Sunburn

by Laurence Shames

  Bert's cab fare was nearing a hundred twenty dollars by then, and he knew he had caught a cold. He'd caught it at the airport; he knew the precise instant it happened: as he trudged coatless, with a sweaty back, to the taxi line. The cold was under his right shoulder blade; he felt it knotted there, radiating out to chest, throat, stomach. He'd told the driver to head uptown; he wanted to get a hotel room and lie down.

  Manhattan hotels did not take dogs, even dogs in carriers, and after being turned down twice, Bert ditched the chihuahua's cage at curbside and held the little creature under his coat; white hairs the length of eyelashes had come off on his mohair suit. He checked into a semidump called the Stafford, was shown to this room, whose water-stained wallpaper was like a foulard tie one wouldn't wear. He'd gotten comfortable, then decided to work the phone.

  It was at that point he realized he had no one to call. No wife, no girlfriends. No buddies, no colleagues. No business associates, no people he'd been asked to send regards to. No one. What he felt at realizing this was not loneliness, exactly, but a dislocation so intense that it was itself a kind of death, a numbing transport to a realm of silent shadows, a sphere where there were movements but no events. He felt like he'd outlived all things familiar; he felt like he'd outlived himself, was watching his mortal shell from some great distance.

  He was slightly lightheaded; he was probably running a fever. He took a nap, slept too long, woke up around 8 p.m. Now it was nearly eleven and he was thoroughly disoriented in time as well as place. He stood at the frosty window, looking with recognition but no connection at the narrow slice of nighttime city.

  Then he sneezed. It was a racking sneeze that squeezed his chest and burned his eyes, and it was echoed by a tiny sneeze from floor level, a chihuahua sneeze followed by a snort and a shake of droopy whiskers. Dog and master sniffled, crinkled up their noses, and looked earnestly at each other with glazed and rheumy eyes.

  Arty was sitting in the middle of his living room, on an ancient vinyl hassock whose splitting seams leaked oily straw. He'd put his bag of ice away; his ankle was just barely swollen, his bare instep faintly discolored with a purplish tinge like that of spoiled meat. "I'm trying to be logical," he was saying. "I'm trying not to be paranoid. But really, what else could it be?"

  Neither Joey nor Vincente answered right away. Joey had been perched on the edge of a wicker chair. Now he sprang up and walked the length of a worn hemp rug; his stride took him almost to the ratty table from which the notebooks had been stolen. Vincente sat far back on the rattan settee. He sat very still and barely seemed to be breathing. His black eyes had settled deep into their bony sockets, his brows hung down like mossy eaves to hide them.

  "Debbi had no business saying anything," Joey said at last. He said it not to Arty but to his father; it had the flat and basic sound of a family closing ranks, turning its doors and windows inward toward some somber courtyard where visitors were not allowed.

  "She didn't say anything," Arty protested. "All she did was ask me if—"

  He cut himself off, annoyed that he felt pressured to explain, compelled to justify himself. "Look," he resumed, "a few hours ago we thought we were gonna get killed. Will ya cut us a little slack on that?"

  There was a silence, a long one. Moonlight turned metallic as it filtered through the screens. A cool breeze carried the smell of damp sand. Arty struggled to reclaim the fragile calm that was the hangover of panic.

  "Vincente, Joey, we're all on the same side. Let's not arg—"

  "But look what you're askin' us to believe," Joey cut in. His face was taut, the slight cleft in his chin grew deeper, darker.

  "Gino told people about the book," insisted Arty. "That's why my place was trashed, that's why my office was rifled. You have a better explanation?"

  "Be careful, Arty," Joey said. "What you're saying, it's like an insult—"

  "Joey, who you talkin' for?" The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. "You talkin' for yourself, Joey? Or d'ya think you're talkin' for me?"

  The young man didn't answer, just stared at his father, his teeth clamped tight.

  Vincente reached up slowly, stiffly, to straighten a necktie that he wasn't wearing. "G'ahead, Ahty. I'm listening."

