The Singer's Gun (14 page)

Anton stood up, opened his wallet, and left three twenty-euro bills on the bar—the bartender called after him, he had drastically overpaid, but he was on his way out the door and could not stop—and he began to walk rapidly downhill toward the Hotel Britannique. After a moment he broke into a run. The sidewalk was narrow in places; he had to dodge around people and heard himself gasping with every breath,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
the words turning into a meaningless sobbing for air, and the traffic was a blur of steel and death and lights at his fingertips. When he looked up he saw that the sky had gone starless. Past the warm soft lights of the Grand Hotel Parker’s, past the Hotel Britannique with its faded lobby full of tourist brochures, and then he darted across the street—horns blared, a Vespa swerved to avoid him—and jogged down the stairs toward the water. At the bottom of the steps he stopped running and settled into a loose staggering walk.

On the last ferry to Ischia he slumped over a railing on the outside deck, staring down at dark water and trying not to think about anything. The gun was a solid weight in his pocket. He couldn’t stop thinking about the things that might happen to a girl like that, drunk and alone in the seething city of Napoli, making her way home to an apartment near the train station unarmed. He had left the precious English-language books in the bar.

In the morning Anton woke with a pounding headache. He’d only sipped at the violet drink in the bar, but he felt poisoned. He took a cold shower and lay on top of his bed for a while before he went down to breakfast, thinking about what it would mean to never return to New York again.

10.

Just before Aria’s fifteenth birthday she returned home to her father’s apartment after a weeklong absence, but the locks had been changed and there was a note on the door next to the eviction notice
(Went to Ecuador, go stay at your uncle’s place)
and from the street she saw that the curtains were gone from the windows. She came back to Anton’s neighborhood quickly, with enormous bravado and shaking hands. She sat at the table while Anton’s mother fluttered around her, bringing her a plate, a fork, some food, some coffee,
you poor thing
. When Anton’s father heard that his brother had taken off for Ecuador he almost punched a hole in the wall, and for the rest of that week everyone stayed out of his way. He talked to his vanished brother while he worked, while he did the dishes, in any situation where he was more or less alone and no customers were present: a furious muttered monologue about family and responsibility, punctuated by curses.

But Aria didn’t talk about her father at all. She didn’t talk about much of anything. She disappeared for long hours, she went to school and worked in the store, she listened to music in her room. She was a polite and quiet presence in their lives that year, always on the margins or just out of sight. Anton’s mother did what she could, but Aria was unreachable. After a few weeks there was a phone call from Ecuador. Her father apologized. He just couldn’t bear to be away from Aria’s mother any longer, he said, so he’d sold everything they had to pay for the plane ticket. The furniture. The dishes. Aria’s clothes. All temporary stuff, he assured his daughter. Nothing they couldn’t eventually replace. Aria’s mother had never felt like marrying Aria’s father while they were all in Brooklyn together, but now they were going to be married in Ecuador. They were happy. Sylvia had stopped drinking. It was unbelievable, miraculous, a whole new life. He said Aria was welcome to move to Ecuador and join them, but Aria laughed and hung up the phone.

That was the year Gary introduced Anton to cigarettes, which they felt conveyed a certain hard glamor. The technique was to squint into the distance and smoke as if you’d been smoking for so long that you hardly noticed the cigarette anymore and in fact had no idea how it had ended up in your hand. They practiced smoking under the bridge, separated from Anton’s parents’ store by several hundred yards and an array of enormous concrete pilings.

“You know your cousin steals?” Gary asked once, when the cigarettes were lit. He passed one to Anton, who took it gingerly—the thing he didn’t like about cigarettes was that one end was hot—and used it to stall for time.

“She’s fucked up,” he said, after he’d exhaled, when it became apparent that Gary was waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop her.”

But he realized as he spoke that he didn’t really want to. Every time he thought of her he was shot through with strange envy. She was six months older but miles ahead.

