'At least he's consistent,' I said.
'I think he liked to do it,' she said.
'I think it gave him a thrill.'
'He do it often?'
'Yeah.'
'And you didn't leave.'
'No.'
I nodded and took a bite of my Roman salad. Bibi had stopped eating and sat staring past me as if she were looking at her own past, just beyond my left ear.
'I didn't have any money,' she said.
'He kept it all. I didn't even have a credit card. He'd give me money for food shopping once a week, two hundred dollars, and he'd check the register receipt when I came home and make me give him the change.'
I didn't say anything. You do it long enough and you get a sense when somebody is at the start of a long talk. The best thing is to give them space and wait for them to fill it.
'I didn't have a credit card. I didn't have anyplace to go, even if I had one. He wouldn't let me work. You know I never had a job? I married Marty right after high school.'
Bibi shook her head. Her face was blank but there was painful self-mockery in her voice.
'Fairhaven High School, nineteen seventy-seven, most congenial. Met him down the Cape, bar in Falmouth we used to go to 'cause they didn't card you. He picked me up. He was dangerous.
Everybody was scared of him, but me. I thought he was exciting, you know? A real man.'
Bibi stared down silently at her cheeseburger for a time.
'You got married right away?'
'Three months.'
'Kids?'
She made a sound that had it been less bitter might have been a laugh.
'Marty didn't want kids. Didn't want my figure get ruined, he said. I think he didn't want to share me with a kid, you know?'
'Well,' I said.
'Your figure didn't get ruined.'
She gave me a little automatic smile to acknowledge the compliment.
'Let me join a health club, aerobics, body shaping, that stuff;
Marty said he liked me looking good.'
Bob came by and poured a little more decaf in my cup. I looked at it gloomily. It was better than nothing. It was not, on the other hand, better than an Absolut martini on the rocks with a twist. And the more Bibi Anaheim talked about her marriage, the more I wanted the martini.
'He used to like to punch me around,' she said.
'And then have sex. Called it making up.'
I nodded.
'He had a lot of trouble,' Bibi said, 'getting it up, you know?
I'm not sure he could get it up, he didn't rough me up first.'
'Probably wasn't pleased that you knew that.'
'No, he wasn't. Said it was my fault. Said he had no trouble with the whores.'
'Probably because they were whores,' I said.
She shook her head impatiently.
'I don't know anything about that,' she said.
'He used to go to the whores a lot. Good. Keep him away from me. Bastard gave me the clap once.'
I was quiet. She sat thinking back, looking past me at the lush artifice of the Las Vegas restaurant and probably not seeing it.
'And then Anthony came along,' I said after a while.
'Funny thing,' she said.
'Marty introduced us. He never did that, you know, but he introduced me to Anthony. Figured Anthony was safe, I guess. He's not a tough guy like Marty. And he was married to Julius Ventura's daughter. I guess Marty never thought Anthony would be the one.'
'He was a friend of Marty's?'
'Marty had a lot of guys hang around him. I don't think he had any friends. Everybody was scared of him.'
