True Confessions (19 page)

The replacement from Bakersfield began bleeding from a cut over his right eye. He tried to hold on in the corner directly above them. A left and a right splattered blood over the spectators at ringside. The crowd was howling for more. The bell rang and the cut fighter slumped on his stool. Blood spurted from the gash above his eye.

“Why didn’t he go down?” Corinne asked.

“He wants his hundred, he’s got to go at least three,” Tom Spellacy said. “She drives a hard bargain, Marge.”

“She must like the sight of blood.”

“That’s why she cuts the ring.” Corinne stared at him for explanation. “It’s only eighteen-by-eighteen here. It’s twenty-by-twenty normally. She doesn’t like to see anybody running from anybody, Marge. She’d put them in a telephone booth, she could.”

Corinne clutched his arm through the next two rounds. The replacement from Bakersfield was systematically pounded, but he refused to go down. The beer brightened Corinne’s eyes. After every sip, Tom Spellacy erased her foam mustache with his finger.

Twelve seconds into the fourth round, the replacement from Bakersfield was counted out. The Modesto Kid’s robe was draped around his shoulders and he danced around the ring as if he had won.

“HI guess he’ll get his hundred now,” Corinne said.

“You’re learning,” Tom Spellacy said. He glanced around the arena. Marge Madragon waved at him from her box in the mezzanine. He waved back. It was Marge who gave him his first job after he quit. Corinne looked at him, then at Marge. At her gym downtown. Stretching people. On a rack. He smiled at the astonished look on Corinne’s face. Ten dollars a shot. Four to him, six to Marge. Mainly shorties an inch or two shy of the five-five regulation height required by the police and fire departments. A belt around the ankles, another under the armpits, then crank away until he thought something would break inside. The stretch only lasted an hour. If there was a long line for the department physical, they had to come back the next day and get pulled apart all over again.

“Why did they do it?” Corinne said.

“It was the Depression, Corinne. These guys were pushing pencils on street corners. This was a steady job with a pension at the end of it.”

“It’s a wonder no one ever died of internal bleeding.”

“Marge always said with all the guys I helped get into the department, I was a cinch to beat the sneezer, anyone checked out.”

He felt someone tap him on the shoulder. Minny Esposito knelt in the aisle. She was stick thin. There was a pencil stuck in the raggedy bun of her hair. She looked away when he turned around. Minny never looked directly at anyone. “Marge wants to see you.”

He looked up. Marge Madragon was beckoning him to the mezzanine. The fighters were being introduced. He shook his head.

“Go on, Tom,” Corinne said. “I’ll be all right. I’m enjoying myself.”

Marge Madragon’s box was in the first two rows overlooking the ring. The seats in the first row had been removed for a wooden table on which was an adding machine, a pair of binoculars, a carton of Hershey bars, a box of tacos and a bucket of gua-camole. Marge’s seat in the second row had been specially molded to fit her huge frame. She motioned Tom Spellacy down next to her, peeled back the wrapping of a candy bar and dipped it into the guacamole.

The two fighters in the ring were feeling each other out.

“Polo said the colored one’s going in the tank,” Tom Spellacy said.

“Polo should keep his fucking mouth shut, he knows what’s good for him,” Marge Madragon said. “I give him the game in the lot, I can take it away from him, I want.”

“Marge can take it away from him, she wants,” Minny Esposito said. Tom Spellacy looked at her quickly, but she was too fast for him. She had already turned away before their eyes could meet. She busied herself with the adding machine.

“It’s a gold mine, that game,” Marge Madragon said. “I told him I wanted a piece of it. He told me to go fuck myself.”

“He told Marge to go fuck herself,” Minny Esposito said.

“He told me he’d fuck Minny before he gave me a piece of the game,” Marge Madragon said.

“He told Marge he’d fuck me before he gave her a piece,” Minny Esposito said.

“Shut up, Minny,” Marge Madragon said.

The Negro fighter below was backpedaling fast.

“The ropes weren’t there, he’d be on his way to Tijuana,” Tom Spellacy said. He looked down at Corinne, chin in her hands, intently watching the action. Marge Madragon was also staring down at Corinne. The thought of Corinne imprisoned between Marge’s barge-like thighs made him wince.

“What happened to the Modesto Kid?” he said suddenly, trying to draw Marge away from Corinne.

