Irresistible Impulse (30 page)

Marlene said nothing after she got off the phone, but went back to work. Harry came back, cursing equally the Germans and ladies’ professional tennis. They shared news, and then Marlene took Posie and the boys and Lucy back to the loft. While Posie was giving the boys their bath and Lucy was settled with her homework, Marlene rifled the patched denim bag that served Posie as a purse, locating a ragged address book, from which she recorded one address. She changed into her black leather pants and engineer boots and put on her motorcycle jacket and a Yankees cap, into which she thrust her hair. Then she went to her tool closet, took an eighteen-inch pipe wrench from her plumber’s chest, wrapped this object in several sheets of the
Times
, and walked out.

Twenty minutes later, Marlene was pounding on the door of a tenement apartment at Sixth Street off C. The door was painted the color of old dried blood, and little flakes of it bounced into the air as she struck it. The hallway stank of hot lard, it being largely a Latino building now, but the smell seemed to be mixed with the scorched chicken feather stink of the former Jews layered over the cabbage of the yet more former Irish.

After three minutes of banging a voice answered from the other side: a curse and an inquiry. Posie’s Luke was a late, heavy sleeper.

“It’s me, Luke. Open up, honey!” Marlene called out sweetly.

Heavy steps. The door rattled and swung open. Luke Last-name-unimportant stood blinking in the doorway, dressed in a pair of ragged blue jeans and nothing else, a thin man in his late twenties, with a stupid-handsome face and shoulder-length dirty dirty-blond hair.

“Yeah, what?” he asked and then, looking her over, “Who’re you?” Marlene had her baseball cap pulled low over her forehead.

“Do you always come to the door with your fly wide open?” she inquired. Of course, he looked down, and when he did, Marlene whacked him over the head with the pipe wrench.

He staggered back into the apartment, his knees sagging. Marlene followed him in, slamming the door behind her, and hit him across the face with the wrench, a two-handed tennis serve swing. He went down, sprawling on his back, blood exploding from his nose. Marlene stood above him, adopted a wood-chopper’s stance, and brought the head of the tool down on his groin as hard as she could. He shrieked high and loud, and curled up on his side in a fetal position, breathing hoarse, bubbly cries. Marlene knelt beside him with her knee pressed into his neck.

“This is for Posie,” she hissed into his ear. “You are not to see her again. You are not to talk to her on the phone. If you see her coming on the street, you are to run away. In fact, the best thing for you to do is to get out of town permanently. If I hear that you have seen her or talked to her, I will come back, with help, and then I will take you apart. You will not be able to walk or talk or move for
years
after that. Nod your head if you understand.”

He nodded so hard he sprayed blood all around his head, like a flower.

Down in the street, Marlene had to lean against her car with her head down before the nausea passed. She stripped the bloody, shredded newspaper from the wrench and tossed it into a waste-basket. She used a tissue to wipe up blood drops. They came off easily from the oily leather.

Marlene drove slowly to Grand Street to buy her family dinner. She ordered two large pizzas at Lombardi’s on Spring Street and, to kill time while they were baking, she walked down Mott to Grand and Ferrara’s. There, at one of the tables in the back, she saw Father Dugan, dressed in a canvas jacket and a flannel shirt, sitting with a youth of about eighteen wearing a maroon parochial school blazer. The boy had the kind of Irish beauty that drew the eye, especially Marlene’s eye: shiny red curls, that milky skin, eyes from heaven. She sat one table away from them. They were deep in conversation, speaking in low, confidential voices, and if the priest noticed her, he made no sign. The waitress came, and she ordered a double-shot americano and a napoleon pastry. After violence, sugar was Marlene’s rule.

The two had stopped talking while the waitress was at Marlene’s table. When she left, Father Dugan met Marlene’s eye and nodded, smiling. “Join us?” he said.

Marlene moved her coffee and napoleon and sat in a chair at the other table. The boy stared at her, confused. He blushed, the red moving up his pale cheeks like spilled wine on a tablecloth.

“This is Kevin Mulcahey, Marlene. Marlene Ciampi, one of our parishioners,” said the priest. The boy mumbled a greeting but did not offer to shake hands. He said, “Well, hum, thanks, Father. I’ll see you later.” He got up so abruptly he knocked his chair over, made an embarrassed noise, righted the chair, snatched up an ugly plastic, bulging briefcase and almost ran from the restaurant.

