The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  “On weekends, when I was little, we used to drive over the river to the Liuzzas’ house. They had a big house, modern, that sprawled all around. My mother wanted a house like that, like her sister’s, but my uncle was more clever than my father. You see, Uncle Liuzza was born into a rich family.”

  Amanti told him about the weekends at her uncle’s house and about Tony Liuzza, her cousin. Her mother always doted on Tony Liuzza. The doting went back to the time before she’d been married, when she’d thought she would never have children of her own, but the doting continued after she had found her husband, after she had a son of her own, and after Amanti herself was born. It was always Cousin Tony in her lap, Cousin Tony being blessed with small kisses behind the ear, Cousin Tony whose collar she straightened with long fingers.

  “If you want to know the truth, I think my mother had a thing for my uncle. She never did anything about it, of course, but that’s why my parents moved up this way in the first place, because the Liuzzas were here. My uncle was going to help my father out with the restaurant; they talked all the time about moving it up to the highway, where my father could catch the tourists on the way to the Berkshires. Uncle Liuzza kept promising money, but it never came.”

  “How did the Liuzza family get their money?” Lofton asked.

  “Munitions. Cannons for battleships, something like that. They made a fortune during World War II. But after Korea, Uncle Liuzza went into real estate.… He pushed Tony, from the time he was little, to be a lawyer. On weekends, when their house would be full of people, Uncle Liuzza would take Tony and show him around like he was some kind of prize. My brother always hated Tony. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I didn’t like him much either.”

  It probably wasn’t fair, but Lofton could understand. He could imagine Tony Liuzza as a teenager, standing just outside the adult conversation—a fresh, well-scrubbed boy, gangly despite his good manners. Of course his cousins would hate him. Lofton guessed he could hate Tony Liuzza, too, if he wanted, just for the guy’s advantages. Liuzza’s thin, painful smile was probably because he knew how people hated him, and he probably hated himself, at least a little bit anyway. Tony Liuzza had attended private school, Amanti explained between sips from her water glass, and Amanti’s mother had wanted to send her children, particularly her son, to such schools. The best Amanti’s father could afford was the local Catholic schools, so the boy went there. He went wild anyway. He hung around with the kids from the tenements. Then one day her brother got too drunk, took out the family car, and lost control on an ice-slick curve; the car hit the guardrail once, then a second time, and flipped over into the ravine below. Six months later Amanti’s father died, too, a heart attack. “After that Uncle Liuzza loosened up with his money—enough so my mother could close down the restaurant and send me off to college in Boston. But that stopped a couple years back. My uncle doesn’t approve of the way I live these days. Neither does my mother.” Amanti gave him a shy, evocative look that seemed to hide some deeper embarrassment. “My mother has what she wants, though. My uncle and aunt let her move into their house, gave her a bedroom all her own—Cousin Tony’s old room.”

  Amanti had stopped rocking. She did not look like a little girl anymore. Neither of them spoke for a while. Lofton listened to the slow whirring of the ceiling fan overhead. He still needed to know why she was sending him to talk to Randy Gutierrez. Had the shortstop confided in Amanti? He also needed to know more about her relationship to Brunner. Tenace had made plenty of insinuations, but the scorer, Lofton knew, had a mind that ran down a one-track road to the garbage dump. Lofton was about to ask her some questions, but Amanti broke the silence first. Her voice had a whole new tone.

  “What do you want in Holyoke?”

  Lofton was taken aback. He had no answer ready.

  “This is where my car ran out of gas,” he said, and felt a thin, clever smile crease his face. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

  “That’s baloney.”

