2

By February 1986, when Claire Coolidge called Charley, he was forty-nine years old. He had spent half of December, all of January, and a week in February agonizing as he waited for her to call him. Charley could go along for months, even longer, without falling in love, but when he did it was as though he had been dumped into a giant Cuisineart, whirled around, and chopped into so many small pieces of anxiety and doubt that he might as well have never gotten out of bed in the mornings. He couldn’t do anything to bring her to him any faster than the route originally planned with Jerry because if he told Jerry again to tell her to call him that would be giving Jerry information that he didn’t need to know because then if Jerry used the information on Charley, thinking he was playing on a weakness to get himself an advantage, Charley would either have to fire him, which would cost them money, or have him zotzed, which would lose them the best flesh-fantasy man in the business.

So Charley waited it out and suffered. He lost eleven pounds, and although he knew he would gain it back after she called him, he had a tailor put alterations in one of his suits—both of his suits were made of dark blue serge—so that it wouldn’t be hanging on him when he met her again.

Charley’s ordeal happened a couple of times a year, less than when he had been fifteen years younger, but he put so much into his idealization of each girl as she happened to him that he couldn’t remember the process of having it happen to him—he only knew it had all started in the back row of a Loew’s in South Brooklyn with Vito Daspisa’s sister Tessie.

Charley Partanna was not a womanizer, not a lady-killer, but his susceptibility to beautiful women went beyond Mother Teresa’s susceptibility to the poor. For the past nineteen years, when a new woman happened to him, as lightning happens to trees when it strikes, he hated himself for a few seconds because all during the nineteen years, excepting for the few months he had been married to what’s her name, he had been engaged, on and off, to Maerose Prizzi, a great beauty and granddaughter of the capo di tutu capi in the entire world, so, as it kept working out, he was always a little ashamed of himself.

Now Claire Coolidge had happened to him. How could it be? He was forty-nine years old, approaching the half-century mark. Could it be possible that this could go on until he was a little old man like the don and the women whose beauty he admired would laugh at him? “Why me?” he had asked Father Passanante during confession. “God created beauty” was all the priest would tell him. “He must have meant you to enjoy it.” He only gave Charley two Hail Marys and one Our Father as penance.

After eight or ten years, Maerose could tell almost before he knew it himself that he was in the grip of his destiny—he knew she could tell, because she threw dishes and small furniture around—but she was very busy assisting her Uncle Eduardo at Barker’s Hill Enterprises so she never had the time to bring it up. He dreaded the day when she would have the time. He liked Sicilian women, but most of the time he wished Mae wasn’t so intense.

Claire Coolidge called him at 10:21 A.M. on February 16, 1986.

“Yeah?” he said into the phone.

“Is this Mr. Partanna?”

His heart leaped. Was this her? It sounded like her, although he wasn’t that sure of his memory for voices. It had been a very short time that they had been together and that he had heard her voice, but this had to be her because the only other woman who had his private number was Maerose Prizzi and it certainly wasn’t Mae. “Yes?” he said cautiously into the phone.

“This is Claire Coolidge.” His gasp cut into his throat and scalded his lungs. “Mr. Gibson suggested that I call you about the possibility of an opening in your ballet company.”

What the fuck kind of a thing was that for Jerry to tell her, that he owned a ballet company? “Oh, yes, Miss Coolidge,” he said, as if he had been searching his mind and had finally made the connection. “Maybe we could set up a meet.”

“Pardon?”

“Let me look,” he said into the phone, but there was nothing he wanted to look at except her. “Ah, are you free for lunch today, Miss Coolidge?” Good luck. He held on tightly. Jerry had said she was very, very straight, and he hoped to God that the implied intimacy of the question would not offend her.

“Yes, I am, Mr. Partanna.”

“Let’s say the Russian Tea Room at one o’clock.” The family owned 486 restaurants in New York and had the linen and towel concessions in 7,492 others, so why did he say the Russian Tea Room? He had never been in the Russian Tea Room. He wouldn’t even recognize the food—maybe they only sold Russian tea. “Do you know where that is, Miss Coolidge?”

“Two blocks north of the New York Ballet Company. One o’clock. Thank you, Mr. Partanna.”

Charley hung up and called Eduardo Prizzi’s secretary. Eduardo’s name had tremendous clout everywhere, from the halls of Congress to restaurant reservation desks. “Miss Blue? This is Charley Partanna. Do me a favor and call the Russian Tea Room and tell them I gotta have a nice table for two at one o’clock. Then ask Mr. Price if he can fit me in between four and five.”

“Can you tell me what you want to see Mr. Price about?”

“The ballet.”

“Ballet?”

“Where they dance on their toes.” Edward S. Price (Eduardo’s legal name) was on the board of directors of everything. He would know how to handle this.

He put on a hat and coat and left the office. “I’ll call back later,” he told Al Melvini.

“Whatta you mean?”

“What do I mean? I’m going out.”

“Oh. Hey, listen, Charley, if you’re going near it, could you pick me up a tube of Preparation H? My air cushion is leaking.”

“I can’t, Al. I’m busy. You duck out and get it.”

“Who’ll man the phones?”

