Samaritan (16 page)

Chapter 12

Danielle—January 15

Danielle entered the apartment in Little Venice trailing two boys: Nelson, twelve, and Dante, an eight-year-old who just took off, flying around the place like his ass was on fire.

Wearing dry-cleaned jeans and a white T-shirt under a red bolero jacket, she gingerly wandered about, lightly touching things, her perfume, that vanilla musk, laying down a heavy sweetish track wherever she went.

Unlike Dante, the older boy, Nelson, pretty much hung at her side from the door on in.

He had a big head, this Nelson kid, accentuated by smudgy rings around cautious intelligent eyes and a monkish high-walled bowl-cut that left him with a stranded bird’s nest of wavy hair at the crown.

“Oh Ray, this place,” Danielle said, her voice husky with want.

When he first picked them up at the Hopewell Houses he was eager to show off where he lived, but now, embarrassed by that eagerness, the cheap-shot easiness of impressing them, he was eager for them to go.

Besides, even as he tried to reenvision his digs through Danielle’s eyes, he couldn’t shake how much he hated it here, his parents’ apartment always feeling dead to him—militantly color-coordinated as it was, in plum and gray; more like a first-class airline lounge than any kind of home.

“Nelson,” Danielle said, “could you imagine . . .” She let her fantasy hang.

The boy shrugged and did an about-face, clearly embarrassed by her saying his name out loud like that.

Nelson had three cut-glass studs in his left ear, wore an oversized Jets jersey and clown-sized baggy jeans, but Ray could tell the kid’s heart wasn’t in it.

He wasn’t drawn to Dante, the eight-year-old too hyper, too much like an unknotted balloon, but Nelson had that hungry-hearted watchful aura that Ray always responded to, that made him keen to connect, to let the kid know he wasn’t out there on his own.

And the boy also made him ache for Ruby. Often when he was around children not his own he experienced sharp pangs of sentiment cut with a panic about “losing her,” whatever that might mean, which tended to make him much more focused on the kids in the room than on whatever adults were around.

“Ray.” Danielle gave him that unnerving straight-on stare. “I would die for this place.”

Her hair was drawn up into a topknot so taut that it lifted the outside corners of her eyes.

On the other hand, maybe all his misty-eyed kid focus this evening was nothing but self-generated smoke to cover the fact that he hadn’t been alone with a woman, not just sexually but socially, for a little more than a year.

Danielle slid back the glass door and stepped out onto the cement terrace which faced the Statue of Liberty and the moon-bleached water.

“Check it out,” both Danielle and Ray said simultaneously to Nelson, Danielle indicating the view, Ray pointing to the full-length funhouse mirror that he had brought back with him from Los Angeles.

“Or whatever,” he quickly demurred, but Nelson gestured for his mother to hang on as he made his way in front of the silver-chipped undulating surface, instantly turning himself into a dwarf with a five-foot forehead. Fighting off a grin, the kid looked like his mouth was stuffed with grapes.

“You remind me of my daughter,” Ray said easily.

Nelson looked stricken.

“You know, I mean in a masculine universal way,” Ray scrambled. “I can tell, you got that watchful thing going on, kind of guy likes to lay back in the cut, check out all your options before you finally make your play.” Shit-talking in a way that would make Ruby cringe. Then more soberly, “It’s a compliment, Nelson.”

“It’s a compliment, Nelson.” Dante mimicked him in a deep dull voice, the kid just materializing, a wooden veal mallet from the kitchen in his left hand.

“Whoa!” Dante jerked back from his image in the funhouse mirror, then promptly took out his dick, the glass giving him back a foot-long loop of Turkish taffy.

Nelson ran out of the living room with a hand over his mouth. Hearing him howl a moment later from the far end of the apartment, Ray became faintly repulsed by the kid’s need to flee.

Sidling up to Danielle on the terrace, Ray rested his forearms atop the guard rail.

“Is that the Trade Center?” she asked, pointing to the hemispheric glow of floodlights across the river.

“Yeah. Not much to see,” he said quietly.

They stood in silence for a moment, watching the silhouette of a titanic crane move jerkily behind the waterfront skyline like a prehistoric forager.

“You know,” she finally said, delicately scratching a corner of her lipsticked mouth with a long red pinky nail, “if I had this place? I would be out here around the clock. I would set up a desk and do all my homework right where we’re standing.”

