18

For her Mardell characterization she developed certain quirks. As Mardell, she fell off chairs. She forgot to turn off shower baths. She told Charley she had left the apartment with a handful of change in her purse then had to walk through the night streets to the subway from the Latino on her stilt heels because she was too proud to ask anybody for cab fare.

Charley bawled the shit out of her, but he couldn’t see that it made any difference. It wasn’t until he figured out that she had to be worried all the time to behave the way she did that he let up on her. In the short time he had known her he paid more attention to her than he had paid to anyone else in his entire life.

He decided to make Baltimore a test case with Mardell. He knew he was going to have to go there for two days, and what made up his mind about taking a stand on such a nothing trip, as far as being separated from her was concerned, was a Sunday afternoon when he offered to go out and get her a pack of cigarettes and she began the blank-eyed stare and the crying.

“Fahcrissake, Mardell, I’m only going out for a pack of cigarettes.”

“That’s how my father left my mother, Charley. And he never came back.”

“Then go and get your own cigarettes. Do I want cigarettes? I don’t even smoke.”

“That is what occurred to me, Charley. That is what set me off. I know you don’t smoke and I am grateful to you for volunteering, but it reminded me of what my father did. You don’t need to get me cigarettes, I’m going to give up smoking.”

“Listen, Mardell, even you gotta know that I gotta have some consideration here. How do you think I feel? I tell you I love you, I do everything I can think of to prove I love you, but you don’t want it. You don’t trust me.”

“Charley!”

“Never mind. Just lissena me. I am talking respect here. When I tell you that I gotta go outta town for a coupla days, I am telling you a very normal thing. It’s business. I gotta make a living. I don’t do what I’m supposed to do and I get fired. You want me to get fired?”

She bit her lower lip and shook her head.

“Now lissena me, Mardell. I gotta go to Baltimore on guvvamint business. My company has a big contract with the guvvamint.”

“Baltimore? People commute to Baltimore.”

“Not when they gotta do what I gotta do. I am gonna call you three times a day—in the morning when I wake up, at lunchtime, then after your last show at night. Two days then I’m home witchew again. Six long-distance telephone calls. Are you gonna accept that or are you gonna cry and show me you don’t trust me and you don’t respect me?”

She nodded. She rushed into his arms almost knocking him to the floor, the sofa catching him as he went down. “It’s all right. Buckingham Palace says it’s all right. It just came in on the beam.”

Charley didn’t remember sleeping much that night but he felt too weak to get out of bed and read a magazine. His whole life had changed. He was stuck with the two most beautiful women in the time warp. It was as if some science fiction magazine had pulled him inside. Maerose and the radio beam. The don’s granddaughter and Buckingham Palace. It was too much from no matter where he looked at it. If Italian-type guys should marry Italian-type women, then he had got himself the most gorgeous, the smartest, the best-connected wop dame since Edda Mussolini. He couldn’t think of anything tremendous she didn’t have. She had class; she had education; she was so beautiful it made him dizzy; and how she had ever learned to do what she could do on a bed he didn’t want to know. Jesus—blue-black hair, eyes like a sex-crazed belly dancer crossed with Albert Einstein, and a body that, although it was different from Mardell’s, was a body so far beyond his lifetime ambitions for a body that it made him want to adjust his clothing whenever he thought about it.

How come I never felt like this about her before, he thought. Because I never saw her that way, that’s why. If only I got started on Maerose before the time I took Gennaro Fustino to the Latino none of this would have happened. But Maerose Prizzi was too far beyond his reach until she decided she was going to have to make the first move.

Worse, he thought, sitting inside his cup and making it runneth over was Mardell, a mountain of loving movements. She had hair like radishes floating in honey, an ass you could play handball on, toenails like canoe paddles, and golden eyes that were so big and scared that sometimes when he looked at her he almost busted out crying. He lost himself in Mardell and he saw himself in Maerose. Maybe the Arabs were right with their rules that it was okay to have a couple of wives—but who told the wives? That was the kicker—who told the wives?

Mardell was the biggest problem but, in a mysterious way, she brought him satisfaction. What am I, he wondered, somebody who walks around feeling so guilty about something or other that I need Mardell to make things rough for me so I know I done my penance and I can feel better about everything? But what did he have to feel guilty about? He lived right. He had never done anything to feel guilty about in his entire life.

As he thought about Mardell’s specialness, he came up with an answer. The reason he got so much satisfaction out of her was that he had to give her more than Maerose asked him to give. Not that Mardell ever asked for anything. She just stood there, whacked up and helpless. Anybody would have tried to help her. She was probably nuts. So she needed him.

He had read about that in a lot of magazines. He had always thought that the women in the magazine stories framed it that way so the guy would cave in. But Mardell didn’t have the head on her to figure out things like that. Mardell just happened to be a natural problem. She was a freak, actually.

Maerose had read all the magazine stories and had figured out how to use them. She was almost too sane, but the main difference between her and Mardell was that Mae was insulated against the shocks of the world and Mardell had nothing but him to protect her.

He decided he knew two things: one, there was absolutely nothing good about the entire situation; two, he didn’t see how he was going to get out of it without totaling Mardell. He was in an impossible situation. Two women were out of their minds about him. Two terrific women were breaking their hearts because they were so in love with him they couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t save both of them. He was going to have to choose one or the other, but his terrible anxiety was for Mardell. Maybe for Maerose, too, but more for Mardell, because he knew in his heart she was capable of killing herself if she lost him.