Tough Guys Don't Dance (18 page)

“You serving any drinks?” I asked.

“It's time for you to go. I can still pass you off as an insurance salesman.”

“Say, you
are
afraid of Regency.”

She was not hard to manipulate when all was said. Her pride had to remain intact. She now said, “It's you he'll be irritated at.”

I said nothing. I was trying to calculate the size of his anger. “Do you think he'd be bad?”

“Buster, he's in another league.”

“What does that mean?”

“He can be bad.”

“I'd hate to watch him cut my head off.”

Now she looked startled. “Did he tell you about that?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Vietnam?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “any man who can behead a Viet Cong with one stroke of a machete is doubtless to be reckoned with.” She was not horrified altogether by such an act. Not altogether. I was remembering the depth of the sense of vengeance in Madeleine. Once or twice a friend had insulted her over what I deemed a small matter. She never forgave it. Yes, an execution in Vietnam could stir up much in her.

“I gather that you're miserable with Patty Lareine,” Madeleine now said.

“Yes.”

“She left you a month ago?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want her back?”

“I'm afraid of what I'd do.”

“Well, you chose her.” There was a decanter of bourbon on the sideboard, and she now picked it up and came back with two glasses, pouring each of us a half-inch of liquor without water, and no ice. That was a ritual from the past. “Our morning medicine,” we used to call it. As before, so again—she shuddered as she sipped it.

“How the hell could you pick her over me?” was what Madeleine wanted to say. I could hear the words more clearly than if she had uttered them.

That was one question she would never ask aloud, and I was grateful. What could I have replied? Would I have said, “Call it a question of Comparative Fellatio, dear heart. You, Madeleine, used to take a cock into your mouth with a sob, or a sweet groan, as if hell were impending over this. It was as beautiful as the Middle Ages. And Patty Lareine was a cheerleader and ready to gobble you up. Albeit with innate skill. It came down to whether you wished your lady to be demure or insatiable. I chose Patty Lareine. She was as insatiable as good old America, and I wanted my country on my cock.”

Of course, my long-lost medieval lady had now developed a taste for men who could behead you with a blow.

The greatest virtue of living with Madeleine had been the way we could sit in a room together hearing each other's thoughts so clearly that we seemed to be drawing them from the same well. So she as much as heard my last unsaid speech. I knew that by the mean twist of her mouth. When she looked at me again, Madeleine was full of hatred.

“I didn't tell Al about you,” she said.

“Is that what you call him?” I said to hold her off. “Al?”

“Shut up,” she said. “I didn't tell him about
you, because there was no need for it. He burned you right out of me. Regency is a
stud.
”

No woman had ever flayed me with that word so well before. Patty Lareine could not have come close. “Yes,” said Madeleine, “you and me loved each other, but when Mr. Regency and I began our little courtship, he would fuck five times a night, and the fifth was as good as the first. On the best day you'll ever have, you'll never come near Mr. Five. That's what I call him, you dolt.”

Against every intent of my will, there were tears in my eyes from the pain this speech gave me. It was equal to suffering while sand is cleaned out of a wound. Yet, at that moment, I fell in love with her all over again. Her words would show me where I put my feet for the rest of my life. It also stirred a pride I thought was dead. For I took a vow that one night before I was done, I would obliterate her admiration for Mr. Five.

Before I left, however, our conversation took another turn. We sat in silence for a time, and then it was longer than that. Maybe it was half an hour later that the tears began to come out of her eyes and wash away the mascara. After a while she had to wipe her face.

“Tim, I want you to go,” she said.

“All right. I'll be back.”

“Call first.”

“Okay.”

She walked me to the door. Then she stopped and said, “There's one thing more I ought to tell
you.” She nodded to herself. “But if I do,” she went on, “you'll want to stay and talk.”

“I promise not to.”

“No, you'll break your word.” She said, “Wait. Wait here,” and she went to a shopping-mall replica of a Colonial kneehole desk in the living room, where she wrote a few words on a note, sealed it and came back.