Aria had a way of staring at the river while she smoked her cigarettes. Standing in front of the store, under the awning when it was raining. One hand in her pocket, the other holding her cigarette, and she lit one cigarette after another and looked out at nothing, or at Ecuador.

Anton’s and Aria’s sole chore around the apartment was to do the dishes, because his parents liked to read after dinner. When the dishes were done Aria usually disappeared into the demands of her private life, going out with friends who exchanged inscrutable jokes in rapid-fire Spanish or closing herself in her room and listening to music with the volume turned down low. She saved and saved and bought her own CD player. Anton’s father was willing to put down his book to have a conversation if he saw Anton hovering around, but there were two or three hours after dinner when his mother was lost to them; she read with all of herself, immersed, breathing language, and couldn’t be reached until she was ready to emerge.

When he didn’t have plans with anyone he closed himself into his bedroom to read after dinner, or stayed with his parents in the living room. Anton resented the absence of a television, but there were things he read in books that took his breath away. His mother’s collection of travel guides never moved him, but Kirkegaard’s last words were
Sweep me up.
He read those three words when he was fifteen years old and his eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.

It was his mother’s absence in the evenings that made Sundays important. When it was warm enough she sat with him on the loading dock in front of the store, watching the boats on the river and Manhattan on the other side. Anton would go out by himself around ten and after a few minutes she came to join him with two mugs of coffee, and they sat there together for an hour or so. They didn’t talk much; the point was contemplation and silence. In winter they drank coffee in the store, where there were two old chairs behind the counter that were too comfortable to sell, but it wasn’t the same as watching the river.

“Does it bother you ever?” he asked her once. “The way we do things?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.” It was a Sunday morning, almost noon. He was fifteen years old and they were watching a Brooklyn-bound J train passing over the Williamsburg Bridge. The warehouse was so close to being under the bridge that at a certain point any approaching subway train disappeared overhead.

“I know a lot of it’s stolen,” Anton said. “The stuff we sell.”

“True,” said his mother. She had finished her coffee and she held the empty mug clasped loosely in her hands. She was looking at Manhattan, or looking through Manhattan at something else. There were moments when Anton’s parents seemed very far away from him.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“No,” she said. “Does that disappoint you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She was quiet for a while. “Your grandfather was an official in the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He was a well-respected man, one of those pillar-of-the-community types, but he was terrifically cruel in his personal life. I ran away at sixteen. Was he moral? He thought so. He operated a soup kitchen and a shelter for the homeless during the winter and probably saved lives. There are probably people alive today who were homeless in Salt Lake City in the ’60s, and they didn’t freeze to death in the winter because of him. Or my sister,” she said. “We’ve had a few misunderstandings, so you haven’t seen her since you were tiny, but she’s a wonderful woman. She was on welfare because she had three little kids to take care of, and her ex-husband never did pay child support. Once there was a bureaucratic error and she received two welfare checks for the same month. She spent the extra money on new winter coats and boots for the kids and a radio, and her ex-husband found out and threatened to report her for welfare fraud unless she stopped pestering him for child support. Was she immoral? Was what she did wrong? I frankly don’t believe so, my beloved child. My point is that it isn’t black-and-white, what we do or what anyone else does in this world.”

“We deal in stolen goods.”

“We deal in goods that would in all likelihood be destroyed anyway. We’re a salvage operation.”

“But
stolen
. We don’t know they’ll be destroyed. Someone else might be planning to save them, and we don’t own them. They’re not
ours
.” He blinked and was humiliated to realize that he was ready to cry. He clenched his coffee cup with both hands to steady himself. Adolescence had made him embarrassingly emotional.

“Anton,” she said, “sweetheart, I know it’s questionable. But we work hard. I’m at peace. Your father’s at peace. We sleep well at night. What are our options?”

“Normal jobs?”

“Normal jobs,” she repeated. Her voice held an edge. “You’ve never worked a normal job, Anton. What do you imagine it might be like?”

“I don’t know. Less questionable.”

“Well, most things you have to do in life are at least a little questionable,” she said. She stood abruptly, took his coffee cup from his hands and left him alone on the loading dock.

