Mortal Bonds (7 page)

“Doug Randolph? The Boy Scout? The guy who wore Brooks Brothers and wingtips every day of his life. What was he doing tied up with Von Becker?”

“Long story. Get him to tell it. It ain’t pretty.” He signed the check and we got up to leave. “I gotta do a turn of the room here. Say my good-byes. You go on.”

“It was great seeing you again, Paddy.”

“Come here.” He gave me a very showbiz hug and air-kissed my cheek. “You ever want to get back in the game, you let me know. I’ll back ya. We’ll have some laughs.”

“I don’t think the regulators will ever let me back. I should have taken you up on your first offer ten years ago. My life would be a lot simpler right now.”

“Hey, you can’t think of it that way. What happened is what was supposed to happen. You only get to choose what happens next. Good luck to you, Jason. Don’t be a stranger.”

I was almost out the door when I heard him call me.

“Jason! Wait. I almost forgot. Well, I did forget, but then I remembered.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Here ya go. Vouchers for four house seats to my show. Take your son and some friends. Kids love the show.”

He flashed me the smile again and waved before he turned back into the dining room. “Petey! Della! Howahya?”

N
o New Yorker in his right mind goes out to Kennedy Airport to greet arrivals. On a good day with minimal traffic, it’s an hour from the Upper West Side. That never happens. It had taken the Town Car driver close to two. But the JetBlue flight had sat out on the tarmac waiting for an open gate for forty-five minutes, so I got to baggage claim well before the passengers.

Five Eastern European limo drivers, all wearing cheap black raincoats despite the grueling heat outside, were congregated around the base of the escalator, each armed with a baggage cart and white rectangular sign. My driver was Haitian and wore a beret over a lopsided Afro. We stood out.

Angie was in the first wave of passengers. She flowed down toward me looking every bit as beautiful and dangerous as I remembered. She wasn’t looking for me; she was waiting to be seen. The pose held until every male in the baggage area had taken notice.

“Hey,
cher
. Thank you for coming out like this. You are lookin’ good.” She gave my prison-issue biceps a squeeze and I felt a zap of something halfway between lust and fear. She stepped back and, with a flourish as though unveiling a work of art, she took off her sunglasses. She stood waiting to be admired.

She had had her eyes done—making her look a little like one of the aliens in
Avatar
. It was probably a good job—I wouldn’t know. She must have had the doctor do it when they were finishing the rest of the repair work. Most people wouldn’t have noticed. I noticed.

“Hello, Angie,” I managed. Her black widow’s dress covered her from jawline to mid-calf, but still managed to reveal every dip and curve in the landscape. She would have stopped traffic in Vegas. Angie probably thought it was conservative. “Good to see you.” It
was
good, I realized. The anger was long gone, replaced by an at-a-distance sympathy, and a touch of forgiveness. She’d been dealt a shitty hand, and it wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t been able to make a royal flush out of it. “Tino? And your Mamma?”

“Mamma wanted a wheelchair, so Tino waited with her. They’ll be along.”

“She all right?”

Angie made a face like she was thinking hard—maybe it helped. “She just likes to be made a fuss over. She’s got the sugar now, but she can walk. Where’s my
petit boug
?”

“The Kid’s in school. You’ll see him this afternoon.”

She pursed her lips in a demonstration of disappointment. “A boy could miss one day of school to come greet his Mamma, couldn’t he?”

I failed to rise to the bait. “No, Angie. The Kid needs his school more than he needs either of us. They’re doing miracles with him.”

I saw the old flash of fire in her pale blue eyes, but she blinked and made it go away. “You’re right. Of course.” Agreeing with me must have been a unique experience, because she suddenly appeared flustered. Her hand came up and fluttered in front of her face. “I brought him a present,” she said vaguely. She looked around as though surprised that whatever it was wasn’t right there. “Oh, damn.” She smiled in confusion. “Tino has it.”

I felt the old urgings of wanting to reach out and help her. I squashed them. Instead I cleared my throat and tried to smile back.

She was still a startlingly beautiful woman, but her face no longer had that perfect symmetry that the camera had so loved when she was modeling. The repairs from the accident were good, just not that good. The last time I had looked at her was when my father and I had brought the Kid down to visit her over Christmas. Her face had been swathed in bandages and what skin showed had been puffy and discolored with bruising. The Kid hadn’t seemed to notice, but Pop had been outraged.

“That’s not right. Why in hell did she drag us all down here, whimpering about needing to see her baby? No child should have to see his mother like that.”

“She needed an audience, Pop. She’s now the Widow Martin and a survivor of the crash that killed her husband. It’s her greatest role yet.”