“This promise you can keep,” she said. “I want you to hold this note until you're better than halfway home. Then, open it. Think about it. Don't ring me to talk about it. I'm telling you what I know. Don't ask how I know.”

“That's six promises,” I said.

“Mr. Six,” she said, and came close, and gave her mouth to me. It was one of the most remarkable kisses I have ever had, and yet there was little passion in it. All the tenderness of her heart, however, and all her pall of rage both passed into me, and I confess that I was stunned by the combination, as if a good boxer had just caught me with a startling left hook and a stultifying right, which is not the way to describe a kiss and gives none of the balm it also offered my heart, but I say this to emphasize how rubbery were my legs on the walk past the neighbors down the road to my car.

I kept the six promises and didn't open her note until long after I turned in the blubber-wagon at Hyannis and got back into my Porsche and drove all the way to Eastham. There I stopped on the highway to peruse her message, and it
took three seconds. I didn't phone her, I just read the note again. It said: “My husband is having an affair with your wife. Let's not talk about it unless you're prepared to kill them.”

Well, I started up my Porsche again, but it will come as small surprise that I was not able to concentrate on the road, and coming to a sign for the Marconi Beach Site of the National Park Service, I turned off Route 6 and drove out to the bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I left my wheels in the space allotted by the Park Service and walked off to sit on the top of a low dune, passing sand through my hands while I meditated on the Pilgrims and wondered if it might be out in the seas right here that they turned north to sail up the tip of the Cape and around to Provincetown. What better place than this promontory for Marconi to send his early wireless messages across the ocean's space? My mind, however, on pondering such large concepts, grew empty, and I sighed, and thought of other wireless messages that had gone between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth and Essex, the Czarina and Rasputin, and in our own most reduced and modest way, Madeleine and myself. I sat at the top of this low bluff and passed sand back and forth in my hands and tried to estimate my situation now that I had seen Madeleine. Did it all come down to Alvin Luther Regency?

It occurred to me that I could just about use a rifle and had hardly any competence with my pistol. For that matter, I had not had a fist fight
in five years. With drinking, and, of late, my smoking, I must have a liver large enough for two. Yet at the thought of facing Regency, I also felt some of the old blood come back. I did not start as a fighter, and I did not seem to have ended as one, but the years in the middle when I tended bar taught me a few tactics, which knowledge I had doubled in the slammer—I was a compendium of dirty tricks—and then finally, it didn't matter. I had gotten so evil in my last few street fights that they always had to pull me off. Something of my father's blood had passed on to me, and I seemed to have bought his code. Tough guys don't dance.

Tough guys don't dance. On that curious proposition my memory, like a boat coming around a buoy into harbor, returned to my adolescence and I could feel myself dwelling again in the year I turned sixteen and went into the Golden Gloves. That was far away from where I now found myself with Madeleine's note. Or was it not so far? After all, it was in the Golden Gloves that I tried for the first time to hurt someone seriously, and sitting here, on the beach at South Wellfleet, I started to smile. For I was able to see myself in the way I used to, and at sixteen, I always pictured myself as tough. I had, after all, the toughest father on the block. While I knew, even then, that I would never be his equal, still I told myself that I was enough like him to make my high school football varsity by my sophomore year. That was a feat! And I remember how that winter, once football
was over, I used to feel a mean and proud hostility toward the world which I could hardly control. (It was the year of my parents' divorce.) I started to go to a boxing gym near my father's bar. It was inevitable. Being Dougy Madden's son, I had to sign up for the Golden Gloves.

A Jewish boy I knew at Exeter told me that the year before he turned thirteen was the worst in his life. He spent it getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah, and never knew if on a given night he could fall asleep or would be wide awake reciting the speech he had to give next winter in the synagogue to two hundred friends of his family.

That wasn't as bad, I suggested to him, as your first night in the Gloves. “For one thing,” I said, “you walk in half naked, and nobody has prepared you for that. Five hundred people are there. Some of them don't like you. They're for the other guy. They're very critical when they stare at you. Then you see your opponent. He looks like dynamite.”

