Twice, page 16
They approached our building, and from behind, I saw Gianna reach into her handbag, maybe looking for her key. Mike turned his head. Then he made a small gesture that is forever seared in my memory.
He put his arm around Gianna’s shoulder, and when he did, Gianna patted her free hand on his. If a single human act could morph into an arrow, that one would have shot directly across the street, shattered the glass of the grocery window, and pierced my heart.
My throat constricted. I started to sweat. When you experience an emotion you’ve never felt before, your body is confused. And in my mind I had just, for the first time in my life, lost someone I truly loved—not to the angel of death, but to another person’s affection. Where do I go? What do I do? Beneath my suddenly uncomfortable skin, my soul felt gutted, angry, pathetic, victimized.
And at fault.
“Ey! Mister! Mister!”
I turned. The Korean owner was scowling from behind the cash register.
“You buy or leave! No stand there. Buy or leave!”
Buy or leave. That’s what it felt like. Invest in whatever it would take to get Gianna back—long talks, long apologies, new promises, new behavior—or walk away, licking my wounds.
I walked away.
✶
What happened next, Boss, I am not proud of. I went to a liquor store, bought four bottles of whiskey, and marched back to the hotel. I stayed there for two nights, ripping up photos of Lallu and drinking myself into a stupor. I didn’t eat. I barely slept. Late on the second night, half out of my head, I called Gianna’s number from the room phone.
It was well past midnight. The answering machine picked up. We used to have a dumb message, the two of us trading lines, then finishing by screaming “Beeeeep!” But now I heard her recorded voice, solo, calm, saying “Hi, it’s Gianna, sorry I missed you, leave a message.”
The words played tricks in my head. Sorry. I missed you. I pressed the receiver to my ear, breathing hard, maybe even crying. Sorry. I missed you. And then I heard a sudden fumbling noise, as if she knocked the phone over trying to answer it.
I panicked and hung up.
In that moment, my worst imagination took over. I pictured Gianna and Mike in bed, making love, ignoring the ringing (Should you get that? Mike whispers, No, nooo, Gianna moans) until my whimpering could no longer be ignored and Gianna, naked, stretched for the phone and knocked it over. And, as I pathetically hung up, the two of them burst into laughter, then flung themselves back atop one another.
It was a stupid, agonizing thought at a stupid, agonizing moment. But I have already made my case about moments: how you forget so many over a lifetime, yet a lifetime can turn on a single one.
At that low moment, fueled with alcohol, jealousy, and the relentless ache of being no longer wanted, I thought back to a time when the tables were turned, when I was the desired one. I thought back to Nicolette, beautiful, sexy Nicolette, and the night I left her in that elevator in L.A. The memory glowed in my mind like a lighthouse tugging me from the fog.
With my eyes squeezed closed, wanting only relief from the hurt, I inhaled the deepest breath I’d ever taken on this earth, and screamed out “Twice!”
Instantly, I was back in that elevator, with Nicolette’s hands on my belt, undoing it slowly while she purred, “Lemme see. Lemme see . . .”
This time, I let her see. I let her do everything she wanted. In that elevator. In her luxurious hotel suite. Across her king-size mattress. Against the bedroom wall. I summoned every ounce of my virility that night and lost myself inside her supple body, because losing myself was what I wanted to do.
Sadly, when you lose yourself, you don’t realize who else you’re losing, too.
Nassau
LaPorta tapped his finger on the iPad photo.
“That’s your ex-husband?” he said, pointing to a man standing by the roulette wheel.
“Yes,” Gianna said.
“And this guy is not?”
“That’s Alfie.”
“Who has never been married to you?”
“No!”
“He never met you in Africa?”
“He did. When we were kids.”
“He didn’t go to college with you?”
“Yes. Well. Not with me. We were at the same school.”
“He never told you he loved you? Made a big deal about it during a rainstorm in Philadelphia?”
“Look, Detective, I don’t know what you’re—”
“Never married you in some little town? Never fought with you over having a baby?”
Gianna straightened her back. She looked upset.
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Not until I have a lawyer.”
“Look, lady, I’m not trying—”
“My name is Gianna Rule. Not ‘lady.’ And I don’t know what you have against Alfie, or why you would make all this up, but it’s not fair to him, and I’m not putting up w—”
“He ripped off a casino.”
“He doesn’t gamble! That’s not Alfie! He’s a good man. He doesn’t take stupid chances.”
LaPorta leaned back. “You’d be surprised.”
Gianna shook her head.
“I’m not saying anything more. Not until I have representation. I’m an American citizen. I have the right to—”
“I know all about your rights,” LaPorta interrupted. “I also know there’s two million dollars in a bank account that bears your name. And it came from this guy in the photo, after an impossible three straight ups at a roulette table, which can only be done by cheating, which is illegal. So, you might not want to talk to me . . .”
He leaned over and opened his bag. He pulled out a notebook.
“But you’re gonna want to read this.”
