Amy straightens on her stool. “I know you want to make an honest woman out of her, Luigi, but your little prom date is—how do you say?—sucking some Teamster’s cock right now. Get it?”
Michele knocks his pint glass over, and beer soaks her wife-beater. Amy jumps back, dripping.
“I am sorry,” he says. “Very sorry.” He lays cocktail napkins impotently on the spreading puddle of beer.
She sets her jaw and leans in close to him. “I bet you’ll fuck me now, you wop drunk.”
“That’s enough,” says Manny.
“Me?” says Amy.
He wipes the spill with a dry rag. “Go change.”
Amy gathers the hem of her shirt and wrings it out. “I know what you’re thinking, Manny. Don’t bother. She’s got this kid’s dick on a string. And you?” She laughs. “You’re shit out of luck.”
The empty pint glass rolls off the bar and shatters on the laminate.
Manny looks straight at her. “Go change or go home.”
Amy stomps out the back door. Manny comes around and helps Michele pick up the glass from the floor. A few girls have gathered around. Lacy tries to help, but he waves her and the others back to the couch, to a pair of Southern truck drivers they called in off the road with the CB in the office. Something tortured and twangy and sour rises from the jukebox.
Michele, squatting on the floor, leans into Manny, so close that Manny can feel the boy’s breath on him. “When she will finish?” Michele asks.
Looking back, this is the moment when he should have known how truly fucked he was. But this is closer to the boy than he’s ever been, and he can’t help himself. He only wants to touch him. He presses his rag to Michele’s wet T-shirt. It’s impossible, but he feels the boy’s warmth underneath, the striations in the muscles of his chest. He feels his heartbeat. “One hour.” He removes the rag and holds his index finger in the air between them. “One hour.”
Michele finishes his replacement beer, and another. By the time Darla says good-bye to her Teamster, logs her cash with Gladys, and joins the boy at the bar, he’s a heavy, lethargic kind of drunk, leaning on his elbows, his eyelids wilted. Manny watches Darla rest her head on his shoulder, chewing on the stir straw poking out from her cranberry juice. No doubt she can feel the warmth of him, the pulse of blood in his neck. “Did you know that tug-of-war used to be an Olympic sport?” she says. “I could do that.”
With his mouth half in his new pint glass, Michele says, “You can do anything. You are a gold mine.”
And then Darla does something Manny’s never seen her do. She takes Michele’s face in her hands and bends him down to her. She kisses him softly on the forehead.
Day seven. At the motel Michele lies staring at the untouched bed across from him. He hasn’t slept in days, not really. When the red-orange glow of sunset permeates the crack between the two heavy panels of curtain covering the west-facing window, he gets out of bed and showers without soap or shampoo, though there are fresh supplies of both on the shelf in the shower, still sealed in their waxy sanitary paper. He keeps the water so hot that when he finally steps onto the linoleum and wipes the condensation from the bathroom mirror with his palm, his skin is flushed pink where the water began to burn his back and shoulders, his stomach and buttocks and balls. He sits on the edge of the bed, naked.
He and Renzo have been friends since they were boys playing for the same youth football club. They went to university together, took the same classes, shared a room in the dormitory, then in a basement apartment near campus. Every morning for three years Michele woke up to the shape of Renzo against the opposite wall, or stepped over piles of his soiled clothes to get to the toilet. But already Michele cannot recall Renzo’s hands, or the sound of his laugh, or the exact expression on his face when he was angry. All he can see is this smooth quilted square of bed, this worn white sheet pulled taut over these too-full pillows like dead open eyes in the daylight. All he can hear is the chug of the air-conditioning unit along the west wall, the underwater sound of cars idling in traffic along Tropicana Avenue, and the Search & Rescue cell phone on the nightstand ringing ringing—at long last—ringing.
That night the doorbell buzzes, and Manny looks over his lineup before opening the door. Darla is nowhere to be found. He last saw her on the couch with Michele, who’s missing, too. Manny does not open the door. Instead, he leaves the other girls standing there and finds Gladys in her office. She sits with headphones to her ears, half smiling, her mouth hanging loosely open. The light of Darla’s fifth wheel glows on the switchboard. “Young love,” says Gladys.
The doorbell buzzes again. “Come on, Manny,” calls Amy from the lobby. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Manny motions to Gladys. With the same reluctance with which she pauses her tape of the previous day’s General Hospital to log cash, Gladys takes the headphones off and stretches them over Manny’s head, nestling the coarse black foam over his small ears. Darla’s voice comes through the crackle and fuzz of the old intercom.
“You don’t have the fucking Academy Awards in Italy? That’s crazy. I love the Academy Awards. Ask me a year.”
“I don’t, ah…”
“A year, a year. Ask me. Go on.” A game she plays with all of them.
“Nineteen ah, seventy… four?”
“Godfather II.” A pause. Manny pictures Michele’s smooth, perpetually puzzled face. “That’s what won Best Picture that year. Ask me another.”
“Okay. Nineteen ninety… one?”
“Easy. Silence of the Lambs. Too easy, none from the nineties.”
“Nineteen fifty-two?”
“That would be… The Greatest Show on Earth. DeMille.”
“Nineteen thirty-eight?”
“You Can’t Take It With You. Fucking classic Capra. Funny. Sad. Optimistic. One of my favorites.”
“You are very good.”
She can do Best Actor and Best Actress, too. The boy wouldn’t know the difference if she were making them up, but she’s not. She can list them all, every single year, forward and backward, which she does, she says, in her head when she’s standing in the lineup or straddling a new client or lying in bed trying to sleep, listening to the shrieks of the peacocks chasing one another around the coop.
There’s a faint rustling sound in the headphones. Manny hears Darla gasp, then say, “Shit, Mikey, where’d you get that?”
“They gave it to me, to live, to wait for Renzo.”
“How much do you have?” The intercom crackles.
“I am not sure. Here.” A longer pause. The doorbell buzzes again.
“There must be nine, ten grand here. What—”
The connection fizzles, submerging Darla’s voice in static. Manny shakes the cord furiously. He presses the headset to his ears so hard they sting. When the connection returns Michele is saying, “Come, ah, with me. To Italy.”
Manny presses his hand to his heart. That stupid boy.
The doorbell buzzes, long and loud, and for a moment it is all Manny can hear.
“I will come tomorrow,” Michele says. “And we will go.” Dumb, big-eyed Michele. “We, ah, fly home,” he is saying. “Tomorrow.”
Before she can answer, Manny presses the speaker button. “Darla,” he says. “The lineup. Now.”
When Manny finally opens the door, the chunky man who’s been buzzing spins his keys on his index finger and steps inside, tonguing a monstrous divot of tobacco down in his bottom lip. He picks Darla, though she barely bothers to look at him. What did Manny expect? Michele, this fat fuck, they’re all the same, stumbling in from the middle of nowhere, trying to fill the empty space in them with her.