“Drop dead, Al.” Charley dashed out of the laundry, got into the van, and drove to his apartment at the beach. He showered, powdered, applied a deodorant so strong that it could also have been used as embalming fluid, put on fresh underwear, his second set of the day, then immediately took the underwear off because it had blue and pink polka dots and if, by a miracle, he had to strip down with her that afternoon, he didn’t want to give the impression that he was frivolous. He re-brushed his teeth, gargled with chlorophyll-packed disinfectant, took liver salts because he had read in a woman’s magazine that the liver was where bad breath started, combed his hair, brushed it, then dressed in the blue suit with the slenderizing pencil stripe that he usually only wore to meetings with Eduardo Prizzi. Either Eduardo could set the ballet job direct or he’d know somebody who could do it. Why did he always read magazines whenever he had the time? Why hadn’t he read books on the ballet so he could give this woman the feeling that he had some idea of what he was talking about?

When he was ready to travel, it was ten minutes to twelve. He started for the door, then wanted to yell at himself. He was a Boss. Why didn’t he have a car and a driver like the other Bosses so he didn’t always have to worry about the fucking parking every time he went into New York? But he knew the answer. If he had a car and a driver, he would be expected to have an entourage, and if he had a lot of guys hanging around him all the time, he would have to talk to them. He telephoned the laundry.

“Al?”

“Yeah?”

“Send one of the picciotti to meet me in front of the Russian Tea Room in New York—West Fifty-seventh Street—at ten to one.”

“What kind of a specialist?”

“Get him there. I need him to park my car.”

He drove from South Brooklyn to the Tunnel, up the West Side Highway, east on Fifty-seventh Street. He got to the restaurant at five to one. Vinnie Le Pore was waiting for him on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

“Park it, Vinnie,” Charley said. “And if you can’t park it keep driving around the block till I come out.”

“How long you gonna be, Boss?”

“I don’t know. Maybe two hours.”

“Jesus, I better get gas.”

Charley went into the Russian Tea Room. Claire Coolidge had beat him to it, which was all right, he told himself; it made him look cooler. What flashed across his mind was the movie guy who told him that he always got laid an hour before he had a date with the woman he loved because then she could sense his aloofness. Charley marveled.

Claire Coolidge was divine in the real sense of the word, he thought, like a goddess. Red-gold hair, green eyes, a beautiful sweet face, and the most gorgeous legs he had ever seen, but she held her feet pointing in different directions like a gin drinker. It was a lucky thing he hadn’t remembered her as being this beautiful because he never would have made it here today—his legs wouldn’t have held him.

They had a large booth, up front, for six people, just the two of them.

“I want to get one thing straight, Mr. Partanna,” Claire said before they could even order a drink. “I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas about me. I was working for Mr. Gibson because I had to eat and I had to somehow get together enough money so that I would be able to wait through the season until something opened for me in ballet. That’s it entirely. And you’d better believe it.”

“You must like that kind of dancing,” Charley said.

“Since I was six years old—” A waiter appeared. “I’ll have a jugo de piña con Bacardi,” she said.

The sentence went through Charley like a knife. The only other woman in his life who had ordered that drink had been his late wife, Corinna. No, that wasn’t her name. Phyllis? Faith? It would come to him, but even if he didn’t have her name on the tip of his tongue—Mardell! Mardell Dupont!—he remembered the drink. “Same for me,” he said.

“Since I was six years old I have dreamed of being a dancer,” Claire said. “When I was sixteen I appeared in my hometown ballet company in Winsted, Connecticut. When I was eighteen I danced for the Dallas Ballet. I am now twenty-two. Since then I have appeared with the Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Boston companies, although I have never danced in opera. And, despairingly for me, I have never danced in New York.”

Charley felt stronger. He knew a little something about opera, but he had not known that they danced there because he had only heard opera on the don’s phonograph records. “Would you like to dance in an opera?”

“My God, Mr. Partanna, if you could get me a place with a New York opera company, I—I just don’t know what I’d do. Thank you,” she said to the waiter.

“Menus?” the waiter said, extending the cards.

“Later!” Charley said, hitting him with a piece of fear that turned his spine to water.

He had one thing on his mind. He had to get a book on ballet, memorize it, then come on strong.

“Call me Charley,” he said to Claire. The waiter had fled.

“Please call me Claire.”

“Did you know that St. Claire was the patron saint of television?”

“I am a Unitarian.”

“Claire—lissena me—I gotta say this. When I saw you, I went. I am in love with you. I am outta my head about you.”

“Does that mean you can place me with a ballet company?”

“Opera or straight?”

“Opera, I think—because I never did opera.”

“Where do you live?”

“I’m at the YWCA right now.”

Charley took a deep breath and a tremendous chance. “Would you like a nice apartment—say near the opera—if I could do that for you?”

She looked at him quite directly, not even blinking her beautiful green eyes. “If you could place me with the opera, I think that would be absolutely wonderful, Charley.”

The crowded, sweaty past thawed and resolved itself into a dew. The present took on a fifth dimension of sensation. The future shone so brightly that, surreptitiously, Charley had to adjust his clothing.