City of Margins

by William Boyle

  The office is cluttered. Repair manuals stacked on rusty filing cabinets. Stray batteries and mufflers in cardboard boxes. Quarts of oil and brake fluid and antifreeze. A couple of tires propped against a cracked mirror. The walls are covered in photos of the Italian soccer team that won the 1982 World Cup. There’s a signed, framed photo of Phil Rizzuto next to a picture of Frank Sinatra playing Madison Square Garden in ’74.

  Michelle hangs up the phone. “Donnie, how’s it going?” she says. “Tommy’s not here yet.”

  “No, I know,” Donnie says. “That ’84 Cutlass Ciera in the yard, it still up for grabs?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a good car, right? Runs good?”

  “Far as I know.”

  Frankie comes in through the door at the back of the office, wiping his hands on an oily rag, chewing on something. He’s wearing blue work pants and a plain white T-shirt streaked with grease. He’s got a crucifix on a heavy gold chain around his neck. His goatee is dusted with flakes of pastry crust. “Donnie, excuse me,” he says. “I’m chowing down on some sfogliatelle a customer brought in. What’s the good word? Tommy will be here in a bit.”

  “I was asking Michelle about that ’84 Cutlass Ciera.”

  Frankie comes over, and they shake. “The Tempo break down on you?”

  “It’s not for me.”

  Frankie nods a little, his interest obviously piqued. “It’s a good car. I did the work myself.”

  Donnie looks past Frankie, through the glass window in the door, into the garage, checking to see what cars are up on the lifts. “I want it. You’re working on a car now, a Nova?”

  “I am. Ava Bifulco’s.”

  “Good. Yeah. This Olds is gonna be a gift for Ava.”

  “You know Ava?”

  “I do now. When she picks up her Nova, tell her the Olds is hers, too. Two grand will square it?” Donnie takes the money out of his pocket and thumbs off a stack of hundreds. He hands it to Frankie.

  “We’ve got a deal,” Frankie says, smiling. “No tax.”

  “I don’t need a receipt. Just give Ava the title and the keys and whatever else.”

  There’s surprise in Frankie’s voice as he says, “Piacere mio, amico. You and Ava an item?”

  Donnie just smiles. “We’re friendly,” he says, imagining Ava coming in to check on the Nova and being shocked by the gift of a new used car.

  Michelle’s been eavesdropping the whole time, her ear tuned into gossip of any kind. Her eyes are wide, her mouth open. She’s recorded all of this so she can repeat the information to anyone who will find it shocking. Donnie Parascandolo and Ava Bifulco, who would’ve seen that coming? He wonders if word will spread to Donna through whichever channels that dope moves. Probably someone Donna works with at Kearney. He doubts Donna knows anything of Ava—she wasn’t that kind of person, in everybody’s business, digging up dirt—but she’d probably still be surprised to hear he’d set his sights on a widow in her early fifties. A lot of guys in his position, they would’ve gone the other way, found some skank in her twenties, but Donnie’s going the high-class route.

  “I like that Ava,” Michelle says now, as if reading his mind. “Very professional. An admirable woman.”

  Donnie likes that. He smiles again. “Admirable’s right,” he says.

  Pags and Sottile show up a few minutes later. Frankie opens the other office for them, the one that Big Time Tommy uses. Sal comes in to say hey. He’s shorter than Frankie by a full foot, has curly hair and big Popeye arms. He’s not much of a talker. He’s in and out.

  Much of the time, Big Time Tommy hangs out at a former disco club he owns on Bath Avenue. This office is one of the many other places that he’s got around the neighborhood, these different little meeting spaces he keeps. There’s a desk and some chairs, a picture of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny cut out of a newspaper and taped to the wall. Other than that, the room’s pretty bare. Donnie, Pags, and Sottile just stand there, leaning against the cold concrete wall. Sometimes Big Time Tommy’s fifteen minutes late. Sometimes he’s an hour late.

  “My cousin called me this morning,” Pags says, deciding to make small talk while they wait. It’s a thing that drives Donnie crazy about him. Let the silence just sit for a few minutes. They’ve known each other a long-ass time. Can’t they just appreciate not talking?

  “Your cousin who?” Sottile asks.

