Belly (17 page)

“Yeah.”

“The parties.”

“I know.”

“The money.”

“All of it,” he said. “Me, too. Except the wine coolers. I don’t miss those.” He took another look at Mrs. Radcliffe. Gray
roots poked from her dyed brassy hair. She had it pulled back in a neon green cloth, and a little trail of makeup ran down
her left cheek like tears. “I never used to see you at the parties,” he said. “When I lived across the street. I don’t think
I ever saw you out and about even one time. I didn’t know you partied.”

“I was busy being Catholic,” she said. “A good Catholic housewife with a kindly husband. I miss it mostly because I never
really got to do it.”

“I’ll take a wine cooler,” he said. “The least disgusting flavor.”

She popped open a lemon-lime and handed it to him. “Gross,” he said, chugging it down in one gulp. “Give me another.”

“Don’t tell Nora,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “She thinks I don’t drink. Especially when the kids are swimming.”

He wrapped his lips around the bottle and said, “My lips are sealed,” his words echoing into the glass.

“How are things at the farmhouse?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what we call it, Nora’s house. The last white-trash house in the neighborhood.”

Belly gulped his drink. “Looks all right to me.”

Mrs. Radcliffe said, “Sure,” and shielded her eyes with her hands, staring out at the pool. “These children were born in the
eighties,” she said. “My girls were born in 1986. That’s something, isn’t it? I guess that’s when the eighties were over for
me.”

“Me, too,” he said, but he did not remind her why.

One good thing, there was one good thing that happened in 1986. The Mets and the Red Sox in that seven-game set, that famous
Bill Buckner play in game six, eight glorious days when nothing existed but baseball, the first time since July, since his
third daughter died, when he’d woken up hopeful, when he’d found a reason to rise.

Mrs. Radcliffe was staring at him. She looked right at him with a wine-cooler glow in her cheeks and she said, “What do you
think of life on the outside?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

Stevie Ray was hanging on one of the girl’s floats, and the girl lay on her stomach with her head on her arms and they were
talking close like that, and Belly felt the foot of space between his lounge chair and Mrs. Radcliffe’s like a precipice.
He was too sober to fall in.

“Did you hear there are gay people in the eighth grade?” he asked her, taking another wine cooler from her.

“Who told you that?”

“Stevie Ray.”

Mrs. Radcliffe sipped a big swig of wine cooler, she smoothed the wavy lines of flesh over her stomach. “Must be one of the
Kennedy boys,” she said. “They always wear pink—I think it’s part of their religion or something, but everybody calls them
gay.”

“Remember when it was bad to be gay? When people had to hide it? Whatever happened to that? When I was little I didn’t even
know a single gay person, not anyone who would admit it. People just flaunt it these days. Where is the shame?”

Mrs. Radcliffe swiveled onto her hips. Flesh pooled on the lawn chair, red stripes from the plastic slats decorated her thighs.
“You must have met some gay people in jail, I would imagine.” She didn’t smile.

“Never.” He rested the wine cooler on his jeans. It made a dark circle and he ran his fingers around the circle.

“I’ve seen
Oz.
”

“Are you trying to tell me Dorothy was gay?”

“I mean the HBO show. Haven’t you seen it?”

“No premium channels in prison,” said Belly. “I’m out of the loop.”

“How about
Midnight Express
then?”

“That was Turkish prison,” he said. “And I don’t remember any buggering.”

“In the movie or in the jail?” she asked.

He took a big sip of sugary carbonation, this stuff would never make him drunk enough, and he said, “I’ve seen some things,”
and he would not say more. She was leaning over, her painted lips were parted and she wanted the details, and he downed the
rest of the spiked soda and he would not say more.

The two girls floated in the center of the pool, and the boys made a whirlpool around them, running alongside the plastic
walls until a current bubbled and the girls began to twirl.

Mrs. Radcliffe said, “My husband used to use your services.”

“I remember,” he said. “Whatever happened to him, anyway? He just disappeared one day. He came in, I used to see him once
a week, and then he was just gone.” He vaguely recalled the heavyset man, balding, always a little dab of saliva caught in
the corners of his mouth.

