Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life (9 page)

And Mick
exhaled.
 
And even smiled.
 
She could take care of herself just fine, he
decided.
 
And he was inordinately pleased
to know it.

The rain
didn’t stretch as far as Brooklyn, and they walked, side by side, to Roz’s
brownstone.
 
What amazed Roz was the fact
that a Town Car was waiting out front when they arrived.
 
She didn’t realize Mick had even spoken to
his driver.
 
But apparently he had.
 
Deuce was standing at the passenger door,
waiting to open it for Mick, when they walked up.

She smiled
at Mick. “Very efficient,” she said.

“You hire
good people,” Mick said, “you get good results.”
 
Then he looked at the series of
brownstones.
 
“Which one is you?” he
asked.

She pointed
at the third from where they stood.
 
“That one,” she said.

“Very nice,”
Mick said.
 
“Reminds me of that
brownstone on the Cosby Show.”

The Cosby
Show?
 
“And that’s where the similarities
end,” Roz said with a smile.
 

“What is
it?
 
A converted apartment building?”

“That’s
right.”

As they
walked up the stoop and he opened the door of her building, he was pleased with
her.
 
She had good taste, for one thing,
and the good sense not to live just anywhere.

They entered
the nice looking building, and he walked her up to her apartment on the second
floor.
 
It was a quiet, clean, nice
environment.
 
He was pleased.

When Roz
pulled out her key and unlocked her door, she turned to him.
 
And there returned those warring emotions
again.
 
On the one hand, she felt a
strong emotional attraction to him too, an attraction she also felt at the
theater, but she thought it had died as soon as he mucked up their connection
with talk of sex.
 
For some reason she
felt as if he was sabotaging their connection on purpose.

But she felt
differently now.
 
A man who would see her
home by way of the gritty Subway line, and would protect her from harm almost
instinctively, and would get such a massive boner just by having her on his
lap, changed her mind about him.
 
He was
crude and rude as hell, she’d already seen those sides of him.
 
But there was another side too, a side that
seemed capable of truly caring for her.
 
He didn’t know her like that yet.
 
He was, despite what he had said, still a stranger to her.
 
But the potential was there.
 
And a part of her wanted to see where that
potential could take them.

But another
side of her, perhaps the bigger side, was telling her to pump her brakes and
wait.
 
This guy was the real deal.
 
This guy could really break her heart.
 
She’d had that happen to her before.
 
She couldn’t bear to experience that again.

She decided
to leave it to fate. She decided to see where he would take it.
  
“Do you want to come in?” she asked him.

Mick smiled,
and folded his arms.
 
“Now that’s
progress.
 
No longer a cannibal threat,
am I?”

“You’ve been
very nice to me.
 
And you’ve been a
gentleman.
 
Yes, you have.
 
Things change. Perspectives change.”

“Yes, but I’m
still the man who propositioned you.”

Roz
hesitated.
 
“I know.”

Mick studied
her.
 
“Does that mean you’ve changed your
mind about my proposition?”

“No,” Roz
said firmly.
 
“I’m not spending the night
with you.”

Good, Mick
thought, and then was amazed he had thought it.
 
He wanted her badly.
 
But not like
this.
 
“I’d better go,” he said.
 
“I’ve got some work to do.”

That
surprised Roz.
 
“Tonight?”

“Every
night.”

Roz was
curious now.
 
“What kind of work do you
do?”

She didn’t
want to know, Mick thought.
 
“I’m a
businessman,” was all he was going to say about it.

That was
obvious, Roz thought.
 
And it was also
his business.
 
“Well, thank you for the
lift.”

“By way of
an accident.
 
By way of the Subway.”

Roz
laughed.
 
“By all those ways, yes,” she
said.
 
“But thank you.”
 
She extended her hand.

Mick took
her hand, and held it, and didn’t want to let it go.
 
Because he still wanted her.
 
He wanted her so badly he was getting aroused
just feeling her little hand in his.
 
But
he didn’t like the intensity of his feelings for a woman he barely knew.
 
Because Roz, despite her strength and
toughness, was fragile in his eyes.
 
She
was like that warning at the Pottery Barn: you break it, you own it.
 
