Virgin Heat (2 page)

Louie Amaro drove to the street's highest point, parked his car at one end of his brother Paulie's grandly curving driveway, which was glutted with vehicles newer, bigger, sleeker than his own. He switched off his ignition, said fretfully, "Everybody's here already."

"So everybody's here," said his wife Rose. "So what?" She flipped down her sunshade. It had a lighted mirror on the back, she checked her thick red lipstick.

"It's right here in my bag." She blotted on a Kleenex. He watched her. Maybe they bickered, maybe she picked on him, but he still took pleasure, felt a thrill of intimacy, watching Rose do things like that. "Big shots," she went on. "Big shots when they're not in jail somewhere."

Louie raised a cautioning finger. "We don't talk about that, Rose."

"Don't talk about it? How do we not talk about it? The man's been in prison nine years, he's been out for a week. Whadda we talk about, the lottery?"

"He's been away. He's back. End of story."

Rose shook her head, emphatically buffed her makeup.

Louie's unsure pride swelled in the silence. "And lemme tell ya somethin'. My brother Paulie, he's a big shot even when he is in jail. Don't kid yourself. My tan—I'm still tan, right? I look relaxed, ya can tell we took vacation?"

The house was an enormous Tudor, with tall chimneys sticking up like organ pipes and a cluster of different-height brown roofs bunched together like a field of mushrooms. Security cameras panned across the pathway leading to the door. Louie rang the bell, then watched his breath until a buzzer let them in.

In the entryway they hung their cloth coats on top of the furs and cashmeres already piled on the racks. Louie took his hat off; he stood before a huge smoked mirror and raked his sparse hair left to right; translucent flakes of skin drifted off his sunburned head. Then they walked down the long hall with its armoires and its torch lamps, to the living room.

The living room was brightly lit and very big and noisy. From hidden speakers came the aged rasp of Frank Sinatra, the ravaged voice buoyed up by brass and strings. In one corner, a huge television set was blaring; half a dozen fat children watched it, tickling each other's ribs. In the middle of the room, three overstuffed gold couches defined a conversation nook; Amaro blood relations and in-laws sat back against the yielding cushions and perched on the pillowed arms.

Louie's brother A1 was the first to notice the new arrivals.

"Louie, Rose!" he bellowed, standing up and shoving a shirttail underneath his belt. "Look at yuhs! Those tans! I hate yuhs, ya pineapples!"

He came lumbering around an end table topped with nut bowls and alabaster eggs, hugged his younger brother, coolly kissed the wife. "Great ta see ya, great ta see ya," he went on. "Ya seen Paulie yet?"

That had always been the first question, Louie thought.
Did you pay your respects to Paulie?
Not just because, tonight, Paulie happened to be the guest of honor and the host. No. Because Paulie was the oldest, the big shot, the money man. "Hey," said Louie nervously, "I just walked in."

A1 looked over his shoulder, the torsion pulling his shirt out of his pants again. "Where's Paulie? Louie wantsta say hello."

"Must be onna phone or somethin'," shouted back the other brother, Joe.

"Get comfortable," said Maria, Paulie's wife. She was handsome, stern, gracious by custom though her heart was all dried up. "Please, you'll have a drink."

A1 led them through an archway to the dining room. Bottles were arrayed on a sideboard that small planes could have landed on. On the prairie of the mahogany table a vast buffet had been laid out—a bleeding beef, a turkey hacked and reassembled, wedges of cheese the size of splitting mauls.

Al made Rose a Manhattan, poured Louie a glass of Bardolino. Then he patted Louie's cheek, the bulbous place just below the cheekbone that gave Louie the look of a clown. Apropos of nothing, he said, "Louie, kid, you're still my favorite."

That's the kind of family it was. Everybody had a favorite, but the feelings were seldom symmetrical. What did Al see in Louie? A jumpy sweetness, maybe, a comparative innocence. Louie was the only brother who didn't hurt people for a living, who had never been to jail. To Al, those things made him lovable. As for Louie, he thought Al was a buffoon and a slob who spit when he talked and couldn't keep his shirt tucked in. His own favorite was his niece, Angelina, Paulie's only child. He loved her for her strangeness, her distracted gentleness, a certain feeling she gave off, like she was only partly where she was. What did Angelina think of him? With Angelina it was impossible to tell, though Louie strongly suspected she viewed him as a harmless fool, a smiling nobody.

They went back to the living room, staked out places on a couch. A heated conversation was underway, Louie gradually realized it was about salami. One brand, the pepper was too coarse, it hit that thing at the back of your throat and made you cough. Another label, the rind stuck, yanked off half the meat with it. Then there was mozzarella.

"Come on," somebody said, "ya see the signs in every deli: Bronx Bread. Ya think they bring the bread but the cheese they don't bring?"

"I am telling you," Joe said, "that me, my opinion, okay, the way it tastes when it's in my mouth, not yours, big shot, the mozzarell' tastes better if I go to Arthur Avenue and see it wit'
my
own eyes sittin' inna . . ."

Joe fell silent. Louie twisted his sunburned neck and saw his brother Paul returning from the bedroom wing.

