Belly Read online

  The boy’s eyes widened, and he started to walk away slowly, shaking his head and whispering absolutions to himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Nora called after him. “Sorry I took the Lord’s name in vain. Jesus,” she said. “You can’t say anything around him these days.”

  Nora plopped the baby in his high chair, cooing softly, wiping strands of dark hair away from the baby’s blue eyes. “My little angel,” she said to him. “My perfect little angel.” There was something strange yet familiar about this image, something that made him feel just the tiniest bit sick, trapped in a scene from the past.

  Belly realized he had not yet left the kitchen. Nora told him the time when he asked and then he knew he’d had two beers for every hour. That was nothing, normally that was nothing, but after four years with no alcohol—well, with some alcohol when they smuggled it in but almost none, some but not much—after all that time, those few beers in half as many hours had his brain cells sprained. He looked at the baby and the baby looked back at him.

  “Nora, this was your high chair. Where’d you come up with this? I remember this.”

  “Mom had it.”

  “Oh. Your mother.” How could he have gone so long, so many days stretched into weeks and then months, without thinking of his wife, Myrna? Guilt crawled up the back of his spine. “How is she, anyway?”

  “We’re not talking about her.”

  “Okay.”

  Nora sat down at the table with her now cold cup of fancy coffee. “Belly,” she said. “You are welcome to stay here. Stay here for as long as you want. Stay here till you get a job, at least. But my kids are not driving until they’re old enough to drive, and they’re not drinking until, well, until high school, when everybody else drinks.” She slid her fingers over his. “Is that okay?”

  He withdrew his hand. “What did I say? Did I say anything?”

  “You have to follow the rules.”

  “Nora, honey, I have been obeying the rules for four years.” He heard his own voice break. “I am your father and not one of your children, so don’t you go and —”

  “Belly, are you drunk already?”

  He said, “No.” He said, “Give me a cigarette.”

  “You have to smoke outside.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You can smoke on either of the porches but not in the house,” she said.

  “You’re going to make an old man with two bad hips get up and go outside every time I have to have a cigarette?”

  “It’s not that much to ask, to get your ass up and walk ten feet to the porch to smoke.”

  He stood in the doorway, one foot inside and one foot out, fished a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, and lit it with his new lighter.

  “Out,” Nora said. “I mean it. Let’s not get off to a bad start.” He didn’t budge. She raised her voice. “Move your ass outside, Belly.”

  He swayed in the doorway.

  “Oh my god, you’re totally drunk.”

  He lifted his hands in an overplayed shrug and smiled, and he exhaled smoke into the still heat of the kitchen.

  “I won’t be able to, I can’t do this.” She stopped, took a breath, started again. “I don’t have room for trouble,” she said.

  All the beer circled inside him, it rose up his spine and into his brain and it made the words come out. “Trouble? Trouble? You were the most trying of the bunch, nothing but trouble your whole life, and who looked out for you? Your mother? You think because she saved your high chair she cares about you? She was the one who called you a mistake.”

  He was aware of the children standing in the doorway. Nora laid her head down on the table, and the baby pounded his fists on the high chair and gurgled with his spit.

  All the day’s nervousness had burned down to a fine dust inside him, and he felt calm and sedated and, even at this early hour, ready to find his bed.

  Nora stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. She opened and closed the cabinets gently, taking out cans and a package of pasta, ignoring him as the boys slumped back into the TV room, and the digital music of video games filled the air.

  “Nora,” he said, and she said, “No.”

  He stepped outside to the porch, put his cigarette out between the sagging and splintered wooden planks and carefully placed the lighter in the pocket of his jeans, the lighter Maybelline had fixed up just for him, and he knew he would see her soon and that she would save him from this house.

  He waited on the porch. He waited for Nora to coax him back in, to ask him what he wanted to eat on his first night as a free man, but she kept her head bent over the boiling water and the half-open cans and the spine of a glossy magazine. He stepped off the porch, cowboy boots hitting macadam, and that was the moment when he finally and for the first time felt free.

