Fin & Lady: A Novel Page 7

  After the war, Biffi and his mother came to the United States to join Biffi’s father, an art dealer who had been safely stranded in New York since 1939. On a picnic with his wife and son, Mr. Deutsch was struck by lightning. And killed. How could you not mention that your father was struck by lightning? But Biffi never did. He walked with a buoyant, unhurried step, as if the evils of the world had never chased him from country to country and never could. He often said the world was cruel, but he never seemed to mean it. After all, he had been named after a café in Milan that made exceptional cake, the Caffè Biffi, or so he said. It was not easy to know when he was joking. He was handsome, funny, and fierce, a diabolical black goatee surrounding a wide, beautiful mouth, angelic brown eyes shimmering above. His accent was musical, his name a confection. He might as easily have hailed from Freedonia as from Hungary. Fin was crazy about him.

  “You’re crazy about him,” Lady once said.

  “Yeah, but you’re just crazy.” Fin could say that to Lady. He could say almost anything to Lady. That was because most of the time she wasn’t really listening. Most adults never listened to children, and she didn’t listen most of the time, either. But then, when you least expected it, there she was, intent, curious, open, her eyes locked on yours, her whole being locked on yours.

  No wonder Biffi Deutsch fell in love with her.

  “Good lad,” Biffi said when he introduced himself that first day. Lad? No one had ever addressed Fin as “lad.” “Good lad.” When he shook hands, he left a dollar bill resting on Fin’s palm.

  Fin tried to hand it back.

  “No, no, it’s for you.”

  Like a tip. Who ever heard of tipping a kid? Maybe in this man’s country they tipped kids. Or at least lads.

  Fin led him into the living room, where Lady lay on the couch, her head covered by a pillow. Fin made his way closer, close enough to lift a corner of the pillow and whisper, “Someone’s here. A man. From not the United States.”

  Lady emerged, ravishing, her skin as clear as porcelain, her eyes bright. “Ciao, Biffi! I wasn’t expecting you!”

  “Not? You have invited me, you see.”

  He settled down on one of the low curvy chairs and crossed his legs. As he did so, his pant leg rode up, exposing bright purple socks, a dazzlingly pale leg, and a dark garter.

  Fin made them martinis.

  “Who taught you this sophisticated skill?” asked Biffi.

  “Lady did.”

  “Did she?” said Biffi. “Did you?” he said to Lady, raising an eyebrow.

  “He doesn’t drink them,” Lady said. “Do you, Fin?”

  “No. They’re disgusting.”

  Biffi laughed. “Well then.”

  When Biffi and Lady got up to go to dinner, Biffi said, “Come on, you, too,” and Fin said, “Really?” and Lady said, “Perché no?” and Mabel said, “Wash your hands.”

  They went to a small Italian restaurant with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and candles stuck in wine bottles that were wrapped with woven straw. There was sawdust on the floor, and Fin felt as if he were in a horse stall. He had spaghetti and meatballs. “Where are you from? Is Hungary near Italy? I’ve been to Italy. And Paris. Have you been to the World’s Fair? Do they have a Hungarian pavilion at the World’s Fair?”

  “He’s usually as quiet as a mouse,” Lady said.

  “I am?”

  “Are you?” Biffi asked.

  Fin thought for a moment. He heard his father’s voice: Cat got your tongue again? “Maybe.”

  “I was a quiet boy,” said Biffi.

  “Quiet children hear things,” said Lady.

  “All children hear things,” Biffi said.

  Fin watched as a beautiful striped slab of ice cream was placed before him.

  “Spumoni!” he said. Just the word was festive.

  “A traditional Hungarian dessert,” said Biffi.

  “Ha ha,” said Fin.

  “Oh yes!” said Biffi. “It is true. And Spumoni is my middle name.”

  “Biffi Spumoni Deutsch,” said Lady. “It just rolls off the tongue.”

  They all started to laugh. They repeated the ice-cream middle name, laughing and laughing. He had never laughed like that with adults. He had not laughed like that with anyone in a long time.

  Biffi took them to a Mets game. “A baseball match,” he said. “A matinee.” And Fin could not tell, as usual, if he was joking.