Her eyes remained fastened on Corinne. “Cut last night at the Casa Mazatlán.”

“You kept his robe.”

She looked at him. “He’s got no use for it. DOA at County General.”

Tom Spellacy shrugged. “That was some replacement you got.”

“The bartender at Casa Mazatlan.”

He laughed. The bell ended the first round. Minny leaned over the railing and shouted, “Hit him with a coconut.”

“Shut up, Minny,” Marge Madragon said. “Fucking bartender wanted new gloves. A record of 1-13-1 and he wanted new gloves. Main eventers get new gloves, I tell him, not preliminary boys. He beat a main eventer once, he says. Vinny Avila. I say, You beat him in the parking lot at the Casa Mazatlán. And you hit him with a hammer. And he says Vinny had the hammer, he had a tire iron. So I give him the new gloves.”

“You’re all heart, Marge.”

“Tom says you’re all heart, Marge,” Minny Esposito said.

Marge Madragon picked up her binoculars and surveyed the house. The second round was beginning in the ring below. Someone shouted, “Hit him, you bum, you got the wind with you.” Tom Spellacy knew the fix was in, but still he was absorbed. In his mind, he picked off punches, looked for openings. He wished he had been able to fight better. He could taste the rubber mouthpiece, feel the salve rubbed into the cut above his eye, the balls of cotton pushed into his nose to plug the bleeding, taste the globs of bloody mucus leaking into his throat from the nosebleeds.

“You shouldn’t’ve done that, Tom,” Marge Madragon said. Her eyes were still glued to the binoculars. She seemed to be focusing on a refreshment stand across the arena.

Her voice startled him. “What are you talking about?”

The crowd suddenly roared. The Negro was on his back on the canvas. The referee was counting.

“I could hear the splash up here,” Minny Esposito said.

The Negro was on his knee, then on his feet. The referee wiped his gloves. The fighters began moving around the ring. He was no longer watching. Marge Madragon avoided his eyes. He knew there was a reason that she wanted to see him. He had a feeling what it was. At least it would get her mind off going down on Corinne.

“You shouldn’t fuck around with Jack, Tom. You embarrassed him with your brother. You shouldn’t’ve done that. He did you a big favor once.”

He wondered how many other people knew that Jack Amsterdam had paid someone off so that he wouldn’t be indicted. Brenda. Marge. He did not really want to know who else. Mary Margaret was the only one he was certain didn’t know. He could have diagramed it for her and she still wouldn’t have understood it. May Dalton’s uncle Slats Shugrue is in the bag business, she would say. At the A&P. A grand bagman he is, May tells me. A regular breadwinner.

Corinne. He did not want to think about that. Better she knew that Mary Margaret was coming home than that he used to work for Jack.

“This your idea, Marge, or his?” He knew that Jack Amsterdam held the mortgage on the Figueroa.

“He deals with important people now, Tom,” Marge Madragon said.

“He has a tuxedo,” Minny Esposito said.

The crowd was on its feet. The Negro was curled on his side. The referee picked up the count. Eight. Nine. Ten.

“He own that coon?” Tom Spellacy said.

“Sixty percent,” Minny Esposito said.

“Shut up, Minny,” Marge Madragon said.

“Him and his tuxedo and his important people, he still tells some jigaboo to take a dive,” Tom Spellacy said.

“He’s got too much to lose now, Tom. Don’t cross him.”

“Tell him to go fuck himself, Marge.”

“He can be dangerous, Tom.”

For an instant the thought crossed his mind that there had to be something else Jack Amsterdam must be worried about. Not just an altercation at lunch. He could not think what it was. Something that would smear shit on his tuxedo.

“Ask Polo,” Marge Madragon said.

“So Jack was responsible for his legs being broken,” Tom Spellacy said.

Marge Madragon unwrapped another Hershey bar. She did not reply.

“One thing I always wondered, Marge,” Tom Spellacy said finally. “You do it to Minny or she do it to you?”

The crap game was still going on in the parking lot when they left the arena. Polo Barbera was nowhere to be seen.

’The white one, got knocked out, the heavyweight, I liked him best,” Corinne said hesitantly.

