A Matter of Love in da Bronx Read online

  --Taxi! I'm late. I'm late! I know it! If it wasn't for this crazy watch and getting tackled by this bozzo sending the drawings all over the world I'll... Hell! And I laid it on Weezy not to be late and now she'll be standing there alone...

  --Miss! Have you no compassion? Have you no understanding? Can't you see I'm not asking for anything you wouldn't just throw away on a stray pussycat? Just some small recognition of me as a fellow human being. You know, like when you meet someone you casually know on your block in some distant city you greet one another like long lost relatives? I don't need that, but pretend we've just come aboard an alien planet, and you say, hey! Hi! A fellow human being from Earth. Say! You'll say, isn't this a great place? I know! A coffee! A coffee! The deli right down the street! We'll have a coffee. Just. Look, I know I've seen you before. If she'd only take off that stupid hat!

  --No! Don't you see I've got problems? I'm sorry! Another time, another place, maybe, things could've been different. Now! What movie was that from? Where they part at the end of the movie? No, it wasn't Bogart and Bergman, but they did part at the end, didn't they? Well, one version of it. Listen, Sol, if you had to put up with my father as I do even when I don't walk in late, you'd show a little sympathetic understanding.

  He could see the taxi had sniffed out an unexpected fare, saw it take a U-turn in a drift, squeal, and hone in on ground zero by the gal with her arm up trying to juggle papers, or something, and the guy doing a Romeo balcony scene. She probably wouldn't give him a hand job in the funny house. If the taxi driver only knew. Last chance! Think of something, Jerk. No, Mr. Jerk.

  --Miss, wait!

  The urgency in his voice. What was it? So commanding. She stopped. Turned. He ran toward her. What was he doing? Yanking off his raincoat. Running between the parked cars.

  --Madam! Adroitly, and with great style, he spread his coat over the puddle between her, the curb and the cab. With the same grande gesture, he yanked open the door, and swept his hand inviting for her to take the cab.

  --You dumb jerk, why'd you do that? Who do you think you are? Sir Walter Scott? She walked around his coat plastered on the street. He nodded, smiling broadly. Yeah? Well, don't forget, he had his head chopped off. In she went.

  --Miss, look. Take this, if not for the ruined drawings, for the cab! He reached in through the door to shove all the bills he had in his pocket into her hand. At least, I can't condemn myself for not having tried. So, go ahead, ride on out of my life. Resigned to his fate, he slammed the door.

  Funny world. Any other time, any other place, the two of us might've had a nice conversation. Perhaps some didactic dissertation on the rite of the honeybee, or the rate of glacial dissipation. But, no. It has to be on a crazy night in my life when nothing's been right, not even this. Sorry, stranger. Sorry, Sol. Whoever you are. She rolled down the window. She held the money out to him. His handsome face, almost all in shadow, seemed much too solemn for such a young man. But what the hell! He could be another Goldberg... Trying to buy me off, like some cheap hooker. Take back your money. Refusal. She told the cabbie to take off as she threw the bills out the window. --Here, you jerk! As for you, Cabbie, don't get your hopes us, this is no big fare, just to the other side of Eden Farms, diagonally across in fact, right in front of the photographer's studio. About an eighth of a mile. Goodbye, goodbye, my love, looking so dejected, so sad, but Sol? What kind of a name is that? Sol?

  Disappeared. In a cab. Out of my life. Out of the world. Forever. Look, look back at me, Hope of Infinite Possibilities, and you'll see the embodiment of Conquest, War, Famine and Death, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, ride into my heart bestirring my brain into polenta, because I know you made up the other part of me that was my life! Without you, I want no part of this world, and you took me as lightly as a fart in a gale. How cruel to have let me see you so late. And so soon. But, enough to waste a good portion of a useful life to show my sacrifice is in earnest. How much can it count if an old man flings the odd change of his life into the vat of eternal unstirrings? Fraudulent waste, it is. Me? I have something to pay! I am to be reckoned with! Cut down in the prime of his life, I can be! ...Hello! What is that? Tucked aneat in greymatching dark of the tarred street one bit of a corner brightwhite signaling to betray its hiding is a lost drawing of my Heloise! My World! Oh! How colossal to own something done of your own creation! You speak to me of a piece of the True Cross! What is it on the faceless figure but an elegant tutu, a cocktail dress, yes! Up off of his knees now, supplication replied, the treasure is brought into the light. And, hello, again! What is that? Tucked aneat in greymatching dark of charcoal but a name! A signature! The artist be done! Like a checkvalve clogging his throat lest his innards bolt out in exhaltation the surging force fills his chest bordering on the real possibility of an explosion. --Oh! Lord! Oh! God! Almighty! Me! As blackfaced blackguards of the night confiscate unremembered raincoat and strewn bills. How incredibly incredible! Salvation a hairsbreadth from a malefic end! There it is! For the entire world to see! Especially me! Me! Her name, Sir! Her name! Her name! Anonymity undone.

