City of Margins

by William Boyle

  She doesn’t hold it against Mikey. And she won’t ever. She’s not sure what to expect of this relationship with him, but she sees something good in his eyes. She wonders if he’ll tire of her in a week or month. She wonders if she’ll tire of him, a kid who throws his backpack on the floor like that.

  But that’s the difference between someone who has lost it all and isn’t willing to take risks and someone who lives by the seat of her pants, who lives for adventure and experiencing new things. She’s tried the one way. Maybe she should try the other.

  Mikey’s talking about leaving, about getting out of the neighborhood. It’s a good idea. She has a car. When he’s ready, they can just go. Why not? What’s to lose? With Gabe and her parents gone, what holds her here anymore? Certainly not her job.

  She pictures herself on a highway with Mikey in her piece-of-shit Mercury Lynx that’s ten years old, the sun hitting the blacktop in front of them, mountains in the distance. There’s a whole country she hasn’t seen. She can live in a Springsteen song with him. Hit the road running, never let up, fuel it all with love.

  Could that kind of life be maintained? Who cares? Give it a shot.

  The debt Mikey mentioned—that must have been from his father with the gambling, what he owed Big Time Tommy. She wonders how deep they’re in. It seems wrong that Mikey and his mother should inherit that debt, especially if that’s why Giuseppe killed himself, to free them of it. Mikey said he knew a way to make money to get out from under the debt. She guesses that’s what he’s out there doing. She hopes he isn’t doing something too stupid. He is impulsive, after all. She wonders if he’s so impulsive that he’d have the notion to break into a house or try to rob a bank. Maybe he’s just trying to make an arrangement with Big Time Tommy.

  She takes a napkin from the holder on the table and pats at the corners of her eyes, the white paper coming away black from the little bit of mascara she’d put on. She looks down at the dress. She doesn’t regret it. She feels nice in it, pretty even. Rosemarie calling her a whore like that. Imagine her, a whore? Mikey’s only the third guy she’s ever even slept with, which is crazy to think about. When he gets back, she’s going to kiss him before he has a chance to say anything.

  She takes a deep breath and goes over to her turntable. Ghost Writer is still on the platter. She starts it over on the second side. “Lift Me Up” comes on. Standing there in her dress, waiting for Mikey to return, this song about being lifted higher by love feels more romantic than ever. That’s what’s happening to her. She’s being lifted above the neighborhood. This is where the tears and grief live, down here in these houses, on these cluttered sidewalks and avenues. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she’s going higher and higher with Mikey, until they float away. It’s nice to think like a kid.

  An anxious rapping at the door. Could it be Mikey, back already? What did he do? She’s imagining mistakes he could make, trouble he could drag with him wherever they go.

  She lifts the tonearm from the record, the needle scratching because of the hastened motion, and then the apartment goes silent except for the knocking. “Who is it?” Donna says.

  No answer.

  She looks around for something to wield. The wrench she’d been using earlier on the sink is still there on top of the speaker. She picks it up and holds it across her chest. “Who’s there?” she says again, suddenly spooked.

  Her mind goes a million places. She’s now tangled up in whatever Mikey’s father got him tangled up in.

  Why wouldn’t whoever’s knocking answer her?

  She reels her wild imagination back in. Maybe it’s an elderly person who can’t hear well. Every once in a while, someone like that—from St. Mary’s usually—will come around looking for Suzette.

  She approaches the door with the wrench held at her side.

  She unlatches the lock on the deadbolt first and then puts her hand on the knob, turning it cautiously and pulling open the door.

  She’s shocked to see Mikey’s mother. She’s wearing the same black sequined blouse and black slacks, dressed like she’s going to a wake, not hosting her son’s birthday dinner, lunch, whatever. She’s got a gold knockoff purse slung over her shoulder, the kind you buy on Eighty-Sixth Street for cheap at one of those dive storefronts. It’s still got a price tag hanging from the strap.

  “What are you doing here?” Donna asks.

