12
I met Magdalena the night of Denise’s wedding, August 13th, 1999. She was in the string sextet, playing viola. Ordinarily she played in a quartet, but her booking agent handled a couple of different quartets, so when people wanted a sextet, which was usually for a wedding, the agent made one up. Denise’s wedding had a sextet and, for after dinner, a DJ.
It was a big wedding. It was at a country club on Long Island that the groom’s family belonged to, since Denise had decided to do it back East, where most of her extended family was. Skinflick and I were seated about a mile away from her.
Somehow everybody seemed to understand that it was my job to babysit Skinflick, and that I was supposed to keep him either too sober or too drunk to do anything embarrassing. It was a pretty sordid job, and it got old fast. I was almost as hung over as he was, and I was tired of hearing him complain. Half of me thought if he was serious he really should make a scene, and steal Denise away. Ignore the constraints of tradition and family and be true for once to his Golden Bough bullshit.
But rituals turn us all into f*cking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don’t remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women—and that’s f*cking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.
So maybe it’s understandable that Skinflick felt unable to step in front of a parade that went thousands of years back. It still made me kind of sick, though, and the humidity didn’t help. At one point I took the long way back from the bar to have some time away from him.
That’s when I saw Magdalena.
I’m not sure this is any of your business, but if you really want me to talk about her, here it is.
Physically: She had black hair. She had a widow’s peak. She had slanted eyes. She was small. Bone-thin except for her lower body, which was muscled from running. Before I met her I’d always liked big blondes. She kicked all their asses instantly.
The white shirt she wore to play viola was too big for her, so it was rolled at the sleeves and open at the neck. You could see her collarbones. When she played she kept her hair back with a velvet band, but locks of it always escaped to arc forward from her widow’s peak. When I first saw her they looked like antennae.
That night she was pale, but whenever she spent time in the sun she would turn brown, like she was from Egypt, or Mars. The waist of her bikini bottoms would stretch from one sharp hip bone to the other and float a centimeter off her stomach, so you could slide a hand down there. She had full lips. I’d kill everyone I ever killed all over again for those lips.
None of this says anything about her. It doesn’t even tell you how she looked.
She was Romanian. Born there, moved to the U.S. at fourteen, late enough to keep a bit of an accent. She was feverishly Catholic. She went to church every Sunday and got sweat on her upper lip when she prayed.
It may strike you as odd that someone—the only one—I loved like that was so religious. I loved even that about her, though. It was hard to argue in her presence that the world didn’t have some kind of magic going on, and she was completely undogmatic. To her, the fact that she was Catholic and I was not had to be as much God’s intention as everything else. God wanted us to be together, and would never make her love someone He didn’t love also.
Prior to meeting Magdalena when I thought of Catholicism I thought of dusty icons, corrupt popes, and The Exorcist. But where I imagined creepy wooden statues of St. Margaret, she imagined St. Margaret herself, in the fields of Scotland, with the butterflies. What Magdalena was to me, the Virgin Mary was to her. It never made me jealous. It just made me grateful to be around her.
Speaking of the Sabine women, by the way, my favorite thing to do was carry Magdalena around. In the days when I had the condo in Demarest and Skinflick was never around, I used to do it for hours. Carry her naked in both arms, Creature from the Black Lagoon–style, or else seated on my bent right arm, facing forward with one of her own arms looped back around my neck. Sometimes I would put my arms out straight against the wall, and she would sit facing me with her thighs over my forearms, so I could lick her from her p-ssy to the sides of her neck, and get at her hip bones, and her ribcage.
I’m still not making this anywhere close to clear.
We knew the second we saw each other. How depressing is that? How far from anything that will ever happen again, to me or anyone else?
I saw her and I couldn’t stop staring at her, and she kept staring back. I worried I just happened to be standing in the spot her eyes gravitated toward when she played, so I moved, and she followed me. During the times she wasn’t playing, when she put her viola down, her mouth would open just a tiny bit.
Then Skinflick came up behind me and said, “Hey, that faggot’s going off alone.”
“Who?” I said, still looking at Magdalena.
“Denise’s ‘husband.’”
Faggot was a charming mannerism Skinflick had picked up hanging out with Kurt Limme. He’d started out using it ironically, like he was mocking goombah bigots, but it had stuck to him. At least he didn’t use it to refer to gay people.
“Okay,” I said.
“Let’s go follow him.”
“No thanks.”
“Whatever, a*shole,” he said. “I’ll go do it myself.”
A few moments later I said “F*ck,” and pulled myself away to go after him.
I saw Skinflick heading around the back of the catering tent. I followed.
Denise’s new husband was standing there in the darkness, smoking a joint, alone. He was a blond guy with a ponytail and rimless glasses who worked as a computer animator or something in Los Angeles. I think his name was Steven, though who really cares.
“He’s a motherf*cking pothead?” Skinflick said.
