Mafia Girl (15 page)

“Are you glad I called?”

“You ask me things I can’t answer,” he says.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Is there a difference?”

“Yes.” There’s a pause of like four hours. “Why don’t you trust me, Michael?”

“I don’t trust anyone.”

“Fucking cop.”

“Yeah,” he says, a smile in his voice.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He doesn’t answer, which is what I expect.

“Do you want me to?”

He exhales. “I don’t know.”

Which isn’t no.

“And Michael…”

“What?”

“Answer the phone, okay?”

He laughs softly and hangs up.

When we get back
to school on Monday morning, Mr. Wright’s secretary comes into first period English and hands me a note, written on heavy beige paper with The Morgan School in embossed purple letters at the top.

Please see me after class
.

The adrenaline pours out so hard I feel like I could levitate. I pass the note down to Clive. He reads it and looks up, and we stare at each other in a deep, meaningful way for a total of ten seconds.

I look at the clock and there’s another twenty minutes until the end of class, which seems like a century, so I start to doodle, nervously writing words like
retribution
,
pay back
, and
fraud
in the back of my notebook, pressing down so hard that I break the point and rip through the page, and in some small way, violating the paper helps.

When class ends, I walk to Mr. Wright’s office, but he’s on the phone with a parent who’s ranting about something stupid because I hear him say, “I understand, I understand,” about fifty times and, “yes, we take those things seriously,” and then another dozen or so “I understands,” and some other stuff about “social conscience,” and I can only imagine how many of those calls he juggles every day.

Finally he comes out for me and I follow him into his office. It’s kind of prep-school cozy, filled with dark brown wooden furniture and a green velvet couch and some comfortable looking green-and-blue plaid armchairs on navy carpet. Lots of bookshelves with boring kinds of academic books and the ginormous Oxford English Dictionary that no one ever looks at because it’s so heavy and the writing is teensy, and really, TMI, right?

He points to the chairs and I sit down. He sits behind his desk and removes his round tortoise shell glasses and rubs his eyes, which are bloodshot, as if he didn’t sleep much last night.

“Since impropriety is not tolerated in any form and I’m willing to go the distance to prove that, I’ve decided to have an outside agency recount the ballots.”

I’m about to say thank you and then stop. I nod.

Mr. Wright stares at me, as if he’s expecting to find some kind of higher truth on my face. I meet his gaze and wait.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he says.

Thanksgiving in my house
begins way before Thanksgiving when my mom starts to put about twelve leaves onto the antique mahogany dining table and sends out the white linen tablecloths to be starched and ironed and the silver candlesticks to be polished. She sets up all the folding chairs because she says she can’t think straight unless she can visualize where everyone will sit and where every platter will go, which is ridiculous but I know by now that you can’t argue with her. So when I have breakfast I sit at the end of the table and lift up the white cloth and put down a place mat and try not to make crumbs because if I do she’ll smack my head and have a meltdown.

What we do for Thanksgiving is invite about half the neighborhood over, which includes Ro’s entire family and their cousins and all of ours and Anthony’s loser friends, and when we start to count up all the people it usually comes to about forty. Then the question is how many turkeys and Anthony always plays big shot.

“Ma, leave it to me, okay?”

A week before Thanksgiving, he comes home with his trunk filled with like five, thirty-five pound turkeys from I don’t know where because he’s afraid if he doesn’t bring home enough he’ll get killed, but my mom sees them and yells.

“Anthony, what were you thinking, eh? Look at this kitchen. How many ovens do I have?”

“Three, Ma.”

“So how am I going to cook five turkeys?”

He brings two over to Ro’s and her mom has to cook them and then Dante usually steals a red wagon from some kid in the neighborhood and drags them back home that way.

This Thanksgiving because my dad is home and we’re not sure how long that will last, we go a little overboard and get two cases of Dom because if this is his last Thanksgiving here, we’re going to make it memorable. And then we order huge flower arrangements for the table and desserts from Ro’s dad because after all the cooking, my mom draws the line at baking.

