Gaetano liked to tell his girl friend Ellen that New York City was
the great flirt of his life. Like lovers everywhere he felt
extraordinary. He wanted to participate body and soul in the city's
life, to be part of it - for a time - just for the hell of it, and to
realize his American dream. He knew he seemed exotic to Ellen.
Nonetheless he insisted that at home in Florence he was a very
ordinary person - a lie by omission for he knew in his heart that from
day to day, from night to night, he was living a most extraordinary
existence.
Although the image of New York had fascinated him since he was a
teenager in Italy, Gaetano had never desired to become an American.
Young, and as adventurous as Garibaldi, he liked being an Italian. He
told one and all that he would one day return home - when he was done.
For if his life today was a search for change, he dreamed of the kind
of permanence where the good things of his present and his past could
remain fixed in time. That, he recognized, was not to be found in his
romance with New York.
He'd gotten back to the houseboat at around six, unusually tired
after a night in the club that had begun at ten the evening before.
Dawn was breaking as he walked from the subway station downhill toward
the river. Everything was familiar: the buses, taxis and private cars
stopped at the light on 79th Street, the early morning traffic
speeding down the West Side Highway, the stillness of the great
apartments at this hour. He glanced up the street where she was still
sleeping and nodded.
When he awoke eight hours later, he was immediately aware of the
rocking, cognizant that his daytime life was resurfacing. It was
around two p.m., he thought. Thank God it was day. It was the moment
when he thought of himself as Dr. Jekyll. He shivered. The electric
radiator hardly made a dent on the dampness. Was he coming down with
something? He looked out the cabin window across the river. The
skyscraper apartments at the Palisades were bathed in sunshine. Thank
God! It was probably warmer outside than in this iron cabin. He pulled
the blanket under his chin and, examining the light blue ceiling,
contemplated the absurd dichotomy of his nighttime and daytime lives.
Was his dual life really necessary? How long could he continue to
divide himself between key club and houseboat? And Ellen? She wanted
and deserved more of his time. Was this a story he could tell back in
Firenze?
As usual he was startled when he heard his name shouted from the
main walkway. "Gaetano! Tu estás? Are you there? Gaetano!
She's on the phone. Off your butt, amigo." Ricardo, the Boat
Basin guardian, always spoke to him in a mixture of Spanish and
English. Ricardo couldn't wait to wake him when the American woman
called.
What did she expect from him anyway? She knew he worked nights. Che
cazzo! What the hell. Yet ... yet ... how he needed her! Save me
Ellen, he thought, save me from my unknowing!
He stood up still dressed in the jeans and wool shirt he'd worn the
night before. He stepped into his half boots, ran a copper blue-veined
hand through long brown hair, pushed open the heavy metal door, and
stumbled out onto the uncovered deck into a warm Indian summer sun. He
was a solidly built man, the certain toughness about his features
belying his easygoing mannerisms and the dreamy look in his eyes.
Ricardo was looking up at him from the wooden pier and grinning
expectantly. "Buenas tardes, amor mío," the Puerto
Rican shouted. "Wake! Wake! Es la hora de vivir. Your
other life is about to begin. Hombre, te está esperando. She's
waiting. Hijo de puta! Ella te llama, l'Americana."
Yes, he'd erred in confiding in that diabolic Puerto Rican about
his complex life. Never trust straight persons like him, he thought,
looking down at the swarthy Hispanic. What bourgeois airs, just
because he had a wife and children uptown somewhere. They would love
him to death to show how low he'd sunk. Crazy!
Let it all come down, he thought in a moment of matinal cockiness.
This is the time he loved best, the moment when real life began. What
did he care?
He looked south. A long barge sparkled in the sun, motionless
against the current rushing toward the ocean. He turned again to the
west. No sign of life over there. Strange, no bridge to New Jersey. No
tunnel. No ferry. Two worlds apart. If he could only swim it. But...
now she was waiting up there. Well let her wait. God he was dizzy! All
the smoke last night ... he needed fresh air. Today he would run as
far as the bridge.
Yet, she deserved better than him. She was everything he was not -
straightforward, mainstream, down-to-earth, normal - whatever that was
- a person of values. She made him constantly aware of their
misunderstanding. Perhaps down there in the club, at dawn, they
thought he had no feelings? Did they think he was insensitive because
he revealed his body so freely? Because he submitted to their leers?
~
"Where've you been, lover boy?" she said from the
doorway, pulling around her the light blue Japanese kimono he loved.
