Gypsy Davey (10 page)

“You make a great bride muthuh, Lois,” he said quietly into her ear. He started singing along with the music.

“Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me.”

Tink tink tink
,
klink klink klink klink
went the spoons against the sides of the wineglasses, and the happy couple kissed. They tinked again, they kissed again. Seemed like it was going to happen a hundred thousand times, with Jo and Gus happy to oblige every time. Too happy, almost, obliging to the point of soft porn, exposing enough tongue and passion right up there on their little stage to embarrass everyone in the room who wasn't fried. Which wasn't too many.

“Buy him a drink, Gus,” Joanne would say, pointing out someone who meant nothing to her. “And that one. Buy her a drink too.” Gus bought, rolling out the knot of money happily each time, fanning his bride with it first as she tipped her head back in not quite mock ecstasy. “The wad,” she called it. “Whip out the wad,” she laughed, in love.

Davey lived the day of his sister's wedding through the lens of a camera. “You're the photographer, Davey,” Lois said as she draped the strap of the camera around his neck. “It's self-winding, self-loading, auto flash, auto focus. I think you can handle it. Just aim and pull the trigger. Get everything.” She stuffed rolls of film in his jacket pockets and pants pockets, making him bulge as if he were wearing saddle bags.

But Davey was happy there. He wasn't happy when Jo told him she was getting married and leaving. Despite the fact that for almost two years now the cycle of month-long screaming matches alternating with super-charged silence between Jo and Lois had driven Davey longer and farther and more often on out of his house, onto his bike, he couldn't bear her leaving. He wasn't happy when the gambling priest spoke of a man shall leave his mother, a woman leave her home, read from Kahlil Gibran, tried to sing “The Wedding Song” a cappella which everyone politely clapped for but Davey didn't because he knew it was stupid. He wasn't happy to see Joanne being strapped into Lois's old gown, sat there in
his soaking undershirt as he watched Lois help her daughter with her gobs of makeup, helped her pull and spray her hair till it reached so high the ceiling fan nearly made a flat top out of it. He watched, Davey did, the whole unnatural scene of Lois gingerly, caringly smoothing Jo's edges, packaging her up to deliver her out of there to Gus.

As mother and daughter looked together into the big round mirror of Lois's dresser—Lois crouched behind Jo, who sat and leaned back against her mother—Davey quietly, of course quietly, slipped out to the bathroom and vomited.

He was still a bit jangly when he received the camera. But there, behind that camera, inside it, everyone else locked safely and manageably within the boundaries of the viewfinder,
there
Davey was happy.

“Take lots and lots of pictures of my friends, Davey, will ya?” Joanne said as she smiled glowingly, her new husband smiling likewise from behind her with his hands on her abdomen.

“I'll go take 'em right now, Jo,” Davey said. Gus walked up and stuck a five-dollar bill in his hand, which Davey stared at through the camera lens. He snapped the picture of Gus's money.

Joanne's friends. The Pack of Dogs, all twelve of them, were the sum total of Joanne's friends. Whether she actually had any friends in the group or not. Good old big stupid old
Phil couldn't make it, being in an army prison in Colorado. Davey went to the bar to take their pictures.

“
Gimp!
Take my picture.”

“Bring it here, Davey, take a shot of this,” Celeste said, raising her black stretch skirt, bending over and slapping herself on the rear. Davey took the picture.

“Yo, Davey, get this,” a fat dog said as he dropped two full whiskey shot glasses into a pint of Guinness and drank the whole thing down. As he slammed the glass down, The Dogs cheered
woo woo woo woo woo
, and a trickle of regurgitated brown-black oil ran out of both corners of the guy's mouth. Davey snapped the picture.

Without talking and without ever pulling his eye from the viewfinder, Davey waved them all in close together for a group shot. The bartender, piling drinks behind them nonstop like a fire brigade, had to be part of the picture. When they were all pressed together in one sweaty, drooling blob, every Dog at once flipped the camera the bird, smiling cheese but saying, “Eat shit, Joaaaaanne.” As he snapped it, Davey already knew it was going to be her favorite.

