Kamikaze Lust Page 14

  “Let them go, Hy,” Mom said.

  “Oh, babydoll, why?” Hy whined, reduced to shambles. I thought he might cry and, at that moment, saw he was everything Dad wasn’t. My father would have beaten the crap out of his son before letting him run away from the dinner table. Then he would have called Mom names as their screaming began, a match of twitching jugular veins and flicking wrists, pink blotches on white skin.

  Not Hy, he called her babydoll and stroked her arm. I felt sorry for him, caught between her and his family, but weighing the facts as I knew them, my sympathy had its limits. Even Dad, I believe, wouldn’t have cheated on his dying wife.

  “I’ll be right back,” Hy said softly and went to catch his family. The rest of us were silent; Kiki, Aunt Lorraine, and I huddled on one side of the table, Mom on the other.

  “Stop it! Stop staring at me!” Mom slammed her chair into the table and rose defiantly as if she herself hadn’t smashed the evening to pieces.

  “Nobody’s staring,” I said, afraid she might faint, or at least try it, but she’d already sent people running from the table. Fainting would be redundant.

  “Six months!” She imitated me, her nose scrunched up and eyes glaring. “You just can’t let me have any happiness, can you? All of you. Jealous bitches!”

  She walked off screaming Hy’s name until the front door slammed behind her.

  “She is totally nuts,” I said.

  “No, just sad,” Aunt Lorraine nodded. “She could have had some life, but nothing was ever enough, just like your father. They were too much alike.”

  “Louie was lucky,” Kiki said. “He saw it coming and got out.”

  “You’re giving him too much credit,” I said, thinking of all the times Dad had come from work smelling like scotch, how the union local had called that day. Louie’s in the hospital, a metal beam whacked him in the kisser. If they knew he was drunk, they didn’t say anything, allowing him and, later, Mom to collect disability.

  “He had a good heart, until it stopped working,” Aunt Lorraine said. She smiled beneath her Yankee cap, and though her rheumy eyes were trimmed with yellow spots and broken blood vessels, she seemed more alive than ever. I remembered how she and Dad had always clung to each other, how they sat together so many evenings listening to the saddest music I’d ever heard, tango music. Songs about love and longing and war. Songs that made my father cry. Aunt Lorraine was the only one who understood his tears, the only one he never hit or berated. Aside from me.

  “Mind you, I’m not making any excuses,” she said. “People pay for their lives.”

  “Not in Brooklyn, they don’t,” Kiki said. She stuck her fork in the middle of the pecan pie and shoved a huge chunk in her mouth.

  Aunt Lorraine and I dipped our forks into the dish. I shook the can of whipped cream but stopped at the sudden flash on Aunt Lorraine’s face. She wasn’t supposed to have any sugar.

  “What are you waiting for?” she said. We shared a quick second of recognition: yes, honey, we both know what’s going on, and I still want the whipped cream. All of my life I feared doing the wrong thing. I was terrified of, say, not following doctors orders or not clearing my credit card balance the day I received the bill. But I had been to the porn set and back, I’d made a pass at Shade the other night, I wasn’t even reading newspapers anymore, and the world went on just the same.

  So I shot a stream of whipped cream on each of our forks and then built a sculpture like the Colosseum in the middle of the pie. The three of us sat swallowing whipped cream and laughing, and I was happy in the sick sweetness, happy until I spotted Rowdy standing against the wall, his spindly fingers hugging the video camera to his chest, with his shoulders jerking and tears streaming down his cheeks.

  BANG, BANG, YOU’RE…

  First the shot went off. One long echoed bang, as if a fleet of trucks had backfired simultaneously. My ears rang, dazed as eyes navigating the aftermath of a photographer’s flash. Then I heard the man scream.

  Heads ducked down; fear crept up my back. People dropped their signs, rushing back and forth in every direction like a scene from an old Japanese monster movie.

  Shade squeezed my arm. “You okay?”

  I took a deep breath, and my lips shook. “Yeah, you?”

