“Nice,” I said, although in truth I don’t care much for white wine and this was too sweet for my taste.
“Viognier,” she said. “Twenty-six dollars a bottle.”
“You can buy top-shelf bourbon for that and it lasts a lot longer.”
“You can’t drink bourbon with dinner,” she said with a laugh, as if I had told a joke. “Besides, wine can be an investment. And it’s cheaper by the case. I’d like to get into that, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it right, have a special kind of refrigerator, keep it climate controlled.”
“Your basement would work.”
And that’s how I came to build her a wine cellar, at cost. It didn’t require excavating the basement, luckily, although I was forever bumping my head on the ceiling when I straightened up to my full height. But I’m six-three and she was just a little thing, no more than five-two, barely a hundred pounds. I used to carry her to bed and, well, show her other ways I could manipulate her weight. She liked me to sit her on the marble counter in her master bath, far forward on the edge, so I was supporting most of her weight. Because of the way the mirrors were positioned, we could both watch and it was a dizzying infinity, our eyes locked into our own eyes and into each other’s. I know guys who call a sink fuck the old American Standard, but I never thought of it that way. For one thing, there wasn’t a single American Standard piece in the bathroom. And the toilet was a Canadian model, smuggled in, so she could have the bigger tank that had been outlawed in the interest of water conservation. Her shower was powerful, too, a stinging force that I came to know well, scrubbing up afterward.
The wine cellar gave me another month—putting down a floor, smoothing and painting the old plaster walls. My grandparents had used the basement for storage and us cousins had played hide-and-seek in the dark, a made-up version that was particularly thrilling, where you moved silently, trying to get close enough to grab the ones in hiding, then rushing back to the stairs, which were the home-free base. As it sometimes happens, the basement seemed larger when it was full of my grandparents’ junk. Painted and pared down, it was so small. But it was big enough to hold the requisite refrigeration unit and the custom-made shelves, a beautiful burled walnut, for the wines she bought.
I was done. There was not another improvement I could make to the house, so changed now it was as if my family and its history had been erased. Deirdre and I had been hurtling toward this day for months and now it was here. I had to move on to other projects, ones where I would make money. Besides, people were beginning to wonder. I wasn’t around the other jobs as much, but I also wasn’t pulling in the kind of money that would help placate Angeline over the crazy hours I was working. Time to end it.
Our last night, I stopped at the foundry, spent almost forty bucks on a bottle of wine that the young girl in the store swore by. Cake-bread, the guy’s real name. White, too, because I knew Deirdre loved white wines.
“Chardonnay,” she said.
“I noticed you liked whites.”
“But not chardonnay so much. I’m an ABC girl—anything but chardonnay. Dennis says chardonnay is banal.”
“Dennis?”
She didn’t answer. And she was supposed to answer, supposed to say: Oh, you know, that faggot from my wine-tasting class, the one who smells like he wears strawberry perfume. Or: That irritating guy in my office. Or even: A neighbor, a creep. He scares me. Would you still come around, from time to time, just to check up on me? She didn’t say any of those things.
Instead, she said: “We were never going to be a regular thing, my love.”
Right. I knew that. I was the one with the wife and the house and the two kids. I was the one who had everything to lose. I was the one who was glad to be getting out, before it could all catch up with me. I was the one who was careful not to use the word “love,” not even in the lighthearted way she had just used it. Sarcastic, almost. It made me think that it wasn’t my marital status so much that had closed off that possibility for us, but something even more entrenched. I was no different from the wallpaper, the banister, the garden. I had to be removed for the house to be truly hers.
My grandmother’s parents had thought she was too good for my grandfather. They were Irish, shipworkers who had gotten the hell out of Locust Point and moved uptown, to Charles Village, where the houses were much bigger. They looked down on my grandfather just because he was where they once were. It killed them, the idea that their precious youngest daughter might move back to the neighborhood and live with an Italian, to boot. Everybody’s got to look down on somebody. If there’s not somebody below you, how do you know you’ve traveled any distance at all in your life? For my dad’s generation, it was all about the blacks. I’m not saying it was right, just that it was, and it hung on because it was such a stark, visible difference. And now the rules have changed again, and it’s the young people with money and ambition who are buying the houses in Locust Point and the people in places like Linthicum and Catonsville and Arbutus are the ones to be pitied and condescended to. It’s hard to keep up.
My hand curled tight around the neck of the wine bottle. But I placed it gently in its berth in the special refrigerator, as if I were putting a newborn back in its bed.
“One last time?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said.
She clearly was thinking it would be the bed, romantic and final, but I opted for the bathroom, wanting to see her from all angles. Wanting her to see, to witness, to remember how broad my shoulders were, how white and small she looked when I was holding her. When I moved my hands from her hips to her head, she thought I was trying to position her mouth on mine. It took her a second to realize that my hands were on her throat, not her head, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. She fought back, if you could call it that, but all her hands could find was marble, smooth and immutable. Yeah, that’s another word I know. Immutable. She may have landed a few scratches, but a man in my line of work gets banged up all the time. No one would notice a beaded scab on the back of my hand, or even on my cheek.