  She was right, of course. He could try to tell her the truth, he supposed. He could tell her that he had been on the verge of the good, happy life when something that resembled the big black shadow of death had fallen across his bed one night. (He might be dying, he might not, but that wasn’t the point; even the doctor had been clever enough to see that.) The shadow had whispered to him in a voice that was seductive all right, sweet as failure, and he had gotten in the car so he wouldn’t have to listen, so he could go for a long drive in which he was nobody, just a pair of headlights in a great big fog. The only trouble was that sooner or later you had to stop, and then you were somebody again, and the voice started up all over. He could have told Amanti this, he guessed, if he could find the words, but there’s no way to tell people such things. Instead, he got clever again. “I’d been driving all night, and I saw a sign that read: ‘Journalist wanted. Fame and fortune next three exits.’ I thought there might be something to it.… So you tell me. What do you want?”

  She regarded him for a long moment. Her eyes were darkened with some sort of liner. Behind the darkness, though, the eyes glittered. The glittering eyes admired his cleverness but at the same time told him she knew it was still baloney.

  “Been married?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t had that pleasure.” He heard irony in her last remark, and—though she tried to keep it out—some resentment. He could not say why, but he felt a sudden surge of affection for Amanti.

  After the meal he walked Amanti to her car, parked in a municipal lot off High Street. Outside, a man on the sidewalk behind them let out a high whistle and a shout. Lofton turned, but the man was not concerned with him or Amanti. He was just calling a greeting to a friend who stood outside the abandoned Sunoco station across the street. Two young boys on bicycles pedaled up next to Amanti; on the sidewalk ahead, a woman and her children stopped to press their noses against the display windows of a bridal store. Aside from this small cluster of people, the street was pretty well deserted in the afternoon heat. Lofton remembered how the people in Mexico, noisy and active on the streets, always crowded close together, it seemed, no matter the empty spaces around them, and how the city women dressed the way Amanti dressed now, in hot dark colors, no matter the heat.

  They took a footbridge across the canal. “Let’s cut this way,” he said, touching her lightly on the arm, then pointing toward a row of stone tenements tucked between the factory canal and Holyoke’s main street. They stopped at the corner, hesitating at the sight of the crumbling, cramped buildings. He remembered the gang members at Mendoza’s, and it suddenly seemed stupid to go on. There was noise and clutter everywhere, graffiti and torn bits of plaster, and the impossible feeling that there were thousands of people living on this short, narrow block. An old woman turned a dull, resentful eye toward them, and he and Amanti stood caught in their hesitation. Then, as if the entire scene had been staged for them, Lofton heard the cry of a fire engine. The slow eyes of the Hispanic woman turned away, and people rushed toward the plume of smoke the next block over.

  “Incendio! Hay un incendio!” the children cried, running, excited, down the block. Without thinking, he and Amanti hurried, almost trotted, toward the smoke, Amanti clutching at his elbow as they went.

  Ahead, the engine turned the corner. They arrived a moment later, in time to see the firemen hurling their axes into the windshield of a Ford van. The smoke had been deceptive. It was only a car going up in smoke, spilled gasoline, maybe, or the vain attempt to collect insurance on a junker, or maybe just done for fun, because burning things was the way the poor expressed themselves in this town.

  “Why did you do it? Why did you do it?” A young man yelled and grabbed a small boy in the crowd. Lofton was alarmed at first, then saw the man was joking. The little boy ran, laughing and screaming, back to the tenements.

  Slowly the crowd broke up: Amanti taking her hand away from his arm; a white teenager in dirty clothes running to catch up with his friends; a black Carib scolding
his wife; and the Hispanic girls, wearing tight clothes and bright earrings, gathering their younger brothers and sisters.

  He walked Amanti to her car in the parking lot behind City Hall. On the way he asked her again about Brunner. She had told him that Brunner was friends with the Liuzza family, but that didn’t explain everything. She hesitated, then looked at him directly.

  “I’m his mistress,” she said.

  Her eyes widened a little, but they also got very dark. If there was any light in them, it was way back somewhere he couldn’t see. Then she resumed the posture she’d had back in the restaurant, that of woman acting like a girl, or of a girl acting like a woman, he wasn’t sure which anymore.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I figured you’d find out on your own. It isn’t exactly a secret. I think even his wife knows.”

