15
On Saturday, my clock radio roused me just before noon, blaring that we were in for a cold snap, which got me wondering what we’d
I dropped Secretariat at the Shell station on Broadway to see what they could do about the heater. The mechanic was a lanky, murmuring dude named Dwayne who had “Butch” embroidered over the pocket of his blue work shirt. Five years after his dad died and left him the station, he was still wearing the old man’s clothes.
“Secretariat off his feed again?” he said. “How ’bout I take him out back and shoot him so you can break in a new nag?” Dwayne had been tending to Secretariat for years, and he never tired of the same horse joke.
“I just can’t bear to let him go,” I said, and told him about the heater.
On the walk back to my place, I called Veronica.
“Mulligan! I was beginning to think you didn’t like me anymore.”
“No chance of that, cutie. What say I take you out on the town tonight?”
“On the town or
She was on to me. “Well,” I said, “that
“Secretariat in the shop again?”
“Yup.”
“Pick you up at seven.”
And she did, driving her slate-gray Mitsubishi Eclipse straight to Camille’s on Bradford Street, where we shared a bottle of wine and ate mounds of spaghetti. Veronica treated, tapping into the five-hundred-dollar monthly allowance from Daddy that supplemented her meager paycheck. Good thing, or I’d have had to do some business with the loan shark eating with his aged mother at a table by the windows. Then it was off to the Cineplex in East Providence for the new Jackie Chan movie, he and his comic-relief sidekick doing a better job of catching the bad guys than I was.
This wasn’t the romantic evening of street prowling and rat watching I’d had in mind, but I was having a pretty good time, especially whenever she leaned over to kiss me. Besides, she had the car keys, so there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Afterward, she came up. We sat together on my bed and watched Craig Ferguson on my sixteen-inch Emerson. She sipped Russian River, her favorite kind of chardonnay, straight from the bottle, and I did the same with Maalox. The police radio, turned down low, chirped benignly in the background. Veronica thought Ferguson was the funniest man on television. I didn’t watch enough TV to know if she had a point.
“Mulligan?” Veronica said, sleep lurking at the edges of her voice. “Are you seeing anybody else?”
I flashed on Dorcas asking, “How many bitches are you fucking now?” Same Mulligan, different woman, better vocabulary.
“Do Polecki and Roselli count?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“Well, then it’s no,” I said.
“Hardcastle says you’ve been stepping out with the blonde in the photo lab.”
“Gloria Costa?”
“Yeah, her.”
“Not happening,” I said. “And Hardcastle is an asshole. You shouldn’t be getting your news from him, and that includes what he writes in his lame column. I’ve got a bad feeling he makes some of it up.”
“Maybe. But I do think Gloria’s sweet on you.”
“I think you could be right.”
The police radio chirped again, making me wonder how I was going to get to Mount Hope if something happened after Veronica went home. I was still thinking about that when she stripped down to her bra and panties and slid under the covers. I didn’t put up a fight. I snapped off the light, took off everything but my boxers, and crawled in beside her. It had been a long time since anyone felt that good in my arms. Maybe no one ever had.
“Mulligan?”
“Um?”
“Is that an erection?”
“God, I hope so.”
“Well, quit poking me with it.”
“You sure? Man my age, no telling when I’ll get another one.”
She laughed, reached under the sheet, and ran a finger along my length, and for just a moment I thought she was relenting.
“Nice try, funny man” she said, “but it’s just not happening until the test results come back.”
I was still trying to think of a snappy comeback when she drifted off. I watched her sleep as my hard-on processed the bad news. Was she really paranoid about AIDS or just trying to slow things down? I didn’t know, and her deep, even breathing told me this was not the time to ask. The ulcer was grumbling, so I got up for another gulp of Maalox, then slid back into bed, buried my face in her hair, and breathed all of her in.
In the morning, I discovered she’d gotten up during the night and turned off the police radio. I decided not to make an issue of it.
Veronica had come prepared, scrubbing her teeth with a yellow toothbrush she pulled from her purse. When she was done, she placed it next to mine in the holder under my bathroom mirror. That seemed promising—and a little scary.
“Anything else you want to store in there? Some Jean Nate? A blow-dryer? I could use some clean towels.”
She laughed. We kissed. The toothbrush stayed.
Veronica lived in an efficiency apartment in Fox Point, the modern red-brick building an unsightly intruder in a neighborhood of well-preserved early nineteenth-century shingle-clad colonials. We swung by there so she could dress for church, then drove to St. Joseph’s, where I’d been an altar boy as a kid. She tried to coax me inside, but I hadn’t been to mass since the sex scandal broke.
I took her car to the diner for one of Charlie’s heart-attack cheddar omelets and the Sunday paper. The savior who stood between me and starvation had already scanned the front page.
“Great headline,” he chuckled, then bent his sweating bald pate over an acre of sizzling bacon.
The head over my story read, ARSON SQUAD IS DUMB AND DUMBER. The managing editor had gotten unexpectedly playful with the layout, juxtaposing photos of Polecki and Roselli with head shots of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, who’d played the title roles in the movie. I scanned the paper for other fire news, but there wasn’t any. Then I called fire headquarters on my cell and confirmed Mount Hope had been quiet overnight.
I picked Veronica up just as St. Joseph’s was emptying the faithful into a day that couldn’t decide between drizzle and sleet. As the worshippers spilled into the street, I recognized three “made men,” four state legislators, and a judge. Tomorrow they’d be back to labor racketeering, truck hijacking, and bribe taking.
At her apartment, Veronica changed into a man’s faded blue oxford shirt and a snug pair of low-rise Levis while I watched and admired the view. I wondered if the shirt had a previous owner of the male persuasion, but once again I kept my mouth shut. By the time we got to O’Malley’s Billiards on Hope Street, the shirt had begun to smell like the woman who was wearing it.
My plan was to teach Veronica how to shoot eight ball. I lost three games out of five. Must have been distracted by the low in those low-rise jeans.
Late that afternoon we lay on my bed and caught an ESPN report out of the Red Sox spring camp in Fort Myers. Jonathan Papelbon, one of the stars of the 2007 World Series, was thumping his chest and saying there was no reason the team couldn’t repeat. “He’s a major-league blowhard,” I said, “but I think he’s going to have another big year.”
And she said, “Why do you care so much about a stupid baseball team?”
Back when you could sit in the center-field bleachers for ten bucks, I spent a lot of weekend afternoons at Fenway with my dad. “Just one World Series championship in my lifetime, that’s all I ask,” he used to say. His heart quit pumping the winter after Mookie Wilson’s grounder skidded between Bill Buckner’s legs.
How do you explain it to the uninitiated? How do you explain why you draped a Curt Schilling jersey over the
