LOUISA CHECKED HER WATCH. It was late and she had to find Simone and Nora who always seemed to lose track of time. They’d agreed to meet in the Hall of Pacific Peoples, which appeared to be empty except for a French family gathered around the fiberglass replica of an Easter Island head that loomed over one end of the room. As Louisa approached, they asked her to take their picture with one of their phones and thanked her profusely when she showed them a shot where everyone was smiling, eyes open. She decided to take a quick look at the Margaret Mead display, which she loved. As she headed toward the glass cases, she passed by a small dark corridor and then backed up, embarrassed, because she’d interrupted a couple in an intimate embrace, only to register before she turned around that one of the couple was wearing red Swedish perforated clogs just like hers. And Nora’s.
Louisa felt her neck and face become feverish. She wanted to run, but she couldn’t move. Nora was leaning against the wall and her shirt was unbuttoned to the waist. Simone’s hands were moving under the shirt. Nora’s eyes were closed, her arms limp at her sides. Louisa could see Simone’s hand moving up toward Nora’s white utilitarian bra. “Please,” Louisa heard Nora say and then watched as Simone’s thumb stroked Nora’s nipple through the worn cotton. Both women groaned. Louisa turned and ran.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Corporal Vinnie Massaro knew that the kids who came into his father’s pizza place called him Robocop. Whatever. One of these days he was going to reach out and grab one of them with the claw at the end of his terrifyingly complicated prosthetic arm, probably the chubby redhead; he’d wipe the smirk off that kid’s face. Maybe he’d grab him with his good arm, his flesh-and-blood arm, and let the kid dangle a few inches off the ground while he stroked his fat, freckled cheek with one steel finger, making him cry and beg for mercy, apologizing through heaving sobs. Vinnie could see the bubbles of snot now.
Stop.
Rewind.
This was not the type of imaginary scenario Vinnie was supposed to indulge, it was not positive or affirming, it was not how he’d been instructed to manage his anger. Stop and rewind was one of the techniques he was supposed to employ, according to his anger therapist, who shouldn’t be confused with his physical therapist or his prosthetic therapist or the occupational therapist who had been the one to suggest anger management when Vinnie used the metal pincers of his brand-new government-financed limb to eviscerate a toy duck into a million bits of foam the day he couldn’t manage to lift and lower the yellow duckie even once.
Vinnie took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. Rewind. Rewind. Rewind. He pictured himself walking over to the table of kids and laughing along with them, showing them his arm, genially explaining how sophisticated the technology was, how certain of his nerve endings had been surgically regenerated so that he could actually control the artificial limb with his brain. I guess I am Robocop, he’d say, part man, part robot.
Wow, the kids would say. Can we touch it? Sure, Vinnie would reply, then laugh and cuff one of them lightly on the shoulder (with the real arm). Go ahead, he’d say, touch it. It’s as good as my old arm. It doesn’t get hot or cold or cut or bruised. It’s better than the old arm!
Better, that is, unless you were Amy, Vinnie’s ex-fiancée, in which case the new arm was definitely not better than the old arm. If you were Amy, you’d pretend to be fine with the new arm, plaster a grim smile on your face, spout platitudes like “It’s what’s on the inside that counts” until the day when Vinnie, finally starting to feel at ease, casually put his arm around her waist and she flinched. Vinnie didn’t feel the flinch, of course (Hey, kids! The new arm doesn’t feel betrayal!), but he saw it; he wasn’t blind. Worse, because he’d unthinkingly touched her with the robot arm, he didn’t even get the pleasure of feeling his fingers sink a little into the soft ribbon of flesh above her hips that he loved so much, didn’t get to feel anything before he saw her recoil and then look at him, petrified and—
Stop. Rewind.
In his mind he went back to talking to the kids at the table and imagined how even the redhead would stop snickering. How they’d all be impressed when he picked up the tiny, plastic, greasy saltshaker. Not the bigger cardboard container of garlic salt, whose mere presence he found offensive. Don’t get him started on how the Mexicans in the neighborhood covered their perfectly seasoned pizza with the garlic salt and sometimes even hot sauce that they’d take out of their pockets in little travel bottles, as if his grandfather, whose recipe Vinnie and his father, Vito, still followed, hadn’t learned to make tomato sauce in Naples where they fucking invented tomato sauce.
