ROSEMARY STOOD AT
the Boardwalk railing, watching Anthony play with her daughter in the wash and drain of the surf.
She felt nothing.
The Miss America Parade had been over for an hour or so, but there was still a beautiful day going on, probably the last one like it for the summer. With the sun casting a bright, clarifying light on everything below.
But Rosemary didn’t care about that either.
Anthony picked up Kimmy and held her over his head so their faces were just a foot apart. She laughed like a little homicidal maniac and Anthony kissed her on the nose.
How could he be so good with her kid one minute and ask her to do this terrible thing the next? What kind of man was he? After all the time they’d spent together, she still couldn’t quite get a handle on him.
And then there was the matter of that guy Nicky who’d turned up dead under the Boardwalk. But she’d made a definite decision not to think about that anymore and she had to stick to it.
One of those old wicker rolling chairs went by behind her and a voice with an Irish accent asked if she wanted a ride. She didn’t bother answering.
Anthony had Kimmy by the ankles and was swinging her around like she was a propeller. She screamed with glee. This would be a day she’d remember for years, especially if they bought her some saltwater taffy later. Her own father never took her out and played with her like this. Just looking at Anthony, you’d think he’d be the perfect stepfather.
Rosemary felt as though she was watching the whole scene from somewhere very far away. It was the same way she feltsometimes when she used to dance on top of bars. Like her body wasn’t really her body. It was just a thing she could rent out for other people to look at awhile.
Maybe she could do this thing she was talking about with Anthony.
Someone with a bullhorn nearby was announcing that tickets were still available for the Miss America finals at the Convention Center tonight. Miss America. They took these girls from all over the country, they made them up like dolls, and they brought them here. To hold their contest and lengthen the summer season. They brought them from Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, and a million other places she’d probably never go as long as she lived. Girls who were young like she used to be. Who didn’t make all the wrong decisions. Who didn’t drop out. Who didn’t marry junkies. Who didn’t end up supporting their husbands’ habits in the backseats of Hondas. Who didn’t live in housing projects. Who didn’t have a kid to look after by themselves. They trained, they smiled, they gave speeches about how they wanted to help others less fortunate. They performed in the talent competitions, they gave interviews, and they modeled elegant evening wear. And in the end, they used their bodies to get what they wanted. That was the deal they made with themselves.
So who were they or anybody else to sit in judgment on her?
Anthony caught Kimmy in his arms and hugged her as the little waves lapped around his thin white ankles.
Rosemary came down the Boardwalk steps and walked across the beach toward them. She took off her shoes and hard cracked shells in the sand cut into the soles of her feet. Kimmy was looking over Anthony’s shoulder, waving and smiling with the gap in her teeth showing.
“Hi, Mommy!”
Maybe in the end she wouldn’t remember any of this. Maybe it was just another day of being four and seeing the boats on the water. And the other children with pails and shovels building dribble castles in the sand. And in a little while, she’d have front teeth and forget everything that happened this afternoon. Maybe by then they’d be in Seattle with the sprinklers and the wading pool in the backyard.
So what did it matter what you did at any given moment or any given hour in your life? Just as long as you got by and went on to the next thing.
Anthony turned to face Rosemary, with Kimmy still hanging over his shoulder, looking the other way.
“So what do you think?”
“I don’t know, Anthony. The whole thing gives me a very bad feeling. But if I go ahead and do it, I want half of whatever you end up making from the fight.”
It was just another deal she was making with herself. To get something, you had to give up something. The only question was, how did you live with yourself afterwards?
“Good.” Anthony smiled. “I’m glad you came to a decision right away. Life’s too short.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Rosemary. “And I’m not too thrilled about it either.”
TEDDY SAT IN
Dr. Josephson’s office after the exam, staring at the edge of the brown oak desk. He felt vaguely ashamed about what the doctor had done to him.
“Mr. Marino, are you a man who can handle bad news?”
“That’s my trade,” said Teddy.
“Then let me be straight with you. I did find a nodule during the examination. And I think we need to proceed with the tests to determine whether you have prostate cancer.”
The words barely registered with Teddy. They were just pebbles falling in a deep well. He stared directly at the doctor, waiting for correction or clarification.
“I see no reason to wait,” said the doctor. “So I’d like to schedule you for a PSA, an ultrasound, and—if it’s necessary—a biopsy within the next week or so.”
Teddy blinked. “What’s a PSA?”
The doctor leaned back in his leather chair and shrugged. “It’s a blood test.”
“And what about that biopsy?”
“Well, hopefully it won’t be needed. It’s just to determine whether you have a malignancy.”
Teddy stiffened, feeling the words come closer and closer to his heart. The pebbles in the well turned into huge boulders, hurtling down. “And how do you do it?”
“Do you really want to know at this stage?”
“I’m telling you, be straight with me!” Teddy demanded, anxiety finally beginning to get the better of him.
“We usually go in through the rectum with an eighteen-to twenty-four-inch needle,” the doctor said reluctantly.
Teddy’s eyes began to water and the floor began to swim under his feet. His head felt light and he started to list heavily sideways, tipping over his chair.