Before vacation we get a ton of homework and after dinner I go upstairs and start doing it and then stop to think about the recount again and how screwed up the election was. And then out of the blue I start wondering what Michael does for Thanksgiving, if anything, and for no reason at all I start to imagine that he probably has a loser Thanksgiving and that thought doesn’t leave my head.

Then I wonder whether he has parents and where they live if he does and about brothers and sisters and the house where he grew up and yada, yada, yada, so, you know what’s coming. I decide that at night I’m going to call him and find out because he said I didn’t know anything about him, and I want to, have to, know more.

It’s easier for me to call him in the middle of the night. My head wakes me at some point after two and, almost instinctively, I pick up the phone. When it starts to ring my head gets totally crazed and I get filled with longing and think about starting out by telling him that I’m naked under the covers, but decide nuh-uh, I could never do that because he’d just hang up on slutty me.

On the third ring, he answers and waits. Didn’t he ever learn the word hello?

“Michael?

“Yeah.”

“Hi.”

“Hi, Gia.”

“You in bed?”

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“On the Henry Hudson.”

“What for?”

“Waiting.”

“For?”

“Speeders.”

This is not what I expected. “You’re still on nights?”

“For a while, yeah.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you talk?”

“Nothing else going on.”

“I miss you.”

Silence.

“You miss me?”

“Gia…”

“I know you do, you bastard. I hope you hurt.”

He half laughs.

“So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

He snorts.

“What? Going home?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s that?”

“Baltimore.”

“To see your mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she cook—the whole Thanksgiving thing?”

“I cook,” he says.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“She doesn’t like to?”

Silence.

“It’s hard for her.”

“How come?”

“Long story.”

“What about your dad?”

Silence.

“No dad,” he says finally.

“Did he…die?”

“Yeah, he’s dead.”

I wait, expecting him to go on, but he doesn’t.

“Is it cold out?”

He laughs. “Yeah.”

“So what, you just sit in the car with the heat on?”

“Right.”

“I wish I was there. To keep you warm.”

“You’re doing that.”

I laugh.

“Shit,” he says suddenly. “Gotta go.”

He hangs up and I stare at the phone.

Progress.

Someone from John Plesaurus’s office
calls to say that John would like to messenger me some of the shots from the photo shoot, which is totally cool because I didn’t expect to see them until they ran in the magazine.

“Tell him thank you, I really appreciate it.”

Only it occurs to me that I probably do not want the envelope arriving at my house because then my mom or dad might open it along with the AmEx bill and
People
or Blue Cross garbage and solicitations from the church, and if the pictures look pornographic, forget the bakery, they’ll chain me to a pipe in the basement for the rest of my life. So instead I give them Clive’s name and address and tell them that would be a preferable move.

When Clive gets home from school he calls. “It’s here, Gia, I have the envelope.”

“Open it, open it,” I shout, my foot tapping on the floor. There’s a pause and I hear paper being torn and then paper rustling, then more rustling.

“Oh my God, Gia!” he yells. “You won’t believe these pictures…
Oh my god!
”

“What? What?” I scream, jumping up and running down the stairs and getting into a cab barefoot and telling the driver to “go faster, go faster, go faster,” and he probably thinks I’m having a coronary, which I am. Finally we get to Clive’s and I’m so nervous I drop the phone and have to go searching for it on the filthy floor of the cab and then I sprint past the doorman who already knows me and waves me in, and I get into the elevator and the doors open on Clive’s floor.

He’s pasted the pictures up on a wall and I am totally out of my mind and hysterical because they are positively
incendiary
.

“I may just have to sleep with John Plesaurus to thank him,” I say, only half kidding. “I mean just look at these pictures.”

“Gia, you are a born model,” Clive says. “The camera loves you.”

