Malavita (16 page)

Donny's mother was dead, and he spent as much time as he could out of the house to spare his hard-up father any extra worries. He was fifteen and no longer expected to be fed, clothed, or even given any advice on life and its many vicissitudes, all of which his father had suffered. He hardly ever went to the cinema, never watched TV, and there was no decent male role model in his neighbourhood to guide him into adulthood. His father was in fact a kind of example – an example of what not to do, a perfect guide to failure in life. So Donny just got along on his own, and pretty well really, picking up tips about life here and there in his wanderings. After several jobs, most of which were only borderline legal, he had become a specialist in the recuperation of old newspapers, just as others had found their calling in old Coke cans. So, three times a week, he would visit the airport containers, and then sell his booty on to other sellers who were prospecting on behalf of collectors of strip cartoons, magazines, dailies – you could find a taker for anything. Danny had become a master of his art: the search, the redistribution amongst his contacts, the discovery of new depots, and, as long as he worked discreetly and alone, the rubbish authorities were happy to turn a blind eye to his business. There was no one like him, capable of plunging bodily into the container, pushing himself down through the layers, turning over the furthest corner, opening up a gap, leafing through, sorting, piling, and then coming up to the surface with his rucksack full of miraculous booty. LAX airport had become his exclusive territory, and he had become a familiar figure, to whom nobody paid any attention.

However, that particular morning, Danny felt he had wasted his journey: the
Vogue
s were too recent, there were some fitness mags, hardly ten-dollars' worth, possibly another five for a 1972
Playboy
which he knew a bookseller in Catalina would take. You could always find takers for these old mags, and they weren't just for nostalgic perverts; sometimes they were completely respectable people, researchers sometimes, or maybe a student writing a thesis about magazines in the past. The most unlikely titles would turn out to be collectors' items, particularly
Playboy
– you really had to have money to burn to look at this outdated American myth. Naked women from 1972, what was that about?

In 1972 his mother and father hadn't even met, and there was nothing anywhere to suggest the future existence of a Donny Ray. He would only be born fifteen years later, by which time the sense of the forbidden had given way to all-powerful merchandising, and the profit motive had broken through the last taboos. For Donny, who had never touched a woman, nonetheless found their bodies a source of inexhaustible raw material, always available, with not the slightest mystery or concealment. For him nudity had always, from the very beginning, been a fact of life, like running water, or the bus, a basic human right. He had never opened a girl's legs, but he knew all about what was there. During his searches, he would glance coolly at the pin-ups in
Hustler
or
Penthouse
– to him all female shapes were equal and none aroused his curiosity any longer. Donny Ray just couldn't imagine that, back in 1972, very pretty women were already taking their clothes off in magazines to be queen for a day, and that a boy of his age would have killed to get his hands on this copy of
Playboy.
He simply leafed through it to check it was in good condition, unfolded the centrefold and found the Playmate of the Month spread out over three pages. Miss May 1972 was called Linda Mae Barker; she was posing in a bubble bath, photographed face on and from above.

Crouched in his container, Danny studied the magazine, thinking. The central photo didn't show much, not
everything
in any case. For the first time in his short life, he felt that something was being kept from him. And this girl didn't look at all like the ones in the present-day magazines. Were women's bodies that different then? Intrigued by the photos of young Miss Barker, so old-fashioned, so charmingly dated, almost to the point of being kitsch, Donny left the airport, still studying the magazine. Before climbing out of the container, he had picked up a crumpled rag, hardly glancing at it – the
Jules Vallès Gazette
, what was this crap? – just the right size to hide the
Playboy
from the curious eyes of passers-by. A gesture that betrayed his age.