  And at the top of his lungs, hopping along the way to home, unceasing in his declaration, he proclaims: I love you! I love you! ILOVEYOU, Louisa Golczek!

  CHAPTER 4

  THE DOGS WERE FUCKING on the sidewalk. She was homebound, her arms loaded with schoolbooks, eleven years old, and no period, yet, when she saw them. Her first sensations responded to fear. Were they fighting? The one with all four on the walk seemed put upon, angry. Somewhat reluctant. The top dog, two pads on the ground, the other two paws grasping tightly the middle of the other pooch, offered no choice. It was taking. For Mary, it was a discovery, a form of physical behavior she'd never witnessed before. First, it was interesting: then it was exciting. It became even more so when she realized the interaction was aggressive of a nature, although conquest seemed the predominant theme it had nought to do with thumbsdowndeath. Not even anything vicious. It was a ritual. Terpsichorean. Even humorous with the tail end of the upper dog diddering rapidly like the tongue of a vibrating Jew's harp. She drew closer, fascinated by the singleminded, full-blank eyes of the one jactitating its moist, red jalapeno pepper into the other one. Like two hands massaging her face, the wave drew her flesh tight, and she suddenly knew she was viewing a `secret' ritual of the world. No! A ritual secret to her! They were...doing...IT! There had been a mysterious bodily function to which the whole and entire world alluded, at ordinary, and at specific times, like at showers and weddings, which drew the blood to her face. She blushed, not because she didn't know--which she really didn't--but because she understood at least partly. It. It was it. Holey Moley! The grownups kept the secret to themselves, but their ribald laughter gave them away when the boundary was crossed. And the church, so holy, and pure, and white, never really said so, or talked about what they were talking about, or would explain when explanations were sought; but one got to sense it: this is what it was all about. Fucking. A word much heard before but shielded in mystery. This was it. So, dogs do it. Too. --Yes, Father, my question for the catechism class today is what do they mean by the Virgin Mary? What is virgin? Ah! You say the ecclesiastical ramifications surpass the mere mortal concepts of the proclivity of Man, sorry! Small "m" for man, you say? And your answer then is "sin." Free from sin? You mean it has nothing to do with puberty, that age at which a girl-child may conceive? And what pray tell is conceive? Ah! Yes! Conception is the starting of life anew. And how do we accomplish this...conception? The intermingling of sperm and ovum? Yes, Mary, my dear, one does that by fucking. If that's so dark, and deep, and sinful, with so much fuss made about it, why is it so pleasurably exciting? No answer given, none received. But her own. Nature puts it in us to do it with no control; Man tries to put in control. Until that time, for her, it was a matter of poking and probing around in the shadowy areas while listening, asking, wondering. And, there, right on the sidewalk for the entire world to confront, were two of God's creatures demonstrating
the latest and hottest techniques. Ka-splash! The big, fat lady douses the dogs with a pailful of water. --Get your little fucker stuck and get more of the same. Just don't go public in front of my building, Pooch. Yeah! Yeah! Go! Team! Gimme an F. Gimme a U. Gimme a C. Gimme a K. F-U-C-K! Fuck! Fuckfuckfuckfuck! A lot of rattamatum for a piddlyping. World is as world does. Mary wouldn't mind, not a bit, if only she wasn't left out of the action. A virgin. Intact. What fun? None. --Whore! You're outmaking the whore! A father's screed. About ten minutes late, what did she know from a mousecan match? He comes to greet her in his rolling chair like a brakeburned eighteen-wheeler barreling down the pike not stopping exactly in time so the footrest clipped her ankle, same place as yesterday. He could do on and on till Kingdom Come for God's sakesgimmeabreak! And once, just once, to savor the sweet, bitter, biting juice of disrespect, she'd like to pull a wad of bills out of her purse to report she cleared an easy eleven-hundred in tricks for the night, and would it be all right if she kept a C-note for herself and gave him the grand if she pleaded with him real nice? Venal spitemite, he'd take it. But no chokeroll tonight, Pop, just a tired gal with a sore ass and screeching feet, and another three-hundred-sixty-five days to face this year starting tomorrow, the beginning of the end of my life. But he doesn't stop! Following me around, distorting his face with ugly besetting bestializations giving me horripilations and a vision of my death in a smoking stinkpool of self-conjured redgreenpurple vomit. Come on, Ma! Lily Dolorosso! Pull yourself away from the television and rescue your daughter! If I move in where you are, Ma, I get it from you both! If I go to my bedroom, I may be safe until morning, but it makes for a long, bladderfilled night. As if she got the message by thought-telephone, her tall, sad-faced, grey-haired mother materialized to pose as the model she might've been, framed in the doorway, hands resting lightly at shoulder height on the jamb, a preview to a crucifixion. --Mary! Why must you get your poor father so upset? You know how much he worries about you, the poor man!

