“Hey, hold on,” Hal said, lurching out of the corner in his parachute pants, “I don’t believe this. We all tried to get out of it — it was a rotten war, an illegal war, Nixon’s and Johnson’s war — what’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember?”
“The marches,” Irene said.
“The posters,” Rob joined in.
“A cheap whore, that’s all. Cover girl, my ass.”
“Shut up!” Tootle shrieked, turning on Hal. “You’re just as bad as Pesky. Worse. You’re a hypocrite. At least he knows he’s a piece of shit.” She threw back a cup of purple passion and leveled her green-eyed glare on him. “And you think you’re so high and mighty, out there in Hollywood — well, la-de-da, that’s what I say.”
“He’s an artist,” Harvey said from the floor. “He co-wrote the immortal script for the ‘Life with Beanie’ show.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you too.”
And then suddenly, as if it signaled a visitation from another realm, there was the deep-throated cough of a precision engine in the driveway, a sputter and its dying fall. As one, the seven friends turned to the door. There was a thump. A knock—dat dat-dat-dat da. And then: “Allo, allo, anybody is home?”
It was Enzo. Tall, noble, with the nose of an emperor and a weave of silver in his hair so rich it might have been hammered from the mother lode itself. He was dressed in a coruscating jumpsuit with Pennzoil and Pirelli patches across the shoulder and chest, and he held his crash helmet in his hand. “Baby,” he said, crossing the room in two strides and taking Tootle in his arms, “ciao.”
No one moved. No one said a thing.
“Beech of a road,” Enzo said. “Ice, you know.” Outside, through the open door, the sleek low profile of his Lazaretto 2200 Pinin Farina coupe was visible, the windshield plated with ice, sleet driving down like straight pins. “Tooka me seventeen and a half minutes from La Guardia — a beech, huh? But baby, at least I’m here.”
He looked round him, as if seeing the others for the first time, and then, without a word, crossed the room to the stereo, ran a quick finger along the spines of the albums, and flipped a black platter from its jacket as casually as if he were flipping pizzas in Napoli. He dropped the stylus, and as the room filled with music, he began to move his hips and mime the words: “Oooh-oooh, I heard it through the grapevine.…”
Marvin Gaye. Delectable, smooth, icy cool, ancient.
Pesky reached down to help Harvey from the floor. Jill took Hal’s arm. Rob and Irene began to snap their fingers and Enzo swung Tootle out into the middle of the floor.
They danced till they dropped.
KING BEE
IN THE MAIL that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100 % Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usuaclass="underline" I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch. He hadn’t bothered to sign it.
“Ken? What is it?”
Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She’d been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front of the house in the sunshine, hunched forward protectively, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. “It’s Anthony,” she said, “isn’t it?”
He handed her the letter.
“My god,” she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal. “How’d he get the address?”
It was a good question. They’d known he was to be released from Juvenile Hall on his eighteenth birthday, and they’d taken precautions. Like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment, and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they’d even toyed with the idea of changing their name, but then Ken’s father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they’d received dozens of Anthony’s death threats — all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession — but nothing since they’d moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.
“You’d better call the police,” he said. “And take Skippy to the kennel.”
Nine years earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat’s fallopian tubes — some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one — and to compound the problem, Ken’s sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies available were — well, she didn’t like to say it, but they weren’t white. There were Thai babies, Guianese babies, Herero babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur, and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days — for a price, of course — but there was an eleven-year waiting list for white babies — twelve for blonds, fourteen for blue-eyed blonds — and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. “How about an older child?” the man from the adoption agency had suggested.
They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-A-Kid, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of “Father Knows Best,” and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.
“An older child,” Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black-marketeer.
“No,” Ken said, “I don’t think so.”
“How old?” Pat said.
Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. “I just happen to have a child — a boy — whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cademartori. Tony. He’s nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week.”
The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling, towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think “boy.” If they’d looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about his smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn’t look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with him. “Physically, I mean,” he said.
Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. “This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow,” he said. “Average height, weight, build, average — or above average — intelligence. He’s all boy, and he’s one heck of a lot fitter than I am.” Denteen cast a look to the heavens — or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. “To be nine years old again,” he sighed.
“Does he behave?” Pat asked.
“Does he behave?” Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost. “Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?” He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again — so far forward his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. “Look at him,” he said, holding up the picture again. “Mr. and Mrs. Mallow — Ken, Pat — let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I’ll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents — they were your age, by the way — just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they’re alive and well and the next”—he snapped his fingers—“they’re gone.” His voice faltered. “And then poor little Tony…poor little Tony comes home.…”