I called home, spoke briefly with Peter, even briefer with my father. I never found her, I said. Sat outside her place for two days, I said. Never surfaced, I said.
I’d try again soon, I said.
And as I made my way to the east, following the now familiar path toward Lexington, I began the reconciliation of the past two days.
Around the time I’d driven deep into the eastern Kentucky countryside, I finally conceded that this journey had done nothing for my paranoia except elevate it, that Melody was not okay, that she was always at risk. If I’d come out to bring rest to my conscience, to somehow convince myself that despite all her years of misery she was turning out all right, I was heading home more jammed up than when I left. Who would be watching out for her? The feds would not be in the dirty stairwells of the parking garages, they would not be in the parks, the bars, the impending dark corners of her life.
That trip only made things worse. Before, I was worried Melody was not safe, not happy; now I was certain of it.
As the Mustang renavigated the mountains of West Virginia, I spliced together the scene at the gas station where I nearly bumped into Melody and the scene in the park where she so obviously longed for a lingering eye. How it bothered me the way she wanted someone to notice her.
And as I merged those two scenes, a realization came across my mind with such power that I inadvertently pulled my foot from the accelerator and the jerking forward of the car startled me: I noticed her.
She made eye contact with me at the gas pumps, and I smiled at her. I gave her what she seemed so desperate for at the park. The truth is I would have noticed her anyway, that she would have stood out from any other woman. I would have given her what she wanted. She was that special.
But she had looked beyond me, like a glass of wine held to the light, trying to make sense of characteristics within the object, not the object itself. Her eyes had landed on mine—connected, without a connection—but after assessing me, she decided to move on to the next stimulus in her field of vision.
She wanted attention that day, just not from me.
Through the hills and valleys of southeastern Pennsylvania, I tried to resolve myself to the life I was destined to lead, the one waiting for me at the end of that journey, waiting with anger and forgiveness like an abandoned spouse, to embrace the life I was dealt, to perform the good and bad things that seemed to come so naturally.
I rationalized that Melody had no idea who I was, even with my imprudent approach in the convenience store and my passing smile at the gas pumps. In the credits of the movie of her life, I would have been listed as Guy at Gas Station. Frigging Mullet would have had a higher billing.
As I broke the line into the Garden State, I realized I could not equally be in her life and remain anonymous.
The question was: Which way to go?
The answer came to me in the center of the Holland Tunnel: I could do more good in her life—far more—if I remained anonymous. My selfish desires would be, as Tommy Fingers would say, no good for nobody.
Winding through the lamplit streets of my neighborhood, down the dark alley that led to the reserved parking pad below my apartment, I dropped the mask I’d presented to myself, the one suggesting it was all over, that the curiosity was quelled and that Melody was alive if not well, that she was a big girl and could figure it out on her own—I dropped the mask that suggested I’d never be back to check on her again.
Of course I’d be back, where I would take my experience as Guy at Gas Station and parlay it into more important roles like Man in Produce Section and Stranger on Cell Phone and Jogger in Park, though always being miscast, never getting credited for the part for which I was so aptly prepared, so commonly playing: Stalker. Though that term, that role, was one I did not consider then, for if I had it might have brought my protective compulsions to an end, and the twisted remainder of what actually happened to Melody, what happened to me, would have never come to fruition. Certainly all of the signs were there: large unaccounted-for gaps in time, sudden disappearances lacking instigation, the lies to my family for what my reasons for finding her were. But I argued them away, as my true intentions for Melody were to protect her—protect her from the people I was lying to—and to make sure she was okay. I wasn’t following her with some fuel of obsession; I was guarding her life.
Spoken like a true stalker.
And as I turned off my car and pulled the keys from the ignition, I knew the next visit Randall Gardner received from a Bovaro would probably be from me.
SEVEN
And on it continued. Year after year, town after town. Throughout my childhood I so wanted to visit the places I read about in school, to travel the landscape of the United States with my family and see all those mysterious and unusual places. My family ended up giving me that gift, in the form of an endorsement to locate Melody Grace McCartney and put two bullets in her head. My life returned to normal in New York. I embraced the love of cooking I’d found, that my mother had instilled in me in the sweetest way as a child, always offering a warm place to hide when tensions would rise in our household, when uncles and friends would arrive home cut and bloody and doubled over in pain, when arguments were so loud I could not find a place out of earshot, when reticent looks were passed around the room from a question like, “What happened to Mario? I haven’t seen him in ages.” My mother could read it in my eyes—it was the thing missing from my brothers’—and would pull me to her chest, tell me she needed my help in the kitchen. She diverted my attention by teaching me how to make homemade ravioli, pinoli and all, by letting me coat the pork and steak in the salmoriglio sauce before grilling, by explaining how the less spice you add to a dish, the greater the flavor. Her ability to distract me from the chaos in our house created a baseline for my life. I was the only one willing to learn her lesson: You’ll be happier if you use your fists for the dough.
