Virgin Heat(6)

Louie remembered why she was his favorite, he felt his sunburned head grow flushed with kinship and with gratitude. He went on, his voice a little stronger now that he believed there was at least one person interested in what he said.

"And the bars, the crazy bars they got there. Live music all day long. Tequila and eggs for breakfast... This here's Sloppy Joe's, world famous, look the big picture a Hemingway . . . And this one, Hog's Breath Saloon, big pig for a trademark .. . Oh yeah, and this one—what the heck's the name a this one, Rose?"

His wife was bored. It showed. "How should I remember, Louie?"

"Well anyway," he said, "weird place. Look: Fancy bar, fancy mirror, but hardly has a roof. Just vines. Vines with flowers. All kindsa fancy drinks. Mango this, papaya that. Old-fashioned fruit squeezer . . . Oh yeah, this I got a kick outa ..."

On the screen, a stranger's blurry and averted face blinked past and then a thick and eccentric pair of hands began concocting a Virgin Heat.

"Playoffs, we gotta watch some jerk makin' a drink?" said Little Allie.

"A craftsman," said Uncle Louie. "A builder. Layer after layer. Look the colors."

The family watched the hands. But no one watched like Angelina did. She watched the bartender flick his thick but supple wrists, watched him arch his pinky as he grasped a spoon. She watched the bent index finger, wounded, independent, that would not fall into line with all the others, and as she watched, her body warmed in its cocoon of shapeless clothing.

She knew it was impossible, unthinkable, but she also knew that she knew those hands, she was sure she did.

She watched them bring the bottle to the glass, slowly, roundly, the strong arm doubling back as though softly to enfold a shoulder, to stake out the small space of a caress. She watched the hands, and, watching them, she heard a voice made more tender by its very gruffness, saying, You and me, Angelina, you and me. At the edges of her vision, the walls of the room stopped meeting at the corners, the floor got wavy underneath her. It couldn't be, it was fantasy, delusion, but she knew the hands on the screen were the hands she had felt on her hair, on her neck, on the tender place just below the ear, every day and every night for what already seemed a lifetime.

The cocktail was made, the cherry drifted downward toward the bottom of the glass, trailing its red curtain of grenadine. Angelina tried to speak, tried to sound casual. Her throat was dry, the words came out tentative and childish. "The name of that place, you can't remember?"

Uncle Louie pursed his lips, clicked his tongue, shook his head, defeated. Angelina tried not to pout, not to squirm.

The video rolled on, moved in no special order to schooners on the horizon, parasailors against a flawless sky, drag queens on pink mopeds. Angelina pressed her back hard against the couch, let the fibers of her sweater rasp against her skin; locking in the image of the hands, she squeezed her eyes so tightly shut that she could feel the lashes interlace. The Amaro family sipped coffee, nibbled cake.

The tape ended in a dappled glare. Allie Junior put on the hockey game. Chitchat moved to other subjects and after awhile people said good night, walked down the long hallway to gather up their furs and cashmere overcoats.

As Uncle Louie was putting on his hat, Angelina, her eyes too bright, the skin mottled on her throat, hugged him hard and said, "Thank you, Uncle Louie, thank you."

Surprised at her enthusiasm, surprised to be embraced, he smiled shyly, his clownish cheeks bunched up.

As he was walking past the thinning ranks of good cars to his own, his wife said, "She's a strange one, your niece."

Louie, wrung out from the evening, didn't answer.

And by morning, Angelina, without a word to anyone, was on her way.





4


That same morning, having no idea that anything was wrong, Paul Amaro left his house, to be driven through the Bronx to his headquarters in Manhattan.

Almost before he had settled into the backseat of his Lincoln, quiet streets had given onto glutted boulevards, stately homes had yielded to boarded stores and warehouses with smashed windows. Across the city line, sooty high-rises were smeared against the damp gray sky; the highway crumbled under the smoking, rusted, veering cars of the uninsured and reckless poor.

With it crumbled the thin crust of gentility that Paulie had affected since moving to Westchester. Mile by mile, the well-dressed commuter devolved back to the thug, the suburban businessman became once more the bully, the threatener, the felon. His posture changed, he skulked low and coiled against the window; his eyes became more vigilant and furtive. Ahead, the skyline loomed; buildings climbed up one another's backs like jungle trees clawing for a little swath of open sky. The appalling density put tension in Paulie's forehead; the city seemed to him a clot of greed, a boil throbbing with frustrations and thwarted drives and ten million interlocking fibers of aggression.