They’d been married three months. Long enough for TeePaul to reveal himself as a bully and a drunk, although all the indications had been there from Day One. He had beaten Angie on more than one occasion, and he had hit my son. Once.

The day he died, he had been trying to punch Angie with his right hand, while using his left both to steer the monster pickup truck she had bought for him and hold the half-empty bottle of Early Times. Angie was crouched down away from him when the truck hit the concrete divider and launched itself into the oncoming lanes. The plastic casing on the air bag hit her in the face rather than the chest. She was lucky. TeePaul was vaulted over the steering wheel, and his head went through the windshield. The trucker, deadheading in a Peterbilt on his way back to Denton, Texas, for a faulty air conditioner repair, had stood on his brakes the moment he saw the big F-150 veering across the road. So, he was only doing around fifty when the pickup—airborne, and north of eighty—connected with his left front fender. That was all for him. TeePaul had bled out through multiple head and neck wounds, screaming and cursing until he choked on his own blood. I couldn’t see why anyone but his mother would have mourned him.

Angie felt me staring—examining her. For a moment, she faltered. Her face reddened and she turned away, hiding a look of fear. The doctors had implanted, grafted, stitched, and smoothed, but the best they’d been able to do was to produce a close copy of the woman who had once commanded a high-four-figure day rate. If I could see the marks and imperfections at four feet, what would they look like to Angie in her magnifying makeup mirror?

“You’re a beautiful woman, Angie,” I said quietly. “Forgive me for staring. You’re easy to stare at.”

“It’s cars. I brought cars. Those little cars he likes.” She gave a short gasp and looked at me. “He does still like them, doesn’t he?”

“He’ll love them. Don’t worry.”

She turned away and looked back up the hall. “Where can Mamma be? I mean, how long could it take? They’re not going to hold her up until the whole plane empties, are they?”

“You were in first?” Of course they were. Angie still had enough of my money to treat herself and her mother and brother to first-class airplane tickets. Also meals, hotels, shopping. Angie had been a sharp businesswoman in a cutthroat environment who had watched every penny—even if she spent it on champagne—but she was also generous, especially with family. “They won’t keep them.”

They didn’t. Down the hall came Mamma Oubre, being wheeled in state by a burly black woman, followed by her son, Tino, who was weighed down with three carry-on bags and a big Dillard’s shopping bag. Tino saw us and waved first. I was glad to see him. Tino owned Lafayette’s most exclusive salon, but at thirty-three had yet to come out to his mother. Still, he was the sanest member of the family. I liked him.

“Hey, y’all,” he called. “Well, well. New York comes out to welcome the Boudreaux. I swear they were checkin’ our bags for alligator skins. Oh my god, Jason, who are you letting cut your hair? I am going to do something about that while I’m here.”

Tino was wearing white linen pants and a lavender guayabera shirt. No socks and woven loafers. While his sister was blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, Tino looked almost Latin with his dark eyes and hair. He turned almost as many heads as his sister—from both sides of the aisle.

Mamma saw me and squealed. “Ooohhh, Jason! Come here, young man, and let me see you.” She jumped up from the wheelchair like a cured penitent at a Pentecostal tent church, raising a few eyebrows from the otherwise jaded New Yorkers waiting for their bags. I let her hug me and gave a short squeeze in return.

The alarm sounded and the belt began to move. Tino and the driver went over to recover the bags. Angie had the Dillard’s bag and was rifling through it, seeking the Kid’s present, I imagined.

Mamma still had my elbow in her grip. She pulled me to her and whispered in my ear, “My little girl has been so excited to see you. I just know you two will find a way to patch things up now she’s done with that
coullion
.” She released me and patted my cheek fondly.

I got that cold, liquid feeling in my gut, the one you get just after swallowing a bad oyster. Things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. And there was nothing to be done about it.

•   •   •

HOW DO YOU
TELL
a mother not to hug her child?

We had left Mamma and Tino to settle in at the rented apartment. Three bedrooms, three baths, sunken living room, newly renovated kitchen, designer furnishings, and a tenth-floor view of the park. “Not too shabby,” my father would have said. Angie and I took the Town Car up to Seventy-third Street to greet the Kid. On the way, I tried to describe some of the differences, or near-unique characteristics, of our child.

“The school is doing wonders, Angie. He knows his letters. He’s good at numbers. He doesn’t really read yet. He recognizes symbols, though, and they think he’ll get it eventually.”

“Mamma says I was a slow reader.”

