Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “Fine and dandy,” I say. I’m working in careful concentric circles, from twelve o’clock to twelve o’clock, with ringed curette and blunt dissector, peeling the intruder out, layer by layer.

  I’ve done hundreds of these procedures. I can do them standing on my head. I’m not going to back off now. But I am tied to a runaway horse whose destination is inevitable but not predictable. I stare hard into the operating microscope. My eyes are not what they once were. Floaters, translucent as amoebae, screen my vision. Even so, I proceed. I have to worry my way around the carotids but in doing so I elevate and displace the optic nerves with my unsteady curette, damaging them. I’d done over two hundred transsphenoidal surgeries with decent results. Until now. With luck she might see degrees of gray and approximate shapes. This is the substance of my recurring nightmare: she wakes to a world of laminated shadows. Some move, some don’t. None can be recognized.

  Trotsky and Nikita wake us at dawn. Ofelia pulls a pillow over her head. The dogs make unearthly sounds. Not quite barking, not quite howls. Something in between, more irritating than either. I get up, get the coffeemaker going. I hear Ofelia in the shower. She doesn’t come out until I’ve finished two cups.

  “You okay, darling?” I say. She is wet under her chenille robe. Her long black hair, backlit by the morning sun and coarse as a horse’s mane, is beaded with a million sparkling prisms. I feel my heart swell with pride and fear. How long will I be able to keep her? When will she finally wake to her own power and beauty?

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Now.”

  “Do you want me to call the manager? He’ll make them get rid of the dogs.”

  “No. I want to leave this place.”

  I reach for her with my shaking hand. “Oh, baby,” I say, thinking the worst.

  “I want us to live in Mexico, Verry. You can be a doctor again, in Mexico.”

  I start to explain how I can’t be a doctor anywhere, when someone rings our doorbell, then starts to pound on the front window.

  It’s Maribel. There’s more animation in her face than I thought possible. Her lips are quivering, her cool eyes are wide with panic, red with tears.

  I knew—having seen this look before on women of all races, nationalities, and economic strata—that Frank was dead. I told Ofelia to call 911, then went next door in my robe and slippers. I went through the motions, gave the cold body routine CPR, for Maribel’s sake, but he was dead, dead for at least an hour.

  The man from Mankato died quietly, bravely, not wanting to alarm his novia. I see him waking with flash-fire pain racing across his pectorals and down his arm, his breath short, then shorter. I see him reach for Maribel, perhaps touching her one last time, not to wake her but to confirm the reality of this impossible gift he’s been allowed these last few months of his life.

  When Maribel woke up, she saw that he was dead, and knew he had been dead for some time, but she rushed over to our apartment anyway, hoping that I, a doctor, might alter the fact. I found him pale as the bedsheet, his open eyes fogged by the absence of the animating spirit. His pacemaker was still kicking spikes of electricity into his indifferent auricles, like a mindlessly ticking turn signal on an overturned car.

  Of course he had no updated will. His Mankato widow will get everything, including the Cord roadster and his Eldo. Maybe even the dogs. And Maribel will have to go back to the scent islands at Dillard’s. Frank had his moment in paradise, but Maribel, who might have had hopes for something more, has nothing but her youth and impeccable pride.

  Frank had a few thousand dollars in the apartment. I encouraged Maribel to take it. But she refused. “He made no provision for me. And I did not ask him to.” I have a sudden and immense admiration for her, but don’t know how to give it words. Her dignity is formidable.

  Back in our apartment, the three of us sit in the small kitchen, drinking coffee in silence, waiting for the EMS van to arrive. Maribel is calm now, even relaxed. I give her my best smile, the one that congratulates stoicism and grit.

  “That drink,” she says abstractly. “That sotol. This is what killed him, I believe.”

  It isn’t an accusation, but even so, I don’t want to argue about it. I personally think he died of surfeit: love, freedom, sex, and happiness. It was too much for an old warhorse sales exec to take. His battered old heart could not tolerate the untethering of his soul.

  I reach for Ofelia’s hand. She grips mine hard, stopping the tremble.