  The stillness of late-afternoon heat made his town look hazy in a movie sort of way. A slight breeze blew through the tall pines across from School Four, where all of his daughters had gone to elementary school before it became a center for vocational training. He walked down the hill and started up, traversing the great fault on which the city was built. Congress Park on his left, Hawthorne Spring on his right, the wide slide of Spring Street between them.

  Long ago, the day after Nora was married, he’d walked down Spring Street, alone, early in the morning, 6:00, 6:30. He’d stayed up all night partying; those were the days when people still laid the coke out in little volcanoes on streaky mirrors in back rooms. The wedding was at St. Peter’s and the reception at War Bar. It was one of those times when Loretta wasn’t speaking to him, so he’d taken another girl, a girl whose name was long forgotten, but he could remember the spider-web scars from a breast reduction reaching across her chest. At some point in the night, he’d screwed her in the bathroom; she’d been pounding Greyhounds, and right after he finished, she leaned over and vomited grapefruit and vodka into the sink. He sent her home in a cab, closed the place up himself, headed east, carrying the girl’s long coat in his arms as the sun rose. Nora had married in December, amid all the gray gloom.

  He was headed up the hill that morning when a car pulled over, a long, green station wagon with fake wood paneling on the side. It was Mrs. Radcliffe, the hot across-the-street neighbor from when the whole family lived on Phila Street, the one with the pool where his grandchildren now swam. “Can I give you a lift?” she’d asked, her big, wet, half-Mexican eyes taunting him.

  “Why the hell not?”

  He’d climbed into the passenger seat, watched her maneuver her big boat of a Ford through the empty street. He’d never once seen this woman without makeup, hair spray, the whole thing, never seen her in curlers or with her lipstick smudged. She came out every morning, afternoon, evening, like a perfectly done-up sex goddess, teasing him from across Phila Street.

  “What are you doing out at this hour?” she’d asked.

  “Nora got hitched last night. It was an all-night affair.”

  “I see,” she’d said, pursing her lips, her perfect lips, in a half-moon of disapproval. He’d forgotten for a moment what a strict Catholic she was, that the few times he’d made it to church, hungover and disheveled, she’d always been up in the front pews with her perfect frilly dresses and her perfect husband in his pressed suit, like caricatures of good Christians.

  They’d turned onto Circular Street, and she’d asked him, “Where are you headed? Where can I drop you?”

  “Home,” he’d said, like an accusation.

  “Where do you live now? I don’t even know.”

  He’d forgotten. Everything. That he lived above the bar by then with Ann and Eliza, daughters two and four, that his third daughter was taken too soon, and then his wife had left him. He’d thought she was taking him back to Phila Street, to his old life, that she’d drop him in front of the old place and he’d open the door to find everything, his former family all intact.

  “Just let me out here,” he’d said, and she pulled up against the curb, a
nd he’d slammed the door without so much as a thank-you, as if she were responsible for the fact that his home was a cramped apartment above the bar where only two of the five women in his life still remained.

  He stood now on that very corner, it must be fifteen years later. The house that stood before him that day—a crumbling brick Greek Revival—had loomed like a joke, a magnificent structure rotting from the inside out. Now that same house was whitewashed, remodeled, with two Mercedes tucked neatly in the multicolored gravel driveway where Volkswagen campers used to park. He never thought he’d hear himself say it, but he missed the hippies now. At least they let his poor lady-town rest in her stately disrepair and didn’t dress her up with million-dollar cars and doodled driveways.

  “There’s the man himself,” he heard a woman say, and next to him was Margie, Eliza’s husband’s sister. He supposed that made her some sort of long-lost daughter-in-law, and she had so much hair on her face she was almost like the son he’d never had. She was a big woman with wild brown hair and gray eyes that had too much white below the eyelid, giving her a startled look. She never wore makeup or even shaved her legs. He had often wondered how she’d found a husband.

