Peter Orner - Esther Stories

And he remembers remembering this. In 1977, driving through a snowstorm in St. Louis at 2:00 in the morning, and he’s standing on the bridge. No trigger, no reason for her to come to him. Nothing in that blinding whirl to take him so far back. But there she was, amid the battering plunk of the flakes on the windshield: the way her wet hair twisted around her neck like a scarf. The sweep of her thin arms. The way she ignored men and the cold. Another time, eating with Manda and her father in some hoity-toity place in Atlanta, putting a forkful of steak in his mouth, and again, for no reason except maybe the happiness of that food, the river. Again her emergence out of the trees. His wish granted and ripped away the next moment; the dark man’s head and shoulders appear. What you wish for and what you can never have — both come out of the woods at the same time. You didn’t fight a war. You cleaned up after one. Still, you’re your mother’s hero. You don’t want to work right now. You want to wander the old roads. You want to stand on the bridge and watch.

SHE HAD TROUBLE getting dates, so some nights she’d march into Cousin Tuck’s and wait for the one-eyed man to finish playing pool. His name was Tito, and he wore a black patch over his left eye. He was a small-time hustler who could clear tables at will, using a combination of ball-smacking power and quiet, surgical, intricacy. He was also a teacher. Really more of a teacher than a hustler, because those of us who were regulars didn’t dare play him for more than a few quarters a game. But some of us would play him to learn. He’d set up your angles, a little left, a little right, pick out spots on the ball, call pockets on shots you would never have dreamed of making had he not whispered that if you hit the 13 into the right edge of the 7 with just enough oomph to bank it off the left side— fuckdawango —you could make that shot. Tito made you feel that you could be consistently good at the game, that you really were capable of mastering the geometry. The click of the balls as beautiful as your own heartbeat. On those nights, after four, five beers, you’d be soaring and people in the booths would start to murmur about you, point the necks of their bottles your way. You standing against the wall, chalking your cue and kissing your knuckles as if all of a sudden Cousin Tuck’s was Bally’s in Atlantic City and you were the guy. Everybody’s guy. But on those nights Tito wasn’t around, you’d be back to hitting slop, back to whacking the ball all over the table, because it was Tito who made you and without him you went back to being nobody.

Her name was Nadine. She was very short and had a flat, almost squashed face, with a little chubbiness all over and eyes that, as Marty Patowski put it, were too big for a single head. But her heart was as wide and as long as the English High School football field across from the bar. She was our, Jamaica Plain’s, locally famous community activist. This was 1987. In our humble edge of Boston, she was like a pioneer. People said that she worked as a paralegal in a legal services office, but she was known for her attendance at any and all J.P. community-based events. She’d be at the Voting Rights for Legal Aliens rally (VRLA), a featured speaker at the bimonthly meeting of Latina Women Against AIDS Project (LWAAP), hustling money for the Youth Build summer employment program for at-risk teens in Roslindale (YBEP). You’d see her on Centre Street stapling flyers to telephone poles with that big carpenter-sized stapler she lugged around in a filthy-bottomed canvas tote bag. You’d overhear her in Woolworth’s quietly grilling the cashiers — Maureen and Donna — about working conditions and insurance plans. Every time you saw her riding her bike in a wobbling rush to a meeting, you’d be reminded of all the contributions you weren’t making to the betterment of society, you gluttonous hog. But Nadine never chastised. She simply tried to infect you with her enthusiasm. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. Oliver or Cynthia or Fernanda or Carmen or Frankie T. There’s an interactive poetry reading tonight at St. Mary’s to raise money for the Art Council’s day-care center, and all you have to give is three dollars and come up with one line about what day care means to you. No kids? That doesn’t mean Reagan’s evil doesn’t affect you! I’ll have some ideas on notecards that I’ll pass around. So just show up and you can read …

Tito wouldn’t make love to her. That was his rule, because he was honest about the fact that he wasn’t in love with her. Admitted that even with his one eye he was a sucker for beauty and couldn’t get around it, so why lie. But he’d take her home with him after the bar and hold her and kiss the scratchy backs of her arms. His bed always had clean white sheets, hotel sheets, and Nadine would feel a little guilty and decadent in that bed, the sheets slick against her bare thighs. She couldn’t help thinking of all the people who would never know a bed so clean, the men and women wrapped in garbage bags sleeping in the park on Vermeer. But she usually got over it, thinking that a lot of people actually got laid once in a while, damnit, so she should be entitled to her little nibble.

On the mornings after, they’d wake up before seven, and Nadine would make a huge buttery breakfast of heaped eggs, toast, and four flavors of jam. Tito would take a run through Arnold Arb and pick up a Globe and a Herald on his way home. Then they’d sip coffee and read the news silently in Tito’s immaculate kitchen. He was a printer and spent his days covered in ink, but outside of work, because of his work, Tito was fastidious, constantly scrubbing.

He taught her pool. Unlike the rest of us, no more than one-night wonders, Nadine actually had some talent. She wasn’t Tito, but after a couple of weeks of lessons she was quietly clearing tables and disposing of some of the better guys in the bar like Angel Cruz and Blake McClusky, Russell McClusky’s little nothing brother.

“She empties her eyes,” Tito said. “Like Willie Mosconi said, ‘Friends, there is nothing in this world but the balls and the pockets.’ What the master meant was that you have to be like some fool drowning. It’s all blue from there. See? The table’s your ocean. Once the other stuff gets in there, once you start noticing your opponent’s fancy shoes…Once you start hearing the music — even Miles’s battaboop — it’s over. You’re through. And Naddy’s got it. Intuitively, she empties. You don’t teach that.”

Nadine and Tito’s story would circulate among those in the know around the bar. How Tito taught Nadine how to kick some ass — and that some nights he’d take her home. Most guys gave him no grief — hell, a warm body’s a warm body. In Boston in February, there’s guys who sleep with frozen squirrel corpses. Once, when Marty Patowski said that Tito probably put a patch over his good eye when he was delivering the Bob Evans home to Nadine, Sal Burkus shot him a look so deadly that Marty coughed and took it back. “Jesus, I joke. Can’t anyone tell a joke in this friggin’ place?”

Burkus pointed the rim of his beer in Marty’s direction and said, “Not you. You can’t tell any jokes.”

On the summer night he showed her his left eye, Tito was standing in the doorway of the bathroom in his designer underwear. Nadine was sitting on the edge of his bed unbuttoning her blouse. He’d pulled a clean T-shirt out for her, and it lay neatly folded on the bed beside her thigh.

“I want to see your eye,” Nadine said. She’d asked before, but she always backed off when he refused. “It’s a part of you and I want to see it.”