  They sat on the first-base line. His first Major League Baseball game. The field was so green. Lady got him a Mets cap. People screamed and ate. The players swung and missed.

  “They seem to miss hitting the ball an awful lot,” Lady said.

  “Nor catching it,” said Biffi.

  “If you strike out twice and then get a hit, that’s like a three hundred batting average, which is really good,” Fin said. “Everyone misses a lot.”

  “So that’s why they call them the Lovable Losers?”

  “Sort of.”

  Biffi furrowed his brow and said, “Next time we go to the races, eh?”

  “What about the World’s Fair?”

  “I have lived through the World’s Fair, boy. The horses are more dependable.”

  But they did go to the World’s Fair. They went on the simulated helicopter ride, on the flume ride, the monorail, the outrigger canoe ride at the Hawaii pavilion. They waited in a long line to see the Pietà.

  “Don’t you want a Belgian waffle?” Fin asked Lady.

  “No,” Lady said. “And if I did, I would go to Belgium. Not to Flushing.”

  Biffi came to the house for dinner, he took Lady out to dinner, he took Lady and Fin out to dinner. Fin and Gus came to recognize the sound of his car and would both rush out to meet him.

  “I choose Biffi,” Fin announced. The house was hot and damp that afternoon, and he and Lady had migrated outside. She was in a bathing suit, stretched out on her stomach on a towel, the transistor radio beside her tuned to Cousin Brucie.

  “For what?”

  “Husband.”

  She peered at him over her sunglasses. “I do like Biffi.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But you have a full-year contract. Don’t fink out on me, Fin.”

  “No. Okay. But what if he’s the really, really good one?”

  “I can’t give up so fast.”

  Fin could also not help but notice that Lady was a little wary of Biffi.

  “You’re too serious,” she said to him once.

  They were sitting in the garden having drinks. Fin had climbed up the tree, and after a while they seemed to forget he was there. He looked down at them through the fat green maple leaves. The air was heavy and still in the treetop, but cooler than below. The leaves themselves were cool to the touch.

  “Certainly not I am serious,” Biffi said. “I am a joker. Everyone says I am a joker.”

  “Everyone is wrong. You’re a superficial joker.”

  “I am a deep joker. That is my charm.”

  “No, but you’re deep. And you scare me.”

  “I am deep. And I am a joker. This is on my positive, surely.”

  “And I don’t buy that pidgin-English bit, Biffi.”

  “Perhaps it is a joke.”

  “Perhaps,” Lady said, and that seemed to cheer her up.

  They often argued. Screaming kinds of arguments. Then they made up. Then retreated to the bedroom. Then, a few days later, argued again, until Biffi started to seem almost as jumpy and changeable as Lady.

  The parties continued, if anything getting bigger and more frequent after Lady met Biffi, as if she needed chaperones, dozens of drunken chaperones. There were other suitors, too. An earnest young civil rights worker, a cynical musician, a journalist with a magnificent beard and a pen that leaked on the sofa. Fin did his reconnaissance, but his heart was not in it. His heart was with Biffi. That one in the suit and tie? Boring. Turtleneck? Smug. Boots? Too loud. Loafers? Too quiet. Sandals? Obnoxious. Leather Pants? No, a simple n
o, Leather Pants was out, it was summer. What about Nehru Jacket? He approached Nehru Jacket while shaking the icy martini shaker.

  “Mittens,” said Nehru Jacket, nodding with approval at Fin’s protective hand wear. The martini shaker was so cold. “Smart.”

  “What are your interests?” Fin asked politely. It was his standard opening salvo.

  “Aeronautics,” Nehru Jacket said, “and sex.”

  Well, he’s out, Fin thought. Lady knew nothing about aeronautics. Ha ha.

  There was one guy Fin thought Lady might like. He came one night with Pierre, the dwarfish interior decorator. He was taller than Pierre, but who wasn’t? There was something appealing and boyish about him, he had very blond hair, and he was Danish, but none of that mattered much. What mattered was that he was an artist.