He hit the floor before the doctor could say he hoped surgery wouldn’t be necessary.
ROSEMARY CAME OUT
of the bathroom wearing a black rayon teddy with nothing on the bottom.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” she said, “but I’m feeling kind of shy.”
Terrence Mulvehill was still lying on the bed waiting for her. He was a powerfully built young man, standing five foot ten, weighing 170 pounds. Muscles wrapped around his arms like steel cables and stretched across his chest like dark armor. He turned his body and casually threw back the sheet, as though he was used to having his physique studied. Thick dreadlocks fell over his eyes.
“Listen, like, I really wanna fuck you. You know?”
“I know, but I’m all nervous.”
“Can I tell you something?” he said in a high, delicate voice. “I ain’t been out in about a month. I stopped trying to fuck anybody. Now when I go out to a club I gotta have three bodyguards around me all the time to keep the women away. Because you never know when someone’s gonna like sleep with you and then say it was rape. Right? There’s a lot of bitches and hoes out there.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure.” Rosemary sat on a pink chair in the corner of the room and looked a little pale.
“Like the other night, right, I went out to this club in New York. The Palladium. Right? I’m dancing with this girl and she’s beautiful, you know. The ass was like right on time and she had the kinda titties you see in them magazines. Right? So just when I’m about to ask her to come home with me so I can make it with her, my bodyguard Amal comes up and says, ‘Yo, Terry, that’s a guy.’ I’m like, ‘Get the fuck outa here.’ And he says, ‘No, man, that’s Jack Pearson. I went to school with him at De Witt Clinton.”
“No shit,” said Rosemary.
“No shit.”
Terrence sat up and the covers fell back from his erection. “So then like I see this other girl and I look at her a long time to make sure it’s a girl. Right?” He rested the side of his face on his hand. “She’s four foot eleven and she got tiny little hands, so now I’m sure this is like a female. So Amal goes up and he starts talking to her, man. And I’m just like hanging back, waiting for him to bring her over. I’m dancing to Bobby Brown and just hanging.”
He closed his eyes and twitched his shoulders, savoring the memory of the beat.
“But then I look up and Amal’s got his arm around this girl. So I’m like, ‘Yo, Amal. What’s up with this shit? What am I payin’ you for, man? I ain’t payin’ you to hang around flirting with girls.’ I was disgusted. I was really disgusted, man. I walked right out and went to my car. My brand-new Porsche, right. And some like homeless guy is scratching his name on the side with a rusty key.”
“Oh no.” Rosemary started to laugh.
He went on, “I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?” he asked in appalled falsetto. “And he’s like, ‘This is Terry Mulvehill’s car.’ I’m like ‘Fuck, I am Terry Mulvehill. Stop writing on my damn car.’”
He shook his head, mortified. “Damn,” he said. “I don’t never have fun no more. It’s got so I don’t trust no one. I’d rather be by myself.”
He touched his erection again and became very still. To Rosemary, he seemed like a confused child trapped inside a warrior’s body.
“That’s all right,” Terrence said, rolling over on his side. “I don’t mind being alone. I just close the curtains and stay in bed all day. Only time I get out is to train.”
Rosemary crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. The tinfoil packet of cocaine was on the ivory-colored bureau next to her. “I read that once,” she said. “I read how when you’re an athlete you’re not supposed to sleep with anybody the night before.”
“Man, that’s bullshit,” Terrence told her, putting both hands behind his head and doing half a sit-up. The musclesin his stomach bulged like oranges packed tightly into a crate. “When I was married last year, I fucked before every fight I had and I knocked every one of them suckers out. That don’t have nothing to do with it. It’s just they all bitches, man. Every one of them. Even my mother. They just after the money. My mother didn’t even call me ’til I got the title. My father brought me up and taught me how to fight. He taught me everything I know about women. And I love and respect the man for it. Otherwise them bitches would have all my money by now.”
“You always have to watch yourself,” said Rosemary.
In the mirror across the room, she saw herself swinging one leg over the other with the cigarette burning down in her hand. His erection never wavered, she noticed. Men were all the same. You’d have to strap a stick of dynamite to it to truly get their attention.
“That’s why when you called, I say ‘come on up.’” He smiled eagerly, “You ain’t gonna charge me, right?”
“Nope, this one’s a free ride,” she said in a tired voice.
“Yeah, yeah, see. And I know you like being with me, just to be with me. Right? Like you like me ’cause you a natural freak. Right? You don’t want nothing from me. You just like to fuck me.”
He was so sincere, so anxious to be liked, it was almost painful to listen. She caught sight of herself in the mirror again, guiltily tapping out her cigarette in the ashtray.
“See, that’s why I let you up, when you called before,” said Terrence. “Because I know I can trust you. And we just gonna hang and have a good time. Right?”
She forced herself to smile. “We’re gonna do the do, Terry.”
“Yeah, yeah. ’Cause otherwise I think I’d just rather sit by myself in the dark.”
He looked down at his penis sorrowfully as though it were a wounded pet.
“That’s kind of depressing.”