  On the Lam

  Little Biscuit, take a nap now and stop that awful singing,” my mother said. She called me Little Biscuit when she was high or in a good mood, otherwise it was Charlie, Chaz, or even Charles. The man she got high with also called me Little Biscuit. We were in his car, a black ’37 DeSoto, somewhere in Georgia, heading for Florida and then on to Cuba, where the man would be safe. We were all high, but of course only they were drinking. I got high with them because they got so happy when they were passing the bottle back and forth in the car, or when they stopped to rest in a shady spot along the highway, or later in the day at a motor court. That’s why I was singing. I wanted them to be happy and I wanted to be happy too. I was ten years old and thought that people were meant to be happy. Why live otherwise?

  We were running from the police and the FBI. The man, who my mother asked me to call Uncle Jack, had done something to someone. Uncle Jack was Jack Bernstein. He was going to work for Mr. Lansky, who owned most of Havana, according to her. She had left my father, Amadeo “Big Biscuit” Biscotti, for Uncle Jack. My father was a gambler who wore tailor-made silk suits and Italian shoes and had his fingernails manicured once a week. She was fed up with gamblers. “They’re as boring as accountants,” she said.

  She was the Maybelline girl in the ladies’ magazines. All you saw was her big blue eyes and dark lashes, but you could still tell it was her. Her eyes identified her sure as a fingerprint. There was something in them—a hardened light that could sometimes look cold, sometimes mean, sometimes so lost it made you catch your breath. Even when she was in a good mood, she held something back. It was as if she could not trust the moment, no matter how banked with good luck it was. No amount of surrounding makeup could warm or soften that stony light. Even when she was high and happy you could see that the dark thing that lived behind her eyes could never be really happy or high. It could worry you, if you thought about it too much.

  We’d been living on the road for a week and I was tired of it. I wanted to go back to New York, to the Lower East Side, where my Mends were. Uncle Jack was nice enough to me. He bought me toys and Big Little books. Once I broke the windwing of an Oldsmobile with a rock. I was throwing it at a bird on a wire, but the rock fell short. The Oldsmobile was parked at the same motor court we were in. Uncle Jack gave the man ten dollars for a new windwing. The man who owned the car was mad and wanted to call the police on me, but Uncle Jack calmed him down fast. “You don’t want to do that, sport,” he said. Uncle Jack had a big bald head and hairy hands with fingers that looked like they could crush rocks. His black eyes, close-set on either side of his thick nose, looked as if they could bum holes into wood. He carried a gun under his jacket, a.38 revolver with a stubbed barrel. The man who owned the Oldsmobile looked at

  Uncle Jack and saw something that made him stop yelling. Then, when Uncle Jack gave him the ten dollars, the man went to his room, apologizing for being such a sorehead.

  “I get carried away sometimes,” the man said in the doorway of his room where he was safe.

  “Relax, sport,” Uncle Jack said. “I would’ve acted the same.”

  He carried the gun in an inside pocket of his coat. When he hung the coat up, the weight of the gun pulled the coat down to one side and made it look baggy. Once when he left the gun lying on a table, I picked it up and aimed it out the window. It was heavy, and I could barely hold it level with both hands. I aimed it at a man who was crossing the street with long, purposeful strides. He was coming toward our motor court and might have been from
the FBI. He was wearing a hat and I aimed the gun at the brim. The man couldn’t know a gun was pointed at him, and that I held the power of life and death in my hands. I put my finger on the trigger, and the thought of pulling it made my heart skip beats and my stomach quiver, the way you feel when you step onto the roller coaster at Coney Island.

  Uncle Jack took the gun from me and said, “No, Little Biscuit, don’t ever touch this gun. It is always loaded, okay? You never want to point a gun at someone unless you are ready to make his wife a widow, you understand what I’m saying? This is not a toy, Little Biscuit.” Then he gave me a dime for a Big Little book. I bought a “Tailspin Tommy” at a drugstore, the one where Tommy finds the secret plans of the smugglers and then has to become a smuggler himself for a while to save his life.

