Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [18]
A quiet man who minds his own business and who doesn’t own a stereo with too large a set of speakers will, in general, get along with his neighbors, and so I did. On my left was a family from Ecuador. They had a twenty-year-old son whom the police came for one night because he had decided that parking people’s cars wasn’t quite as profitable as selling them. His parents knew I had been a cop, and so they asked me to counsel him. I did what I could. After that he decided to raise pit bulls for the dogfights over in Hialeah, but the police hadn’t liked that idea very much either, and so now he was back in community college, trying to find another way into the economy.
Billy Shuster lived in the studio on my right. He was a transvestite who worked as a postman by day. It sounds clichéd, but he really did like show tunes, particularly Ethel Merman’s rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” which for some reason he never played all the way through to the end. It was very anticlimactic in an annoying way. It got so that I could even predict to the second when he would lift the stylus only to set it down at the beginning again.
Sometimes, when Billy left his door open, I’d see him standing at the ironing board in his bra and panties, ironing the clothes he was going to wear that night, his sand-colored Twiggy wig perched on the end of the board like a depressed cat. Billy told me once that he liked me because I brought stability to the building. In his own way, so did he. He had been a tenant there for fifteen years. Sometimes, on cooler evenings, he and Sternfeld played chess on a little tiled table they’d set up in the shade on the small patio behind the hedges. It didn’t seem to matter much to Sternfeld whether Billy was dressed like a man or a woman, though he didn’t curse nearly as much when Billy was in drag. He just didn’t like the fact that his partner usually won their matches.
Later that afternoon, when I pulled up in front of the apartment, Vivian’s red Porsche was parked at the curb, just past the spray of purple bougainvillea that was overwhelming the hedges in front of the building. Sternfeld was sitting in a lawn chair under the eaves, his aluminum walker off to one side. He shielded his eyes from the sun as I came up the three steps that led to the first landing. I looked down the walkway at the closed door of my apartment.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“I’ll give you two guesses,” Sternfeld said. “And it’s not my place.”
“You let her in?”
“She had the key, asshole.”
“You’re right. I forgot about that.”
“You told me she was history,” Sternfeld said.
“She is.”
“Well, I guess history just got reincarnated.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“When are we going back to the Rascal House?” Sternfeld asked. “I’m overdue for a corned beef on rye.”
“Soon,” I said.
“That’s what you said last week.”
When I opened the door, Vivian was sitting at the small table in the alcove next to the kitchen. She stood up and walked into my arms, and I held her to me. She was trembling with fear and relief, as though in great distress she had arrived at a place of possible deliverance, and I knew that I had been waiting a long time for exactly this moment, when every absence and betrayal would be canceled out by a simple embrace—at least temporarily.
I took her chin in my hand and turned her head. There were tears in her dark eyes. Despite myself, I was glad to see her.
“You cut your hair,” I said.
“I hate it,” she said petulantly. “They took too much off.”
“No,” I said. “It looks good.”
I asked her if she wanted anything to drink, then went to the fridge and brought out two Diet Cokes and poured hers into a clean glass. When I came back, she was smoking a Marlboro. I went into the kitchen again and found a lid from an empty jar of mayonnaise and