  “Lady likes artists,” Fin said when Pierre introduced Jan as one. “What are your interests?”

  “Toy soldiers,” said Jan.

  “No, really, what are your interests?”

  “He paints toy soldiers at a factory in New Jersey,” Pierre said. “It’s his day job.”

  “It is, au contraire, my passion,” Jan said.

  Fin could hardly believe his luck. Here was a man who threw in French phrases, just like Lady, and loved toy soldiers, just like Fin.

  “Lady,” he said, tracking her down at the door as she greeted a man with a large beard and a large stomach.

  “He’s a famous poet,” she whispered when the man had gone into the living room.

  “Okay, but what about Jan the painter artist who’s over there with Pierre? He could be the one. As a backup to Biffi. He’s not a lemon at all.”

  Lady glanced over. “Oh, but, Fin, he likes boys.”

  Fin almost blurted out, Yeah, I know, and toy soldiers, too. Then he realized. Jan liked boys that way.

  “That’s so unfair,” he said.

  “Life is unfair,” she said. “President—”

  “—Kennedy said that, I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You told me.”

  “Oh. Good for me!”

  And Lady went back to float among her would-be suitors. Biffi was not there that night, banished temporarily from the house after a particularly loud and violent fight. Lady had thrown a coffee cup at him, and he had said something in Hungarian and slammed the door behind him. You couldn’t rely on either of them, not to know what was best for Lady. The only one who knew, who truly knew Lady, Fin thought, was Fin. Lady had not really told Fin that President Kennedy said life was unfair; at least the first time she told him was not the first time he heard it. His mother had sometimes said it in a soft, wistful voice, Life is not fair, when she was sick. President Kennedy said that, she would add, as if that made it more true or less sad or both. Lady said it, too, of course, but usually when someone wanted something from her she was unwilling to give.

  Fin watched her now as she made her way to the window and stood looking out. She turned off the lights for parties and lit candles everywhere. She was so glamorous, so romantic, her hair gleaming in the flickering light. So unguarded, just for a moment, that moment, like a kid, a girl in a world in which life was not fair.

  I’ll take care of you. The words sounded so silly, even in Fin’s head, even as a thought, a silent thought. He was eleven. Lady was Lady. She hated to be taken care of. No one took care of Lady. But I will, he thought. I’ll take care of you.

  He retreated to the top of the staircase and sat there sleepily petting Gus, listening to the party below. Flirtatious laughter. Blustering arguments. The noise got louder and louder as more people arrived. Smoke wafted up with the noise. Cigarette smoke. Marijuana smoke.

  And then Lady wafted up, too.

  “What are you doing here, Finny?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t sleep? Come on, night owl.” She tenderly took his hand. She led him into his room. Tucked him in, the covers up to his chin, his arms uncomfortably pinned to his sides. He didn’t mind. She was smiling at him, stroking his head.

  “Everything will be okay,” he said.

  Lady looked surprised.

  “It will, Lady. I promise.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Fin.” And she kissed his forehead as softly as his mother used to do.

  Friends

  Every Tuesday night, Lady and Fin would drive to Fifty-seventh Street and eat Chicken Kiev at the Russian Tea Room. Butter bubbled out of the chicken, and Fin said it looked like the oil bubbling out of the sand at the beginning of The Beverly Hillbillies. He had red soup with dill in it, the first time he had tasted dill. Then they would go to drawing class at the Art Students League, and Fin would try not to stare at the nude model.

  “Don’t be silly,” Lady said on their first visit. “Haven’t you ever changed your clothes at a country club?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Lady pondered this. “Well, if you did, and you were a woman, this is what you’d see.” She smiled triumphantly.

  Two of her friends from college were also in the class. Mirna was one. She was dark, wiry, always on edge, “the edge of what we thankfully don’t know,” Lady said. Mirna’s face was permanently puckered with worry. When she talked, and she talked a lot, she seemed to be squeezing her words up from somewhere, somewhere you probably wouldn’t want to go. Ever. She had seriously muddy brown eyes. You could get stuck in them, leave a boot behind.

  “Hi!” he said as they entered the studio, and he grinned. He always grinned when he saw Mirna, but it never did any good.

