Bitter Bronx (7 page)

THE CAT LADY'S KISS

S
he'd never been kissed by a man, never even fumbled around on the dunes of Orchard Beach. She lost her cherry to Queen Donadio, the head cashier at the Italian market on Arthur Avenue. It wasn't love, or anything like that. Angela must have been fifteen, and the cashier kept eyeballing her one afternoon until she felt hypnotized, so she followed Queenie into the storage room. Angela didn't have to do a thing. Queenie plucked off Angela's clothes, and without a word of warning began to nibble between her legs. Most of Queenie's scalp had vanished, and Angela didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was like having a wet tickle. And then she started to moan in rhythm to the maniacal wanderings of Queenie's tongue, and she let out a cry that was like the mooing of a cow robbed of all her milk.

Queenie dropped her after that, didn't even say one word of hello, and it wouldn't have mattered, because Angela got into trouble. Her mother was away in a mental hospital, and her father never worked; he kept sniffing around whenever Angela had her period. She didn't have the heart to punish her own
papi
. They were starving, and Angela began to steal—at first it was bread and apples to keep them alive, and then she became a bandit in the Bronx, stealing purses from old ladies. One of the old ladies yelled too loud, and Angela beat her over the head to stop all the yelling. The woman started to cackle and had a stroke.

Angela sat in a juvenile facility, and was sent off in shackles to a prison farm the minute she turned seventeen. She had to punk for the trustees and older inmates, who looked after her and saw to Angela's education. She even finished high school at the farm. Part of her education was a floating film club: an unfrocked professor would wander from prison farm to prison farm with a DVD player and a whole bag of films out of the 1940s. The one Angela liked best was about a woman who turned into a ferocious cat whenever a man tried to kiss her; even her husband couldn't kiss this cat lady, who might have torn him to ribbons, fond of him as she was.

The older inmates would laugh and say, “Yeah, she would have loved him to death.” And they began to call Angela the cat lady who'd never been kissed by a man.

She was twenty-one when she left the farm. She returned to the Bronx with an institutional gray complexion. She went to work at the market on Arthur Avenue. The new head cashier was a man named Robertson. He was a jailbird, like Angela, with his own gray pall. He must have been forty. He had big ears and hands as soft and smooth as a girl's. He wouldn't leave off looking at Angela.

Robertson was quite clever with his hands. He would construct figures out of stray pieces of wire, twist that wire into walruses and lithe, prowling cats. And when he gave these wire figures to Angela, his fingers trembled. He never leered at her once or touched her behind. He was like a strange, balding knight with big ears.

Angela didn't know what to do about Robertson. She felt a slight tug in her loins, but it frightened her. “Miss Angela,” he said, after six months of silent, stubborn courtship. “I sure as hell would like it if we could make love.”

“Where?” she asked, already imagining him ripped to shreds.

“Where else? In the storage room.”

“Mr. Robertson, it would have to be at your own risk.”

But her balding knight walked her into the storage room and bolted the door from inside. He touched her face. She began to purr, but it quickly became a growl.

“Mr. Robertson, do what you want with me. But we can't kiss. I'm the cat lady. And loving me might mean your own death.”

He undressed her with his beautiful soft hands.

“I wish,” he said, “I wish I could shape you out of wire.”

“Mr. Robertson, you already did. I'm that prowling wire cat.”

He stroked her flanks, ran his fingers across her breasts until her nipples were taut and fierce as knives.

“Mr. Robertson, you'll have to make me wet. I've never been with a man.”

He wouldn't stoop between her legs. He kept stroking Angela with his soft hands until her whole body quaked. But the more he aroused her, the more she felt her whiskers grow. He hovered near her mouth. Her thighs tingled, tingled with dread.

She thought of her father, who had tried to rape her with his wrinkled prick. Perhaps she was the cat lady long before she'd gone to the prison farm, waiting for her father to kiss her, so she could rip out his throat and claw him blind. Poor Papi, she sang to herself, as her own storage-room magician kept fondling her with his soft hands.