Tom Spellacy kept walking and did not reply. He got into the Plymouth and started the engine and waited until she got into the other side. Even before her door was shut he gunned the Plymouth out into the traffic. He did not look at her nor did he speak.

Two blocks up Figueroa, Corinne said, “Let’s get something to eat.”

Tom Spellacy scratched a match lit with his thumbnail and put it to the cigarette in his mouth. He exhaled a stream of smoke but said nothing.

Corinne stared out the car window for a moment, then tried again. “We could go to the Trocadero.”

“We could go to the Cotton Club, too,” Tom Spellacy said. “If I stuck up a gas station along the way, pay the cover charge.”

“The Windsor, then.”

“Check my gun, see if it’s loaded, so when I say, ‘Stick ‘em up,’ they know I mean business.”

Corinne leaned her back against the car door so that she was facing him. “Look, Tom, what happened back there.”

“Nothing happened back there.”

“Okay, have it your way. Nothing happened back there. So let’s have some fun. Let’s go to the Troc. We can afford it. We’ve got two incomes.”

He braked to a halt in the middle of the block. Cars screeched to a stop behind them and then horns began to scream. Tom Spellacy turned and stared at her, as if oblivious to the jam he was causing. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is two can live cheaper than one.”

She blurted the words out, so softly that the car horns almost drowned her out.

“Next thing I’m going to tell you is I’m pregnant, I think.”

He took it better than she expected. His eyes flickered for a
moment and his hands tightened on the steering wheel, but beyond that nothing. She had been waiting for the moment to tell him for three days, but now she wished she could take the words back and lock them in a box along with all her other devils.

The car drifted out toward the center divider. She lifted her hands to ward off the blinding headlights of the oncoming cars, and for an instant, she thought he was trying to kill them both. A horn screeched and he shouted, “Go fuck yourself!” and then he eased back into the center of his lane. He drove out Sixth and then crossed over to Melrose and it wasn’t until he stopped at a red light at Highland that he spoke.

“You’re sure.” It was a statement, flat and unemotional. He tapped his fingers on the wheel waiting for the light to change.

“Pretty sure.” She forced herself to look squarely at him. “Very sure. The rabbit died.”

The light changed and he turned right and headed toward Fountain. She couldn’t tell him it was a matter of self-preservation. She worried, but then she always worried. She was thirty-four years old and a two-time loser. He had called her that one night when she tried to ask him about Mary Margaret. “For a two-time loser,” he had said, “you give out an awful lot of advice about other people’s marriages.” He had tried to laugh it off, but sometimes when he was in bed with her, he would caress her and say, “My little two-time loser.” It was Tom’s way of keeping her at arm’s length, she knew that. And didn’t care. That was what she was, there was no getting around it. Not that she wanted to try marriage a third time. But she didn’t want to lose Tom either. The question she did not wish to consider was whether it was out of love or fear of being alone.

She hunched against the door of the car and lit a cigarette. The matchbook cover said Hotel Roosevelt. When was it they had been there. A week ago. Two. To hear Frankie Carle. She always kept hotel matchbooks. For memories. She thought of the hotel rooms she had been in. She had always loved hotels. Her father was a pharmacist in Vernon, and when she was a little girl, he occasionally brought drug salesmen home to dinner. After they had eaten, the men would tip back their chairs and talk about the Corn-husker and the Grady and the Tutweiler, and then they would leave, heading on downtown to the drinks they had been denied before dinner. She dreamed then of ordering London broil in the Tutweiler Grill, of knowing how to tip the bellboy and how to call room service for ice, of walking through hotel lobbies and being admired, making friends, a lonely ten-year-old’s dream. Then when she was nineteen, one of the salesmen had brought her downtown and fucked her in Room 432 at the Ambassador. It had hurt and she had bled but what troubled her most was that she had become a traveling salesman’s story. She knew it when the drummers began to call. It was odd knowing you had a telephone number that was passed around in the Palm Court of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

And at the Raddison and the Grady and the Tutweiler.

Tom Spellacy stopped the car in front of her apartment. He crimped the wheels toward the curb, turned off the ignition and made sure the rear doors were locked. So he’s going to come in, Corinne thought. To tell me he can’t marry me or where I can get a clean scrape. If he says he’s only thinking of me, out he goes: She wondered if he would offer money for an abortion.