  “My cousin Andrea.”

  “Andrea who moved to Staten Island?”

  “Right.”

  “How’s she like it?”

  “She doesn’t like the dumps, I’ll tell you that. And she’s over the bridge four, five times a week. ‘Why’d I even move?’ she says. She still comes back to go to Alba. She says there’s nowhere as good over there.”

  “Staten Island,” Sottile says, and he shakes his head.

  “Anyhow, she goes like this to me, she goes, ‘You remember when we were kids and we used to hide in Nana’s basement closet with all the olive oil and the wine?’ ‘Sure,’ I says. ‘You remember kissing me?’ she says. ‘What the fuck?’ I say. This broad’s married with three kids, and she’s my cousin, and—not for nothing—she’s not my type. ‘I think you got me confused,’ I says. ‘You’re right,’ she says. That’s how my morning starts. I’m fucked-up about it. What’s it mean?”

  Donnie says, “What do you mean, ‘What’s it mean?’ You either made time with your cousin in your nana’s basement or you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t,” Pags says.

  “Andrea’s nice,” Sottile says.

  “So, you didn’t,” Donnie says. “End of story.”

  “But why would she say it?” Pags is honestly confounded.

  “Maybe she dreamed it. Maybe you’re somebody’s fantasy, after all.” Donnie laughs, makes a smooching noise. He wishes he had cigarettes. He forgot his case at home, forgot he needs a new pack.

  Big Time Tommy comes strutting in a few minutes later with Dice on his heels. “It’s the cavalry, waiting patiently for orders,” Big Time Tommy says, plopping down behind the desk. Dice stands beside Big Time Tommy, arms crossed, his upper lip puffy where Donnie punched him. He’s giving Donnie a look that’s meant to be intimidating but is about as far from it as a man can get.

  Donnie winks at Dice.

  “Heard you two had a little spat,” Big Time Tommy says.

  “I told the guy don’t touch my shoulder,” Donnie says.

  Big Time Tommy nods. “Dice is not a good listener, I’ll agree on that front.”

  Dice just stands there and sits on his feelings. Big Time Tommy must’ve put him right in his place when he told him what happened.

  “You got what for us today?” Donnie asks.

  “I’ve got a guy off the rails is what I got,” Big Time Tommy says. “Duke O’Malley.”

  “I remember him.”

  “He’s in the hole for ten large and I know he’s holding out, but there’s the bigger issue of his mental health. He’s going around saying, ‘Fuck Big Time Tommy. I’m not paying that tubby bitch.’ Antonio over at the Wrong Number says he came in with a sign the other day, like a homemade sign you make in grade school. Oak tag, glue, glitter. He’s got written on it, ‘Big Time Tommy Ain’t Shit!’ And a drawing of me where I look like Santa Claus. ‘Tubby bitch,’ you believe it? This mick must be off his meds. Number one, he’s no Sissy Spacek. Number two, he works for Mr. Natale as a bookkeeper, which looks bad for me.”

  Mr. Natale is the other neighborhood big shot, Big Time Tommy’s former mentor and biggest current foe.

  Donnie says, “So, we shake him down for the ten, fuck him up if he can’t pay? Easy enough.”

  “On the surface, it’s nothing. But the word I got is he’s hiding out in his house, ready for battle. I’m telling you, he’s whacked out completely. You know Vlad? Vlad went over there yesterday, he says Duke thinks he’s in a fucking Western now. Vlad rings the bell, Duke comes out geared up like John Wayne. He fucking draws on Vlad, sh
oots at his feet, says, ‘Dance, you commie stooge.’”

  “No shit.”

  “He lives with his sister, Duke does. She’s sick in the head, too.”

  “So, we go over hot?” Pags says.

  “In the least. Be ready for a showdown, is what I’m saying.”

  Donnie laughs. “Some Sergio Leone shit.”

  “This guy’s laughing,” Big Time Tommy says, motioning to Donnie. “You ain’t gonna be laughing, believe me. Duke was in the Korean War. We’re not talking about another Dice here. Take it serious, okay?”

  He has Dice write down the address and then stands, paying his respects to Marisa Tomei on the wall by touching her picture longingly.

