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  But it was the constant questions that wore her down, that made her want to hide out in her room for as long as she could get away with.

  It was the same at every family party. Aunts and uncles would seek her out, hunt her like hungry lions cutting a single gazelle from the herd. They had gotten incredibly skilled at cornering her. They backed her up against blank walls, ambushed her in the pantry, shanghaied her while heading to or returning from the bathroom. One by one, they'd get her alone, put their faces so close that their pores became as prominent as the pits on strawberries. They'd look at her with a soupy caring that soon dribbled over into condescension, pity. Their voices would drop to a funeral home murmur, and they'd say—

  So Angelina, ya met anyone?

  You going out much, Angel?

  Tell me, Angie, is there somebody you're dating?

  Ange, ya found a fella?

  Angelina, in turn, had gotten pretty deft at giving evasive answers. She met plenty of people— checkers in the supermarket, toll collectors on the Throgs Neck Bridge. She went out a lot—to the movies with her girlfriends, to bars in groups of bachelorettes whose personnel would shift and dwindle as more of the women stumbled onto mates. And the fact was, she did date now and then. A friend would line her up. Or a guy at another table would send over a drink, and if he didn't seem like a total jerk, she'd talk to him, see him for dinner on the weekend.

  But those dates went nowhere, and the rueful glances her relatives fixed on her seemed to suggest that they thought her dates would always go nowhere.

  Why did they think that? Angelina wondered. Did they think something was wrong with her, that her insides were faulty, the nerves withered or disconnected? Did they imagine she was frigid? Did they somehow enjoy imagining she was frigid, picturing avid hands laboring to rouse her unresponding body?

  Well, she wasn't frigid and there was nothing wrong with her equipment, thank you very much. The truth was she had a secret. She was twenty-seven years old and had a secret that had simmered inside her for a decade now, that had burned as unremittingly as one of those red bulbs they use to keep food hot in diners. The secret had given her patience and a kind of anchoring wisdom it might have seemed she had no claim to. But wisdom didn't come from experience alone; it also came from yearning, and waiting, and appraising and dismissing all those many things and people that did not measure up to the thing that one was waiting for.

  She thought about her secret and got ready to join the party. She stepped into stretch pants with stirrups, pants that made uncontoured tubes of her calves and thighs. She pulled on a cabled mohair sweater that made her chest into a vague fuzzy nothing. Pulling on the sweater mussed her jet black hair; she restored its arch with a lift of the handle of the teasing brush, pinned it into place with a black velvet headband, made sure the flip at the nape of her neck came free of the woolly collar. She looked at herself in the mirror, thinned mascara on the lashes that shaded her wide-spaced violet eyes. She looked archaic, but what no one realized was that she knew she looked archaic, she wanted it that way, it was a private emblem of her cherished distance.

  A virgin with a passionate secret, she slipped into her loafers and went downstairs to face her family's questions and their pity.

  * * *

  People were eating.

  They sat on sofas, love seats, plates on their knees, the men with napkins stuffed into their collars. They talked as they ate, pointing at each other with their forks. The women cautiously chased oily artichokes across the china, exactingly cut roast beef with silent knives. The fat kids ate in front of television, dropped meatballs and hunks of sausage on their disheveled clothes.

  Angelina approached the picked-over buffet, took some raw vegetables, a slice of crumbly cheese, made herself a white wine spritzer, weak. She took a deep breath and stepped through the archway that led on to the living room, hoping to be not just archaic but very small, invisible.

  "Angelina, hon!" bellowed Uncle Al, his voice like the wet tongue of a large and unkempt dog. "And how's the beauty of the family?"

  Before she could answer, Aunt Rose, Louie's wife, said, "She is beautiful," as though someone had denied it.

  "Come sit by your Uncle Joe," said her father's other brother.

  "She sits by me," said Paulie Amaro, softly.

  Obediently, she did. Her father kissed her cheek, stroked her unyielding hair. She picked up a ring of raw red pepper, took a tiny bite, and chewed it slowly, giving her throat some time to open.

  The conversation resumed around her.

  "So like I was saying," rasped Uncle Al. "Florida don't show me nothin'."

  "Key West isn't like the rest of Florida," Uncle Louie said.