  “What are you doing out in the middle of the day, Margie? Don’t you have a job?”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  He looked up toward his hairline and then at the clouds that held no promise of rain.

  “I just walked home for a late lunch, heading back to the office now.” Margie patted her briefcase. It looked like it was made of straw. “Prison did wonders for you. You look strangely good. Just your hair turned gray.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “I thought you’d come back bald and fat or something. You look like you’ve been summering in the Hamptons.”

  “We did have golf,” he said.

  “Well, how the hell are you?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “Oh, come on. Really. How are you?”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m tired. It’s hot. I’m unemployed. I’m out of jail. I’m fine.”

  Margie switched her weight from one thick ankle to the other. “Well, in a strange sort of way we missed you. They cleaned out all the local criminal color and installed law-abiding yuppies.”

  “I heard you got one of your own in City Hall now.”

  “Yes, a Democrat, finally, after sixty years of Republican rule, not to mention a hundred years of racetrack corruption.”

  “I meant a Jew.”

  “Oh, that,” she said.

  “Your people have surmounted the final frontier.”

  “Jesus, Belly, leave my people alone. I do.”

  “I’ve got nothing against your people, Margie. I just believe in the Bible, and the Bible’s got nothing to do with the Jews.”

  That burning feeling was beginning to resurface, here in the late-afternoon sun with Margie and the whitewashed mansion, and the beer was evaporating and the sweat beaded at his forehead.

  “I am talking to Archie Bunker live and in person,” Margie said.

  He turned his head away from her, smiling with one side of his mouth, and when he saw her face turn red, saw her clench her teeth and force herself not to yell at him, he felt calm again.

  “Tell you what, Belly. Why don’t we go downtown and get a cup of coffee? I know a nice place down there on the corner. They call it Café Newton, I believe.”

  “You go ahead. Just contribute to the downfall of Saratoga with your four-dollar coffee. Join Nora.”

  Margie stepped into the shade of a mulberry tree. “Hey, don’t blame me. I’m on your side. I’m Mrs. Small Business Association. I’m the whole town planning office. I’d rather have a locally owned bookie joint than a big chain coffee store.”

  “It was a bar, not a bookie joint.” He scraped his cowboy boot along the cracked sidewalk, wiped his palms on his jeans.

  “They don’t send you to prison for four years for running a bar in this town. We’ve got more bars per square foot than any other town in New York State.”

  “Thanks for the statistics.”

  “It’s my job.” She moved her briefcase to the other hand. “All I’m saying is, I’m on your side.”

  “No thanks, kid.” He fanned his collar. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Did I offer you any?” Margie looked down at her shoes and said, “Shit.” Squashed mulberries stained the bottoms. “Goddammit, I have to go to my meeting with berry juice on my soles.”

  Belly laughed at her, two sharp ha’s erupting from the back of his throat.

  Margie brushed a sweaty clump of hair from her face. “Lord God, you’re a misanthrope.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  Margie started to cross the street, calling behind her, “Okay, Belly. Nice to run into you. Not really, but congratulations on getting out and I hope you turn into a nice person.”

  She was already halfway down Spring Street when he thought to yell back at her, “Fuck you and your ancestors!”

  Maybelline the Springway waitress was a mighty step down from his normal harem. He’d been out with hostesses and a couple of sous-chefs; he’d even been out with girls who danced at the Bunk House down Route 9 in Half Moon, but most of those girls were putting themselves through law school on tips. That’s what they said, anyway.

  He’d never had a problem getting women. He could dance, that was one thing. He could lead any woman through the tango, like his grandfather taught him, twist her up till she collapsed in his arms. He could dance, and he had all his hair, and aside from a few extra moles sprouting on his back, age had mostly forgotten him. The older he got, the younger his girlfriends became, and it was this more than anything else in his life that made him feel his place was safe at the top of the food chain.