  “Can I come in?” Rosemarie says.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Is Mikey here?”

  “He’s not here, no.”

  “Can we talk like women?”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Where is Mikey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rosemarie looks past her into the apartment, notices Mikey’s backpack on the floor. “I know Suzette Bonsignore,” Rosemarie says. “Your landlord, I take it. Maybe I should go talk to her.”

  Donna ignores the empty threat, pressing the hand holding the wrench against the doorframe as if she’s about to say, “Goodbye, get lost.”

  “What’s with the wrench?” Rosemarie says, stepping forward, her little feet over the threshold. “You gonna whack me one?”

  “I didn’t know who was knocking. You wouldn’t answer. I figured I better be prepared.”

  “I didn’t think you’d open up if I said who it was.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I’m sorry for how I acted.”

  “Are you really?”

  “Give me five minutes, please. I’m just concerned for my son.”

  With that, Donna makes the decision to let this woman into her apartment, against her better judgment.

  Rosemarie sits on the couch and takes in the room, her eyes lingering on the crates full of records.

  Donna sets the wrench back on top of the speaker. “Well?” she says.

  “He’s got a life ahead of him, my son, and he doesn’t know what it is yet,” Rosemarie says. “How long you been seeing him? He doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “We just met.”

  “And you’re coming home with him to dinner? You’re not some dumb girl. What’re you, thirty-five, forty? Imagine yourself in my shoes. I look around, I can tell you don’t have kids. That’s a different life, not having kids.”

  Donna is on the verge of tears again. Mikey is only a few years older than Gabe would’ve been. How would she react if he was alive and came strutting through the door with a woman twice his age? Impossible to say since he’s gone forever. If Gabe was alive, she’d be a different woman. She thinks about saying, I had a son, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t owe Mikey’s mother anything. She doesn’t want to let her in that far.

  Rosemarie continues: “I don’t know you, I don’t know your story, but let’s just agree you need to part ways with my son before things get any more involved. I need to be a mother. I need to rein him in, regain control. Mothers do what I’m doing. We don’t do what you’re doing.”

  Donna remains silent. She faces the turntable, wipes dust from the surface of the record with an orange cloth she keeps nearby. She needs to bite her tongue. She shouldn’t have allowed this woman in. “You’re right,” she says, her back still to Rosemarie. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “My son needs to get his head right. I’m not gonna let him go down the same path as his father.”

  Donna turns around, and Rosemarie has a gun pointed at her. Her first reaction is to laugh. This can’t be real. Women like Rosemarie don’t show up at your apartment with a fucking gun. She’s just an overprotective, controlling mother, that’s all. And they only met a short time ago. How could she possibly be pinning Mikey’s downfall on Donna? Maybe it’s just a power move. A nasty woman showing her claws. Probably the gun’s not even loaded.

  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Donna says.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “You met me for five minutes. Less than that.”

  “My brother came to me with this,” Rosemarie
says, her eyes tilting toward the gun, “to protect myself from Big Time Tommy. But things like that don’t just happen. He must’ve known I’d need it for this reason. He has a sixth sense, I always said that.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Mothers sometimes have to be.”

  “I’m going to go over to the phone and call the police. You go ahead and try to shoot me, okay?”

  Donna takes a couple of steps toward the kitchen.

  Rosemarie stands, the purse that was in her lap falling to the floor, an envelope with Mikey’s name on it in big letters falling out, and she aims harder, both shaky hands on the gun now, one around the handle and the other cupping it, the pointer on her right hand wobbling over the trigger.

  “I don’t believe this,” Donna says. “This must be a nightmare. I fell asleep. I’m dreaming this.”

  For a second, she convinces herself that’s true and then wonders if she’s even met Mikey, if he found Gabe’s note and brought it back to her. How big a world can someone dream? If that’s not real, maybe Gabe’s not dead, maybe there was no Gabe, maybe she never even married Donnie. Maybe she’s still a girl. Maybe it’s 1970, and she just dreamed a whole possible future for herself. Could be. If you dream a future, it doesn’t necessarily mean dreaming the whole of it. It simply means that you’re set down at a point in time, say 1993, and your past exists behind you.