“What happens to any of them?” she asked, and served herself another bottle. “He found himself somebody younger.” She raised
one eyebrow at him and he thought maybe she was coming on to him, maybe he could take off her bikini top and let those stretch
marks hang down over him, maybe she would whisper to him while he worked at her, maybe she would take him inside that big
warm house and hide him.

He thought about Mr. Radcliffe then, about Bruce. Bruce was a talker. He’d stop in on his way home from work for a pint of
Guinness and relate the family woes. He’d had some kind of tumor erupt on the side of his face, nothing serious, but it looked
bad, some giant ball of pus at his temple. And Mrs. Radcliffe’s appendix burst, they thought it was period cramps or something,
and they’d all held a vigil over her hospital bed; Bruce had been left to care for these girls, they were twins, that’s right.
Bruce had always been thankful that their problems were solvable—“The best kind of problems to have,” that was his motto.
No one had died, no cancer, no long-suffering illnesses, no losses.

Belly wondered what it felt like to stick it out with someone like that, to seal yourself to another human being by surmounting
adversity together. He’d never had the chance. Myrna left him before they could survive their tragedies. But then, the Radcliffes
hadn’t made it either.

“That’s what you did, isn’t it?” she asked. “You left Myrna for that Loretta woman?”

Belly shifted himself on the chair. His flesh clung to the plastic slats. He tried to reposition the chair so the sun would
not glare at him so directly, but the sun, it followed him wherever he went, it forced the booze from his pores so no matter
how much he drank now, here in the pounding heat of the late afternoon, his brain refused to succumb.

“She left me,” he said. “Myrna left me.”

“Is that right?” she asked, her voice tinged with disbelief.

“She left me a week after the funeral,” he said. “I got home from work and she’d just packed up all her things and put them
on the front porch, all these liquor boxes she’d pilfered from the bar.”

“I remember,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “I remember I went over there to borrow some coffee liqueur and Nora said she’d moved out.
I just assumed you told her to.”

Belly shook his head. Maybe the wine cooler was working. “I couldn’t believe she just left me with the girls like that. First
Nora took off and then, she, then my daughter.” He swallowed. “And then I come home and Myrna’s just gone. No warning. She
said she just could not stay sober and stay with me. What did she expect me to do, stop working at a bar? Stop keeping alcohol
in the house, just because she couldn’t keep a lid on it? But I mean, her own children. What kind of woman would do that?”

“I remember so clearly that it was coffee liqueur I wanted.”

“It was all her idea. I remember the biggest box she had, it was all booze. She’d written “booze” on it in a big fat black
marker. She took all the booze in the house with her and she dumped it in this big Dumpster by the highway. She took
my
booze.” He was getting worked up, his voice rising so the kids stopped in midwhirlpool and stared, water whooshing all around
them.

One dance, they’d tangoed together, a little joke of a twisty drunken dance at the senior prom, after six months of dating,
tangoed just the way his Grampa taught him, she got pregnant that night, and they’d never unraveled, not until the day she’d
told him she was moving to her own bungalow in that dead little town to the west.

“Is your daughter going to be there?” asked Mrs. Radcliffe.

“Which one?”

“The one who lives in New York, Ann. The news one. She never comes around.” She adjusted her breasts in her bikini bra. “The
gay one,” she said, winking at him. “The kind they all know about in eighth grade.”

Myrna’s leaving should have ruined him, should have shamed him into submission. Or he should have begged her to stay, or to
return, or to stop drinking and stand up to the task of raising her three remaining children, should have dug up the marriage
license and tapped on it with a pencil and recited, “till death do us part,” but he just dropped her off and purged her from
his memory. He should have kept the house on Phila Street for the last years that Ann and Eliza went to high school, should
have kept their bedrooms preserved with the posters of Shawn Cassidy and LPs of the Cars and the Who and A-ha stacked to the
ceiling. He should have given his wife some opening in case she wanted to come home.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

The wine coolers stranded him with a miserable headache. Mrs. Radcliffe’s stretch marks looked like fingers, beckoning him.
She smiled her sugary wine-cooler smile at him. “Well, Myrna will be there at least. She’s still a churchgoer.”