Tom took her by the arm, and when they got to her apartment, he unlocked the door with his own key. He opened the refrigerator, got out some ice and made them both drinks.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” he said finally. Corinne braced herself. And then he told her that Mary Margaret was coming home.

When he finished, she took a sip of the rye highball in her hand. It was too strong and she poured some more ginger ale in it.

“Well?”

“It wasn’t what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She couldn’t think of an abortion now. Suddenly she exploded. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me she was coming home?”

“She’s crazy, Corinne.” He knew the answer was not adequate. It was just his standard line on Mary Margaret. “She’s always got some scheme. Chatting it up with the priests. Next week she’ll say she’s going off to work in the missions. Sister Mary Margaret, the Maryknoll. Raped by a fucking Chinaman.”

“When is she coming home?”

“Soon. A couple of weeks.” He did not tell her that Mary Margaret had notified Des and not him. Or that Des would try to get Moira a day off from the convent. He tried to change the subject. “When is it due?”

“I have plenty of time to get a scrape, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“I just might keep it.”

He stared at her.

“Make your high and mighty brother an uncle again.”

That should stop him.

“And if I do get an abortion, I won’t need your help. I’ve had one before.”

There suddenly was nothing more to say, only one place for it to end. She unhooked the Murphy bed and let it fall into place. It had always been this way. When words failed, when she could not express fear or doubt, sex was the only release, the gateway to the fatigue that killed pain and anxiety. They coupled briefly, violently, clothes on, clothes off. She claimed him with her mouth, searching his face for the signs of guilt, the sense of sin that anything he regarded as unnatural brought to it. Finally he slept and she dozed.

After awhile she woke and looked at the luminous hands of the clock on the bed table. Three-seventeen. The sheet under her was stained with semen. It had always bothered her that after lovemaking it was she who had to lay in the warm viscous pool. She went into the bathroom and dampened a washcloth. Her body was reflected in the full length mirror on the bathroom door. She had never had any feelings of narcissism about her body, and as she stared at herself in the mirror, she thought, Now I’m pregnant, but there was no reaction, neither dread nor fulfillment. With the washcloth, she rubbed at the stain on the sheet. She had often wondered if the chambermaids in the hotels where she fucked were aware of the signs of lovemaking in a deserted bed.

Her laundering did not affect Tom. She picked up his shoes and his socks and hung up the clothes scattered on the floor. He slept on his stomach, his face cradled in his arm, his sleep punctuated by a slight, even snore. She couldn’t bear the sound of snoring. It grated on her nerves like the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard. Tom groaned and rolled over. She wanted to wake him, to talk to him, but he seemed to resist conversation. It was as if he wanted to protect himself from being told anything more.

She went back into the bathroom, tripping over an ashtray brimming with dead cigarettes. She thought the noise would awaken him. His breath caught for a moment and he coughed, but then the even pattern of his snoring continued. She closed the bathroom door and sat on the toilet seat. She could feel a migraine coming on. When she
had
a migraine, she thought of sex, not in any lubricious way—she never got wet—but almost as a problem in physics, the interaction of two moving properties. She reduced the act to an equation whereby the circumference of the orifice equaled the circumference of the member plus friction. She wondered how Sister Angelica, her physics teacher at Holy Resurrection, would react to this application of elementary physics; the thought made her laugh. The reduction of the sexual union to a scientific equation seemed to blunt the pain of the headache. Even the aura disappeared. After a few moments, almost out of a sense of duty, she wet a finger and put it between her legs. She could feel the first flickering of response, then she stopped. She never brought herself to orgasm. It was a holdover from her childhood when she believed that masturbation was sinful only if she came. A theory she never tried out on Sister Angelica.

She was wide awake now and in her mind she began to make a list. Corinne always made lists when she couldn’t sleep. It was her way of counting sheep. Somewhere in the apartment, there was a list of lines from
Gone With the Wind
. She was always adding to it. “I believe in Rhett Butler—that’s the only cause I know.” “Some little town in Pennsylvania—called Gettysburg.” “If you have enough courage, you can do without a reputation.” “She’s a pale-faced mealy mouthed ninny and I hate her.” Corinne thought: “Fiddledeedee. I get so bored I could scream.” She must remember to write that down. What else?

She remembered the books in the cabin at Arrowhead.

The weekend when she got pregnant.

