Little Boy

by Anthony Prato

  “I’m in the palm of your hand!” I screamed through my tears. My face was dripping—whether it was sweat and tears or tears alone I don’t know.

  For those few moments in the stairwell, not another soul existed in the universe. I barely heard the footsteps of families walking down the steps behind me; nobody, thank God, bothered to wrestle me away for her. Thank God New Yorkers mind their own business, I thought. Had somebody tried to stop me, I’d of killed him, I swear.

  “Remember the poem I just gave you! Goddamn, you buh—, please, please stop it. You’re hurting me so much. I—I’m sorry! I’m not perfect either, I swear I know that’s true.”

  With that said, she stopped squirming. But she stayed crunched up against the wall in a little ball of coat and hat and pants. Pressing my face against her ear, I began to breathe hard. I thought I was having a heart attack and I probably was. I must get her back. I have to go home with her. She will come to my house for dinner tonight, just as planned. I wasn’t ready to give her up. I couldn’t.

  Whispering roughly into her ear, I said, “I’m in the palm of your hand, I swear. I’m not perfect—you own me. You control me. You are my religion, baby. I need you. I’ll tell you everything right now that I’ve never told you before. Remember that girl, Rachel? I told her I loved her. Just once, but I didn’t mean it. And when I went out with Kyle last weekend, I got drunk. I didn’t mean to, I swear. I just—I don’t know—I just missed you so much. I know we’ve been getting along okay for a while, but it just hasn’t been right, you know? I miss you. I miss us in Central Park—remember when we went to Central Park last spring? I even think about us drinking together sometimes, you know, and it scares me. I just—I’m so sorry, Maria—I just want a girl who laughs for no one else. I want you to be mine. I love you, angel. I really love you.”

  I continued to cry, using her hair to sop up the tears. My hands were so cold and chapped they were almost bloody.

  “Why do you do this, A.J.?” she wailed. “You’ve changed so much. We aren’t in love anymore, don’t you see that?” Forcing my body against hers as if I were one half of a vice and the wall the other, I clenched my teeth and—and growled.

  “Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that again.” I wasn’t talking; I was snarling these words to her. It was an awful sight, now that I think back on it. Just terrible.

  We remained there for a few minutes, against the wall, both of us sobbing, too exhausted to budge. Finally, I felt overpowered by her. I was on the verge of collapsing. I struggled to stand up, lifting Maria with me as if I was a human forklift. She clung to my jacket, but I wasn’t sure if it was to keep from falling or because she’d forgiven me.

  “I’m sorry,” I kept repeating, “I’m so sorry. Let’s just go home and forget all about this. Please. I promise it’ll never happen again.”

  Silently, Maria descended the staircase, allowing me to follow close behind. Not a word was spoken on the subway back to my car.

  We went back to my house and had Thanksgiving dinner with my parents like nothing had ever happened. Creepily hushed by the day’s events, neither Maria nor I spoke to one another the rest of the day. Luckily, she spoke to everyone else as if we’d just returned from a fun-filled morning at the parade. I knew she wasn’t happy with me. But she was back by my side and that’s all that mattered.

  Maria gave Thanksgiving new meaning. I was so thankful for her, because she loved me even though I was imperfect. But she was perfect. She was an angel. She was my guardian angel, and I had to use her strength to protect me from myself, and to get me through all of my worries.

  As I drove her home in silence that night, I thought to myself: What kind of person is stupid enough to hurt his own angel?

  ***

  If Thanksgiving was fucked up, Christmas was a nightmare. If I'd only put as much effort into my behavior as I did into the gifts I bought. As usual, there was a calm before the storm.

  Roaming the gigantic, crowded Queens Center Mall several days before Christmas, numbed by sheer desperation, I explored store after store, aspiring to unearth a gift that would drive Maria's memories of Thanksgiving into extinction. Fortune struck me when I lumbered into a cruddy jewelry store on the basement level. A lot of the girls in her high school, I'd noticed, wore gaudy necklaces with something called name-plates. They usually read "Vito loves Domenica," or “Lakeesha loves Carlos,” or some shit like that. Picture a golden street sign dangling from a guinea princess's neck.

  I'd always hated these things, not to mention the chicks who wore them. So, being the innovative guy that I was, I decided to do something a little different. I asked the Iranian guy behind the counter if he could carve out numbers instead of letters. About ten minutes later, after explaining in phonetic English the difference between numbers and letters, the guy finally said yes. One hour and eighty dollars, and seventy-eight cents later, Abdul handed me the result: the date Maria and I met—2-8-92—scripted in 18 carat gold, attached to a gold necklace.

  Fast forward to Christmas morning at Maria's house. Her parents are sitting on a new, plush green sofa in the living room—a gift, Maria said, from her dad to her Mom—as Maria, pigtails and all, looking like a nine-year-old expecting Santa to appear, kneeled anxiously beneath a garishly decorated Christmas tree. Before you could say Kris Kringle, shredded wrapping paper was spread before her and the “date plate”—my own personal invention—was on her neck. She was so happy she burst into tears. She adored it.