  Al ignored him. "Florida. Ptui. The beaches, they all got whaddyacallit, men-a-war. Ninety-year- old Jews in baggy shorts. No casinos, no big acts. Everywhere ya go, spicks."

  "Not spicks," said Aunt Rose. "Spicks are Puerto Ricans. These are Cubans."

  Al said, "So what're Cubans, Eskimos?"

  "Key West is different," Louie said.

  Joe said, "Aruba. Aruba is different."

  "Who's talking about Aruba?" said Aunt Rose.

  "Black sand," Joe went on. "How many places, ya see black sand?"

  "Jersey, right in Jersey," Al said.

  "Key West," said Louie, a little desperately, "it's not about sand, it's about—"

  "About what, Uncle Louie?" Angelina asked.

  He gestured feebly, his plate wobbled on his nervous knees. "About . . . about, like, the way people are down there. Easy. Funny. It's hard t'explain, that's why I brought the tape."

  "Oh jeez," groaned Uncle Joe. "Home movies."

  Uncle Louie flushed, his peeling sunburned scalp grew redder beneath his wisps of hair, his clownish cheeks grew scarlet.

  "That's not nice," said Angelina. "After Uncle Louie went through all the trouble."

  She said it gently, but she was Paulie's daughter, she was sitting at his right. Joe squirmed against the brocade cushion.

  Paul Amaro took a sip of wine, washed his teeth with it. He'd been away nine years, a third of Angelina's life. He was remorseful for having left her; ashamed, he wouldn't let her attend his trial or visit him in jail. He remembered her goodbye kiss better than he remembered his wife's, he wanted to indulge her now in every way he could. "We'll watch the tape," he said, as he stroked her hair again. "We'll have coffee, cake, we'll watch the tape with coffee."

  * * *

  Fat, spoiled Allie Junior had red sauce on his bright blue shirt and olive oil on the placket of his fly and he didn't want to watch the tape. "It's playoffs," he whined. "I wanna watch hockey."

  "There's another TV in my bedroom," said Maria, Angelina's mother.

  "But this is the good TV," the child griped.

  "Here we're watching Uncle Louie's tape," said Paul.

  "Uncle Louie's stupid tape," muttered the child.

  A1 made an operatic reach toward his belt buckle. "The strap? You want the strap?"

  The fat kid sulked. Buttons were pushed and the tape began to roll. Uncle Louie cleared his throat and launched into his narration, but his heart wasn't in it. "This is the airport—"

  "Who wants to see a stupid airport?" said Little Allie, and his father smacked him on his chubby arm.

  ". . . Open-air, lizards running around, they still got DC-3s parked on the runway . . . And look at this—right across the road, the ocean. How many places, ya rent your car, the first stop sign is the ocean?

  People drank coffee, nibbled cake. Louie did his travelogue and wondered why he wasn't happier about it. He was showing off his vacation, he'd told himself if he got to do that it would be a successful evening. But somehow his triumph had been tarnished in advance, it was always like that with his family.

  "Funny names they got for things down there," he rambled on, as unsteady pictures chased each other across the screen. "This is Duds'n'Suds, combination bar and laundromat. Or this place, onna corner of Truman Avenue and Margaret Street, they call it the Margaret Truman Launderette."

  "Ya took vacation," said his brother Joe, "or ya did the wash?"

  Louie ignored the comment. "Look that sunset," he soldiered on. "The way the harbor faces, the sun slips right into the water."

  Angelina was sitting on the carpet, her back against an ottoman. She watched the red disk slide beneath the surface of the barely rippling Gulf, serene and stately as a king entering his bath. "It's beautiful," she murmured. Her face seemed far away, she imagined herself someplace warm as August and foreign as the sea.

  Louie remembered why she was his favorite, he felt his sunburned head grow flushed with kinship and with gratitude. He went on, his voice a little stronger now that he believed there was at least one person interested in what he said.

  "And the bars, the crazy bars they got there. Live music all day long. Tequila and eggs for breakfast... This here's Sloppy Joe's, world famous, look the big picture a Hemingway . . . And this one, Hog's Breath Saloon, big pig for a trademark .. . Oh yeah, and this one—what the heck's the name a this one, Rose?"

  His wife was bored. It showed. "How should I remember, Louie?"

