanging up. But I’m not sure what’s good about it. In fact, I feel my mood taking a dive. I decide to put on some layers and get out of the house.

There are still enormous banks of snow flanking the streets and few cars are venturing onto Surf Avenue as I cross over and head toward the water.

The boardwalk is deserted and, just ahead, big waves are violently slamming the beach. I sit down on a bench, pull out a cigarette, and light it. I have only smoked one so far today and the nicotine goes right to my head, improving my mood considerably while presumably shortening my life by a few more minutes.

The cold starts seeping into me and I get up and walk. I walk all the way to Brighton Beach, burying my hands in my pockets and mentally running through images of the last few days. Attila. My friend Big Sal. Suddenly, Ed Burke intrudes. I find myself wondering what he’s up to in Florida. Wondering if he’s met a girl down there. I find the thought disturbing and I go back to thinking about Attila. Not that this is particularly soothing. I don’t know what I feel for him, but I certainly don’t want anything bad happening to him and somehow I doubt that Big Sal’s ministrations will do him
much good. I start feeling panicked and I quicken my pace as I head home.

I get back into my apartment, remove my coat, and look at the answering machine. Six messages have come in over the last hour and that can’t possibly be good.

I
got in the truck and peeled out of the parking lot. Didn’t make it real far though. I should have realized they’d jack up security after what happened on the track. But I wasn’t thinking. I was pissed off. The lady security guard who had waved Attila and me through earlier was so uptight now that she had a damned
weapon
drawn.

“Sir, could you step out of the vehicle, please,” she said.

She was a chubby little thing, her green uniform clinging to her for dear life. Her flat brown eyes looked like a snake’s.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting out of the truck.

She fired off a series of questions about why didn’t I have the proper stickers for my vehicle and what was I doing there. I explained how she’d waved me and Attila in just a couple hours earlier, but she wasn’t buying it. She made radio contact with other security people and pretty soon there was a big to-do and they had to summon Henry Meyer to vouch for me.

At first, the trainer looked at me blankly. Then recognition dawned.

“Oh, Attila’s friend. Right. What were you doing with him anyway?”

“Just hanging around,” I said, wanting very much to tell him the truth, but not doing it. “Attila was showing me what’s what. I’m thinking of getting into a syndicate, buy into a horse or two.”

“Huh,” Henry grunted, like this was one of the worst ideas he’d heard all day. “Yeah,” he said, turning to the three security officers now collected there, “he’s one of my riders’ friends. It’s okay.”

The chubby brunette officer looked resentful. This was probably as close as she’d ever come to having a reason to shoot someone and I’d rained on her parade. My kind of girl.

I got back in the truck and drove off through the bowels of Queens and home to my other kind of girl. My wife. She was actually home. And, I have to say, she nearly gave me a heart attack.

“Baby, where you been all morning?” she purred, surprising the hell out of me for even noticing I hadn’t been around—and compounding that surprise by seeming glad to see me.

She was wearing her spandex workout pants and a little tank top distended by her glorious tits. I guess I stared at her with my jaw hanging open.

“What’s the matter, Sal?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said.

And then, she started fumbling with my pants, right there in the living room.

“Where’s Jake?” I said, not wanting to emotionally scar the kid with the vision of his mom blowing his dad in the living room.

“Play date. All afternoon, baby.” She’d undone my belt and pulled my jeans over my ass and I already had a hard-on that could have drilled a hole in the ceiling.

And then my wife blew me. I came in about thirty seconds.

“Hair-trigger response,” she said, touching me with pride. “How long I gotta wait?” she asked, pulling her spandex leggings down just below her large pale ass.

“Apparently not very long,” I said, entering her first with my fingers, then with my quickly rejuvenated hard-on.

“I want another baby,” she said then, bucking her hips into me.

This was something of a shock. A few months earlier, she hadn’t
wanted me inside her. Now she
really
wanted me inside her. Women. Go figure. Another fucking kid though? Jake was my life and that seemed like enough. Plus, erratic as Karen was, I was pretty sure she wasn’t gonna stick with me that much longer. Then it would be
two
kids growing up with jerk parents taking out their bitterness on them.

