A Song for Mary (38 page)

“Where’s Amsterdam?” Frankie asks.

“Someplace over there,” Raymond answers, “next to England and France and places like that. I need a new girlfriend, too, since Marilyn moved to New Jersey.”

That’s where Marilyn Rolleri is, I think.

“You should go out with Maryanne Maniscalco,” Frankie says. “And you don’t have to go over the ocean. I saw her yesterday, short skirt, crinoline slip, she bends over and you see the big planet.”

“The big planet?” I say.

“Venus, man,” Frankie says. “Venus, the only planet that matters, and she’s not going out with anyone anymore.”

Raymond is still laughing. I lean against a wall and light a cigarette, thinking that Marilyn Rolleri is probably better off in New Jersey if Raymond doesn’t even care about it. All my life I have been dreaming about having a girl like her, and I never came closer than a fast hallway kiss. I would care a lot more than Raymond does about it, I know, if it was me.

“I’ll talk to her,” Raymond says, “maybe.”

“Man, what should we do tonight?” Frankie asks.

“Where are Nicky and Mikey and those guys?” I ask.

“I’m going to meet them later, man,” Frankie says. “At the Tavern Bar on 48th Street.”

“I got something great,” Raymond says. “C’mon with me, under my stairs in the hallway.”

“I hafta go home in an hour,” I say. “Maybe I’ll just stick around for a little bit.”

“Don’t be such a queer,” Raymond says. “You have all year if you want it.”

Frankie’s mother doesn’t look up as we pass her and leave the candy store for the hallway next door. Under the stairs in the back of the hall, Raymond puts his finger to his lips as he picks up a brown paper bag and pulls a bottle from it.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Pernod,” he says.

“Bernard?” I ask.

“No,” Raymond says. “Pernod, like
p-e-r-n-o-d
.”

“I don’t think that’s how you say it, man,” Frankie says.

“It’s like anisette,” Raymond says, “but I don’t know how to spell that.”

“A-n-i-s-e-t-t-e,”
Frankie says, spelling it out.

“You go to the head of the class,” Raymond says as he breaks the seal, and hands the bottle to me.

It has a sweet taste, and it doesn’t make my throat hurt the way whiskey or Scotch does. I take a second swig, this time a big gulp.

Frankie drinks some, too, and then Raymond, and then it is back to me. I take two more gulps. I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all.

Two hours later we are sitting in a booth in the back of the Tavern Bar down Second Avenue. We’ve been hanging around here, or in a bar called The Studio, for a couple of months now. You have to be eighteen to drink in New York, but most of the people I see are sixteen or seventeen. I get away with it because I use a duplicate of my brother’s driver’s license.

Frankie had to carry me down most of the way to 48th Street. The liquor hit me like I walked into an airplane propeller under Raymond Connors’ stairs, and we just sat there trying to make words with the sounds that were coming out of our mouths.

Now I am drinking glass after glass of soda water, trying to dilute the stuff before I pass out. Raymond is still laughing. He laughs at everything everyone says, funny or not.

“Where’s Nicky?” Frankie says.

Raymond laughs.

Jurgensen walks into the bar and sees us in the booth. I don’t see Scarry or Walsh.

“Hey, Dennis,” Jurgensen says. “Hey, Frankie, Raymond.”

Jurgensen sits at the bar.

Raymond laughs.

“You got twice as much teeth as you need, Raymond,” I say.

Raymond laughs.

“And your head looks like a cue ball balanced on top of a pool stick.”

Raymond laughs.

I realize then that Raymond doesn’t hear anything at all. He is just laughing to have some response. The Pernod has made him kind of delirious, and he can’t shake that stupid smile on his face.

I know I am drunk, I am thinking, and if I could only get to the bathroom and throw it all up, I would be all right again. I am seeing two of everything. I see Jurgensen, both of him, sitting at the end of the bar by himself. There is a thin wall of a bar separation between him and me, about five feet high, and Jurgensen is watching John Conroy put a glass with an inch of water on the top of the separation.

When you sit at the end of a bar, you see everything. Jurgensen will watch that glass until somebody knocks into the separation, and he will watch the glass fall to the ground and break, and he will watch as John Conroy demands that the clumsy guy buys him another drink, a full glass of gin, or risk a broken nose. I know that Jurgensen will sit there amusing himself with Conroy and ten other neighborhood guys until he falls off the stool in another two or three hours.