The guy looked about twenty-six, which was four years older than we were, and six years older than Denise. He said, “You Adam?”
“F*ckin right,” Skinflick said.
“You’re the mob cousin?”
“The what?” Skinflick said.
“Must have the wrong guy. What do you do for a living?”
“Are you giving me f*cking lip?” Skinflick shouted.
The guy flicked the remains of his joint away and put his hands in his pockets. I was impressed. He might have been able to kick Skinflick’s ass if Skinflick was alone, but Skinflick was not alone.
“I’ll have Pietro kick your head so far up your ass you’ll be able to see out your own mouth!” Skinflick said.
“No he won’t,” I said, laying a hand on Skinflick’s shoulder. To the guy, I said, “He’s a bit drunk.”
“I can see that,” the guy said.
Skinflick slapped my hand off. “F*ck both of you.”
I took Skinflick by the arm, too hard to slap off. “You’re welcome,” I said to him. “Say congratulations.”
“Eat shit,” Skinflick said. To the guy, he said, “You better treat her right.”
The guy was wise enough to not answer as I dragged Skinflick back to the wedding.
I took him to our table and made him eat two Xanax while I watched. When they kicked in I left him there and went back to watch the sextet.
At nine o’clock they stopped playing so the DJ could take over and people could dance. They all stood up and started packing their instruments and music stands.
I went to the edge of the stage. Magdalena blushed and avoided my eyes as she packed. “Hello?” I said.
She froze. The others stared.
“Can I talk to you?” I said.
“We’re not allowed to talk to the guests,” one of the other ones said. The woman who had been playing cello. She had an underbite.
“Then can I call you?” I said to Magdalena.
Magdalena shook her head. “I’m sorry.” It was the first time I heard her accent.
“Can I give you my number? Will you call me?”
She looked at me.
She said “Yes.”
Later, I was standing around stunned, and Kurt Limme came up to me.
“Noticed you hitting on the help,” he said.
“I didn’t know you were invited to this,” I said.
“I came here to support Skinflick. This is tough on him.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve been with him all night.”
Limme shrugged. “I was busy. I was f*cking his aunt in one of the Port-a-Potties.”
“Shirl?” I said.
He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah.”
“Yuck for her,” I said. “I hope she was drunk.”
But I didn’t really care.
Love was in the air.
I spent the next three days in Demarest, killing my heavy bag and waiting for her to call. When David Locano called instead and asked me to meet him at the old Russian Baths on 10th Street in Manhattan, I jumped at it just to have something to do.
Locano was using the Baths regularly at that time, on the theory that the FBI couldn’t build a microphone capable of surviving a steam room. This seemed overly optimistic—it was before 9/11, when we all learned how incompetent Louis Freeh’s FBI really was—but we went with it.
For my part I kind of liked the steam room. It was dirty but it gave meetings a kind of ancient Rome feeling.
“Adam’s getting his own apartment in Manhattan,” Locano said when I got there. He looked depressed. He was hunched forward in his towel skirt.
“Yeah,” I said. I sat down next to him.
“Were you going to tell me?”
“I figured you knew.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Yeah, I went with him to look at it.”
That made him wince. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“I don’t know. You should ask him.”
“Yeah, right. I can barely talk to him. Even when I get to see him.”
“He’s going through a phase.”
Which was true. Skinflick was spending all his time with Kurt Limme. But I wasn’t too upset about it. I had my own shit going on, and in a weird way the fact that Skinflick would rebel against me as well as his father was flattering. It showed that Skinflick saw me as an influence on him, just as he’d been an influence on me.
His father felt otherwise, though. “It’s that f*ck Kurt Limme,” he said. “He wants to put Adam in the business.”
“Skinflick won’t go through with it,” I said.
He nodded slowly. Neither one of us believed me.
“I really don’t want it to happen,” Locano said.
“Neither do I.”
He lowered his voice. “You know it means he’d have to kill somebody.”
I let that sit for a minute. “What about getting him an exemption?” I said.
“Don’t jerk my chain,” Locano said. “You know there aren’t any exemptions.”
I did know that, I guess.
It still freaked me out to hear him admit it.
“So what can we do?” I said.
“We can’t let him do it.”
“Right, but how?”
Locano looked away from me, and whispered. I couldn’t hear him.
I said, “Excuse me?”
“I want you to kill Limme.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay you fifty grand.”
“No way. You should know better than to ask me that.”
“A hundred grand. Name it.”
“I don’t do that shit.”
“It’s not just for Adam. Limme is bad news.”
“He’s bad news? Who gives a shit?”
“He’s a cold-blooded killer.”
“How’s that?”
“He shot a Russian grocery clerk in the face.”
“To get made?”