  When we got to Florida, something happened. Uncle Jack made some phone calls from the Palm Garden Tourist Court in Hialeah while sitting on the bed in his shorts. My mother was taking her bubble bath. Uncle Jack wedged the phone in the thick folds of flesh between his jaw and neck. As he talked, he opened his gun and took the bullets out. He squinted into the cylinder holes, then put the bullets back in. I’d seen him do this before. It was a nervous habit. When he hung up, he went into the bathroom and told her to get dressed. “The deal’s off,” he said. “I’m suddenly a goddamn leper.” He looked sad and worried.

  My mother got out of the bathtub and walked naked and dripping bubbles through the room looking for a cigarette and cursing. “Jesus damn it all to hell. This is just what we didn’t need,” she said, her eyes turning hard. They packed their suitcases while I went out to the parking lot to throw rocks at birds. I hit a car again, this time on purpose. The rock skipped off the hood and made a pit in the windshield, but no one came yelling out of his room. Then we got into the DeSoto and headed back up the highway we came south on.

  Uncle Jack drove fast. We had a slow trip coming down to Miami from Manhattan, but everything was different now. We turned west through Georgia, went into Tennessee, and then headed for Illinois. We drove day and night, no stops, except for gas. Uncle Jack kept both hands on the steering wheel and he glanced up at the rearview mirror a lot. He yelled at her and she would yell back. Sometimes she would start crying without anyone having said a word and he would pull the car off the road and put his arms around her. I heard him whisper into her ear, “We’ll beat the bastards, Ruta.”

  We finally stopped near Green Bay. We found a nice motor court called Ole’s Sleepytime Lodge. It was next to a small lake and had a bed, a cot, and a kitchenette. My mother went out to buy groceries, and then she fixed a big dinner of rigatoni, sausage, cheese, and bread. The Biscotti women had taught her how to cook Italian. She bought a gallon of red wine and a bottle of Hires root beer for me. She also bought me a toy. Things were suddenly relaxed again and I was glad of that. I waited for them to get high so that I could get high, too, because I needed to feel happy again. They made themselves drinks before dinner, and when we ate, we stuffed ourselves. They drank half the wine and then sat in the small sofa, Uncle Jack’s arm around my mother, her hand on his thigh, kneading. They looked happy but half paralyzed with food and drink.

  I played with the toy she gave me. It was a bomber, an old Boeing with open-air turrets. It was a windup that fit in your hand. You’d wind it up and it would scream like a siren and sparks would fly out from underneath it. I imagined diving on Germans, the machine guns in the turrets blazing, the bombs falling away. Uncle Jack stood up and belched, then put a nickel in the radio. He found the “Make Believe Ballroom” on an NBC station, and they danced as if they were in New York in some fancy club. My mother was wearing her party dress. Uncle Jack, his big head glowing like a peeled onion, said, “Answer me this. How come an ugly mug like me winds up with the Maybelline girl?”

  I was glad to see them so happy, and I sang along with the Make Believe Ballroom orchestra, Moonlight becomes you. I sang this slow romantic ballad as I killed Germans, finding them in their pillboxes and blasting them out with firebombs. I swooped down on them, making the ratatat sound of the turret guns and the thud and boom of the bombs. I got high on music and the sounds of war.

  The radio had a shortwave band, and I got a nickel out of her purse so I could listen to it for another hour after they went to bed. She didn’t care, because she wanted me to occupy myself. I listened to foreign-language broadcasts, pretending to understand them. Their bed was by the wall, across the room from me and the radio. My cot was under the window and next to the table that held the radio. They tried to be quiet, but I heard them anyway through the static and voices—the concertina wheezing of the springs and the quick sounds she could not hold in.

  I got up early the next morning and went outside. I was surprised to find ankle-deep snow on the ground since it was still summer. The car had a shelf of snow on it, dripping like soft cake frosting off the hood and trunk. The sky was blue, like Florida, but it was also dark. It was as if you could see black streaks of night behind the blue, like this northern blue was thin and couldn’t last. Florida blue was thick. You could cut big mile-deep cubes out of it and there would still be blue sky to spare.

  “Charlie, come on!” she said. I went back into our room. “We’ve got to go, but first you get in the shower with Uncle Jack. You stink like a stray dog.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  “Do what your mommy says!” Uncle Jack yelled, his voice rattling the windows.

