4

“Frozen Milky Ways?” Jane said seductively.

“Oh, well, I’d like to but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t got the money,” some demon of honesty blurted before I could stop him. Jane shrugged. “Well, okay.” She sighed with disappointment and this serious and troubled sort of look on her face. “Then let’s go to Fiorenza’s and smell hot buns, or would you rather watch lube jobs at Morrie’s Auto Works?” And then seeing my reaction, she cascaded into boom-boxed pixie dust laughter. “Hey, come on, I’m just kidding,” she said to me, smiling, then she reached into a pocket, flashed a five-dollar bill and said, “See this? I’m loaded.”

Five bucks? Was she ever!

It was Friday and a Catholic feast day and classes were out at noon, and so we went to see a movie on East 14th near Third, where every five or six minutes you’d feel the shake of the el trains rumbling overhead. I wasn’t sure they would let us in. On the Feast of the Ascension Foley and I had to sit on an apartment building staircase for almost three hours to see Hedy Lamarr in White Cargo on account of the dumpy, pissy, hard-of-hearing woman in the ticket booth who thought we were playing the hook. She’d cupped a hand to her ear, her wrinkled face scrunched up and suspicious as she asked, “The feast of what?”

“The Ascension,” I told her.

“That’s a lie. There isn’t any Catholic Feast of Consumption.” It didn’t help that Foley had threatened her with bayonet practice.

Today, though, we didn’t get a challenge.

The movie that we wanted to see was Gunga Din, but first we had to sit through Movietone News and after that a crummy comedy about Brooklyn, the word “Brooklyn” being the source of all the humor, I gathered, which was zilch, but it was loud with lots of yelling, which was good because we hadn’t eaten lunch and my stomach had started to rumble and it being that so far as I knew I was the only human being in the world with this problem and being wide-eyed with panic that Jane would hear it, I made a sudden quick trip, or so I told her, to the men’s room, but just stood in the back of the theater for a while as I waited for my stomach to figure out that it actually wasn’t Krakatoa, until an usher came up to me, leaned over and whispered, “Hey, kid, what’s the problem?” and thinking he was talking about the rumbling, I blurted, “I was born this way! I can’t help it!” Right. All a part of life’s rich pageant. But it all worked out pretty much okay since by the time Gunga Din had begun, the stupid rumbling had finally grossed itself out, I guess, because it stopped and I was back in my seat. When Gunga Din ended I wanted to see it again, and so did Jane, believe it or not, which I say because the picture was a manly man beer-and-belch, bonding-and-adventure kind of thing, but Jane loved it as much as me and we sat through three showings of that jerky Brooklyn movie just so we could watch Gunga Din three times, which, believe me, said a lot of great things about Jane, as much later in life when I took a first-time date to see the movie at some art house that was having a “Cary Grant Week,” at the end when Din’s on top of the Temple of Gold in a turban and this diaper he’s always wearing, and he’s blowing a bugle to warn off all these British troops who were approaching, wearing kilts and playing bagpipes and singing “Bonnie Laurie,” that they’re marching directly into an ambush by hordes of fanatical Thugee assassins who are about to shove the bagpipes straight up their butts before feasting and toasting the Goddess Kali with a drink made of cobra blood and Gordon’s Dry Gin, this being the closest they could get to a Harvey Wallbanger; but then Din gets shot about a jillion times and as he falls from the top of the temple he keeps trying to blow the warning on the bugle which, sure, since he’s dying doesn’t sound like Harry James, and my date put her hand to her mouth and giggled!

At that part of the picture Jane cried all three times.

