Belly (11 page)

Stevie Ray pressed on the hard white top and said, “It looks dead.”

“Can we have Popsicles?” asked Jimi.

“Go ahead. Clear your places first and then you’re excused.”

Belly looked at the Basset Hound. “You want a Popsicle too, or is that too phallic for you?”

She and Nora exchanged glances.

“I think I’ll just skip dessert,” she said, rising to clear the rest of the table. “There was enough sugar in all that alcohol
we drank.”

So Nora and Bonnie tended to the dishes, leaving the baby in his high chair, and Belly stared down at the sorry pie. He pushed
it onto the baby’s wooden tray. The kid mashed his fingers into it, gloves of yellow cream and white meringue coating his
hands, crust on his fingernails.

“That’s the way,” Belly said as King grabbed handfuls of pie and tossed them onto the dining room floor.

I
t was light outside, and hot, and Belly did not know what to do with the still lake of hours laid before him. In the bathroom
he smoothed his hair, tucked his button-down shirt into his jeans, straightened the pant legs over his cowboy boots.

He thought of something his father told him, long ago, when he asked for a loan to marry Myrna.

“Come back with a bottle of Jameson’s,” his father had said.

“Why?”

“Because booze is the answer to every question.”

Nora was on the front porch, crouched down so her belly rested on her stretchy jeans, inspecting the floorboards. Spring Street
was sleepy, and for a moment it felt like September, like all the tourists had returned his town to him.

“How’s she look?” asked Belly.

“This will be the last thing to work on,” she said. “Gene says the foundation’s rotted. We’ve probably got to pull the whole
thing down and rebuild, but that’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of dealing with the design folks at the city to approve it.”

“What a crock,” Belly said. “The city can tell you what you can do to your house, that you own? That’s bullshit.”

Nora shrugged. “That’s the way it is now.”

They stared at the house across the street. Everything about it was new, but fake-old, with a fancy swinging glider on the
restored porch, perfect lace curtains, intricately painted trim. He felt the slightest bit embarrassed to be standing in front
of this half-finished construction project parading as a house, like the music had stopped and they were the only ones left
standing.

“Who lives there now?”

“Yuppies,” Nora said. “City people who come up on the weekends.” She straightened up, slowly, holding on to the creaking rail.
“So you’re going to the pallet factory tomorrow, right? Gene says you can work in the office, if you want. I imagine you know
a little bit about bookkeeping.”

Belly looked at Nora. “It wasn’t all me,” he said.

“I know, I know it.”

“There were lots of other people in on it, too.”

“I know, Belly. You don’t have to tell me.”

He looked at Nora, swollen Nora with her secret fat boy-friend and her whiny children and her absent husband and he said,
“Okay.”

“I’ll take you over there tomorrow afternoon.”

Belly pressed on the sagging wooden plank beneath his feet and it gave a little, so splinters of dead wood poked through.
“All right,” he said. “Okay.”

B
elly walked down Caroline Street, crowded and teeming with drunken tourists.

He had lived in this town all his life, as had his father, and he didn’t recognize a soul. Somewhere in this milling mess
of people, he was certain, walked Loretta and the NYRA boys and his old clients and his regulars. They must have found a new
home somewhere, maybe at the ridiculous fancy bar Loretta preferred near the end.

He crossed Broadway, the dividing line between east and west, and headed behind the bank, to the big blight of a supermarket
they called the Ghetto Chopper—the slum version of Price Chopper. He bought two bottles of cheap Cabernet and a plastic pocket
combination corkscrew/ bottle opener and headed back south, through the perfectly restored little enclave of Franklin Square
with its Italianate mansions that now housed a bridal shop and a funeral home.

He hooked back to Broadway and stood in front of the visitors’ center, looking at the pretty little bungalow of a building,
the numbers 1915—the year it was built—sunk into a block of cement below it. He was a tourist in his own town, and the thought
made him so thirsty. He kept walking till the sidewalk ended, all the way to that once-abandoned Tudor building by the state
park that now housed the Museum of Dance. It was lit from below, looming like a mausoleum; the half-timber poked from the
stucco like it was trying to break loose.

Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would not drink, he would not be cruel, he would follow the rules and obey. He would sober
up and have his shit together by Sunday. He just needed one more night of swimming in alcohol, of losing himself in it, and
then he would come back. He sat on the dried-up lawn while cars streamed along Route 9, he opened both bottles with his new
corkscrew and he drank one while he waited for the other to breathe. He felt sorry for the grass, so brittle and beige and
begging for rain. Even after the sun set the air was still thick, and he laid his head back on the lawn and waited for the
world to cool.

He saw the women of his life swaying before him, his daughters, mistress, wife, parole officer all dancing on the SPAC stage,
led by some prima ballerina in a toga, a girl with a beautiful, doll-like face. He was on the dais, prostrate, the women as
whirling dervishes around him, concocting some spell, choreographing a tour of his wrongs and misdeeds, his grand mistakes.
They were lifting him up without touching him, the lady in the toga—it was Grace Kelly in
Rear Window
—leaning over him, tickling him with her blue eyes and blond hair and her perfect features till he could stand the tickling
no longer and he reached out to grab her by the hair and her hair came tumbling out.

It was the grass. The grass tickled his face. His face was in the grass, sharp little blades digging into his cheeks. He’d
drunk both bottles, slipped straight into oblivion and did not realize it till he was on his way home. He raised himself on
his wobbly hips and his knees were stained green and the world seemed new in that moment, and also it seemed like a big mean
place, like a woman with a full cart of groceries who would not step aside to let him buy his one little thing.

The walk home was long and hot and then he felt a few drops of rain. He thought, The rain is coming, but it was only a small
rain, a sprinkle that taunted him, and when it left, the temperature rose like a laugh that gets bigger before it stops abruptly
and makes you wonder what was funny in the first place.

I
N THE
morning Bonnie nudged Belly awake. “You’re on the couch again,” she said.

“I can’t make it up to the attic.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. He’d slept in his clothes, and the zipper of his jeans had
carved a neat vee in the flat skin of his stomach.

“Coffee?” She handed him a rainbow mug with big brown letters that read
World’s Greatest Mom.

“Aw, you’re sweet,” he said. “For a man-hater.”

She laughed. “I was warned about your tongue.”

“Oh yeah? You been talking to my old girlfriends?” Something about this girl opened him, or closed him, he couldn’t tell which,
something that compelled him to push on her or pull her toward him.

“Well, no, that’s not what I mean, but more power to you. I heard you already found yourself a nice young one.”

“Maybelline.”

Bonnie handed him a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. “She called four times last night.”

He crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trashcan. He missed. “She’s just a distraction.”

“From what?” Bonnie asked.

“Anybody else call?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. You can ask Nora when she comes back. She said to tell you that you’re going to the pallet factory around
12:30 so you better haul your ass up and look for another job if you want one.”

“What a sweet girl.”

Belly got up and stretched, set his coffee mug on the TV, went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He’d skipped toothbrushing
for two nights, and now he felt the enamel coated in a filmy mush. He came back and Bonnie was still sitting on the couch,
those long legs, those tight jeans—even her knees were sexy—and he picked up the mug and sat down next to her. He was too
tired this morning to summon his disapproval. He hated her for making him want her.

“Are you excited for Stevie’s confirmation?” she asked.

“I don’t know if that’s the word. I just hope I don’t catch fire the moment I set foot in St. Peter’s.”

“Been out sinning?” she asked.

“For years.”

“Well, you went in there all these years you were divorced and nothing happened, right?”

Belly rested the mug on his pants. “Who said I was divorced?”

“Ann did.”

“I’m Catholic,” he said.

She said, “So am I.”

“Well, I never divorced her, and as far as I know she never divorced me.”

She cocked her head to the side. “But you wear no ring.”

“Never did. Men didn’t wear rings back when I got married, back in the Stone Age.”

Belly’s hips were stiff and his head ached and his mouth was dry and his gums were sore and parts of last night were chipped
and faded or not there at all, and he did not want to talk about his wife.

“Listen,” said Bonnie. “I don’t want to offend you or anything, but I have the feeling that if you keep drinking and don’t
go out and look for a job you’re going to piss some people off.”

“Oh, people,” he said. “You mean my family?”

