“Hey,” the woman offered.
“Hey,” Joe said, and he faced forward and for the first time in weeks he felt happy. Diffuse, childish joy.
Jesus Lord, did Joe Daley love women! Not just fucking them, though fucking was certainly part of it. He enjoyed their company, he was happy in their presence. Their tricks, the smells and makeup and clothes. The power of their clothed bodies! The happy squeeze of cleavage, the rise of the hips under their dresses, the suggestion of nudity up an open skirt. He exulted in it. Joe was dumbfounded when people, especially men-baby brother Michael could be particularly preachy here-suggested there was anything low-down or girl-hating about Joe’s womanizing. Joe couldn’t imagine anyone loving women more or better than he did. How on earth could anyone take seriously the pretense of monogamy in marriage? Joe lumped it in with all the other crazy old relics of Catholicism, like Church Latin and celibate priests and Swiss Guards. What did Joe’s appreciation of other broads have to do with his sincere love for Kat? It just didn’t figure. One had nothing to do with the other. Maybe a smarter guy could understand it. Then again, if some smart-ass ever did figure it out, Joe hoped he would keep it to himself. He did not want any part of a world without women.
Joe raised his empty glass and shook the ice cubes. The bartender ignored him. Joe called him by name, but the bartender pretended not to hear as he hefted a rack of dirty glasses back into the kitchen.
“Wax in his ears.” The redhead shrugged.
“I guess so.”
When the bartender returned, Joe asked loudly for another bourbon rocks.
“Tab’s getting pretty high, Joe.”
“I haven’t been here that long.”
“Not just tonight.”
“Just give me a drink. You’re a bartender not a, a…accountant. Whattaya? What are you shaking your head? Just give me a drink.”
“If it was up to me…It’s not coming from me, Joe.”
Joe gave him a vexed look, a first stirring of trouble.
“Hey, Joe, if it was up to me. I mean, what do I give a shit?”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Just throw in a few bucks, Joe. Make it look good.”
“I don’t have any cash, the banks are closed. What do you want me to do?”
The bartender shook his head. “Can’t do it.”
“Can’t do it? The fuck is that, ‘can’t do it’? How long’ve I been coming here?”
“Long time.”
“Long time is right. Is this how you treat a customer?”
“No offense, Joe, but if you were a regular customer, I’d have cut you off a long time ago. You’re going to drink us out of business.”
“You don’t think I’m good for it?”
The bartender cleared away Joe’s glass and slung the ice into a dump sink. Joe took the act as a provocation and he started to stand, and things might have got worse had the redhead not piped up with “I’ll buy him a drink.”
The bartender, though he was probably relieved to avoid a confrontation with Joe, gave her a look. “He’s a cop, you know.”
“So? I got nothing against cops.”
After he had his drink, Joe lifted the glass toward her. “Thanks.”
She said, “Never a cop when you need one.”
“You need one?”
“Sure.”
A few hours later Joe lay in this woman’s bed. The pillow under his nose stank of her perfume. She was beside him, under a thin blanket, the cool skin of her bottom against his. She snored, fluttery tubercular snores.
The room was dimly lit with reflected street light.
Joe stared at the wallpaper by the bed, a faded flower print. The paper was peeling at the seams. There must have been a room just like this one in Moe Wasserman’s demolished building. Maybe it had flowery wallpaper, too. Probably there’d been lots and lots of rooms like this in the West End. People had lived in those rooms, those boxes, stood in them, slept in them, got born and died in them. Now they were all gone. The rooms didn’t exist anymore except as boxes in the air. Pieces of sky. This room where Joe was lying-it had been a box in the air, too, thirty feet aboveground, until someone had come along and wrapped it in these four walls and floor and ceiling. He was lying in a bed thirty feet off the ground, in a box in the air. A city is a pile of such boxes.
And Amy’s room was a box, splashed with her blood. By now the blood had been scrubbed off, probably. The walls had been repainted. They would re-rent the room as soon as everyone forgot what happened there. It wouldn’t take people long to forget. Amy’s death had meant nothing. The world still turned, people went about their business. Joe should not have been surprised. How many men had he killed in the war? Germans, Italians. Fifty, a hundred, who knew? Why bother to count? He did not give a shit about them. Not then, not now. He would happily have killed more if he’d had the chance. A person was nothing. A bag of bones. Joe Daley included.
29
The consensus among the Daleys was that Ricky, paradoxically, would be the one least devastated by Amy’s murder. He was so deft with his emotions, or maybe just so secretive, that he would slink off like a cat and do whatever it was he did when he was hurt, but he would do it in private. Even to his brothers, Ricky’s composure was a little eerie. He had stood at the wake for hours with a stone face, shaking hands. He had not shed a tear at the funeral or since. It seemed perfectly obvious he would get over Amy’s death. He had loved her, yes, but in the end you did not have to worry about Ricky.
Kat never bought any of it, all the Daley admiration for Ricky, for the way he kept a cool head. She preferred the hotter emotionalism of Joe’s temper or even Michael’s brooding, which at least signaled a vivid interior life. You had to let off the pressure, wasn’t that what Freud and all them had said? She thought there was something childish about Ricky’s inexpressiveness, and she was determined that he would not go unmothered in his hour of need.
All this, at least, was the quick summary of things that Ricky formed when he opened his door to find Kat, all put together in her sweater set and space-helmet of black hair, holding a pan covered with tinfoil. Ricky, barefoot and wearing jeans and a T-shirt, unshowered for three days, felt strangely proud of his dishevelment. By comparison with his coiffed and scented sister-in-law, he was natural and unaffected. He was himself.
“I brought you dinner,” Kat informed him.
“What is it?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s for me, isn’t it?”
“Ricky, whatever I made, you’ll eat.” She bussed his cheek. “Ingrate.”
Kat had never been to Ricky’s apartment before and she paused by the door to survey it. Living room in front with a galley kitchen and a narrow hallway leading back to a bed- and bathroom. The living room was furnished with just a threadbare couch that might once have been saffron yellow but now was too dingy to be any color at all, and too ass-flattened to be comfortable. An unfinished bookcase held a hi-fi set, two long shelves of LP’s, and books on the bottom shelves. Jazz music played. Kat bobbed her head to the strolling rhythm.
“You like it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It’s Miles Davis.”
“I know who he is!” Kat’s tone was surprised. She must have seen Miles Davis on a late-night show or Ed Sullivan or somewhere. She did not remember much except that he was bald and shuffled around the stage as he played.
“Here, take it.” Ricky got the dust jacket and offered it to her. The record was Kind of Blue. “Keep it. It gets
