Belly (4 page)

He was headed up the hill that morning when a car pulled over, a long, green station wagon with fake wood paneling on the
side. It was Mrs. Radcliffe, the hot across-the-street neighbor from when the whole family lived on Phila Street, the one
with the pool where his grandchildren now swam. “Can I give you a lift?” she’d asked, her big, wet, half-Mexican eyes taunting
him.

“Why the hell not?”

He’d climbed into the passenger seat, watched her maneuver her big boat of a Ford through the empty street. He’d never once
seen this woman without makeup, hair spray, the whole thing, never seen her in curlers or with her lipstick smudged. She came
out every morning, afternoon, evening, like a perfectly done-up sex goddess, teasing him from across Phila Street.

“What are you doing out at this hour?” she’d asked.

“Nora got hitched last night. It was an all-night affair.”

“I see,” she’d said, pursing her lips, her perfect lips, in a half-moon of disapproval. He’d forgotten for a moment what a
strict Catholic she was, that the few times he’d made it to church, hungover and disheveled, she’d always been up in the front
pews with her perfect frilly dresses and her perfect husband in his pressed suit, like caricatures of good Christians.

They’d turned onto Circular Street, and she’d asked him, “Where are you headed? Where can I drop you?”

“Home,” he’d said, like an accusation.

“Where do you live now? I don’t even know.”

He’d forgotten. Everything. That he lived above the bar by then with Ann and Eliza, daughters two and four, that his third
daughter was taken too soon, and then his wife had left him. He’d thought she was taking him back to Phila Street, to his
old life, that she’d drop him in front of the old place and he’d open the door to find everything, his former family all intact.

“Just let me out here,” he’d said, and she pulled up against the curb, and he’d slammed the door without so much as a thank-you,
as if she were responsible for the fact that his home was a cramped apartment above the bar where only two of the five women
in his life still remained.

He stood now on that very corner, it must be fifteen years later. The house that stood before him that day—a crumbling brick
Greek Revival—had loomed like a joke, a magnificent structure rotting from the inside out. Now that same house was whitewashed,
remodeled, with two Mercedes tucked neatly in the multicolored gravel driveway where Volkswagen campers used to park. He never
thought he’d hear himself say it, but he missed the hippies now. At least they let his poor lady-town rest in her stately
disrepair and didn’t dress her up with million-dollar cars and doodled driveways.

“There’s the man himself,” he heard a woman say, and next to him was Margie, Eliza’s husband’s sister. He supposed that made
her some sort of long-lost daughter-in-law, and she had so much hair on her face she was almost like the son he’d never had.
She was a big woman with wild brown hair and gray eyes that had too much white below the eyelid, giving her a startled look.
She never wore makeup or even shaved her legs. He had often wondered how she’d found a husband.

“What are you doing out in the middle of the day, Margie? Don’t you have a job?”

“Do you?” she asked.

He looked up toward his hairline and then at the clouds that held no promise of rain.

“I just walked home for a late lunch, heading back to the office now.” Margie patted her briefcase. It looked like it was
made of straw. “Prison did wonders for you. You look strangely good. Just your hair turned gray.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“I thought you’d come back bald and fat or something. You look like you’ve been summering in the Hamptons.”

“We did have golf,” he said.

“Well, how the hell are you?”

“Fine. You?”

“Oh, come on. Really. How are you?”

“What do you want me to say? I’m tired. It’s hot. I’m unemployed. I’m out of jail. I’m fine.”

Margie switched her weight from one thick ankle to the other. “Well, in a strange sort of way we missed you. They cleaned
out all the local criminal color and installed law-abiding yuppies.”

“I heard you got one of your own in City Hall now.”

“Yes, a Democrat, finally, after sixty years of Republican rule, not to mention a hundred years of racetrack corruption.”

“I meant a Jew.”

“Oh, that,” she said.

“Your people have surmounted the final frontier.”

“Jesus, Belly, leave my people alone. I do.”

“I’ve got nothing against your people, Margie. I just believe in the Bible, and the Bible’s got nothing to do with the Jews.”

That burning feeling was beginning to resurface, here in the late-afternoon sun with Margie and the whitewashed mansion, and
the beer was evaporating and the sweat beaded at his forehead.

“I am talking to Archie Bunker live and in person,” Margie said.