“Yeah, it do get lonely sometimes,” Terrence said. “I get to feeling so bad, I think I never find no one wants to be with me. Like sometimes I think I’d rather be dead. Just the other night, you know, I was standing right out on that balcony over there, thinking what it’d be like if I threw myself off.”
He stared at the window ten feet across the room, as if he was still considering jumping. Then he lowered his eyes and balled up part of the bedsheet in his fist. His left knee came up protectively in front of his groin.
“But then you called,” he said. “And things got much more better.”
He smiled and his gold incisors flashed at her. “Anybody ever tell you, you got like beautiful eyes?”
“Gee, I, uh, yeah, I guess so.”
“Well like don’t tell anybody I said that to you, ’cause they might like think I’m gettin’ soft. I’m supposed to be the Monster, you know.”
She forced another smile as she picked up the tinfoil packet from the bureau top. “I like you too, Terry.”
“So can we like do it now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m still kinda nervous. You sure you won’t get high with me first?”
“YOU BELIEVE THIS?”
said Teddy.
He sat on a bed in the Atlantic City Medical Center a few days later, wearing a large white hospital gown with blue polka dots on it. An IV needle was stuck in his right arm and a catheter tube ran under the covers into the head of his penis. He regarded both of them miserably.
“Prostate cancer,” he said.
“I thought it was your stomach,” said Vin, sitting by the bedside.
“They still don’t know what’s the matter there. I got that cough too. Every fucking thing is breaking down at once. That’s why they wanted to operate right away.”
Teddy held his mouth shut, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with all the bile he’d accumulated inside. An elderly man’s voice groaned behind the beige canvas curtain that divided the room. Vin turned on the radio on Ted’s night table to drown out any potential wiretaps.
“Vin, I got one question for you,” Teddy said with a loud racking cough. “Where are we going?”
“I know.”
“I’m serious.” Teddy coughed again and looked at the radio playing “Greensleeves.” “A couple of days after I got pinched, I had a sit-down with my lawyer Burt Ryan. He tells me about this contract for fixing the City Hall parking lot. Turns out Lenny Romano got it. You know, Nat the bookmaker’s son, from over Margate. ‘Why’s that?’ I ask. ‘Oh,’ says Burt. ‘I thought he had your permission.’ Like I’m an asshole and I don’t know what’s going on. He says he thought Lenny was a ‘friend of ours.’
Minchia!
Where are we going here? What am I gonna do, act like I don’t know what’s going on in my own
borgata?”
“Of course,” Vin assured him, running the Ace comb once through his hair.
“Plus, I got Danny Klein borrowing thirty large from me and not telling me who it’s for. You see, Vin, it’s no good. We can’t have that. We can’t have a circus. All these little factions are running around trying to conquer the market under our flag. It all comes down to the same thing. Where are we going? I mean, not for nothing, but your own son Anthony . .. You know I don’t like Anthony. I love him. And he loves me. I know that. Every time he sees me, he says, ‘Teddy, I only got one love, you.’”
“Right,” said Vin, though he didn’t look too sure.
“So why do I have to hear from Burt that Anthony’s getting involved with some fight at the Doubloon this fall?”
“I don’t know nothing about that!” Vin looked stricken. “Burt musta got his facts wrong. Anthony wouldn’t get involved with anything serious without clearing it with us.”
“Vin, I given that kid every chance in the world. I bankrolled his entire life. If I find out he’s been making money without putting anything in the elbow ...”
Vin jumped up. “It’s not true! Anthony’s pledged the first dollar he makes to you. But the kid’s broke. You seen how he’s living.”
“Vin, look at me.”
“I’m looking.”
“No, Vin. Look at me.”
Vin met his eyes.
“Is this what our marriage is about?” Ted glared at him.
“No, Ted...”
“Is this what it is? Lying, deceiving each other? Over money?”
“No, Ted...”
“Then why don’t you level with me?” The strain put a crease between Teddy’s eyes. “If Anthony’s doing a fight at the casino, there’s gotta be at least a million coming out of it. And I’m entitled to at least half of that. Am I right?”
“Of course, Ted. But Anthony wouldn’t lie to us about that.”
“Yeah, why not?”
“He’s my son, Ted.”
“He’s not your son. You couldn’t have a son. Remember? Low sperm count, the doctor said. Not enough firepower.” Teddy jerked his catheter tube to emphasize the point and swore when he hurt himself.
A nurse came in, looked at his chart, and left.
“Let me ask you something,” said Teddy. “Who are you loyal to? Me or Anthony?”
Vin shook his head. “Teddy, why you wanna hurt me like this? You’re my
rappresentante.
You know my love is only for you.”
“Then prove it,” Teddy demanded, putting his wide white fingers over Vin’s stony knuckles. “Get me that fuckin’ payout. Between these fuckin’ doctors and lawyers, I’m already a hundred G’s in the hole.”
Another nurse came in, saw the two men holding hands, and smiled. She changed the bag of fluid feeding into Teddy’s IV tube and left.
“Ted,” Vin began in an earnest voice. “I’m gonna get to the bottom of this. I’ll go over there and talk to Anthony right now. I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding.”
“It better be.” Teddy frowned at his catheter again. “I’m getting tired of waiting for him to do what’s right.”