  He walked into Ruffian’s, trying to keep his head down and his eyes up at the same time, trying to hide himself and hoping to be recognized. This was a place he never came: the competition. Just a narrow, dark room painted billiard green, with a good jukebox. He fantasized for a split second that this bar was Loretta’s new hangout, that she would see him here with his orange-gooped-up ladyfriend. There would be a fight, Loretta and Maybelline tearing at each other’s hair, at each other’s clothes, Belly between them playing referee, and he would get to go home with both of them, briefly, and then, after, send the younger girl on her way, and it would be just him and Loretta, alone and back together.

  But he would never have the energy for that kind of evening. He sat at a plastic table with the girl and ordered JD neat from the short, dark waitress who didn’t know his name.

  Maybelline had done herself up in a variety of animal prints. Cheetah, leopard, tiger—he couldn’t remember the difference. He hated cats. But he had not touched a woman in four years, and here was this pretty, young girl before him, warm to him for some reason he couldn’t determine, and he was in no mood to be choosy.

  “What were you in jail for?” Maybelline asked him, doing that same stupid trick with the straw: blowing air through it and nibbling on the end. Then she dunked it in her whiskey sour, slurping drops of alcohol from the gnarled tip.

  “Oh, you know,” he started, but he could see he’d have to confess before she’d sleep with him. “Nothing bad, don’t worry. Just gambling.”

  She giggled. “I know. I know all about it. It was in the papers.”

  “You read the papers?”

  She stuck out her tongue. “I’m just saying, it was in the news.”

  “Just now it was?” he asked. “That I was out?”

  “No, before,” she said. “Whenever that was, five years ago. The trial and everything.” She sipped from her tumbler and nibbled on the waxy maraschino stem. “You were famous.”

  “Only for three weeks,” he said. He looked at the orange sparkling above her eyelid. He wanted her, but he wanted her to be someone else. She smiled at him, a little fleck of orangish lipstick wedded to
her front tooth, and when he smiled back, his lips were lying.

  “Will you open up your bar again?” she asked him.

  He didn’t tell her that he couldn’t. “I have to get my own place first. I’m staying with my daughter for now.”

  She looked disappointed, kind of green like all that copper had oxidized. He figured it was over, no chance to win this one, so he reached out to touch her hand, her small hand with thick fingers and long nails and too many fake gold rings. He rubbed the soft fleshy pad under her thumb and thought, if this was the only contact he had with a woman, maybe that would be enough. If he closed his eyes and held her hand, he could pretend something bigger had happened.

  “I have roommates,” Maybelline said. “But we can go to my place.”

  Belly looked up. She wasn’t joking. He wondered if perhaps his daughters had pooled their resources and rented her for the night, if the New York Racing Association was sending him a sign, if Maybelline was a present offered him from some beneficent bystander waiting to reveal himself from behind the bar at Ruffian’s. But it was just this girl, a girl who’d heard of him in his glory days, willing to give herself to him. Who was he to say no?

  All he could think before, during, and after: It’s so good to fuck.

  They drove from Saratoga to her apartment in Ballston Spa, which was pretty much like living on Central Park West and driving out to Queens to get laid. He sat in the passenger seat of her puttering Hyundai while she drove him to her small, carpeted apartment in a sliced-up old Stick-style mansion. She had a tiny room with a tiny window and a tiny bed and two teddy bears in the corner: thirty-two years old with teddy bears. Two ugly calico cats circled them wherever they walked.

  Belly lay on Maybelline’s frilly dollhouse bed and let her wait on him. She couldn’t cook anything. Burned the Pop-Tarts that were their dinner. Mixed too much water in the OJ. Heated up frozen mini-quiches in the oven till the crusts caught on fire and set off the smoke detectors so they belted out their songs like opera stars. It got so he was used to the taste of tar. “Inured” was the fancy word. And he lay there, inured, chewing on his burned-up food, his first meal out of prison, while Maybelline rested her head on the gray fuzz of his stomach, listening to his gastric juices stir and the smoke detectors sing till there was a whole orchestra in her house, in her bed, in her arms, every instrument off-key or broken, until she stood on her painted-pink step stool and silenced them, silenced even what was inside him.