Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (47 page)

“I should be asking you. Where’s the guy you were trying to not ask about at lunch? The one who says… what was it?
Come vuoi tu
?”

I think I blushed. It was easy to talk about his ex-wife and their failed attempts at children. Talking about my beautiful Capo made my skin prickle.

“Working,” I lied.

“On Thanksgiving? Talk about taking someone for granted.”

“Oh, Jonathan. Do we need to get laid?”

He nearly choked on his whiskey, and I realized I’d never spoken like that around my brother. As innocent as the words were, the sentiment was not from the Theresa he knew.

“Okay, okay!” He held his hand up in surrender. “I’ll lay off the guy.”

“Which guy?” Sheila asked from the other side of the screen door. Before I could answer, she continued, stepping back. “This guy?”

Beautiful even from behind a screen, Antonio stood, smiling and holding a bottle of wine. Sheila slapped the door open. I think I must have been smiling right back at him.

“Napa, again?”

“It’s from Campania.” He handed it to Sheila, who stared at him a second, smiled, swallowed. Antonio jerked his thumb inside the house. “The rest of the case is by the door.”

“You brought a case?” Sheila asked.

“Theresa said to bring wine.”

Sheila didn’t say anything, but turned on her heel and went back inside. I was stunned. I hadn’t seen Sheila blown back by a man in a long, long time.

“Antonio,” I said, “this is my brother, Jonathan.”

They shook and exchanged how-do-you-dos. Daniel had been the last strange man I’d brought to a holiday function, and he’d melted into the scenery as if he belonged there. But I wasn’t worried about Antonio. There were so many men and women, friends and others, who came to Sheila’s dinners, that Antonio’s presence would be noted but not focused on.

“So, Theresa’s told me all about you,” Jonathan said.

“Really?” Antonio said.

“No, actually, not a damn thing.”

“Don’t mind him,” I said to Antonio. “He’s got all my worst qualities.”

Antonio folded his napkin in front of him. “Then you must be a shrewd yet reckless man.”

“You aren’t describing my sister. You can’t be.”

“You’re implying I’m not shrewd?” I said in mock consternation.

“I’m implying that, for you, a four-inch heel is reckless,” Jonathan said.

The doorbell rang, and the chaos began.

antonio

 couldn’t count all the adults at the house, much less the children, who were more restrained and more present than the kids in Napoli. I didn’t trip over them. They were both more self-possessed than kids from home and wilder. They were shrewd with adults and seemed unable to negotiate their own squabbles or feed themselves. But I was so busy trying to remember names and faces of the adults that I didn’t have time to give the children any of my reserves of memory.

I remembered Deirdre but pretended I didn’t. I shook hands with Fiona and Margie and made a point of remembering them because they were siblings. Men came and went; there were boyfriends and husbands, and some were half a relationship I didn’t understand.

“Thank you,” Theresa whispered to me between conversations and questions I didn’t want to answer.

“For you? The world.”

“How are you holding up?” she asked as we walked the edge of the property where it fell to the beach. Beneath us, the waves crashed against the rocks.

“Which one is your mother?”

“My mother isn’t here yet.”

“Margie still looks at me like she doesn’t approve.”

“She doesn’t approve of much,” she said.

“I bet her husband is an unhappy man. Which one is he?”

“Doesn’t have one.”

“Too bad,” I said. Our hands swung together as we walked along the property, leisurely heading back toward the house. We were still too far from anyone for eavesdropping, and the water made a good mask for our conversation.

“I’m thinking you need to come to the Bortolusi wedding,” I said.

“How’s that going to work while your father negotiates the value of your cock with the Sicilians?”

“You took on this dirty language with both fists, didn’t you?”

“There’s no other word to use. Does it bother you?” she asked.

“It makes me have to keep myself from taking you by the hair and putting you on your knees.”

“Quick. Change the subject.”

“If you come, it looks like a strategic move. It looks like I can walk any time, or that I want to.”

“Keeping your frenemies on their toes,” she said.

“Exactly.” We’d gotten close to the house.

“Shall I ask for olive oil with the bread?”

Just as we came in from the patio, there was a crash from the kitchen, the volume and length indicating a mishap of some scope. It barely paused the conversations around us.

“None of the women are going to the kitchen to help?” I asked.

“She has a staff, but I was just thinking…”

Jonathan came up behind Theresa with his whiskey drained to the ice. “She kicked me out,” he said.

“Does she need help?” Theresa asked.

“Would she admit it?”

She looked up at me. “Sheila might kick Jonathan out, but from me, she’ll take help.”

“
Andiamo.”

“Jonathan, can you take care of Antonio? Make sure he doesn’t step on a toe.”

“Mom’s not even here yet,” Jonathan said.

She play punched him in the arm and went to the kitchen to see what had happened.

I tried not to look at her bottom when she walked away. She never swayed it or asked for attention with it, but her posture was so straight and proud, the result of such effort to remove sex from her gestures, that I got hard just looking at her.

But her brother was right next to me, and looking at his sister as if she was naked wouldn’t make me a friend. I didn’t know what future I had with Theresa, but I was sure getting kicked out of her sister’s house at Thanksgiving wasn’t going to help.

“You’re the only boy,” I said to Jonathan. “Of how many?”

“Eight.”

“Protecting all these women. Sounds like a full-time job.”

“You have a sister, then?” His Italian was accented, but fluid and nuanced. I had to remember not to underestimate him.

“Back home,” I said. “Just one, two years older than me.”

“She know everything about everything?”

“But, of course. How I breathe without her help, I always wonder.”

He glanced around. I knew the look. He was seeing if anyone was listening. At least one of them must have spoken Italian. “Even after you came here looking for those
bastardi
?”

