1
"Regrets?" said Vincente Delgatto. "Shit yeah, I got regrets. I got regrets like Heinz got beans."
The old man pushed some air past his pale gums and espresso-stained teeth. The sound that came out wasn't a sigh exactly, wasn't a laugh, was more like a half-resigned grunt that had kept an edge to it, a hiss. He reached up to straighten his tie. This was an old habit, a gesture that helped his composure and helped the transition from one thought to the next; his hands were almost to his throat before he remembered he wasn't wearing a tie.
He was sitting poolside in Key West, at the home of his bastard son, Joey Goldman. It was January, twilight, 77 degrees. A breeze was moving the palms, the fronds made a dry rattle, like maracas. It was not an American sound, this rhythmic scratching, it was an island sound, Caribbean, it made Vincente think of Havana in the old days, of smoky New York nightclubs back when Latin was the modern thing and women wore pointy brassieres and hats with fruit. For a moment he saw himself as a young man, dapper, limber, doing the rhumba with his long-dead favorite mistress, Joey's mother.
"Shit yeah," he repeated, "I got regrets."
He took a sip of wine, looked off at the green sky to the west. Back home in Queens, the sky never looked like that—green, yellow, with pink spikes sticking up like the crown of the Statue of Liberty.
"But ya know," he resumed, "it's funny: in songs, inna movies, there's always some old guy, he's washed up, a has-been, he's got no hair, no teeth, he's wearing rubber underpants, and he's bragging about how he doesn't regret nothing, if he had it all to do over, he'd do it exactly the same. It's like . . . like a whaddyacallit—"
"A cliche?" put in Sandra Dugan, Joey's wife.
"Yeah, Sandra, thank you. A cliche. Like this is what an old fart automatically says. But come on. Ya live to be seventy, eighty years old, and wit' all the millions a chances ya get to fuck things up— 'scuse my language, Sandra—you'd do it all the same?"
"Some people," Joey said, "maybe they would."
"Bullshit," said his father. "There's only two reasons why a person would say that. One, he's so pigheaded he can't admit he made a mistake. Or two, he's so feeble inna head, his memory is so shot, he really can't remember what he did or shoulda did. Me, I remember. For better or worse, I remember."
"Right, Pop," Joey Goldman said. "And this is why I'm telling ya: Write it down."
The old man was shaking his head almost before his son had started to speak. He had a long face, Vincente did, with a big bridgeless nose and full lips that looked even fleshier against his sunken cheeks. His black eyes had always been deep-set but in recent years they seemed to have burrowed even farther into their bony sockets: they nestled in the shadows of brows and lids and wrinkles, it took a certain effort to reach them.
"Fuhget about it, Joey," he said. "No offense, but it's like the worst fuckin' idea I ever heard. People like us, we don't write things down. Do we, Bert?"
"Hm?" said Bert the Shirt d'Ambrosia. He wasn't much older than Vincente, three, four years, but he'd lived in Key West for a decade or so and the easy life of Florida had somewhat melted his alertness. Also, he'd died some years before. Not for long, but he'd had a severe upset on the Eastern District courthouse steps, and in the hospital his heart had stopped for maybe half a minute; he'd used the flat place on his EKG as an argument for being excused from a profession that usually did not allow retirement.
"Write stuff down," Vincente repeated. "People like us, we don't do it, right?"
"People like us," said Bert, "a lotta guys can hardly read. How they gonna write?" He underscored the question with upturned palms, which then came to rest on an ancient chihuahua curled in his lap.
"OK, OK," Vincente said, a little bit impatiently. "But aside from that, we don't write things down because we don't write things down."
"That's true," said Bert, and he petted the dog.
The dog had been gray to begin with and now, at age thirteen, was turning ghastly white. It was white at the tips of its outsized ears and white around its bulbous eyes, which in turn were going milky with cataracts. The dog was always shedding white hairs the length of eyelashes, and Bert, unconsciously, was always plucking them off his gorgeous silk and linen shirts of mint green, lavender, and midnight blue.
"Besides," Vincente said, "ya write something down, right away people can see it—"
"That is the idea," Sandra put in.
"Whose idea?" Vincente said. He had one of those rumbling voices that didn't get louder as he got worked up, it got deeper, it moved the air in a way that was felt more than heard.