When the Thrill Is Gone (7 page)

“How you doin’, boy?” he asked.

I smiled and shook my head, saying without words that the weight was beyond my range. It was a truth I wouldn’t have revealed to most people. I wouldn’t have even told Gordo, but he needed to be needed, and I needed him to be—period.

“What is it?” he asked.

I told him about the woman pretending to be another, about the man feigning his identity, too. I told him about the hidden house on top of the building nine blocks away.

“Tricky,” the dying man said. “That’s the kinda boxer you got to worry about. He have you lookin’ for left hook but he bankin’ on a straight right. You think you got it figured and then—bang!—outta nowhere you crouch down right into a uppercut.”

It was good advice from a master trainer. Here I thought I had the case all figured, but the facts I knew really only told me that I didn’t know anything.

“And then there’s this guy,” I said. “Harris Vartan.”

“Vartan? What you got to do with that mothahfuckah?”

Gordo didn’t curse, hardly ever. He always told me that women and children come to boxing matches and it’s bad enough that they have to see their loved ones bleeding and battered.

They don’t need foul language to spice the bloody stew
, he’d say.

“How do you know Vartan?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven, no no no, thirty-eight years ago he come into my gym and told me that he owned one’a my boxers, said that he had plans for him. I told him that if he was a slave master, that if he thought of men as chattel, then he could take his property and get his ass outta my place. I let that boxer know the same damn thing.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nuthin’. Vartan looked at me and then he kinda half-smiled. He had a torpedo with him. That guy took a step at me but Vartan held him back. Lucky for the gunsel that he did, too. You know I was hot.”

“He let the boxer alone?”

“Sure did. Kinda surprised me, too. You know, I asked around about him. They said that he knew where the bodies were buried’cause he the one put ’em in the ground. What you got to do with him?”

“He was a friend of my father’s,” I said.

“Oh. I see.”

Gordo was respectful of the memory of my dad. Whenever the subject of Tolstoy came up he held back any opinion.

“How about you, old man?” I said to cover his embarrassment.

“This morning I heard Kat arguin’ with some guy,” he said. “The kids was all gone and they was talkin’ loud. I didn’t hear what she was sayin’ except when she told him to leave. I don’t know what the man said but he sounded pretty angry.”

I wondered but didn’t worry about the argument. Katrina could take care of herself. From there the conversation drifted over to the latest boxing matches. Gordo wanted to give his opinion on a potential Mayweather-Paquiao match-up but he started to fade before we got too deep into it.

I left the dying man dozing. Our conversations tired him out but he seemed to like them. They were the least I could do for the man who was more of a father to me than Tolstoy had ever been.

ENTERING THE HALLWAY, I saw Elsa going toward the front door. She had taken off her nurse’s uniform and wore a pink dress that showed off her form. She was maybe ten pounds over her ideal weight but that just made her look better.

I walked down to meet her at the door.

“I wanted to thank you for how you’ve taken care of Gordo,” I said.

“He’s a good man,” she said, “with kind eyes that take in everything. I always make him my last visit in case he needs me.”

“Would you like to stay and eat with us?” I asked, expecting her usual refusal.

“Yes,” she said. “I would like that.”

I WENT TO the kitchen to tell Katrina about our dinner guest.

“She’s a sweet woman,” my wife said. “We’re lucky to have her.”

“Gordo said he heard some arguing this morning.”

“Really?” Katrina said and then, “Oh. He must mean about Carlos.”

“The super?”

“He came up and said something about the boys throwing cigarettes from the windows. I told him that no one in this house smoked.”

“Huh,” I grunted, wondering what she was hiding.

10

AT THE BACK of the kitchen there’s a smallish walk-in pantry lined with shelves on every wall—from floor to ceiling. It’s there that Katrina keeps her spices, condiments, and the more arcane of her cooking devices. I put a three-legged mahogany stool back there so I could get some peace in my own house now that Gordo was dying in the den.

Hunkered down on that little boxer’s seat, I tried to regain my balance.

Watching Gordo fade was a hard thing for me. He was just ten days off the last dose of the medicinal poison the doctors used on him.

Gordo was a fighter, and I was, too. Watching him wilt under the cancer was like seeing your champion being worn down to a bloody pulp one fight after his heyday.

If stomach cancer was a man I’d’ve slit his throat, tossed him in the Hudson, and then gone out for a rare steak and red, red wine.

A tapping came at the cupboard door.

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Daddy,” Katrina’s blood-daughter said.

“Come on in, baby.”

The door opened, letting in the light and clatter from Katrina’s kitchen.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked, flipping the light switch.

Michelle’s skin was dark olive and her eyes were a definite almond shape. It wasn’t the gentle sloping of Chrystal and her pretender but the real Asian variety. Michelle was another man’s daughter, a diamond dealer from Jakarta whom Katrina once thought she might marry—after ditching me. But instead he was killed in an earthquake and Shelly was presented as mine.

The slender child plopped down on my lap, put her arms around my nearly bald head, and kissed me just above the left ear.

“How are you, Daddy?”

“Just about normal,” I said. “Head below the waterline, but at least that’s better than six feet underground.”

She squeezed my head tighter.

“You sad about Uncle Gordo?”

“I ever tell you that he used to let me sleep on a cot at the back of the gym when I’d be on the run from my foster homes?”

“Yeah, but you could tell me again.”

“Dinner,” Katrina called.

I stood up, cradling Shelly in my arms. She loved to be held like a child and I loved her even though we had nothing in common, from the blood in our veins to our outlooks on life.