  The writer leaned forward on his hassock, put his elbows on his knees. "Vincente," he said, "d'you remember, the first time we ever talked, you asked me if I ever spilled a secret? The question, the way you asked it, it scared the shit outa me. But I told you the truth. And it's still the truth."

  The Godfather listened in perfect stillness. His skin was drawn and waxy; over his cheekbones the flesh was yellowish and in the hollows it was gray.

  "And right at the start," Arty continued, "I told you something too. I told you it was a strange thing about a book, at some point a book becomes a public thing, everybody's property, and no matter who you are, how powerful, you couldn't pick the moment when that happened. You remember that, Vincente?"

  The old man nodded almost imperceptibly. He licked his cracked lips but his mouth had no moisture in it; flesh rasped over flesh and no part could comfort any other.

  "So what I'm saying now," the ghostwriter went on, "is that our book, the word of it, is out. Why else would someone steal my notebooks? What good are they to anybody?"

  The Godfather said nothing. He sat very straight, his hands on his knees; the posture was Egyptian.

  "I don't know what's going on with Gino," Arty said. "Debbi didn't tell me anything. You told me, Joey—you told me there was a problem in your family, remember? Gino's the problem—for all of us. Am I wrong?"

  Arty fell silent. Joey paced. Outside, the wind scratched out island sounds and transported smells of tepid ocean.

  Vincente Delgatto was a man who could not be lied to, nor was he capable of closing himself to what was true. He sat there very still, and the truth of Gino's final betrayal seeped through his tissues like swallowed poison. The old man took in a deep breath. It wheezed through his nostrils then came out as a groan. "My son," he said. There was love and bitterness and bafflement and self mockery in the words. He said them again: "My son."

  He got up from the couch, tried not to let it show how much he needed to use his arms to help his legs to lift him. He moved slowly toward Arty, his hands extended. Arty rose, and the Godfather took him in his arms, didn't kiss him, but laid his grizzled cheek against the ghostwriter's, did that on both sides. "Ahty," he said, "the trouble I've caused you, fuhguve me, please."

  He stepped away, did half a pirouette between the hassock and the sofa, seemed momentarily to have lost the sense of where he was. Then he added, less to Arty than to himself, "I hope to Christ I have the strength to make it right. Joey, I'm tired. Take your father home."

  40

  Just before eight the next morning, Debbi Martini, dressed in a purple leotard with black tights underneath it, her neck wrapped in a pink scarf against the early chill, approached the bicycle that Arty had leaned against Joey Goldman's house the evening before and climbed aboard. It was an act of considerable courage.

  She'd never owned a bicycle. Many Queens kids didn't. Traffic was dangerous, bikes were easy to steal. She tried to remember the last time she'd been on a bike. She thought it was when she was eleven. She remembered that the sidewalk squares had seemed to slip by dizzyingly fast beneath her and that it felt great when the air flew past her ears. She remembered, too, that she'd forgotten to put her feet down when she stopped, had hovered for a moment till gravity noticed her, then had tipped slowly, almost gracefully, into a scraped and bleeding heap at curbside.

  Now she climbed onto Arty's high broad seat, bit her lower lip, and launched herself down the driveway. She felt perilously tall, tall and wobbly as on the top step of a ladder. She reached the street, yanked the handlebars to turn, kicked out a skinny leg for balance, and was on her way to Nassau Lane. Arty had a bum ankle and needed to go to work. The least she could do was bring him his bicycle.
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  The morning was cloudless; stamped tin roofs gleamed like rubbed coins and threw angled shadows that were so precise they seemed painted on the street. Doves sang on telephone wires; dogs lolled, their paws clicking on the quiet pavements; hibiscus flowers yawned themselves awake. Debbi pedaled and grew more confident, she leaned into turns and let one hand dangle jauntily at her side. She smiled as she rode; the air tickled her gums and she almost let herself imagine that maybe she was on her way to make love with Arty, this tall nice guy who asked her things about herself and remembered what she'd said.

  Arty at that moment was placing his coffee mug at the edge of the bathroom sink and stepping gingerly over the low sill into the shower. Random spurts and dribbles spilled out of his corroded showerhead. Some of the water hit his flank, some clattered against the lumpy-painted stall. He soaped his armpits and sleepily hummed.