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes a shitload of difference. You’re telling me Limme shot someone what, five years ago? That sucks. He deserves to die for it, and I hope he at least goes to jail for it. But it doesn’t give me the right to kill him. It doesn’t give you the right, either. If you feel that strongly, call the cops.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“Well I can’t murder someone for being a bad role model for Skinflick. Who’d you kill to get made?”
His voice turned hard. “That’s none of your f*cking business.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“What the f*ck’s gotten into you?” he said. Then, a moment later, “I hear you and Limme spent some time together at Denise’s wedding.”
“We spent about thirty seconds insulting each other. I hate that dick.”
“And Adam f*cking worships him,” Locano said. “It’s gonna get him killed, or sent to jail.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well maybe you should have thought about that twenty years ago.”
What can I say?
Your best friend’s dad. Somewhere along the way you start to think of him as kind of like your own dad, or your idea of what your own dad should be. You come to believe that he likes you, and that you can trust him, and even talk shit to him.
You never think This guy’s a killer, and he’s smart. You piss him off, he’ll turn on you. Like that.
You never think it in time, I mean.
When I got back to my apartment there was a message.
“Hello. This is Magdalena.” Breathy, like she was keeping her voice down. Then a pause, then a hang-up. Nothing else. No number.
It flipped me out. I played it five or six times, then called Barbara Locano, then called Shirl, feeling weird about the Limme thing. Shirl gave me the name of the wedding planner in Manhattan who had hired the sextet.
The wedding planner told me from the cell phone in her car that she didn’t give out contacts, “for their privacy.” She said, “I mean, I’m sure you’ll find a perfectly nice orchestra if you arrange your own wedding.”
I made an appointment to meet her at her office the following day for an estimate, and when she got all flirty and demanding I didn’t bother to find out how serious she was, just did everything to her she asked for. I barely even noticed.
Getting Magdalena’s upcoming schedule was easier. Marta, her booking agent, seemed to think of giving it out as advertising, and worth the risk—at least to Marta. Apparently no one stalks the booking agent.
Most of the parties on the quartet’s schedule were in private homes, which might or might not be big enough to crash without drawing attention, so I picked a wedding in Fort Tryon Park, in upper Manhattan, that didn’t begin until nightfall. When I got there it turned out to be in a single large tent attached to the side of the stone-walled restaurant in the middle of the park. The event wasn’t large, but it was laid back, and as soon as it was even slightly crowded I was able to mix in. I was wearing a suit, having assumed, correctly, that no one would hold a black-tie wedding in Fort Tryon Park.
Magdalena had on the same white shirt and black waiter pants. I stayed out of her sight until the group took a smoking break on a roadway up the hill, and I approached her. She was talking to the cello player near their van.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” the cello player said. The challenge in her voice made her underbite worse.
“It’s all right,” Magdalena told her.
The cello player said something in a language I couldn’t even identify, and Magdalena said something back in what I assumed was the same language.
“I’ll be over there,” the cello player said to both of us, and walked off.
Magdalena and I stared at each other.
“She’s protective,” I said eventually.
“Yes. She feels she has to be. I’m not sure why.”
“I understand it.”
She smiled. “Is that a pickup line?”
“No. Kind of. I want to know you.”
She put her head to one side and closed one eye. “You know I’m Romanian?”
“No. I don’t know anything about you.”
“It’s not likely it would work out, with a Romanian and an American.”
“I don’t feel that way at all.”
“Neither do I,” she said.
On the off chance that I had heard her correctly, I said, “When can I see you?”
She looked away. Sighed. “I live with my parents,” she said.
For an awful moment I wondered if she was sixteen or something. It was certainly possible. Just as it was also possible she was thirty, since she gave off a feeling of ancientness like you’d imagine from a vampire, or an angel.
To be honest, if she had been sixteen it wouldn’t have stopped me.
“How old are you?” I said.
“Twenty. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Well then.” She smiled. “Perfect.”
“Come away with me right now,” I said.
She touched the back of my hand with her strong slender fingers. I brought my hand up to interlace them.
Later, when she would sleep with my balls in those fingers, which were barely able to contain them, I liked to think back to that night in the park. But at the time she said, “I can’t.”
“When can I see you, then?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you.”
“I need you to call me.”
“I will. But we only have one phone.”
“Call me from anywhere. Whenever. Do you still have my number?”
She recited it from memory, which I knew would have to satisfy me.
But another entire week went by without her calling. Insanity. I forwarded my phone to work, then drove like a maniac to get there so I wouldn’t miss her. I took the cordless everywhere in the house. People who weren’t her I just hung up on.
She called on a Sunday night, late. I was doing handstand push-ups against the wall and screaming. Out the window it was raining. I rolled forward and came to my feet with the phone in my hand.
“Hello?”
“It’s Magdalena.”
I fell still. I was completely slick with sweat. My pulse felt ready to blow apart my fingertips, and I couldn’t remember whether it had been that way a minute ago or not.