Davey stopped on the way to the dance floor to take a picture of the young waitress, who smiled carefully while balancing her full tray of empty glasses.

He snapped Joanne dancing, for the fifth time already, with the gambling priest who talked like a machine gun in
her ear, laughing hard every few seconds although Joanne only smiled.

He snapped the three tables of Gus's relatives, all dressed in black. Gus said that in his culture black was festive. But they looked, faces too, as if they meant to be at the wake that was happening on the opposite side of the street. Davey shot a whole roll of them, fascinated at the changeless expressions through it all.

Sneaky Pete and Lois were dancing again. They were dancing together almost exclusively now, the string broken only by Pete's trips to the bar to refire Lois's vodka gimlet and his manhattan; or Pete's visits to the DJ's table to request yet another special song. Most of the songs said something about remembering. The good old days. When we were young. You'll always be the one. That sort of thing. Sneaky Sneaky Pete, when he sank his teeth into a vein, he bit hard and he sucked.

He sang softly into her ear:

“I met my old lover

on the street last night . . .”

Davey took a picture of Lois, eyes closed tight, resting her head like a baby on Pete's shoulder. Then he turned away fast.

While Lois was dancing with Pete, Joanne was dancing with everybody else. All the mourners from Gus's family. All The Dogs, still grabbing her ass, though now she smacked their hands away. She even danced with Gus once or twice.

“Take this one, Davey. Davey, over here, I just
have
to have a picture of this. Take a bunch.” There were fifty people all together at the reception, relatives, party slugs, strangers. The kind of crowd you could assemble simply by throwing open the doors of a K of C, VFW, or Elks hall on any sweaty Sunday, without ever sending invitations. It would have been hard to gather any six of the fifty who all liked one another, and it would be even harder to pick six Joanne honestly liked. But now they were all vital to her happiness. “Oh Davey, Davey, get this one, get this one.
The Girls
, all together for the last time.” The girls all laughed drunkenly, hugged and kissed, and Davey recorded it.

When it was time to cut the cake, Davey was perched fifty feet away, by the swinging kitchen door, photographing that waitress every time she came through.

“Daaayyy-veeeee!” the whole crowd seemed to scream at once. Davey ran over and got there just in time to snap the bride and groom smashing squares of yellow sheet cake in each other's faces to the sound of hysterical cheering, and “Pop Goes the Weasel” over the loudspeakers.

The cake was still being sliced up when, after a brief,
teasing pause, the sound system came back up, louder than before, and the dance floor filled to capacity. It was karaoke time, and as the first bass lines of “Brown-Eyed Girl” thundered beneath the floor, there was Sneaky Pete rising above the dancers, microphone in hand, standing on the table.

“Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

la-la-te-da . . .”

Pete sang well, not his first time with a mike in his hand. He pointed right at Lois as he finished, and she melted like she was a teenager again and Pete was all four Beatles. Even though her eyes were actually black, not brown.

After serenading her once more, with “You Are My Sunshine,” Pete whispered something to the DJ, slapped a big bill in his hand, and stepped down to claim Lois. The heat and the Pete, the gimlets and the wedding of her daughter and the dreamy music were kneading her down. She was cream when Sneaky Pete scooped her up and danced her tight again. She reeled, he pressed. He sang soft and sweet and blew cool on her arched neck at the same time, to Ray Charles's “You Don't Know Me.”

“No, you don't know the one

who dreams of you at night . . .”

Davey watched it, the way the TV host watches animals from the bush on nature programs. He shot. He shot Pete stroking his mother's hair. He shot his mother nuzzling Pete's cheek with her nose and playing lightly with his exposed chest hair. He shot his mother nibbling Pete's trapezoid muscle near his neck, and crying dime-sized tears on the silk floral shirt.

“Forget about them, Davey,” Joanne said, yanking him by the sleeve. “Dance with
me
.” Joanne walked backward onto the dance floor, tugging Davey, who dragged like a mule.

“I have to take the pictures, Jo,” Davey said, shaking his head frantically. “I'm too busy, can't dance, can't dance.”