The movie made me thirsty, plus I was starving, so Jane and I decided to get something to eat, but that was only after Jane had to wave off all my phony protestations that I couldn’t let her “pay for that too” while all the time I was walking two quick steps ahead as I lured her toward a little Italian restaurant I’d noticed on our way to the film. It turned out that the place was so down on its heels they didn’t even have plastic grapes all around, they had pictures of plastic grapes. We sat down in a booth with a mirrored wall and when I saw that our tablecloth was made of white paper and there were crayons for little kids to doodle around with while they drooled and whined infantile threats for their food, I almost felt sick to my stomach because even to this day I get nauseous at the sight of paint palettes and brushes, even crayons, on account of my older sister, Lourdes, who was terrifically beautiful and later on married and moved to California, but when I was five and she was sixteen she had this endless stream of middle-aged merchants Pop dealt with always coming around to our West Side apartment in some hopeless sort of Old World courting ritual, and always on their first—and always last—sort of audience that Pop had arranged for them, they’d come to the apartment and just sit and have a visit with Pop and me and Lourdes, who’d be sitting the whole time with this look on her face like any second she was going to bolt up from her chair and say, “Excuse me, I have to go shoot myself.” The guys were mostly Greek or Lebanese or Armenian, and always wanting to ingratiate themselves with “the kid,” every one of them would bring me a gift of the same freaking children’s paint set, and soon there were stacks of them piled up in our entry hall closet, which was mostly pretty tough on Lourdes, on account of with our bathroom being right off the living room so everyone would hear what she was doing in there, this entry hall closet being farther away, that’s where Lourdes would always hurry to after excusing herself for “just a minute,” lock herself inside it and throw up. Once this short, skinny, middle-aged Armenian tailor thought he might break the ice with a tailor joke: “Once dis tailor he put up sign outside his store which is saying, ‘A.B. TINK WHATYOUTINK! WE SELL CLOTHES FOR NUTTINK!’ Comes den a customer, he is picking out suit and den after he is saying, ‘What dis ting you are giving me? A bill?’ ‘Sure, a bill,’ says the tailor in the joke: ‘You cannot read what is saying the sign? Is saying, “A.B. TINK. WHAT YOU TINK? WE SELL CLOTHES FOR NUTTINK?!”’”

Lourdes was in the closet for a record eight minutes.

“Oh, hey look,” Jane exclaimed with high perk. “All these crayons! Come on, let’s both draw something, Joey! What fun!” An entry hall closet door flashed to mind as a possible subject of my sketch, but a waiter came by just then and we ordered spaghetti with meatballs and Jane asked him to bring us “any really, really red red wine.” They must have thought we were midgets, inasmuch as no problem about age came up, and the waiter brought us glasses of a dark red wine that he said was “Tokay.” You never know. It tasted velvety, thick and sweet, and as I’d never drunk alcohol before in my life within minutes I was speaking several unknown languages poorly. “I feel like the top of my head’s floating off,” I told Jane with this idiotic grin on my face that I’m pretty sure lasted the whole time we were there. The wine hit Jane too, I think, because as soon as she was done with her spaghetti she pushed aside her plate, leaned back, and with her hands clasped in front of her on the table and that same spacey look in her eyes that so often graces those of the incontrovertibly boxed, she drawled slurrily, “In the summer I used to raise bees.”

I answered woozily, “Neat-o. Where was that? On some farm?”

“Time and space, what do they matter?” she answered; and then staring intently into my eyes she leaned forward with her head close to mine and confided, “It’s the bees that count, Joey. It’s the bees.” As I had no snappy comeback to this, I kept quiet with my stare glazed and dopey and my eyebrows knitting inward in this ludicrous attempt at looking wise and judicious while massively crocked at the age of thirteen and not minding the snickering of angels far away. “I was running out of room for my bees,” Jane continued gravely, “so I went to a cigar store and asked the owner if he maybe had an empty cigar box I could have. He said, ‘Sure. What do you want it for, kid?’ I said, ‘Bees. I raise bees. I’ve got about a thousand that I’m taking to another location; you know, someplace where bees have real meaning for people and they don’t go burning crosses smeared with honey on your lawn and screaming, “Keep your creepy hives the hell out of our lives!” and then waving all their medical bills for bee stings. I need the cigar box to put them in,’ I told him, and when he said, ‘Won’t they suffocate, kid?’ I said, ‘Fuck ’em!’” And with this Jane polished off the last of her wine, banged the glass back down on the table and drilled me with her eyes without a smile or a blink.