"I had to run." He hated it when she tried to talk tough.
He stroked her blond hair familiarly and kissed the wide-open blue
eyes looking straight up at him.
"I took the afternoon off - just for us. And Timothy is with
his father until tomorrow." Her tone was right but her message
was full of reproach. "The day was ours."
For Ellen - in their affair as she liked to call it - it was much
more than just making love. He knew that. It was all those little
things she wanted to do together - a walk along the river, an art film
at Lincoln Square, or sitting in a café on the avenue. All those
things that couples do which would then culminate in their lovemaking.
He knew that. But how could he enjoy the cinema or the passeggiata or
the café with that fear lurking in his intestines?
Hers was serious talk. Frightening talk. Time was the issue. His
excuses were ready but he also wanted the occasion to say, "I'm
sorry." Now, again, he had doubts. It seemed certain that today
he would have to go to bed with her. That was the immediate problem -
go to bed here, and later, perform in the club. How could he ever
reconcile his two lives?
"Why don't you ever talk about your life?" They were
sitting close in the enclosed balcony looking over Riverside Drive.
Her hand was resting on his leg. "Your life in Florence. Your job
here. Your plans ... your hopes." She didn't say plans for them
as a couple. And she seldom spoke of love. But he knew what she was
thinking.
"I've told you all there is say about Italy. I was born, grew
up and wanted to change. And here I am! What can I say about a night
job at UPS that I got only because an Italian American took a liking
to me." That subject too was sensitive - it was part of the great
lie. United Parcel Service! Ha! If she only knew!
"You and that crazy job!" Reproach again marked her tone.
"We never get to do things together."
"You're right, Ellen. Let's go out now. I feel so stale
inside."
That was it, distract her. Keep her busy until suddenly it was too
late. That was what he liked about American women - so direct, so
naïve and undemanding. Yet, he smiled to himself, she was not so
easily fooled either. But like good women anywhere, Ellen was not
demanding. Little attentions like flowers or dinner in a nearby
restaurant satisfied her.
What kind of a couple were they anyway? She, a successful doctor,
two years older than he, relatively well-to-do, a child to take care
of; and he, a striptease artist who lived on a houseboat, a liar, with
not even the vaguest notions about the future. The voice of his
eternally alert mind always whispered the same words - you're lost,
there's no return, no going back. No return to what? he always asked.
Not that he was searching for wisdom in the darkness but he was
deceived, and the darkness whispered back incomprehensible words.
Yours is the loneliness of the refugee, it said. Eternal heartbreak.
It is the gut-gnawing loneliness a traveler feels alone in the empty
dining room of a distant luxury hotel.
Out on Broadway it had begun to rain in a thin mist, wet and
sticky. He shouldn't be out here, he thinks. He felt feverish. They
were both peering up through the spray at the high arch of the massive
apartment building that reminded him of the palazzos of Florence when
suddenly, a man threw himself to the wet sidewalk right under their
feet.
"Oh! Oh! You good people, have pity. I'm fifty-five years old.
Look! Look at me! Look at my fifty-five years. I have nothing. I am
nothing. I'm less than nothing. I'm hungry. Help me eat."
Wiry and emaciated, with a head of extraordinarily beautiful gray
hair and a scraggly beard, his eyes closed as if in prayer, he clasped
his tiny delicate hands in front of him, his upside down hat gaping
upward from the pavement. "I beg you, I beseech you, help me. For
the love of God, help me. I need you to survive. Before they kill me.
If you've a bit of humanity in your souls, come to my aid. Succor me.
As Mary Magdalene did Jesus."
In fascination, Gaetano stared down at the abject figure. He
squinted. Mary Magdalene? Jesus? He saw what his father would have
seen. A light hovered around that gray head. But, but ... was that not
a horn? From the thick wavy hair, yes, a horn seemed to protrude,
powerful, impudent, arrogant, swaying from side to side like the head
of a cobra and surging upward, toward them. It must have been the rain
or a reflection from the city lights. He leaned forward. He shuddered
feverishly. Was the stranger a messenger? For him? Could it be him? He
was delirious.
With an act of willpower he ignored the stink of stale alcohol
rising from the praying figure. He took from his pocket a ten dollar
bill and put it in the thin hand. "Get up!" he cried,
grabbing at the wet hat on the pavement and pushing it into the
trembling hands. "I'm sorry but you must get up!"
"But he's a drunk," Ellen said. "He only wants to
drink."
"Only? He has to drink!" Gaetano said. "See his
hair? How it stands up! What pain he must be in. Oh, Ellen what
pain."