  --Levva mind `poor man!' Out this late she can only be sleeping with the niggers, or Puerto Ricans!

  Lie down with a hound dog, one wakes up with fleas. Look at my laying down place; I should be making it with snakes. But before I have to listen to this double-barreled barrage of begriming insalubrity, I shall hie myself away to my stormbarred castle, drawbridge and moat. She threw the bolt to the bathroom door, turning on full force the tub water to drown out mother's grating implorations and father's odious condemnations. Blessed be those that get tired. Them. Soon, I hope. And the weary her. Almost meticulously, she set on the floor purse, portfolios. Next, down the john cover. In super slow-motion, ignoring the occasional Wham! To the door by Father Dolorosso, still in coat and hat, she sat to retrieve the last cigarette filed in the pack. By the time she pulled in the first deep wholechestful of smoke, they quit; both of her parents. Now she could draw a bath. Finish the smoke. Undress to the flesh. Melt into the water. Add more burning hot. Float. Drift on the Sea of Dumb. Wave of sensations. Currents of relief. Spasms. Deep. Hard. Needed. Now languid. Dogs fucking. Double-ended dildoes... Leather, hair, smells, Kraft-Ebbing things. Total faint from the world.

  It was at least an hour later, Mary was able to slip undetected into her room where she found her niece, Gilda, who shared it with her.

  --Aunt Mary, I've had it!

  --Shh! Shh! Girl in the bluestorm funk. Let me do first. Stowing things, replacing the coat with a sleeping gown, taking to a mirror to transform cold cream into a mask, watching the girl all the while pacing in her nightie, arms folded, bare feet padding, padding, padding. At seventeen with as healthy a pair of tits as anyone in the world would want. Black hair, long, thick, framing a too thin face, that held a knifedge nose, firestorming eyes, fishmouth lips. Sex. Sexy. Sexual. Sexuality. Fucklover

  --Same story? Quietvoice a prophylactic against reignition from without.

  --Aunt Mary, I don't know about you, all I know about is me, and I can't take any more of what Uncle Rocco and Aunt Lily are putting me through. Like I'm some sort of wild beast that needs to be chained down. I'm a human being! I need friends. To do things. They hold me like this! The clenched fist turning fingers white from the directed anger. Come on!

  The two-three months she was there was hard on Gina, a reversal of the freedom she had living alone with her mother until she died. Home then was spelled motel, a safeparking space for things and stuff and such. The dreaded illness: ennui; newdoings the only antibiotic.

  --How do I stand it? I'm used to it, I suppose. They need me. I've never known anything different. You don't miss what you don't know. You just suppose and wonder about it.

  --Aunt Mary? Don't you need it?

  Go to sleep, you little shit. Who do you think you are to rub my nose in my own terrified swaddling sheet? --You'll graduate next year. You'll be eighteen. You can then do as you please. In the meantime, you enjoy the comfort, safety and protection of this home...such as it is. Just a little gentle hypocrisy to loosen the manacles a bit for her, perhaps.

  --Fuck that crap!

  --I don't like the language, but I still say good for you!

  --By what right is this done?