“Thanks for calling,” I croaked.
“I can’t talk. I’m at a party. I’m in the bedroom. Everyone’s purse is here. They’ll think I’m stealing something.”
“I need to see you.”
“I know. I need to see you too. Can you come meet me?”
“Yes I can,” I said.
The party was at a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. She was waiting for me under the awning of the apartment building across the street, to stay out of the rain. She had her viola with her in a nylon case. As soon as I saw her I swerved the car into the fire-hydrant half-space in front of the building. She ran over and put her viola in the back seat and got in the front. I already had my seat belt off.
We kissed for a long time. It was difficult because I needed so badly to look at her, but I was also so hungry for her mouth.
Eventually she put her head on my chest. “I want you but I can’t have sex with you,” she said.
“That’s okay.”
“I’m a virgin. I’ve kissed a couple of boys, but that’s all.”
“I love you,” I said. “I don’t care.”
She grabbed my face and looked into it to see if I was serious, then started kissing me again, a thousand times harder. I heard a zipper, and she took my hand and put it on her crotch, then pulled the cotton of her underwear aside.
Her p-ssy was blazing, and sopping. When she squeezed her thighs together it forced my fingers up into it.
Skinflick approved, by the way. Magdalena was completely honest and never questioned herself, and while Skinflick was no longer exactly like that, he still respected it in other people, and recognized how rare it was. Once when he and I were alone together he said “She’s perfect for you. Like Denise was for me.”
The three of us smoked pot together sometimes. Magdalena would announce that she wasn’t feeling it at all, then go lazy-lidded, then start kissing my neck and whisper, “Take me to the bedroom.” Skinflick, on the other side of me, would say, “Make Pietro do it. I’m watching cable.”
But that was later, when Skinflick was living with me again.
What happened was this:
One night in October I came home to find him sitting in my living room with a gun in his hand. A chunky .38 revolver. I’d been out running, something I’d started to do with Magdalena, but right then she was either playing with the quartet or at night school, where she was studying accounting.
When I came through the door Skinflick didn’t point the gun at me. But he didn’t put it down, either.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Did you kill him?” he said.
He looked f*cking awful. He was pale, and a weird mixture of skinny and flabby.
“Who?” I said. Thinking: Oh shit. David Locano is dead.
“Kurt.”
“Kurt Limme?”
“You don’t know anyone else named Kurt.”
“How the f*ck would you know? I haven’t talked to you in weeks.”
“Did you?”
“No. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know he was dead. What happened?”
“Someone shot him in the face in the doorway of his apartment,” Skinflick said. Limme’s apartment was in Tribeca. “Like he buzzed the person in.”
“What do the police say?”
“They say it wasn’t a robbery.”
“Maybe it was your Uncle Roger,” I said. Shirl’s husband.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Yeah, I guess. Sorry.” For a second I wondered if I had killed Kurt Limme, and somehow forgotten about it. “What does your dad say?”
“He says you didn’t talk to him about it, so if you did it you did it alone.”
“Nice,” I said. I pulled a chair over from the table. “I’m going to sit down now. Don’t shoot me.”
Skinflick tossed the revolver onto the coffee table heavily as I sat. “F*ck you. I wasn’t going to shoot you,” he said. “I’m just worried they’ll come after me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. That’s the point.”
“Huh,” I said. “I’m sorry about Kurt.”
“It’s not gonna stop me.”
“Not gonna stop you from what?”
He turned away. “From getting made,” he said.
“I didn’t realize that was on the agenda,” I said.
“Yes you did.”
“You’re right: maybe I did. But it’s a shitty idea, and maybe you shouldn’t think about it right now.”
“I don’t need to think about it. I’m doing it.”
“You’re gonna murder someone to impress a bunch of scumbags?”
“It’s what Kurt would have wanted.”
“Kurt’s dead.”
“Exactly. And I’m gonna say ‘f*ck you’ to whoever killed him.”
I said, “You think whoever killed Limme cares whether you get made?”
“I have no f*cking idea!” Skinflick said. “I don’t even know who did it!” He sulked for a moment. “Anyway, who are you to question me? You got revenge for your grandparents.”
“That doesn’t mean it was right.”
“But it was, wasn’t it?”
“Well, it sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s right for you.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Between me and you?”
“That’s right.”
“Jesus,” I said. I sincerely did not want to get into that. “For one thing, I had someone to kill. I wasn’t just killing to do it.”
Skinflick’s face flashed a hint of relief.
“Well, f*ck, dude,” he said. “I’m not gonna kill somebody innocent. I’m not an a*shole. I’m gonna find some scumbag. Like the ones my dad finds for you. Some sick f*ck who’s begging for it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll run the whole thing by you first if you want.”
“Okay,” I finally said.
That’s all I said: Okay.
Now, you tell me.
Was that some kind of promise?