Stop.
He’d pick up the real saltshaker and daintily shake a few grains into his fleshy palm, throwing them over his left shoulder to thwart the devil like his nonna taught him. The kids would applaud.
Yeah, Vinnie would say, winding up his demonstration with something positive and forward looking, trying to avoid bitter and self-loathing. I’m one of the lucky ones, he’d say, winking at them like he was a goddamn movie star.
HERE WAS THE THING: Vinnie was one of the lucky ones and he knew it. He could have lost more than one limb. He could be dead. When the IED exploded, he could have been walking on the left side of the path instead of the right like his buddy Justin who was alive but not. Traumatic brain injury they called it, instead of what it was, fucking retarded. Justin, back home in Virginia sitting and drooling in front of a television set all day, every day, bathed by his mother, spoon-fed by his father, wheeled out onto the porch for a little sun and fresh air so the neighbors could peer out their windows and feel blessed, shake their heads and say, There but for the grace of God. Justin, carried to bed by his brother every night, only to wake up the next day and start the whole depressing regimen all over again until he finally did kick it and was out of his misery for good. Justin, who had been five measly days away from completing his tour and going home—whole.
So yes. Vinnie was lucky. Fortunate. He was still strong, mostly healthy. He could take over the family businesses whenever he wanted, not only the pizza place but also a nice Italian grocery across the street, mostly imports, that his grandfather had opened on Arthur Avenue back when the neighborhood was all Italian, only Italian, before the ever-increasing influx of Mexican families over the decades. He had family around who were helpful and supportive. Fuck Amy. Maybe he got too angry sometimes, but he was working on it. He was trying.
Now that the kids had left the pizza joint (snickering at him, he knew it), he was a little calmer. Calmer that is until he saw Matilda Rodriguez coming down the street and his fury smoldered anew because there she was, walking down the street, again on the crutches, swinging herself around like she was the fucking Queen of fucking Sheba and Arthur Avenue in the Bronx was her kingdom. Waiting for people to move out of her way, hold doors open for her, offer to carry her bags. What was next? A rickshaw? A fucking velvet cape over an icy puddle?
It wasn’t right. She should be walking.
He put his head down, took a deep breath. Rewind, rewind, rewind. He tried to employ an imaging technique using a positive historical frame of reference.
He thought about when he met Matilda, during her first weeks at the rehab center when he was there doing the tedious work of managing his new arm. He thought about how upbeat and determined and flirtatious she’d been then, not just with him—he wasn’t an idiot—with everyone, but still, it had been nice. How she sang a lot and called everyone Mami or Papi, no matter his or her age in relation to hers. He remembered her swinging dark hair and bright smile, which reminded him about a particular pink sweater she wore during those first weeks. He thought about how that pink sweater would pull across her breasts when she was positioned on the crutches, making it apparent that she hadn’t bothered with a bra, riding up to reveal her tiny waist. He thought about how he might like to touch that pink sweater, which made him think of his mechanical arm and how if he did touch the sweater, the material might snag and maybe even rip and start to unr
avel. Matilda would look down at her damaged sweater and her face would fill with regret and maybe even a little disgust. And then she would look back at him with her lovely almond-shaped eyes and—he could see it perfectly—they’d fill with pity.
“CORPORAL!” MATILDA, IN the doorway of the pizza place now. She was with her cousin Fernando, the one who’d visited her repeatedly in rehab when he was on break from law school. He was carrying her purse and all her grocery bags. Her eyes were watery with cold, and her smile was tentative; she knew how Vinnie felt about the crutches, about her not using the prosthesis.