  Forget it. Rosemarie is absolutely real. She’s there, right there, and her shaking is getting more intense.

  “Believe me, I don’t want to shoot you,” she says. “I just want you to promise that you won’t see my son again. I’ll take his bag, and I’ll leave. He comes back, you don’t answer. He calls, you don’t answer. He’ll forget about you. He’ll move on to the next girl.”

  “Fine,” Donna says.

  “I don’t believe you. You’re a snake. You’ll say one thing, and you’ll do another. I can see it in your eyes. Mikey will come back and you’ll laugh about how crazy I am. You’ll take him away from me.”

  “I think you need help.”

  Rosemarie moves forward again, the gun coming even closer. Donna reads it as a lunge and ducks away, snagging the wrench from on top of the speaker. She swears Rosemarie’s about to pull the trigger. The motion is there, she’s ready, and what if this gun is actually loaded? What if Rosemarie is that kind of crazy? If she’s crazy enough to shoot Donna, maybe she’s crazy enough to get away with it.

  That’s what’s running through her head when she lashes out with the wrench and slams Rosemarie in the side of the head with it.

  A gash opens from Rosemarie’s eyebrow to her hairline. Blood erupts from the wound. She looks stunned and then broken, like a clock that’s stopped ticking, and the gun falls from her hand to the floor. She follows the gun, slumping over it, deflated at Donna’s feet, the sequins on her blouse glinting in the thin shafts of light filtering into the room around the edges of the pulled shade.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Donna says.

  She looks at the wrench, its jaws streaked red. She sets it back on the speaker, wishing she’d never picked it up to begin with. She leans over the body. There’s a world of blood, pooling outward on the rug. The floors aren’t level, but she’s never noticed just how exactly off-kilter the room is until the blood starts to run toward the couch on the big area rug. She thinks, stupidly, of the shop on Eighty-Sixth Street where she bought this flat weave rug when she first moved in and how much she paid for it, bargaining the seller down a hundred bucks.

  She touches Rosemarie’s shoulder and tries to turn her so she can see her face. She says her name. She thinks of Mikey. She thinks of what she’ll need to do now—call 911, get an ambulance here, the police. Mikey said he might be gone the rest of the day. She has no way to contact him. She says the woman’s name aloud, this stranger who showed up at her house with a gun, threatening her. She wasn’t wrong to protect herself.

  Rosemarie said she was protecting herself, but from what? Donna was actually protecting herself. From a woman with a fucking gun.

  Time is passing. There’s still no response.

  She closes her eyes. Make this go away. Please. Make this be a dream.

  She’s not talking to God. Who is she talking to?

  She’s shaking now. Worse even than Rosemarie was. She presses her hand against Rosemarie’s shoulder again and allows the shaking to pass through her fingers into the sequins on the blouse, hoping it will electrify her into waking up. What then? An apology for clocking her with a wrench? Beats the alternative.

  “Rosemarie, come on,” Donna says. “Please don’t be hurt.”

  The blood spreading thickly across the floor tells a different story. Rosemarie’s fucking hurt all right. Maybe worse than hurt.

  Donna replays the moment in her mind. Rosemarie was about to pull the trigger, right? That’s why she took a quick swing with the wrench. It happened that way. Her hand was forced.

  She looks at the phone on the wall in the kitchen. She considers the silence of the apartment. A creak upstairs must be Suzette adjusting herself on the recliner in front of the TV. Did Suzette hear the thump? Does sound like that travel up? Might the walls have rattled when Rosemarie fell?

  The gun is just sitting there on the rug, almost touched by blood. If what Rosemarie said is true, Donna curses the woman’s awful brother for bringing it to her. The gun entered the picture, and Rosemarie lost all sense. She thought of it as a way to regain control.

