Peter Orner - Esther Stories

Maybe Nadine caught Tito off guard barefoot in those silk briefs he got on sale at Filene’s. It also could have been that he just figured, finally, it’s only Nadine, what difference does it make if she sees? She of all people should be able to handle this. Right? Doesn’t she volunteer at that nursing home on Childs Street, the place tucked back in the trees where all the inmates are old and deformed, on the edge of death, hollering into the night, a bunch of elderly lunatics clinging to their lives by yelling themselves hoarse? Doesn’t she sit and read to those people and put her hand on their raving arms to calm them? Tito shrugged and lifted the patch. He smiled. “You asked.”

She couldn’t conceal her revulsion. She looked down, at the clean shirt, then back at the eye. It was wreckage. A flap of skin and a gash, half an eyelid only partly covering a blurry mass of tissue, a gobble of iris and blue-white cornea.

Her reaction didn’t surprise him. Tito slid the patch back down. Renee had done the same thing when he finally showed her. Had acted as if she were seeing it over and over again after he put the patch back down. Here was the same gagging look. And like Renee, Nadine was now saying something about blind people, about how much he had to be thankful for with his one good eye. It was as if someone had recorded the same bullshit Renee said and was now playing it from hidden speakers in this very room, as if Renee were under the bed. Baby, of course you aren’t any different to me now. How could I love you less? But Renee was three years ago. She didn’t leave right after. No. That would have been unseemly. But soon enough after. For a clown with two perfect shiny eyes, a greasebag assistant restaurant manager from Quincy. Tito took consolation in knowing that Renee carries the memory of his eye with her. That sometimes in bed with her tomato-sauced boyfriend, his eye floats across her night-mares like a wound.

“I’m sorry,” Nadine said.

“No need.”

“I bugged you.” She stood up and moved closer to him, but Tito backed away. “I should have known.”

“Known what?”

“That it would hurt you to show it.”

“I’m not one of your causes.”

“Did I say that? That you were a cause?”

“Save your bleedy heart for your social work.”

Nadine stepped back to the bed, fisted the shirt, and threw it across the room. She’d promised herself when they first started leaving the bar together that this was only about being with someone, someone to help chew up the meaningless hours when she couldn’t work. That was all this was ever going to be. She turned and faced him. Stood there in her unbuttoned blouse and plum-colored bra. “And I’m some princess, Tito? You taking Princess Fergie home with you?”

“You’re being stupid here now.”

“You can’t look at me. Easier with the light off?”

“Why don’t you put the T-shirt on?”

“What if I love you?”

“Nadine. Don’t—”

“For the sake of argument. Me with my big ass and this face. What if I do?”

“I told you.”

“Right. That you’re waiting for some Brahmin with a ponytail to stray into the bar, a lost lamb in search of directions. Excuse me, I’m looking for the Green Street metro. Oh my!” She put her hand over her heart and swooned. “A hunky to beat all hunkies!”

“Naddy—”

“And he’s Mexican! Or something like Mexican. Oh, they will be absolutely floored on Beacon Hill, floored!”

Tito retrieved the shirt from the floor and tried to hand it to her, but she refused, kept right on talking at him in that screeching voice, what the little lost girl would look like, her curls, her sneery lip, her little yellow shorts, her peek-a-boo thighs…

Tito watched her and listened. Her half-naked rave in the middle of his room. The rain pelted the window like a phantom tap dancer. When he tried to take her in his arms, she whapped him. “Like you’re the bastard that invented loneliness.”

For the first time he didn’t ask her for help scratching his back, and she didn’t offer. That night they slept on opposite edges of the bed. Even the bottoms of their feet didn’t touch. When Tito woke up to news radio at 6:17, Nadine was long gone.