  Debbi skirted the cemetery, its blockish crypts shamed by the life-drenched promise of the morning. Palm fronds swayed and lifted, revealing yellow coconuts clustered close as giant grapes. She bounced down cobblestone lanes patched with tar and recalled the feel of Arty's hands around her face. She pedaled and she teased herself by pretending, just pretending, that maybe she was bold enough to appear at Arty's door and seduce him by the light of day.

  Arty was shaving in the shower. There was no mirror; the process was one of memory and guesswork. He fingered his sideburns, traced out where they ended. He stretched his upper lip to trim beneath his nostrils. He craned his neck to shave under his chin; he nicked himself above the Adam's apple and didn't even realize it.

  Debbi swooped into Nassau Lane, her red hair blown back from biking, her purple leotard just slightly damp with exercise and adventure. She coasted the last twenty yards to Arty's cottage, then attempted a bravura finish to the ride: Rather than hitting the brakes, she tried to stop herself by hooking a Christmas palm with her elbow as she scudded by. It was like trying to do-si-do a partner made of stone. The front wheel jackknifed as the bicycle pivoted around the tree; Debbi hugged the trunk like a koala to keep from falling.

  She took a moment to regain her dignity before going to the damaged door.

  Arty was brushing his teeth in front of the bathroom mirror when he heard the knock. He'd put a piece of toilet paper on his cut neck. He'd wrapped a towel around his waist; water was still dripping down his legs. Perhaps he should have felt fear at the approach of an unexpected visitor, but fear was a habit he hadn't yet learned, and the knock did not sound sinister. He rinsed his mouth and headed toward the living room.

  They saw each other through the screen.

  "Hi," said Debbi, as Arty pushed open the door. "I brought your bike."

  Arty was a person who woke up blank, had to reclaim his life slowly every morning. "I forgot it wasn't here," he said. "Come in. Have some coffee."

  She put one foot over the threshold, hesitated. "You're not dressed."

  He looked down at his towel, noticed he was still holding his toothbrush, remembered he still had toilet paper on his neck. He shrugged. She shrugged and came in anyway.

  She followed him through the living room into the narrow kitchen. She looked with rueful understanding at his small coffeemaker that had dripped two humble cups, a bachelor's dose of morning brew. She watched him, the long muscles in his back, as he reached into a high cupboard and produced a chipped blue mug. Her legs were tingling, maybe from the ride; her hands felt cold and electric, perhaps the aftermath of clutching handlebars.

  She said, "Arty."

  She said it just as he was reaching for the coffeepot. He didn't turn toward her right away, just looked over his shoulder. Then her eyes swiveled him around. He put the cup down on the counter. For a long moment she studied him. His arms and face were tan, his body was surprisingly pale. His chest was smooth except for a little tuft of hair along his breastbone; the tuft glistened, still damp from the shower.

  Her hand reached out on its own to touch it.

  Arty's arms went around her and pulled her snug against him.

  The Godfather woke up from a fitful sleep with a dull headache so evenly diffused across his skull that it seemed it must have been spreading all his life. His temples surged with tiny tides; thumbs seemed to be pressing on his eyeballs. The soft pillow felt cruel against the back of his head; there was grit, corrosion, in the knob at the top of his spine.

  He lay awake a long time and let life proceed without him. He'd heard Debbi leave her room and close the door behind her. He heard Joey and Sandra as they went about their morning routines. He heard the sounds a house makes: the whoosh and drips of plumbing, the bells and buzzers of appliances, the inevitable creaks and groans of wood and hinges.

  When he was sure that everyone had gone, he arose, put on backless slippers and an old robe of burgundy silk, and shuffled out to the garden. He sat with his back to the sun, let it warm his shoulders.

  He thought about his helplessness.