  Donna knows someone—knew someone—who was good in bad spots. For all his other faults, Donnie could always act, whatever the severity of the situation was. Be it a simple mess of broken glass, or a car accident, or deeper and darker things she didn’t know much about, Donnie could always be counted on to respond. Tony Pagnanelli and Ralph Sottile called, needing something, needing help, and he’d be there in a flash. And they reciprocated, his pals. It was the same with her.

  Once, years and years ago at Kings Plaza, she was being followed by someone to her car, and she stopped at a payphone, called Donnie, and he answered, thank Christ, and was standing right in front of her with his bat, Tony and Ralph at his side, ten minutes later. She’d marveled at how fast they’d gotten there.

  Even the practical stuff with Gabe he’d had to handle: the church, the wake, the cemetery. She couldn’t do any of it. It was Donnie who paid the bills, Donnie who signed the forms, Donnie who shook the hands that needed shaking. Part of it was his job. Part of it was just who he was.

  It’s a stupid idea to call him, but the situation doesn’t make sense. He’ll walk her through what to do, give her the guidance she so desperately needs.

  She wonders if she does manage to call him now, if he’ll respond in the same way he would’ve when they were married, if he’ll still feel that deep loyalty to her.

  She doesn’t want to do it, but she’s not sure what else to do.

  She goes to the phone, shaking harder and harder with each step. She dials Donnie’s number, her former number, from memory. She thinks of the cellar. She thinks of Gabe. She fears hearing Donnie’s voice.

  But it’s not Donnie who picks up.

  It’s Tony Pagnanelli. Pags.

  “Donna?” he says, his voice full of shock.

  She breaks down crying.

  “What is it?” he says.

  The words get caught in her throat. “Is Donnie there?” she manages to say.

  “He’s out. Tell me what’s wrong. I’ll help you.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Go ahead and tell me what it is, sweetheart.”

  She tells him, all of it, because what else can she do? He tells her he’ll be right over, not to move, not to call anyone, not to open the door for anyone but him. She says okay and hangs up the receiver and sits at the kitchen table with her back to Rosemarie.

  DONNIE PARASCANDOLO

  Ava takes off her wedding ring and puts it on the counter in a blue plastic bowl. She washes her hands with Dawn dish soap.
She stays facing the sink, looking down at the drain. When she turns back to him, she’s crying. Just a bit, but there are tears on her cheeks and a tremble in her chin. What they’ve done, she feels bad about it.

  “That wasn’t nice?” Donnie says.

  “It was,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “You seemed to like it.”

  “It wasn’t you.” She tosses him a dish towel from a rack next to her.

  He wipes himself off and then walks over to her, still naked, throwing the towel in the sink and leaning against the counter. He reaches out and puts his hands on her chest. Her bra is black, plain, pills of lint on the straps. “I’d like to see these,” he says.

  “Don,” she says, pushing the ring onto her finger.

  He lowers the straps off her arms. She doesn’t stop him. He likes the way she’s half-bursting out of her bra. She’s got good cans for a woman in her fifties.

  She slips the straps back on and puts everything in place. “I’ve just gotta use the bathroom,” she says. “I’ll be right back. The clothes, they’re right there. Get dressed in case Nick comes home.”

  He nods and reaches for the jeans.

  Ava disappears into her bedroom, shutting the door.

  He puts on the jeans without his boxers, which are still balled on the floor. He puts the shirt on next. Ridiculous Atlantic City thing. A little tight on him. Must’ve been a pretty skinny fuck, this Anthony.

  He leans over the sink and drinks water from the tap. He takes a squirt of dish soap and washes his hands first and then rubs some into his chin and rinses it off under the stream.

  The phone rings again.

  “Just let it go,” Ava calls out.

  But he bets it’s her son, so he goes over and picks up. “Yeah?” he says.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Nick says on the other end. Donnie hardly even knows him, but he sure as shit recognizes that voice, though the drunken warble of it has faded.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Donnie parrots back to him.