Some say they fled away together. To a cabin in backwoods Maine where they still speak French. Or maybe it was Newfoundland. San Bernardino. Others say they went separate, and not far, that she stuck to her guns and never spoke to him again, that she went to Waltham and he went to Medford. There’s even one guy who swears he saw Tito doing some strange ritual dance outside her apartment, three days after she’d packed up a U-Haul and left J.P. to stew in its own juice. This guy said Tito’s dance was something like half hopping and half praying, and that he kept going around and around in a circle. It all depends on how big a liar the guy who’s telling it is. Because the fact is, there isn’t anybody around here who knows anything more than I do. And what’s it matter, really? Neither of them ever set foot back in Cousin Tuck’s. What else is there?

Before they vanished, Nadine rode her bike into the bar. Pedaled right through the door. It was a hot night, and Moca Joe had propped the door open with a brick. That tote bag dangled from her handlebars. Not stopping the bike, in mid-speech about the uselessness of pool, she pedaled by our row of stools to the table, still going on about pool, how it was a disgusting waste of time and resources. Billiards! The world rides on a highway of shit while we hit glass balls into pockets like oblivious ducklings. And she called Tito all sorts of names. I won’t go into all the particulars, but she let him have it as bad as she could give it, in front of all of us, in the place where he was king. She went right for his throat and said Tito’s rule over Cousin Tuck’s was like Reagan’s, slack-jawed and drooling at the wheel while the crew cuts run the country from the basement. The pool shark racks ’em up again. Another round of opium for the masses. Then she got off the bike, let it drop, and turned to us at the bar. She said something that sounded rehearsed: “Listen up, louts, I LOVE his eye. Not his pool eye, ignorants. Do you hear me? The eye he hides. ” She turned around and approached Tito. She placed both hands on the green felt and pulled till it ripped. Then, with one angry finger pointed at him, she said, low and vicious, as if this worst truth had only just occurred to her, “Forty-two years on earth and still dumb enough to be vain. And by the way, we didn’t fuck. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

She got back on her bike and rode slowly toward the door. A couple of guys at the front tables moved their chairs out of the way to give her clear passage. And through the whole thing Tito just stood there holding his cue and looking at the chalk blue tip as if it were the thing exposing him, calling him out.

After Nadine coasted out of the bar (Angel stood by the door, kicked his heels together, and saluted), Tito yanked the triangle off the hook by the Bud Light girl and started to rack. He moved in the slow methodical way a shamed man does when he knows everybody’s watching. His hands wandered around as though they were detached. Nobody — not even any of the newcomers, who could not have understood the significance of what had happened — stepped up to challenge. Tito broke, and the crack of the balls in the silence of the bar was enough to make even Sal Burkus wince. We listened to him knock around. He avoided the tear she’d made in the felt. Nobody made any comments. He waited a decent half hour before leaving, so we wouldn’t think he was chasing her heels, her rattling back fender.

THEY WERE BOTH in town impersonating Edgar Poe. You’d see one or the other charge down the street in a ragged morning coat, cape, and cravat, with a similar wavy crop of unruly hair and wide forehead, but one would be silent and smiling, the other growling like something rabid. Originally, they were part of a festival honoring Poe, but the festival, after a while, became irrelevant. In time, it felt as if they’d always been with us, those two who stomped our streets, hunched and shrouded in black. They gave respective one-man shows on alternate nights, except Sunday. Growling Poe performed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Smiling Poe on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Both performances were sparsely attended. In one famous instance, Growling Poe did a beseeching, raging version of his show for one deaf senior citizen who hadn’t even come there for Poe. The woman had stumbled down into the dark catacombs on a far different mission. She was looking, she told the angry, pacing, furious-haired man, for her beloved kitty. Growling Poe was already irate that nobody had shown up that night and imagined that she’d been sent by his enemies to make a clown of him. He repeated her question in a diabolical whisper: Have I seen your kitty? This confused the old woman, because she could read lips. “Yes, that’s what I asked. Have you seen my cat? She likes to roam down here. This isn’t the first time. Naughty pussy crawls in through a window.”