Bitter Bronx (10 page)

“My father fired you, didn't he?”

“Yes, he did, Miss Marla.”

“You were gone in a flash. That much I do remember.”

“He would have forgiven anything if I had been a Silk. We grew up in the same Bronx neighborhood.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He'd lived at the Lewis Morris—I lived there many years later, when it was more like a jail, with wire mesh in the windows to keep out the burglars and the addicts. We liked to reminisce. That's why he hired me. I didn't have much of a résumé. I was lucky to get out of Fordham alive.”

“And then he fired you.”

“I went through all his female executives like a crazy scythe.”

“Then why didn't you get to me . . . with the same scythe?”

“Ah,” he said with a gorgeous smile. “I have one cardinal rule: Never touch the boss's daughter.”

His last name was Banderas, like the movie star who was married to Melanie Griffith. His first name was Raoul. They met at the St. Regis almost every night, dined at the bar. At first he wouldn't take any cash from her. But she insisted.

“Indulge me,” she said. “Use it as pocket money to replenish your wardrobe with another Yale tie.”

“But I might strangle you with it if you make fun of me, Miss Marla.”

“That would be perfect—to come before I croaked.”

She would traipse home at one in the morning in her million-dollar pumps from Louboutin and find Lollie sitting there like a bulldog.

“You've abandoned your own girls.”

Lollie knew how to blind her daughter with a few choice barbs. But Marla wouldn't let Lollie catch her with blood in her eyes.

“They can always Twitter me if they're in trouble.”

“You're heartless,” Lollie said.

“No, I'm crazy about a man.”

M
arla had no one to talk to about her own Antonio Banderas. But she did ask Mortimer to accompany her into the Bronx and show her where the Silks had once resided. He was forlorn in his tattered robe. But he relished being in a limo, and his good humor came back. They traveled up to the Concourse. The Lewis Morris resembled a Park Avenue palace that had fallen into ruin. Part of its front wall seemed as if it had been burnt or been lately under siege. Its doorman had a bulletproof vest.

Daddy had a blank look on the damaged side of his face. The stroke had ravaged him, but some fire still must have burned inside his skull. And suddenly he wasn't ravaged at all.

“Marla, once upon a time, dentists would kill for a suite at the Lewis Morris.”

They rode down a hill to a tiny Italian ghetto with its own ducal restaurant, where the waiters welcomed Daddy in his robe. They served him dish after dish, with tiny glasses of red wine. Marla ate whatever Daddy ate. Finally she mentioned Raoul.

“He's probably a confidence man, but I don't care. Why did you fire him?”

She could feel him wander through all that rubble in his head. The bad side of his face began to twitch.

“I never fired anyone named Raoul.”

“You talked with him about the Bronx—and the Lewis Morris. Daddy, Raoul looks like Antonio Banderas.”

The clam sauce had spilled under Mortimer's napkin—Marla wouldn't wipe her own father, as if he were a deranged orphan at the restaurant. But there was a boy's mischief in his eye.

“Does he have a little scar under his mouth—almost like an unhealed scratch?”

“Yes!” She gripped Mortimer's arm so fiercely, he started to blanch.

“He moved in with one of our bookkeepers, beat up her boys, and threatened to kill them if she didn't hand over her paycheck—every month. He held one of her boys halfway out the window. Gabriel, that's the name he used. And he wasn't from the Bronx.”

“How come you never told me about this Gabriel?”

The mischief was still there in Daddy's eye. “Tell you what? That he was the lord and master of our copy machines? The detectives who came looking for him said he was some customer. He set a man on fire in Miami.”

Marla ran home to her little girls, who weren't so little anymore. Candice and Lollie Jr. thought she was insane when she tried to hug them for a whole minute.

“Mother,” Candice said, “you're wrinkling my blouse.”

But Marla adored their complaints, even adored their texting and Twittering—that electric quality of their lives, where one minute morphed into another with its own maniacal message.

She couldn't confront Raoul. He would only have lied and lied until she weakened and licked his scar again. She met with the same team that had “solved” Daddy's other problems, had scared off the witnesses in his court case. She'd never asked these shadow men about their methods, but this time she did.

“I don't want him hurt—just frightened to death, so he'll never come near me or my girls.”

They must have been ex-soldiers. They had the straightest backs she had ever seen. That's what she liked about them. They had their own touch of class. She told them about her next rendezvous at the St. Regis. She paid the shadow men in hundred-dollar bills.

“Mrs. Silk,” they said, “just you rest up. It will be done.”

She hadn't bothered to change her name, even when she was married. Candice and Lollie Jr. were Silks, just like her.

“You won't hurt him?”

“Not a hair on his head.”

She panicked, wanted to call Raoul and tell him to run. But she knew the consequences. Raoul might have stalked her, sat at the bar, right under King Cole in his funny crown, like a lunatic's thinking cap.

She kept away from the St. Regis, though she continued to rent the room. It made her feel mysterious. Six months passed. She had to rescue Lollie one more time from the clutches of Central Park. She played pinochle with her father whenever she had a free moment. She hired a tutor to help Candice and Lollie Jr. with their homework and thanked God they hadn't been harmed by that maniac who'd set fire to a man in Miami. And she threw herself into her own work. She was named a senior vice president and decided to celebrate with a glass of pinot noir at the St. Regis.

Marla sat in her old chair, right under the reds, browns, and blues of Maxfield Parrish. She paid no attention to the yattering around her. She looked at the bottles of Courvoisier behind the bar. And it was as if she'd conjured him up from a dream. There he was in his Yale tie, with bruises under his cheekbone.

“Miss Marla, I told the barman that your drink was on the house. Old King Cole is as happy to see you as I am.”