“I’m so hungry. I swear I could eat five slices right now,” she said, moving into the restaurant, toward one of the booths. He watched Fernando help her sit and get comfortable, slide her crutches beneath the table. Vinnie concentrated on a nonjudgmental greeting. He counted to ten before he approached, tucking the damp dishtowel he carried into the waistband of his jeans. Matilda sat and looked up nervously as he came closer, wiping her slightly runny nose with a Vito’s Pizzeria napkin. He leaned a little on the table with his good hand, moved his face closer to hers.
“Where the fuck is your foot,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The night of the accident the previous summer, Leo had sat in the Emergency Room bracingly, horrifyingly alert. Hung-over. Petrified. He kept replaying the moment of the crash, Matilda’s screams, and the far more frightening moment when she’d stopped screaming and he was afraid she was dead.
They were in adjacent rooms in the ER, he and Matilda. He could hear her occasional moans and the doctors talking about the possibility of reattachment. Her right foot had been nearly severed at the ankle. A hospital translator was talking to her parents.
An old family friend from the sheriff’s department had made a call to George Plumb from the accident site around the same time that Leo had called Bea. George and Bea left the wedding and arrived at the hospital together.
George immediately discussed containment with Leo. “I don’t care what you remember,” he said to him softly. “At this moment, you don’t remember anything. You’ve had a head trauma.” He nodded toward Leo’s bleeding chin. “Got it?”
Leo was watching Bea listen through the curtain, not knowing whether to hope that her Spanish was still strong or had, along with many of her talents, diminished to ineffectual. She was listening hard; her head was bent, and Leo noticed that the tops of her shoulders were slightly sunburned. Her dress, like almost everything she owned, was vintage—short, black, and sleeveless—and she was clutching herself, as if trying to stay warm in the chill of the air-conditioned hospital.
Bea wasn’t cold; she was concentrating on understanding as much of the conversation as possible, which was pretty much everything. She was losing some medical terms, but she understood when the translator explained to Matilda’s parents the slim possibility of a successful reattachment. He detailed the complications, the chances of rejection, the powerful pharmaceuticals and lengthy hospitalization and rehabilitation Matilda would need in the coming weeks and months. The very, very long road ahead with a reattachment that could still result in an eventual amputation. Matilda’s father told the translator they had no insurance, that they were, in fact, in the country illegally.
“That doesn’t matter right now,” she heard the translator say, his tone urgent but kind. “You are entitled to the proper treatment.”
One of the nurses gently interrupted. “We don’t have much time to decide if you want to reattach. We’d need to prepare the foot.”
Bea could hear Matilda’s mother address the doctor and her husband in heavily accented English. “What is a life without a foot?” she said. The anguish in her voice was harrowing. “What kind of future will she have? How will she walk? How will she work?”
“No, Mami, no.” Matilda spoke from the bed, her voice slurred and dreamy, from shock and morphine. “The man from the car is going to help me. He knows people. Music people. It was just an accident. A bad accident. He is going to help me. No more waitressing.”
“Your music?” the mother said, incredulous. She reverted to Spanish, her tone bitter and scared. “You lose your foot and this man is going to make you a star?”
“I need to get out of here,” Matilda pleaded.
The translator was speaking to the doctor, but Bea couldn’t make out what they were saying. Bea walked over to Leo, who was still clutching a bloody piece of Matilda’s white blouse in his hands. The nurse had cleaned the wound and left to get sutures so she could stitch Leo’s chin. George pointed to the curtain. “Pick up anything interesting?”
Bea hesitated. What she’d just heard wasn’t her business; the information was not hers to pass along. She knew George.
“Bea?”
“Kind of,” Bea said. “They’re deciding whether to amputate.”
George sighed. “Not great news.”
Bea turned to Leo. In the fluorescent light of the ER, chin split, eyes bloodshot and watery, gaze unfocused, he looked beaten and scared. He tried to smile. He looked, for a minute, like a little boy, and she took his hand.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said to her. “One minute we were going—”
“Shhh.” George stopped Leo by raising a palm. “Time for all that later.”
Leo held Bea’s hand so tightly her fingers were numb. “Careful, Superman,” she said, wriggling her fingers and loosening his grip a little.
“Superman. Right.” Leo lightly touched his chin and winced. “I could use Superman right now. Have him fly and reverse the earth’s rotation to go back in time.”