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” said Marlene. “I didn’t mean to scare your friend away.”

“Oh, Kevin’s all right. He’s a little nervous. We were discussing his vocation.”

“You’re recruiting him?”

“Rather the reverse. I’m advising him to take some time.”

“You don’t think he’d make a good priest?”

Father Dugan sipped his cappuccino contemplatively. “I have no opinion either way, but the fact is, he lusts after women and it frightens him to death, and so he imagines that becoming a priest will solve the problem. I was trying to suggest to him, gently, that this is not necessarily the case.”

“You’re speaking from personal experience?” Marlene ventured lightly. He looked at her, his face calm but his eyes radiating the sort of soul-shriveling loving disappointment she recalled so well from Sacred Heart. They must have a special school that teaches them how to do that, Marlene thought as adolescent sweat broke out on her face.

He broke the gaze and said musingly, “Yes, sex. It’s so difficult for secular people to comprehend that there are a certain number of men and women in the world who don’t care for it, for whom it’s rather an irritation. Like psoriasis, for example. Or they just don’t like it, like some people just can’t stand olives or peanut butter. Some of these people are naturally attracted to celibate institutions and are content in them. Others of them persist in sexual activity because the society seems to demand it and they don’t wish to appear odd or unhealthy, and so they are unhappy and make their partners unhappy. Conversely, there are highly sexed people who have been taught that those feelings are shameful and to seek refuge in celibacy. They often get into trouble. As they say, when priests fail it’s either Punch or Judy. But there are worse things too, sad to say. Choirboys, et cetera.” He paused and looked at her closely before resuming. “A few of these, however, are able to convert their passion into spirituality, and these become the great saints in the world—Augustine, of course, Francis, Teresa of Avila, St. Ignatius Loyola—”

“Ignatius? I thought he was a misogynist.”

“Well, he thought it best to steer clear of women, but that was because they couldn’t get enough of him. A little, skinny, limping guy and they practically followed him around on the street, slavering. Fine ladies, princesses, even, and of course he wanted to avoid scandal, which would have torpedoed the Society. It did, of course, eventually, but that was much later.” (Marlene knew the story, naturally, from school: the Sacred Heart has something of a grudge against the founder of the Jesuits because, by his fiat, the Society of Jesus is the only religious order that does not have a sister house of nuns, and Sacred Heart nuns are ordinarily just those whom nature has designed to be Jesuits. Marlene occasionally thought that this unfair exclusion, much alluded to by the mesdames, had something to do with her own choices in life.)

“What Kevin needs,” said Father Dugan, steering the conversation again, “is a nice but not too nice girl, experienced but unthreatening.”

“I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” said Marlene. “Would you like the rest of the pastry? My eyes were bigger than my stomach. Besides, I have to go pick up my pizzas.”

“Bless you, no, thank you,” said the priest, smiling again and patting his belly, which as far as Marlene could see was perfectly flat. “It’s an indulgence I can’t afford.”

“Oh, come on! I won’t tell—seal of the confessional.”

The priest laughed. “Ah, Loyola, how wise you were to protect us from the temptations of charming penitents! No, really, dear,
quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi
.”

“Um, anything you thus press on me, I discredit and revolt at?” Marlene translated.

“Yes, Horace. Very good.” He beamed at her, his eyes full of affection and pain, mixed well. She thought that he must be nearly as lonely as Tranh, or Harry. He stood up and dropped some coins on the table.

“Now, I have to go too,” he said. “I have to fix the trap in the rectory sink. Oh, you would know where can I find some plumber’s dope and a cheap used pipe wrench?”

“You plumb?”

“We Jesuits are advised to be all things to all men. To Father Raymond and Mrs. Finn, our housekeeper, I am a plumber.”

“In that case, you can get the dope at Canal Hardware off Lafayette,” said Marlene. “I just happen to have an eighteen-inch pipe wrench in my car. You can borrow it.” They walked out of the restaurant to Marlene’s VW, where she handed over the tool.

“Ah, thank you. You were plumbing today too?”

“No,” said Marlene, “I was just using it to beat up a guy.”

Father Dugan inclined his head inquiringly.

“Sunday, Father,” said Marlene. “In the box.”

“What happened to Posie?” asked Karp as he helped Marlene clear away the remains of the family’s informal dinner.

