Virgin Territory (4 page)

When Sandy Viola married Victor DellaCruz in the spring of 1997, she didn’t hide the fact that she was three months pregnant. Unfortunately, Catholics don’t allow pregnant women to get married in their churches, so Sandy had to find an alternative. She did a lot of research and then decided to rent the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center.

The Winter Garden is a big glass-paned structure situated not that far from where the World Trade Towers used to be. Of course, back in 1997 the world was a different place—the Towers were still standing, and to Sandy, the 45,000-square-foot glass building looked almost like a cathedral. Sixteen Egyptian palm trees were lined up on either side of the enormous glass cavern; the trees rose up so high that the tops of their forty-foot fronds touched the glass ceiling, and on a good day the sunlight came streaming through a thousand windows like the Second Coming of Jesus.

In the Viola-DellaCruz video, twenty-five or thirty people are milling around in the open area at the foot of the marble stairway. Most of the guests are either holding plastic champagne flutes or chowing down on mini-quiches. Because it is a Saturday morning and this is more or less a public space, there are a few businessmen and weekend shoppers who are passing through the scene. A jogger comes and goes on his way to Battery Park. A few stray Japanese tourists in candy-colored clothes and sensible sport shoes wander into the scene; they stand there wearing expressions that seem to say,
Hello. We are aliens. We have just arrived from outer space. What is this place?

At a certain point, the camera pans upward to find Sandy, the future Mrs. DellaCruz, standing at the top of the marble staircase. She looks like a plastic figurine on top of a wedding cake, but instead of a groom beside her, it’s her father, Mr. Viola, and instead of a big white, puffy wedding gown, she’s wearing an off-white dress with matching shoes. Even from a distance, you can see the flash of her smile. Mr. Viola is also giving off a lot of shine, because the slick of his hair is catching the light. I bet Doug had to adjust the settings to cut the flare. You can tell just by looking at Mr. Viola that the guy is totally in the moment. He’s beaming up there at the top of the stairs, just plain happy to have lived long enough to see this day, glad to be able to give his daughter away to the man she loves.

Down below, there’s some confusion as to whether the maid of honor, a middle-aged woman in a floral-print dress,
is supposed to accompany the bride and Mr. Viola down the steps. The maid of honor runs halfway up the marble stairs and asks the bride for instruction, but she’s told to go back down. It’s pretty clear that none of them knows what the hell they’re doing.

A recording of classical music is broadcast over the PA system, and that’s the signal for Sandy to take hold of her father’s arm and begin their descent. But suddenly, instead of following them down the stairs, the camera moves slightly upward and to the right, where a woman is walking the perimeter of the terrace. She has long dark hair, which she quickly arranges, only to have it resettle into a mess. She’s wearing a pair of loose-fitting eggplant-colored pants, a matching parka, and a flowing blue silk scarf. Even though the camera zooms in, she’s a little too far away to make out the features of her face. She is leading a five-year-old boy by the hand; she’s practically dragging him along as though they’re late for something. But the boy is not in a hurry; all he cares about is the small, red collapsible umbrella he’s twirling with his other hand.

The woman stops and looks at the wedding party down below. She’s seen it a million times before. Looking around the cavernous glass palace, she spots the camera, smiles brightly, fusses with her hair again, waves. Then she tries to interest the little boy.
Look, look
, she seems to be saying. She points toward the camera and coaxes him to wave his non-umbrella-holding hand. But he’s committed to his project, mesmerized by the
twirl of collapsible red. The woman shrugs and smiles at the camera, waves once more.

When we find Sandy and her dad again, they’re almost down at the bottom of the stairs. You can tell that Sandy’s brimming with emotion. She has no idea that the biggest moment of her life has just been upstaged. Later, when Doug presents Sandy DellaCruz (formerly Viola) with the final edit of her wedding day, there’ll be no trace of the woman and the boy. The moment will have been edited out as though it never existed. Because really, what could he say to Sandy that would make any sense to her?

Look! Right there. See? That’s my wife and my kid up there. They showed up late, but they made it. They came. Aren’t they beautiful? Aren’t they just perfect? They’re my whole life. I love them. I do
.