“What made you do it?” my friend asked.

I told him the truth. “I wanted to make my father happy.”

For a boy with such a good purpose, I had, all the same, a nervous stomach in the dressing room. (I was sharing it with fifteen other fighters.) They, like me, were to be in the blue corner. On the other side of a partition was a dressing room with fifteen contenders from the red corner. Every ten minutes or so, one of us on each side would go out to the auditorium and another would come
back. There is nothing like the danger of humiliation to build fast alliances. We didn't know each other, but we kept wishing each guy luck. Devoutly. Every ten minutes, as I say, one kid would go out, and soon after, the previous kid would return. He would be ecstatic if he won, and in misery if he lost, but at least it was over. One kid was carried in, and they sent for an ambulance. He had been knocked out by a black puncher with a big rep. In that minute I considered forfeiting my match. Only the thought of my father sitting in the first row kept me from speaking up. “Okay, Dad,” I said to myself, “my death is for you.”

Once the fight started, I discovered that boxing, like other cultures, takes years to acquire, and, immediately, I lost the little culture I had. I was so scared I never stopped throwing punches. My opponent, who was fat and black, was just as frightened and never stopped either. At the bell, neither of us could move. My heart felt ready to explode. By the second round, we could not do a thing. We stood still, we glowered, we used our heads to block punches because we were too tired to duck—it cost less to get hit than to move. We must have looked like longshoremen too drunk to fight. Both of us were bleeding from the nose and I could smell his blood. I learned on this night that blood has a scent as intimate as body odor. It was an horrendous round. When I got to my corner, I felt equal to an overraced engine whose parts were ready to seize.

“You got to do better, or we don't win,” said the trainer. He was a friend of my father's.

When I could catch my voice, I said as formally as I could—you would have thought I was already in prep school—“If you want to terminate the fight, I will abide by that.”

The look in his eye, however, told me he would repeat my remark for the rest of his life.

“Kid, just go beat the shit out of him,” my trainer said.

The bell rang. He gave me my mouthpiece and a shove toward the center of the ring.

Now I fought with desperation. I had to eat the entrails of my remark. My father was shouting so loudly, I even thought I was going to win. Boom! I ran into a bomb. The side of my head could just as well have stopped the full swing of a baseball bat. I suppose that I careened around the ring because I only saw the other boxer in jump cuts. I was in one place, then I was in the next place.

New adrenaline must have been shaken loose by the punch. My legs were shocked full of life. I began to circle and to jab. I ran and I ducked and I jabbed (which is what I should have done from the beginning). At last I could recognize the given: my opponent knew less about boxing than me! Just as I was measuring him for a hook (since I had now discovered that he lowered his right each time I feinted with my left to the belly) why, the bell rang. Fight was over. They lifted his hand.

Afterward, when the well-wishers were gone and I was sitting alone with my father in a coffee shop, a second wave of pain just commencing, Big Mac muttered, “You should have won.”

“I thought I did. Everybody says I did.”

“That's friends.” He shook his head. “You lost it in the last round.”

No, now that it was over and I had lost, I thought I had won. “Everybody said it was beautiful the way I took that punch and kept moving.”

“Friends.” He said it in so lugubrious a voice that you would have thought it was friends, not drink, that was the bane of the Irish.

I never felt more argumentative with my father. There is no surliness like sitting around, half dislodged in every vale of your mind, torso and limbs, your organs hot and full of lead, your heart loaded with consternation that maybe you did lose the fight your friends say was stolen from you. So I said out of my own puffed mouth, and I probably never sounded cockier to him, “My mistake was that I didn't dance. I should have come out fast at the bell and stuck him. I should have gone: Stick! Stick! Slide,” I said, moving my hands, “and circled away. Then back with the jab, dance out of range, circle and dance, stick him! Stick him!” I nodded at this fine war plan. “When he was ready, I could have dropped the bum.”