  Mirna came closer. “Are you all right?”

  Am I all right? Fin thought wildly. I thought I was. But I must be wrong.

  “How are you?” he said, tilting his head brightly, like a terrier.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Fin,” Mirna said, nodding when really she ought to have been shaking her head. It was like someone patting her head with one hand, rubbing their belly with the other. She often nodded like this. Who was she agreeing with?

  “Nope,” he said. He tried to nod as he said it. “Not afraid.”

  “Someday,” Mirna said. She squeezed his hand in hers. Then went off to take dark charcoal stabs at the large sheet of paper propped on her easel. Lady once told Fin Mirna was a bit upsy-downsy, mostly downsy.

  Lady’s other friend, Joan, was beautiful, not beautiful like Lady, more like a cake, Fin told me. She was sweet, substantial, blond, her long hair a shining yellow, cut in bangs across her forehead, her skin white, her cheeks pink as a birthday frosting flower. Maybe it was the candy coloring, maybe her high-pitched voice, but there was something childlike about her. Fin attached himself to her, the way a dog attaches itself to the only person in the room who hates dogs. She clearly found him annoying. He sensed this, but could not resist her. When she began to give him treats to make him go away, it just made it worse.

  “Here,” she said, handing Fin a Life Saver. “Go see what your sister is drawing.”

  “She’s drawing the same thing you are. The naked lady.”

  “Well, go see if hers is any good.”

  “It’s not.”

  Fin tried to imagine the three of them, Lady, Mirna, and Joan, in the same dormitory. Joan, after curfew and a few too many, had climbed in the window of the wrong room, then climbed into Lady’s bed; that’s how they met. They met Mirna the next year when Mirna did the same thing. They were the Gleesome Threesome, the Bra Trois—Fin had heard them reminisce. But he still could not picture them in the same room, even when they were in the same room.

  “That’s why we like each other,” Lady said, trying to explain. “We’re friends in spite of ourselves. See?”

  “I guess.”

  “And then, soon enough, you have so much history together. I’ve known them a long time.”

  “Did they know Uncle Ty?”

  Uncle Ty had appeared only once at the house on Charles Street. Business, supposedly.

  “Maybe,�
� she said.

  On one of these evenings of art class, the three friends arrived early enough to set up their three easels in a row.

  Fin waited patiently beside Joan until she noticed him and dug out her roll of Life Savers. “Here. Take the whole roll. Don’t you feed him?” she asked Lady.

  Fin took the striped pack and sat on the floor, pulling the Life Savers out, separating the orange ones.

  Mirna was talking to Lady in a loud whisper. “Do you ever”—she paused. She was a great one for pauses—“regret it?”

  “Regret what?”

  “You know. The operation.”

  “Jesus, Mirna, shut up.”

  “Well, you know…” Pause. “With this”—pause—“situation…”

  At the word “situation,” Joan looked at Fin, then, abruptly, back at her easel.

  Lady said rather loudly, “I can never do hands. They look like paws.” She glanced at Fin and smiled. “Don’t they?” she said.

  “Yup.” Fin pretended to read the book he’d brought with him, The Cricket in Times Square. Lady had given it to him. “You’re like the cricket,” she’d said. He stared down at the page, at a drawing of enormous men and women hurrying past a tiny cricket. He stared down and pretended he was reading. He knew when they didn’t want him to hear. Why do they say things, he wondered, if they don’t want you to hear?

  “This situation, as you put it,” Lady said softly, very softly, to Mirna, “is sitting right here.”

  “You were so young,” Mirna went on, implacable, in a tone that suggested being young was on its way to being an incurable disease.

  “I’m still young,” Lady snapped.

  “You know, Mirna,” Joan said in her pouty voice, “you’re only a year younger than we are. I don’t know why you make such a big deal about it.”

  “But you were practically a teenager…” Mirna said.

  “I was a teenager.”

  “And you dropped out of college.”

  “I attended the school of hard knocks.”

  “And you got knocked up!” Joan said.

  They all started laughing.

  “Ladies,” said the teacher.