Backed to the stove, Sylvia pulls a saucepan of boiling water off the burner. She ignores the too-hot handle, and splashes her father’s crotch with the contents, and when he bends over, howling in pain, she cracks the saucepan across his skull. He drops to his knees, and she hits him again.
——
Sylvia checks her hair in the reflection of the glass door before pulling it open. She enters Club Barlow like a movie star walking the red carpet, wearing the awkward smile of grief she has spent hours practicing in front of a mirror—makes a show of waving at familiar faces, some of which aren’t even looking her way. She walks through the room, her steps landing in perfect time to the bossa nova track pouring from the club’s speakers. She takes a small booth on the far side of the dance floor with a gilt mirror at her back, and when the waitress comes for her order, she says, “Martini. Dry.”
The dance floor is empty. Nobody dances anymore. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame.
As she sips her drink a series of men come to her table. They do not sit beside her. Instead, they lean in close and tell Sylvia they are sorry for her loss, and if she ever needs anything—anything at all—she should call them. She promises to do so, though she never will. Their definition of “needing anything” goes no further than her crotch. Louis’s murder has left her a pretty shell, vacant on the sand, and every fucking hermit crab on the beach is trying to wriggle its way in. Sylvia expects this. In fact, she knows it will work to her advantage, but not with these men. None of them has what Sylvia needs. They run their numbers and sell their smack and boost electronics from the backs of trucks. Graceless. Useless. Before her first drink is gone, she has already tucked five business cards into her handbag.
Across the room she sees Mickey Rossini, the man she was hoping to find. He is a large man, with thick salt-and-pepper hair brushed back from his brow in a lush wave. His suit is ash gray and cheap. With his arm around a bleach job half his age, he looks as happy as a bear with a mouth full of honey. His overly broad grin and hooded eyes show he’s devoted much of his night to drinking. He has a reputation among the ladies—gentle, sweet, affectionate. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame, though she can live with it until she gets what she needs. She stands from the booth and smoothes the sides of her dress before lifting her handbag and crossing to Rossini’s table.
The blond is the first to notice Sylvia. She looks up with a bright, wide-eyed smile, which quickly vanishes. The girl recognizes the threat and immediately scowls, knowing she will have to defend her territory from another predator. Sylvia is unfazed.
When Rossini’s eyes fall on Sylvia, a noticeable amount of the intoxication clears from them. He’s wanted Sylvia for years, but she has shot him down at every turn. Rossini is a thief; he jacked locks and cracked safes for Louis, making a fraction of a fraction of the money the things he stole were worth. She’d never needed him before.
“Hello, Mickey,” she says.
Rossini straightens himself in the booth, removing his palm from the bottle job’s thigh. He leans back in the booth and says, “Sylvia, it’s good to see you.”
“Is this your wife?” the blond asks. She is sulking because Rossini’s expression tells her that she has already been subtracted from this equation.
“No,” he says.
“Then who the fuck is she?” the blond wants to know.
“She’s a friend. Don’t worry about it.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, playing demure. She locks eyes with Rossini and dips her chin bashfully, knowing the effect it will have on the man. “I’ll let you back to your evening.”
“Wait. Wait.” He nudges the blond and says, “Why don’t you go powder your nose. I need to have a word with Sylvia here.”
“Mickey,” the girl whines.
“It’s business,” he tells her. “Be a sweetheart and give us a couple of minutes, okay?”
He gives her a sloppy peck on the lips and produces a fifty-dollar bill and hands it to the young woman, who quickly drops the note into her purse. She scoots her butt across the booth, and as she stands, she fixes a glare on Sylvia, who pretends to ignore the girl’s attitude, but decides in that second to put a serious fuck you in the little cunt’s night.
These amateur bitches, Sylvia thinks. They didn’t understand the game, and that’s why it ate them alive, leaving them shaking their tits in low-rent knocker shops by the docks to feed the bastard brats of sailors and warehouse men, waiting for some disease to slowly snuff their candles. Over the years, Sylvia had seen a hundred similar pieces of trash blown into the gutter, and she didn’t pity a single one of them.
“I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, sliding into the booth next to Rossini. “It’s just that since . . . well, you know . . . I’ve been a little lost.”
“I know,” Rossini says, placing his hand on Sylvia’s knee in a salacious move he masks as mere comfort. “It’s gotta be tough. How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” she says. Already she has managed to work tears into her eyes. She sniffs lightly and retrieves a napkin from the table to dab her cheeks.
“Oh now, Sylvia,” says Rossini, scooting closer to her. He puts his arm around her shoulders and slides his hand higher on her thigh, re-creating the pose he’d assumed with the bottle job before Sylvia’s arrival. In a handful of moments, Sylvia has replaced the blond in the booth, in Rossini’s thoughts, and in the thief’s plans for the night.
Rossini is typical, a man led by his ego and his cock who believes himself the cure-all for a woman’s pain. His need to rescue her is an evolutionary blindfold, and though she finds his predictability unsatisfying, it serves her purpose.
——
Sylvia is twenty years old. For two years she has enjoyed an affair with Joe Tocci, a handsome and sophisticated man who will soon be named boss of his own crew. He is her lover and her employer, sending her on trips across the city, muling drugs and cash. Sylvia takes pride in her work, feeling she is paying her dues and earning respect within the rackets, unlike the other women who satisfy themselves in the roles of whore, wife, or victim.
One night she returns to the apartment Tocci has rented for her to find Joe and six of his friends three sheets to the completely fucked up, and before she can set down her handbag, a scrawny prick with buckteeth and the bumpy skin of a gourd by the name of Toady turns to Joe and says, “Mind if I take a ride?”
To her amusement, Joe replies, “I’d kinda like to see that.”
Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.
Before she knows what is happening, the men approach her. They grab her arms painfully and hoist her from the floor. Then she is pinned to the dining-room table, men holding her arms and her legs while Toady rips away her clothes. Sylvia screams and Joe Tocci slaps her and tells her to keep her “whore mouth shut.” Toady climbs on her first and as he begins the rape, Sylvia spits in his face. Toady balls up his fist and punches her in the mouth. The violence so thrills him he hits her again and again. Dazed by concussion, Sylvia squeezes her eyes closed. She imagines herself in an ocean, except it is a sea of stones. She is batted this way and that by granite waves that stink of men. Opening her eyes, Sylvia sees a series of faces hovering above her, blurred and monstrous in their lust. One man kneels on the dining-room table and lifts her head by a fistful of hair before forcing his cock in her mouth, and the scents of urine and sweat fill her nose and she thinks she might drown in them. Hot spray lands on her face and thighs and belly, and they turn her over so that her burning cheek is momentarily soothed by the coolness of the polished wood, and then she is afloat again, tossed about like flotsam on fever-hot swells of stone. And later, so much later, as a dozen muffled aches throb across her body, she hears Tocci laughing. He says, “I guess I better get a new one. This one’s broken.”