11.

The day after he stole the singer’s gun Anton went down to the piazza and called Gary.

“You want me to kidnap your cat,” Gary repeated.

“Not
kidnap
, exactly.” Anton had purchased aspirin with great difficulty at a pharmacy near the hotel—the pharmacist didn’t speak English, which necessitated a brief game of charades at the counter—but his headache wasn’t entirely gone yet. The sharp light of afternoon made him want to go to bed with the curtains drawn, and the gun was a malignant presence in the top dresser drawer in the hotel room. “I mean, he’s
my
cat, it’s not like you’re stealing him.”

“Oh, so I’m not kidnapping him in the
technical
sense of the word, I’m just breaking into your apartment, extracting your cat, and then putting it in a crate and shipping it to Italy. Cool.”

“No, I’d send you my house keys. No break and enter involved.”

“Oh, okay. That changes
everything
.”

“Look, and I’d pay your expenses and all the shipping—we’re clear about that, right? I’ll throw in another fifty for your time if you want. A hundred. Make it a hundred, okay? A hundred dollars for two hours of your time.”

“Thanks, but why don’t you keep the money and buy a new cat?”

“Because I already
have
a cat. Jim isn’t replaceable.”

“Yeah, look, it’s just a little crazy for me. Isn’t there anyone else you could call?”

“You’re my best friend. Who else would I call?”

“Sorry,” Gary said.

“Two hundred. Would you do it for two hundred?”

“No, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s crazy, Anton, I’m sorry. I’ve known you forever. And I gotta tell you, man, you’ve just been a little out there lately.”

“Why? Because I miss my cat? I’ve been here for six weeks, Gary. It’s lonely as hell.”

“No, because you left your wife on your honeymoon and now you want me to take the cat from her too, and all this after you cheated on her with your secretary. You ever stop to think about what kind of a person you are?”

“I do, actually. I think about it all the time.”

“And you can still sleep at night? Because it’s just not admirable, Anton. It isn’t. And look, hey, you know I’m not one to judge, I’ve always been here for you, I was the guy you called and went for beers with every time she fucking canceled a wedding on you, man, but how could you leave your wife on your honeymoon?”

“You don’t understand, there were—”

“Oh Christ, let me guess. There were mitigating circumstances.”

“Well, yes, there—”

“How fucking mitigating could a circumstance possibly be?”

“Pretty mitigating,” Anton said.

“She cheated on you? She tried to kill you? What?”

“No. Nothing like that. It wasn’t anything she did. Look, I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry,” Anton said. “I just can’t.”

The phone call ended badly and afterward Anton went to the café closest to the water. It was the only café on the piazza that still kept regular hours, the only one frequented by the fishermen; the other cafés were opening later and closing earlier as the supply of tourists dwindled and colder winds moved over the surface of the sea. He suspected that the nozzle on this particular café’s milk frother wasn’t cleaned very often—the lattes tasted slightly like yogurt—but the beer was decent and the grilled panini were good. He’d taken to watching the sunset from this place. Anton sat outside in the last light of afternoon, thinking about his cat and about all the things he should have said to Gary.

Later he took a circuitous walk that lasted three hours and returned to the café after dark to get drunk. There were other lonely foreigners in the piazza that night. They came together as the café emptied out and shared three bottles of wine, and when the café had closed they sat together on a pier: Anton, a couple of Germans who spoke English, another American whose name he didn’t know. The Germans were catching an early flight back to Munich; after a while they went back to their hotel and then it was just Anton and the other American, some guy from Michigan. Anton sat on his hands and looked down at the water, the slick of lights on the surface. He was cold. The effervescence of the previous few hours was fading. He was starting to think about the singer and her gun and his far-off cat again.

“I can’t remember your name,” Anton said finally. “Did you tell me?”

“David Grissom.”

“Anton Waker. Pleasure.” He reached sideways to shake David’s hand. “I’ve seen you around here a few times before tonight. Doing the crossword puzzle. Sketching stuff. I think we’re staying in the same hotel.”