  "Well anyway," he said, "weird place. Look: Fancy bar, fancy mirror, but hardly has a roof. Just vines. Vines with flowers. All kindsa fancy drinks. Mango this, papaya that. Old-fashioned fruit squeezer . . . Oh yeah, this I got a kick outa ..."

  On the screen, a stranger's blurry and averted face blinked past and then a thick and eccentric pair of hands began concocting a Virgin Heat.

  "Playoffs, we gotta watch some jerk makin' a drink?" said Little Allie.

  "A craftsman," said Uncle Louie. "A builder. Layer after layer. Look the colors."

  The family watched the hands. But no one watched like
Angelina did. She watched the bartender flick his thick but supple wrists, watched him arch his pinky as he grasped a spoon. She watched the bent index finger, wounded, independent, that would not fall into line with all the others, and as she watched, her body warmed in its cocoon of shapeless clothing.

  She knew it was impossible, unthinkable, but she also knew that she knew those hands, she was sure she did.

  She watched them bring the bottle to the glass, slowly, roundly, the strong arm doubling back as though softly to enfold a shoulder, to stake out the small space of a caress. She watched the hands, and, watching them, she heard a voice made more tender by its very gruffness, saying, You and me, Angelina, you and me. At the edges of her vision, the walls of the room stopped meeting at the corners, the floor got wavy underneath her. It couldn't be, it was fantasy, delusion, but she knew the hands on the screen were the hands she had felt on her hair, on her neck, on the tender place just below the ear, every day and every night for what already seemed a lifetime.

  The cocktail was made, the cherry drifted downward toward the bottom of the glass, trailing its red curtain of grenadine. Angelina tried to speak, tried to sound casual. Her throat was dry, the words came out tentative and childish. "The name of that place, you can't remember?"

  Uncle Louie pursed his lips, clicked his tongue, shook his head, defeated. Angelina tried not to pout, not to squirm.

  The video rolled on, moved in no special order to schooners on the horizon, parasailors against a flawless sky, drag queens on pink mopeds. Angelina pressed her back hard against the couch, let the fibers of her sweater rasp against her skin; locking in the image of the hands, she squeezed her eyes so tightly shut that she could feel the lashes interlace. The Amaro family sipped coffee, nibbled cake.

  The tape ended in a dappled glare. Allie Junior put on the hockey game. Chitchat moved to other subjects and after awhile people said good night, walked down the long hallway to gather up their furs and cashmere overcoats.

  As Uncle Louie was putting on his hat, Angelina, her eyes too bright, the skin mottled on her throat, hugged him hard and said, "Thank you, Uncle Louie, thank you."

  Surprised at her enthusiasm, surprised to be embraced, he smiled shyly, his clownish cheeks bunched up.

  As he was walking past the thinning ranks of good cars to his own, his wife said, "She's a strange one, your niece."

  Louie, wrung out from the evening, didn't answer.

  And by morning, Angelina, without a word to anyone, was on her way.

  4

  That same morning, having no idea that anything was wrong, Paul Amaro left his house, to be driven through the Bronx to his headquarters in Manhattan.

  Almost before he had settled into the backseat of his Lincoln, quiet streets had given onto glutted boulevards, stately homes had yielded to boarded stores and warehouses with smashed windows. Across the city line, sooty high-rises were smeared against the damp gray sky; the highway crumbled under the smoking, rusted, veering cars of the uninsured and reckless poor.

  With it crumbled the thin crust of gentility that Paulie had affected since moving to Westchester. Mile by mile, the well-dressed commuter devolved back to the thug, the suburban businessman became once more the bully, the threatener, the felon. His posture changed, he skulked low and coiled against the window; his eyes became more vigilant and furtive. Ahead, the skyline loomed; buildings climbed up one another's backs like jungle trees clawing for a little swath of open sky. The appalling density put tension in Paulie's forehead; the city seemed to him a clot of greed, a boil throbbing with frustrations and thwarted drives and ten million interlocking fibers of aggression.

  By the time he stirred his espresso in the back room of the Gatto Bianco Social Club on Prince Street, he had been subsumed entirely into his urban persona, his professional stance; he was angry, snarling, crude, and obsessed with honor in a shrill and sullen sort of way.

