Welcome to Paradise (12 page)

Strolling now along streets lined with
hibiscus shrubs and shaded by enormous banyans, he scanned his
conscience and found it basically clear. He was an okay guy, not a
saint, but a person of average virtue, ordinary decency. He was
gentle with animals and would return a wallet if he found one.
Essentially honest. Peaceable. Preferring to be kind than
otherwise.

Such people were supposed to be rewarded. By
God, or the universe, or however you wanted to put it. If not with
gaudy gifts, then at least with neutral fortune and peace of mind.
This Al had been taught, and this he still believed.

So why did he have less peace of mind than
he'd had three days ago? Either the universe was out of whack, or
he was looking at it wrong.

The universe, he couldn't fix. So he finessed
his point of view.

These calamities that kept happening to
him—maybe they weren't what they seemed. He'd been seeing himself
as chosen victim, singled out for misery—but maybe that was a
mistake. This unlikely, pinpoint malice that found him time and
time again—maybe the real intention was something altogether
different.

He walked, he pondered, then suddenly it hit
him.

Hit him so abruptly that he laughed out loud
from the bottom of his burning lungs. Of course! Of course that's
what it was! No one was out to get him. He wasn't targeted for
torment after all. A great wave of relief swept warmly over him,
coupled with humble amusement that he hadn't caught on, solved the
riddle sooner. He shook his head, and laughed some more, and wiped
his eyes, and his dog looked back at him across her shoulder as
though he'd lost his mind.

*

"Nicky," said his friend Donnie Falcone,
"don't even think about it."

"How can I not think about it?" Nicky said,
fingering the collar of his turtleneck.

In New York it was already dusk, one of those
brown dusks that buries a gray day with people barely noticing the
fade. They were having a cocktail in Tribeca. This was no dim and
somber Mob joint but a hip place with an artist or two crammed in
among the brokers. The waiter for their miniature table was skinny
and wore black. There were women at the bar with straight, lank
hair and bags under their eyes. Donnie, lean and lugubrious in his
big black coat, almost looked like he belonged.

"I'm there," Nicky Scotto went on, "I'm
runnin' things again—how can I not think about it?"

Donnie rubbed his long and concave face.
"Find a way," he urged. "Be practical, Nicky. Skim your twenty,
thirty, whatever you can manage in a week, and let it go."

"Twenty, thirty," Nicky said dismissively.
"It's not about the money."

Donnie sipped his martini. "Don't make me
laugh, I got chap lips."

"Okay, it's not just about the money. It's
about who's the right guy—"

Donnie was rolling his cocktail napkin up
around the damp base of his glass. "Nicky," he broke in, "lemme ask
you somethin'. How'd you get the job?"

Nicky leaned in closer across the table that
was barely big enough to hold two sets of elbows. "I tol' ya. Tony
decided—"

"Fuhget Tony decided. How did you actually
get the job? Who tol' you you had it?"

"Carlo," Nicky admitted. "Carlo called me
up—"

"Exactly," Donnie said. "Carlo. Not Tony.
Carlo. Zat tell you anything?"

Nicky looked stubborn in his bafflement.

"Here's what it tells me," his friend went
on. "It tells me that who runs the fish market for one lousy week
is exactly the kinda piddly bullshit that Tony don't wanna be
bothered havin' a sitdown about."

"But if I just explain to him—"

"Explain what? Look, you want my advice, here
it is: fuhget about lookin' ta sit down wit' Tony."

Nicky pouted, chased condensation down to the
bottom of his glass of scotch. "Ta you it's piddly bullshit," he
complained. "Ta me it's like a whole new chance."

"Fine. Except it isn't."

"How you know it isn't?" Nicky challenged.
"How you know it isn't a tryout, like, a test."

Donnie raised his neat hands in surrender.
"Okay, okay, I don't know nothin'. I only know that Tony's gonna be
aggravated, ya waste his time wit' this."

"Waste his time? It's an opportu—"

"Nicky, you're makin' a mistake."

Nicky Scotto, annoyed but not dissuaded,
gestured for another round of drinks. The waiter, more than cool,
answered the gesture with the most elegant of tiny nods, and wove
toward them through the crowded place as silent as a fish.

