Styx & Stone (41 page)
Authors: James W. Ziskin
Across the street, I climbed the stairs to my cold apartment and opened the radiator valves wide for some heat. Standing in the kitchen, still in my overcoat, I opened the envelope. It was from Gigi.
Thursday, January 28, 1960
Dear Ellie,
It’s hard to reach you by phone, so I decided to drop off this short note. I wanted you to know how nice it was to see you last night. If it’s not too late, I’d like to invite you for dinner Saturday at Barbetta. You deserve an evening out.
I know you’re very busy these days. Please call me when you have a free moment.
Tuo Gigi
I folded the letter into its envelope and slipped it back into my coat pocket. Again my fingers came across something else, this time a small, hard object. I pulled it out and turned it over in my hand. It was a roll of film: Gigi in slumber. I pried the cap off the canister and dropped the roll into my left palm. Kodak Tri-X, twenty-four exposures. I stared at it for a long moment before gripping the tail of the film tightly between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. Then I yanked it out of the cartridge, deliberately exposing it to the light to ruin it. I never wanted to see those pictures or Gigi again. I didn’t want to be reminded of what we’d done.
I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, desolate and miserable, then collapsed sobbing, my face buried in the crook of my arm. It was one of those desperate, howling breakdowns that exhaust you, rend your lungs raw and make your stomach ache. It was as violent as it was hopeless. Then there was a knock at my door.
I was sure it was Mrs. Giannetti come to complain; I must have been crying too loud for her taste. But when I opened the door, I found Fadge standing sheepishly in the cold, a brown paper bag tucked under his arm.
“Hi, come on in,” I said, wiping my eyes on a handkerchief. He followed me up the stairs, rumbling as he went.
“I thought you might like a cocktail,” he said once we were in the warmth of my kitchen. He pulled two quarts of Schaefer beer from his parcel and placed them on the table. “And dinner,” he said, producing a large bag of Wise potato chips.
I was still tingling from my spell, but trying to hide the evidence with bravado. “It’s not fair,” I smiled. “A girl doesn’t stand a chance with a big spender like you.”
He stared at me with his bulging eyes for a moment, making me think maybe I’d misjudged and gone too far with the teasing. I was wrong.
“Well, in that case, let’s get you out of that sweater,” he said, and I had to laugh.
After one glass of beer, I left the rest of the Schaefer’s to Fadge, while I switched to White Label. We sat in my parlor for hours, listening softly to some of Elijah’s jazz records. The break from the loneliness was a godsend, even if we talked about sad things.
Fadge told me how his mother had died a few years before, and his father before that. And he had lost a brother, too. Always sickly, suffering from some kind of congenital heart problem as well as polio, Ron’s older brother, Robert, had passed away while still in high school. He told me it had been hard to lose everyone, but there wasn’t any getting around it. That was the way it was. I appreciated the wisdom of his fatalism, the acceptance, and the resignation. I promised myself that I, too, would try the same one day, once I’d had my fill of grief.
We marveled at the coincidences in our lives, the shared pain, and I took a perverse comfort in it. It was as if I had been rotting for years in a dark prison, alone, desperate, and cold, when, suddenly, the cell door opens. A dear old friend, beaten and unconscious, is pitched inside with me, and I am overcome with joy.
“Why did you come over tonight?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you were hoping to get lucky.”
He shook his head. “With a skinny girl like you? Naw.” He paused, thinking of something. “I just wanted to have a beer,” he said finally.
I smiled gently at him as he looked away. I knew why he had come, and it almost felt like he’d saved my life. I’ve loved that fat guy ever since.
The next day, I spent hours developing the photographs of Dad’s drawings. They were some of the nicest shots I’d ever taken. I made a couple of sets of prints, experimenting with different exposures and sizes. I intended to get a few of them enlarged, printed, and professionally framed. One photograph—Charon, ferryman on the River Acheron—I sent to an address in Brooklyn: a walk-down on Sixteenth Street, in the shadow of the El. I thought Karen Bruchner might want to keep it, the same way he’d kept that name all those years.
Deepest appreciation to Dan Mayer, editorial director at Seventh Street Books.
Greatest respect and affection for
il grande
John Freccero, a dear friend and an inspirational scholar, who taught me so much about Dante and
The Divine Comedy
.
Heartfelt gratitude to my peerless agent, Bill Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc., without whom Ellie Stone would never have come to life, and
Styx & Stone
would have languished forever in a drawer.
A linguist by training, James W. Ziskin earned bachelor of arts and a master of arts in Romance languages and literature from the University of Pennsylvania and speaks Italian and French fluently. He worked in New York City as a photo-news producer and writer, and then as director of NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. He has since spent fifteen years in the Hollywood postproduction industry, running large, international operations in the subtitling/localization and visual-effects fields.
James lives in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Lakshmi, and cats Bobbie and Tinker. He is represented by William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc.
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