Prison seemed not to have disagreed with him, though the truth was that, beneath the robust exterior, tubes were silting up, pumps growing sluggish, filters clogging. But he still had his mane of wavy silver hair, the dramatic upswept eyebrows, the power to stop conversation when he walked into a room. His shoulders were still broad and square, the stomach ample but not fat—imposing rather, imperial. The skin was ruddy beneath the careful shave, the strong nose Greek in profile, bridgeless. His pearl-gray suit hung as timeless as the drapery on a statue.

Louie felt himself rising, moving in a kind of trance to greet his brother. Was it love or obligation, awe or fear or just a quailing habit from a lifetime of being the youngest, the weakest, the least important? He let Paulie hug him, smelled the clove and citrus of his aftershave.

The younger brother flushed, shrank within himself. In a family of big shots, he sold elbow joints and toilet snakes and plungers. Paulie's question— was it concern or an old need to keep him down, humiliate? With family it was hard to tell the two apart.

Paulie blinked, ran his tongue between his front teeth and his lip. "Sure, Louie. Sure. Later on. For now how 'bout we eat? Anybody hungry?"

Angelina was upstairs in her room, marshaling her forbearance and her good cheer for the inevitable moment when she would join the party, be kissed and petted and fussed over by the gathered relatives.

Not that she didn't love her family. In her way she loved them a lot—the men with their rough cheeks and loud laughs and crazy nicknames for each other, the women with their scents of roses and powder, their stunning, modest endurance, her mother presiding over the sacred confabs in the kitchen. She liked them fine, some she even admired.

But it was the constant questions that wore her down, that made her want to hide out in her room for as long as she could get away with.

It was the same at every family party. Aunts and uncles would seek her out, hunt her like hungry lions cutting a single gazelle from the herd. They had gotten incredibly skilled at cornering her. They backed her up against blank walls, ambushed her in the pantry, shanghaied her while heading to or returning from the bathroom. One by one, they'd get her alone, put their faces so close that their pores became as prominent as the pits on strawberries. They'd look at her with a soupy caring that soon dribbled over into condescension, pity. Their voices would drop to a funeral home murmur, and they'd say—

So Angelina, ya met anyone?

You going out much, Angel?

Tell me, Angie, is there somebody you're dating?

Ange, ya found a fella?

Angelina, in turn, had gotten pretty deft at giving evasive answers. She met plenty of people— checkers in the supermarket, toll collectors on the Throgs Neck Bridge. She went out a lot—to the movies with her girlfriends, to bars in groups of bachelorettes whose personnel would shift and dwindle as more of the women stumbled onto mates. And the fact was, she did date now and then. A friend would line her up. Or a guy at another table would send over a drink, and if he didn't seem like a total jerk, she'd talk to him, see him for dinner on the weekend.

But those dates went nowhere, and the rueful glances her relatives fixed on her seemed to suggest that they thought her dates would always go nowhere.

Why did they think that? Angelina wondered. Did they think something was wrong with her, that her insides were faulty, the nerves withered or disconnected? Did they imagine she was frigid? Did they somehow
enjoy
imagining she was frigid, picturing avid hands laboring to rouse her unresponding body?

Well, she wasn't frigid and there was nothing wrong with her equipment, thank you very much. The truth was she had a secret. She was twenty-seven years old and had a secret that had simmered inside her for a decade now, that had burned as unremittingly as one of those red bulbs they use to keep food hot in diners. The secret had given her patience and a kind of anchoring wisdom it might have seemed she had no claim to. But wisdom didn't come from experience alone; it also came from yearning, and waiting, and appraising and dismissing all those many things and people that did not measure up to the thing that one was waiting for.

She thought about her secret and got ready to join the party. She stepped into stretch pants with stirrups, pants that made uncontoured tubes of her calves and thighs. She pulled on a cabled mohair sweater that made her chest into a vague fuzzy nothing. Pulling on the sweater mussed her jet black hair; she restored its arch with a lift of the handle of the teasing brush, pinned it into place with a black velvet headband, made sure the flip at the nape of her neck came free of the woolly collar. She looked at herself in the mirror, thinned mascara on the lashes that shaded her wide-spaced violet eyes. She looked archaic, but what no one realized was that she knew she looked archaic, she wanted it that way, it was a private emblem of her cherished distance.

A virgin with a passionate secret, she slipped into her loafers and went downstairs to face her family's questions and their pity.

*

People were eating.

They sat on sofas, love seats, plates on their knees, the men with napkins stuffed into their collars. They talked as they ate, pointing at each other with their forks. The women cautiously chased oily artichokes across the china, exactingly cut roast beef with silent knives. The fat kids ate in front of television, dropped meatballs and hunks of sausage on their disheveled clothes.

Angelina approached the picked-over buffet, took some raw vegetables, a slice of crumbly cheese, made herself a white wine spritzer, weak. She took a deep breath and stepped through the archway that led on to the living room, hoping to be not just archaic but very small, invisible.

"Angelina, hon!" bellowed Uncle Al, his voice like the wet tongue of a large and unkempt dog. "And how's the beauty of the family?"

Obediently, she did. Her father kissed her cheek, stroked her unyielding hair. She picked up a ring of raw red pepper, took a tiny bite, and chewed it slowly, giving her throat some time to open.

Al ignored him. "Florida.
Ptui
. The beaches, they all got whaddyacallit, men-a-war. Ninety-year- old Jews in baggy shorts. No casinos, no big acts. Everywhere ya go, spicks."