  “Great gift, guy!” Mr. Della Verita said.

  “Oh, Mah-Ree-Uh, it’s so beau-tee-ful,” Mrs. Della Verita prawned, her Brooklyn accent as thick as the olive oil in her baked ziti.

  I asked Maria to wear it in school from now on and she said she would. Now everyone would know the day that we met. It would become the national holiday of a nation inhabited by two young lovers. Maria would wear it with pride, I knew, because that’s just the way she was.

  But, as I said, I like to be innovative. In addition to the date plate, I'd purchased two tickets to the opera at Lincoln Center. We were going to see The Barber of Seville, or, as her father said, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, or something like that. Crouching beside Maria, as if I was about to ask for her hand in marriage, I handed her the pair of tickets. She smiled tranquilly and nearly strangled me with a hug. Her father placed his arm around her mother, all smiles, as if to say, Say hello to our new son-in-law.

  Mission accomplished! Maria had never been to the Metropolitan Opera, I was certain, and this was a classy gift to show my cultivated side. I am grinning even as I write this because I really don’t have a cultivated side. Honestly, I didn't care much for the opera myself, but Maria did. In one of our many conversations, she'd mentioned that her father listened to Pavarotti, and that she'd grown to love opera. Bingo! I thought. A gift waiting to be given! Her father, watching intently from the sofa, had never given her something like this. Appearing suddenly disquieted, Mr. Della Verita stood up and peered in our direction, first at his daughter, then at me. He took a step toward us, remained still for a moment, smiled, and placed his giant calloused hand on my sweaty back. "You know how to give a gift," he said with a quick wink of his eye. I think Mr. Della Verita was happier with me that Christmas than Maria was.

  As I said, mission accomplished.

  ***

  We traveled into Manhattan a few days after Christmas. A fresh sheet snow covered the sidewalks and store canopies. Even rat-infested bodegas looked charming after a recent snowfall. It was a magnificent New York winter day. The sky was a crisp sapphire and the sun was particularly radiant; it shone almost as brightly as it did when Maria and I went to Central Park during the spring. Skyscrapers sparkled. Blissfully gripping Maria’s hand, strolling down Broadway, I tried my damnedest to forget the drudgery of Thanksgiving. We skipped and joked and kissed as if we’d just fallen in love the day before.

  So, listen,” I said, “halfway through the show, they’ll have an intermission. And then, right befo
re the show begins again, they’ll flick the lights on and off, so everyone knows to go back into the theater.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Did your mother tell you, or something?”

  “No,” she said, “I’ve been to the opera before. Just once when I was a kid.”

  Burning with jealousy, sweat accumulated on my palm, allowing our hands to slip apart. She said it as if it weren’t a big deal, as if it didn’t mean a goddamn thing. That’s what made me even angrier than I already was.

  Destiny handed me a choice: grab Maria’s hand, kiss her, and continue walking, or grill her like a cop would a thug. A millisecond later, the choice was made. “What the hell do you mean?” I blared. My voice echoed down the corridor of skyscrapers as if I was yelling into the Grand Canyon. “You said you’d never been to the Met before!”

  “I never said that! Oh, A.J., please don’t start up again.” Her voice spoke for her eyes which spoke for her heart. She began to weep. But I couldn’t resist; in a sick sort of way, I was like a kid in a candy store, aching to grab every opportunity to question her.

  But I was an angry kid. Eyeing the golden metal dangling from Maria’s neck, I saw my breath before my face, jetting rapidly in and out of my nose in columns like the smoke from a dragon’s nostrils. I hated Maria at that moment. She was Satan.

  “Oh, great,” I said, “just great. Now what’s the fucking point of even going to see this thing?”

  “I’ve never seen this opera before. I went to another one with my seventh-grade class over four years ago. I don’t even remember the name of it.”

  “Don’t you understand? I wanted to show you something new today. I wanted you to experience something you’d never had before.”

  She looked at me with this face that had “fuck you” written all over it. “You want to show me something I’ve never seen before, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, hesitating. “Don’t you understand?”

  “Well then why don’t you act like an adult? Stop acting like a fucking child! I’ve never seen that before!” She said it so smugly, and that’s what killed me so much. She didn’t have to say that, or say it in that way. She didn’t understand, and that’s all that mattered. I started envisioning her little goddamn elementary school friends, laughing at some goddamn opera, wondering what the fuck it was. I hated the opera already. And I hated every one of her goddamn little friends.

  Well, as they say, the show must go on. And so did we. I dragged Maria down Broadway and entered the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center between 62nd and 66th streets. The beauty of the Opera House calmed me. A giant structure of glass and marble, it sat amidst the mammoth apartment buildings of the Upper West Side. I remember thinking that it looked like a jail for the rich, a massive marble jail with a colonnaded facade. Yellow flames of light were piercing the bars from within, beaming onto the elevated plaza, reflecting in a rectangular pool of water in the center. Standing not twenty yards from the front door, on the Broadway edge of the concrete common, listening to the din of the traffic behind me, I squinted intensely, striving to see what was inside.

