Before My Life Began (46 page)

Trust nobody. Abe was right. If I'd gone upstairs and made the wrong move, said the wrong thing… If I'd lost my temper… I backed into a doorway, looked out both ways. Nobody was following me. I lifted the gun barrel to my nose, sniffed in. I saw myself in our apartment house courtyard and I was on my knees, banging down on rolls of caps with a stone, letting the red paper unroll, pounding on the gray dots.

I shivered, imagining myself biting down on the barrel, recalling the awful feeling when I'd bit down through a steak onto the tines of a fork. I walked at a normal pace, staying close to the buildings, watching the street, on the lookout for slow-moving cars, wondering why I didn't feel more about Abe, why I wasn't crying, why my heart wasn't breaking. I was relieved that he was gone, I realized, and the feeling, to my surprise, did not displease me. Why not? I kept the gun ready, pressed to my leg. I heard men speaking in Spanish, arguing and laughing. In front of an apartment building, four men sat around a small bridge table, drinking beer and playing cards. Behind them, two men straddled chairs backwards. I saw dollar bills held down by rocks. A stand-up lamp was next to the table, its cord running through the air, looped into the window of a first-floor apartment. I didn't want any trouble. I veered sideways, toward the curb, so that I wouldn't have to duck under the cord.

I unzipped my jacket, slipped the gun inside, tucked it under my belt, between my pants and my shirt. Two dark-haired girls were leaning backwards against a car. I could smell their perfume, see their chests rise slightly. They giggled, spoke to me in Spanish, asked if I were lost. One of the men looked up at me from his cards. I smiled with closed lips to show him I meant no harm. He gestured to the girls, winked at me, tossed a card onto the table. Coins clinked in a glass ashtray. The girls laughed, asked me what food I ate to have grown so tall.
“¡Mira! ¡Mira!
Hey,
muchacho grande
, you real cute, you like to meet my friend Nydia?”

Could they see my wedding ring? The girls called to me, asked my name. I didn't look back. I saw the phone booth on the corner, hesitated for an instant, realized that I had already made my decision: I would not telephone. I was on a wide street where the lights were brighter, but the night sky, blocked by the elevated subway above me, the crisscrossing of girders and tracks, was darker. Where was I? The sign said Liberty Avenue. A man in a stained camel's hair jacket, no shirt below, sat in the alcove of a liquor store, a paper bag in his lap. I looked down at a sewer grating, blocked by wet newspapers and garbage, by a mass of something brown that looked like a clump of human hair.

I thought of Beau Jack's wolf-children, racing beneath the city, chewing at Vincent's face, stripping his cheek from the bone. I looked back. A pair of headlights seemed to float along the street toward me, as if in water. The headlights stopped where the men were playing cards. I moved out of view, crossed over, then ran. I heard a train rumble out of the station, saw the entrance on the next block, felt something wet hit the back of my head, glide down my neck. The gun dug into my waist, scraping, knocking against my hip bone. Liberty Avenue. The Fulton Line. I could take it to downtown Brooklyn, to Atlantic Avenue. I could change there for the uptown Seventh Avenue IRT. If I made good connections I could be at the Port Authority Terminal in Manhattan within forty to fifty minutes.

I took the stairs two at a time, fished in my pocket, found change, pushed through the turnstile. They would look for me first at our apartment, then at the office on Flatbush Avenue. They might return to my mother's building. They might figure I'd want to go home first—to Gail and to Emilie, to pack—or that I would go to Abe's apartment. Abe was probably right, that they would never count on me being ready to head straight for a bus station. I walked to the far end of the platform, leaned against a billboard.

If they found me and brought me back to Fasalino, and even if he didn't get rough with me… I clenched my fists, wanted to pound the billboard, to punch through it, through the teeth of the blond model smiling coyly at a man in a tuxedo who was pouring a glass of Scotch. I blinked and experienced one of those moments Gail and I often talked about, of being in a place I'd never been, but of sensing that I'd been there before. Gail had shown me an article that tried to explain
déjá vu
by talking about the images our retinas often took in during the splitsecond before our minds registered, rationally, what it was we were actually seeing. In that split second, as in a dream, whole stories—entire lives—could pass, and we would think those moments and lives had taken place, not an instant before, but in some other distant time, in some other life.

