"That's all?"
She crinkled up her eyebrows, began to let herself imagine that maybe Arty was angling for an assurance he didn't think he had the right to come out and ask for. She gave it like a Christmas present. "Gino and me," she said, "we're history. That's over, finished, good riddance. . . . You didn't know that either, Arty?"
Sheepishly, he shook his head.
"Sicilians," said Debbi. She gave a half-indulgent, half-exasperated frown. "Always playing us-and-them, whispering games, divide and conquer. . . . Think about it, Arty. With what you know and what I know, we almost know something. If we could tell each other."
He settled back in the seat, looked ahead at the snaking road that hopped from rock to rock to Key West at the end of the line. Gino was history. Debbi was here. Arty hugged his hurt foot and said, "Yeah, if we could tell each other."
———
Nassau Lane was not much wider than Joey Goldman's car, and when Debbi pulled up in front of Arty's cottage, tree limbs dangled over the convertible and there was barely room left over for cats to slink along the curb. Stars twinkled, were briefly erased by smears of moonlit clouds. Debbi cut the engine, and the sound of rustling fronds flooded in to fill the quiet.
For a moment they just sat there. Then Debbi gave a cockeyed smile and gestured toward her devastated clothing and slightly torn up face. "Do I say thank you for a lovely evening?"
"We saw deer," said Arty.
"True," she said. 'The size of dogs."
Arty made no move to go, and after a pause she added, "Your legs—you'll be OK?"
He nodded, glanced down at his door handle, didn't reach for it. "Ice," he said.
They sat. Moonlight filtered down, hands fidgeted in laps, the faraway perfume of closed flowers came to them. When a man and a woman desired each other and were not lovers, there was no quite graceful way to end an evening, it never quite stopped being high school.
Wistfully, regretfully, Arty said, "Well . . ."and fumbled to open the door.
He looked up from his fumbling to see Debbi's face very close to his, moving toward him, silent, fluid, and mysterious. She kissed him very quickly at the corner of his mouth, at the puzzling cusp between friendly cheeks and amorous lips; then, just as quickly, she withdrew again. Arty, reluctant Arty, saw her retreating, saw her eyes slipping away, her wrapped hair being framed by night and distance, and without an instant's hesitation he reached out both hands to hold her face, to keep it near his own. He kissed her on the mouth, tasted lipstick and salt air.
Then he climbed out of the car, half turned away, and said good night. He felt light and happy but still he limped as he headed for his ravaged front door.
38
"Fuck is this supposed ta mean?" said Pretty Boy. "Juicy pa .. . para ..."
"Paradox," said Aldo Messina, sitting between his minions at a six-sided table covered in green felt.
"Right," said the handsome thug. "Paradox. Surest way to fail: aim higher than anybody realizes. Fuck's 'at supposed ta mean?"
Bo, the philosophic thug, murmured thoughtfully, "I think maybe it means—"
"Or dis?" His partner cut him off. "Common sense—not very common; does that make sense?"
"Dat one's like," said Bo, "ya know, a play on—
"A play on bullshit," said Pretty Boy. Aldo Messina, looking glum and bloodless, pressed the notebook shut, pushed it aside like a plate of food with bugs in it, and grabbed another from the stack.
This was at the Fabretti family headquarters—the San Pietro Social Club on Broome Street in Manhattan. The club had once been a hardware store; it had display windows covered by steel roll-down shutters that had not been opened since the Eisenhower years; its glass front door had been replaced by a metal one with a peephole. There was a small bar with an espresso machine and some bottles of anisette and Scotch. On the walls hung tilted pictures of Italian-American lounge acts: men with pompadours and bedroom eyes, women in sequined evening gowns with cleavage.
Pretty Boy leaned in toward the new notebook and started in again. "Remember the as .. . ast—"
"Asterisk," Messina hissed.
"Asterisk," parroted Pretty Boy. "Fuck's an asterisk?"
"It's, like, inna sky," said Bo. "A little planet, like."
His partner wasn't listening. "Asterisk. When in doubt, break the scene. Look, I don't see where any a dis has ta do wit' Vincente Delgatto, and I don't see where dis guy comes off thinkin' he's a writer. Y'ask me, he comes off like a fuckin' nut. Mosta what he writes, ya can't even make out what he's writin'."