“Stop it,” she said, grabbing the camera from around his neck. “And smile for a change, will ya, for Christ's sake.” Joanne giggled as she began snapping pictures of Davey.

“Cut it out, Jo,” he said, covering his face with his hands, turning sideways, looking down at the floor. “That's enough. Gimme back the camera.” While he waited for her to give it back he stood looking at the floor, his hands plunged into his pockets, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot.”

“C'mon, Dave, it's only fair. You're taking everybody else's picture, and nobody's taking yours. When I look back, it'll be like you weren't even here.” Davey didn't look up as long as she still held the camera. Joanne stopped giggling, looked at him, frozen stiff in the middle of the floor with
people wiggling and singing all around him. She walked up and from her position—six inches shorter then him—stuck her face right in his.

“I ain't ever
seen
a photo of you, have I, Davey?”

Davey shrugged his wide, gangly shoulders.

The camera strap hanging around her neck, Joanne took Davey's face in her hands and turned it up. “Keep it right there,” she scolded. She took a few paces backward, during which Davey's chin slowly began sinking again. “Ah. Uh-uh,” she called. He straightened up to a dignified, if solemn, pose. She reeled off ten pictures from six different angles, then got a cousin to take the two of them together.

“Now.
Dance
with me,” she demanded.

Davey didn't fight this time, because he didn't want to. Even though he had never danced with anyone in his life. It was a slow song and Joanne simply guided him around in a toddling circle while she held him.

“You gonna be all right now, Davey? With me gone, I mean?”

He nodded.

“Sure you are. I just needed to hear it. It's not like you need me anymore anyway, huh? Big sucker that you are now. Huh. Huh?”

He nodded again.

“I'm gonna be just a few blocks away anyhow, and you'll
be there a lot, I know. Anytime you want, in fact. Except call first, okay? So I know you're coming. 'Cause I got a family of my own now, Davey, and I got responsibilities for my own home, understand?” She took Davey's hand and placed it on her puffed belly, guiding his hand in a sweeping circular stroking motion. He let his hand stay there a few seconds, his mouth opening slightly to a little O, his eyes taking the same shape. Abruptly, he pulled his hand back.

“Ya, you understand,” she said. “Hey, Lois will probably relax, now that I'm gone. She'll be a pussycat, start babying you up all over the place, you being her only baby bird left. It'll be great for you, for everybody, right?”

“Yo sport, can I cut in?” Gus was standing there smiling his sleepy smile. Davey looked at him uncomprehendingly. He held Joanne tighter and continued to turn with her.

“Davey, I really should dance with my husband some,” Jo said. She squeezed Davey tight, then gently pushed him away. “Remember, Davey. Anytime you want. Just call first.”

Davey stood looking at her, his fingers suddenly scratching and scratching at the seams along the thighs of his pants. He grabbed the camera from the stunned cousin who was still dancing nearby with it hanging around his neck. Before Jo could put her arms around Gus, Davey pressed the shutter release and started taking pictures. Or
picture
, the same one over and over and over, the auto winder advancing the film
to the next frame, the flash flashing, strobing, a long series of small lightning bursts popping from Davey's forehead. He stopped when the film ran out. Joanne and Gus went on to dance.

“My baby can
dance
?” Lois gushed as Davey tried to reload. “When did my little one learn how to dance? How come I didn't know my boy could dance? I saw you dancing over there, you . . . dancer.”

Davey tried to concentrate on his job, but it didn't matter. Lois seized him in her arms and they were dancing, the camera pressed between them.

“What a wonderful day, Davey. Isn't it a wonderful day?” Lois started welling up again. “Say what you will, your sister and I have certainly had our little moments, but God I love her. And she is the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. And
you
are the most beautiful photographer.” Lois gave Davey a big sloppy kiss on the lips, from which he shrank. He didn't like the way she smelled. He didn't like having to hold practically all of her weight as they danced. He didn't like her brand of happiness. Lois tried to pull him closer, but he held her waist stiffly out in front of him, like she was a basketball he was about to pass off. “Isn't she though, Davey? Doesn't Jo look radiant?”