He wasn’t at all sure if he wouldn’t break
it, and he was certain he was not ready to own it.
 
He knew what he had to do.

 
“Goodbye, Rosalind.
 
Take care of yourself, as I know you will.”

“You better
know it,” Roz said with a smile.

He released
her hand.
 
And left.

When Roz
entered her apartment, she found herself hurrying to her living room window to
watch him leave.
 
He walked out of the
building, got into his limo, and without giving her or her apartment a backward
glance, drove away.
 

She turned
away from the window, leaned against the frame, and found herself in tears.
 
She always did it wrong.
 
When he wanted her, she nearly took his head
off and accused him of being some heartless sex pervert, and then even worse, a
psychopathic cannibal.
 
When she decided
she might just want him, he was understandably no longer interested.
 
She shook her head.
 
Typical Roz.
 
She was always going when she should have been
cumming
.
 
She couldn’t get it
right if her life depended on it.
 
At
least that was what her mother used to say.
 
And she knew that was what everybody else was going to say when she
finally left New York, and her dream deferred, behind.

She even
thought about Mick’s offer to backdoor her into Barry Acker’s play.
 
Although she didn’t feel bad about turning
him down, mainly because such a move would be wrong on every level, she knew
most people, including Betsy, would disagree.
 
Get in however you can get in
,
they’d say,
and prove yourself
later
.
 
But the problem was in the proving.
 
Because Mick was right.
 
She was
the weakest dancer on stage today, and could have easily been the weakest
actress too.
 
And despite what Mick said,
thirty-two wasn’t the time for an actress to still be hustling to break
through.
 
Thirty-two was the time for her
to be long past her debut, and in her prime.
 
Not just starting up, but starting to wind down.

Ten years of
hustle.
 
Ten years of blood, sweat, and
tears.
 
And what did all of those years
net her?
 
No breakthrough, not even a
career anymore.
 
Just more hustle.
 
Just a satchel filled with hopes and dreams
and other men’s schemes.
 

She pushed
away from her window frame and headed for her bedroom.
 
Forget Mick.
 
Forget Barry and his rejection.
 
Forget fucking Broadway.
 
She was
going to bed.
 
She was getting off a
stage nobody was inviting her onto in the first place.
 
This day had been long enough.

Three weeks
later and Mick was back in town.
 
The
limousine he owned and used whenever he came to town was now repaired and was
pulling in front of the luxurious Carson-Benning hotel just as he was walking
out.
 
The valet hurried to open the
limousine door for him, and he got into the backseat.
 
It had already been a long day of business,
and wasn’t looking like a particularly fantastic night, but he had promised
Barry.
 
That was why he was taking this
long-ass drive out to Jersey for dinner with the Ackers.
 

Deuce
McCurry, his driver, was thrilled to no longer have to drive his boss around in
that Town Car loaner, in what he considered to be a toy car compared to what he
was accustomed to driving, but Mick wasn’t giving it a second thought.
 
He wasn’t giving his business commitments a
second thought either. He wasn’t even thinking about the Ackers.
 
As he sat in that backseat, as Deuce drove
past iconic symbols of New York City like snapshots of familiar places, Mick
couldn’t stop thinking about Rosalind.

He
remembered when he was in Vegas a few months prior, and spent time with Reno
Gabrini and his wife Trina.
 
He
remembered how wonderful their love seemed at that time.
 
Reno and
Tree
,
as Reno called her, seemed so good together.
 
She didn’t take guff from him, and he didn’t take guff from her.
 
But the love, the passion, was as vivid as a
leaf in hand.
 
Mick wanted that kind of
love.
 
He wanted it so badly that it
pained him sometimes.
 
But he was no
romantic bleeding heart.
 
He knew the
chances of finding a woman like Tree, a woman who could love a hard man like
him unconditionally, was as plausible as finding a genie in a bottle.

But then he
met Roz.
 
Rosalind
.
 
Mick leaned his
head back, his eyelashes so long his eyes looked closed, and smiled with one
side of his mouth upturned just thinking about her.
 
He’d been thinking about her for the past
three weeks.
 
She was certainly different
than Mick’s usual type.
 
And it was a
plus in her favor because his usual type, the models and the businesswomen and
the socialites, never did shit for him.
 