“Yes. Your family. Sounds like your parole officer, too.”

“What can they do? Send me to prison? I’ve been there, and I can tell you, it’s starting to seem like a pleasant alternative
to this nuthouse.” His empty words did not impress her; he didn’t even believe himself.

“I highly doubt that.”

He shrugged. “I still have a few days to get a job before I violate my parole, and the least the family can do is, you know,
give me a little time to relax.” He looked for his cigarettes but could not find them. They seemed to have fallen from his
pocket, swallowed up by last night’s grass. He searched through the kitchen cabinets until he found Nora’s mostly untouched
Marlboros, snuck one from the pack, and returned to the couch. “My family’s not the ones I have to worry about pissing off,
anyway, ” he said.

Bonnie lingered there a moment, her mouth opening and closing like a dying bass. What did she want to know, what did she want
to tell him? He could see her fingers tapping at the couch cushions, wanting to walk toward his hands, what? Maybe she wanted
to comfort him, and he wanted the comfort, too much: it made him feel sick.

“I’m going downtown now, anyway. I’ve got something lined up.”

“Sure you do,” she said.

“I do.”

“I’ve got to go,” Bonnie pulled her hair back in a ponytail, taunting him with that long neck.

He said, “You’re leaving? What a shame,” and he smiled at her so she stood and shook her head. He smoothed out his shirt and
rebuttoned his jeans and snapped his folded hand open and shut in a fake wave good-bye to his daughter’s wife. He put the
unlit cigarette to his lips and pretended to smoke it, just like Nora did.

When she left he felt the ghosts of Nora and Phil and the children following him around the house. He turned on the radio,
a song:
That ass, the dick
or
What a Wonderful World
or too-smooth country music, and he turned it off. He sat in the brown recliner and the TV talked to him about elands and
football and the heat wave and the big Whitney race and a girl who’d tumbled into a stretch of the Hudson overflowing with
PCBs. He listened to the television chatter and to the telephone’s silence and when the same thought bubbled up inside him
he said aloud, “Stop thinking about that.” He said, “No,” he said, “I don’t care,” he talked himself inside out but the thought
would not go away. “I’ve got to get a job.” The word,
job,
felt like a prescription to spend the rest of his life in a dentist’s chair.

By now, they should have called him. They should have sent Loretta over with his money and acclaim, maybe a mysterious letter
from the bank that Nora’s mortgage had been paid. But their silence felt like a warning now, like an omen: he was on his own.

He thought of one thing, one small possibility that lingered in his peripheral vision, a long shot. He tucked his shirt in
and ran his fingers through his hair and he walked downtown, this time taking Circular to Lake and dipping down the steep
hill, past the firehouse and the police station, avoiding the old War Bar altogether.

The empty corridors of City Hall echoed, the marble floors so shiny they looked wet. It was over-air-conditioned in the lobby.
It was fucking freezing, and somehow that made pools of nervous perspiration swim inside his shirt. He was a teenager again,
again an insecure, unsettled adolescent, as if the first round hadn’t been bad enough.

The building hadn’t changed much since he’d first walked in there, almost thirty years before, to file a DBA. The way it had
worked, the way it had always worked in Saratoga, was you got the Republican chairman’s imprimatur on any piece of paperwork
and you got what you wanted: a building permit, a summer job at the track, your parking tickets waived. Belly just figured
he would walk down to City Hall and someone there—McSweeny or Bill Fisk or any of the NYRA boys lingering in the halls—would
find him a sinecure, or shake his hand, leaving a rolled-up wad of twenties stuck to the palm. Somebody there would repay
him for his silence.

He eyed the empty halls and no one burst from the doors to greet him. He waited a minute, two minutes, and then he looked
at the directory—small white letters on a felt board, so old-fashioned—but he knew none of the names written there. No McSweeny,
no Fisk, nothing familiar on that whole right-hand panel of the board except Margie Kessel, town planner, Eliza’s sister-in-law.
So he would not see his people yet. They were still hiding. They were waiting for the right time to contact him, that was
it. They were waiting for the dust to settle, to make sure the new DA—whoever that was—hadn’t fitted him with a wire or tapped
his daughter’s phone line before they came to give him back his money and his woman and his life.