The Composition Book
I stayed in Mexico with Nicolette for the remaining two months of the movie shoot. We were discreet around the set, never more than sitting together behind a camera. But at night, it was a different story. I would knock on her hotel room door, and she’d swing it open, wearing a robe, look both ways down the hall, then pull me in and push me toward her huge bed, undressing me as she kissed my face and dropped the robe to reveal nothing underneath. Our lovemaking was intense and noisy, rooted in pleasure and sensation. At times, it seemed that Nicolette was enjoying how good she was at it, even as she was enjoying me.
I didn’t care. Yes, it was different from when Gianna and I were together, which was more about emotion and eye contact and holding each other afterward, tender and content. But anytime I thought of that, I pictured her with Mike, and my body tightened like a sprinter in the final strides of a race. I threw myself into satisfying this seductive woman who was coiled around me, and I didn’t think about anything else.
I would never spend the night in Nicolette’s bed, because the production assistants came by early in the morning, and she didn’t want to risk us getting caught. But we did talk a good deal, often over late-night room service. We traded stories about our childhoods, our careers, our parents. Nicolette’s father had been abusive, and she ran away from home when she was fifteen. Her mother, she said, stopped taking her calls for years—until she appeared in her first movie.
“Then, suddenly, she was telling the neighbors about me,” Nicolette said.
“That’s awful.”
“What about your mother? How’d she treat you?”
“She was great. I loved every minute I had with her.”
“She died when you were young, right?”
“Eight.”
“That’s so sad. I’m sorry, Alfie.”
I looked in her eyes. She seemed genuinely empathetic.
“She gave me something before she died.”
“What was it?”
“A gift. A magical talent.”
She made a sly smile, then lifted her leg and rubbed her foot around my thigh.
“What kind of talent?” she cooed.
She leaned over and began kissing my neck. That was as close as I came to telling her the truth. We spent one weekend at a resort along the coast, and another weekend in Cancún. During those escapes, she was less guarded, and we sometimes walked hand in hand along a beach, or swam together in a pool. She never really asked about Gianna, but I volunteered that things were not good between us and that we had separated. I was mixing years, of course. During that time, Gianna was actually still in New York, in our apartment, and we hadn’t yet tried having a baby, hadn’t yet fought over that failure, hadn’t yet taken a “break,” or had a surprise confrontation with her old boyfriend standing behind her.
Didn’t matter. I knew it would happen. And I was living the way I had always lived, with many lifetimes snaggled around each other. The truth is, I told myself where Gianna was going, so I could excuse where I was.
✶
At the beginning, I had called Gianna every night from Mexico, telling her about the daily movie activity and lying about why they needed me there. By the end of the shoot, we only spoke every couple of days.
One night, after some particularly wild lovemaking with Nicolette, followed by grilled cheese sandwiches and a bottle of wine, I was leaving her room when, wearing just a cropped T-shirt and panties, she grabbed me close, tipsy, and nuzzled her cheek against mine. “Sing me something,” she said. So I softly sang another verse from “Make Someone Happy,” the song I knew she liked:
“One smile that cheers you
One face that lights when it nears you
One girl you’re everything to.”
She made a satisfied groan when I finished, and as I opened the door to leave she kissed me gently on the lips and said, “Mmm, love you,” and I instinctively replied, “I love you, too.”
✶
Now, Boss, comes the tragic part. It will make sense once you read it, and maybe then you will grant my last request regarding Gianna. I hope so. It’s all I have left.
I returned to New York once the movie finished shooting. Gianna left a message saying she was stuck at work and couldn’t make it to the airport, could I get a cab into the city? That was different. Usually, if I went away, even for a few days, Gianna would be waiting at the gate, holding snacks in case I was hungry and jumping up and down as if she hadn’t seen me in a year.
I used the cab ride to set my composure. How was I going to handle our reunion? I’d time jumped back nearly three years to Mexico because I’d been angry at Gianna, and Mike, and that whole confrontation. And once in the past, I’d been narrow-minded in my emotions. Nicolette and I were making a film during the day and making love at night. I selfishly made no room for outside thoughts about my wife or our future. Maybe because I knew, deep down, I’d acted rashly. I didn’t want to face that.
But back in New York, everything felt different, as if a summer had ended and I’d returned to a sterile classroom. Nicolette was off to make a film in Canada, so there was no seeing her for a while. We hadn’t formalized anything, other than to say we would miss one another and I would try to fly out to see her during her shoot.
As I waited for Gianna to return, I wandered around the apartment, remembering my last time here, three years in the future, when we’d already separated and my presence had been erased.
But now my coffee mugs were on the kitchen counter and my shoes were in the closet and it hit me that I was about to relive not days or months, but the longest stretch I had ever repeated in my life. While I’d known this intellectually, I don’t think I absorbed it emotionally until that moment, staring at my old sneakers.
“Hey, hi,” Gianna said, pushing through the door. “You’re home. How was it?”
The first thing I noticed was her tone, which was different. Flatter. Her hair was cut short, the way she’d worn it back then. But her usual smile was missing.