“Yeah, I’ve been here a few weeks.”

“Long vacation?”

“Staying here a while. Painting,” David said.

“You know, that’s a skill I always wanted. I could never even draw.”

“It’s an overrated talent.” David seemed uninterested in the subject. “Where do you live?”

“Here. I used to live in New York, but I don’t think I’m going back there. You?”

“No fixed address, as they say in the newspapers. I’ve been drifting around Europe for a while.”

“What do you do, aside from traveling and painting?”

“You know, I used to think that was the most banal question,” David said. “
What do you do?
I used to think it was synonymous with
How much money do you make?
But lately I’ve begun to think it’s the most important question you can ask someone.
What do you do? What are you doing? What is your method of conducting your life, by what means do you move through the world?
Important information, isn’t it? But I’m sorry, I’m rambling. Is that bottle empty? In answer to your question, I travel aimlessly and try not to think too much. I work odd jobs and paint still-life paintings and then throw out the canvases every time I move to a new place, unless I can sell them to tourists, which only happens if I paint landscapes. I’m going to ask what you do in a minute, bear with me, but first, what’s the most important question you’ve ever been asked?”

“The most important . . .?”

“It’s a subject that interests me,” David said. “I used to start conversations the regular way—you know,
Hi, how are you, how ’bout this weather we’re having
—but then a few years ago, around the time my wife died, I developed an allergy to small talk. So lately I’ve been starting with that question, and I find it makes all the conversations I’m in more interesting. Also, I’m drunk.”

“It’s a good question.” Anton was quiet for a moment. “A girl in New York asked me something once. She said,
What was it like when you were growing up?
”

“What was it like when you were growing up. That’s good. That’s very good. I’ll remember that one. What do you do?”

“Me?” Anton raised the wine bottle to his lips, drank for a moment and set it back on the pier. “Nothing good. Nothing at all, actually. I’m not doing anything but waiting. Can’t we just ask each other what we
used
to do? Because the present, well, I have to tell you, I don’t like the present very much.”

“I used to sell cocaine to art school kids in Michigan,” David said.

“Really?”

“Not a bad business,” David said. “I only left Detroit because my wife died.”

“I’m sorry about your wife. I used to work at a consulting firm,” Anton said, “but I think it’s safe to say that that career’s more or less over. Now I’m just waiting to perform a transaction. I’ve been waiting for a while now.”

“What kind of transaction?”

“One I’d rather not do,” Anton said. “It’s nothing, actually. I just have to give a package to someone, and after that I’ll be free. The waiting’s killing me, though. I’m not sure there’s anything much worse than this.”

“Really? You don’t think there’s anything much worse than sitting on a pier on the southern coast of Italy drinking wine?” David was smiling. “How drunk
are
you, exactly?”

“Drunker than I’ve been in a while. I meant there’s nothing much worse than this
limbo
,” Anton said. “This
waiting.
All this waiting, and I have nothing to go back to once the waiting’s done. There’s nothing left in New York City. It isn’t just that my marriage is over, it’s that it never should have started in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking. She was a once-in-a-lifetime person, but that doesn’t mean I should have married her. There’s nothing left there for me there except my cat and a girl I had an affair with once.”

“Do you love her?”

“The girl? I don’t know. A little. Yes. Okay, the thing is, I miss her, but not as much as I miss my cat.”

“Your cat.”

“Jim. He’s not just any cat, I rescued him when he was a little kitten. I was walking one night with Sophie, my wife, back when we were still just dating. It was raining, and there was this little wet shivering kitten in a doorway. He almost died. Lost an eye to infection. I tried to get my best friend to kidnap him and ship him over just now, but he wouldn’t do it.”

“That’s why I try to avoid having too many friends,” David said. “Unreliable species.”

“Not as bad as family.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You don’t have a family?”

“Not really,” David said.

“I envy you, man. I wish I didn’t have a family.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” Anton said, “I don’t. I wish I had a different family.”