And now she knew why this balding knight appealed to her. He had Papi's big ears and famished look. Her mother had been out of her mind ever since Angela was a child, trying to stick her own head into the oven, hovering on the fire escape in her nightgown, and being led off to the asylum.

“Angela,” she had wept, “your father stopped fucking me five minutes after you were born. You're his new bride.”

And little Angela would walk to kindergarten pretending to wear a bride's veil. But it made no sense being married to Papi, who snored all the time and smelled like a goat. And she tore her own pretended veil.

And now she was in the same storage room where Queenie had licked her to the edge of madness seven years ago. But she didn't miss Queenie. She had Robertson, the jailbird, who began to hum under his breath, and her body stirred to that whispering music. He was shaping her with his hands, turning her into a wire creature.

She growled once, but it was no less a song than Robertson's.

His lips grazed hers. Her mouth opened into a sweet well. His tongue tasted of cinnamon cloves and cherries on a tree. She ripped at him, but her paws didn't leave a mark. His tongue went deep. Robertson had learned how to survive a cat lady's kiss.

He grew morose within a week. And Angela wondered if he was as fickle as Queenie. But it wasn't that. A hopeless gambler, he had lost a bundle to the Albanians, who had come to Arthur Avenue with their own “caravans”—rag shops and rinky-dink cafés and social clubs, which the Italians tolerated because these donkeys from Albania kept Latinos from overwhelming Arthur Avenue and turning it into a second South Bronx.

The Albanians never bought property. They rented from Italian landlords and didn't interfere with the local mob bosses. These donkeys had become the enforcers of the Neapolitan social club, which had dominion over Arthur Avenue and the Belmont section of the Bronx. But Belmont was a landlocked island surrounded by the Latino wild men of Tremont and Fordham Road. It was the natural barriers of the Bronx Zoo and Quarry Road that kept the wild men away from Belmont—Arthur Avenue was hard to find—and also the Albanians, who had their own wild men. Their chieftain was Lord Lekë, and he held sway over Bathgate Avenue, at the ragged edge of the old Italian neighborhood.

It was this Albanian wild man who coveted Angela, had seen her in the market, had thought of kidnapping her, but didn't want to bring an earthquake to Arthur Avenue. So he sent out his spies on a reconnaissance mission. They discovered her with that jailbird, Robertson, who was a complete outsider, having grown up in Montana or some other place that didn't really exist in the minds of the Albanians. Lord Lekë and his clan sucked him deeper and deeper into their gambling dens, offered him access to their own harem of whores, and then put the screws on him. Either Robertson signed Angela over to his clan or Lekë would send him to live with the snow leopards in the Bronx Zoo.

“But Miss Angela is not a cow,” the jailbird tried to reason. “And I cannot sign her over to you, Lord Lekë.”

“But you could persuade her about my charms. . . . She doesn't have to live on Bathgate Avenue. All she has to do is visit me once, and I will cancel your debt.”

Despite his fears, Robertson couldn't present such a proposal to Angela. All he could do was twist his pieces of wire into some miniature of Lekë's long nose and winter cape. And Angela, who'd been through the medieval rites and rituals of prison life, understood right away.

“That Albanian bastard thinks your markers are also mine, and that he can paw me whenever he wants.”

Robertson didn't say a word. His eyes practically disappeared inside his skull, and Angela knew that he would either fall into his own mad oblivion or run away. But he didn't run. And one morning he failed to show up at work. Angela found him across Quarry Road, at St. Barnabas. His face was a mask of bruises. And Angela couldn't see much else under his hospital gown.

She started to cry. “Why didn't you run home to Montana?”

“My home is in the Bronx,” he said, “with you.”

He'd continued his wire menagerie on the night table near his bed. Leopards and rhinos, ostriches and giraffes, like the inhabitants of some new Noah's ark. She visited him every evening after work, sat beside him, and after having sworn to herself that she'd never knit, sew, or cook for a man, she knit her balding knight a sweater. But St. Barnabas couldn't hold him forever.