“Some piece of shit pounded on her. Again. The worst part is, she went
looking
for it. Christ, Butch, she lives with
me
. She knows what I do. It’s like … shit, I don’t even know what it’s like.”

“A nun on the stroll?” suggested Karp.

“Thank you. You know, I may have to hand in my feminist card, but I’m starting to think that some women want to get pounded, just like some guys like to have women pee on them.”

“It’s the natural result of the contradictions caused by our corrupt patriarchal society,” said Karp primly. Marlene snorted. “God, and if you believed that, wouldn’t you be the perfect man!”

FIFTEEN

C
hristmas fell on a Wednesday that year, and Judge Peoples decided to forgo trying to fit in any trial sessions in between the big day and the second of January. Karp thus had a week off to spend with his family, or rather with his children and their nursemaid, since his wife was heavily engaged with the violent discontents of other families. Karp did not mind this as much as he thought he would. He was, for one thing, a low-maintenance husband: neat, lacking noisy or time-consuming hobbies, not fussy about meals, of moderate libido. After the extraordinary tension of the Rohbling trial he was more than content to sink into slovenliness, rolling around with his two boys in piggy filth, unshaven, eating junk, watching holiday shows and soaps on TV, going to Macy’s to see Santa (the boys shrieking in horror, Lucy blasé) and to shop for presents.

Lucy virtually took over the operation of the household, her natural bossiness now at last having full scope. She had been around kitchens, helping, since the age of five, and had no problem with simple meals of the heat ’em up plus salad variety, which was vital because Karp could not boil water, and Posie was not much better. Lucy incorporated this duty into her perpetual rivalry, and considered she had done well by it;
they
had mere cuteness, she had lasagna and minestrone. Daddy went shopping with her alone, and took her and her pals to Rockefeller Center to skate, and to downtown movies
in a cab
.

During this period Marlene would often be out half the night, or all of it, and come staggering in at dawn. They did not talk about what she was doing. He didn’t want to know.

The actual holiday, naturally, remained literally sacred to Marlene, and she consigned her besieged ladies to the hands of God and Harry Bello, going out to her parents’ house in Queens on Christmas Eve and eating the traditional dinner of twelve fish dishes (her aunt Celia explaining to Karp, as she did each Christmas without fail, that these represented the twelve apostles), attending midnight mass with the whole family (including Lucy, a glorious first for the child) at her girlhood church, St. Joseph’s, driving home sleepily to Manhattan and returning Christmas day to exchange gifts and eat heroically.

Karp enjoyed this event. He had minimum social responsibilities and no horse in any Ciampi race. He was, in fact, often appealed to as a neutral party, a being so alien that he might be expected to bring a uniquely fresh judgment to the field of Italian-American family squabbles. These were marvelously colorful, brief and violent as summer squalls, full of operatic gestures and imprecations. Karp much preferred them to the quarrels of his own family, which were covered over by a poisonous geniality and lasted for decades.

Besides that, the Ciampis treated him as a guest, since it was clear that he could never be a
paisan
. John, the oldest, the orthodontist, a basketball fan, talked to him about teams and players, and checked the smiles of all the kids, of which there were fourteen; Patricia, the city planner, discussed politics with him, assuming that Karp, as a Jew, was more liberal than he actually was; Anna, the big sister, cooked and kept her five kids in line, and interacted with Karp only on the subject of food and children; Paul, the handsome one, the youngest boy and a chef, flirted unconvincingly with all the wives, and was not allowed in the kitchen; Dom, the middle boy, was supposed to have gone into his father’s plumbing business but had gone instead to Vietnam, from whence he had returned minus a foot and something else, for which reason when he became as he always did, terribly drunk and abusive and violent, his brothers and brothers-in-law took him out in the backyard and restrained him, talking him down in shifts until he was fit for company again or stumped off yelling down the street. Karp, for some reason, although by far the largest person in the room, was excused from this duty by unspoken agreement, another aspect, he supposed, of his special outlander status. The true family attitude toward him was, he imagined, summed up by ancient Nona, Marlene’s grandmother, tiny and nearly blind, who once remarked to him, “My granddaughter, Marlene, the crazy one, married a (whispering)
Giudeu
, may God forgive her, but they say he doesn’t look like one of them, and besides, the
pazza
, she could have brought home a black
niuru
, God forbid!” (crossing herself)