*

Al Tuschman was still chortling off and on
when he walked into the office of Paradise and asked to use the
phone. He was flushed and disheveled, and the desk clerk with the
eyebrow studs looked at him with politely smiling disapproval.

"Been drinking, Mr. Tuschman?"

"Only half the ocean. If you'll excuse me,
this is gonna be long distance."

He dialed, leaning on the counter. The clerk
moved off just to the edge of earshot.

Waiting for the call to be picked up, Al got
giddy once again. It's what happened when a man was allowed to
crawl back from the precipice. Relief became a species of dementia.
His chest heaved, his nose ran, and when Moe Kleiman finally lifted
the phone and said a friendly, salesmanlike hello, Al had no breath
to speak.

"Hello?" his employer said again. "Hello?
Kleiman Brothers Furniture."

"You guys," Al Tuschman managed between
snorts. "What a buncha kibitzers!"

"Who is this?" asked his boss.

Al wheezed through soggy passages. "The
lobsters. The calamari. Jesus, howdya manage?"

"Al?"

"Really had me goin'. Thought... Christ, I
don't know what I thought."

"If this is Al—"

"And about the car, I mean, jeez, the trip
was prize enough. Ya didn't have to glom the car—"

"What car?"

"—pay off the lease—"

"Are you meshuga altogether?"

"Come on, Mr. Kleiman. Joke's over. Time to
let it go."

"Are you okay, Al? Let what go?"

Al hesitated, cleared his throat of salt.
Belatedly, it dawned on him that he must be sounding like a
lunatic. He tried to cling to his giddiness, which was also his
hope, but it was going, fast; emptily he watched it slip away like
a loved one at the airport. Desperate now, he said, "Really, Mr.
Kleiman, about these pranks—"

"Pranks? Al, trust me, I don't know what
you're talking about. Is something wrong?"

He struggled for a normal breath and strove
now for a sober tone. "Wrong? Oh, no. Coupla funny things have
happened. I just thought maybe . . ."

"Yes?"

"Really I'm just checking in. Things okay up
there?"

"Fine, Al, fine."

"Checking in, and thanking you again for the
trip. This is quite a place."

"You like it?"

"Love it. Thanks again."

"You're welcome, Al. You earned it," Kleiman
said, and Al could picture him kindly smiling, the thin mustache
stretched into gray rays across his lip. "Enjoy and get home safe.
We miss you here."

Al almost said he missed them, too, but then
was stopped by the galling and ridiculous sensation that if he said
it he would start to cry.

Instead he said, "Hey, I'll be back soon.
You'll see, I'll be tan and sell my ass off. Better than
before."

"So what now?" asked Chop Parilla.

"I wish you'd quit askin' me that," said
Squid. "Every time I'm baskin' inna glow of something, you're
already buggin' me what's next."

They were sitting at a beachfront restaurant
at the south end of Duval Street. It was a seafood joint but they
were having burgers; ever since the calamari they hadn't felt like
fish. Chop looked off at the ocean. The last light was skimming
across it, making it look both thick and glassy, like if soup could
be a mirror.

"Somethin's up my ass about this job," he
finally admitted.

"Yeah," said Squid. "You only got to steal
one car." He was eating french fries. He ate them one by one, the
long way. He blobbed the tips in ketchup then held them up above
his mouth like a trainer dangling herrings to a seal.

"Nah," Chop said, "it isn't that. It's ...
it's ... ah the hell with it."

Squid wiped ketchup from his lips. He found
it entertaining when Chop tried to explain himself. "Come on," he
urged. "What?"

Chop took a bite of burger, slowly chewed.
"It's that. . . it's that ya got no waya knowin' when you're
finished, when ya've done the job. Ya see what I'm sayin'?"

Squid sucked his Coca-Cola through a
straw.

"I mean," said Chop, "ya torch a place, the
place burns down, ya've done the job. Ya hurt a guy, he's inna
hospital, ya've done the job. But this? Ya bother 'im, ya bother
'im some more—how ya know when ya've bothered 'im enough and the
job is really done?"