  "Nine fuckin' years," he said to his old friend Funzie Gallo. "More like ten. All that fuckin' time, we can't find the mizzable fuck that ratted me out?"

  Funzie was eating a pastry with powdered sugar on it; these days he was always eating pastry, as though to mask the souring of the life he knew with syrups, glazes, oils from nuts, reductions of fruit. The pastry was making him fat in odd places. His ankles hung over his shoes and little pads of blubber were narrowing his eyes. Now he licked his stubby fingers almost daintily before he answered. "We tried, Paulie," he said. "We put the word out everywhere. But the Feds, that program they got, they want a guy to disappear, they can make him disappear."

  Paulie slowly, resolutely shook his head. "No one disappears except he's dead. People get new faces. Fuckin' government can give 'em histories, all the papers. But disappear? No. Ya know why? They don't disappear 'cause they never stop being who they are. Who they are, sooner or later it's gonna show."

  Funzie licked his gums, tugged lightly on some extra flesh that hung down beneath his chin. Outside, trucks clattered past, music to smash things by was pumped out of people's radios. Cautiously, he said, "Paulie, what happened to you was a long time ago."

  Amaro just stewed. Funzie knew he should leave it there but he didn't leave it there.

  "Life goes on, Paul. We got businesses to run. Deals to consider. Opportunities, like this thing down south—"

  Paulie wasn't listening. He didn't want to think about business; he wanted to think about revenge. "I want that scumbag dead."

  "Dead, not dead," said Funzie. "It's not worth losing sleep. This grudge, Paul—for your own sake, why don't you let it go?"

  Paulie's big knuckles were white against his tiny abused espresso spoon, blood pressure made his ears turn red. His voice was pinched, quietly furious.

  "We didn't get where we are today by letting grudges go."

  Yeah? thought Funzie. And where were they today? Hiding behind metal roll-down shutters that some nigger kid had had the balls to paint grafitti on, drinking coffee at a stained card table in a dim outpost that smelled of roach spray and anisette. Gray, unhealthy men who each day mattered a little less to the world outside than they had the day before. Paulie didn't realize; he'd been away too long. He'd seen the headlines, sure—the indictments, the betrayals, the defections—but the guts of their decline he didn't grasp. He, Funzie, had wolfed biscotti and run the brugad while Paulie was in the can; he understood the slippage all too well. "But Paul—" he began.

  The other man cut him off. "Funzie, I'm sixty- three years old. That fuck stole nine years a my life. Took me away from my home, my daughter."

  "I know, Paul. I know. But that's over now. It's over and the world has changed."

  "You telling me it's changed so much that shit like that goes unpunished?"

  * * *

  Angelina had never in her life been guileful, had never had to be. She'd never snitched candy, because candy had always been pressed on her. She'd seldom fibbed as to her whereabouts, because all in all her whereabouts had been contentedly licit; it hadn't cramped her to stay in the neighborhood, because she lived mainly in the precinct of her thoughts, and for the most part she'd been happiest in her room, the nursery of her imaginings.

  But now, as she was abandoning her home and her family to seek out the treasonous man she loved, she discovered, with surprise and an exciting shame, that an instinctual cunning seemed to exist in her, as ripe and fully formed as a baby on the day of birth, that had been waiting only for a purpose. Once the purpose had been revealed, she shocked herself by being rather shrewd and as outwardly calm as a veteran spy.

  Noiselessly, carrying only a large handbag, she'd stepped out of her parents' sleeping house—the house that, with breathtaking suddenness, no longer seemed her own. She never once looked back at the shrubs still struggling to awake from winter, the brooding chimneys stacked up on the roof. Under swift clouds racing through an undecided sky, she'd strolled down Hillside Drive to the intersection with busy Maple Avenue. She'd called a cab to take her to La Guardia, where she paid cash for an airline ticket.

  On the flight south, she'd sat silently among chintzy end-of-season tourists, watching with no real curiosity as they left their seats in brown sweaters and returned from the bathroom wearing shirts of pink and acid green. Through a gap in the jetway at Miami airport she caught her first real whiff of Florida, the smell of salted mildew colonizing damp carpets and the foam inside of vinyl chairs. She'd walked in a daze past promotional pyramids of plastic oranges and listened as lost travelers were paged in Spanish.