“Homework?” The breeze brought scented wisps of her hair across his face.

“Yeah. I go to Dempsy Community College. They got a two-year program in Public Policy. Housing said that if I get the degree they’d throw me a desk at Hopewell, make me the tenant liaison officer.”

“That’s great,” Ray said, half-listening, mostly just soaking up being next to her.

“Yeah, see Hopewell, they’re so sick of the tenants bitching about this, that, the other, they decided to make some of us management. See how
we
like it.”

“You want to neutralize a threat? Give it a job.”

“Didn’t work on my husband.”

“Oh yeah?” Ray was all ears.

“The thing is, I never graduated high school and, they’ll let you into the college, but I can’t get my degree until I get my GED, so I’m kind of doing both at the same time.”

“Straddling two horses,” Ray said, still stuck on Husband.

“Try three. I work a forty-hour job, too.”

“Damn, that tattoo’s no lie,” wanting to touch it, her. “So where’s your other son tonight, with Carla?”

“What other son?”

“That little boy jumping on the couch at your mother’s.”

“David? That’s my brother’s boy. So’s Dante, thank God. My mom keeps picking up the ones that fall off the back of the truck.”

“Really.” Ray thinking, I can help.

“Really.”

“But Nelson’s yours?”

“All mine.”

“Does his . . .” He faltered; how to put this . . . “Does his dad live with him too?”

“Yeah, OK.” Danielle smirked. “What you’re really asking . . .” She cut herself off, briefly leaned her arm into his, just a playful bump but it made his head spin.

“He’s out of the picture,” she said.

“Out, like . . .” Ray pushing, losing control a little.

“Like three strikes you’re out,” she said, enjoying this game.

“In English?”

Danielle sighed. “There’s two institutions in this city start with the words ‘Dempsy County.’ I attend one, he lives in the other.”

“What’s he in for?”

“Guess.”

“What kind of sentence he get?” Ray assumed she meant drugs.

“Year and a day. Like always.”

Ray repeated it to himself, Like always; then let it be.

Back in the living room, Dante, for some reason shirtless now, came up to Ray with a baseball-sized rock that belonged in the bedroom.

“What’s this?” The kid offered it up to him on twinned palms.

“That’s coprolite.”

“What?”

“Petrified dinosaur shit.”

Dante let it drop to the floor. “What’s
wrong
with you, man!” A chip shot off the hardwood in a powdery spray.

“Dante!” Danielle snapped.

Nelson quickly, anxiously, looked to Ray, then, clucking in irritation at his cousin, stooped to pick it up.

As they left the apartment, heading for a restaurant, Ray became aware that Danielle’s perfume would still be in the air a few hours from now when he returned, just hanging there like an unmitigated longing, and there would be nothing he could do about it.

Oriente was a big red Cuban-Chinese restaurant in Hoboken, gaudy and loud.

Ray picked it not for the food, which was OK, but for the fifteen-foot papier-mâché hand suspended from the ceiling: a life-sized Chinaman complete with lampshade hat and pigtail, struggling to free himself from two chopsticks held by gigantic green-nailed fingers.

“So Nelson, what are you into these days,” Ray asked over a plate of plantains and mu shu pork.

“So Nelson, what are you into these days,” Dante aped him, once again nailing his self-conscious attempt at breeziness.

“He’s into books,” Danielle answered for her son. “His father was a college graduate, not that you’d ever know it.”

“Oh yeah?” Ray made himself smile. “What do you want to be?”

“He told me Vice President of the United States.”

Nelson glared at his mother.

“Vice?” Ray asked.

“He says being the President’s too much pressure,” Danielle answered for him again.

It dawned on Ray that Nelson hadn’t said word one since being picked up at Hopewell over two hours ago.

“So what kind of work you do?” he asked Danielle.

“Me? Bullshit work. I’m a receptionist over in New York. You know this movie guy, Harold Krauss? The producer?”

“Does TV movies?”

“Him. I’m a receptionist at his company.”

“Really.”

“Really.” Dante again.

“You know I worked in TV for three years myself,” Ray said cautiously.

“On
Brokedown High,
right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I watched it once with my mother. She saw your name in the opening credits and got all excited. ‘I know him! I know him! He lived in the building! He lived in the building!’” Danielle quoted her mother in a high hissy whisper.

