His hand shook under the weight of the first whiskey, and he sat at a table in the corner, stared out the window and watched the pigeons rise up from the street and settle back down again till he knew every one of them as an individual, knew its strut and color, knew the cocks from the hens and the old from the young. There they were, fecund and flapping, like some mindless feathered symbol of his own feckless life, leaping up instinctively as each car passed and then pouring back down again in its wake, oblivious, strutting, pecking, fucking. He was thinking about Giovannella and Rosaleen and Eddie Jr. and little Guide—Guido, for Christ’s sake — and wondering where he’d gone wrong. Or how. He was no biologist, like Katherine, but he knew that if the male of the species — namely, Eddie O‘Kane — sticks his thing in the female enough times, no matter the time of month or the precautions taken, eventually she’s going to swell up and keep on swelling till there’s another yabbering little brat in the world.
But he caught himself right there. This was no ordinary brat, this was no black-eyed little shoemaker’s son, this was Guido O‘Kane, his son, and he had to take responsibility for him. But how? Slip Giovannella money each month and play the Dutch uncle? Catch the shoemaker in an alley some night and make her a widow and then go ahead and marry her, which is what he should have done in the first place? But then — and there was an icy nagging voice in the back of his mind, the voice of the Ice Queen reading him the riot act in the downstairs parlor — he was already married, wasn’t he?
All this was going through his head when the little two-seat Maxwell with its trim white tires and expressive brakes pulled up to the curb and sent the pigeons into a paroxysm of flight. He could see Dolores Isringhausen sitting at the wheel, her pearl gloves, the way she cocked her head back and the glassy cold look of her eyes. She didn’t get out of the car. She didn’t come in. Just tapped the horn as if she were summoning some lackey, some black buck to slip into the manor house and service her while the master’s away, and what did she think he was? He didn’t move a muscle. Raising the glass to his lips, he took a long slow sip, as if he had all the time in the world, eyes locked on hers all the while. He wanted to gesture to her to come in, but he didn‘t, and when she tapped the horn again, her features drawn in irritation, he got up, crossed the barroom and went to her.
“What was that about?” she said, glancing up as he climbed in beside her. “Didn’t you see me? You were looking right at me.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, the car lurching forward with a crunch of the tires, and by the time he got settled they were charging down State toward the ocean, the blue skin of the sky joined to the blue skin of the sea by a thin gray seam of mist that blotted the islands from view. She had the top up, for discretion’s sake, and she drove too fast, dodging round a market wagon and a double-parked car, nipping in behind the trolley and shooting through the intersections as if there was no other car on the road. “I saw you,” he said, and he could feel the weight lifting off him, just a hair, “and it was good to see you, damn good…. I just needed a minute to feast my eyes on you and think how lucky I am. Or how lucky I’m going to be.”
“What’s the matter,” she said, bunching her lips in a moue, “all your girlfriends on strike?” She leaned into him for a kiss, but she never took her eyes off the road. They rattled over the streetcar tracks and in and out of a pair of potholes that nearly put his skull through the canvas roof, and then she swung left on Cabrillo, heading away from town. “You still seeing the little Italian slut, the one with the dirty eyes? You know, the breeder?”
“Nah,” he lied, “there’s nobody right now.” And he gave her his smile, their faces so close, the car jolting, the smell of her. “I’ve been saving myself for you.”
By way of response, she produced a flask from beneath the seat, took a drink and handed it to him. “Then I guess I can expect a pretty hot time,” she said finally, giving him a sidelong glance, her smile tight around lips wet with gin, and like any other actor taking his cue, he reached out and laid a hand on her thigh.
They didn’t stop at a roadhouse, lunchroom or restaurant, but went straight up Hot Springs Road and into the hills of Montecito in a hurricane of dust and flying leaves that didn’t abate till she swung into the tree-lined drive of the villa and glided up to the garage. She killed the engine and he wondered if he should go round and open the door for her, but she didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and in the next moment they climbed separately out of the car and headed up the walk in front of the house. The place was deserted, no servants or gardeners or washerwomen, no eyes to see or ears to hear, and she took him by the hand and led him straight up to the bedroom. He knew what to do then, and as the afternoon stretched into the evening and the sun crept across the floor through the French doors flung open wide on a garden of ten-foot ferns, he used his tongue and his fingers and his hard Irish prick to extract all the pleasure from her he could, and it was like breaking for the goal with the ball tucked under his arm, like swinging for the fence, one more empty feat and nothing more. He didn’t love her. He loved Giovannella. And he thought about that and how odd it was as he thrust himself into Dolores Isringhausen with a kind of desperation he couldn’t admit and the sun moved and the woman beneath him locked her hips to his and he felt the weight slip back down again, hopeless and immovable, till it all but crushed him.
He must have fallen asleep, because when the phone rang in the next room it jolted him up off the sheets and she had to put a hand on his chest to calm him. He watched as she got up to answer it, her legs and buttocks snatching at the light, and not a sag or ripple anywhere on her. How old was she, anyway — thirty-five? Forty? He’d never asked. But he could see she’d never had any children — or if she had, it was a long time ago. He took a drink from the flask and watched a humming-bird hovering over the trumpet vine with its pink cunt-shaped flowers and listened to her whispering into the receiver. And who was that she was talking to — tomorrow’s lay?
She came back into the room in a susurrus of motion, hips rolling in an easy glide, and straddled the white hill of his knee. He waited till she’d reached over to the night table for a cigarette and held a match to it, and then he said, “So your husband — he isn’t back from the War yet, is he?”
“Who, Tom?” She twitched her hips and rubbed herself there, on his knee, and he could feel the warmth and wetness of her. “He’s never coming back — he’s having too much fun pulling the trigger on all the whores of Asiago.”
“Does he know about you? I mean, that you‘re—”
“What? Unfaithful? Is that the word you’re looking for?”
He watched her eyes for a signal, but they were as glassy and distant as ever. She merely shrugged and shifted her thighs to accommodate the angle of his knee. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”
“What do you think?”
What did he think? He was a little shocked, that was all, to think how loose her morals were — and her husband’s too. He wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing, not if he were over in Italy fighting the Huns or the Austrians or whoever they were. He didn’t say anything, but she was watching him, working herself against his shin now, the tight little smile, the bobbed hair, the gently swaying breasts.
“Better I should lock myself in a nunnery till the great warrior comes home?”
No. Or yes. But he’d leapt ahead of her already, and he realized he didn’t give a damn for her or her husband or what they did with their respective groins — he was thinking about that half-Italian baby in the perambulator and the pale wondering face in the crumpled-up photograph. “You mind if I ask you something?”