Except for iPhone shots and pathetic family photos from when I was little, the only pictures, I’ve really seen of myself have been awful graduation pictures, where your face looks pasty because they white out your zits, or those photobooth candids, which only show a mini version of your face and neck and you have an idiotic grin on your face or your eyes are closed, but not any kind of close-ups of my face and body.

So the first thing I do is take the best two shots—that show my entire naked back with me turning my face around over my shoulder and doing this hot vamp thing with my eyes—and put them in an envelope. Clive and I go to the post office and I overnight them to Michael, who, of course, has no idea that I even know where he lives and will probably be pissed to find out that I did all this detective work on him, but whatever. So then Clive and I celebrate by going out to Per Se, this over-the-top restaurant in the Time Warner Center. We have gnocchi Parisienne with tarragon custard and cauliflower mushrooms and carrots with fines herbes and beurre rouge and some other entrees just to taste them. We try to order wine but they just smile and shake their heads because even though we show our IDs, they know they’re laughably fake. So we go with San Pell and even though I don’t know what I’m eating, it all tastes so fabulous that it feels like I’ve died and gone to heaven and Clive charges the seven hundred dollar bill to his dad.

I call John Plesaurus when I get home. “You are such a genius.”

Of course he loves being told what he already thinks about himself.

“Gia, you were a perfect model, really, and you’re so incredibly beautiful, and you know what?” He takes a deep breath and then there’s like this thirty-second pause. “More than anything, I’d like to take pictures of your extraordinary body.”

What follows is this embarrassing three-hour silence on the phone because hello, John is, what, like forty-five, and that is so not what I expected to hear from him and how do I answer that?

“Naked pictures?” I finally blurt out.

“Mmm, really beautiful nudes, but just for me,” he says. “No one else would see them.”

I swallow hard. “John…do you know who I am?”

Another pause.

“Yes, so?” he says in this supercool innocent way.

“So?” I laugh. “So? So John, my dad would chop you up into little pieces and leave you at a Dumpster if he knew you said that to me.”

He doesn’t take that entirely seriously, which he should, and sort of laughs it off.

“Gia, it’s just a thought or maybe just my fantasy, okay, so why don’t we leave it at that?”

Then I crack up and it breaks the mood and I thank him again and hang up and then stare at the phone and go
holy crap
and pray the feds haven’t bugged it and that this doesn’t come out on the front page of the
New York Post
or a supermarket tab tomorrow.

When my cell vibrates
exactly two days later in the middle of the night, I wake up with a start and try to clear my head.

It’s him
an excited little voice in my head sings, and I’m trying to guess in those few seconds how he’s going to react to seeing the pictures. Pissed because they’re too hot and he thinks I’m too young and maybe a total slut? Or blown away and turned on because he gets to stare at half of my naked body in the privacy of his own home?

Based on what I know about Michael, I decide that nothing is simple and that he’ll probably be feeling a freakin’ combo of the two and he won’t know what to say or feel or do, but just the fact that he’s calling…

I answer then wait for him to talk because for once in his life maybe he’ll say hello and start a conversation the way nine-tenths of the people on the planet do.

But he doesn’t know hello. Or even hi.

“Gia?”

“Mmm.”

“Who took these pictures?”

“Why?”

“Tell me.”

“
Vogue
. A photographer for
Vogue
.”

“You’re going to be in the magazine?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.”

“Do you like them?”

He exhales. “Yeah.”

“Just yeah?”

“No, not just yeah.”

The wattage rises without him even being in the same room. I smile. “I’m glad. I wanted them to blow you away.”

His half laugh.

“God, Michael, you’re so impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because you hold back, you’re so afraid or whatever.”

“Yeah, or whatever.”

I yawn. I can’t help it. Only it’s not exhaustion—it’s not enough oxygen to the brain from speed breathing because he called.

“Go back to sleep, baby,” he says, maybe because he can’t think of anything else after that, otherwise he’s afraid of where the conversation will go with the pictures and all, but then again, I don’t imagine phone sex is exactly his thing. “You have school tomorrow.”