A Piece of the Action

Five

January 5

Stanley Moodrow sat in the kitchen of his Avenue B apartment, thumbing his way through a copy of the Daily News while he waited for the coffee to boil. Moodrow had been reading the Daily News at the kitchen table for a long time. He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d begun to take an interest in the news of the day, but he could clearly recall his father passing him the comic section at a time when he’d been too young to do more than look at the pictures. And he could remember his mother picking up the paper, too. After his father went off to work. That’s when she got her breakfast.

The way Moodrow saw it, his family had gone through a lot of ups and downs when he was a kid, but there’d always been two fixed pillars in their lives. Heirlooms to be handed down from generation to generation. One was the Daily News and the other was a baseball team called the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was reading the Daily News, but the Dodgers were out of his life. Permanently and forever.

What did the sportswriters call Walter O’Malley? The most hated man in New York? And it was true-even Yankee fans hated O’Malley. For Dodger fans, the feeling was almost pathological. Moodrow could easily imagine putting a bullet into Walter O’Malley’s fat carcass. All those years waiting for a World Series? His father hadn’t lived to see it. His mother, either.

Moodrow got up to check the glass bulb on top of the percolator. The bubbling liquid wasn’t really coffee yet, but it wasn’t all that far away. He left it to boil and took a box of Cheerios out of the cupboard. Moodrow wasn’t crazy about cereal, but the soreness in his ribs had eased considerably and he didn’t want to upset the applecart by messing with pots and pans. He was scheduled to report for assignment in two days and he was determined to do nothing more than eat, read the papers and watch television in the meantime.

The doorbell rang before he could sit down. “Be there in a minute, Greta,” he called, reaching for his robe. It was a little early for Greta Bloom, his mother’s oldest old friend, to come up from the second floor, which she did whenever Moodrow was sick or hurt.

“I just wanna see you’re okay. What’s the harm?”

That was her answer whenever he tried to discourage her. Greta Bloom was a professional philanthropist. An impoverished philanthropist. Living on social security, the only thing she had to give was time. Greta went out to the shul on Clinton Street every day. She belonged to a dozen charitable “societies” and had more energy than Stanley Moodrow on fight night.

“Good morning, Stanley. I know it’s early, but I wanted I should catch you before you went to work.” Greta Bloom, in a worn yellow housedress, was barely five feet tall. She peered up at Moodrow through pale gray eyes. Her face was small and round with sharp, narrow features that complemented her nervous energy. Even the wrinkle-lines on her forehead danced in time to her enthusiasm.

“I’m not going to work today, Greta, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Oy vey, Stanley. You’ve been fighting again. I thought you gave that up. I thought you were a policeman.”

“Sometimes a policeman has to fight, too. You want coffee?”

“I can’t stay. The sisterhood meets at ten o’clock and I didn’t even get into the shower yet. I was wondering could you do me a favor? Not for me, for a neighbor. Rosaura Pastoral who lives in 2D. You know her?”

“Maybe if I saw her, I …”

“It doesn’t matter. So many people moving in, moving out … it’s impossible to keep count.”

“Unless you hang around the mailboxes and gossip all morning.”

“Please, Stanley, I don’t have time for your wiseguy remarks. I told you I’m in a hurry. Anyway, Rosaura has a boarder-had a boarder, I should say-named Luis Melenguez who got killed on Pitt Street the day after Christmas. With a gun, Stanley. Somebody shot him. It’s been a week and nobody knows nothing. Rosaura went down to the precinct and the detectives wouldn’t even talk about it. Told her to go home and mind her own business. Can you imagine?”

Moodrow could imagine. Cops know they have to take abuse from the victim’s family. It’s expected and you deal with it. But the landlady?

“You want me to teach them some manners?” he asked without so much as cracking a smile. “Slap ’em around a little bit?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. And it’s not me. It’s not what I want. It’s for your neighbor, for Rosaura Pastoral. She’s a very nice woman.”

“What’s for Rosaura Pastoral. What do you want me to do?”