  It was a raw line of thought, mean, vulgar, and tactless, and he hated it. Helplessness was what he'd struggled his whole life to avoid, and he used to be able to kid himself he'd done a pretty good job of avoiding it. The helplessness of the poor, the helplessness of the immigrant, the helplessness of the neighborhood schmo without an education—those specters he'd conquered. As a young man, he'd grabbed fiercely, sometimes violently, for the things young men believed could safeguard them from impotence, spare them from humiliation—respect, money, power—and all those things had come to him.

  Yet what had he really accomplished except to arrive at a higher, more chastening realm of helplessness? A realm where associates were enemies. A realm where family members schemed, where legal heirs connived like . . . like bastards. A realm where there were no small disappointments, only tragedies. A realm where the final helplessness consisted of being unable to ask for help.

  Vincente sat. Sunlight played on the blue water of the pool, breeze shook the mottled leaves of the aralia hedge. He did not believe in sin and retribution, at least he didn't think he did. Still, he could not help feeling that what was happening to him now was some grim comeuppance for unforgiven things done long ago. For the first time in many years the Godfather thought hard and unguardedly about the violence of his youth.

  The young Vincente Delgatto had been tough, remorseless—a stringy and quick-handed street guy with a dangling cigarette and a dimpled fedora. He'd intimidated people, grabbed their lapels, thrown them against the hoods of Stutzes and Packards. He'd killed. Twice. Miserable people, loathsome, not worth mourning. Still, they bled, they twitched as they died, their fingers grabbed at empty air, groping blindly for something to hold on to, something to stop their dead slide down to hell.

  The Godfather shuddered. Overhead, a flight of ibis went by, a lone osprey circled. Violence. It was appalling, but at least, Vincente reflected, it was not a lie. Believing that violence could be outgrown, put aside—that was the lie, the lie he'd lived by for decades now. He'd told himself that violence had been a tool, a stratagem that set him up, established him, and which he was now in a position to forswear. He could become a diplomat, a peacemaker even, and the violence would seep out of his life, be filtered away by time until the remembered blood ran clear and clean as water.

  Only it didn't work that way; he saw that now. Brutality was a virus, once it entered a life it stayed there; it lurked in the organs, it waited with a patient malice, it could take over any time. Vincente sniffed the clement air scented with limestone and chlorine and flowers, and he realized there had never been a moment when his life was not a violent life, that even in the absence of fists and bullets there was the simmering violence of jealousies and grudges, of plots and hatreds, of betrayals and memories that made jagged tearing cuts like rusty knives.

  In his top left dresser drawer, back behind his socks and handkerchiefs, the old man kept a gun. It was a thuggish weapon, a snub-nosed .38; he'd had it for many years and never fired it. Suddenly he felt a morbid sniggering comp
ulsion like the sick tug that pulls a former drunk back into the tavern. He wanted to heft the gun, to hold it in his hand. If peace, for him, was sham and pretense, if serenity was something he'd murdered half a century ago, then he might as well embrace the soul and emblem of the violence he realized now he couldn't flee.

  He stood up in his robe and slippers, felt the unwholesome excitement of a child left home alone to play with matches or to masturbate. He took a deep breath that did not come easily into his constricted chest; then he padded slowly but with resolve through the sunshine toward the empty house.

  41

  Gino Delgatto, being dull, coarse, and sluggish, dealt with captivity better than most.

  After four days in the cramped and smelly office of the seafood warehouse, he'd fallen into a numb docility, almost a bestial contentment. His skin was oily under his stubble beard, ingrown hairs put red splotches on his throat, but he didn't really notice. The swelling under his eyes had subsided; his smashed nose, like a failed souffle, had become resigned to its flatness and only hurt now when he sneezed. His clothes were wrinkled and dirty, his underwear foul, his armpits stank, and he didn't much care. Time passed and he was still alive. He played poker with the Fabretti thugs who watched over him in shifts. His captors had started taking pity on him; they brought him egg sandwiches, pizza, gave him bourbon now and again. He slept when he could and listened to the insane ringing of the metal building he was caged in.

  On the fifth morning of his imprisonment, something happened that was outside the drab routine: Pretty Boy came storming in, bellied up against him, and backhanded him hard across the cheek. Flesh tore inside his mouth as it was crushed against his teeth.