He sipped his wine appreciatively.
“I’d go down to the park and they’d make fun of me. ‘Fat Vinny.’ ‘Tubby.’ ‘Lard ass.’ And a whole lot worse. They wouldn’t let me play. So after a while, why bother trying. The kids were all out playing baseball or kick the can or whatever else, I was inside reading everything I could get my hands on about old Boston crimes. Ask me anything about the Brinks robbery or Sacco and Vanzetti. The Boston Strangler, it’s like I needed to know as much as I could about that one.”
By now, Mongillo’s plates had been cleared without him ever so much as offering me a leaf of romaine lettuce. The entrées arrived and it looked like he had ordered his food by the pound.
I told him about the steam-room incident of a couple of hours before. He immediately snapped up his cell phone and relayed the information to Edgar Sullivan.
When he hung up he said, “You should drink a lot more beer to rehydrate.”
It was touching, this concern, but I said, “It doesn’t work that way.” He didn’t seem to hear.
Idle conversation now. I told him about Maggie Kane and me not calling her back.
“That thing was never meant to be,” he said.
I told him about running into Elizabeth Riggs in the San Francisco Airport.
“Now, there’s a woman who loved you more than anyone you’ll ever meet.”
I paused mid-chew and stared at him. He looked at me defensively, shrugged, and said, “What do you want me to say? She did.”
I asked, “How do you know that?”
“Fair Hair, how do I know anything? Intuition. My own personal radar. She didn’t make it too tough, either, the way she looked at you, the way she talked to you, about you. A good woman. And good-looking, to say the least. That weird to see her?”
Suddenly, my swordfish didn’t have a whole lot of taste and the cottage fries seemed limp, though maybe that was just me.
I mumbled, “Yeah, it was pretty strange.”
Vinny chewed on his steak, took a sip from a glass of ruby-red wine that Jack had brought over, and said, “Yeah, I bet it was bizarre, huh? She still look great? Those big eyes? That flat stomach? God, that hair that frames both sides of her face?”
“All right, never mind. Forget I brought her up.” I pushed my dinner plate a couple of inches away from me, almost reflexively.
Mongillo said, “Oh-oh. Someone’s got a little case of the regrets. Or maybe they’ve come down with love sickness.”
I wanted to tell him she was pregnant. I wanted to tell someone, anyone. But then I didn’t want to have the inane conversation that would inevitably follow, so I said sharply, “Drop it, Vin, okay? Not the time.”
For a moment, he actually looked hurt. That moment passed quickly when Jack returned with dessert menus. He said, offhandedly, “Well, go get her all over again, and this time don’t be such a fuckup.”
Ah, if life really was that easy: me being able to get her all over again, me not being such a fuckup.
28
I left Mongillo and Nam at the bar mulling various dessert wines — Moscatos and Brachettos and other types I pretended to know even though I didn’t have a clue. And I headed out the door in hopes of finally putting this long, absurd, and occasionally dangerous day behind me.
My car was already parked right out front, so I fidgeted in my pocket for a ten-dollar bill and asked the valet for the keys.
“I don’t have them,” the kid said.
Great.
“Who does?” I mean, it’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask a professional valet about the keys to my own car.
“He does,” he said, and as he said it, he pointed to someone or something behind me. I turned suspiciously around and found myself face-to-face with none other than Edgar Sullivan.
“Hello, Edgar,” I said. “You’re my designated driver?”
“I’m your guardian angel,” he replied.
He was sitting on a bench tucked amid some shrubbery and surrounded by two ornate buckets that were nothing more than glorified ashtrays. Massachusetts forbids smoking in all public places, and this bench was obviously put here as a little haven for the nicotine addicted. It’s one bad habit I never took up, though perhaps I still had time.
Edgar stood up slowly, the way old men always seem to do, his knee audibly cracking as he breathed a tiny sigh. He smoothed out his pants and walked stiffly toward me, thrusting out his right hand and saying, “I heard you almost melted to death today. I’m you, I’d be really steamed.”
“Didn’t I see you on Comedy Central last week?”
He smiled, not quite embarrassedly, but almost. “You sound like my second wife,” he said.
“Was that the really young one?” I asked.
“No, she was twenty-eight,” he replied.
I left the obvious question unstated.
A few stragglers were leaving the restaurant and handing their stubs to the valets. Others waited patiently and impatiently in the cool night air for their various BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes to be wheeled around. Edgar jingled my keys and said, “Come on, I’ll get you home safely.”
Truer words had never been spoken, but in retrospect, the cost was almost too much to bear.
We were floating down the wonderful riverside highway known as Storrow Drive, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. Ends up, I was learning, the young wife, the third one, was twenty-three years old. The first one was thirty. The fourth was an age-appropriate fifty-four.
“The next meaningful relationship I have is going to be completely platonic — with a dog,” Edgar said. He shook his head and added, “Sounds good when I say it, but don’t bet on it. I can’t help myself. I love wedding days. The celebrations, the well-wishers, the high expectations. It’s the marriages that don’t turn out so well.”
The Charles River was on our left, with Cambridge beyond it. The Back Bay of Boston — a neighborhood, not a body of water — was on our right. We were rolling toward the waterfront when I checked the clock on the car and said to Edgar, “Do you mind pulling off on Beacon Hill for a minute? I want to grab tomorrow’s paper.”
And he did. I wanted to see what the Phantom Fiend would see when he opened the Boston Record in a few hours — or more to the point, what he wouldn’t see, which was his miniature manifesto, if a manifesto can be done in miniature, which I don’t think it can. I wanted to know what he’d be reading instead of his own words, to get some empathic sense of what might set him off, and how.
I requested Beacon Hill because for whatever reason, the Record delivers the third batch of papers fresh off the press to a twenty-four-hour drugstore on the back slope of Beacon Hill. The first batch, by the way, goes directly into the newsroom, and keeping with tradition, the second batch always gets hand-delivered to the newsroom of the Boston Traveler, our main competition. They, in turn, send a stack from their early run over to us.
Edgar pulled off onto Cambridge Street, which isn’t in Cambridge, but go figure. I don’t know if Cambridge has a Boston Street, but I kind of doubt it. He glided up in front of the all-night CVS, stuck the car in a no-parking zone, and turned off the ignition.
“I’m going to run in,” I said.
He opened the driver’s door and said, “Not without me you’re not.”
The navy blue Record delivery truck was just pulling away as we stepped through the front door of the CVS. I can’t vow that this was the most upbeat place in the world at five after midnight. An Arab-looking clerk stood behind the counter reading that month’s Cosmopolitan — the one with the “Seven Sexual Secrets That Men Want to Tell” on the cover. And yes, he was a man, undoubtedly with secrets of his own. There was an elderly woman with a kerchief in her hair checking the use-by dates on every six-pack of Pepsi at a display near the front of the store. Otherwise, the place looked barren.