  I took off my clothes in the bathroom. Uncle Jack was already in the shower, singing, the steam coming out from behind the curtain. I got into the shower at the far end, away from the spray. Uncle Jack was lathering himself with soap, even his bald head. His eyes were shut tight and he was singing, “We did it before and we can do it again,” a war song. We weren’t in the war yet, but you could see it coming.

  The water was hot. I stayed out of its reach. Then Uncle Jack rinsed off and said, “Okay, Little Biscuit, your turn.” He saw that I was staring at him, and he laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll have a cannon like that someday yourself. Then you’ll be a mensch, a real trouble-maker. Remember, the ladies will always go for a real mensch, no matter what.” I got under the spray and Uncle Jack gave me the soap. “Get your hair good and clean, Little Biscuit. I think you got lice.”

  We kept going north, up into Michigan. The farther north we went, the colder it got. It was only September, but the air was crisp and the lakes were clear blue, not tan and weedy like the warm lakes down south.

  A police car pulled us over outside of Iron Mountain, and Uncle Jack took his gun out of his coat pocket and put it on the seat next to him, under a newspaper. The policeman looked at Uncle Jack’s New York license. “Big city folks, hey?” he said.

  Uncle Jack nodded. “We’re on our way to my wife’s folks, over by Marquette. Ain’t we, baby?” He patted her leg.

  The policeman, squinting at the license, said, “Bernstein. Jack Bernstein. Not many Jewish boys here in the Upper Peninsula, hey?” He looked into the car, suspicious.

  “My wife’s a Finlander, officer,” Uncle Jack said.

  The policeman bent down and took another look at her. “Hyva aamtia!” he said.

  “Hyva paiva, ” she said back. “Good to be home,” she said in English.

  “Kűinka se mene?" he said.

  “Fine,” she said. “Hyva kűtos.”

  The policeman smiled and touched the bill of his cap. “Have a good visit, folks,” he said. He got back into his car and drove away.

  “Shit!” Uncle Jack said. “Jesus!” He took the gun out from under the newspaper and put it back inside his coat.

  “Satana!” my mother cursed. “Perkelle!”

  The trip seemed endless. I got the idea into my head that they would now turn around and head south again, and that’s how it would be forever, driving up and down the country, crisscrossing, doubling back, going in circles, coast to coast, border to border, a never-ending run. “Are we really going to Grandma’
s house?” I said.

  “That’s right, Little Biscuit,” Uncle Jack said. “You are at least.” I saw my mother give Uncle Jack a look. I’d seen that look before. It meant Shut up. When she wanted to keep something away from me and someone else accidentally blurted out the truth, she’d turn that look on them. She uncapped the bottle of gin and tilted it up to her lips, then she passed it to Uncle Jack. She wanted to get high, and I wanted her to, but I didn’t think I’d be able to get high with them. I tried to sing, but my throat was suddenly full of road dust.

  I had a sinking sensation, one I’d had before. I felt like I’d stumbled into a hole and was falling straight down into bottomless dark. The hole was always there, somewhere in front of you, like a trap. It made you suspicious of good moods. A good mood set you up for the sudden drop. You’d get high, you’d sing, then the earth opened up, blue sky turned black, and the hole sucked you down.

  I was going to get dumped again. This time at Grandma Aiti’s house. The first time my mother left my father, I was sent to St. Vincent’s, the boarding school in Tarrytown. She said she wanted me out of the Lower East Side. “You talk like a wise guy,” she said. “I want you to learn how to be polite and talk proper English. Maybe if you get into the church choir up there in Tarrytown, you’ll quit singing like a ruptured mule.”

  I feared and hated St. Vincent’s, and all the other boys there feared and hated it too. We were all rejects, too much trouble for our families. Everyone there feared and hated everyone else. The nuns, who glided through the playgrounds and hallways like huge black and white confections, were nice to us, but nice people can’t deal with groundless fear and universal hatred. They can’t believe such uncivil energy exists in children. They believe it’s a mood or an act, a temporary thing that you can easily drop if you wanted to. The nuns didn’t understand that it was the only thing that kept us from disappearing completely.