  ANTONINA DIVINO

  Antonina’s plan is simple. She’s going to leave a note for Mikey in his mailbox, let him know that Nick Bifulco will be coming around so that he’s not blindsided. There’s a lot she wants to say to Mikey, but she decides not to write a gushing letter. He probably doesn’t even think about her except for the fact that hanging out with her got him cracked in the head with a bat.

  She’s in her bed, not really ready to get going with the day after sneaking back in late. Following the diner, she and Ralph had just driven around the Bronx, stopping somewhere called Orchard Beach and sitting in the parking lot in the dark, listening to Ralph’s tapes. She always expected him to make a move on her, but he never did. This time, he talked to her about some of his favorite songs, the stuff he’d mentioned at the diner, what he’d put on a mixtape if he made one for her. She found it hard to imagine him making a mixtape.

  After Orchard Beach, they drove home through Manhattan, taking the Bruckner to the FDR. Traffic blocked up the FDR. Ralph cursed a lot. Antonina liked looking out at the lights of the city. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and she felt like a kid, coming home from some family trip she’d never really gone on.

  Ralph knew the history of the bridge. He’d seen a show on PBS. He talked about the guy who designed it—she forgets his name now. How it opened a hundred and ten years ago. How they used to store wine in vaults on the Manhattan side—they called it the Blue Grotto because there was a shrine to the Virgin Mary or something. How they built the towers. He went into great detail on this, about how they sunk some stuff and how mind-blowing it was what they were accomplishing way back then. How the workers got the bends. How they used to have trains and streetcars running across. He said they couldn’t build a bridge like it these days if they tried because everything’s shit and no one cares that much.

  She rolls over now and reaches around on the floor next to the bed, looking for a spiral notebook. She finds one, its yellow tattered cover etched with doodles, a pencil nudged into the wire spirals.

  She opens the book to a blank page. It was supposed to be her book for some math class with Sister Renee, but she never took a single note. Instead, sometimes, she uses it as a diary. But her thing is she’ll write on a page—about whatever, a normal day, or going with Lizzie to the city, or seeing some movie she really likes, or even about her first time with Rico Ruiz or one of her weird little Bronx trips with Ralph—and she’ll say everything she wants to say, every feeling she has, whether it’s complicated or not. Her thing is to be totally honest with herself. Or, at least, to try to understand what honesty even is. She’ll write everything down and then she’ll rip the page from the book, bring it out on the fire escape, light a smoke, and use what’s left of the flame to set the paper ablaze. Sometimes it takes another match. She likes to watch the burning paper flutter down to the yard, crinkle into nothing amid the weeds on a broken patch of concrete. That shit’s poetic to her.

  What to say to Mikey is the thing she needs to figure out now. Maybe she should just let it go, let him deal with it on his own. What purpose could leaving a note for him serve other than suggesting that she has some desire to reconnect?

  Well, does she? It’s been two years. She’s a senior now. He’s home from college, a dropout. Maybe they should reconnect. They’d be smarter this time, wouldn’t start stripping down in public. She knows places they can go.

  So, she does still have a crush on him.

  Sure.

  After all, he’s the only guy from the neighborhood she’s ever known who has renounced being from the neighborhood. He looks different, acts different, talks different, even if the neighborhood is somehow buried deep in him.

  She writes:

  Dear Mikey,

  That loser teacher Nick Bifulco from OLN came around saying he wants to make a movie about DP. He wants to talk to me and you about the night in the schoolyard. I don’t know how the hell he even knows about it. He was drunk when he came over my house. I just figured I’d warn you. If you ever want to hang out, give me a call. I have my own line.

  And then she signs her name with hearts over the Is and scribbles her number under that. She rereads the note ten times. Has she said too much or too little? Is she coming off as desperate? Or does it seem more like she’s not even interested?

  She’s about to rip it up and try again, but then she decides that it’s okay, it’s fine. There’s no way Mikey could think she was being too aggressive or that this was anything other than her looking out for him. Maybe the hearts are too much. She turns them into big inky dots instead.

  She gets up and finds an envelope on her dresser and folds the letter, stuffing it inside and writing MIKEY in big letters across the front.