“For instance, he knows the letters
F
,
O
,
R
, and
D
, and when he sees the Ford logo he knows what it means. But show him the word ‘ford,’ like a ford in a stream, and he has no idea. He can’t get it.”

“Well, that’s a hard word.”

He could also “read” the words Chevrolet, Maserati, and Lamborghini, but he couldn’t figure out “dog.”

“But he is beginning to talk about things other than cars. He understands the concept of conversation, but he’s still not good at it.” And sometimes he simply refused to partake.

“He gets that from his father’s side,” she teased.

That was fair. I was in college before anyone suggested to me that constantly asking questions wasn’t really conversation and that it could be annoying, or even rude. I barely spoke to anyone for a year after that.

“He still doesn’t like to be touched. He’s going through a bad patch right now. Not a big deal. Things get worse before they get better. That’s what Heather says.”

“Heather?” Angie managed to make the single word conjure up visions of vampires, serial killers, and afternoon talk-show hosts all in one. “Heather is a color.”

“Heather is his shadow,” I said.

“Your new fuckbuddy?”

There went the sympathy and forgiveness. I stared out the window, counting the things I would rather be doing than escorting my ex around town. When I was well into the double digits, I risked answering her. “Heather is more than a nanny, less than a doctor. Neither the Kid nor I could make it through the week without her. She is a pain in the ass sometimes. She can be tough. But I trust her. More important, I think the Kid trusts her.” I spoke calmly, rationally, kindly. “She wears more facial jewelry than Marilyn Manson’s whole fanbase, and she’s got forearms the size of my calves. And I think she’s a lesbian, though, honestly, I’d be afraid to ask.”

It was her turn to stare out the window. Then she said something I never thought I would have heard from her again. “I’m sorry.”

We both took a moment to take that in. I wanted to say I was sorry, too, but I couldn’t think of anything to apologize for.

“I was reacting,” she continued. “I meant to ask if you were seeing anyone.”

A water moccasin slid through my lower intestine. I was all too conscious of her long bare legs, the gravity-defying lift of her million-dollar breasts (they’d been insured when we were first married), the faint scent of Bolt of Lightning, and the memory of a limo ride in Paris our first year together. I felt a rise in my pants.

“We had us some times,
cher
, didn’t we?” She said it casually, as though she didn’t know exactly what I had been thinking. “So, are you?”

“Am I?”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

When in doubt, tell the truth; it’s easier to back down from the high ground. Another of my father’s aphorisms.

“I am.” My throat was tight, and I almost coughed it out.

Angie laughed. “
Mais,
boo, you sound like you swallowed a
tooloulou
.” She patted my thigh. “I’m happy you got youself
une bebelle foh de gogo
.” Angie the Cajun—one of her playful poses. Once I would have enjoyed it; now it sounded practiced, forced. I had a rare flash of insight about my ex-wife; Angie was as uncomfortable as I was.

•   •   •

THE ELEVATORS
at the Ansonia were built to carry grand pianos. With just the two of us riding up together, the space felt impossibly small.

“Angie.” I paused, not sure of quite how to proceed.

“Anh?” she said after five seconds of dead silence.

I jumped in. “When you take the Kid through the lobby, you can’t walk on the black tiles. Only on the white ones. I should have said something before we came in, but I didn’t want to sound like a nutcase.”

“That is just what you sound like. What are you talkin’ ’bout?”

“Holes. The Kid thinks the black tiles are holes. He gets scared. It’s just a . . . a thing, but it’s . . .” I couldn’t think of what it was. It made sense as long as I didn’t have to say it out loud.

“Foolish?” she snapped.

“Important,” I said. “And don’t be surprised if he’s not talking. He goes through these periods.”

She was one degree from boiling over. “You said he was getting better.”

“He is. You’ll see.”

The elevator glided to a stop and the doors slid open. Angie seemed to bite back some reply and then stepped into the corridor. I did a quick hop-skip to walk with her rather than follow.

I wanted her to see the Kid was doing well. He goddamn was doing well. She’d left him locked in a room at her mother’s when caring for him had become inconvenient. I took him to school every morning. Checked his scrambled eggs for spots. Made sure he had clean blue clothes to wear on Monday. I was the one who wrapped him up tightly in a sheet at night until he fell asleep. And sometimes two or three times more through the night when his terrors came on. And when I walked through the lobby I was careful to step on white tiles only—even when the Kid wasn’t with me. And why in hell should I be worried about proving something to her? She was the one who’d stolen him away eight months earlier, only to abandon him back at her mother’s. And if I hadn’t gone and brought the Kid back, he might have been in the truck that day and . . .