“Oh, no,” Natalia cut in, making a moue over the “o” sound and holding it a beat too long. “Dana's job is for looking after me and Madison,” and she reached out to caress his biceps. “Is that not so, baby?” She smiled her biggest smile. “A full-time job, no?”
The husband's snifter was empty and he was reaching out his claws to refill it. “Where did you say you went to medical school? Hopkins, wasn't it?”
“Yeah,” Peck said. “But I was thinking it might be cool, really cool, to do something with Doctors Without Borders. You know, go to Sudan or someplace. Help people. Refugees and that sort of thing. Cholera. Plague.”
“Médecins sans Frontières,” the husband said, as if he were licking fudge from between his teeth.
From the back room came the sound of the kids' video, some Disney thing with the seahorses and talking starfish and all the rest, music swelling, the sound of artificial waves. He was agitated, and he didn't know why. The day had been perfect, the sort of day he could have lived through forever, the day-the days-he'd promised himself when he was inside, when everything was gray and the sun never seemed to shine and there was always some self-important officious asshole there to make you toe the line, lights out, everybody up, and the bonehead cons with their pathetic attempts to join the human race, “427, factory, I swear; Nobody changes this channel, motherfucker;” and “How would you like your Jell-O cooked, sir?” But no, he did know why. Everything he had was balanced on the head of a pin, like the collapsible two-story brick house with the three-car garage and the bird in the cage and the yapping dog all folded up in a carpet in one of Madison's videos, swept away in a windstorm that raked the lot where it had stood just a heartbeat before. It was people like this, like “Jonas,” like “Kaylee,” that were the problem. What was he thinking? That he could just waltz in and set himself up and think these people were his friends or something? No. That wasn't the way it was. That wasn't the way it would ever be.
So what did he do? He pushed himself back from the coffee table and raised one foot in his shining new ultra-cool Vans with the checkerboard pattern and set it down right beside Jonas' drink. “Yeah,” he said, leaning back into the cushions and giving both arms a good sinew-cracking stretch, “that's right. That's who I'm talking about.”
When he first met Gina, things were different. He was twenty-five years old, with two years of community college behind him and stints at restaurants in Maui and Stowe, no record of any kind except for traffic infractions (tickets he tossed in the trash, because really, they were just a scam anyway, a means for local municipalities to raise cash so they could buy more cruisers and more radar guns so they could rob more people in the name of law and order), and he'd just been promoted to manager at Fiorentino's, the youngest manager they'd ever had. Or at least that was what Jocko, the basset-faced old bartender who'd been there since the Civil War, told him. Then Gina showed up. He'd been sitting at the bar, his day off-noon-with Jocko and Frank Calabrese, the owner, and a mini-parade of girls slipped in and out applying for the cocktail waitress job advertised that morning in the local paper. They had the faintly tarnished look of cocktail waitresses, every one of them, and some had experience, some didn't. He wasn't looking for experience. He was focusing on one attribute only-how hot they were, on a descending scale of one to ten. None of the others even came close to Gina-facially, maybe, but her body was right out of “Playboy;” or better yet, “Penthouse.” Jocko and Frank, who could be brutal, didn't give him any argument.
Gina-Louise Marchetti.
She'd gone to Lakeland High School, just outside Peterskill, she was twenty years old, between boyfriends, and living-temporarily, she insisted-back at her parents' place on a twisting black road in the rural tree-hung precincts of Putnam Valley, where absolutely nothing was happening, not then or now or ever. Within a week he was sleeping with her and within the month she'd moved into his apartment. Most nights after work they'd cruise the local bars and then sleep in till noon and on their days off they took the train into Manhattan and hit the clubs. They did drugs together, but not in an excessive way, and only speed and once in a while E, and they began to enjoy some decent wines and experiment with recipes out of a cookbook when they had a night at home. For Christmas she bought him a cherrywood wine rack-“For the cellar you're going to have”-and he gave her a case of red the liquor salesman got him wholesale; they cooked a paella for Christmas dinner, just to be different, and spent most of the night admiring the way the twelve symmetrical bottles of Valpolicella looked in the new wine rack.
That was nice. Very domestic, very tranquil. He was in love, really in love, for the first time in his life and he was making good money-and so was she-and there wasn't a bump in the road. They moved into a bigger apartment, with a view of the Hudson from the nuclear power plant all the way up the river to where it snaked into the crotch of the mountains. He got himself a new car, a silver five-speed Mustang with some real pop to it. Nights-alone, in bed, just the two of them-were special. “You're an awesome lover,” that was what she told him, “awesome,” and he believed her then-believed her now, for that matter. But everything in this life turns to shit, as his father used to say (until he died in his Barcalounger of an aneurysm in the brain, the cocktail glass still clutched in his hand), and Frank, the owner, proved it by getting divorced.
Divorced meant time on your hands, time to pick and cavil and criticize, and Peck didn't take criticism well. He never had-in fact, the surest way, all his life, to make him react, was to call him out on something, whether it was his chores at home when he was a kid, or the dick of a math teacher he'd had in the ninth grade trying to humiliate him at the blackboard or the succession of half-wit bosses he'd had from junior year on and every one of them thinking they were God's gift to the world. He knew differently. No matter what, he was always right, even if he was wrong, and he could prove it with one jab of his right hand. Maybe other people-the losers of the world-could turn the other cheek, bow their heads, suck it up, but he couldn't. He had too much pride for that. Too much-what would you call it? — self-respect, self-love. Or confidence, confidence was a better word. At any rate, Frank started living at the bar, inhaling Glenfiddich all night long and getting nastier and crankier and crazier by the day. And then-it was inevitable-there came a night when Peck couldn't take it anymore (some shit about he wasn't ordering the right grade of parmesan and he didn't know real parmesan-“Parmigiano-Reggiano”-from his ass and he was fucking up and costing his boss money) and the youngest manager in Fiorentino's history went down in flames. There was some name-calling, some breakage, and he wouldn't be counting on a reference from Frank Calabrese anytime soon.
Gina was a rock, though. She threw down her apron, emptied the tip jar and stalked out to the car, and within the week she'd found a storefront on Water Street and hit her father up for a loan and Pizza Napoli was born. The place was an instant hit-you would have thought they were giving the pizzas away-and the secret was Skip Siciliano, the pizza chef with the handlebar mustache and the towering white toque he'd managed to coax away from Fiorentino's because Frank was an asshole and Skip couldn't have agreed more. That and the location. People wanted to look out on the broad rolling back of the Hudson and sit at nice tables with sawdust on the floor and strings of salami and garlic hanging from the racks overhead and eat pizza hot from the oven and they wanted antipasto and calzone and homemade pasta too and they wanted takeout and a nice selection of medium-priced Italian wines. By the end of the first year, he and Gina got ambitious and opened the second place-Lugano, a name they picked after closing their eyes and dropping a coin on the map of Italy. The idea behind Lugano was to make it an upscale place, full menu, osso buco, seafood, cotechino, specials every night, caponata in a cut-glass jar on every table and crostini the minute you sat down.