A couple of days have passed since the Virgin Mary was spotted at the golf course, and women are beginning to gather near the entrance gate. Who knows where they’re coming from or who they are, but there are already about two dozen of them in attendance; they sip coffee, munch on homemade breakfast treats, and pray like there’s no tomorrow. They don’t carry signs or chant ultimatums; they don’t push or shove for a better spot. They stand in the hot sun, sometimes for hours, praying to be allowed to enter the grounds of the Spring Hill Club and to see the Blessed Virgin Mary, or, as they sometimes refer to her, the BVM.

Yesterday morning, Prendergast and Jack Felder made an appearance on the front steps of the club, and they tried to reason with the women. They explained that no one will be allowed to wander the grounds and there really is nothing to see so everyone might as well go home. When no one headed for the parking area, Jack pulled out a bullhorn. “If we don’t
get back to business as usual,” Jack informs the women, “this place’ll be shut down, and everybody will lose out.”

The women nodded as though they understood the situation and then went home. But this morning, the whole thing started up again. By noon, men and children have joined the ranks, and the crowd has swelled to about three hundred. Parking has become a problem, traffic cops are assigned to the area, and a local TV reporter is doing a human interest story. Word has traveled fast, and already there are people from as far away as Texas who have come in search of a healing miracle and face time with the BVM. But unless you are an employee of the Spring Hill Club, you can forget about setting foot on the grounds. And that’s that.

Jack Felder considers it an affront and possibly an infringement of his constitutional rights that the Blessed Virgin Mary has chosen
his
golf course as her personal landing pad. According to him, she’s bad for business.

“Why me?” he wants to know. “Why
my
place? There are six or seven golf courses in this town that are better equipped for this sort of thing. And where the hell are all these people coming from? They’ve scared away my members.”

Jack isn’t the only one having a problem with the sudden influx of strangers to the community. Jupiter is a fairly conservative town, so the fact that Holy Rollers have started turning up in brightly patterned shorts and tops, with too many kids in tow, cooking their own meals by the side of the road and speaking
their home languages, has disturbed the townies; and they aren’t shy about expressing their opinions.

“Friggin’ Dayglows,” says Chad Westerly.

Chad and I are down in the basement of the club, a windowless cell with banged-up lockers and a couple of plastic lawn chairs. Chad and I always get there before anyone else. It’s not as though we love the place, we just want to get dressed and out of there before the older guys show up and make us the target of their lame jokes and endless ribbing.

“I think you mean Dagos,” I point out as politely as I can.

Chad cuts his eyes at me and sighs like I’m trying to be superior.

“Whatev,” he says, yanking on a sock.

“No,” I say. “It’s important. In case you don’t know,
Dago
is a racial slur for an Italian immigrant, and I’m pretty sure that you don’t mean to refer to the mostly Latino and Eastern European women who are gathered at the front gate as Italians.”

“Probably some Italians out there,” Chad says as a way of defending himself. I can tell he isn’t happy being corrected.

I’ve always believed that words have meaning and it’s better to say what you mean. My mother was a poet, after all. She taught me that words are precious symbols that allow us, depending on the way we arrange them, to express just about anything in the world. We have to choose our words wisely, she told me on more than one occasion; if we have any chance of being understood in this world, we have to say what we mean and we have to
mean what we say. That was a tall order for me as a kid, but then after she died it became even more of a challenge because most of the time I didn’t know what I meant or what to say.

“Anyway,” Chad continues, “wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few terrorists out there, too.”

“Terrorists? In Jupiter?”

“Yeah, man. It could happen,” he says, pulling on his khakis. Chad’s hair is a noncolor, and it pokes out of his head as straight and coarse as packing straw. His eyes are dirt-water gray, and they just sit there in his head staring out like the shot-out headlights of a junked car.

“I heard there are gangs of kids hanging out behind the clubhouse, too. They’re up to no good. Crack is what I heard.”

“Crack, Chad? For real?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

Of course, I’m no expert on the habits of teenage crackheads from the Sunshine State, but I’m pretty sure that a third-rate seaside golf club isn’t their idea of a perfect hangout. But just to be sure, I decide to check things out.