He took the overground railway at Aviation Avenue and settled down on a bench at the end of an empty carriage. He began to study Linda Mae Barker's body from head to foot, amazed by all of it, starting with the dark-brown hair with its darker roots, held back by a schoolgirl's red ribbon. An ordinary brunette, like any of the ones you might see in the street, no more nor less sophisticated than usual; he had passed thousands like her in real life: there was the dental technician who never looked up from her work in the little office in Placid Square, or even that social worker who was always begging him to keep appointments with the psychologist. The playmates Donny looked at nowadays had great blond manes which could have covered their whole bodies. Linda Mae Barker was a gazelle compared to lionesses like that. Donny, with infinite patience, studied her every feature, her hardly visible freckles, her sweet smile, her adorable little face. He was touched by such innocence, by the way she seemed to say so little while showing so much, her shyness at being naked, the slight vulnerability of her expression, the reason for which you could only guess at, and which was invisible to those who didn't study her properly. He recognized that look in the women he saw every day; they had no pride, and were simply curious about everything, capable of being amazed by the smallest thing. The modern-day pin-ups had eliminated every shred of that naivety from their expression, gazing out as they did, beyond the photographer, at the millions of men, all connoisseurs of the power of naked flesh. You could read in Linda Mae Barker's face the challenge she had set herself – to pose naked in front of the whole of America – and her victory could be read deep in her eyes.

And the most extraordinary thing was that the rest of the body, from the shoulders down, also reflected this modesty that Donny was finding so confusing. Linda Mae Barker's breasts! High on the torso without being insolent, almost fragile despite their splendour. He searched for a word to describe them and, for want of a better one, picked “imperfect.” Yes, they were imperfect, their shape slightly unfamiliar, something between an apple and a pear, and a very long way from a melon. Before discovering Linda Mae's, Donny had always thought breasts were like geometrical spheres, all the same size, pumped up until they almost leaped out at the reader's face. Linda Mae's imperfect breasts made one long to spend some time remodelling them by hand, just so that they could spring back to their original shape, which was in the end the best one. Linda Mae's chest pre-dated surgery and silicone. And the innocence was compounded by the way the whiteness of Linda Mae's breasts contrasted with the rest of her tanned body, showing a clear bikini line. Donny couldn't get over this. White breasts? It was unheard of! It was almost indecent. What, no sunbeds in 1972? No instant tan? No one topless on the beach? Had Linda Mae never shown herself naked to anyone else? He got off the train at Long Beach station, still clutching the
Jules Vallès Gazette
wrapped around Linda Mae Barker's body. The more he stared at her, the more he wanted to protect her from sight. He got on a bus going to Lynwood, where his mate Stu lived, a childhood friend now working as a debt collector. Stu had often tried to teach him the art of breaking debtors' thumbs, but Donny, finding most forms of violence unattractive, had preferred to specialize in the old newspaper business; he saw it as a kind of contemporary treasure hunt, and here was the proof: he had found Linda Mae Barker at the bottom of a rubbish container. A young girl who had given herself to
Playboy
as one might give oneself to a first lover. With enormous care, he turned to the bottom half of the centrefold to see what was going on below the waist. The pubic area was almost entirely concealed by a mound of bubbles, just showing some edges of barely shaved pubic hair, which appeared to be the same colour as her hair – an exotic touch on this nymph-like body. Donny was more and more surprised. He had seen several thousand pubic regions in his time, in every possible shape: hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs, and every shade of blue and pink, and the most usual kind were entirely shaved. He knew more about labia than his own father. Linda Mae Barker, whose left leg was raised slightly inwards, preserved her most intimate parts, kept them hidden for ever; men, and Donny in particular, would just have to imagine. He regarded this pose as both unfair and completely legitimate. In a daze, Donny got off the bus and walked a hundred yards down Josephine Street. He entered a black brick building, nodded to the old Puerto Rican sitting in the hallway – he was a sort of unpaid doorman who had been there for ever – and rang the bell of Stu's ground-floor flat. While he waited, he had a last look at the astonishing twenty-one-year-old girl from back in 1972, when a hundred million Americans had seen in her the epitome of eroticism. Donny was worried by this unsettling feeling of annoyance that pervaded him – could this be what was known as arousal?