The evening after the thirtieth anniversary dinner at Malvolio’s, Anton took the subway out to Brooklyn. He was tired. His footsteps were heavy on the steel steps up to the loading dock, and his planned speech evaporated when he stepped into his parents’ warehouse. There was the stone fountain just inside that had been there for a decade, sold at last, tagged, waiting for transport. He stopped to touch it—Look at this holy work of art, these holy stone birds along the edge of this basin—and ran one finger over the ecstatic curved spine of a finch. He thought he was alone but when he looked up Aria was already watching him. She was behind the counter, leaning on it, the
New York Times
spread out under her elbows.

“How could you do this?” It wasn’t at all what Anton had meant to say.

“Anton,” she said, not unkindly, “grow up.”

“It’s not—”

“You’re not
really
going to say
It’s not fair
, are you?” They were again thirteen, standing under the awning across the street from Gary’s father’s store; she was explaining how to shoplift but he was a baby and she was disgusted with him,
You just take it from the shelf and then you don’t have to pay for it.
The things she was stealing were different now, colossal: entire futures, perhaps lives, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed when her crimes became so enormous. It occurred to him that perhaps he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Aria,” he said, “this is my life. I’ve done something different. No one else in our family—” he was about to say
has ever gone to college
, but stopped himself just in time. “Aria, listen, I’m getting married, I’m going to have kids someday, and they’ll go to good schools because I have an office job and I can support that, and they will never have to do anything even remotely corrupt.”

“You’re saying they won’t have to do what you did.”

Anton sensed a trap but nodded anyway.

“Except that you didn’t have to do what you did either.” He had stepped on the tripwire; the trap snapped shut. “What were your grades like in high school?”

“I hate rhetorical questions.” Anton couldn’t look at her.

“Straight A’s,” Aria said. “You could have done anything. You always said you wondered what life would be like with a college degree, well, you could have gone to college. You had the grades. They have scholarships for kids with grades like yours. But you didn’t go to college, did you?”

Anton had no answer to this.

“The way I live is my decision,” she said. “The way you live is yours. No one ever forced you to be corrupt.”

His father was approaching from the back of the warehouse. He was holding a paintbrush in his hand, tipped with paint the color of poppies. “Are we back on the blackmail thing again?” his father asked.

Anton rested his hand on a stone bird to steady himself. “Yeah, Dad, we’re back on the blackmail thing again.” The curve of stone wings beneath his fingers.

“Well, she’s family, Anton. No getting around it.”

“She’s your niece. I’m your son.”

“She’s as much my daughter as—”

“Anton,” his mother said. “Ari, Sam, what is this?” She had appeared from somewhere in her work clothes, a streak of dust across her shirt. She was twisting a damp rag between her hands. “I heard you all the way in the back.”

“This
blackmail
thing again,” his father said. “Talk to him, Miriam.”

“Oh, Anton, it’s an important deal for her, you
know
that. I don’t know why you won’t help her.”

“Well, I don’t have a choice but to help her out, Mom, that’s the thing. That’s actually what blackmail
is
, in case no one ever told you.”

“Don’t speak that way to your mother.”

“Okay. Okay.” Strange to realize, looking at the three of them, that he didn’t want to see them again. No, that wasn’t it; it was more that not seeing them again was suddenly, staggeringly, absolutely necessary. “Tell you what,” Anton said, “I’m getting married in three weeks.”

“Well,” his mother said, “assuming Sophie doesn’t—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. I’m getting married in three weeks, and I don’t want to see you there. Any of you.” He forced himself to meet their eyes. They were staring at him, uncomprehending but starting to understand. “I don’t want any of you to come to my wedding. You are not invited. You are not people who I want to see again. Do you understand me? I’m done.” His mother was weeping. The look in his father’s eyes. “I love you,” Anton said. His father made an indecipherable sound. “I love you. All of you. I just can’t, I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to live the way you live anymore. I can’t.” He was at the threshold, backing out. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” They stood frozen in place, and something broke in him at the instant he turned away.