The Black Hole is an old concrete structure located out behind the clubhouse. Ages ago it was used by the kitchen staff of the golf club; they went there to change clothes, place bets, swap meals, make deals, and trade gossip. More recently, it’s become a popular place for make-out sessions between the senior caddies and the kind of girls who have low standards when it comes to romance. Because the place is shrouded in
mystery and is a source of unreliable information, it’s became known as “the Black Hole.” And now, according to Chad, it’s the gathering place of crack addicts, terrorists, and “Dayglows.”

I’m only a few feet away from the Hole when I realize that someone’s in there. Lit matches are being flicked one by one at an empty beer bottle that’s been placed within spitting distance. Every thirty seconds or so, a little flash of fire makes an arc out into the daylight and then exhausts itself on the grass in a tiny puff of smoke. Not one of them comes close to hitting the bottle. This seems a useless way to spend a morning, but then who am I to judge? I’m a person watching someone spend a useless morning flicking matches.

“Somebody out there?” asks a voice from inside.

It’s a girl’s voice with a trace of a Spanish accent. I have a vision. She’s hot, and she thinks I’m hot. We fall in love, buy a used car, drive to New York City. We have lots of sex. I’m hoping she has a driver’s license.

“Hell-o-oh?” she sings out when I don’t respond right away.

I poke my head around the corner, and as soon as I see her I disqualify myself as a participant in my own fantasy. She’s way out of my league. This girl is a total first-class, type-A hottie with a tangle of long black hair and smart, dark eyes. She isn’t wearing trendy designer clothes or carrying a purse the size of her head. She doesn’t have a lot of rings or bracelets or a fancy cell phone with a jeweled case. When she leans forward to get a better look at me, her shoulder dips into the light and looks fresh baked.
She’s wearing a pair of tight white shorts, and her long bare legs stick out like they’re doing advertising in a catalog.

I stand there unable to say a word, forgetting everything, including my name. She seems to take pity on me. She tilts her head, and her eyes light up as though she’s just about to recognize me. Then, without the slightest warning and for no apparent reason, she tosses her hair and laughs. She laughs so hard she knocks her head against the concrete wall behind her and then drops her matchbook to the floor. As I reach down to pick up the matches, I can feel my face turning red, though I’m not sure why.

“Ouch. Geez. That hurt,” she says, rubbing the back of her head and letting out another little laugh. “That’ll teach me. For a minute I thought you were someone I knew.”

“Sorry,” I offer as I hand her back the matches.

“You didn’t do anything. What’d you do?”

“Nothing, I guess I didn’t do anything.”

“Esssaaactly,” she says as though we’ve just had some big philosophical discussion. She looks at me from my top to my bottom.

“You got a smoke on you?”

I do. In fact, I have two stale Marlboro Golds that have been banging around in a flip-top box and stuffed into my back pocket for a month. I stole them from Doug. I’ve also kept a condom in the flip-top box—just in case. I figured I’d meet a girl and we’d have sex, and then afterward, while we’re lying together
tangled and exhausted, she’d look up at the ceiling and ask me for a smoke. Naturally, I wouldn’t want to disappoint her.

“You don’t smoke, do you, baby?”

Anyone can tell by the way I’m coughing up my lungs that I’m new at this sort of thing. Serves me right for trying to imitate the way Doug takes long, hard drags on his cigarette as though his life depends on it.

“It’s okay. It’s not for everyone,” she says, and then she takes a puff. “In fact, smoking should be for no one. But what’re you gonna do? It gets you and then … gross, right?”

She’s careful to blow the smoke away from me, and then she asks, “How old are you anyway?”

“Fifteen, almost sixteen actually.”

“I’m seventeen,” she replies. “My name is Angela, but I’m going by the name Marta right now, because … well, because Marta is my real name. My true name. What is
your
true name? No! Don’t tell me. I’ll tell you. You are … you are … Alexander. Like Alexander the Great. What about that? Do you feel it?”

I wonder if the planet Pluto could feel the change when it was assigned a number instead of a name. Did it matter to that mass of floating rock spinning at the very edge of our solar system that it was being called by some other name, a number? But I don’t mention Pluto, because I have a hunch that talking outer space with this girl will get me nowhere.