I scraped up marginal cash to buy an old storefront in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, right off Wythe Avenue. The place was worth a fortune until it mysteriously burned up two days after I mentioned to my father I had my eye on it; I bought the shell for almost nothing, was swamped with free labor and materials for the next nine months. The details of what made the place so special, like a chandelier dating back to the early 1900s and parquet floors from an even earlier age—all gone. But this is how the Bovaros acquire things. Why bother loosening a bolt with a wrench when you can whack it off with a hammer? But they meant well, in their felonious way. It’s amazing the things family will do for you sometimes.
In the hidden hours of the schedule of my life, between the enforcement of contracts and delivery and removal of money to those clients requesting financial help and help for those requiring our protection, I rebuilt the restaurant from the ground up. The late nights and random free moments were all absorbed by the tasks of hiring electricians and plumbers and designers; I quickly learned the other end of the restaurant business, an area to which I’d had little exposure growing up. As a result of everything in the building having been replaced—virtually a new facility—I took the restaurant to the other end of the spectrum. Instead of trying to recreate the natural history that had burned away, I refurbished and redesigned the place in a cutting-edge, trendy way that could not have been mistaken for anything other than intentional overcompensation, a style just arriving in Williamsburg. Gone were the discs of Sinatra and his peers, in came a twenty-four-hour satellite feed of trance, a barely audible track of what seemed like one song that started in March and didn’t end until November when the power dropped. The menu, originally intended to replicate Country Italian, the food of my youth, turned into an Italian fusion with more contemporary flavors and unexpected elements; a feast of food as you’d expect from an authentic Italian restaurant, with the twists in flavor and presentation you’d expect from places whose menus defied categorization. I spent the last of my available cash on a restaurant sign designed by a local artisan, a wood and metal creation that
spread across the brick surface above the awning—SYLVIA. I named the restaurant after my mother, the woman who taught me not only how to love food, but how to understand it, who after a miserable life of nurturing a crime boss and her hoodlum sons, died of ovarian cancer before she would ever see me complete its restoration. And as the staff was assembled, the tablecloths draped on the wooden tables, and the bar stocked, my father told me we’d be laundering money through the back end of the business, how we’d be bringing in more than vegetables and meats through the back door.
It’s amazing the things you will do for your family sometimes.
Even at the time, while working through long nights of spackling and painting and nailing down hardwood, I knew the reconstruction of the restaurant served as a massive distraction, a means for occupying my mind and keeping it off of Melody. I worked myself to exhaustion every day, so that those moments before I fell asleep, even as I slumbered on a discarded couch in the unfinished kitchen, I’d not have a chance to think of her, be one step closer to forgetting her.
But just before Sylvia opened its large wooden doors to the public, around the time the head chef and I started experimenting in the kitchen and assembling the menu, Melody returned to my head because of the distance of time I forced between us. The first few months after finding her in Kentucky weren’t so bad; I’d just seen her, and though her existence seemed uncomfortable and unsafe, it was fresh. But as the same season approached one year later, those warm early summer days, the thoughts of her became nearly impossible to push away, and the memories of my experience with her became vivid again, even the slightest reminders—the smell of cut grass or greasy, stale convenience store hot dogs—would send me into a tailspin. And as those memories rose in my mind, so did my concern for Melody, my wonder of what had happened over the last year, whether she had dived into promiscuity in a search for temporary connection, or if she had retreated into herself, destined to hide from the rest of the world, watch life pass from behind a family room window.
My memory of her no longer made sense; she was changing, and I began to once again ascend the fixation of finding out how.
There are two hidden benefits to running your own restaurant: abundant food and easy access to booze. Of course, the greatest downsides to running your own restaurant are all that abundant food and easy access to booze. On the food side, the kitchen crew had to come to terms with various guys from the Bovaro crew hanging out in the kitchen, feasting for free, most commonly my youngest brother, Jimmy, who by twenty-one was piling on the weight with monthly regularity, began to take the shape of a tackle, with all the violence and dexterity built right in. That first year, though, I began to pack on the pounds as well, gained ten before the restaurant had paid its third round of bills.
But what really got me was the alcohol.
It became harder and harder to get to sleep. The control and influence from Pop played a part, my having taken a restaurant I had designed and renovated with my own hands and whoring it out to my family’s money laundering, allowing it to be pimped by my older brothers. The resentment began to age me. But the real stress was something else entirely. The more successful Sylvia became, the more the guilt kicked in; it seemed unfair that I could have the life I was given while having cast Melody into the darkness, then leaving her there. The worry returned, could only be quieted by a small glass of Glenfiddich at the close of the day. The problem is, as any alcoholic will tell you, liquor is a pretty effective way to get rid of that leak in your ceiling; cover it in a thin layer of paint after each storm. Soon, you may as well start a little earlier so by the time bed is in view, you’re already there. And if it serves you well at night, why not dilute the guilt and shame and worry anytime you feel their burden? Works equally at lunch as it does at dinner.
Took about three months for me to get to the point where it became noticeable—“Anybody seen Johnny?” “Check in the bar”—and one more for it to have become an official part of my day. The pressure of running a restaurant is immense—like putting on a high-profile stage production day after day—but the alcohol wasn’t diluting my stress, in fact made that part of my life worse, slowed my ability to multitask. Its only purpose was to cloud, to erase. It did that well in a temporary capacity, so I kept it flowing.
