Virgin Heat (3 page)

He gestured feebly, his plate wobbled on his nervous knees. "About . . . about, like, the way people are down there. Easy. Funny. It's hard t'explain, that's why I brought the tape."

Paul Amaro took a sip of wine, washed his teeth with it. He'd been away nine years, a third of Angelina's life. He was remorseful for having left her; ashamed, he wouldn't let her attend his trial or visit him in jail. He remembered her goodbye kiss better than he remembered his wife's, he wanted to indulge her now in every way he could. "We'll watch the tape," he said, as he stroked her hair again. "We'll have coffee, cake, we'll watch the tape with coffee."

*

Fat, spoiled Allie Junior had red sauce on his bright blue shirt and olive oil on the placket of his fly and he didn't want to watch the tape. "It's playoffs," he whined. "I wanna watch hockey."

The fat kid sulked. Buttons were pushed and the tape began to roll. Uncle Louie cleared his throat and launched into his narration, but his heart wasn't in it. "This is the airport—"

"Who wants to see a stupid airport?" said Little Allie, and his father smacked him on his chubby arm.

". . . Open-air, lizards running around, they still got DC-3s parked on the runway . . . And look at this—right across the road, the ocean. How many places, ya rent your car, the first stop sign is the ocean?

People drank coffee, nibbled cake. Louie did his travelogue and wondered why he wasn't happier about it. He was showing off his vacation, he'd told himself if he got to do that it would be a successful evening. But somehow his triumph had been tarnished in advance, it was always like that with his family.

"Funny names they got for things down there," he rambled on, as unsteady pictures chased each other across the screen. "This is Duds'n'Suds, combination bar and laundromat. Or this place, onna corner of Truman Avenue and Margaret Street, they call it the Margaret Truman Launderette."

"Ya took vacation," said his brother Joe, "or ya did the wash?"

Louie ignored the comment. "Look that sunset," he soldiered on. "The way the harbor faces, the sun slips right into the water."

Angelina was sitting on the carpet, her back against an ottoman. She watched the red disk slide beneath the surface of the barely rippling Gulf, serene and stately as a king entering his bath. "It's beautiful," she murmured. Her face seemed far away, she imagined herself someplace warm as August and foreign as the sea.

Louie remembered why she was his favorite, he felt his sunburned head grow flushed with kinship and with gratitude. He went on, his voice a little stronger now that he believed there was at least one person interested in what he said.

"And the bars, the crazy bars they got there. Live music all day long. Tequila and eggs for breakfast... This here's Sloppy Joe's, world famous, look the big picture a Hemingway . . . And this one, Hog's Breath Saloon, big pig for a trademark .. . Oh yeah, and this one—what the heck's the name a this one, Rose?"

His wife was bored. It showed. "How should I remember, Louie?"

"Well anyway," he said, "weird place. Look: Fancy bar, fancy mirror, but hardly has a roof. Just vines. Vines with flowers. All kindsa fancy drinks. Mango this, papaya that. Old-fashioned fruit squeezer . . . Oh yeah, this I got a kick outa ..."

On the screen, a stranger's blurry and averted face blinked past and then a thick and eccentric pair of hands began concocting a Virgin Heat.

"Playoffs, we gotta watch some jerk makin' a drink?" said Little Allie.

"A craftsman," said Uncle Louie. "A builder. Layer after layer. Look the colors."

The family watched the hands. But no one watched like Angelina did. She watched the bartender flick his thick but supple wrists, watched him arch his pinky as he grasped a spoon. She watched the bent index finger, wounded, independent, that would not fall into line with all the others, and as she watched, her body warmed in its cocoon of shapeless clothing.

She knew it was impossible, unthinkable, but she also knew that she knew those hands, she was sure she did.

She watched them bring the bottle to the glass, slowly, roundly, the strong arm doubling back as though softly to enfold a shoulder, to stake out the small space of a caress. She watched the hands, and, watching them, she heard a voice made more tender by its very gruffness, saying,
You and me, Angelina, you and me.
At the edges of her vision, the walls of the room stopped meeting at the corners, the floor got wavy underneath her. It couldn't be, it was fantasy, delusion, but she knew the hands on the screen were the hands she had felt on her hair, on her neck, on the tender place just below the ear, every day and every night for what already seemed a lifetime.

The cocktail was made, the cherry drifted downward toward the bottom of the glass, trailing its red curtain of grenadine. Angelina tried to speak, tried to sound casual. Her throat was dry, the words came out tentative and childish. "The name of that place, you can't remember?"

Uncle Louie pursed his lips, clicked his tongue, shook his head, defeated. Angelina tried not to pout, not to squirm.

The video rolled on, moved in no special order to schooners on the horizon, parasailors against a flawless sky, drag queens on pink mopeds. Angelina pressed her back hard against the couch, let the fibers of her sweater rasp against her skin; locking in the image of the hands, she squeezed her eyes so tightly shut that she could feel the lashes interlace. The Amaro family sipped coffee, nibbled cake.

The tape ended in a dappled glare. Allie Junior put on the hockey game. Chitchat moved to other subjects and after awhile people said good night, walked down the long hallway to gather up their furs and cashmere overcoats.

As Uncle Louie was putting on his hat, Angelina, her eyes too bright, the skin mottled on her throat, hugged him hard and said, "Thank you, Uncle Louie, thank you."

That same morning, having no idea that anything was wrong, Paul Amaro left his house, to be driven through the Bronx to his headquarters in Manhattan.