  Nothing.

  The jail is flanked by two equally impressive buildings that didn’t look at all like jails, Avery Fisher Hall and the New York State Theater. As large as the plaza between them was, I felt ominously trapped, almost as if I were in an elevator stuck on the 13th floor.

  Once inside, we quietly settled into our seats in the balcony and the opera commenced. I was so lost in confusion and despair and nausea, that the actual show is a blur. Nothing induces nausea more than knowing exactly how much you’ve fucked up, and precisely what you’ve done wrong, but being absolutely unable to reverse the inertia of your sin.

  Fifty-nine bucks a ticket—a lot of money for a seventeen-year-old—and I have no fucking idea what The Barber of Seville was about. Based on the audience’s reaction—whistles, applause, cheers—the story line was gripping, the singing superb, Rossini’s music exhilarating. I don’t remember, however, whether Maria enjoyed it or not.

  What do I recall vividly is the emotion I felt, sitting on the edge of the balcony section, way up high over the stage. It must have been five stories up, at least. Peering over the railing, I was as close to plummeting to the ground as I’d ever been. My mind and body separated and drifted through the air and left all reason behind. I ached to pull myself together, to tear my ass of the seat, and take a nose dive over the balcony, smashing head first into the expensive seats like a B-52 whose engine had failed. For the briefest of moments, as Maria watched the stage and as the thunderous orchestra synchronized with my drumming heartbeat, suicide at the opera was my perfect wish. For the briefest of moments, I’d be flying... flying... flying... feeling the greatest rush imaginable...unstoppable and purely free.

  But I could hardly stand up. Perhaps it was the sheer brevity of that kind of moment which prevented me from fulfilling my craving. Or perhaps a real man would have faced the inevitable despondent reality of his existence and leapt over the side, putting an end to his misery.

  Not me, though. Back then, I wasn’t a real man.

  I started to cry. I didn’t have to cry, but I just forced myself to do it. When Maria didn’t notice, I cried a little louder. Then she noticed, I know she did, but she didn’t respond. What a bitch, I thought. What kind of person doesn’t feel sympathy when someone she loves cries?

  Halfway through the intermission, standing in a broad, fancy room in front of a bar hocking champagne for seven bucks a glass in dead silence, I told her I was going outside, and that I didn’t want to see the rest of the show. I got outside and smoked cigarette after cigarette, all alone on Broadway. People kept looking at me as they walked by the theater. Maybe they were wondering what the hell a teary-eyed, disheveled teenager was doing smoking butts in front of the grandest jailhouse in America. I know what I was wondering. Hell, I was freezing my ass off out there, and she was in the theater, protected and warm, and she didn’t even bother to come outside and check up on me. Fucking bitch! Lonely on Broadway—that’s where I was until the opera ended. I figured if I looked really cold and depressed when Maria finally came out, she’d feel some goddamn sympathy. But she didn’t.

  She met me outside; her stare was as icy as the air. “You missed a beautiful opera, A.J.,” she said. We rode the R train back to Long Island City silence. I dropped her off at her house, got back into my car, and revved the engine. As she sprinted toward the door, frantically looking for her keys, I peeled out away from the curb. A worried neighbor peered out the window to see where all the noise came from.

  I didn’t understand exactly why Maria had acted that way. Sure, I made a mistake, but why didn’t she empathize with my sadness? It was obvious, I thought. It was so obvious that it sickened me to think of her. She’s just like my mother, I thought. Driving along, down the jam-packed Grand Central Parkway toward Fresh Meadows, I realized that Maria could be a real goddamn bitch sometimes. Shit, she didn’t even bother to thank me for bringing her to the opera.

  Chapter 16

  Maria’s Bed

  We rebounded the next day, as usual. But first Maria had to vent, so she called me early in the morning and began yelling and screaming.

  “Look,” I said, “I was just upset that I wasn’t the first guy to bring you to the opera, that’s all.”

  “But you were the first guy!”

  “What I mean is, you’d done it before. I’m sorry, okay? I love you. Let’s not ruin the rest of Christmas vacation.”

  “I’m starting to think that no matter what we do, it has to be my first time ever, with anyone, or you’ll go crazy.” I refused to respond.

  It’s funny how normal that conversation seemed at the time and how, looking back on it now, how it embodied our relationship to a degree. When she ruined a date, it was forever discussed; when I ruined a date it was seldom mentioned again. Business as usual. In retrospect, such a habit seems sick and twisted and obsessive. There was, I cringe
to admit now, little difference between me and murderer. The only difference between us is that, unlike a killer, I was too much of a coward to choke a person’s spirit in one fell swoop; instead, I preferred to smother it, allowing it to slowly suffocate and die, like a baby trapped under a pillow.

  But, hey, I was seventeen years old, for Christ’s sake. I was jealous. Being a girl’s first everything was, I thought, a possibility. Back then, reason was my reluctant foe, compulsion my persistent ally. Not to mention my best friend of all: short-term memory.