Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

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 pussy 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, asshole,” he said. “I’ll go do it myself.”

A few moments later I said “Fuck,” 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 motherfucking 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?”

“Fuckin 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 fucking 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. “Fuck 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 fucking 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.