“Do you believe that?” she asked me.

Oh, well, first off, even shnockered I had to blink a bit at Jane’s salty lingo, though in just a few seconds that feeling went away and the word seemed just a colorful but innocent part of her, like the freckles on the end of her nose. But as for believing her story, no way, although based on Jane’s quirkiness, who knew?—plus now the Tokay was putting in its two cents with “Better watch it there, kid! Call her a liar and you’ll wind up washing dishes in this dump all day on account of she won’t be picking up your tab!” Solid thinking for a not-so-popular wine. But instead of saying, “Sure, I believe it,” I said nothing, I just nodded my head while at the same time steadfastly thinking, I believe the spaghetti was prepared al dente! to avoid any chance that one day in confession a certain hard-nosed Father Huerta, who would doubtless have been Beau Geste’s Sergeant Markhoff’s personal choice for Fort Zinderneuf’s chaplain, would be reading me off as the most shameless and hardened chronic liar since Citizen Kane’s biographer denied that in fact he’d said “Rosebud” twice. But then even with only my equivocating nod Jane exploded into smiles while tiny stars in her eyes danced a polka as she said to me, “Yes, Joey! Yes! You trust! You’ll be ready!”

Which was as transparently clear to me then as a haiku written by Yogi Berra. I said, “Ready for what?”

She didn’t say. And then abruptly from euphoria her face seemed to sag into a misty melancholy as she turned her head to look at herself in the mirror and, touching a hand to her hair, said softly and sadly, “I’m not pretty at all.” Not knowing what to say except, “Hey, what are you, nuts?” I just stared at the perfection of her face for a bit and it was then that I noticed that except for the reddish hair she looked enough like Lourdes to be her sister. There was also this funny sort of marking on her cheek, the left one, and, “What’s that?” I decided to ask her, pointing.

She shifted her eyes to me in the mirror.

“What’s what?”

“That little circle with the X inside of it. It’s on your cheek. You belong to some crazy-girl witch cult or something?”

“It’s a birthmark, Joey. Like your smirk.”

I looked up and saw the waiter hovering above us, distractedly picking at his wavy black mustache like he was feeling around for bits of chopped garlic that the chef had reported missing. He also had an eye on the door to the street as a couple with three little kids came in after seeing the movie Bambi, I guessed, as it was playing at the theater next door and all of the kids were still blubbering and sniffling, doubtless over the death of Bambi’s mother, who’s shot by a hunter in accord with Walt Disney’s decision it was time that they learned about the Problem of Evil even if it messed up their psyches for life and later led to them turning into serial killers with their victims all members of the NRA and always found with a note in block letters pinned to their bodies saying:

THIS IS FOR BAMBI’S MOTHER, YOU FUCK!

The waiter looked down at us.

“Dessert? Profiteroles? Spumoni? Bisque Tortoni?”

I ordered blueberry pie with chocolate ice cream, something else I’d never had before but which the Spirit of Tokay was insistent that I order, to which Jane added spunkily, “Make that two!” I eyed her as if I’d just met her. Gunga Din with tears three times, I reflected, and blueberry pie with chocolate ice cream once, and it was then I got this pretty big crush on Jane Bent.

It was early October and one of those orangey full-moon nights, so we walked to the newly built East River walkway, just ambling along, with me at first undecided as to which way of walking would impress Jane more: Gary Cooper’s suffering but stoic-faced “You’d Never Know My Indigestion’s Killing Me” style or Humphrey Bogart’s more intimidating lowered-shoulder slouch with a dead left arm held immobile across his waist like Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. Funny thing: as I was mentally trying out the styles, I think Jane pretty well understood what I was doing, because she’d glance at me sidewise with this knowing sort of fond little smile. The reflection of that pumpkin moon on the river and the string-of-pearl lights of the Brooklyn Bridge were so romantic that running through my head was the voice of Bing Crosby in a movie I’d seen where he’s in a canoe on a moonlit night singing “Moonlight Becomes You” to Dorothy Lamour. But this being real life and not a movie I kept hoping that nothing would spoil the magic, like encountering a police truck fishing some derelict out of the river with these slender long poles with metal hooks on the end before slapping him into a wooden box with these loud squishy thumping sounds like the guy was a side of beef and even now still an all-around royal pain in the ass. This was something I’d seen that past summer when, walking down East 23rd the day before, some poor old bum came shambling past me in the opposite direction and I heard him saying, “Kill me, Jesus! Please! Please kill me!” over and over and without any trace of emotion, like he was praying the next day would be sunny so he could go to a Yankee game. I’d wondered if his was the body I’d seen fished from the river.

