Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online Page B

clink. The waiters, who wore blue bow ties and tight little jackets, treated Merle like Cleopatra. They brought flowers to the table. They lit a long red candle. They served us wine, even though we were too young to drink in public. They wouldn’t let us order from the menu.
    â€œDarlings, you’ll eat what Mr. Frank eats.”
    We had a Tuscan appetizer—crushed tomatoes and olives on flat bread. We had a salad of tiny green and yellow stalks. We had linguine cooked in the chef’s own white wine sauce. We had chicken breasts baked with onions, walnuts, and diced ham . . .
    Merle may have been myopic, but she wasn’t blind. The restaurant was a haven for top-tier gangsters and their Madonnas, or mistress-wives. Some of these Madonnas were even younger than Merle. She never asked me who “Mr. Frank” was. But her lavender eyes were like needles after her second sip of wine. I was heartsick. There wasn’t any way to win. I couldn’t woo her with literature. I’d taken her out of her own little cave and had revealed nothing but a garish world of gunmen.
    We rode back to West End Avenue in utter silence. She wouldn’t even let me hold her hand. And she didn’t invite me upstairs. I’d disappointed her more than I could ever have imagined. And she was quite cruel.
    â€œJerome, I think you’d better stick to your armored car. If you cruise long enough, you might find some poor Ophelia . . . and maybe the two of you can run off together and drown. Goodnight, my sweet, sweet prince.”

    T here were no more study dates. Merle never glanced at me once in the halls of Music and Art. Her lavender eyes went right through my skin and bones. Still, I was probably the richest kid at M&A. Rosenzweig cheated me, but he couldn’t afford to cheat me too much. The catalogues were his bread and butter, and I was his most popular item.
    But I felt cheated out of my childhood. I slaved like a dog after school. I wore white bucks, but the time I spent in the showroom kept me from my studies and pulled me far, far from New Haven and Harvard Yard.
    I heard through the grapevine at M&A that Merle Messenger had fallen in love with a Harvard frosh. She arrived at school in a crimson sweatshirt, wearing a Harvard pin. She’d snub her friends, stare at the ceiling, yawn while Dr. McCloud talked of Thomas Hardy and Jude the Obscure , and then she didn’t come to school at all.
    The West Siders swore she had eloped with that crimson boy and was living in a cabin on Mount Rainier. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I couldn’t borrow Rosenzweig’s limo and ride to Seattle. And the farther away I was from Merle, the more I missed our nights together and my breakfasts with the Messengers.
    And then, six months after Merle had disappeared, I saw Mrs. Messenger at Music and Art. That should have been enough of a hint that Merle wasn’t on Mount Rainier.
    â€œMr. Salinger,” she said with a teasing smile, “Merle would like to see you.”
    I started to shiver in my pants. “I don’t get it. Hasn’t she gone away?”
    â€œShe never left Manhattan. She’s been hospitalized, but now she’s back home. She was suicidal—for a couple of weeks.”
    At first I thought the crimson boy had broken her heart, but there was no crimson boy, according to Mrs. M. It was all part of Merle’s “liquid imagination.”
    I didn’t know what to bring—candy or flowers? But I brought nothing at all. I didn’t want Merle to feel I was visiting a mental patient.
    Her face was as white as Count Dracula’s. All her fleshiness had disappeared in six months. But her lavender eyes still bled with the fierceness of the Milky Way. She had gates on her windows now. And the shadows of the buildings across the street overwhelmed her room. We could have been in some netherworld.
    â€œHow is tricks?” I asked in Archy’s