What I saw in that moment was a dream I once had, or thought I'd had, of being on the subway platform late at night, alone, on my way to a party. I'd forced Gail to stay home—we'd argued, she'd pouted—because I knew, somehow, as surely as I'd ever known anything, that if we went together, leaving Emilie behind, we would all die.

I was very frightened. Gail and I lay in one another's arms, my head on her chest, my cheek against her swollen breast, and it was clear to me that I had told her of my fears—my dream—for she was soothing me, telling me that it wasn't so, that it was only a dream. Why should I continue to believe that I would poison her life with mine? Why should I be so frightened of my feelings—of my desire to be tender and gentle?

I was nineteen years old, almost the age Abe was when he had gone to Mr. Rothenberg the first time. I was nineteen years old and I was living my first life, and in that instant when I wondered if what was happening was happening for the first time or if I were only reliving the remembered moment of a dream I'd once had, what I wanted more than anything in the world was simply to be holding Gail and explaining to her that what seemed so crazy to me was not that men like Abe and Rothenberg and Fasalino and Vincent led the lives they led and did the things they did, but that their lives existed at the same time ours did—parallel to ours somehow—within the same universe. How could it be? How could we be in our bed, the lights out, fondling Emilie, while at the same moment a man like Vincent could be a few miles away firing a small piece of metal into the skull of someone I loved? And where, I wanted to know—this was the part that made my stomach tighten, that was hardest to make sense of—where was the difference?

I heard the girls laughing. I looked up, muscles tense, expecting, I realized, to see that the two Spanish girls had followed me. How long had my mind been drifting? Two couples were coming toward me, their arms around one another's waists. The girls wore silk kerchiefs, tight skirts split at the calves, high-heeled shoes that clacked on the concrete like cleats in a locker room. The guys were about my age and wore black motorcycle jackets, pegged pants. They stopped and kissed, their girlfriends' mouths pumping and sucking. I tried not to stare. I tried to look at them without looking at them.

You
won't hurt yourself, will you?

No. I wouldn't hurt myself. Not if I could help it. Gail's words were the same, each time I left home. One of the girls tugged on her boyfriend's sleeve. He was tall, only an inch or so shorter than me, oily black hair slicked back into a D.A. He tossed a penny onto the tracks, then another. His girlfriend told him to stop, that the train was coming. In the distance, at the vanishing point of the tracks, I saw small dots of white and red. The tall guy pushed his girlfriend away. “Geronimo—!” he shouted, then leapt down onto the train tracks, landing squarely. The girls shrieked. People from the other end of the platform hurried toward us. Was the guy crazy? The train was roaring toward us, banging from side to side, the lights growing larger. The guy stood on the tracks, feet spread on the gleaming rails, smiling broadly, head thrown back as if he intended to let the train roll right over him, to catch it in his teeth.

He was playing it awfully close. My heart bumped. What if his shoe got caught, if he tripped? I remembered an old war movie in which a soldier gets his boot stuck in a railroad track while crossing a train yard. When the train roared across the screen, blacking it out, the whistle blasting, I'd covered my eyes and felt sick.

I moved fast, to jump down, but the other guy held my arm.

“Don't be crazy, guy—Frankie, he does this all the time.”

Frankie, in the well of the subway, had two hands on the platform, for leverage. He vaulted up easily, as if he were getting out of a swimming pool. He brushed himself off.

If the word were already out, or if they heard about what happened later on, after they got home. If they remembered me…

I put my hands in my jacket pocket, felt the gun through the inner lining of my pocket. Frankie's girlfriend was all over him, yelling at him about how scared he made her. She was shrieking and laughing, mascara running in a thin black line from the corner of her right eye. One hand on her ass, Frankie brushed his hair back with his other hand, stared at me across her shoulder, then plunged his tongue into her mouth. The train bore down on us. The other girl had both hands pressed over her ears. The train doors slid open. When they entered the rear door of the front car, I moved sideways, walked through the first door of the second car.