  She nodded, clasped her hand tightly around mine, and together we elbowed our way out of the police barricades, which the union leaders had decorated with colorful Christmas lights. We spotted Tony standing by the coffee shop. Shade let go of my hand, and I wished we were back in the crowd, our fingers locked as we bounced like electrons between the bodies of strangers.

  We joined Tony and asked him what happened.

  “Some idiot machinist was packing a forty-five and the thing went off. Got’im in the foot.”

  “His own foot?” Shade said.

  “He was carrying a gun?”

  “Yes, he shot himself, and yes, he had a gun. That’s kind of a no-brainer.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pouch of tobacco, and started rolling a cigarette.

  “A gun! What was he doing with a gun?” I had to scream above the bedlam. The horns and megaphones. People shouting. The ominous wailing of police cars and an emergency rescue van.

  A few reporters mingled amid the crowd scribbling on pads and flicking their cell phones. The three of us noticed them simultaneously. Shade zipped up her olive green leather jacket and turned her back to them. Bloated clouds wrestled with the wind above. Tony kicked the ground and leaned back against a parked car, almost too casually. I wondered if he’d heard my question about the gun. He bit a string of tobacco from the end of his cigarette and spit it into the gutter. “I can’t even afford real cigarettes.”

  “You never could,” Shade said.

  “No, I used to be able to, I just didn’t want to. There’s a big difference.” He exhaled, looking defeated, angry, as if pushed the wrong way he might explode. A lot of people out here looked that way. Striker’s pose.

  “Are you still editing?” Shade asked Tony, and again I couldn’t believe they weren’t talking about the shooting. As if it were innocuous, like the crack of my toy gun from Bermuda.

  “Yeah, I had a couple of days at EgoEast this week. Magazines are so funny. Nobody works. They all come in at ten, dressed like models. Then they go to lunch.”

  “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” I interjected. “Am I hallucinating or did some guy just shoot himself?”

  They both laughed, looked at me as if I were a kid asking where babies come from. I felt like an idiot. “Where have you been, Rachel?” Tony dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his dirty sneakers.

  Shade and I crossed stares. She winked at me, as if to say my secret was safe with her. I wondered which secret we were protecting: the job, the porno, our kiss. “She’s been hiding out in Brooklyn.”

  “You don’t have TV there?” Tony said. “They’ve been tipping delivery trucks and dumping papers in the Hudson like crazy. The other night they pummeled a driver so badly he wound up in the hospital.”

  “It kicked off every channel,” Shade added.

  “Really, look,” Tony said. He shoved his neck to the left, where a few union leaders were surrounded by microphones, cameras, and tape recorders. Nobody had told me any of this when I’d been here last week. Then again, I’d basically signed in and left unnoticed.

  Today, having a few free hours and wanting to glom on to their union solidarity, I followed Shade and Tony to The Corral, where I heard more gruesome tales of the line. Apparently, strikers were now spitting paint through plastic straws at anyone who crossed, marking their treachery in chicken-shit yellow. Then there were the scab-beatings and midnight truck raids. Tony said he’d gone along one night. He was so drunk he couldn’t get the stocking over his head and ended up passing out in the back seat of a car belonging to a bundler or pressman, he couldn’t remember. Sunrise found him in the car alone as the rest of the insurgents celebrated over breakfast.

  I should hav
e been appalled by the violence, moved perhaps to action or indignation, but hard as I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to care. All I wanted was for Tony to leave so I could be alone with Shade.

  This happened sooner than expected, as the strike had been a boon to Tony’s popularity. He strutted between tables as if he were at a wedding where he knew just about everyone in the room. Shade also received her share of nods, and I had to work hard to keep down my jealousy.

  “Are you drinking these days?” she asked after Tony left.

  “Sure, why not?” I had nothing to do until Ethan’s Christmas party later. I was bringing Robbie Rod, whom I’d ended up inviting the day before. He was saying he liked the way I watched people and the way I listened, intently, with my entire body. “Most people hate keeping secrets,” I replied. “They’ll tell you anything if you look at them right.”

  “You want to divulge a few secrets, Silver? I promise I’ll watch.”

