"One of these years," he said, "I'll learn to keep my mouth shut."
"Honestly, I doubt that," Angelina said.
"And I won't be such a slut for romance."
"I doubt that even more."
It was late afternoon, the time when the sun loses its knockout punch and throws instead a sluggish heavy hook that is almost an embrace. Uncle Louie had found his naked backgammon partner, was rolling dice in dappled shade, had lost a dollar and a half so far. Ziggy was upstairs napping or maybe only sulking. Angelina and Michael reclined on poolside lounges, among men taking siesta in the open, confident as cats, their less-tanned places swathed protectively in towels.
Answering a thought of his own, Michael said suddenly, "But jeez, I hate a closet case. The harm they do, those chickenshits."
Angelina caught herself picking at a cuticle, forced herself to stop. Cautiously, she said, "Michael, I wonder if somewhere, somehow, you knew . . . Not that he was a cop, I mean, but that he wasn't really there for you, you couldn't really have him."
"The allure of the unavailable?" said Michael. "Lust with an escape hatch?"
Angelina changed the cross of her ankles, rocked her knees from side to side. "Something like that. But more like . .. like you had enough of an involvement so that you could believe you were involved, but what the involvement really did was keep you uninvolved."
He fingered his earrings, took a moment to sort that out. Then he said, "We talking about me, old girl, or you?"
"Both," admitted Angelina. She didn't hesitate, just half-turned on a hip and rearranged her arms.
Michael blinked, his sandy eyelashes became a blur. He'd had a measly week or so invested in David/Keith; Angelina had bet a decade on Ziggy/ Sal. He didn't think it was his place to question the wisdom of such a huge investment.
She did it for him. "It's just, you know, now that Ziggy's here, now that we're this close to getting together, I think back on what kept me going all those years, what kept me lonely and not minding it, and it just seems, I don't know, so thin."
"Thick enough to bring you down here," Michael said.
"I know, I know. But now—" She couldn't find the words, just gestured in the air, let her legs flop flat against her lounge.
"You know what I think'" said her friend. "I think you have postcoital depression."
"Michael, we didn't—"
"Without the coital part," he said. "You think you need coitus to have postcoital depression? You think life's that fair?"
"But what I'm feeling—"
"You're feeling let down, right? You're feeling you were with your lover, the whole universe should have been transformed, and here it is, the same old world, a mess. Am I right?"
Angelina didn't say he was and didn't say he wasn't, just lifted her behind a second and fretted with the elastic on her bathing suit.
"So now you feel regret," Michael went on. "It happens. You try for sex without remorse, sometimes you get remorse without the sex."
"I don't feel regret," protested Angelina. "What I feel ... I feel uninterested."
"Uninterested?! There you're kidding yourself, old chum. Look at you." He sketched the air along the length of her body. "You can't sit still a second. If ever a woman needed either a man or a hula hoop—"
"Michael!"
But Michael was launched upon the gospel of passion and he wasn't stopping now. "Uninterested? Then why'd you bring him back here? Just a good deed? A pure unselfish rescue mission?"
"It was the only thing I could think of," she maintained.
"And how convenient that it was!" said Michael. "You bring him here, excuse me, like a half-dead moth back to the nest, so you can watch him flit and flutter and then enjoy a tasty morsel at your leisure."
"That's a terrible thing to say!"
"Is it?" Michael parried, and did not unsay it, just crossed his arms on top of his stomach from the gym and gave a pagan little smile. Angelina pouted, untwisted a shoulder strap, shifted her disgruntled hips. A scrap of breeze put shivers on the pool and raised a smell of chlorine and damp towels.
After a moment Michael said, "Sweetheart, can you look me squarely in the eye and say it isn't so?"
* * *
In New York it was one of those heartbreaking April days when spring, like a drowning swimmer, gets sucked back into the cold gray eddies of winter. Looking out the bakery window at a chilly slanting rain, Funzie Gallo hunkered closer to the warmth of the big black oven, nibbled sesame biscotti, and held the phone a little distance from his ear as Tommy Lucca raved. When the Florida mobster paused for breath, Funzie softly said, "What could I tell ya, Tommy? He hasn't called."