Back when he was working on the show, Ray had often fantasized about people who had known him from childhood turning on their TVs and reacting to the sight of his name; but in the few instances where that pipe-dream scenario had actually become an in-the-flesh encounter, it invariably left him feeling more embarrassed and shallow than vindicated.

“You don’t want to get deeper into TV work yourself?”

“As what, a seasoned receptionist?” Danielle said with a twist of the lips. “Well, actually what I do is more interesting than it sounds. Like, three days after I got hired, OK? My boss Krauss, he buzzes me, says to come into his office, bring a notepad. I go in, he’s auditioning this actor for some movie, like a disease movie, a virus movie, or some such. I go in, he points to a chair in back, says, ‘Take notes.’ And I’m thinking, ‘On what?’

“So, the guy reads his lines with an actress, the audition lasts maybe ten minutes, Krauss gets up, says, ‘That was wonderful. We’ll call,’ the guy leaves, the actress leaves, it’s me, Krauss and this other producer, Krauss looks to me, says, ‘So what you think?’ I’m like, ‘About
what
 . . . ?’ Krauss says, ‘Would you fuck him?’” lowering her voice on the f-word. “And I’m, in my mind, I’m, ‘How
dare
you.’ I mean I was shaking I was so insulted, but scared too, because I needed that job. But all I say is, ‘I don’t know. Would you?’

“And at first he’s like, his face is, ‘Who the hell are you to . . .’ But the other guy starts laughing like, ‘Hey, good one, Hal,’ and I guess that broke the tension. He never actually apologized to me but he’s been kind of, I don’t know, tasteful about things ever since.”

“Tasteful.”

“I mean he still calls me in every time he’s auditioning actors, you know, ‘Take notes,’ but after they leave, all he says to me is, ‘So what do you think?’ and all I give him is thumbs up, thumbs down. But I’ll tell you one thing I learned about movies? It all boils down to ‘Would you fuck him, would you fuck her.’ Everything flows out of that.”

“Understanding what you just said?” Ray aching for her. “That’s a six-figure salary right there.”

“Jesus, Krauss has this wife? Two weeks into the job she comes in, slips me a hundred-dollar bill and her cell phone number, says to me, ‘Any woman goes in that office, the door’s closed more than fifteen minutes, you call me.’

“I’ll take the money, but screw you, bitch, I’m not playing pussy police for her and I
know
he’s layin’ carpet with two of the office staff plus about every third or fourth actress goes in for a part, but she’s not getting shit out of me. I mean, the presumptuousness of asking me to do that.”

“He ever put the moves on you?”

“Me? I don’t know, kind of. I mean, right from the jump I can tell he’s sizing me up, sees the tattoo, figures anything goes, right? Like, day two he comes out of his office, sits on my desk, says, ‘Hey, good news. I just bought the film rights to five of the Ten Commandments, got a two-year option on the others.’ You know, it was a joke, but I believed him, and I think that turned him off.”

He heard regret in her voice, like she would have been up for it if things had broken another way.

“Nah nah nah,” Danielle said, reading his eyes. “Mainly I just felt stupid about not getting the joke.”

And with that gentle correction, Ray decided he was in love.

“So, Nelson.” He beamed at the kid, who had been listlessly stabbing the same shrimp with a single chopstick for the last ten minutes. “What’s your favorite subject?”

“He’s good at everything but gym,” Danielle said.

“That’s exactly like I was, except I wasn’t even good at gym.”

“You hear that?” Danielle asked him, Ray fending off irritation, the boy not needing a translator.

“How much money you got?” Dante asked him.

“On me?” Ray was sick of this kid.

“Can you buy me something?”

“I’ll buy you a beer.”

“I’ll drink it.”

“Dante, shut up,” Danielle snapped.

“Was I talking to you?” he shot back in a high railing voice.

“He’s like the demon seed, this one.” Danielle palmed her forehead.

“Oh yeah? You’re like the
water
melon seed, you big booty bitch.”

Nelson covered his mouth again, swallowing another howl as Danielle snatched Dante clean off his seat and had him dragged halfway to the restrooms before Ray could react.

Now that he was alone with Nelson, some of the kid’s wallflower vibrations made it across the table, had Ray tongue-tied for a long moment.

“Nelson, I tell you, when I was in school? The only good thing about seventh grade was that I was finally done with sixth. And the only good thing about eighth grade? I was finally done with seventh. What grade are you in?” trying to get him to verbalize at least one word.