“You're just the man, Donny, I need a hand . . .”

Inside the apartment there was a curious combination of twilight and halogen glow. For his own reasons, Stu had decided to block off what light there was with thick shutters, which also acted as a protection against burglars. Donny had often slept there in front of the TV, his body sunk into the sofa cushions. He automatically went over to the fridge, and looked inside, without taking anything. Stu went on with what he was doing. It looked like a complicated operation, and, from a distance, reminiscent of Prohibition, a time these boys had never known.

“Can I ask what you're doing?”

“It's a parcel for Uncle Erwan.”

There were ten large cups of black coffee, a packet of sugar and six bottles of pure alcohol on the table where Stu was working.

“Coffee liqueur, it's his drug, the idiot says it helps him digest. I must really love him. Just to wind me up, he won't just drink Irish coffee, like any other Irishman, the stuff you can buy in the shops, oh no, he's got to have it home-made, that's what comes of hanging out with those fucking Italians. It's a real bind, I tell you. You have to mix ninety percent proof alcohol with sugar and coffee, but not just the sort of coffee I normally get, it's got to be espresso, the real thing, a sort of mud I get them to make at Martino's opposite. While I'm mixing the bottles, you can go to and fro, I need ten more cups like this, Martino knows. Geddit?”

“Stu, I'm in love.”

“What's that to me? You, in love? Who with?”

“Linda Mae Barker.”

“Don't know her.”

“She's a playmate.”

“Let's see.”

Donny held out the magazine, and immediately regretted it, gripped by jealousy at the thought of other eyes on his beloved.

“Her? You're having me on. She looks my mom when she was at school. Take the tray and six cups, don't let them get cold, it mixes better when it's still warm.”

“I want to know what happened to her.”

“? . . .”

“. . .”

“She must be dead, what year is it?”

“'72.”

“'72! You're crazy – you're talking about an old woman, that's disgusting.”

“What happened to her? What did she become after that? Is she married, has she got kids? Did people go on saying, ‘I saw you naked in
Playboy
, that was a while ago.' Did those photos change her life? For better or worse? Did she regret it? Or did she think she was lucky? What does she look like now? A woman who, for just one month, drove half the men on the planet mad – is she just growing old like all the others?”

Stu stopped fiddling with his bottles. He looked worried.

“It's just a stage you're going through, it's not serious, but you'd better talk to someone. I was a bit strange at your age too, but this is something else.”

“I'm going to write to Hugh Hefner, he'll know what's become of her.”

“Who's that?”

“The man who founded
Playboy
. He invented bunnies.”

“I'd take care if I was you, with all those nuts who write in. You'll have the cops round.”

“I could look on the Internet, on one of those ‘Friends Reunited' sites.”

“Yeah, and what about just falling for someone your own age. How about the little singer we saw at the Studio A party?”

“Linda Mae may need me just now.”

“Just now I'm the one who needs you, so go and get the fucking espressos, so I can send off this fucking parcel; we'll think about your problems after that, OK?”

They finished the job, Stu put the stopper in the last bottle and then got out the wooden case in which the coffee liqueur was going to travel across the United States from West to East.

“Your Uncle Erwan, is that the garage man?”

“Are you crazy? I'd tell Uncle Dylan to go fuck himself if he asked me to do anything. Erwan's in Rikers, with the long-stay guys, he'll never get out. Idiot hasn't got any family, except me, so I'm the fool who has to make his crappy liqueur.”

Stu's favourite uncle was the eldest of the Dougherty brothers. He had left Los Angeles towards the end of the Sixties in pursuit of the Pasionaria of a short-lived revolutionary movement. As the only member of the armed wing of this movement, Erwan had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Rikers Island, the New York State prison, for no less than having tried to kill the President. Stu, who had never known his uncle other than behind bars, had great respect for him, not so much for his political convictions as for the length of his sentence, which gave him some kudos in the neighbourhood.