“Find out what’s going on. You told me last time you were gonna be a big-shot detective. That’s what I told Rosaura when I saw her last night. ‘Stanley’s gonna be a big-shot detective. He’ll find out what’s going on.’ ”

Moodrow knew better than to refuse Greta Bloom. A compromise was the most he could hope for. “I’ll ask around, Greta. Find out who’s handling the case and where it’s going. But don’t expect me to jump in and solve the crime. This isn’t Gunsmoke and I’m not Matt Dillon.”

“Stanley, don’t have a heart attack. Nobody expects miracles. If you tell Rosaura that everything’s kosher, I’m sure she’ll be satisfied. Now, I gotta run, bubbe. And put some ice on your face. You look like Frankenstein.”

He closed the door behind her, then headed back for the kitchen. The doorbell rang again before he got to his Cheerios. “What did you …” he asked as he swung the door open.

The sight of Kathleen Cohan in her new fox coat froze him in mid-sentence. It was funny how you could spend half the summer in a bathing suit, but you felt almost obscene in a striped bathrobe with your hairy calves sticking out.

“Jeeeeeesussss Christ.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name, Stanley. I’m hoping that Jesus isn’t watching me, anyway.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You invited me, remember? Anyway, I’ve come to observe your domestic habits.” She pranced into the room and took off her coat. “I think it’s important to really know a person before marriage. Especially if you’re a Catholic and you have to stay married forever.”

“Yeah? Great. Only don’t put that coat down or the roaches’ll kidnap it. My domestic habits ain’t that good.”

“Ugh. You have cockroaches? I hate them.”

“Everybody in the city has roaches.” He hung her coat in the hall closet.

“I live in the city and I don’t have cockroaches.” She snuck up behind him, put her arms around his waist and squeezed gently.

“Bayside, where you live, ain’t the city.” He paused for a second. “And that hug didn’t hurt. I must be getting better.”

“If Bayside isn’t in the city, why do I pay city taxes?”

He turned and kissed her. “For kids who grew up in this neighborhood, Bayside is Never-Never Land. Peter Pan lives in Bayside.”

“In that case,” she giggled, “you can call me Tinkerbell.”

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. She responded eagerly, wrapping her arms as far around his back as they’d go. Moodrow, despite the fire pulling at his crotch, didn’t quite know what to make of her sudden appearance. He’d been trying to get into bed with her for the better part of a year, but he’d always respected her whispered refusals. That was the way good girls were supposed to act. At least according to the prevailing mythology. Was it possible that an official engagement changed the rules? He let his fingers slide down her spine, expecting to find that latex chastity belt under her skirt, but what he felt was the firm globes of her buttocks.

“Kathleen …”

“I’m supposed to be with Joanna. At the movies.” Joanna Buchanan was Kathleen’s best friend.

“What?” Preoccupied as he was, Moodrow barely understood the words.

“Daddy thinks I’m with Joanna. I actually was with her. We had breakfast after church, but then I came to see you. Joanna went to the movies. With her boyfriend.”

Moodrow didn’t know what to say next, but he was smart enough to realize that she was running the show. And smart enough to let her, too.

“I thought I’d probably find you in bed,” she declared. “I mean, if you’re in too much pain to come out and see me, you should at least be flat on your back.”

“Right now, you could definitely knock me over with a feather,” Moodrow admitted. He waited for her to say something else, but she just stood there, grinning. Finally he asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee.

“Great.”

“Sit on the couch and relax. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He was pouring the coffee when he figured it out. She’d come here to go to bed with him. Deliberately and consciously. Yet he still had to seduce her. The realization didn’t come easily. The girls he’d known before he met Kathleen had mostly grown up on the Lower East Side. Some of them would do it and some wouldn’t, but whichever way it went, they didn’t need to play out this elaborate charade. Sex was a lot different in Bayside. In fact, as far as Stanley Moodrow was concerned, sexual politics out in the suburbs were more complicated than the politics at the U.N.