  --No right. It's reaction. Not right. You might understand, tolerate the duress if you knew. Or would you? What difference would it make to you, Gilda, my springwound niece, if you knew why these two people do as they do? Not much, I think. Surprised you would be to learn your uncle is a cuckold. Oh! Yes! Fucking someone else, she was. Like a bitch in heat on the street. Yet, love we call it. And he found out. That was after his accident, not before. I wonder if she did before? I wonder? Who could blame her after he was chairbound, a healthy woman and all, and he a ruttable incapacitant. Maybe. Except for the late night attenuated transmissions intercepted through plaster and wallpaper by her sensitive ears. Guttural commands. Gustatory guttling. Finally, the gaggings. Not so often, of late. Then, there was something he did to her, she couldn't tell, to empty her well of desire, to damp the spark before the fire, and she wore dark circles under her eyes. A connection, perhaps, to her weekly rendezvous timed by him to the millisecond? If she only dared follow her, just once. No matter that. No matter anything, really, Gilda. Just don't become another me! Go to sleep. Life begins tomorrow! Go to sleep yourself, Mary Dolorosso, your dreams at this time of your life sadly handled reruns. And how impossible you make my now world, Gilda, in the same bed, on the same sheet, under the same covers. How magnified I feel the gentle pulsing of your body, the small whimperings in the deadstill of the night, the black velvet heat from your flesh laying on mine, the sweet exhalations fringing my own, all teasing me into half-waking thoughts I had been dreaming, dreaming a dreadful life and he, beside me, not you, Gilda, will touch me into splendor once again.

  But tonight, the reruns start. Real ones. --Enchanted, Sir! I'm sure. Sol, is it? No! It has to be Sal, Salvatore! Of course. A coffee, you ask? What harm could there be, a coffee? They--the reruns--continue beyond her niece's patience. Face down, head turned away, hand cupping hand at her crotch, minuteministrations, teasing touches, time-taking playings. Auntie must not know. Auntie must be asleep. Too late! She's too soon! The serious strokings take over. The body muscles strain fettered with lust, then, finally, the violent first thrust responding to the flooding compulsion, accompanied with a strained to be silent, wide-opened-mouth forcedbreath. The subsiding emanations. The last sweet twinge. The lungs fill satisfyingly, fully, then empty; the stirrings, the body released from its mission. Accomplished.

  Unaccomplished. Urge. Elicited. Again? How long before Gilda sleeps? To be civilized, we must behave as zoo animals.

  CHAPTER 5

  ENTERING THE KITCHEN that night, Sam found the circularity of the day less parametrical and more haloed for the very first time in his life. So, something had changed in his world, absentmindedly running the bolt, too, as he summarized the day., He would dwell right there and then on each marvelous moment saving the delicious last one for the delicious last; but was
distrained from doing so by the shadowy messenger summoned, no doubt by the homeshot brass, now hovering in the failing, overburdened light of the tiny bulb from the kitchen table lamp. How he would welcome a solitary refuge to sniff around each moment, inspecting it, rotating it, finally engulfing it with his mind, to savor and set its taste. A whole day to relive! And held back! I want to get to it! Oh! Day! Allow me this luxury! Dare I think a tomorrow, too, like you?

  --Sam, this morning...I forget. We forget. The Mother.

  How can one not honor forthright truth! Of course, forget! It happens! It's human! What a day! Does it never end? Hopefully not. Happy birthday to me! Hap-...

  --We talk about it. We were going to remind you. Pa wants to know if you asked for your check today. Early, like he said.

  My check! Is that what you said? Why so sad, Mother? How could I have dared expect some whit of joy by this my birth unremembered? Have you lost again your only son? Why doesn't the Father come to ask himself to spare us both this much of the burden where I must put it on you, and I on myself for doing so when he should get it firsthand? --No, I didn't ask for it. I didn't remember. I didn't get it, Innocent Messenger, but you'll get yours, won't you? Who decrees the world should be so demanding? Who sets priorities for the sun, stars, seas? The shadows shifted, the form gone.

  No, he wouldn't even think about thinking of the fascinating day's engulfment until he could give it uninterrupted, ironclad absorption. So, he answered the gentle pings of hunger. What was in the air? The aphrodisiac of slowly browned garlic and onion in olive oil to imbue plasmatic life to tomato sauce, meatball and sausage? With homemade pasta! Fabulously spectacular last request before death! But where is it? Usually, a nice plateful, covered, sitting atop a pot of once-boiling water on the stove. Or, on the table, placemat, napkin, fork. No. Neat as can be. A-hah! The frige then! The appetite comes with the thinking. Growl. HUN-GER! Pangs-bite-chew-the-stomach-brain. Quick! Look fast the answer. Nope. None. Not a bite left to undo the yawning, yearning inside. Thick slice of Italian bread dribbled lots with water, traced with oil, splashed with vinegar. Meager fare to be laced with a fresh onion if he dared, which he didn't.