He turned his head away from her, smiling with one side of his mouth, and when he saw her face turn red, saw her clench her
teeth and force herself not to yell at him, he felt calm again.

“Tell you what, Belly. Why don’t we go downtown and get a cup of coffee? I know a nice place down there on the corner. They
call it Café Newton, I believe.”

“You go ahead. Just contribute to the downfall of Saratoga with your four-dollar coffee. Join Nora.”

Margie stepped into the shade of a mulberry tree. “Hey, don’t blame me. I’m on your side. I’m Mrs. Small Business Association.
I’m the whole town planning office. I’d rather have a locally owned bookie joint than a big chain coffee store.”

“It was a bar, not a bookie joint.” He scraped his cowboy boot along the cracked sidewalk, wiped his palms on his jeans.

“They don’t send you to prison for four years for running a bar in this town. We’ve got more bars per square foot than any
other town in New York State.”

“Thanks for the statistics.”

“It’s my job.” She moved her briefcase to the other hand. “All I’m saying is, I’m on your side.”

“No thanks, kid.” He fanned his collar. “I don’t need your help.”

“Did I offer you any?” Margie looked down at her shoes and said, “Shit.” Squashed mulberries stained the bottoms. “Goddammit,
I have to go to my meeting with berry juice on my soles.”

Belly laughed at her, two sharp ha’s erupting from the back of his throat.

Margie brushed a sweaty clump of hair from her face. “Lord God, you’re a misanthrope.”

“I don’t know what that means, but don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

Margie started to cross the street, calling behind her, “Okay, Belly. Nice to run into you. Not really, but congratulations
on getting out and I hope you turn into a nice person.”

She was already halfway down Spring Street when he thought to yell back at her, “Fuck you and your ancestors!”

M
aybelline the Springway waitress was a mighty step down from his normal harem. He’d been out with hostesses and a couple of
sous-chefs; he’d even been out with girls who danced at the Bunk House down Route 9 in Half Moon, but most of those girls
were putting themselves through law school on tips. That’s what they said, anyway.

He’d never had a problem getting women. He could dance, that was one thing. He could lead any woman through the tango, like
his grandfather taught him, twist her up till she collapsed in his arms. He could dance, and he had all his hair, and aside
from a few extra moles sprouting on his back, age had mostly forgotten him. The older he got, the younger his girlfriends
became, and it was this more than anything else in his life that made him feel his place was safe at the top of the food chain.

He walked into Ruffian’s, trying to keep his head down and his eyes up at the same time, trying to hide himself and hoping
to be recognized. This was a place he never came: the competition. Just a narrow, dark room painted billiard green, with a
good jukebox. He fantasized for a split second that this bar was Loretta’s new hangout, that she would see him here with his
orange-gooped-up ladyfriend. There would be a fight, Loretta and Maybelline tearing at each other’s hair, at each other’s
clothes, Belly between them playing referee, and he would get to go home with both of them, briefly, and then, after, send
the younger girl on her way, and it would be just him and Loretta, alone and back together.

But he would never have the energy for that kind of evening. He sat at a plastic table with the girl and ordered JD neat from
the short, dark waitress who didn’t know his name.

Maybelline had done herself up in a variety of animal prints. Cheetah, leopard, tiger—he couldn’t remember the difference.
He hated cats. But he had not touched a woman in four years, and here was this pretty, young girl before him, warm to him
for some reason he couldn’t determine, and he was in no mood to be choosy.

“What were you in jail for?” Maybelline asked him, doing that same stupid trick with the straw: blowing air through it and
nibbling on the end. Then she dunked it in her whiskey sour, slurping drops of alcohol from the gnarled tip.

“Oh, you know,” he started, but he could see he’d have to confess before she’d sleep with him. “Nothing bad, don’t worry.
Just gambling.”

She giggled. “I know. I know all about it. It was in the papers.”

“You read the papers?”

She stuck out her tongue. “I’m just saying, it was in the news.”

“Just now it was?” he asked. “That I was out?”

“No, before,” she said. “Whenever that was, five years ago. The trial and everything.” She sipped from her tumbler and nibbled
on the waxy maraschino stem. “You were famous.”