They turned him on sexually for a night, maybe even a couple nights, but
then he wanted nothing more to do with them.
 
And he was no kind lover.
 
When he
dumped them, he dumped them, and if they tried any tricks to get back with him
he showed them better than he told them what kind of fucker he really could
be.
 
Because Roz was wrong.
 
There wasn’t a kind bone in his body.
 
None.

But the fact
that she thought there was, and that he had been what she said was
nice
to her, made him feel some kind of
crazy way.
 
Maybe even some kind of happy
way.
 
Hell Reno Gabrini was a hard
motherfucker too, and he had the love of a good woman.
 
Mick didn’t see why he couldn’t find that
kind of love too.

Barry Acker
said that a good woman, the kind of woman who could make you laugh, was as good
as gold.
 
Roz certainly made Mick
laugh.
 
And although he almost blew it by
attempting to turn her into a booty call, he believed they made amends.
 
Because she was no bed action chick.
 
She was no easy lay.
 
She was definitely a keeper.
 
What weighed heaviest on Mick’s mind had
nothing to do with deciding whether or not he would keep her.
 
It was more about whether or not, after she
found out the harsh, cruel, true nature of his being, if she would want to keep
him.

That was the
crust of it.
 
That was the heart of the
matter.
 
That was probably the real
reason why no other woman had ever cracked his shell.
 
Because, when it came to navigating those
murky waters of the heart, Mick Sinatra was Pottery Barn fragile too.
 
If Roz broke his heart, she was going to own
it.
 
She was going to have a piece of him
no other human being ever had.
 
And that
shit, the idea that he could need a woman so badly that he was willing to be
that vulnerable, scared him more than any gangster he ever faced ever could.

But even
with all of that, he couldn’t stop thinking about Rosalind.
 

He liked
that grit he saw in her.
 
If somebody
would have told him a month ago that he could even consider bothering with some
struggling actress who’d been trying to make her dreams come true for ten
years, he would have told that person to kiss his ass.
 
He didn’t like unrealistic people who gave
into fantasies and fairy tales and dreams that were never coming true.
 
But he didn’t believe Rosalind lived in any
fantasyland.
 
He believed she was a
sensible, practical girl, a realist to her core.
 
She knew her dream might not come true.
 
That was why she went to college, got herself
educated, and now was able to teach acting to make ends meet. But she was
willing to get out there and hustle and try anyway.
 
She failed.
 
But she tried.
 
Mick loved her for
that.

Then Mick
frowned.
 
He loved her for that?
 
What the fuck was he thinking?
 
This woman was turning him into some softie
already and he’d only seen her once.
  
He
didn’t love her like that?
 
He didn’t
love her at all!

But he
couldn’t get her off of his mind.
 
Even
as they approached the George Washington Bridge, and was about to make that
journey into Jersey, Roz was still on his mind.
 
Then he thought about her fears, and how she thought he might boil her
like a lobster and eat her for dinner, and he was smiling again.
 
And thinking about her smile, and her walk,
and her beautiful face.
 
And it suddenly
felt inevitable.
 
Inexplicable.
 
But inevitable.
 
He pressed the intercom button.

“Yes, sir?”

“We’re going
to make a stop first.”

“Here in New
York, sir?”

“Yes,” Mick
said.
 
“In Brooklyn.”

Deuce
smiled.
 
He didn’t understand Roz, but he
liked her too.
 
“Yes, sir,” he said, and
headed in that direction.

Roz and
Betsy walked slowly toward their apartment building.
 
Roz had been at the acting studio all
evening, and Betsy had been on another audition.
 
She wasn’t selected, and she was pissed.

“But the walrus,”
she said, “oh boy.
 
They loved her!
 
I told them I can play an ugly girl.
 
Give me some makeup, geez, that’s all it
takes.
 
But they wouldn’t give me the
time of day.”

“Because
makeup is never all it takes,” Roz said.
 
“Ugly isn’t a look.
 
Ugly is a
state of mind.
 
I told you that.
 
You go in there twisting your mouth and
walking as if you have some affliction, you can forget it.
 
That’s not what they want.”

“Well what
do they want then?”
 