  “Is that why you want me to write this story—to help you get rid of him?”

  “I could do that on my own.”

  Amanti started the engine. Lofton reached through the window and touched her shoulder. There were a lot of things he still needed to know.

  “I’ve heard some stuff in the press box. About some renovation project Brunner’s mixed up with; only the government part of the money seems to be tied up in the state legislature. What about this Senator Kelley?” Lofton asked. “What’s his connection to all this?”

  “I don’t know anything about politics.” Amanti’s voice was sharp, distressed. Without looking at Lofton, she slid the car into gear. All right, Lofton thought, I’ll check into Kelley myself. Watching her back into traffic, giving her a quick wave that she returned at the last minute, he guessed that her sudden anger was more at herself than at him. She hadn’t liked admitting her affair with Brunner.

  Amanti was tired of the heat. Even though summers were always hot in Massachusetts, no one seemed, especially in the small towns, to take air-conditioning seriously. The local man Brunner had gotten to install the central air in her apartment had done it incorrectly. Not one in a long line of repairmen had been able to make the system work the way it was supposed to. So the shower was the best way to cool down. She turned the water on as cold as she could stand it.

  She wondered why Lofton had asked about Kelley, if it was just coincidence or if the reporter had some idea what had gone on between them for the last four years. The latter didn’t seem likely. The few people who knew there had been anything between herself and Kelley—the Liuzza family, her mother, Brunner—weren’t likely to say anything. She was Brunner’s mistress now, yes, and he got what he paid for, and in a certain way she enjoyed the touch of his rough hands; but the man with whom she struggled in her thoughts had always been Kelley, and still was Kelley, at least most of the time. And Brunner knew that.

  Amanti turned off the shower. She didn’t towel herself dry, not completely. She put on a thin, loose robe and went to the living room. She sat down between two fans and let the breeze cool her. Though she was still conscious of the oppressive, dreamy heat around her, she could avoid it so long as the fans blew across her damp skin and she didn’t move too much or too quickly. It was curious, she thought, how she’d had trouble picturing Kelley’s face the other night. The truth was, though, she had learned the trick of keeping her mind empty. It hadn’t always been that way; she had once dwelt infinitely over everything that happened to her, every conversation with Kelley, every fragment of her childhood. She had just found out it was easier not to think things over, a kind of escape when escape was impossible. You could keep everything way back in your head—your past, your lovers, your present, your future—and pretend none of it existed, which was nonsense, of course. Because then those things controlled you without your knowing. Or you could do it the other way: You could study the details of your life intently, the way as a kid she had studied her face in the mirror—and later, as an adult, she had studied Kelley’s face on the bed beside her—but then you knew the details too well, and it was impossible to change anything. So, both ways, it was the same. Once something was in motion, it was in motion. Your life went in its own direction. You could watch or not, do it as you pleased, but you shouldn’t expect the simple act of flipping your eyelids up and down to change anything.

  Still, her talk with Lofton had gotten her thinking. She went to her trunk, took out an old photo album, and started looking through the pictures: her parents’ old house in Holyoke, gray and weather-beaten; the restaurant with its big yellow sign and her father standing beneath it; her brother leaning against the car, jet black hair, black jacket, cigarette between his lips, imitating some actor he’d seen in the movies. There was only one picture of herself as a girl, thin-legged, smiling toothily, wearing a dress that fell all the way to her shoes, but there were several that had been taken when she was older, a college student posing in cashmere sweaters beneath old trees, in front of old buildings, all of which seemed to be covered with ivy. Oddly, she hadn’t dressed and posed like that when she first entered college, the way many of the other girls had, but toward the end, when in fact she had stopped attending classes, though she was still enrolled. While the pictures showed she was conscious of the irony, she remembered being dead serious at the time. In the album, scattered among the clear snapshots, were ones that had not developed properly. Several years ago she had tucked the unrecognizable shots in with the others, dark prints in which the underlying image was so faint that she had to struggle to pick her face, or that of some forgotten friend’s, out of the blackness. At the time these prints had made the other photographs seem more poignant.