And if it was should I be sad or glad?

We sat on a bench for a while looking out at the river and the twinkling lights of the Brooklyn shore, not talking but refueling our souls while in the distance a tugboat hooted sadly along. Then I heard Jane asking me a question.

“Joey, do you pray?”

I turned and tried to read her. Her voice had been earnest and touched with concern, like her jade green stare now meeting mine.

I said, “What?”

“Do you pray?”

“Sure, I pray. I go to Mass every Sunday.”

“I mean at night. Do you pray every night?”

I shook my head.

“You need to do it,” she said. “It builds up graces.”

“What do you mean?”

She was looking really serious now.

“The world’s a battleground, Joey. I mean it. You can’t see it, but we’re really in a scary war with darkness, with these demonic evil shitheads, the ‘Dominions’ and the ‘Powers’ that Saint Paul goes on about, and inasmuch they’ve got most of the high-powered weapons we need to put on armor, which is grace, Joey, the grace of the sacraments; and a way we get to access that grace is by prayer.” Then she added, “For a start.”

“For a start?”

“For a start. Didn’t your pop teach you night prayers, Joey?”

Well, I didn’t know whether I should pull up my socks or sing “Swanee River,” but wisely choosing neither I just gently shook my head. I mean, what could I say? Oh, well, sure: Pop had told me I should try to pray at night. He said that he’d promised my mom he would do that. But teaching me how? I mean, to get in the mood and teach me right Pop would have to be standing in deep meditation on a pointed crag about sixteen thousand feet in the air with the favored family eagles slowly flapping and circling all around him in the mist quietly cawing at him, “Don’t look down!”

I didn’t say this, of course. What I said was, “Not exactly.”

“Come on then, kneel down and I’ll show you.”

My eyes bugged out a little. She was kneeling at the bench, her hands folded prayerfully on the wooden seat. “Come on,” she said. “Do this for me, would you, Joey? It would make me very happy. Joey, please?”

Well, I did it. I knelt down beside her and with a fervent prayer in mind, alright, which was that none of my classmates would happen by, but as it was Jane taught me a different one: “‘Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.’ That’s all you need to say,” she told me. And then again that little sneaky caboose, “For now.

“But do it every night,” she then added. “Every night!”

“Hey, you sweet-lookin’ honey!”

Jane and I quickly stood up. It was a group of three guys, most likely eighth-graders from Our Lady of We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges, one big and pretty brawny in a red tank T-shirt with the single word “SO?” on the front in huge letters. “Why don’t you dump your skinny boyfriend,” he went on, “and come along with us guys to a party? What do you say? You want to come? Sure, you do. Come on, I got something nice for you there. Real nice.”

When I finally had to recognize the probability he was talking to Jane and not someone on the Planet Schwartz, before I could open my mouth to advise him his behavior was “not the way of Zen,” the guy in the tank shirt reached to clutch at Jane’s arm when suddenly, WHAMMO! She’d whipped around sideways and kicked him in the jewels, and with his mouth wide open in shock and awe, not to mention excruciating pain, Mister “I Am Not Zorro After All” slowly crumpled to the ground while the two lesser toughs held back, looking suddenly fearful and confused and not at all like Huntz Hall, a St. Stephen’s grad who played one of the “Dead End Kids” in the movie. Meantime, Jane was now crouched in a fighting position with a tightly clenched fist held out in front of her and another fist coiled at her waist. “Vamanos, hombres!” she warned them. “I have power! I am the power!” Then she took a step forward and instantly the three caballeros turned and ran, heading back uptown, their disgraced fallen leader hobbling gamely as he straggled behind muttering threats of revenge that would have even made the Count of Monte Cristo blench, while now and then he would turn and shake a fist at us, yelling, “You going to see what going to hoppen to you now! You know? You going to see! My God, you going to see!” His Latino Jeremiads continued sporadically until, as he began to recede in the distance, a final valediction so faint that it might have been coming from the edge of the Andromeda galaxy dimly floated down to us from far upriver: “I feel sorry for you guys! You know? I’m feeling sorry so bad I’m going to puke!!”