I put her body in a trash bag, covering it with lime left over from a landscaping job. Luckily, she hadn’t been so crazed that she wanted a fireplace in the basement, so all I had to do was pull down the fake front I had placed over the old hearth down there, then brick her in, replace the fake front.
Her computer was on, as always, her e-mail account open because she used cable for her Internet, a system I had installed. I read a few of her sent messages, just to make sure I aped her style, then sent one to an office address, explaining the family emergency that would take me out of town for a few days. Then I sent one to “Dennis,” angry and hate-filled, accusing him of all kinds of things. Finally, I cleaned the house best I could, especially the bathroom, although I didn’t feel I had to be too conscientious. I was the contractor. Of course my fingerprints would be around.
Weeks later, when she was missing and increasingly presumed dead according to the articles I read in the Sunpapers, I sent a bill for the things that I had done at cost, marked it “Third and Final Notice” in large red letters, as if I didn’t even know what was going on. She was just an address to me. Her parents paid it, even apologized for their daughter being so irresponsible, buying all this stuff she couldn’t afford. I told them I understood, having my own college-age kids and all. I said I was so sorry for what had happened and that I hoped they found her soon. I do feel sorry for them. They can’t begin to cover the monthly payments on the place, so it’s headed toward foreclosure. The bank will make a nice profit, as long as the agents gloss over the reason for the sale; people don’t like a house with even the hint of a sordid history.
And I’m glad now that I put in the wine cellar. Makes it less likely that the new owner will want to dig out the basement, risk its collapse, and the discovery of what will one day be a little bag of bones, nothing more.
BLACK-EYED SUSAN
The Melville family had Preakness coming and going, as Dontay’s Gra
nny M liked to say. From their rowhouse south of Pimlico, the loose assemblage of three generations—sometimes as many as twelve people in the three-bedroom house, never fewer than eight—squeezed every coin they could from the third Saturday in May, and they were always looking for new ways. Revenue streams, as Dontay had learned to call them in Pimlico Middle’s stock-picking club. Last year, for example, the Melvilles had tried a barbecue stand, selling racegoers hamburgers and hot dogs, but the city health people had shut them down before noon. So they were going to try bottled water this year, maybe some sodas, although sly-like, because they could bust you for not charging sales tax, too. They had considered salted nuts, but that was more of a Camden Yards thing. People going to the track didn’t seem to want nuts as much, not even pistachios. Candy melted no matter how cool the day, and it was hard to be competitive on chips unless you went off-brand, and Baltimore was an Utz city.
Parking was the big moneymaker, anyway. Over the years, the Melvilles had figured they could make exactly six spaces in their front yard, plus two in the driveway. They charged $30 a spot, which was a fair price, close as they were to the entrance, and that $30 included true vigilance, as Uncle Marcus liked to say to the people who tried to negotiate. These days, most of their business was repeat customers, old-timers who had figured out that the houses south of the racetrack were much closer to the entrance than the places on the other side of Northern Parkway. The first-timers, now they were a little nervous about coming south of the track, but once they made that long, long trek back to the Northern Parkway side, they started looking south.
So, eight vehicles times thirty—that was $240. But they weren’t done yet. All the young ones ran shopping carts, not just for the Melvilles’ own parkers but for the on-the-street ones who couldn’t make it the whole way with their coolers and grocery sacks. Dontay and his cousins couldn’t charge as much as the north side boys, given the shorter distance, but they made more trips, so it came out about the same. Most of the folks gave you at least ten dollars to haul a cooler, although there was always some woe-is-me motherfucker—that’s what Uncle Marcus called them, outside Granny M’s hearing—who tried to find a reason to short you at the gate.
The money didn’t end just because the race did. On the day after Preakness, the older Melvilles all signed up for cleanup duty in the infield, and there wasn’t a year that went by that someone didn’t find a winning ticket in the debris. Never anything huge, but often good for twenty bucks or so. People got drunk, threw the wrong tickets down. You just had to keep the Sunpapers in your back pocket, familiarize yourself with the race results. This was going to be Dontay’s first year on cleanup, and he couldn’t help hoping that he would find a winning ticket. His uncle had lied about his age to get him a spot on the crew, so he’d make the minimum wage up front. But the draw was what you might find—not just tickets, but perfectly good cartons of soda and beer, maybe even jewelry and wallets without ID.
But Preakness itself was the best day, the biggest haul. The night before, Dontay oiled his cart’s wheels and polished his pitch. There was a right way to do it, bold but not too much so. People didn’t like to feel hustled. He also pondered the downside to Preakness: no one needed the carts to carry stuff away because the coolers were always empty by day’s end, light enough for the weakest, most sissified men to heave onto their shoulders or drag on the pavement behind them. Which was a shame, because people were looser by the end of the day, wavy with liquor and their winnings. Dontay was still thinking on how to develop a service that people needed when the race was over. The main thing everyone wanted was a fast getaway, another virtue of the Melvilles’ location, which had several ways out of the neighborhood. What would people pay to ride a helicopter, though? There had to be other possibilities. Dontay thought on it. Besides, more and more people were bringing in wheeled coolers, a troubling development.