I sat by myself, picked at the cane cushion. There were eight or ten men in the car—no women at this hour—and a few were asleep. When his own father died, my father told me, they placed pennies on his eyes. The train windows were smudged a watery tan. There were always choices. Abe was right. I was choosing not to telephone Gail. I closed my eyes, tried to force my father's face into my head. I wished he could have lived long enough to have known Gail, to have held Emilie. The train swung from side to side, out of the station, high above the street, rocking around curves. From a distance it would seem tiny, these tons of steel and glass and wire—a mere necklace of pale-yellow beads moving noiselessly across the horizon.

The train was slowing down. Grant Avenue. We were near the Cypress Hills cemetery. Why was my father still crying? Why did he love me? Did he agree with me that, for the sake of my wife and daughter, I was doing the right thing? I wanted to have the chance to be the kind of father to my own child that I'd always wanted him to be to me. I smiled. Gail would understand that, wouldn't she? Later I would tell her all about what had happened and why I'd done what I'd done, though she would probably turn her back on me at first, fold her arms across her chest. The train doors closed. We moved again. I kissed Gail's cheek, from behind—she was at the window, looking out—and when I saw her turn on me, her eyes were filled with something beyond rage. A fist closed around my heart.

Later?

I rose from the seat, one hand pressed over my heart. Didn't I know? Couldn't I understand? My mother was shaking her head, laughing at me for my innocence.
Later?
Didn't I know that I would never see Gail or Emilie again?

The train heaved to one side and I stumbled, grabbed at an overhead strap. Below me, an old man looked up from his newspaper. His eyes were kind and he set the paper down beside him, ready to help me if I fell. He put one hand over his right eye, to keep away the glare from the ceiling lights. I moved backwards, sat. The man disappeared behind his paper. I heard my heart tapping steadily against the wall of my chest, but there was nothing squeezing it anymore.

It had probably never occurred to Abe that a loser like Vincent was capable of doing Fasalino's dirty work. Did he have a moment at the end, I wondered, like the one he'd wished for—a second or two to look back, to take stock?

Things seemed clear enough. With Abe and Rothenberg gone, I was no real threat to the others. Still, they would probably keep after me for a while. Little Benny and Lefty and Monk and Turkish Sammy could be taken care of easily enough. If they survived, they'd work for whoever paid the rent. As soon as the killing stopped, the police would lose interest. I looked through the window to the city beyond, out over all the rooftops and on to the horizon, where the air was such a pale, misty black that it was hard to see the dividing line between city and sky.

The less Gail knew, the safer she was. I would protect her the way Abe had protected me. No letters, no calls, no messages. I leaned back, closed my eyes, saw my mother dancing in slow circles with Beau Jack. I looked at the station signs, thick black letters on white. Crescent. Chestnut was next. Then Montauk and Linwood and Van Siclen. We'd be at Atlantic Avenue in less than ten minutes. I looked behind me, saw the two guys and their girlfriends out on the platform, moving backwards as the train began to move forward.

I knew, of course, what would be in the safe-deposit box. It was simple enough to take on a new identity. All you had to do was keep your eye on the obituary columns until you found somebody your own age who had died. Then you went down to City Hall, bought a copy of his birth certificate, took his name for your own. The rest was easy. The lights raced by, flickering like enormous fireflies. I stared at my reflection, suspended in the dusty window above the city, superimposed on the city as in a double exposure.

The train was rocking us gently. I imagined that we were moving out past the Philadelphia suburbs. Gail's feet were tucked under her, her head on my chest, and we were heading for Maryland. We kissed, and at that moment the train swerved, our teeth clicked. We laughed. Gail touched my mouth with her fingers. Was I sorry about our decision? Would I regret it later on? Would I hate her and resent her for taking away my freedom, for stealing from me all the other lives I might have had? She hated it when we were apart. She wasn't tempted by other men, but it made her feel crazy and scared—as if she were going to crack open, as if her parents were right to worry about her—because without me there she would begin to feel that she couldn't remember me. She would begin to feel that she couldn't hold onto the feelings she had toward me when we were together. Would I forgive her for being weak in that way? When she concentrated, trying to envision me, to conjure me up, she would lose a piece of me at a time, as if I were being erased—first my hair, and then my forehead, and then my eyes, and then my nose, and then my mouth…