Tough Guys Don't Dance (19 page)

My father's face was without expression. “Do you remember Frank Costello?” he asked.

“Top of the mob,” I said with admiration.

“One night Frank Costello was sitting in a night
club with his blonde, a nice broad, and at the table he's also got Rocky Marciano, Tony Canzoneri and Two-ton Tony Galento. It's a guinea party,” my father said. “The orchestra is playing. So Frank says to Galento, ‘Hey, Two-ton, I want you to dance with Gloria.' That makes Galento nervous. Who wants to dance with the big man's girl? What if she likes him? ‘Hey, Mr. Costello,' says Two-ton Tony, ‘you know I'm no dancer.' ‘Put down your beer,' says Frank, ‘and get out there and move. You'll be very good.' So Two-ton Tony gets up and trots Gloria around the floor at arm's length, and when he comes back, Costello tells the same thing to Canzoneri, and he has to take Gloria out. Then it's Rocky's turn. Marciano believes he's big enough in his own right to call Costello by his first name, so he says, ‘Mr. Frank, we heavyweights are not much on a ballroom floor.' ‘Go do some footwork,' says Costello. While Rocky is out there, Gloria takes the occasion to whisper in his ear, ‘Champ, do me a favor. See if you can get Uncle Frank to do a step with me.'

“Well, when the number is over, Rocky leads her back. He's feeling better and the others got their nerve up too. They start to rib the big man, very careful, you understand, just a little tasteful chaffing. ‘Hey, Mr. Costello,' they say, ‘Mr. C., come on, why don't you give your lady a dance?'

“ ‘Will you,' Gloria asks, ‘please!'

“ ‘It's your turn, Mr. Frank,' they say.

“Costello,” my father told me, “shakes his head. ‘Tough guys,' he says, ‘don't dance.' ”

Now, my father had about five such remarks and he never dropped them on you until he did. “
Inter faeces et urinam nascimur
” became the last and the unhappiest, even as “Don't talk—you'll spill the wind out of the sails” was always the happiest, but through my adolescence, it used to be: “Tough guys don't dance.”

At sixteen, a half-Mick from Long Island, I did not know about Zen masters and their koans, but if I had, I would have said the remark was a koan, since I didn't understand it, yet it stayed with me, and the older I became, the more meaning it offered, until now, sitting on a beach at South Wellfleet, looking out at the surf that came to me at the end of the three-thousand-mile ride of the waves, I thought again of the wonders of erosion that Patty Lareine had worked on my character. The wells of self-pity rose predictably, and I thought it was time to stop thinking of my koan unless I could bring a new thought to the circle.

Surely my father had meant something finer than that you held your ground when there was trouble, something finer that doubtless he could not or would not express, but it was there, his code. It could be no less than a vow. Did I miss some elusive principle on which his philosophy must crystallize?

It was then that I saw a man approaching on the beach. The closer he came, the nearer I came
to recognizing him, and with that, many of my preoccupations with myself began to fade.

He was a tall man but not menacing in appearance. In truth, he was plump, and soon in danger of looking like a pear, for at any weight he would have had a potbelly and not much in the way of shoulders. Moreover, his gait as he walked on the sand was comic. He was well-dressed, in a three-piece pin-stripe charcoal-gray flannel suit with a white collar on a striped shirt, a club tie, a small red handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a camel's-hair coat folded on his arm. To avoid scuffing his brown loafers, he was carrying them in his hand, and so marching in argyle socks over the cold November sand. That gave him the prancing, skittery foot of a show horse stepping over wet cobblestones.

“How are you, Tim?” the man now said to me.

“Wardley!” I was twice stupefied. Once, because he had put on so much weight—he was slim when I saw him last in divorce court—and again, that we should meet on this beach at South Wellfleet I had not visited in five years.

Wardley leaned over and stuck out his hand in the general direction of where I was sitting.

“Tim,” he said, “you were a perfect son of a bitch in the way you acted, but I want you to know, I don't sit on bad feelings. Life, as one's friends constantly admonish, is too short for that.”