Dontay was a Melville and all the Melvilles were industrious by nature. True, some had focused their energies on less legal businesses, which is why the number of the people in the house tended to fluctuate. They were at the high end right now, with Uncle Stevie home from Hagerstown and Delia’s twins staying with them, while Delia was spending time on the West Side, in that place that Granny M called “thereabouts.” When’s our mama coming? the twins asked late at night, when they were sleepy and forgetful. Where’s our mama? “Thereabouts,” Granny M said. “She’ll be coming home shortly.” Granny M pledged that her house was open to all her children and her children’s children and, when the time came, and it was coming, her children’s children’s children, but she had rules. Church was optional if you were over twelve. Sobriety was not. That’s why she had squashed Uncle Marcus’s plan to buy some cheap tallboys, layer them beneath the bottled waters and sodas, in case some folks had second thoughts about paying track prices for beer or decided they hadn’t brought enough beer of their own.
THE TRACK DIDN’T OPEN ITS DOORS until nine, but the Melvilles’ Preakness Day started at 7 A.M., with Uncle Marcus and Ronnie Moe, a shirttail relation, taking the two cars over to the Wabash metro stop, then cabbing back before traffic started peaking. Weather for Preakness was seldom fine—either it fell short of its potential and ended up rainy and cool or it overshot spring altogether, delivering a full-blown Baltimore scorcher with air that felt like feathers. Today was a chilly one, and Dontay was on a roll, ferrying coolers faster than he ever had before, his money piling up in the Tupperware container that Granny M had marked with his name. He would have liked to keep his bills in his pocket, a fat roll to stroke from time to time, but he knew better. Even with the streets crowded as they were today, with uniformed police officers everywhere, the bigger boys, the lazy ones who didn’t like to extend themselves, wouldn’t hesitate to knock him down and take his money.
In his head, he tried to add up what he had made so far. Granny M took a cut for the collection plate, but he’d still have enough for the new version of Grand Theft Auto. Or should he buy some new Nikes? But Granny M would buy him shoes, no matter how much she bitched and moaned and threatened to get him no-brands at the outlets. Beneath her complaints, she knew that shoes mattered. Even when Uncle Marcus was a kid, so long ago that there weren’t any Nikes, just Keds and Jack Purcell’s, it had been death to come to school in no-brands. Fishheads, they called them then. Granny M wouldn’t do that to him, as long as he passed all his classes, which he had more than done. Dontay not only had almost all B’s going into the final grading period, his stock-picking club had come in third in the state for all middle schools. And Dontay deserved most of the credit for that because he had said they should buy Apple before Christmas, then drop it quick, all those people buying iPods and shit.
An iPod—now wouldn’t that be something to have, although the Melvilles had only one computer and it was hard to get any time on it, even for homework. Plus, the big kids in the neighborhood knew to look for those white wires, and they would smack a man down for them, then kick him harder if it turned out to be some knockoff player. He counted up in his head again, but naw, he was nowhere close. And here it was going on 3 P.M., the meaty part of the day gone. Unless he found a winning ticket at the cleanup, he wasn’t going to be buying anything like that. His own CD player, though. That was within reach.
The big race was only ninety minutes away and the neighborhood had pretty much gone quiet when a man and a woman in a huge-ass Escalade inquired about the final space at the Melvilles’, which had opened up unexpectedly after some couple had a fight earlier in the afternoon. That was what Dontay thought had happened, at least. He had escorted two people in, a man and a woman, and the woman had shown up not even an hour later, so anxious to get away that she had shot the car right over the curb, no thought to the shocks. The Melvilles were wondering what would happen at day’s end, when the man returned for the car that wasn’t there. Maybe they could offer to take him home, undercut the local cabbies.
“How much to park here?” asked this latecomer, the woma
n behind the wheel of the Escalade.
Uncle Marcus hesitated. This late in the day, she might expect a discount. Before he could answer, she jumped in: “Forty dollars?”
“Sure,” he said. “Back it in.”
“I admit I can’t maneuver this thing into such a tight space,” she said. “It’s new and I’m still not used to it. Would you do it for me?”
She hopped out and let Uncle Marcus take her place, her dude still sitting stone-faced in the passenger seat. Dontay thought that was cold, making a man look weak that way, but the man in the Escalade didn’t seem to notice. Uncle Marcus showed off a little, whipping the SUV back into the space and cutting it a lot closer than he should have, but he pulled it off. The woman counted two twenties into his hand, then added a ten.
“For the extra service,” she said. Her man didn’t say anything.
Oh, how Dontay prayed they would have a cooler, but they didn’t look to be cooler people. She looked like a grandstand type—polka-dotted halter dress, big hat and dark glasses, high-heeled shoes in the same yellow as the background of her dress. The man had a blazer and a tie and light-colored pants. Those types usually didn’t have coolers. In fact, those types didn’t usually park in the yards, but it was late. Maybe the lots at the track were full.
Still, it never hurt to ask.
Hardly Knew Her Page 16
