“He’s in the car, Chester,” Marlene called out. “I just want to talk. Why don’t you put your first coat down and we’ll chat while it dries?”
After an uncertain pause he did that, in a dozen smooth strokes, the solvent smell filling the room despite the roaring fans.
He put the can down and leaned against the draped fender of the big car. “She sent you, right?”
“No, actually, I came on my own. You probably figured out Brenda’s at the shelter again. Chester, I thought we talked about your hand problem. I thought that was all over.”
“Hey, it wasn’t like that, I swear to Christ, Marlene. You want to hear how it went down? Okay. We get invited to this party, right? Up in Inwood, man, my cousin Clarisse’s. I say, Brenda, let’s go, we’ll have some laughs, but she says, no, she don’t like Clarisse. Okay, so I say, I’ll drop by myself, fuck it, she invited me and all, and she says, okay, go. Fine. So I go. A couple hours, I’m there, feeling good, I had a couple, few drinks, what happens? Bam! In walks Brenda, dressed up and all, so I go over to talk with her and so forth, why she changed her mind, and I see she’s coked to the ears. So, fine, right away I knew there’s gonna be trouble, and sure enough, pretty soon she’s mixing it up with Clarisse, Brenda made some remark. You know like she does?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“So Clarisse and her start scuffling, and we all break it up, and I pull Brenda into the bedroom, and I try to talk to her, you know, but now she’s like yelling shit, all kinds of personal stuff. I mean really yelling so’s everybody could hear it. So I like lost it and I popped her a couple, not hard, and she runs out, crying. So I had a few more and I take the subway home.”
“That’s it?”
“No, later back at our place, she comes in, maybe three in the morning, stoned. She takes her fuckin’ panties, which I actually bought her, out of her bag in front of me and tosses them on the floor. In front of me, you understand? And. . fuck, man, I don’t want to get into what she was saying, but it was real bad, mean stuff, and like I must’ve blacked out because the next thing I knew, there’s blood all over the bed, and I’m standing there in my shorts and she’s gone.”
“You busted her face up pretty good, Chester.”
He hung his head and then lifted it abruptly and stared at her. The beginning of panic showed in his eyes. “Are you gonna get me arrested again?”
“No. Look, let me explain something. You know what I do, right?”
“Yeah. You beat up on guys who pound their old ladies.”
“Not exactly. Chester, there’s bad guys out there. Sick guys. Guys who get their rocks giving women grief, guys who don’t feel like men unless they got a woman who’s a slave. There’s guys who just pick a woman off the street, or in a store or a bank, they see her and they stalk her, and they make her life hell. I can stop that kind of guy sometimes.”
“With one through the skull is what I hear.”
“If necessary,” Marlene said coldly, “but my point is, you’re not a bad guy. You’re a good guy. You’re just in a bad relationship. I’m telling you now that if you stay with Brenda Nero, one day you’re going to wake up next to her corpse. No, wait, I know what you’re going to say. She’s great a lot of the time and you love her, and you’re right, she is great. She’s sexy, pretty, she’s classy, she’s smart-but she’s also crazy, Chester. Disaster happens around her. You got to break it up. I mean now. You understand what I’m saying?”
She wanted to shake him as he stood there by his fender, rolling his eyes and shaking his head, like an unusually stupid horse shying from a proffered halter. I’m no good at this, she thought. He’s right, one through the head is where my true talent lies. But eventually she got him to promise more or less that he’d ditch the woman, and she left him, thinking that she would have to do the same thing with Brenda, too, with even less chance of success. Marlene had met more than one woman whose life was a disorganized sprint toward an early grave, and most often they got some poor schmuck to help them into it. Tragedy, whereas Marlene did best at melodrama, with a clear villain in the black suit and the tender maiden in white pining for rescue. Depressing, and she had wanted to be cheery for Mom, or so she thought, and naturally, there was no question of coming to the old neighborhood and neglecting a family visit. The NSA would be happy if it could track Chinese missile tests as accurately as Marlene’s family recorded the trajectories of their absent children.
The elder Ciampis dwelt in a pre-war two-story bungalow, built of dark brick, the sort of sturdy, simple house that working-stiff vets could buy in the late 1940s when the nation was still poor enough to afford it. In the front, two small patches of immaculate clipped lawn greenly gleamed behind low privet growing through a chain-link fence. To the left the lawn patch was decorated with the usual Virgin w/blue mirror ball and birdbath, and on the right there was the fig tree, stunted and twisted but still alive, still throwing out green shoots. These items demonstrated, as they did in all the old boroughs of the city, that second-generation Italian-Americans lived here.
Marlene hitched herself around in the car seat, removed her pistol and its holster, and locked them in the glove compartment. Marlene had a new gun. The old gun had killed two men and it had started giving her the sick shivers when she touched it, so she had sold it and bought this thing, a SITES AW9 “Resolver,” one of the lightest 9mm semiautomatic pistols available, made in Turin, sleekly Italian in design. She prayed daily and sincerely that it would never have to resolve anything, would forever remain a shooting-range virgin. It was a little less than twice as long as a king-sized cigarette and about twice as thick and weighed about the same as an office stapler. This made it much too heavy to carry into her mother’s house.
The front door was, as always, unlocked. Marlene went in and passed directly into the kitchen.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Good, you can help me hang,” said her mother, indicating the wicker basket of wet wash on the kitchen table, as if this visit had been arranged, or as if Marlene had never left home. Mrs. Ciampi, despite the book on Italians, had never been a physically demonstrative parent.
Marlene heaved the basket up on her hip and followed her mother out through the screen door to the tiny backyard. She and Mrs. Ciampi began to hang clothes on plastic lines strung between two T-shaped poles.
“Didn’t we get you a dryer, Ma?”
“I like it better when they hang. They don’t smell right from the dryer.”
Marlene was out of practice, being totally dryer dependent herself, and her mother placed four clothespins to every one of hers. Marlene cast glances at her mother through the flapping linen. Aside from the hair, which had gone pepper and salt, and a thickening middle, she looked more or less as she had looked during Marlene’s youth, or perhaps it was merely imagination. She had the kind of face that holds age well, Marlene thought, handsome rather than beautiful, too bony for that, the features too prominent. The main difference seemed to be the track suit she was wearing instead of the flowered housedresses she had worn every day back then. Mrs. Ciampi had discovered track suits late in life and had adopted them for every occasion that did not involve the Roman Catholic Church. She had a dozen, this one being aqua with a beige stripe. Combined with her mother’s energetic movements, the outfits suggested that she was about to strip and run the five-hundred-meter hurdles.
While they worked, Mrs. Ciampi wormed into, with a skill that the KGB would not have disdained, every cranny of her daughter’s life, having already detected on her secret mother radar the unidentified bogey menacing Marlene’s heart. The twins first, their little doings elaborated, discussed, the peculiar difference between them made light of, on the basis of other family twins, not to worry; Marlene’s own work, deplored sadly, the infant Marlene, her brilliance and hoped-for future recalled, with the familiar anecdotes, the necessary dollop of guilt offered and accepted; the brothers and sisters analyzed, their recent triumphs and travails recounted, nor could one neglect highlights from the lives of Marlene’s twenty-three first cousins, none of whom, it seemed, was required to shoot people in their chosen fields of endeavor.