I shook his hand. If he was willing, I did not see how I could refuse. After all, his wife had
run across me dead broke in a bar in Tampa—it was the first time she had seen me in close to five years—had given me a job as their chauffeur, had taken me to her bed under his nose, thereby resuming the romantic possibilities we had begun on our night in North Carolina, and had then motivated me to the point where I certainly tried to think up a fail-safe method to kill him. That failing to spark, I certainly did testify against him in the divorce trial, taking the stand to swear—and some of it happened to be true—that he had solicited me to testify against her for a very good sum. I had added that he proposed I take Patty Lareine to a house in Key West that he was prepared to raid with a detective and a photographer. That was not wholly true. He had merely mused aloud over such a possibility. I also said that he had asked me to seduce her with the aim of becoming a witness for him, and that was successful perjury. It is possible my testimony did as much for Patty Lareine as her lawyer with his video coaching. Wardley's legal guns certainly treated me like a star witness and did their best to paint me as an ex-con and a beach bum. They were as nasty as you would expect, but how could I keep any kind of good conscience about my role? Through all of that gig as a chauffeur in his home, Wardley had treated me as an Exeter classmate down on his luck. It had been no way to treat him back.

“Yes,” he said, “I was hurt for a little while, but Meeks always said to me, ‘Wardley, extirpate
self-pity. It's one emotion this family can't afford.' I hope they're dipping Meeks now in the worst pits, but that's neither here nor there. One must take one's advice where one can find it.”

He had the damnedest voice. I will come to describe it in a moment, but for now, his face was over me. Like many ungainly people, he had a habit, when speaking to someone who was seated, of leaning forward from the waist and putting his mug into the air space around your own, so that you were always uneasy you'd receive the dew of his patrician spit. With the sun on his face he looked, particularly at this short distance, like a dollop of oatmeal. He would have been oafish in appearance if he weren't so neat, for his thin dark hair was straight, and his features, left to themselves, were lumpy, lacking in strength and sullen, but the eyes were startling. They were luminous, and had the curious gift of goggling into a blaze at a passing remark as if the devil had just rammed a thumb up Wardley's track.

So his eyes did their best to own you, staring into your face as if you were the first soul he had ever found remotely like his own.

Then there was his voice. My father would have hated it. God certainly used Wardley's voice to display His decency. Whatever Wardley lacked in any other way was made up for by his diphthongs. A snob would turn to cream before those diphthongs.

If I have taken a while to describe my old classmate, it is because I was still in shock. I had
long been a believer in the far reach of coincidence; indeed, I went so far as to think one must always expect it when extraordinary or evil events occur—a bizarre but forceful notion I hope to explain. That Wardley, however, should choose to appear on this beach now—well, I would have been happier at first with a rational explanation.

“It's incredible that you're here,” I said despite myself.

He nodded. “I have absolute faith in chance meetings. If I had a saint, her name would be Serendipity.”

“You seem glad to see me.”

He considered this, his eyes intent on mine. “Do you know,” he said, “everything considered, I think I am.”

“Wardley, you have a good nature. Please sit down.”

He complied, which was a relief. Now, I did not have to look constantly into his eyes. His thigh, however, which had ballooned up as much as the rest of him, rested against mine, a large soft amiable physical object. The truth is that if one had a vocation in that direction, one could have grabbed him, etc. His flesh had the kind of nubile passivity that begged to be abused. In prison, I remembered now, they used to call him “the Duke of Windsor.” I used to hear cons say of Wardley, “Oh, the Duke of Windsor. He's got an asshole as big as a bucket.”

“You don't look well,” Wardley now murmured.

I let this pass, and took my turn to ask, “How long have you been in these parts?” I could have meant this Marconi Beach, South Wellfleet, the Cape, New England, or for that matter, all of New York and Philadelphia too, but he just waved his hand. “Let's talk,” he said, “about vital matters.”

“That's easier.”