Moodrow congratulated himself on his insight (“pretty deep for a twenty-five-year-old kid,” was what he told himself) and walked back into the living room prepared to do what he had to do. The only problem was that Kathleen wasn’t there. He glanced over at the front door, half expecting to find it open, but it was closed and locked.

“Stanley?”

There were only two other rooms in the apartment and they were both bedrooms, so that was where she had to be. In a bedroom. If his career as a detective went anything like this, he’d be back to walking a beat in a month.

The bedroom was dark when he came in, but he could see well enough to know that she was in his bed. And that her clothing was draped over the back of a chair. He reached out to put the cup on the bureau and missed by a foot. The cup landed on the wood floor and splattered hot coffee over his right foot. He didn’t notice it any more then he’d noticed the punch that’d broken his nose.

“I love you, Stanley,” she whispered. “And I don’t want to wait anymore. Not another minute. Even if you do look like Frankenstein come back from the dead.”

Moodrow touched a finger to the tape covering his nose. He thought about taking it off, then realized that what he was going to have to take off was his bathrobe. With Kathleen watching.

“I thought the girl was supposed to do the striptease,” he said.

Kathleen giggled. “Take it off. Take it off.”

“All right, I will.”

Moodrow sat on the edge of the bed and slowly drew the covers back. Kathleen, surprised, started to cover her breasts with her hands, then fell back on the pillows. Her breath was shallow, her eyes half-closed. Moodrow laid the fingers of his right hand on her throat, then slid them gently down her throat, over her breasts and along her smooth, flat belly. When his fingers crossed the dark triangle of hair and dropped into the moist flesh below, she moaned softly and her legs came apart.

“Be gentle, Stanley,” she whispered. “Don’t hurt me.”

But he knew he was going to hurt her. Of all the dirty tricks nature had laid on human beings, this was the dirtiest. There was no painless way, short of surgery, for a woman to lose her virginity. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be pleasure, too. Moodrow had been thinking about it for a long time and he’d already decided what he was going to do. If she let him. If she didn’t withdraw from what she had to see as a perversion.

He let his lips and tongue follow the line his finger had traced, though he took much longer, playing with her nipples and her belly and the soft hollow spot on the inside of her thigh. Her milky white skin reddened until it seemed like her whole body was blushing, but the deep, almost guttural sound coming from her throat indicated something other than embarrassment. At some point, she began to call his name. Repeating it until the single word became lost in a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scream.

Moodrow sat up on the bed and yanked off his bathrobe and his underwear. Kathleen, he knew, was as ready as a virgin, male or female, could be. Her eyes were joyous (if somewhat glazed) and her body was completely open to him. It was the perfect moment to enfold her in his arms, to gently lift her legs …

And that’s exactly what he would have done. If he hadn’t put the Trojan on backwards. If he hadn’t ripped it and had to fumble in the nightstand for another one. By the time he managed to open the foil and get it on, the glaze in Kathleen’s eyes had disappeared.

“I’ve never seen one of those before,” she said.

“That makes two things you’ve never seen before.”

She ignored the humor, reaching out to take his erection in her hand. He would have expected her to be reluctant, but she seemed more curious than naive. She drew him into her, opening for him, accepting his thrusts until he began to call her name, until he was lost in his own fire.

By the time Moodrow finally rolled over to one side of the narrow bed, they were both covered with sweat. He knew that he should take her in his arms, that she needed to be reassured, but somewhere along the line he must have smacked his nose, because it hurt like hell.

“Are you all right, Stanley?”

“My nose,” he answered. “I think I broke my nose again.”

He opened his eyes to find her propped up on one arm. Her breasts were inches from his face. Suddenly, the realization that he would marry this woman, that he’d spend his life with her, rushed over him. What he felt was grateful.

“I love you, Kathleen,” he said, ignoring his nose.

“I love you too, Stanley.” She leaned down to kiss him gently on the lips. “We’re going to have a good life together. A great life.”