  She takes off the boxers and Sonic Youth T-shirt she’d worn to bed. She borrowed the shirt from Lizzie and never gave it back. She’s never even really listened to Sonic Youth. She puts on clean underwear she finds stuffed in the top drawer of the dresser and a bra hanging from her doorknob. Then one of her favorite loose-fitting flannels and her overalls. Finally, back into her combat boots she goes.

  Her eyes are heavy, and her mouth tastes stale. She discovers a piece of gum in her jar of loose coins and pops it in her mouth. She stuffs the envelope in the front pocket of her overalls.

  Unlocking the door, she goes quietly down the stairs from the attic, knowing her father will be at work and hoping her mother isn’t around. She gives her mother credit for not bothering her, for not knocking when she shouldn’t knock, for giving her plenty of room to fuck up. She’s not a baby, after all.

  In the kitchen, there’s a note on the table from her mother: Be back. Finish the coffee.

  She pours herself a cup from the percolator. It’s lukewarm. She looks in the liquor cabinet under the sink and finds a bottle of sambuca stashed behind all the gin and Kahlúa and scotch. She splashes some into her coffee and leans against the stove, drinking it down in a few gulps.

  On the way out of the house, Antonina notices that Jane Rafferty is sitting at her front window, watching her open and close the front gate. Antonina looks up and kind of gives her a half-wave. Jane’s face is empty, full of longing. Antonina wonders if she’s thinking about when she was a girl, how it feels to leave your house, your yard, to walk freely in the world. This thought makes Antonina sad. How do people get stuck inside like that? How do people decide to retreat from the world? She doesn’t know Jane’s story. She’s never asked. Her mother and father say Jane’s whacked in the head. She’s never left the house that Antonina can remember. A cousin of hers brings groceries once a week. Antonina’s mother says it goes back further than that—she’s known of Jane since she was in high school, and even then, Jane didn’t leave the house.

  What if there was some heartbreak? Antonina’s sure there had to have been. Most people don’t just stop living out of fear. They stop living because something happens to make them stop living, right? Must be. Antonina wonders if anything like that will ever happen to her. Jane was a girl once. She didn’t have pink hair and overalls and combat boots, but she was a girl, and she was probably a normal girl who left her yard and walked to school and work and to meet friends. Antonina’s thinking she should knock on Jane’s door one day, ask her if she needs anything. Why hasn’t she ever th
ought to do that? A nice person would think to do that. Is she not nice? Not believing in the shit she’s been taught at church and school doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to be nice.

  She smiles at Jane, but Jane doesn’t smile back. She just has that same gone-in-the-eyes expression, watching the outside world like it’s boring TV.

  Antonina heads toward Bath Avenue.

  Mikey’s house isn’t that close. It’s far enough away in the wrong direction that she never passes it on the way to school or the subway or wherever. The only time she’s passed by in the last couple of years is when Ralph happened to drive up his block one night after getting off the Belt on their way back from the Bronx.

  She was only ever there once. They didn’t do anything. His mother and father were both home. He had to get something in his room. He showed her around, quickly. She remembered seeing his boxers crumpled on the floor, a stash of condoms in an open tin box on his dresser, his They Live poster. The room had smelled of boy funk. She’d touched the spines of a few of his books and cassettes.

  Mikey’s mother, Rosemarie, had not been happy to meet her—Antonina remembered that much. “How old is this girl?” Rosemarie had said, looking her up and down.

  “Sixteen,” Mikey said, and Antonina didn’t correct him.

  Rosemarie shook her head. “You’re in college,” she said to Mikey. “Act like it.”

  His father, Giuseppe, she only saw through a doorway. He was in the living room, fumbling around with their VCR, and didn’t seem to care who Mikey was with. It’s so crazy to her that he killed himself the night they were in the schoolyard. That’s another reason she’s steered clear of Mikey. She would’ve hated to have to see him through that.

  When she gets to Mikey’s block, she takes a deep breath and tries to think of what she’ll say if she happens to bump into him. Her plan is to just leave the letter in the mailbox, but who knows? Say he’s sitting out front on the stoop. Say he sees her from a window. What then?

  The mailbox is next to the front door. It’s made of black plastic and opens like a toaster oven. She runs up to it and deposits the letter in the box on top of a Genovese circular and a menu for a Chinese restaurant on Cropsey.