Carella wondered how many wars it would take.
* * * *
They tried to imagine what this Riverhead neighborhood must have looked like forty years ago.
The elevated-train stops on the Dover Plains Avenue line would have been the same. Cannon Hill Road, and then the stations named after the numbered streets, spaced some nine blocks apart. The end of the line would have signaled an expanse of vacant lots, and then the beginning of the first small town beyond the city itself. Today, those once-empty lots were crowded with low-rise apartment buildings and shops where city melted imperceptibly into suburb.
No longer were there trolley tracks under the elevated tracks, and the traffic was heavier now. Today, Dover Plains Avenue was lined with bodegas where once there had been Italian groceries or Jewish delis. What had earlier been an ice-cream parlor was now a cuchi frito joint. The pizzeria and the bowling alley were perhaps there long ago, but the language spoken in them now was Spanish.
Times had changed, and so had the neighborhood where Alicia Hendricks and her brother, Karl, had once lived. But still anchoring the hood, like pegs at the corners of a triangular tent, were Our Lady of Grace Church, the Roger Mercer Junior High School, and Warren G. Harding High.
Alicia and her brother had each attended both schools. Karl had gone on from Harding High to prison. Alicia had begun work at a restaurant named Rocco’s. They did not expect the restaurant to be there today. But there it was, sitting on the corner of Laurelwood and Trent, a green and white awning spread over the sidewalk, tables outdoors a little early in the season, waiters in long white aprons bustling in and out of the place. ROCCO’s, the sign above the awning read.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Parker said.
The present owner was a man named Geoffrey Lucantonio. His father, now deceased, was the Rocco who’d owned the place when Alicia worked here all those years ago. Geoffrey was seventeen when Alicia took the job. He remembered her well.
‘Sure. I used to fuck her,’ he said discreetly. ‘Then again, so did everyone else.’
Apparently, Alicia’s reputation had preceded her from Mercer Junior High. Well-developed at the age of twelve, she had first gained a following as the ‘vacuum cleaner’ of the seventh grade, a sobriquet deriving from her ability to perform excellent oral sex, a trend that was catching on among pubescent girls as a means of avoiding vaginal penetration and therefore unwanted pregnancies. By the time she reached the ninth grade, she’d tipped to the fact that blowjobs were a form of male exploitation, and she moved on to sex that brought satisfaction to herself as well. It wasn’t long before her phone number was scrawled in telephone booths and on men’s room walls with the advisory ‘For a wild ride, call Alicia.’
‘They used to have these Friday night dances at Our Lady of Grace,’ Geoffrey said. ‘The guys used to line up around the block, waiting to dance with her. Just to get close to her, you know? Those tits, you know?’
Parker could just imagine.
‘And she fell right into my lap,’ Geoffrey said, rolling his eyes. ‘I mean, talk about letting the fox into the chicken coop.’
Genero figured he’d got that backwards.
Parker was a little envious. Beautiful, uninhibited fifteen-year-old coming to work in your father’s restaurant? His own father had never even owned a hot-dog stand!
‘How long did she work here, would you know?’ he asked.
‘Of course I know! Two years. Left when she was seventeen. Went to manicuring school to
Parker almost sighed with him.
* * * *
That Friday afternoon, as they sat at an outdoor table on the sidewalk of a place called Rimbaud’s in a small town perched on a river upstate, eating ice-cream sundaes and sipping thick black espressos, she said, out of the blue, ‘Chaz, from now on, I don’t want to charge you.’
He looked across the table at her.
And suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears.
She was so startled, she almost began crying herself.
‘Chaz?’ she said. ‘Chaz?’ and reached across the table to take his hand. ‘What is it, honey? Please, what is it?’
He shook his head.
Tears spilling down his cheeks.
He took out a handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes.
‘I wish I’d met you sooner,’ he said.
‘Any sooner, you’d be a pedophile,’ she said, and smiled across the table at him, and kept holding his hand.
He began laughing through his tears.
‘Are you doing this because it hasn’t been working for us?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘It
‘I meant… the sex.’
‘Oh, that’ll be fine,’ she said airily, ‘don’t worry about it. We just need more practice at it.’
He nodded, said nothing.
‘We’ve just met each other,’ she said, enforcing her point. ‘We have to keep at it, is all. Learn each other. We have plenty of time.’
He still said nothing.
“The sex is nothing, I’m ready to wait forever for it to work,’ she said. ‘You want to know why? Because you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met. Some guys, in the middle of the night, they like to start complaining about their wives, you know? I know you haven’t got a wife, I’m just trying to explain something. They do that because they suddenly feel guilty about being in bed with a whore. So they blame it on the wife. The wife does this, the wife doesn’t do that, it’s all the wife’s fault.
‘Other guys, they like to tell you how brainy they are, or how macho they are. Middle of the night. This is because they’re paying to get laid, and they want you to realize they don’t
‘I’ve never been to bed with anybody like you, Chaz,’ she said, and reached across the table, and took both his hands in her own again.
‘You always treat me like a lady, Chaz. Always. Well… that’s because I’m a whore, right? I know that. Always treat a lady like a whore, and a whore like a lady, right?’
‘You’re not a whore, Reggie.’
‘You keep saying that, I’ll start believing it.’
‘Believe it,’ he said.
‘Chaz,’ she said, and paused, and looked across the table at him, and said, ‘do you trust me?’
‘Completely.’
‘Then tell me what happened last night.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. When last night?’
‘Where’d you go, for example? What’d you do?’
‘I had some business to take care of. I told you.’
‘Late at night? You didn’t get back to the hotel till…”
‘Yes, Reggie. Late at night.’