I don’t want to pass out like that, and if I could get to the bathroom, I could have another two or three hours of some good time here.

Suddenly, I remember that I was supposed to go home to decorate the tree for Christmas. I said I would be an hour, but that was two and a half hours ago. Maybe Billy is still there. Maybe I could still help him do the tree. If I could only get to the bathroom.

“Lemme out, Frankie,” I say.

“Where ya goin’, Dennis?”

“Baretroom.”

Frankie gets up and I slide over the leather seat and fall right to the floor. Shit, I think. Here I am lying flat out on the floor of a bar that would serve kids from Sister Stella’s third-grade class. I leave my head on my arm. I feel a bit of a comfort here, and I want to close my eyes and go to sleep, but Frankie has his arms around my waist pulling me up from the center. It would be so easy to just go to sleep, to be anything but drunk like this.

“Get up, Dennis,” Frankie is saying, “before the bartender sees you and kicks us all out.”

I stagger to the bathroom, and as I pass by a back booth I see Buckley sitting there with a woman. I don’t pay much attention because I don’t like him much, anyway, and I rock from side to side until I am before the bathroom sink, and I lean over and the Pernod comes out as I open the faucet and watch everything mix with the water, and I hear myself wretching as half my stomach goes down the drain. I take a big mouthful of water and gargle, and then I clean the sink out.

“Always try to clean the sink when you’re out,” my mother told us the night we were at Joe’s Original Restaurant, “because there will always be somebody behind you that might want a clean sink.”

I cup the water in my hand and splash it up to my face. It feels like a curtain of ocean air has swept across my skin. I am feeling less woozy now, less legless. It would be a gift from God to be home now sleeping in the top bunk.

“Sit down, Dennis,” Buckley says as I begin to pass them by.

I am now in the red leather booth, next to a woman who I guess is twice as old as I am. She has a round face and full red lips, like you’d see on a billboard. I watch her figure going back and forth from being one person to being two. I guess she’s pretty, but I don’t like the way she has her hair, a million little crispy curls coming down over her forehead. I squint to make sure I see only one of her.

“This is Loretta,” Buckley says.

“Hello, Loretta,” I say, holding my hand out to shake hands.

She leans over and kisses me on the mouth.

Even in this dizziness, I am thinking that I never knew a woman could be like this, that she could just say hello, a simple hello, and then open her mouth and the full force of a hot breath mixed with alcohol and cigarette smoke could shoot into your body with a kiss.

I don’t know what to say when she stops, but I am glad that I gargled. She turns fully toward me on the leather seat. I can see her legs now, and the way her polka-dotted green skirt hangs loose between her legs and over her thighs. Her clothes are clinging to her, and even in this fog I can sense the hard muscles of her thighs and the solid firmness of her breasts.

“So you’re Dennis,” she says.

I look at Buckley, wondering what the score is here. He’s smiling.

“Loretta,” Buckley says, “is a friend of mine. She’s been lookin’ at you and told me you remind her of James Dean.”

“My mother,” I say to them, “says that I look like Gabby Hayes in the morning.”

“Well,” Loretta says, “you look like James Dean now.”

There are two shot glasses filled to the brim before her, and she lifts one to her lips and downs it like a longshoreman.

“And,” she adds, “I like you.”

I look at Buckley again, as I feel Loretta’s hand on my leg. He is still smiling.

“Lookit,” Buckley says, “I gotta meet Ray Dececci up on 54th Street. If you want, you can take Loretta to my house for a drink or something, ‘cause my whole family went to Pennsylvania for Christmas. I can meet you there later.”

What should I think about this invitation? I wish I was back on the floor, my head on my arm, falling into a deep rest that would take me out of this world.

I can see my brother waiting in the living room for me to help him with the decorations. He said he wouldn’t do them without me, but I am also looking at Loretta, and I am wondering what is going on here.

It looks like a fix-up, but it could also be a setup. I never liked this Buckley guy too much, until now. It seems to be a generous thing if it’s the real McCoy, to let me go with Loretta to his house. Real generous.

Or why didn’t I think of this before? Maybe this is a prostitute, a woman that Buckley has gone together with in some deal. He is in with those kind of people, I know.