Ellen looked at him in surprise. She took his hand.
"Bless you good people. I will pray for you," the old man
cried, pushing his hat on the back of his head. "I forgive
you!" His horn of onyx glistened in the sparks of rain. Now
grinning, all white teeth, he turned and rushed down Broadway in short
hurried steps, his legs thin in his jeans.
"I hate myself when I feel self-righteous," Gaetano said
after a moment. Yet, he thought, thank God there was always that door
in his mind left open. His father looked out of that crack. Anarchist
and atheist, once a sheet metal worker in red Sesto Fiorentino, his
Babbo's life was a dream. Nights, when Gaetano was small, the powerful
man with the bull neck of a boxer and a dreamy look in his eyes, told
his son about Jehovah - Yahweh, he'd called him - and later, to help
him sleep after the tales of terror, he spoke of the Unicorn. Babbo
said it was shiny, the magic Unicorn, a halo around its head from
which extended a long black horn. It was good. The ideal. The Bible
said so. If you did good in life anyone could hope for a visit from
the Unicorn. Maybe that was why Gaetano, today, had no use for piety.
He hated the pious. Maybe it was a twist of fate, the child refound,
that he, above all, wanted to see the Unicorn.
"I love you," Ellen said.
He stared at her. She was the good in his life. So why the
dichotomy? Why could he not unite his lives? They held hands. She put
her head on his shoulder. As they walked back uptown, their hips
swayed and met regularly as in the act of love. The same people as
always passed. The drizzle was unrelenting. The same things seemed to
be happening again. Everything was repeated. Some reckless power, a
playfully murderous power, was lifting him and carrying him magically
toward fulfillment - or to the rim of the abyss.
In the elevator she pressed against him. His big hands encircled
her buttocks and lifted her briefly. She levitated. Seemed to surround
him.
But again his emotions deceived him.
He wasn't prepared for his failure in bed. He never was when it
happened. Yet, before he failed, he'd felt the warning sweat break out
under his arms and along his thighs.
She raised her eyebrows but said nothing. How could she know?
It was his torment. If he made love now he would fail on the stage
tonight. He would face public embarrassment. Since he was a teenager,
he'd had an uncanny ability to will an erection. He thought it had
little to do with eroticism. As long as he could remember, he'd been
able to do it. But not here with Ellen. It was mysterious, like the
search for the Unicorn, he thought secretly.
They paid him well for his talent down there, both female and male
admirers. All that money for a hard-on! One was to show off on the
stage, the other was to share his strange ability with her. It seemed
like cheating on her. They all told him he could make a fortune in
porno films. He was disgusted. His God-given ability was an
abomination. He was a sideshow. His nighttime self was Mr. Hyde. He
hated the night. But on days like today, fear invaded him. He couldn't
make love with Ellen. It was terror. It was the key club stage. It was
the night. It was Babbo. It was the Unicorn.
Ellen sighed and walked naked to the window. He joined her. They
looked out toward the Hudson River. The rain fell. They watched taxis
in the rain on Riverside Drive, his arm around her naked flank, her
head on his shoulder. His penis limp.
"It's nothing to worry about. You're tired. Are you sick? Why
don't you stay home in bed? I'll nurse you, you sick boy."
"I have to worry about it." He was chagrined. It was
simultaneously humiliating and ironic, for he was also proud of his
cursed virility. But he also detested that pride as he hated
hypocritical, sanctimonious piety.
His father used to put him to bed if he so much as sneezed, then
tell his stories of terror. And of the Unicorn. Bible stories.
"Babbo's crazy culture," Gaetano said. "My heritage.
"One of the few things my father ever read was the Bible. Said
it was illuminating. I still don't know if he was more fascinated or
terrified by that mean God of the Old Testament who could strike down
thousands of his people if they so much as lagged behind with the Ark
of the Covenant. Wham, ten thousand of them with one blow! Just like
Stalin, Babbo said. He would also pronounce the name Gesú - Jesus -
but never Christ. Ours was not a Catholic family. I never went to
church. Maybe it was religious though - or maybe anti-religious.
Anyway it's the same thing. Babbo read a lot about that old God. But
he spoke in the same hushed way about the Unicorn.... He said it was
the messenger - of the right thing to do in life. He said maybe it was
Jesus. And that it was our servant."
Without the Unicorn, Gaetano knew he was nothing. He would have
nothing left. No magic left. He would be naked. Empty. Alone.
~