He hesitated, didn't sit down at first. She couldn't stop peeking at the scar near his mouth. Daddy had been right. It did look like an inflamed scratch.

She'd finished half her pinot noir, and she could afford to play the conjurer. She beckoned Gabriel-Raoul to sit beside her.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Your hirelings knew how to be delicate. They could have broken my face, but they didn't.”

Marla wanted to lick all his wounds and shout that she was sorry.

“You shouldn't have followed me here,” she said.

“I wasn't following you, Miss Marla. This is my watering hole. I sit here like a monk and commune with King Cole.”

“Whenever you're not setting fire to someone or hanging little boys outside a window.”

The wound near his mouth seemed to leap out of its own carapace, like some living creature.

“I should slap your face,” he said.

“I'll kill you if you come near my children.”

She started to cry. She didn't even have much of a revelation. Daddy had hid behind one of his Marrano masks—he'd lied about Raoul.

She stood up and meandered up to her room, with that fugitive from Miami right behind her. She would have welcomed a beating. She's the one who had been bad. But Raoul was as tender with her as he had ever been. Marla was confused. She wanted to be spanked. Then he wrapped his Yale necktie around her neck.
Good
, she thought.
It will be the end of me
.

But he made love to her with that necktie around her neck, as if she were Yale's homecoming queen. Marla couldn't believe that he'd set fire to a man. She traced the scars on his chest with her little finger. But she had to declare her own independence from him before she was swallowed up in that wonderful map of his skin.

“Raoul, or whatever your name is, how many men did you murder in Miami?”

He smiled, and all her gruffness went away.

“Miss Marla, I couldn't even tell you what Miami looks like.”

“Father says you were in charge of the copy machine.”

He was no longer smiling. “Yeah, I
was
his copying machine.”

“Don't be so damn cryptic,” she spat at him. She was donning her very own mask. If Marla didn't get away from Raoul and the St. Regis, she would be ruined.

“I looked after his mistresses,” he said.

“What mistresses?”

“Why do you think I got that cozy with the St. Regis? Mr. Mortimer kept his own suite.”

“I don't believe it,” Marla said. But she did believe it. That's the kind of secret Daddy would have.

“Some were call girls,” Raoul said. “I'd entertain them until Mr. Mortimer arrived. Some were fashion designers and models who needed an extra buck. Your father wasn't interested in romance. I did most of his courting.”

“Stop it,” Marla said. “You were Mortimer's pimp.”

“No,” Raoul said. “I never chose his mistresses. I amused them.”

“And took them up to my father's room.”

She raged with jealousy as she imagined the tight little bodies of the models and the Rubenesque proportions of the prostitutes—their ample arms, breasts that could smother Raoul.

“That's why I got canned. He said I made him look small, that he couldn't tantalize these women after they had been with me.”

“And what happened when I walked into the King Cole that first time?”

“I was confused. The barmen told me you had your own room. And I figured that Mr. Mortimer had sent you, and that you were looking for a scout.”

She glared at him. “Why would I need the services of a scout?”

“To help you fish for men.”

She wanted to pluck out his eyes. But Marla played the diplomat.

“How delicate you are! But I don't need barmen or scouts. I need you.”

Ah, if she could only have another glass of wine. She didn't know what to do with Raoul. Should she shower money at him, like she did with those shadow men who couldn't even scare him off? Should Marla keep him like a poodle? But she was the poodle, despite her bank account.

“I'll give you a thousand dollars if you spend the night with me—that's what I pay for my shoes.”

He tightened his tie around her windpipe, but even that violence in him was gentle. Marla was lost. He whispered in her ear.

“If you mention money one more time, I will set you on fire.”

She started to cry, but it was the noiseless whimper of a little girl. She could have phoned the nighttime nurse who looked after Lollie and Mortimer, or even Twittered her two girls. They could survive without a mother, at least for one night. She'd never bothered to bring pajamas to the St. Regis. Marla's room had the same soft glow as the King Cole Bar. She could see the outline of Raoul. His eyes seemed to burn in the dark—she loved that dancing, electric dark of the King Cole. She hummed to herself as Raoul wiped her tears with a finger that had the miraculous touch of velvet fur.
Lord
, as Lollie would say,
I have myself a man.
What did she care if Daddy's detectives came for her tomorrow? Daddy didn't have detectives. He had to negotiate each step to the toilet.

Let him tumble. She wouldn't run home to him. Marla was spending the night with Raoul.

LITTLE SISTER

W
hatever Marla did, Marla did so well. The golden spoon she'd been born with had never failed her, but her little sister had gagged on the same spoon. Little Sister wasn't so little. She was a twelve-pound baby who inherited most of Marla's toys. When she couldn't solve their intricate engines, Marla would have to be called in. Little Sister had a name, but no one seemed to recollect it. She'd turn glum or fall into terrible fits. She struck Marla with a shoe when she was three and Marla was four.

She was banished to a back bedroom in the family's palatial apartment on Central Park West. Soon she had her own guardian, and Marla seldom saw her. When Marla was five, Little Sister disappeared from the apartment. Soon Marla began to feel as if she'd never really had a sister, but had been visited by some strange goblin or ghost.

Little Sister was never mentioned at the dinner table. There were no pictures of her in the apartment. The back bedroom was turned into a storage bin, but a lock was on the door, and Marla couldn't get in. Her father, Mortimer Silk, was the arbitrage king of Wall Street. He made fortunes on the rise and fall of currencies and was the commander of his own “frigate,” as he liked to call his firm. Her mother, Lollie, had been the homecoming queen at Ohio State. And whenever Marla had a jolt in her mind and mentioned Little Sister, Lollie would ruffle her nose.