Charlie Opera

Chapter 2

Cecilia Bartoli nailed Una voce poca fa as Charlie Pellecchia swayed back and forth. He watched from his hotel room as crowds of people waited for the Pirate Show in front of the Treasure Island Hotel-Casino across Las Vegas Boulevard. Charlie adjusted the volume on his headphones as the Rossini aria boomed into his ears. He felt the pure high of the violins as he closed his eyes.

A thick plastic hairbrush thrown from across the room smacked Charlie in the middle of his back. The sting of the hairbrush startled him. He dropped the portable CD player from his hands. The headphones remained attached to the unit and were pulled off his head.

Charlie turned to his wife as he reached behind him to rub at the red mark the hairbrush had left on his back.

“What the fuck?”

“I’ve been calling to you for five minutes!” Lisa Pellecchia yelled. “From the shower. In the bathroom. Five minutes!”

“I was listening to something,” Charlie said. He was still trying to reach the painful spot on his back. “That hurt, damn it.”

Lisa’s face tightened. She looked about to burst with more rage. She shook her head instead and returned to the bathroom.

Charlie picked the CD player and headphones off the floor. He set them down on the small round table alongside the carton of cigarettes he had brought from New York. He turned to one side to look at his back in the mirror. He saw a red welt.

“Shit,” he said.

He tried to reach the red mark on his back one more time. In the process, he noticed the roll of flab that had formed around his waist. He stood up straight again, turned to one side, and looked at his profile in the mirror.

He had gained weight. He guessed his weight was 230 pounds, maybe 240. At 5-foot-10, he figured he was at least 30 pounds overweight.

He struck a muscle pose. He was still well defined for his age. He had maintained a barrel chest and big arms. He flexed both his biceps in the mirror and quickly dropped his arms when he heard his wife in the bathroom. When he thought he was safe again, he looked into the mirror and whispered, “Figaro, Figaro… Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Fi-ga-ro.”

It was the second time since they’d come to Las Vegas that his wife had thrown something at Charlie. Earlier in the morning Lisa threw a pillow at him for whistling the overture to Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. She was watching the Today Show on NBC, after her first cup of coffee. Charlie had just come back from a long walk and was listening to the Mozart opera through his headphones.

Lisa hated opera.

Charlie was starting to think maybe his wife hated him, too.

In the afternoon, he took his second long walk of the day. He walked north along Las Vegas Boulevard and noticed a busy construction site a few blocks off the Strip. He walked farther north passed the Desert Inn, the Riviera, and the Sahara. He finally stopped walking when he reached the Stratosphere wondered how Las Vegas looked from the top of the Stratosphere.

Charlie had been a window cleaner for fifteen years in New York City before starting his own business in the same industry. He worked house rigs on fifty-story buildings. He had worked portable rigs on ten- and twelve-story buildings. He also had worked belts and ladders and an occasional boatswain chair. Heights were never a concern to him. He had always been fascinated with tall buildings.

He had recently sold the window cleaning business he started more than ten years ago. Charlie was retired now, but he wasn’t sure what he would do with himself.

He wondered how the glass at the top of the Stratosphere was cleaned when he looked up at it from the street. In the lobby he wondered how many men it took to clean the transom glass.

On his way back to his hotel he stopped at the Mirage, where he bought a stuffed animal, a small white tiger, for his wife. He was feeling guilty about ignoring her earlier in the morning. Charlie hadn’t turned up the volume on the opera intentionally, but he could understand why his wife thought he had. Lately they weren’t getting along. Opera was one of many distractions Charlie used to escape their problems. He thought Lisa might be jealous of his distractions.

He hoped his wife would like the tiger. She had always liked receiving a surprise bouquet of flowers in the past. As he crossed Las Vegas Boulevard, a strange thought suddenly entered his mind.

Charlie wondered if his wife was having an affair.

“I almost killed him before,” Lisa Pellecchia told her lover.

She cradled the telephone against her right shoulder as she lowered the volume on the television. She turned on the bed so she could hear the door if it opened.

“Stay calm,” John Denton said on the other end of the line. “You know what you have to do. It’ll be over soon enough.”