“Yes.”

Though the shift in the conversation hadn’t caused half a second of pause, and our faces betrayed nothing, it was as audible to me as a magazine clicking into place.

“Heard you missed one,” he said.

“I haven’t forgotten.” I was being watched, indeed, by the redhead with the vapor cigarette and one of the men.

“Good.”

“I think that’s the only big failure in my dossier,” I said.

Jonathan nodded. “We’ve decided to overlook it.”

“No Italian!” Theresa had returned. She put her hand on my back. “Not fair. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Did Sheila need anything?” Jonathan asked.

“Besides a mop? No. And she’s letting the kids toast the s’mores before dinner.”

They exchanged a look that seemed more intense than it needed to be.

“Oh, Jon don’t tell this story,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It’s… I don’t know. Inappropriate.”

At the word, he took on a glint of mischief and leaned toward me. “Our dad took us to the club whenever Mom was unavailable, meaning
incapacitated
, and the nannies had the night off or were overwhelmed.

“Which was most of the time.” Theresa was cutting in on the conversation despite her misgivings about appropriateness. “The ‘overwhelmed’ part, I mean.”

“Yeah. Of course, he’d go off with his cronies to the Gate Bar to drink, and we’d be left in the TV room. Which had this big screen. At the time, this was a big deal.”

“Oh, and movies on prerelease.”

“Right. R rated, too. But mostly, we’d wander around, and at one point we got to the carriage house. It was me, Theresa, and Leanne, who was old enough to know better. But we saw these lights on and who knew, right? Maybe there were baskets of candy or some coke or something.”

“We were too young for that.”

“I think Leanne was dabbling. So. Hell, if there wasn’t something going on. Out on the patio, it was so damn dark, but we smelled a barbecue and found it happening at the carriage house. A bag of marshmallows was right there. It was closed. The boxes of graham crackers and chocolate were, too. Leanne wouldn’t let me have any unless there was no one inside. So we checked.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Eight,” he said. “By the way, it was the last time she got candy out of my hand. Anyway, so, you know, the carriage house was like a guesthouse for dignitaries, right on the Downtown Gate Club grounds. It had everything in it. A kitchen they never used, a little pool, and a sitting room, which we snuck into.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Theresa said.

“So, we’re in there. And we hear this noise, like this slapping. And we’re all curious. Oldest of us is what, eleven? And, get that look off your face,” he said to me, “It’s not what you think.”

“It’s ten times worse,” Theresa said.

“We peek around to the living room, and then, I mean the slapping gets louder, and there’s this…” He lowered his voice. “Woman, bent over the couch, with her bare bottom out, and a guy. Big hairy motherfucker of a beast, hitting her ass with a slab of meat.”

I didn’t say anything, because I hadn’t heard that exact idiom before. But Theresa burst out laughing.

“I think it was a raw flank steak,” she blurted out.

“Wait, what?”

“She covered my eyes. So sure, if she knows the cut of meat, I believe her.”

“
Mio Dio
.” I didn’t even believe what I was hearing. I had to hold in an attack of laughter, because Theresa was taking over the story.

“The guy… he hears something, and he stops. We run. Leanne pulls us in some crazy direction—”

“She has no sense of direction. She gets lost putting her contacts in,” said Jonathan.

“And we end up in the bedroom diving for a closet. We make it, but we hear the guy stomping down the hall, yelling in Russian.”

“Czech,” corrected Jonathan. “And I tell them, I whisper, ‘You’re my sisters, and I won’t let him spank you with meat.’”

Though he’d kept his face straight until then, none of us could hold it in any longer. I laughed so hard I thought my guts would drop out of me. Theresa had tears streaming down her face, and Jonathan tried to finish the story between bouts of laughter. “Leanne, I mean she was horrified. She said, ‘No one’s spanking anyone with meat, Jon.’ And then this one”—he pointed to Theresa—“says, ‘he was just tenderizing it for the grill.’”

“I was protecting your eight-year-old mind!” Theresa said.

“Wait,” I said. “You were talking? In the closet? Did he hear you?”

“We were in the tunnel by that time.” Theresa wiped a tear away, then seeing what must have been a quizzical expression, she said, “There are moveable panels in the closet. All the kids knew about them. The carriage house used to be a speakeasy. There are tunnels under it that go across the street. From prohibition.”

“Ah.” I said. “So you got away?”

“Yeah,” Theresa said. “There’s one spot where it bent to a grate under the parking space outside, and if you stood one kid on top of the other, you could open it. I have no idea if those panels are still there. I’m sure they’ve been sealed during a renovation or something.”

“They closed the connection between the carriage house and the grate,” Jonathan said. “I was trying to lose my virginity a few years later and ran into a wall.”

“It has to still be there,” I said.

“It’s all still there. Trust me. But the grate’s not connected to the house any more. And that was the best escape route, too. Landed across Gate Avenue. Remember?”

“All right!” Sheila called out from the kitchen. “We’re not waiting for Mom. So if you all want to eat, the caterer is here, and we’re ready to go!”

theresa

e ate like kings and queens, princes and princesses. I didn’t taste any of it. I was memorizing Leanne’s slovenly ponytail, Sheila’s lilting singsong, Margie’s clipped wit, Deirdre’s errant curl and sober scowl. Jonathan said nothing of importance, deftly avoiding any meaningful, personal subject matter as if he were in some sort of pain he didn’t want discussed over dinner. I wanted to corner him and ask what was happening. But then he told some joke and got a witty rejoinder from Margie. He laughed. I smiled at my brother and wondered how I would make it through the rest of my life without hearing his laugh.