My father eventually took me aside and performed a well-planned intervention, went like this:
DAD: “Johnny, c’mere.”
ME: “What’s up, Pop?”
DAD, violently slapping a glass of whiskey out of my hand: “Knock it off, kid.”
It’s amazing the things family will do for you sometimes.
And there it was, as I stood before my father, Peter, and a few of the crew: that look. The same look of dishonor and disappointment covered in a ganache of we’ll get through this that burned to my memory from when I was ten years old. The look that told me I’d screwed up again. I was becoming weak, not unlike the addicted scumbags we dealt with and their never-ending needs for gambling and drugs and prostitutes. In our family and crew, a glass or two of wine with a meal or a pair of beers was nothing, but the third would always raise an eyebrow, and if it became a pattern, guys were dropped down—or off—the list of trust. Like Louis Salvone; one day you party a little too hard, a year later you’ve got a coke habit and prison cell and a shiv in your gut.
I surrendered the alcohol with relative ease, for it wasn’t serving the purpose it did for most alcoholics. One of the guys who supplied Sylvia with quality meats was a recovering alcoholic and very distant cousin of my father. I hardly knew him, but you could tell by looking at the guy that he was living a new rendition of his former self, that his once heavy body had been drained and thinned by alcoholism, his face left sagging, his belt hidden by a spare tire that had lost its air. He lived a sober existence, but with every delivery I could see him watch the bar through the kitchen door, where if someone was cooking with vodka or wine his movements would slow and his nostrils would flare and undulate like a frigging dog. He once told me he couldn’t walk past a bar without wanting to go in, that the smell of any booze at all would make him salivate, that he could actually taste it before the bartender had finished the pour. His story never resonated with me; I couldn’t even understand it. I never developed a flavor for alcohol as much as I used it to get rid of the bitter taste of regret I woke up with each morning. In my case, drinking had become a casual way to dilute my guilt and concern, like taking Tylenol every day to assuage the pain of a headache that lasted a year.
I needed no help screwing the cap back on the bottle; I knew there was really only one way to make my headache go away.
Once I’d sobered I looked around and realized the fusion cuisine and the trendy restaurant were a natural fit for me, a breath as fresh as that Kentucky air. For all my armchair analysis of Melody and the people around me, it took me some time to realize—or admit—that the restaurant was a way to break out. I believe contemporary flavors and unexpected elements were the terms I used to describe the food, but they might have been better used to describe me. Everyone on staff at the restaurant always called me Jonathan, and for whatever reason I never corrected them, learned to like it, helped me to live my alter ego. I was the Bovaro on the fence, perched high and looking down on the two worlds of my life, not stuck there because I could not decide which way to go, but trying to figure out how to exist in both equally. I wanted to live the fusion, too.
I started taking my health more seriously, started working out—to build muscle but mostly to release tension—and eventually got an on-again/off-again personal trainer who operated out of the gym near my apartment, a talented gal constantly distracted by my last name. Nonetheless, the training worked, and in my family gaining additional strength would never have gone unutilized.
Over that initial year of developing the restaurant, my appearance began to change, and not just from filling out my sweaters across the chest. While in my mildly drunken stupors I had started noticing that almost everything I read w
as getting blurry, though once free of the booze, things remained blurry. I took a trip two blocks away to an optician who’d had a storefront in Brooklyn since the 1950s and was told I was myopic. Translation: I can’t read jack from any real distance. The optometrist, so old I feared his final breaths would be wasted on me, handed my file over to his great-granddaughter to help me select frames. The whole time this girl stared at my face like she knew me, except she didn’t. I’m not much for self-assessment, but for whatever reason this gal was taken with me. And as I perused the wall of frames all I really wanted was her help in finding something suitable. Can’t explain why, but not many people in our household or crew ever wore glasses; I had no starting point. The only two guys who did were in their eighties; one had frames with lenses the thickness of petri dishes, the other had frames with an opening for one big lens and inside was the windshield of a mid-seventies Chevelle. On the other hand, my sous-chef wore glasses, blue and bold and providing a welcome distraction from the plague of acne his face had once fought and lost.
So, the great-granddaughter, eyes still stuck on my face, reached up and pulled down a set and handed the lensless frames to me. I studied them—as trendy as my restaurant and as expensive as its repairs—and as I held them in my hand, they were so light, so delicate that all I could think was, These are gonna break in less than a week. I slowly put them to my face, felt as odd wearing them as if I’d slipped on a dress.
“Oh, yeah,” great-granddaughter said.
I studied myself in the mirror, glanced at her sideways.
Then she smiled and laughed a little. “Oh, yeah.”
I returned to the restaurant, wobbling a bit from my newly sharpened vision, amazed at how far away I could read things; apparently, my sight had been on its way out for some time. And as I walked in the back door of the restaurant, Peter was coming out. We stopped a few feet apart from each other, hands in our pockets.
The Exceptions Page 9