Squid folded his hands and serenely smiled,
confirmed in his most basic belief—a belief that allowed him to
feel his efforts did not go totally unappreciated. He'd always held
that an intrinsic sense of art, however rudimentary and
inarticulate, existed even in the densest dullard. "So you're
saying it's about the structure of the thing?"

"Fuck structure. What I'm sayin'—"

"Is that you want a rise and fall, a
climax."

"What I want," said Chop, "is to know when
the fuckin' job is over so I can go home to Hialeah and play wit'
motors."

Squid went back to eating french fries.
"S'okay," he said, "in your own mind, what would it take for the
job to be over?"

"Fuck difference does it make?"

"Come on," said Squid. "We're talkin'
hypothetical."

"Fuck hypothetical. Lemme eat my burger."

Berman sighed. "Chop, ya know what separates
us from monkeys? We converse while dining, we make witty
conversation. So come on. What would convince you that we did
enough, the job is over?"

Parilla put his burger down. "Okay. Okay. The
fucker's hauled off in a straitjacket. Or better yet, he dies."

Squid clasped his hands together, looked up
at the deepening violet sky. "Beautiful! Perfect classic endings.
Except that ain't the job."

"I kinda wish it was. Now lemme eat my
fucking dinner."

He'd had one forkful of coleslaw when Squid
was at him again.

"What this job is," the bandy man said, "the
beauty of it, it's modern."

"Fuck modern."

"It doesn't finish. It's just there. Like one
a those paintings that's just dribs and drabs and slashes all the
way to the edge. Forces you to deal with tension."

Chop put down his fork. "Keep talking and
you're gonna deal with my foot up your ass."

" Ya see the power of that tension? I mean,
it even gets to you!"

"One more word, Squid. One more word."

The bandy man swallowed viscously and finally
shut up. Eating french fries, he stared off at the ocean, which had
given up its copper tinge and turned a nighttime indigo. With
neither rise nor fall, it spread to the horizon, and was everywhere
a climax, since it had no start or finish. The most ancient and
most modern picture. He wished he could make Chop see it. He knew
he never would.

*

Big Al Marracotta, an all-or-nothing guy,
could not accept that his vacation had been tarnished, that his
carefree, sex-dazed time in Florida should be anything less than
perfect. It offended him that problems dared intrude; it frustrated
him that he could not shut off the world; it made him bitter that
pleasure wasn't simple.

So his attitude got lousy and he did
everything he could to make things worse. The change was very
sudden, and understandably baffling to Katy Sansone.

Things had been going pretty well. She'd been
giving him a back rub. They'd been talking about things, he'd been
almost revealing. She'd felt like she was helping him, that they
were getting close, almost like a real couple. Then the phone rang
and she was banished to the bath.

Now, three quarters of an hour later, she was
out of the tub, swathed in a robe, a towel turban on her head, and
everything was different. Al looked mad again. "Things okay?" she
innocently asked, shaking water from her ear.

He didn't answer and didn't look at her. He
wasn't pacing anymore, just sort of wandering around the room.

Trying to be helpful, she said, "That phone
call—?"

"There wasn't any phone call," he cut her
off. "Remember that." He kept wandering, seeming to look for places
where his small feet hadn't yet flattened the carpet.

"Al, is there anything I can do?"

There wasn't, and he held it against her that
there wasn't. He stared at her from under his eyebrows, and in the
stare was an unreachableness that was not very different from
hate.

Katy still imagined that she must have done
something to deserve that look. "If you're mad about how long I
stayed at the beach—"

"I don't give a shit how long you
stayed."

He went to the phone and ordered a bottle of
scotch. Katy rubbed the towel against her scalp.

"Why don't you put an outfit on," he
said.

At first she was happy he said it. Sex opened
him up, if anything did. She scanned his face for some hint of the
boy-devil grin, the wry, untempered zest that welcomed her into his
selfishness awhile. But he didn't look zestful, just craggy and
mean. She got worried in her stomach. She tried to sound playful.
"Which one would you suggest?"

"Black."

She got some things from her suitcase and
went back to the bathroom.

The liquor arrived while she was in there. Al
poured himself a tumblerful and picked out a porno film. He pulled
down the window shades; the last, dusky light put a lavender gleam
around their edges, then faded, squandered, into night.

Katy emerged, walking stiffly on spike
heels.