He should have left the door open for her. But he couldn’t stand to see his third daughter’s belongings, and even when he
shut the door to her tiny room at the top of the stairs, he could see everything inside it, the towering boxes of toe shoes
and her textbooks and collection of black dolls and all of her earrings posted on a red ribbon in a ripple above her dresser.
And her goddamned pink sweater with the alligator. He couldn’t stand to see his wife, they looked so much alike, and he couldn’t
stand to be inside that house, and he hated his three remaining daughters and he hated himself for hating them and none of
it was good, nothing worked, nothing pleased him except his mistress Loretta, who erased all his agony with her smoky perfume
and that cloud of rusty red hair.

“Well, all that miserable business happened a long time ago,” Mrs. Radcliffe said. “I just wanted to thank you for being so
discreet,” she said. “For not giving up any of your clientele. That was very brave of you.”

Her words, they soothed him. They shut him up. He didn’t tell her that none of the clientele was ever in danger, that only
gambling promoters could get in trouble, not gamblers. He didn’t tell her that Loretta and the NYRA boys had threatened his
family, that far worse would have happened than prison had he given up names. He just let Mrs. Radcliffe’s words wash over
him like some kind of breeze, some little wisp of relief he’d been waiting for. She patted his hand. “Another wine cooler?”

“No,” he said. “Got to keep my eye on the boys. I promised.”

Mrs. Radcliffe chatted on about her daughters, talked about how they’d all be there on Sunday for Stevie Ray’s confirmation
party and what she and the girls were going to wear—the three of them had matching outfits for church.

“Boys, let’s go,” he called. “Time to go.”

Faint whines escaped from the boys as they climbed out of the pool and gathered up their things to leave. Belly noticed how
Stevie Ray lingered on the edge of the pool, his bare foot catching the edge of one of the twins’ rafts. Two conflicting thoughts
rushed at him simultaneously, compounding the headache: he was both proud and jealous of the boy. He followed behind Stevie
Ray, watching his walk, shoulders hunched forward in a huddle. He didn’t play sports, this grandson of his, he didn’t hang
out with other boys, he caved in on himself when he stood, and Belly realized his oldest grandson was exactly the kind of
boy he’d picked on back in junior high.

B
elly remembered the morning after his third daughter’s funeral, when all the decibels were too high and too tinny, and even
the soft thud of the
Saratogian
hitting the front steps jolted him awake. He had padded down the carpeted stairs, the
swish swish
of his Grinch slippers on shag, out to the porch. Mrs. Radcliffe had stood on her front lawn, watering her begonias, pregnant
with the twins. She set the hose down so it sprayed a big dark slash on wet macadam. She came to the middle of the road, no
double yellow lines, just newly smoothed tar in time for the racetrack. He slumped into the road to meet her. She lifted her
arms, soft pads of fat jiggled below her biceps—how he missed women’s bodies before aerobics and Madonna and Jazzercize—he
smelled flowery deodorant and sweat and coffee breath—and he meant to rest his head in the perfect round nook between her
shoulder and chin, but she took one hand on either side of his Brillo-pad cheeks, she pulled his face to hers and kissed him
full on the mouth, slid her tongue in to meet his and licked the filmy enamel of his top teeth. He shook his head now, trying
not to remember.

In the kitchen, Stevie Ray popped open a can of Coke, and Belly stared at the black face of the computer. He said, “How do
you work this thing?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Stevie, come over here and turn this thing on.”

“It’s right here, Grampa.” He pushed a little round button and a green stripe lighted within it.

“Show me how to e-mail.”

“You don’t know how?”

“This whole Internet thing exploded while I was gone. I know what it is, I just don’t know how to work it.”

“Well, you have to have an account first. You have to have an address.”

“I’ll use yours.”

“No way.”

“I’ll use your mother’s. She has one, doesn’t she?”

“We have a family one,” he said.

Belly tugged on Stevie Ray’s soggy sleeve. “Aw, come on. Give Grampa a break.”

Stevie Ray squished into the chair with Belly, his fingers dancing over the keyboard. He felt the warmth of the boy’s body,
smelled the sharp scent of chlorine and sunscreen, and the boy concentrated fiercely on the computer screen. Belly reached
up and tousled his hair, but the boy squirmed out from his hand, and then his hand hung there in the air a minute, like Wile
E. Coyote before he noticed there was no more ground beneath him.