“You went off the pill?” I said, just like that, as we stood unceremoniously fucking in the living room.

“Yes,” she said with a thrust of her hips.

“No way, Karen,” I said, abruptly pulling out of her, causing her to whine like a dying lawn mower, “not the way you’re erratic. I don’t want
two
kids growing up with divorced parents.”

Usually I didn’t speak my mind with her quite this frankly. I had in the very beginning. When I’d met her, she’d been starting over after being a high-priced call girl supporting her coke habit. The first time she walked into my home group of AA, every guy in the room pretty much instantly wanted her. And I instantly wanted to kill those guys. I felt possessive of Karen before I’d even talked to her. And, to try and do things right with her, I’d been completely honest about everything. But a lot had changed in eight years.

She wheeled around, face red with anger, her workout pants still down around her hips, exposing her bush.

“What the hell are you talking about, Sal?”

“Don’t take it like that, baby,” I said. “Come on, I’ll get a condom.”

This infuriated her even more. She pulled her pants back up and stormed upstairs, leaving me there in the living room, with my dick literally hanging out. Maybe my diplomacy skills left a little to be desired.

I didn’t know what to do. So I pulled my pants back up, got my keys, and went out.

I got in the truck, started the engine and the Beethoven. Ruby was on me to expand my repertoire and listen to some Bach and maybe Shostakovich but I hadn’t gotten there yet. I liked Tchaikovsky, but when I’d told this to Ruby, she had scowled and, the next
time I’d seen her, she’d given me five new CDs. Bach, Handel, some moody Russians, and some guy named Schoenberg. An opera no less. I wasn’t ready for that. Or was I? Right then I needed some serious mood alteration. I riffled through the glove box until I found the Schoenberg disc. I stared at it for a minute.
Moses und Aron
it was called. Ruby had told me how Mr. Schoenberg had only used one
A
in Aron because otherwise the title would have had thirteen letters and he didn’t want to bring bad luck on his opera. I took Beethoven out and put in Mr. Schoenberg. Full volume even though I had no idea what I was in for. The music came. A low rumble of male voices. It was pretty strange sounding but not bad strange. I put the truck into drive and pulled ahead.

For about ten minutes I succeeded in not thinking. Not about Karen, not about Ruby’s damn jockey. I just drove and listened to that crazy, dark music. Then I found I’d pulled up outside of Johnny’s candy store on Havemeyer Street.

I turned Mr. Schoenberg down. Very gently so as not to offend. I’d gotten that way with classical music. If I had to stop it before listening to the whole thing, I turned it down in tiny increments so as not to shock myself or offend the spirit of the dead guy who’d composed it. I suppose a coupla the CDs Ruby had told me to buy were by guys who were actually still alive. But Mr. Schoenberg had died fifty something years ago.

I stared at the bright yellow-and-red entrance to Johnny’s. The place had been in the Del Tredici family since the turn of the century. At one point though, Johnny’s dad had gone under and rented it to some Dominicans who turned it into a bodega, painting it that red and yellow that is apparently in the bylaws of some Bodega Decoration Code. Eventually, Johnny had gotten on his feet enough financially to take the place back over and restore it to a candy store—bookie in the back—but he’d never gotten around to painting it and it was now a crumbling yellow and red. He’d put up a green awning that said J
OHNNY’S
C
ANDY
and someone, maybe his kid Nicky, had pointed out that the shop was now flying Rastafarian colors. But it’s not like any Jamaican guys were mistaking it for a
social club. Everyone within a twenty-block radius knew non-Italians weren’t gonna get a warm reception there. Unless they were dropping a few thousand on a long shot at Aqueduct.

I got out of the truck and went inside. Johnny’s daughter Nan was sitting there, smoking and reading
People
magazine. On the counters around her were big old-fashioned glass containers full of colorful candies. The candy aspect of the store didn’t do booming business considering that the neighborhood, which had been predominantly Spanish for a few decades, was now infested with white hipsters who mostly steered clear of candy—coming in only occasionally to soak in the quaint factor.