The glow of the Tokay had worn off and I wasn’t sure how I should take all of this. First my role as a provider and now this.

But I was quick to give praise.

“Holy whack!” I exclaimed. “Jane, where’d you learn judo?”

“It’s not judo.”

“Then what is it?”

“Effective. Listen, Joey, gotta go now. I got lots of stuff to do.”

“Gee, so early?”

“Can’t be helped.”

“Well, okay then,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.”

She shook her head.

“No. This is something I need to do alone.”

“Such as what?”

“Seven churches,” she said. “Okay? On Holy Thursday you get graces if you visit seven churches.”

“It isn’t Thursday, though. It’s Friday.”

She looked up at me with patience in her eyes. And something else. Maybe fondness. Maybe worry. Maybe both.

Looking aside, Jane folded her arms across her chest while a sigh fluttered down to the tabletop with the weight of a withered leaf.

“Now it starts,” she murmured.

She was shaking her head.

“Whaddya mean?” I said, frowning a little in puzzlement.

With this she turned back to me, her eyes a little tight as she answered, “You know perfectly well what I mean. Must you always be so quarrelsome, Joey? Do you have to be right every time? Someone tells you it’s daytime, you insist it’s night? Then they point to the sky and say, ‘See, there’s the sun,’ and you give them your biggest killer line, ‘Yes, but! ’”

“What do you mean?” I said; “It really is Friday!”

“And you’re stubborn as ever besides. Now, listen, Joey, one more thing. It’s important.”

“What’s important?”

“That it’s okay to love me. But don’t be in love with me. Okay? And be good to your father. He loves you so much.” And with that she turned around and started quickly walking south while calling out to me, “Trust, Joey! The magic word is trust!”

Oh, yeah sure, I was thinking: Trust. I mean, who could you possibly believe about anything? The wiring in my brain was still shooting off sparks from that time near the end of third grade when Baloqui approached me, his eyes wide and his face an off-white, which was the best it could do whenever drained of blood, and grimly whispered in a horrified tone, “Oh, my God, Joey!”

“What?!”

“Oh, my God! I just found out what it is you have to do when you get married!”

“Yeah?”

“You have to put your weeney inside your wife’s heine!”

I took a couple of steps backward, half yelling, half gasping at him, “What? Are you out of your mind, Baloqui? Get away from me! No! No, don’t touch me! You disgust me! Where in hell’d you hear a crazy thing like that?”

“From a guy in fifth grade!”

I went numb. A fifth-grader! This was authoritative!

“Then I’m never getting married!” I gritted.

“Me too!”

We hugged tightly. I thought I heard a whimper.

The next month Baloqui’s parents invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, which his family held the day after ours, and all through the meal I’d see Baloqui’s dead stare go from his father to his mother and then back, and then he’d lower his head and mutely shake it.

I saw Jane take a right on a path that would lead her to Avenue A and then on to her Holy Thursday churches on a Friday. What a mystery she was: plucky as short, fat Tony Galento getting hammered in the ring by Joe Louis, and jumpy as fleas who’ve just gotten great news; dropping the F-bomb and then teaching me to pray; making sense, then being totally wingy. There was also this aura about her, something spiritual; ethereal, really. And then I remembered some stuff that she’d said to me, things like, “You’re as stubborn as ever.”

As ever? What did that mean?