Sure, then he met Gina, and it was all shit after that. Or no: to give her credit, because she had an awesome body and a pierced tongue that tasted of the clove cigarettes she smoked and could make him stand up straight just thinking about it, she took him on more of a shit-slide, a whole roller-coastering hold-your-breath-and-look-out plunge into a vast vat of shit and on shit-greased wheels too. But he didn't want to think about that now. He wanted to think about Natalia, the girl from Jaroslavl who never got enough of anything-the shopper extraordinaire, restaurant killer and bedroom champion-with the breathy bitten-off Russian accent that made him itch and itch again and her little daughter by the guy who brought her over and got her her papers, an older guy she never even liked let alone loved.
They were in the car now, the Z4 he'd bought her (black, convertible, with the 3.0-liter engine and six-speed manual transmission), and the trunk was full of Smart-Mart loot and Madison was squirming in her lap. “Why is it we must go so soon?” she said, giving him a look over her daughter's head. When he didn't answer right away because he was fumbling with the packaging of one of the CDs he'd picked up while she was shopping (the new Hives, a greatest hits compilation of Rage Against the Machine, a couple of reggae discs he'd been looking for), she lifted her voice out of the darkness and said, “Dana? Are you listening to me?”
He loved the way she said his name, or the name she knew him by, anyway-down on the first syllable, hang on to the “n” and then rise and hit the “ah” like a bell ringing-and he dropped the plastic CD case into his lap and reached for her hand. “I don't know, baby,” he said, “I just thought you might want to go someplace nice, like that seafood place maybe, you know? Aren't you getting hungry?”
Her voice floated back to him, coy, pleased with itself: “Maggio's? On Tiburon?”
“Yeah,” he said, and he had to release her hand to shift down. “I mean, if you're still up for it.” He gave her a glance. “And Madison. She could sleep in the car-I mean, she's really knocked out.”
She was silent a moment. The engine sang its sweet song as he accelerated into the turn. “I don't know,” she said, “too much tourists, no? Already, already the tourists! What about-?” And she named the priciest place in Sausalito.
“I hate that place. Phonier than shit. All the waiters have a stick up their ass.” He was remembering the last time, the look on the face of the little fag with the bleached hair when he mispronounced the name of the wine-it was a Meursault and he'd had it before, plenty of times, but he wasn't French, that was all.
“I like it.”
“Not me. I swear I'll never go there again. I say Maggio's. I'm driving, right?”
The car thrummed beneath him, everything-every bolt and buckle and whatever else they had under the hood-in perfect alignment. This was the real thing, German engineering, and it made him feel unbeatable. He fumbled a moment with one of the reggae CDs-an old Burning Spear his cellmate used to play all the time-and then passed it to her. “How about a hand here, huh?” he said, and Natalia's sweet smoky arrhythmic voice floated out again-“Sure,” she said, “sure, no problem, honey, and Maggio's is fine, really”-and the lights flashed in the windows and the fog came up off the bay and Madison, her hair shining in the draw of the approaching headlights, found her niche in her mother's arms. And there it was: the first light insuck of a child's snore, replete.
He was abstracted all through dinner, but Natalia hardly noticed. She was chattering away about some new appliance she needed for the house-a new microwave oven, that was it, because the old one, the one that came with the place, was outdated and it took her nearly five minutes to boil water for a cup of tea and she just didn't trust the Smart-Mart line since they were a such a “cheapie” place, didn't he think? — and he let her go on, her shopper's rhapsody a kind of music to him. If she was happy buying things, then he was happy paying for them. It was a feeling he liked, providing for her-especially in contrast to Marshall, the dud she'd been with before him and who wasn't the father of Madison and was so stingy and petty she couldn't even begin to talk about it, but of course she always did. She'd been out to the car twice to check up on the kid and sneak a smoke and she managed to tuck herself back into her seat just as the entrees arrived. He didn't say anything, just watched her as she unfolded the white linen napkin with a fillip of her wrist, her shoulders bare, eyes darting round the room-in her element, absolutely in her element. The steam rose from their plates. The waiter materialized over her shoulder-“Grated parmesan? Ground black pepper?”-and faded away. She spread the napkin across her lap, took a sip of wine. “You are the quiet one tonight, Da-na, yes?” she said, giving him a sidelong look as if better to examine him from the angle. “Something is wrong? You usually like this place, is it not so?”
He did like the place. It wasn't in the league of the Sausalito restaurant maybe, but the menu was pretty eclectic and they knew him here-everybody knew him-and if there was a line of tourists or whoever, they always seated him the minute he walked in the door. Which was the way it should be. His money was good, he tipped large, he always dressed in a nice Armani jacket when he came in for dinner and his girlfriend was a knockout-they should have paid “him” just to sit at the bar. He was having the seared ahi, to his mind the best thing on the menu, and it came teepeed atop a swirl of garlic mashed potatoes and translucent onion rings with a garnish of grilled baby vegetables; she was having the seafood medley. The ahi looked good, top-flight, but he didn't pick up his fork. Instead he reached for the wine, their second bottle, a Piesporter he'd always wanted to try, and it was good, light and crisp on the palate, very cold and faintly sweet the way a Riesling should be. “Yeah,” he said, “the place is great.”
She was neatly slicing a medallion of lobster in two. Her earrings caught the light as she bent her head forward, and he saw her framed there as if on the screen in a movie theater, the selective eye of the camera enriching the scene till the grain of the wood paneling shone behind her and the crystal glittered and her eye lifted to meet his. He'd bought them for her, the earrings, fourteen-karat white gold chandeliers with a constellation of diamonds, to make things up with her after their first fight-she wore them to bed that night and she didn't wear anything else. “You look not so great-like a man who is, I don't know, not so great right now. Are you not hungry? You are feeling discomfited?”
He had to smile. Inside he was still seething at that fuckhead on the other end of the phone-Rick James, yeah, sure, the superfreak himself-but he had to hand it to her: she could make him smile anytime. “Discomfited.” Where in Christ's name had she come up with that one? “It's nothing, baby,” he murmured, reaching across the table for her hand, a hand almost as big as his own, the long predatory fingers, the pampered nails in two shades of lacquer, as if a cobalt moon were setting over a maraschino planet in ten fleeting phases. She took his hand in a fierce clasp and brought his knuckles to her lips.