“It was good. Good. Tiring.” I injected more enthusiasm into my voice. “How are you doing?”
I stepped forward and initiated a kiss, which she returned. I can’t say if it was my lips or hers, but something had changed.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“What’s been going on?”
“You know. Same stuff.”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause that lasted a couple seconds. It felt like a decade.
“You hungry?” she said.
“Um . . . yeah. Yeah. Let’s go out.”
“I have some food here.”
“All right. We can eat here.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“Give me a second to get cleaned up.”
“Yeah.”
She hung up her coat and headed to the bathroom.
“Gianna?”
She turned her head.
“It’s nice to be home.”
She nodded. “That’s good,” she said.
It was anything but.
✶
Love is different, my grandmother had warned. It’s the only thing you can’t do twice.
I did remember that conversation, Boss. But time had worn down its urgency. Maybe I thought it didn’t apply to me. Maybe I just wanted to think that.
At first, with Gianna, I blamed our new dynamic on the length of my absence. When you’re gone a long time, it takes a while to readjust. We didn’t make love my first night back, citing exhaustion, nor did we the next two nights, going to bed at different times. When we finally did, that weekend, it felt familiar, but almost obligatory. I admit, comparing it to the passion of Nicolette in a Mexican hotel room wasn’t fair to my wife. But then, none of this was.
I thought back to that visit with my grandmother, when she held her photo album and teared up at the image of an old flame.
This woman. Gianna. Is it true love?
I think it is.
Then I’m worried, Alfie.
About what?
That you’ll do something stupid.
Had I done that? Had I angered the force that granted me this power? Even writing that makes me sound like I was a victim, when the truth was, whatever I had done, I had done to myself. But my habit of fixing things had made me think I could fix this, too. I didn’t realize how wrong I was until a month after I’d been home, when the consequence of my wandering heart became clear.
Gianna and I had re-immersed ourselves in old routines, seeing friends, going to movies. We were cordial enough. When I asked her “Is everything all right?” her answer was always “Fine.”
Then, on a Monday night, we were sitting on the couch, when a commercial came on the TV for a household cleaner. It showed babies making a big mess of things, paint on their faces, soup in their laps, a litter box they’d overturned.
“Cute kids,” I said.
Gianna nodded silently.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“About children?”
She shrugged.
I knew from experience she was yearning for a family. I also knew it was dangerous to bring this up, because it had led to all the things that had unraveled us the first time. But trying to find my way through the smoke, I stepped into the fire.
“Do you want us to try for a baby?” I asked.
I saw her wince. Just slightly. But I saw it. A resistance? A repulsion? I had never seen that look before. My insides collapsed.
She hooked her hands together and dropped them in her lap.
“Alfie,” she said, “we need to talk . . .”
But we didn’t need to. I already knew. Yaya had been right. If you change your mind, your first love will never love you again.
Gianna was gone.
Nassau
LaPorta hurried past the shooting fountains and into the casino, moving briskly past the blackjack tables and the clanging slot machines. He’d hated enduring the Nassau traffic again, but he needed to run the footage past Toussaint, the dealer who was first approached about the roulette scheme.
He unlocked the security office and saw two officers leaning against the wall, while Toussaint sat in a folding chair, chomping nervously on a piece of gum.
“Look at this,” LaPorta said, pushing the iPad under his gaze. “Which one of these is the guy who approached you?”
Toussaint didn’t hesitate.
“This man here.”
LaPorta threw his head back in frustration. The ex-husband. Mike.
“That’s the guy with the earring you were talking about?”
“Yes.”
“Not this guy?”
He pointed to Alfie, sitting at the table. Toussaint squinted.
“I don’t know this man.”
“Ahhh, damn it!”
LaPorta banged his fist so hard on the table, Toussaint bounced in his seat.
“I want this footage circulated to every security person here!” LaPorta yelled at the guards. “We need to find this guy fast. His name is Mike Kurtz. American. Move!”
The two guards rose quickly and LaPorta followed them out. Five minutes later, he was back in the squad car, returning to Gianna Rule, who at that very moment was hunched over a ballroom table, reading a notebook, with a hand on her mouth and tears coming down her face.
✶
Alfie, now in handcuffs, was led down a corridor inside Fox Hill Prison. The walls were painted beige on top and dark green on the bottom, and oversized fans blew from the ceiling, creating a constant rumble. As the island’s only correctional facility, the place was divided into maximum, medium, and minimum-security sections.
A guard directed him to the receiving desk, where Alfie stood as his papers were processed. He eyed a nearby emergency exit and took note of the security cameras’ placements. The officer behind the desk wore a sand-colored uniform. He made a copy of Alfie’s passport, then pointed to where the guard was to take him next.
“Excuse me,” Alfie said. “But I am allowed a phone call under Bahamian law, right?”
The officer sighed.
“Yes, that is correct.”
“I’d like to make it now, please.”
“To family only, or your embassy.”
“Understood.”
Alfie was led to a counter with a telephone. The guard removed his handcuffs, then stood nearby.