“Only for three weeks,” he said. He looked at the orange sparkling above her eyelid. He wanted her, but he wanted her to be
someone else. She smiled at him, a little fleck of orangish lipstick wedded to her front tooth, and when he smiled back, his
lips were lying.

“Will you open up your bar again?” she asked him.

He didn’t tell her that he couldn’t. “I have to get my own place first. I’m staying with my daughter for now.”

She looked disappointed, kind of green like all that copper had oxidized. He figured it was over, no chance to win this one,
so he reached out to touch her hand, her small hand with thick fingers and long nails and too many fake gold rings. He rubbed
the soft fleshy pad under her thumb and thought, if this was the only contact he had with a woman, maybe that would be enough.
If he closed his eyes and held her hand, he could pretend something bigger had happened.

“I have roommates,” Maybelline said. “But we can go to my place.”

Belly looked up. She wasn’t joking. He wondered if perhaps his daughters had pooled their resources and rented her for the
night, if the New York Racing Association was sending him a sign, if Maybelline was a present offered him from some beneficent
bystander waiting to reveal himself from behind the bar at Ruffian’s. But it was just this girl, a girl who’d heard of him
in his glory days, willing to give herself to him. Who was he to say no?

All he could think before, during, and after: It’s so good to fuck.

They drove from Saratoga to her apartment in Ballston Spa, which was pretty much like living on Central Park West and driving
out to Queens to get laid. He sat in the passenger seat of her puttering Hyundai while she drove him to her small, carpeted
apartment in a sliced-up old Stick-style mansion. She had a tiny room with a tiny window and a tiny bed and two teddy bears
in the corner: thirty-two years old with teddy bears. Two ugly calico cats circled them wherever they walked.

Belly lay on Maybelline’s frilly dollhouse bed and let her wait on him. She couldn’t cook anything. Burned the Pop-Tarts that
were their dinner. Mixed too much water in the OJ. Heated up frozen mini-quiches in the oven till the crusts caught on fire
and set off the smoke detectors so they belted out their songs like opera stars. It got so he was used to the taste of tar.
“Inured” was the fancy word. And he lay there, inured, chewing on his burned-up food, his first meal out of prison, while
Maybelline rested her head on the gray fuzz of his stomach, listening to his gastric juices stir and the smoke detectors sing
till there was a whole orchestra in her house, in her bed, in her arms, every instrument off-key or broken, until she stood
on her painted-pink step stool and silenced them, silenced even what was inside him.

If he closed his eyes, if he kept his eyes closed, yes, it wasn’t Maybelline, it was Loretta. It was Loretta, it was the first
time, it was War Bar in its heyday, there was music, there was the music of murmuring and bass beat and that reassuring scent
of stale beer. He had cheated before, yes, of course, many times he had stepped out on Myrna, whose breasts drooped and swung
like pendulums after nursing four babies, whose stomach turned to a rippling ocean of flesh, everything fallen on her, even
her spirit, a body given up on, a body gone to bed.

All the times he’d strayed it had been easy. Easy. The first time—what was her name? A young girl, some folkie type, who’d
come to the dais at the back of the bar and asked if she could play her lame Bob Dylan covers on a shiny acoustic guitar two
sizes too big for her, that she barely knew how to strum. Such a sweet little thing all the way up from Half Moon in her daddy’s
Chevy Celebrity. How could he resist? Yes, he did think about Myrna, for a minute, thought about her the way she used to be,
the way she was in their first six months together, before the accident of Nora sealed them up. Myrna, who was too smart for
him, really, too sharp, she had something he’d never even touched, what his mother called Ambition. And how she’d dulled over
the years, and rounded, and grayed, so much more malleable than he ever would have guessed.

When he met Myrna, that last year of high school, she was an innocent. That’s what he loved about her. She was shockable.
His potty mouth, his chain-smoking, his binge drinking, his belt-wielding father, all of it caused her to gasp, to rub her
soft hand on his thigh and say, “You poor dear.” She had barely tasted alcohol, other than the sips of wine at Communion,
and the first time he plied her with beer—the old Genny Cream Ale, he remembered, the thick dark bottle with the green label—her
face lit up, her cheeks with round patches of red like a baby doll, and she twirled around him, his private dancer, his Catholic
virgin. He adored her, and he wanted more than anything to fuck the innocence right out of her. And he did.