When the Thrill Is Gone

10

At the back of the kitchen there’s a smallish walk-in pantry lined with shelves on every wall — from floor to ceiling. It’s there that Katrina keeps her spices, condiments, and the more arcane of her cooking devices. I put a three-legged mahogany stool back there so I could get some peace in my own house now that Gordo was dying in the den.

Hunkered down on that little boxer’s seat, I tried to regain my balance.

Watching Gordo fade was a hard thing for me. He was just ten days off the last dose of the medicinal poison the doctors used on him.

Gordo was a fighter, and I was, too. Watching him wilt under the cancer was like seeing your champion being worn down to a bloody pulp one fight after his heyday.

If stomach cancer was a man I’d’ve slit his throat, tossed him in the Hudson, and then gone out for a rare steak and red, red wine.

A tapping came at the cupboard door.

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Daddy,” Katrina’s blood-daughter said.

“Come on in, baby.”

The door opened, letting in the light and clatter from Katrina’s kitchen.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked, flipping the light switch.

Michelle’s skin was dark olive and her eyes were a definite almond shape. It wasn’t the gentle sloping of Chrystal and her pretender but the real Asian variety. Michelle was another man’s daughter, a diamond dealer from Jakarta whom Katrina once thought she might marry — after ditching me. But instead he was killed in an earthquake and Shelly was presented as mine.

The slender child plopped down on my lap, put her arms around my nearly bald head, and kissed me just above the left ear.

“How are you, Daddy?”

“Just about normal,” I said. “Head below the waterline, but at least that’s better than six feet underground.”

She squeezed my head tighter.

“You sad about Uncle Gordo?”

“I ever tell you that he used to let me sleep on a cot at the back of the gym when I’d be on the run from my foster homes?”

“Yeah, but you could tell me again.”

“Dinner,” Katrina called.

I stood up, cradling Shelly in my arms. She loved to be held like a child and I loved her even though we had nothing in common, from the blood in our veins to our outlooks on life.

I took my place at the hickory dining room table. It was large enough to seat ten but lately only four of us sat down for a meal — Shelly and Twill, Katrina and me. Dimitri had stopped eating with the family since his girlfriend, Tatyana Baranovich, had gone off to Russia with her new beau, Vassily Roman. While Katrina and Shelly brought out the covered platters Gordo showed up at the door, leaning on a bamboo walker and assisted by Elsa. Her eyes were on him like a proud mother watching her youngest taking his first steps. Gordo’s head was glistening from the exertion but he pushed right through the strain and made it to a chair at the far end of the table.

“Hail, Lazarus!” I proclaimed.

He raised a hand to bless me and I smiled.

Elsa sat on Gordo’s right and Shelly took the left-hand side.

“Twill!” Katrina called. “Dimitri!”

“Dimitri?” I said to my wife.

“He’s part of this family, too.”

“But...”

Before I could say more the brothers rumbled in. Squat Dimitri was dark, my color brown, while Twill was lean and charcoal with not even a hint of his mother’s Nordic blood in his skin.

Broad, earthbound Dimitri sat across the table from me, while Twill sat at my side.

“What’s up, Pops?” Twill asked. He was no blood relation, like his sister, but he had been my favorite since the first day I laid eyes on him.

“Up?” I said. “Man, I’m flat on my back and the ref started the count at nine.”

Gordo heard the joke and grinned, nodding like one of those bobble-headed dolls people used to put in the back windows of their cars.

Katrina and Shelly took the lids off the platters, revealing a feast of fried pork chops, spinach and collards chopped and sautéed in butter, potatoes cooked with bacon, onions, and vinegar, and homemade applesauce. Katrina was a magician in the kitchen.

“Hey, boy,” I said to my one true son.

“Dad,” he said.

Since I had tried to help his girlfriend, Dimitri felt conflicted about me. Where once he expressed only disdain he now conversed with tepid deference. This was a definite improvement in our relationship, but we had a long way to go.

“How’s school?” I asked him.

“I haven’t been goin’ lately.”

“What you been doin’, then?”

“Nuthin’.”

He looked down at the plate his mother had put before him. That would be all he’d say that night. His pain tore at me, but what advice could I give? My heart had been broken the same way and I was just as lost.

I turned my attention to Twilliam. He was saying something to his sister and she was holding Gordo’s thumb.

“What about you?” I asked Twill.

“Same,” he almost sang.

“What kinda trouble you gettin’ into?”

“Not me, Pops. Now I’m outta school I put in thirty hours a week at the D’Agostino’s. Got to make some money so I can move out when you let up on me.”

“You’re only seventeen.”

“Alexander was leadin’ a legion at that age.”

“What you know about Greek history?”

“Whatever Mardi Bitterman says. She reads her dry books and tells me the story.”

“Is she your girlfriend now?” Katrina asked.

“She’s my friend, but I can’t say from firsthand if she’s a girl or not.”

“Twill,” Katrina protested. “That’s rude.”

The conversation went on like that, Dimitri brooding while Twill danced around any question asked of him. Gordo was served a special soup that Katrina made, and he fought bravely against the gravity of fate as Shelly regaled him about a trip she planned to take to Senegal. Elsa anticipated Gordo’s every need. Her care for him somehow soothed me.

We ate and after a while Katrina broke out a couple of bottles of decent Spanish red. The liquor seemed to revitalize Gordo. He started telling us stories about the old days and the boxers he saw hitchhiking from one bout in Cincinnati to another the next day in Cleveland.

“Back in those days,” he declared, “a man was fightin’ from sunup to sunup. The only way he knew he was in a ring was he got a break when the bell sounded.”

That night Katrina gave me a sloppy kiss before drifting into sleep. It didn’t mean anything. She was having an affair with Dimitri’s school chum Bertrand Arnold. Maybe she thought I didn’t know. I didn’t begrudge her the passion. She certainly wasn’t getting it from me, and since she was sated physically she wasn’t so anxious. She could even fall asleep without the TV crooning in the background.

I was wide awake with all my responsibilities and failures floating aimlessly through my mind. I turned on the TV and caught the beginning of The Thin Man with Powell and Loy. The dry wit between the two made me restless. Before the final scene I climbed out of bed and went back to the dining room.

Elsa had gone home at ten and the large apartment was quiet. It was two in the morning but I entered the number on my cell phone anyway.

She answered on the first ring.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Aura.”

There was a moment of appreciative silence before she said, “Leonid, what’s wrong?”

“I miss you.”

“And I you.”

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Reading,” she said. “Thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

She didn’t answer the question.

“Can I meet you tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe for breakfast?”

“Of course.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I’ll see you then,” she answered. “I really should be getting to sleep.”

I went back to bed, but sleep had settled in another room somewhere, down the hall with the children and the dying.