“Easier, Mac, you're right. I've always said—in fact, I used to say it to Patty Lareine, ‘Tim has an instinctive gift for good manners. Just like you, he tells it as it is. But he puts the best face on the matter.' I was trying to smuggle a clue, of course, into her obdurate head. How I tried to give her a notion of how to behave.” He laughed. It was with the great pleasure exhibited by people who have spent their lives laughing aloud when they are by themselves, and so, if there was much loneliness in it, there was also extraordinary individuality, as if he didn't care how much was revealed of the most godawful sinks and traps in his plumbing. The liberty of being absolutely himself was worth the rest.

When he had finished this laugh, and I had begun to wonder what was amusing him so, he said, “Since you, me and Patty have been down this road before, let me make it brief. What would you think of doing her in?”

He said it with a gleam, as if proposing the theft of the Koh-i-noor diamond.

“Total?”

“Of course.”

“You don't take long to get to the point.”

“That's the other piece of advice I received from my father. He told me, ‘The more important the matter, the quicker you must broach it. Otherwise, the importance itself will weigh on you. Then you'll never get it proposed.' ”

“Maybe your father was right.”

“Of course.”

He was obviously leaving the option to pursue this suggestion entirely to me.

“I'm inclined to ask,” I said. “How much?”

“How much do you want?”

“Patty Lareine used to promise me the moon,” I said. “ ‘Just get rid of that awful faggot,' she'd say, ‘and you'll have half of all I'll be worth.' ” I said this to be as rude to him as I could. His compliment about my good manners had irritated me. It was so blatant in its stroking. So I said this to see if his wounds had dried. I'm not so certain they had. He blinked rapidly, as though to keep a few emotional paces in front of any loose tears, and said, “Well, I wonder if she now has equally agreeable things to say about you.”

I began to laugh. I had to. I had always assumed that when we were done, Patty Lareine would be kinder to me than she had been to Wardley, but that might be a large supposition.

“Are you in her will?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Do you hate her enough to do the job?”

“Five times over.”

I said it without pause. Talking on the beach
gave a great freedom to say anything. But then the number came back. Had I uttered a true sentiment, or was it merely a repetition of the noxious idea that Madeleine Falco Regency's husband ejaculated five times a night inside that temple I had once adored. Like a boxer, I only seemed to ache hours after the ugly exchanges had taken place.

“I've heard,” Wardley said, “that Patty treated you badly.”

“Well,” I said, “you could use the word.”

“You look whipped. I don't believe you could perform the deed.”

“I'm sure you're right.”

“I don't want to be.”

“Why don't
you
commit it?” I asked.

“Tim, you'll never believe me.”

“Tell me anyway. Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

“That's a good remark.”

“It's not mine. It's Leon Trotsky's.”

“Oh. It's worthy of Ronald Firbank.”

“Where is Patty Lareine now?” I asked.

“She's around. You can count on that.”

“How do you know?”

“She and I are vying for the same piece of property.”

“Are you trying to slay her or defeat her in a business deal?”

“Whichever comes first,” he said with a droll flash of the whites of his eyes. Could he be trying to emulate William F. Buckley, Jr.?

“But you would rather see her dead?” I persisted.

“Not by my own hand.”

“Why not?”

“You simply won't believe me. I want her to look into the eyes of her killer and have it all wrong. I don't want her to see me as the last thing in her life and say, ‘Oh, well, it's Wardley going in for pay-back.' That's too easy. It'll give her peace. She'll know who to haunt as soon as she gets her stuff together in the next place. And I'm not hard to find. Believe me, I prefer her to die in a state of profound confusion. ‘How could Tim have done it?' she'll ask herself. Did I underestimate him?' ”

“You're marvelous.”

“Well,” he said, “I knew you wouldn't comprehend me. But you hardly can, considering the gap in our backgrounds.”

He had turned around sufficiently so that his eyes were looking into mine again. On top of it all, his breath was not too fragrant.

“But if you scotch her in the real estate deal,” I said, “she'll know it's you paying her back.”

“Yes, she will. I want that. I want my living enemies to see my expression. I desire them to know on every breath they take that, yes, yes, it's Wardley who did this to them. Death is different. Send them out in confusion, I say.”