  He had stared as if he already knew every one of my secrets. I blushed, but managed to allay the tension. “I have no secrets, RR,” I said.

  “Good. Me neither.”

  “Good.”

  “So let’s have dinner tomorrow.”

  “Actually, I’ve got another idea,” I said, and before I knew it he’d agreed to come with me to Ethan’s party, and I immediately thought, what have I done? How can I get out of this? Although I smiled at RR and laughed about the fun we’d have, I feared the wrath of Alexis, who certainly wouldn’t approve of me dating her ex-husband, feared the reception of my pedigreed colleagues, feared the thought of meeting him for drinks before the party. It all seemed too intimate.

  Neither had I found the right moment to tell any of this to Shade, who’d put in our order for a pitcher of kamikazes. “The preferred cocktail of striking reporters,” she assured me, adopting the Scarlett O’Hara voice she affected in bars.

  “Since when?”

  She shifted her head back and forth a few times then sighed. “Okay, look, I’m sick of tequila. Tequila makes me batty, and it’s all anybody drinks around here. That and watered down beer. I feel like I’m back in college. Besides, we need a new ritual. We need kamikazes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We smiled until it embarrassed me. I looked around the bar, dark and smoky with wooden chairs and brown formica tables. It could have been any bar, in any city, anywhere. I did recognize a few people, and I caught the scent of nostalgia in the air. It would be a stretch to say I missed these people whose names I could barely keep straight, but acquaintances made the world whole, gave it context. Since the strike my professional context had changed, at the very least it wore less clothing.

  “I don’t know, Slivowitz,” Shade sighed, and I thought she might be tired of me, frustrated by our situation. Her every word or gesture, no matter how innocuous, seemed coded. A sentence, a smile, a tap on the wrist, nothing was what it was. I felt as if I were studying a foreign language, unsure of my translations and afraid to speak. You might call it social aphasia. Or performance anxiety.

  Salvation came in a silver cauldron. Shade filled two shot glasses with the pale, lemony liquid and handed me one. “Here’s to never being boring,” she said. We clicked our glasses together and drank. The sourball elixir chafed my throat, and I feared throwing up. Shade refilled our glasses. “Again,” she said. “And none of your one-for-me-one-for-the-floor routine.”

  “You knew?”

  “I’m omniscient.”

  “Then why are you trying to get me drunk?”

  “I don’t know, you think it’ll work?”

  I tipped back my shot glass, drank the contents, and slammed the glass down on the bar. “Yes,” I said and laughed.

  “Slivowitz.” She pivoted toward me, propping her head up with a bent elbow. “There’s something I have to tell you.” The look in her eye finished the sentence…and you’re not going to like it. Tina Macadam, I thought, feeling the blood drain slowly from my face.

  “I’m going home for a few weeks, at least through the holidays.”

  “That’s it?”

  She shrugged.

  “You’re such an alarmist, why do you do that? I thought it was something bad.”

  “Well it is sort of, I’m leaving tomorrow.” Her brow crinkled, her mustard eyes clouding like the late afternoon sky. Then again, I was looking through a kamikaze-colored lens. She refilled our glasses. “So I was thinking we should do something tonight.”

  “Oh god.” I buried my head in my hands, feeling guilty. In my mind I saw myself calling RR and canceling. Ethan wouldn’t know the difference.

  “What?” Shade touched my shoulder, again asking what, and I felt as if I’d cheated on her, which was ridiculous when she was the one who kept pulling away. Guilt slowly gave way to resentment and I thought: why should I change my plans just because she’s leaving town tomorrow?

  “Look, if you can’t just say so,” she said.

  “No, it’s not that, I mean that’s part of it, but…”

  “I can’t hear you.” She pushed my shoulder back so I had to lift my head up. We stared. I reached for the kamikaze Shade had poured and drank it in one quick gulp.

  “I’m going to Ethan’s Christmas party, and I invited Robbie Rod. There, now you own it with me.”

  “You’re going out with that porn star?”

  “He’s an entrepreneur, he only used to be a porn star.”