“Before the really dry crab cakes were passed?” Bea said, trying to distract Leo from the crying she could hear on the other side of the curtain.
“More like to early 2002,” he said.
That sounded good to Bea—2002, the year before he sold SpeakEasyMedia and met Victoria; Tuck still alive; her book newly published. The year that was the dividing line, in Bea’s mind, of the Leo she loved, the Leo who was one of her closest friends, gradually disappearing and morphing into someone unrecognizable.
Leo looked like he might cry. She was scared for him. “How did I get here?” he said. She was trying not to stare at the split in his chin. He was going to have a scar. “How did I fuck up this badly?”
In spite of the circumstances, Bea’s heart billowed to hear something approaching self-reflection and regret, something hinting at an apology coming from Leo. It had been a long time.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, feeling helpless.
“I don’t know about that,” Leo said. There was a slight commotion on the other side of the curtain. The parents seemed to be arguing in Spanish, and the translator was trying to intervene. “I think it might be the furthest thing from okay,” he said.
Bea put her hand on Leo’s back, and he leaned into her a little. She motioned George closer and spoke softly and quickly, before she could change her mind. “I heard something else.”
“What?” George said.
“The parents are undocumented.”
George smiled for the first time since arriving at the ER. “That is much better news. Good work.” He pointed a finger at Leo. “This is still going to cost you a fucking fortune, but I can use this.”
From the other side of the curtain, Matilda’s voice rose above the ongoing bickering, louder and more insistent. “Tómelo, Mami, tómelo!”
Tómelo. Take it. Take the foot. Then the translator speaking to the surgeon: “They want you to amputate.”
“I think that’s the right decision,” the surgeon said. “We’ll get a clean cut. Leave as much bone as possible.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Morning, West Seventy-Sixth Street. Bea was sitting in the pre-sunrise dark, holding a cup of chamomile tea with both hands, waiting for the heat from her favorite mug—the one she’d gotten the lone year she’d capitulated during the public radio fund-raising drive and pledged a premium—to warm her stiffened
fingers. The kitchen table was in its winter location, awkwardly wedged into an interior corner, partly blocking the doorway to the living room but well away from the exposed wall and the two battered windows that looked out onto an air shaft populated by a disturbing number of pigeons and God only knew how many rodents. She knew she was lucky to have windows in the kitchen, was lucky, in fact, to have a kitchen big enough to house a table, but the rope-sash windows were as insulating as a piece of ClingWrap. The abraded wood would swell in the summer heat, and the layers of old paint and putty would become malleable and gummy, making the windows impossible to open. In the winter, the wood would shrink, letting in preposterous amounts of cold air. Sitting wrapped in a bulky sweater over her nightgown, she waited for the telltale hiss and bang of the radiator pipes, signaling 6:30 A.M. and only ten more minutes until the room was decently warmed. She was up too early; it was cold.
Bea couldn’t sleep for two reasons. The first was because of the horrible party at Celia’s. The second was no doubt directly related to the first: She’d had an upsetting dream about Tuck. She didn’t dream of him often, which was good, because he was usually tense and frustrated in her dreams. Dream Tucker couldn’t speak, just as he’d been at the end of his life after the stroke. Sometimes he’d write something down in the dream, but she could never read it—either the words were blurred or she kept misplacing the piece of paper or, on the rare occasion she did manage to read what he’d written, she could never remember what it was when she woke in the morning. Sometimes the dreams clung to Bea all day, leaving her unsettled and jittery, gloomy. Like today. She wondered why a relationship that in real life had been so sustaining and even-keeled was so fraught in her dream life. She decided that Tucker represented the part of her unconscious that struggled with writing, and that made perfect sense to her: why the deep recesses of her mind and soul would seize on Tucker as the right vehicle to deliver her own dissatisfaction to herself. He’d been dead for almost three years and she still thought of him constantly, mostly as he was when she first met him, standing in front of a classroom, reading poetry to his students, mesmerizing them with his sonorous voice, the voice he’d so cruelly lost use of at the end.
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