  She came to a photograph of Kelley. The sky behind him was gray, the clouds darkening, but the light must have been right because it had caught him well. His hair was as black as a stallion’s, and his eyes a deep dark blue. They were the sort of eyes that changed color with the light. What she had always liked about the photograph was the way it showed the color of his skin, a pure, startling white that might have seemed unhealthy, or effeminate, on another man—and sometimes seemed that way on Kelley—but on that day, she remembered, his skin had had a soft, beautiful luster. She remembered that day at the beach. As they walked along, and the water wrens skittered to be out of their path, Kelley had told her that the one thing he had liked about being a lawyer was talking to the jury, and the one thing he liked about being a politician was talking to the crowd. (Kelley was a good speaker, Amanti had known at the time; she now knew that there were men better, but that didn’t matter.) Talking to a crowd, Kelley told her, was better than talking to one person because it wrenched you in the gut, it made the blood pound in your ears even when you were speaking as softly as you could. Everything fell in line in front of a crowd; everything was simple and pure, and the things you had done, no matter what—those things were right. The rest of your life you sloshed through the mire and the muck, you did things which no God-fearing bastard would do—but which everybody did, he was learning—and you knew you would go to hell except for the fact that there was no hell and for the fact that the second you stepped onto the platform you knew everything had a reason.

  Amanti had first met Kelley not in Boston but at the Liuzza house. It was on a weekend, more than four years ago, after the time of the cashmere sweaters but before she had dropped completely out of school. Her mother had insisted she go with her to one of Uncle Liuzza’s get-togethers. “Your uncle’s paying for your college,” her mother had said, “he invited us over, and I don’t want you to insult him.”

  When they reached her uncle’s house, a group of men sat around the living room table. Uncle Liuzza was there, and Tony sat beside him, looking as he always looked in his father’s presence, anxious to please but slightly beleaguered, smiling continually. Her uncle introduced her to the other two men. One was Jack Brunner. He took her hand a little roughly and held it a bit longer than you might expect. When Brunner let go, he smiled and gave her an indiscreet once-over, his best smile. Then her uncle introduced Kelley.

  “David
Kelley here is running for the state legislature; he’s a fine young man,” her uncle said. At the time Kelley did not seem young to her; he was in his middle thirties, more than ten years older than herself. Kelley took her hand when they were introduced. His was a lighter touch than Brunner’s. She liked his touch. She could feel Brunner, and the others, watching as her hand lingered. Her mother made a motion that it was time to leave, to go back into the kitchen with the other women, but Amanti sat down with the men. Uncle Liuzza frowned, but rather than trouble himself with asking her to leave, he simply went on as if she weren’t there.

  The men talked about Kelley’s campaign. Kelley was running in the district that encompassed a small triangle of towns including Holyoke, Chicopee, and the rural, wealthier area of South Hadley. Kelley had grown up in Chicopee, the son of a hardware store clerk, and gone to law school on a scholarship.

  “The working class will go for you,” Uncle Liuzza said, “and I’ll get the rich son of a bitches to fall in line. It’s just a matter of promising a few zoning changes.”

  Uncle Liuzza looked significantly over at Brunner, then at Kelley. Kelley smiled wryly, ingratiating and defiant simultaneously, and the defiance made you like him all the more. Uncle Liuzza liked Kelley, too, she thought. Or at least her uncle hoped he could use him to help get some of his greenbelt property rezoned; it had been a concern of her uncle’s for years. It didn’t take much to see that Brunner didn’t share her uncle’s attitude toward Kelley. Though Brunner was in construction himself and wanted the same zoning changes, he was hesitant to throw his support behind the younger man.