I better ask him straight out, I think, and I get up from the seat.

“Could I see you a second?” I say to Buckley, waving him away from the table.

“Hey,” Loretta says as he gets up and leaves.

“Look,” I say to him, standing just a few feet from Jurgensen. “I am tapped out and can’t even buy a drink here, so if you’re lookin’ for a few shekels to be with this Loretta, I don’t know where I’ll get it.”

“Hey,” Loretta calls again, I guess feeling abandoned. She has the second shot glass to her mouth.

“No, no, no,” Buckley says. “It’s nothing like that, man. Damn, I am giving you a hundred percent luck here, and you are breaking my horns.”

Loretta is now sitting on a worn velvet couch in Buckley’s apartment on 48th Street, just around the corner from the Tavern Bar. She is so much older than I am, maybe thirty I am thinking, but she has something warm about her, like she is a little girl being quiet and polite.

She has a very nice body beneath her green skirt with the white polka dots and her red sweater. She is like a Christmas present. Raymond would laugh now if he thought I had a Christmas present like this.

But what do I do now that I’m here? I’m not sure how I should act. I have never been with a girl alone like this in an apartment, where it might lead to something. I hear guys like Jackie Morgan talk about it, but I have never had a steady girlfriend who would even let me feel the cloth of her brassiere.

And no one has ever talked to me about what I should do with a girl like Loretta. She’s not even a girl anymore, and if Father O’Rourke was here, he would say that I am in the near occasion of sin, and I should think of everything that is dear to me, to think good thoughts, to think of everything I respect in life, like Archie, and my brother, who is going to beat me, I know, because I didn’t help him with the Christmas tree.

This is the famous Penn Station of the Our Father. I am thinking this as Loretta puts her arms around me. And lead us not into Penn Station. Maybe I could talk to her some, get her to relax a little. I could relax, too, I feel so edgy.

“I wonder,” I say to her, “why Buckley didn’t go to the country with his family. My mother never goes on a trip without us.”

“Maybe,” she says, “they didn’t want him to go. C’mon, Jimmy, loosen up, will ya?”

What is this Jimmy stuff? Does she want me to be James Dean or something?

“Why not?” I ask. “I wonder how they let him stay here alone.”

I’m thinking of when my mother told me she was going to Aunt Kitty’s, but then ended up back in the kitchen to catch me coming home late. What would I do here, I am thinking, if Buckley’s father walked into the house?

Suddenly I can feel my eyes beginning to close. It is like I have taken a pound of horse and my eyelids weigh a hundred pounds. I know I want to keep talking to Loretta, but I am so tired.

I just want to fall into her lap, close my eyes, and sleep for a week.

“The family hates him,” Loretta says. “He told me.”

How could a family hate someone in their own family, even someone as pimply as Buckley? I look at Loretta, try to focus on her, but I am too dizzy to see her clearly. All that Pernod. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so many club sodas. Maybe it just spread the Pernod out.

I know I could kiss her if I wanted to, but I keep my body a few inches away from her on the couch. I don’t know why I am hesitating to make out with her, but I feel that it is not the normal thing, to just meet a girl or even a woman like Loretta, and then two seconds later end up on a couch with her on 48th Street.

But, still, she is a good looker, and I don’t know how long it will be before I ever have this kind of a chance again. As Buckley said, he was dealing me one hundred percent luck.

Loretta takes her sweater off. Just like that, she crosses her arms and pulls her sweater right over her head, and she is sitting there in a white brassiere, again looking like a little girl waiting to be told what she should do next.

“I wish I had some whiskey,” she says.

“Maybe I could find some,” I say quickly, beginning to get up from the couch, happy that I could move even for a minute. I am now feeling the sweat in my hands, and I wipe my hands on my pants.

“No, no,” she says. “You just sit here, and I’ll look.”

Loretta gets up and walks through the Buckley apartment. It is much bigger than my apartment, but it is way down here on 48th Street. I wouldn’t want to live here, I am thinking as she disappears into the darkness of the kitchen. It is so far away from 56th Street.

God, if I could just rest a little, maybe I could feel better, and maybe I could talk to Loretta some more. I have never done anything like this, and if I just felt a little better now, maybe I could tell her that I have never done this.