Almost before he had settled into the backseat of his Lincoln, quiet streets had given onto glutted boulevards, stately homes had yielded to boarded stores and warehouses with smashed windows. Across the city line, sooty high-rises were smeared against the damp gray sky; the highway crumbled under the smoking, rusted, veering cars of the uninsured and reckless poor.

With it crumbled the thin crust of gentility that Paulie had affected since moving to Westchester. Mile by mile, the well-dressed commuter devolved back to the thug, the suburban businessman became once more the bully, the threatener, the felon. His posture changed, he skulked low and coiled against the window; his eyes became more vigilant and furtive. Ahead, the skyline loomed; buildings climbed up one another's backs like jungle trees clawing for a little swath of open sky. The appalling density put tension in Paulie's forehead; the city seemed to him a clot of greed, a boil throbbing with frustrations and thwarted drives and ten million interlocking fibers of aggression.

By the time he stirred his espresso in the back room of the Gatto Bianco Social Club on Prince Street, he had been subsumed entirely into his urban persona, his professional stance; he was angry, snarling, crude, and obsessed with honor in a shrill and sullen sort of way.

"Nine fuckin' years," he said to his old friend Funzie Gallo. "More like ten. All that fuckin' time, we can't find the mizzable fuck that ratted me out?"

Funzie was eating a pastry with powdered sugar on it; these days he was always eating pastry, as though to mask the souring of the life he knew with syrups, glazes, oils from nuts, reductions of fruit. The pastry was making him fat in odd places. His ankles hung over his shoes and little pads of blubber were narrowing his eyes. Now he licked his stubby fingers almost daintily before he answered. "We tried, Paulie," he said. "We put the word out everywhere. But the Feds, that program they got, they want a guy to disappear, they can make him disappear."

Paulie slowly, resolutely shook his head. "No one disappears except he's dead. People get new faces. Fuckin' government can give 'em histories, all the papers. But disappear? No. Ya know why? They don't disappear 'cause they never stop being who they are. Who they are, sooner or later it's gonna show."

Funzie licked his gums, tugged lightly on some extra flesh that hung down beneath his chin. Outside, trucks clattered past, music to smash things by was pumped out of people's radios. Cautiously, he said, "Paulie, what happened to you was a long time ago."

Amaro just stewed. Funzie knew he should leave it there but he didn't leave it there.

"Life goes on, Paul. We got businesses to run. Deals to consider. Opportunities, like this thing down south—"

Paulie wasn't listening. He didn't want to think about business; he wanted to think about revenge. "I want that scumbag dead."

"Dead, not dead," said Funzie. "It's not worth losing sleep. This grudge, Paul—for your own sake, why don't you let it go?"

Paulie's big knuckles were white against his tiny abused espresso spoon, blood pressure made his ears turn red. His voice was pinched, quietly furious.

"We didn't get where we are today by letting grudges go."

Yeah? thought Funzie. And where were they today? Hiding behind metal roll-down shutters that some nigger kid had had the balls to paint grafitti on, drinking coffee at a stained card table in a dim outpost that smelled of roach spray and anisette. Gray, unhealthy men who each day mattered a little less to the world outside than they had the day before. Paulie didn't realize; he'd been away too long. He'd seen the headlines, sure—the indictments, the betrayals, the defections—but the guts of their decline he didn't grasp. He, Funzie, had wolfed biscotti and run the
brugad
while Paulie was in the can; he understood the slippage all too well. "But Paul—" he began.

The other man cut him off. "Funzie, I'm sixty-three years old. That fuck stole nine years a my life. Took me away from my home, my daughter."

"I know, Paul. I know. But that's over now. It's over and the world has changed."

"You telling me it's changed so much that shit like that goes unpunished?"

*

Angelina had never in her life been guileful, had never had to be. She'd never snitched candy, because candy had always been pressed on her. She'd seldom fibbed as to her whereabouts, because all in all her whereabouts had been contentedly licit; it hadn't cramped her to stay in the neighborhood, because she lived mainly in the precinct of her thoughts, and for the most part she'd been happiest in her room, the nursery of her imaginings.

But now, as she was abandoning her home and her family to seek out the treasonous man she loved, she discovered, with surprise and an exciting shame, that an instinctual cunning seemed to exist in her, as ripe and fully formed as a baby on the day of birth, that had been waiting only for a purpose. Once the purpose had been revealed, she shocked herself by being rather shrewd and as outwardly calm as a veteran spy.

Noiselessly, carrying only a large handbag, she'd stepped out of her parents' sleeping house—the house that, with breathtaking suddenness, no longer seemed her own. She never once looked back at the shrubs still struggling to awake from winter, the brooding chimneys stacked up on the roof. Under swift clouds racing through an undecided sky, she'd strolled down Hillside Drive to the intersection with busy Maple Avenue. She'd called a cab to take her to La Guardia, where she paid cash for an airline ticket.

On the flight south, she'd sat silently among chintzy end-of-season tourists, watching with no real curiosity as they left their seats in brown sweaters and returned from the bathroom wearing shirts of pink and acid green. Through a gap in the jetway at Miami airport she caught her first real whiff of Florida, the smell of salted mildew colonizing damp carpets and the foam inside of vinyl chairs. She'd walked in a daze past promotional pyramids of plastic oranges and listened as lost travelers were paged in Spanish.

Now she was looking out the window of the small clattering propeller plane that made the short hop to Key West.