  “I don’t care what he is, I don’t give a shit about him,” she said, raising her voice just enough to make me wary. “How can you do this to me?”

  “To you? So I’m supposed to be exclusive in this unrequited thing.”

  “You still don’t get it!” A few people turned to look at us; the bartender lowered his eyes in our direction.

  “Well, then start explaining.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. “Because you know what? I’m really sick of hearing how you know everything and I know nothing, just because I’ve never been with another woman.”

  “Put your money back,” Shade said, but I stuck the bill on the bar.

  “I want to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we can’t talk here.”

  “What are you afraid of, you big traitor? You scab!”

  “Don’t call me that!” More heads turned toward us, their half-familiar faces slapping me with sobriety. “Are you crazy? You want to get me splattered!”

  Shade bit her lip, then turned her head away. I stood, swung my bag over my shoulder, and leaned in close. “If you want to talk I’ll be outside.”

  I walked out into a bullet-gray sky, nervous that Shade hadn’t followed me. As much as I wanted to run back and throw my arms around her, I had to admit it felt sort of cool being the one who walked off. Cool. Another word waxed in multiplicity and overrated: if being cool was so great, why was I left tipsy and alone with the wind slapping the collar of my pea coat up against my face?

  Craving a cigarette, I bummed one from a young woman in nylon sweats with a walkman attached to her ears. I saddled up against a car in the lot next to The Corral. To my right was the coffee shop, in front of me was the picket line where the remaining strikers huddled together, occasionally flouting a poster or screaming an obscenity in the winds full of flying trash. She should have come after me already.

  I watched a man duck around the coffee shop. He moved nervously, looking back and forth at the strikers as he walked toward me. His coat was similar to mine but for a few streaks of bright yellow paint: a scab. The first I could actually identify. It made me think of the yellow star the Nazis had stamped on my grandfather, marking him for death. Despite the Italian flag patches on my jeans, the visits to the priest, the name change, I couldn’t shake his jaundiced yellow from my sleeve.

  When I was in my early teens, I used to dream the Nazis came to Brooklyn. They took up residence at the local synagogue and began their systematic genocide. Bay Ridge started looking like East Germany before the wall
came down. Through the burnt-out buildings and fallen bricks, I wandered, a massive, gold Italian horn swinging over my flat chest. My job was to find Jews in hiding and turn them in. I gave up my entire family, but that wasn’t enough. What saved me, finally, was sucking Hitler’s cock, because everyone knows Jewish girls didn’t do that. I had survived, but I was alone—a closeted Jew in the new and improved, ethnically cleansed Bay Ridge. The biggest traitor of them all.

  As the scab came closer, our eyes met in a passing stare. He must have guessed I was the enemy, although he had no clue I didn’t give a shit about the fight. He couldn’t have known I was more likely to drop to my knees in sympathy than to spit paint or tip a truck. Maybe Shade was right, I was more scab than striker.

  Above me the sky rumbled, a raindrop tickled my nose. I tossed my cigarette and through the charcoal air traced its arc to the ground.

  “Good, you’re still here,” Shade said. I looked up and found her standing a few feet in front of me. Her hair was pulled back tightly against her head, and her eyes looked swollen. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “Maybe the kamikazes weren’t such a good idea.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s like all of a sudden everything went red.”

  “That’s what serial killers say.” I pulled my collar up against my chin and smiled at her. Around us, the mist and drizzle felt like anticipation. We were still for a while, not saying anything, just staring. I swear her eyes said take me home. “Look, I can cancel tonight,” I said. “I was going to say that before you freaked out.”

  “Don’t do that. Maybe we need some time.”

  A crack of thunder and the raindrops got hard. In the distance I could see strikers sprinting to the coffee shop as Shade and I battled the rain amid the flashing lights of The Corral, and I wished we were at a cheap motel in a place neither one of us knew.

  She wiped a raindrop from her nose, sniffled. Her hand flung up to hail a cab, and one screeched to a halt in front of us. “You want it?” she said.

  “You take it.” I held the door open as she climbed inside. Before shutting the door, I bent down into the stuffy heat and asked her if she wanted to come with us tonight.