So Angela did what she had to do. She couldn't have gone to the Neapolitans at their club, because she was a Latina and a little freak who liked women as much as men. She'd never been to Bathgate Avenue before, though it was five minutes from the market where she worked. She'd seen the Albanians at Dominick's; they always occupied the last two tables, always ate alone; they brought their own cotton napkins, their own knives and forks, and if one of the Neapolitan lords entered the restaurant, they would salute him with their wine glasses and return to their incredible gluttony. Dominick's had no menus, only markers on the wall. But each Albanian went through Dominick's secret repertoire of pasta dishes, each had a salad meant for five, and five espressos served in little glasses. They were never boisterous, and they never asked for the bill. They would bow to the waiter and hand him an envelope stuffed with cash.

Angela knew the Albanians were taking their own time. They would swallow up Arthur Avenue in ten or twenty years, imprison the Neapolitans inside their own club without ever declaring a state of war. She recognized how shrewd their chieftain was, Lekë with his long nose, his brutal blond looks, his thick hands, and the winter cape he wore no matter what the season. He'd seen Angela across the dining room with its row after row of communal tables, had sent her a flower and a glass of coffee, which she realized must have been some kind of Albanian ritual. But she wouldn't respond. She never did, no matter how many times the coffees came in their little glasses. And now she had to prevent her bald knight from being beaten to death.

The Albanians of Bathgate Avenue had no church. They were agnostics who might have preserved a few Muslim, Christian, and Jewish signs. Albanian farmers and bandits had protected the Jews during the German occupation of their country. Not one Jew was delivered to the Gestapo or the SS. Some of the bandits began wearing skullcaps as a mark of respect; they never violated Jewish women. Stars of David and Jewish candelabra remained in Albanian homes long after the war.

And that's what Angela found in the windows of Bathgate Avenue; Jewish stars and candelabra mingled with crosses and paintings of Jesus. She didn't waver for a minute. She walked into Lekë's social club, even though the door had been painted black and there was a sign that said
CATS AND STRANGERS NOT ALLOWED
. She'd entered a cavern where money flew like feathers; she'd never seen such an enterprise. Men wagered over bundles of sticks, threw chess pieces into the air like lucky coins, and mutilated deck after deck as they tore up cards they didn't happen to like. There were women at the tables wearing head scarves; they gambled with the men. They were obedient and insolent in the same breath, bowing to Lekë and his lieutenants, who sat on enormous pillows, and taunting them with their eyes.

They seemed frightened of Angela, who wore no scarf and did not bow to any of the gamblers. Lekë stared at her from his pasha's pillow—a blue-eyed Albanian. Angela navigated among the horde of gamblers, propelled by her love for that balding knight at St. Barnabas, and paused near the pasha's cowboy boots. The social club was silent as a mouse.

“Lord Lekë, we have things to discuss.”

He laughed. “Have you come to seek employment, my little cashier?”

The Albanians chortled and clapped their hands. “Lord,” one of his lieutenants shouted, “put her to work on her back.”

And the women laughed louder than the men, causing their head scarves to ripple.

“Quiet,” Lekë said. “Show the lady some respect. . . . I have no secrets from my men, Miss Angela. We are a family—Michael, make her some tea!”

Lekë's minions served Angela tea in a glass that was much too hot to hold, but she held it anyhow, drank the bittersweet water. They served her little cakes—almond tarts with raspberry cream at the bottom. But no one asked her to sit, and all of a sudden she was the only one in this dark den who was still standing. It was a cave in the middle of the Bronx, with images of some medieval prince on the wall. He had a handlebar mustache, bushy eyebrows, and long curly hair; he wore a kind of skullcap, an embroidered jacket, and sticking out of his cummerbund was a knife encrusted with jewels. He was, she would learn, Lekë Dukagjini, a fifteenth-century mountain prince who fought against the Turks and instituted his own highland code, which governed tribal warfare; in this code women could govern as well as men, and there were many “virgin warriors” among the Dukagjinis, women who fought and dressed as mountain men. A popular myth was that all Albanians were descended from this one warrior-prince, who watered the highland lakes and many a mountain woman with his sperm and his blood; he lost his limbs in battle, dispatched ten thousand Turks. And the current prince of Bathgate Avenue was named after this ferocious man, as one of his lieutenants explained while she sipped her tea.