I TOOK MY PLACE at the hickory dining room table. It was large enough to seat ten but lately only four of us sat down for a meal—Shelly and Twill, Katrina and me. Dimitri had stopped eating with the family since his girlfriend, Tatyana Baranovich, had gone off to Russia with her new beau, Vassily Roman. While Katrina and Shelly brought out the covered platters Gordo showed up at the door, leaning on a bamboo walker and assisted by Elsa. Her eyes were on him like a proud mother watching her youngest taking his first steps. Gordo’s head was glistening from the exertion but he pushed right through the strain and made it to a chair at the far end of the table.

“Hail, Lazarus!” I proclaimed.

He raised a hand to bless me and I smiled.

Elsa sat on Gordo’s right and Shelly took the left-hand side.

“Twill!” Katrina called. “Dimitri!”

“Dimitri?” I said to my wife.

“He’s part of this family, too.”

“But . . .”

Before I could say more the brothers rumbled in. Squat Dimitri was dark, my color brown, while Twill was lean and charcoal with not even a hint of his mother’s Nordic blood in his skin.

Broad, earthbound Dimitri sat across the table from me, while Twill sat at my side.

“What’s up, Pops?” Twill asked. He was no blood relation, like his sister, but he had been my favorite since the first day I laid eyes on him.

“Up?” I said. “Man, I’m flat on my back and the ref started the count at nine.”

Gordo heard the joke and grinned, nodding like one of those bobble-headed dolls people used to put in the back windows of their cars.

Katrina and Shelly took the lids off the platters, revealing a feast of fried pork chops, spinach and collards chopped and sautéed in butter, potatoes cooked with bacon, onions, and vinegar, and homemade applesauce. Katrina was a magician in the kitchen.

“Hey, boy,” I said to my one true son.

“Dad,” he said.

Since I had tried to help his girlfriend, Dimitri felt conflicted about me. Where once he expressed only disdain he now conversed with tepid deference. This was a definite improvement in our relationship, but we had a long way to go.

“How’s school?” I asked him.

“I haven’t been goin’ lately.”

“What you been doin’, then?”

“Nuthin’.”

He looked down at the plate his mother had put before him. That would be all he’d say that night. His pain tore at me, but what advice could I give? My heart had been broken the same way and I was just as lost.

I turned my attention to Twilliam. He was saying something to his sister and she was holding Gordo’s thumb.

“What about you?” I asked Twill.

“Same,” he almost sang.

“What kinda trouble you gettin’ into?”

“Not me, Pops. Now I’m outta school I put in thirty hours a week at the D’Agostino’s. Got to make some money so I can move out when you let up on me.”

“You’re only seventeen.”

“Alexander was leadin’ a legion at that age.”

“What you know about Greek history?”

“Whatever Mardi Bitterman says. She reads her dry books and tells me the story.”

“Is she your girlfriend now?” Katrina asked.

“She’s my friend, but I can’t say from firsthand if she’s a girl or not.”

“Twill,” Katrina protested. “That’s rude.”

The conversation went on like that, Dimitri brooding while Twill danced around any question asked of him. Gordo was served a special soup that Katrina made, and he fought bravely against the gravity of fate as Shelly regaled him about a trip she planned to take to Senegal. Elsa anticipated Gordo’s every need. Her care for him somehow soothed me.

We ate and after a while Katrina broke out a couple of bottles of decent Spanish red. The liquor seemed to revitalize Gordo. He started telling us stories about the old days and the boxers he saw hitchhiking from one bout in Cincinnati to another the next day in Cleveland.

“Back in those days,” he declared, “a man was fightin’ from sunup to sunup. The only way he knew he was in a ring was he got a break when the bell sounded.”

THAT NIGHT KATRINA gave me a sloppy kiss before drifting into sleep. It didn’t mean anything. She was having an affair with Dimitri’s school chum Bertrand Arnold. Maybe she thought I didn’t know. I didn’t begrudge her the passion. She certainly wasn’t getting it from me, and since she was sated physically she wasn’t so anxious. She could even fall asleep without the TV crooning in the background.

I was wide awake with all my responsibilities and failures floating aimlessly through my mind. I turned on the TV and caught the beginning of
The Thin Man
with Powell and Loy. The dry wit between the two made me restless. Before the final scene I climbed out of bed and went back to the dining room.

Elsa had gone home at ten and the large apartment was quiet. It was two in the morning but I entered the number on my cell phone anyway.

She answered on the first ring.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Aura.”

There was a moment of appreciative silence before she said, “Leonid, what’s wrong?”

“I miss you.”

“And I you.”

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Reading,” she said. “Thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

She didn’t answer the question.

“Can I meet you tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe for breakfast?”

“Of course.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I’ll see you then,” she answered. “I really should be getting to sleep.”

I went back to bed, but sleep had settled in another room somewhere, down the hall with the children and the dying.

11

THERE’S A SMALL diner on Forty-sixth just east of Fifth called Winston’s. It’s got a red linoleum counter and yellow tables along the plate-glass front. I didn’t need to tell Aura to meet me there—it was our place. When I arrived just shy of seven I could see through the window that she was already at our table, just being served her coffee.

I stopped at the entrance and allowed myself to be amazed yet again at how my heart began to pound when I saw her. From this sphere of wonder I proceeded to the booth.

We didn’t kiss hello.

I meant to say good morning but uttered “I love you” instead.

She reached out to touch my hand and I felt a thrill of excitement. “Me too.”

I sat, and the waitress, a strawberry blonde with pale skin and a ballerina’s body, took my order.

In contrast to the server, Aura was the color of glittering dark gold. Her hair was blond but wavy. She came by this coloring naturally, seeing as her mother was Danish and her father from Togo. Her pale eyes were no color that I could name.