Arrowhead had been her idea. She knew Tom would never go, but she had made the reservation and packed his clothes without telling him and by that time it was too late for him to say no, to invent an excuse. They drove the two hours to the lake in silence. The storekeeper at the combination gas station and general store had the key to the cabin. He wore slippers and a mothy cardigan and he apologized for not having a greater selection of food in stock. “Don’t get too many folks out here this time of year,” he had said automatically, as if he had seen too many couples out of season and knew they would never complain about the quality of his stock. They bought some bread and milk and bacon and instant coffee and set off down the boardwalk for the house. The houses on the lakefront were gray and weathered, their verandahs bereft of furniture. The loneliness of the lake seemed to Corinne to contain an intangible threat, as if there were nowhere deserted enough for the purpose for which they came.

The house was on the hill overlooking the lake. Tom un-stacked the upended wicker chairs in the living room and placed them around the straw floor matting. Going into the kitchen, he lit the pilot light under the stove and searched around for ice and glasses. There was no ice, but he finally found two empty peanut butter jars and poured two drinks. The tap water tasted of rust, but Corinne drank gratefully, eager for anything to ease the weight of silence. With her finger, she traced her initials in the dust on the table at her side.

“You didn’t find a duster?”

“No.”

“I’d better clean up.”

She pulled sheets and blankets from a closet and went into the bedroom. As she tucked in the hospital corners on the double bed, she could feel Tom watching her through the open door and knew he was wondering what he was doing there. She placed their suitcase on the bed and unpacked it, hanging her coat and nightgown neatly on hangers, arranging his shaving equipment and her cosmetics carefully on the cigarette-scarred bureau. When she was finished, she picked a book from the cheap stained bookshelves by the bed. The volumes left in a summer house always seemed so sad to her. She examined the titles and wondered who and why in the past had been given or bought
A History of Phelps Dodge
or
Hardy Perennials and Herbaceous Borders
or
Anthony Adverse
or
Harper’s Electricity Book for Boys
. Inside
The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale
was the inscription, “To Betty Howard, with love from Aunt Agnes, March, 1928.” Corinne wondered who Aunt Agnes was, and Betty Howard. Where had the young girl gone, what had she become. What tremor of youth had made her underline the words:

Even now Corinne could remember how the words had touched her.

“Shall we go for a walk?” Tom had said.

“No.”

It was a tired summons and she took him by the hand and they lay on the mildewed sheets, more alone than together.

Eleven weeks ago.

Corinne looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. There were tears in her eyes. She dug the heels of her palms into her cheekbones and moved them back toward her ears, then down over her jaw until the pinched pity disappeared from her long, guarded face. She turned out the lights and went into the living room.

It seemed simpler to spend the rest of the night on the couch.

When Tom Spellacy awoke, she was gone. There was a penciled note on the floor under one of his shoes saying she had gone to mass. Swell. He noticed the pillow and the blanket on the couch and felt a momentary flash of irritation. She was usually as neat as a pin and he suspected that the mess of bedclothes on the divan was her way of telling him she was perfectly capable of going it alone, of taking care of herself. He rolled over and swore. Why had he agreed to go away to Arrowhead? It was the first time he had ever gone away with a woman. A weekend was trouble. A house and keys and groceries and arrangements and excuses to be away from town. Too many people knowing what you were doing, too many opportunities for things to go wrong. A cop’s reasoning. That’s all right, that’s what I am. There was a lot to be said for the anonymity of an automobile, the lack of commitment in a motor court.

He thought, I always seem to fail women, but even as he said it, he knew it was a lie. He never gave enough of himself to women to fail them. He knew it and they knew it. Which made it a self-congratulating lie at that.

He lay back on the pillow, trying to make out objects around the room. It occurred to him suddenly that he had never been alone in the apartment before. Corinne had always been there. He had slept there for months, but to him it was a room like so many others he had known, a room with nothing of himself in it. There were two photographs in a silver frame on the bureau and he assumed they were of her parents, but he had never asked. A Tiffany lamp shade with a crack in it that must have meant something to her, but he did not know what. He got up and walked around the apartment. He was a detective, but he had never paid any attention to the old invitations he found in the desk drawer or the books that said
Ex libris
Homer Morris. They were clues to a mystery he did not want to understand.