Lisa shook her head as she leaned her back against the headboard.

“I feel terrible,” she said. “I can’t believe I hit him like that. I threw something else at him earlier. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

“It will be all right. Just stay calm.”

“I wish you were here.”

“Me, too.”

Lisa felt herself tearing. “I better hang up. He should be back any minute.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

Lisa kissed Denton through the telephone. “Good night,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

When she hung up, Lisa took several deep breaths. It was a method of controlling her emotions she had learned the year before in therapy. She tried to focus on what she needed to do as she controlled her breathing.

Her nerves had been on edge all day. She was anxious to end her marriage. She needed to confess the extramarital relationship she was having with the same man for the second time in two years.

As her breathing finally returned to normal, Lisa reached for a tissue. The door opened as she held the tissue up to her nose. When she looked up, Charlie was standing at the foot of the bed with a stuffed animal. It was a white tiger. Lisa burst out crying.

“The last time you told me,” Charlie said. “That was fair. I think you should tell me now if there is something going on.”

They were sitting alongside each other in the sports book area. Betting at the sports book had already ended for the day a few hours earlier. Charlie had refused to talk in their room. He had told his wife that he felt caged in upstairs. He looked arund the expanse of the betting parlor as he waited for her response.

“There’s nothing going on,” Lisa lied. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Charlie sipped at his third gin and tonic. They had been sitting there for half an hour. Lisa had started with white wine. Now she was drinking Diet Coke.

“Well, then, what is it?” he asked. “Do you just hate me? Do you want to kill me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What gives with the brush this afternoon? You damn near took my head off, Lisa.”

“I apologized for that.”

“Jeez, well then, I guess I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

“You know what I mean. I was wrong. I’m sorry. There, I said it again.”

“What the hell brought it on? And what about the dam bursting when I walked in the room? I bought you a present, for Christ sakes.”

Lisa turned away from him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been edgy. I think we have problems we can’t solve right now.” She looked around herself. “Not here, anyway. Not in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, well, what the hell, then. Next time use a tire iron. We’ll solve our problems in an emergency room.”

“I’m through saying I’m sorry, Charlie.”

“Right. Of course you are.”

He was frustrated. It was obvious Lisa was holding something back. He knew he was drunk, but he wanted her to tell him the truth. He finished his third gin and tonic. He set the glass on a ledge alongside his chair and craned his neck to look for a waitress.

“I thought Las Vegas would be good for us,” he said.

“So you could walk,” Lisa said, with a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

Charlie ignored her.

“Well?” she said.

“I thought we’d have things to occupy us,” he said. “I like to walk. You used to like to walk. Now you like to shop. There’s plenty of both to go around. I thought we wouldn’t be on top of each other here. I made a mistake.”

Lisa huffed.

He thought about the affair she had been involved in two years earlier. She had met another lawyer on the West Coast during a corporate case they were involved in together. They met secretly for more than three months before she finally confessed to Charlie.

“Have you talked to John lately?” he asked.

“Let’s not go there, okay?”

He downed his drink. “I guess that’s an answer.”

“You’re drunk,” Lisa said. “I won’t talk to you while you’re drinking.”

“Then I’ll make it easier for you,” Charlie said. He spotted a waitress near a row of slot machines to his right. He called to her.

“I’m not going to watch this all night,” Lisa said. “You getting drunk.” She stood up from her chair.

Charlie looked his wife up and down. She was still a beautiful woman. She had recently turned forty years old, but there was no way of guessing her age. At 5-foot-4, 108 pounds, she was both lean and muscular. A month ago she had changed her hair color from auburn back to her original color, brunette. She was wearing her hair short again, instead of the long cut Charlie preferred. In the tight black slacks she was wearing, Charlie saw Lisa for the knockout his wife truly was.

Of course she is having an affairhe was thinking.

“Waitress!” he yelled.

A chubby woman in a much too tight waitress outfit stopped to write his order.

“I think you’ve had enough,” Lisa said.

Charlie lit a cigarette. “I think maybe we both have,” he told his wife.