“Sure, sure,” he said.
“You got busted, didn’t you?”
“That was just a bad break.”
The waiter brought their drinks. Terry’s “usual” was a shot glass of whiskey with a tumbler of water on the side. She lifted the shot glass, winked at Colley over it, and then tossed back the shot.
“You drink it straight now, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, and picked up the water tumbler.
They were silent for several moments. Colley was finding it difficult to think of anything to talk about. Last time he was with her, she’d told him she was going up to Vermont. He’d wanted to know why she was going all the way up there, and she’d told him she wanted to get away from him. If he quit what he was doing, she wouldn’t go. But if he continued... Listen, he’d said, go, stay, do whatever the fuck you want, I ain’t changing my life style for nobody. He looked at her now. She smiled at him over the water tumbler. Then she put down the glass, opened her bag, and took out a pack of cigarettes.
“I see you’re back on the weed,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, and struck a match and held it to the end of the cigarette. She blew the smoke up at the ceiling, and then leaned back in the booth, one arm resting on the leatherette top, the other bent, her elbow on the table, the cigarette trailing smoke. “How was prison?” she said.
“Lousy,” he said. “How you think it was?”
“Where were you, anyway?”
“Sing Sing.”
“That’s supposed to be a good one,” she said.
“There ain’t no good ones,” he said.
“That’s where Di Santo got sent,” she said. “He told me it was a good one.”
“Di Santo got sent to Attica.”
“No, Sing Sing.”
“Attica, don’t tell me. It was Attica.”
“Where’s that?”
“That’s in New York, too.”
“Well, wherever. Di Santo said it was a good one.”
“It’s worse than Sing Sing. That’s where they had all the riots, few years back. Where a lot of guys got killed.”
“That must’ve been while I was in Vermont,” she said. “I hardly even read a newspaper while I was up there. We didn’t even have a radio in the house.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me and the other kids. We all lived together in this old run-down house we were renting.”
“What were you, like hippies or something?”
“No, no,” Terry said, and shrugged. “We just lived together, is all.”
“Three guys and three girls,” Colley said.
“Yeah.”
“What did they have, these guys? Long hair?”
“Yeah.”
“Beards?”
“Yeah.”
“So they were hippies, right?”
“Look, call them what you want, okay?”
“I’m calling them what they were. Hippies is what they were. What’d you do up there all the time? Smoke dope all the time?”
“Yeah, we smoked dope all the time,” Terry said, and sighed. “And had orgies.”
“What?” Colley said.
“On Tuesdays,” she said.
“What?”
“We had orgies on Tuesdays,” she said. “All day Tuesday. That was the orgy day.”
“I’m trying to be serious, and you’re kidding around,” he said. “You left the Bronx, you were a nice girl, you didn’t even know what the fuck a marijuana cigarette was. So you go up there to Vermont with those fuckin hippies, and all of a sudden you—”
“I went up there because you wouldn’t stop what you were doing.”
“You can’t expect a man to change his way of—”
“You were a crook, Colley,” she said.
“That’s right. I was a crook,” he said. “I still am, you want to know. Right.”
“Right. And I didn’t want to be around when they busted you. It was as simple as that. The way you were going, I knew it was just a matter of time before they busted you. So I went to Vermont. Because I loved you,” she said, and the table went silent, the bar went silent, the street went silent, the entire world went silent.
“Well,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
Their voices were softer now. She had reminded him that she had loved him, and perhaps it no longer meant anything to him, perhaps people do not want to hear that once they were loved, perhaps all they want to hear is that they are loved, here and now, in the present, never mind the fuckin past; but she had loved him, she had just told him she’d loved him once upon a time, long, long ago.
“I loved you, too,” he said. The words sounded strange to him. The moment they left his mouth, he wished he hadn’t said them. He felt suddenly in danger for having said them. He did not even know this blonde with the butch haircut and the dress cut so low you could almost see her nipples. Green eyeshadow on her eyes, lips a bright painted red, cigarette smoke trailing up past her face. “That was a long time ago,” he added quickly.
“Yes,” she said. “People change,” she said. “But I can still remember.”
“Sure,” he said, and nodded. His glass was empty, he wanted another drink. He signaled to the waiter, and when he came to the table he ordered a double this time, and asked Terry if she wanted anything, and she said she wouldn’t mind. They were silent until the waiter brought the drinks, as though neither of them was willing to explore the territory that had just been opened. The moment the waiter put the drinks down, they reached for the glasses. Terry again swallowed the shot in a single gulp and then picked up the tumbler and sipped at the water. Colley took a large swallow and then set his glass down.
“Do you remember the time we went to Coney Island,” she said, “and the Ferris wheel got stuck, and we were up there for close to three hours? Do you remember that, Colley?”
“Yes, I remember that,” he said. He sipped at his drink and listened to her as she described a sky full of stars, the lights of the amusement park below, the sound of music from the calliope, the breeze blowing in off the Atlantic. They had held hands and talked about the future. Trapped on the Ferris wheel, he had promised for perhaps the tenth time that he would quit doing robberies. The promise had moved her to tears, and they had sat there swinging in the chair at the top of the wheel, and had talked about when the wedding would take place, and what kind of straight job Colley might get, and where they would live — should they stay in the Bronx, or maybe move to Mt. Vernon or even further up? He was lying even then. He had planned and cased a job for the very next night, and he knew he would go through with it, whatever he promised her tonight on this wheel. He wanted to reach up and touch the stars.
He had stolen her from Ernie, she used to be Ernie’s girl. Ernie was already boxing by then, this was two years after the club broke up, the Duke had already turned junkie, and had kicked the habit, and was pushing the stuff; everybody said he had Mafia connections, but Colley doubted it. Benny already had himself two girls by then, both experienced pros who were bringing in enough cash every week to keep him living pretty good. His ambition, he told Colley, was to have a string of twelve girls, be a gentleman of leisure. Colley told him it’d take a better man than Benny to control a dozen girls, and Benny threw him the arm salute. Colley himself had already done a dozen or more robberies and was beginning to make a good living at it. He sounded Benny about coming in with him, said he could use a good driver. Benny said he would rather stick to his girls. That was how the situation stood when Colley met Terry.
He met her when she was seventeen and he was twenty-one; she was engaged to Ernie Pass at the time. They were all calling him Ernie Pass by then because he was boxing professionally, was in fact on the road all the time, fighting in tank towns, which was how come Terry Brufani was alone so much of the time. Colley met her at a confirmation party, a big ginzo affair, ham sandwiches and beer in a hall on Westchester Avenue, one of his cousins three or four times removed. The Brufani family had been invited, too, and there she was — Terry Brufani, seventeen years old, ripe as a Sicilian olive. They danced together the whole night, but when he asked her if she’d like to go see a movie or something next Saturday, she told him she was engaged to Ernie Pass.