Betsy was
frustrated.
 
“They said the character was
an ugly duckling type.
 
That means she
has to be ugly, right?”

“But what
kind of ugly, Bess?
 
Was her attitude
ugly?
 
Was her past life ugly?
 
Or was it just a physical thing?
 
If you go on an audition thinking only
physical, then they’ll never pick you.
 
They want you to think outside the box.
 
They want you to be creative.
 
Anybody can play ugly.
 
But how
many actresses can
be
ugly?”

Betsy smiled
and shook her head.
 
“You are too deep
for me, girl.
 
You’re a really good
teacher.
 
And not a bad actress, either.”

“Not bad
doesn’t translate into good.”

“You can’t
have everything, Roz.
 
Some people can do
it, and some people can teach it.
 
I’ll
bet it’s a rare thing for somebody to be able to do both.
 
I mean think about it.
 
How many acting coaches have ever made it
big?
 
None.
 
That’s how many!
 
You can’t have it all.”

Roz didn’t
understand that.
 
It made no sense to her
that teachers couldn’t be good doers too.

But what she
really didn’t understand, when she and Betsy turned the corner onto their
block, was the fact that a stretch limousine was parked in front of their
building, Deuce McCurry was standing at the passenger door, and Mick Sinatra
was walking out of their building’s front door.
 
Her heart began to soar.

Betsy,
however, was confused.
 
“What’s he doing
here?” she asked.
 
Then that eternal hope
that kept many an actress going, quickly emerged.
 
“Maybe he’s got a part for us after all!”

But before
Betsy could began to run Mick down and make a fool of herself, Roz stopped her
and pulled her back.
 
“No, Bess,” she
said.
 
“I’m sure that’s not it.”

Betsy
frowned.
 
“Then what does he want?” she
asked.

Roz didn’t
exactly know either, but she was thrilled by the possibilities.
 
It had been three weeks since she last saw
him that rainy night at her door, but not a day went by when he didn’t at least
casually cross her mind.
 
And it wasn’t a
heartwarming feeling for her.
 
It was a
feeling that she had blown it.
 
It was
the feeling that she had allowed her past pain with her ex to cloud what any
fool could see was a magnificent prospect.
 
Her ex Carmelo, once again, had won.
 
But seeing Mick coming out of her building gave her hope too.
 
But unlike Betsy’s hope, it wasn’t based on
what he could do for her career.
 
It was
based on what he could do for her heart.
 
Because he’d already, after just one night, touched a nerve.

Mick didn’t
see them coming until he was about to get into his limo and Deuce was opening
the back door.
 
Deuce saw her first.

“I believe
that’s her coming now, sir,” he said, as he looked down the sidewalk.

Mick looked
too and saw Roz, along with that blonde friend of hers, walking his way.
 
The blonde might have been taller and far
more ostentatious with her dyed hair and colorful dress style, but his eyes
went back to Roz.
 
She was the reason he
came.
 
And when he saw her, looking as
sweet as he remembered her, he smiled.
 
His heart actually raced with excitement.
 
A rare feat for him.

To his
delight, Roz was smiling too.
 
“Hi,” she
said as she and Betsy approached him.
  
She looked at the limo.
 
“The same
one?”

Mick
nodded.
  
“It’s been repaired.”

“That was
quick,” Roz responded, although she was certain it was quick because it was
Mick.

“How are
you?” he asked her.

“I’m
good.”
 
She looked at his casual attire,
at his beige sports jacket, at his black turtleneck shirt and black
trousers.
 
She decided that she liked his
style.
 
“What about you?”

“I’m okay,”
Mick said.
 
“Where were you?”

“Over at the
studio.
 
I teach acting, remember?”

He
remembered.
 
“Taught anybody I would
know?”

“Yes,” Betsy
said with a smile.
 
“Me.”

Mick looked
at her with that look that gave Roz pause.
 
But before he dropped some of that cruel bluntness on somebody as
sensitive as Bess, Roz intervened.
 
She
needed him to see the person in there, not the caricature. “Mick Sinatra, this
is Betsy Gable.
 
I know you’ve seen her
face, and you’ve seen her dance, but I don’t think you ever knew her name.”