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“Wrapped in swaddling clothes?”
“I get the irony, Malone,” she says. “How was your day?”
“Yeah, good.”
Malone likes that she doesn’t press him, that she’s satisfied with what he tells her. A lot of women aren’t, they want him to “share,” they want details he’d rather forget than recount. Claudette gets it—she has her own horrors.
He strokes that soft spot. “You’re tired. You probably want to sleep.”
“No, baby, I want to fuck.”
They finish their drinks and go into her bedroom.
Claudette undresses him, kissing skin as she bares it. She goes to her knees and takes him into her mouth and even in the dark bedroom, with light coming in only from the street, he loves the look of her full red lips on his cock.
She’s not high tonight, it’s just the weed, although it’s very good weed, and he loves that, too. He reaches down and feels her hair, then slides his hand down into the kimono and feels her breast, teases it and feels her moan.
Malone puts his hands on her shoulders to stop her. “I want to be in you.”
She gets up, goes to the bed and lies down. Draws her knees up like an invitation and then issues one. “Come here, then, baby.”
She’s wet and warm.
He slides back and forth across her body, across the full breasts and the dark brown skin and reaches down with a finger to feel that soft spot as outside sirens blare and people shout and he doesn’t care, doesn’t have to care right now, only has to slide in and out of her and hear her say, “I love that, baby, I love that.”
When he feels himself about to come, he grabs her ass—Claudette says she has no ass for a black girl—but he grabs her small tight ass and pulls her close and pushes himself as deep in her as he can go until he feels that little pocket in her and she grabs his shoulder and she bucks up and comes just before he does.
He comes like he always does with her, from the tips of his toes through the top of his head, and maybe that’s the dope but he thinks it’s her, with that low soft voice and warm brown skin, slick and sweaty now, mixing with his, and maybe it’s a minute or maybe it’s an hour when he hears her say, “Oh, baby, I’m tired.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He rolls off her.
She sleepily squeezes his hand and then she’s out.
He lies on his back. Across the street the liquor store owner must have forgotten to turn off his lights, and their reflection blinks red on Claudette’s ceiling.
It’s Christmas in the jungle and for this short time, at least, Malone is at peace.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_a792a2aa-4801-566d-8f53-8beae39e5c62)
Malone sleeps for just an hour, because he wants to be out in Staten Island before the kids get up and start ripping open the presents under the tree.
He doesn’t wake Claudette when he gets up.
He gets dressed, goes into the little galley kitchen, makes himself an instant coffee and then goes to his jacket and takes out the present he got her.
Diamond earrings from Tiffany’s.
Because she’s crazy about that Audrey Hepburn movie.
Malone leaves the box on the coffee table and goes out. He knows she’ll sleep until noon and then make it to her sister’s for Christmas dinner.
“Then I’ll probably hit a meeting at St. Mary’s,” she said.
“They have them on Christmas?” Malone asked.
“Especially on Christmas.”
She’s doing well, she’s been clean for almost six months now. Hard for an addict working in a hospital around all those drugs.
Now he drives down to his pad, on 104th between Broadway and West End.
When he separated from Sheila, a little over a year ago now, Malone decided to be one of those few cops who lives on his beat. He didn’t go all the way up to Harlem, but settled for the outskirts on the Upper West Side. He can take the train to work or even walk if he wants, and he likes the neighborhood around Columbia.
The college kids are annoying in their youthful arrogance and certitude, but there’s something about that he likes, too. Likes going into the coffeehouses, the bars, hearing the conversations. Likes to walk uptown, let the dealers and the addicts know he’s around.
His place is a third-floor walk-up—a small living room, a smaller kitchen, an even smaller bedroom with a bathroom attached. A heavy bag hangs from a chain in the living room. It’s all he needs; he’s not there much anyway. It’s a place to crash, shower, make a cup of coffee in the morning.
Now he goes up, showers and changes clothes. It wouldn’t do to go back to the house in the same clothes because Sheila would sniff it out in a second and ask him if he’s been with “huh.”
Malone doesn’t know why it bugs her so much, or at all—they separated almost three months before he even met Claudette—but it was a serious mistake to have answered Sheila’s question “Are you seeing anyone?” honestly.
“You’re a cop, you should know better,” Russo said when Malone told him about Sheila freaking out. “Never give an honest answer.”
Or an answer at all. Other than “I want a lawyer, I want my delegate.”
But Sheila had freaked. “‘Claudette’? What is she, French?”
“As a matter of fact, she’s black. African American.”
Sheila laughed in his face. It just cracked her up. “Shit, Denny, when you said at Thanksgiving you liked the dark meat, I thought you meant the drumstick.”
“Nice.”
“Don’t get all PC with me,” Sheila said. “With you it’s always ‘moolie’ this and ‘ditzune’ that. Tell me something, do you call her a nigger?”
“No.”
Sheila couldn’t stop laughing. “You tell the sistuh how many brothuhs you tuned up with your nightstick back in the day?”
“I might have left that out.”
She laughed again, but he knew it was coming. She’d had a couple of pops so it was only a matter of time before the hilarity turned to rage and self-pity. And it came. “Tell me, Denny, she fuck you better than I did?”
“Come on, Sheila.”
“No, I want to know. Does she fuck better than me? You know what they say, once you try black, you never go back.”
“Let’s not do this.”
Sheila said, “Because usually you cheat on me with white whores.”
Well, that’s true, Malone thought. “I’m not cheating on you. We’re separated.”
But Sheila was in no mood for legalisms. “It never bothered you when we were married, though, did it, Denny? You and your brother cops tapping everything with a pussy. Hey, do they know? Russo and Big Monty, they know you’re stirring tar?”
He didn’t want to lose his temper but he did. “Shut the fuck up, Sheila.”
“What, are you going to hit me?”
“I’ve never laid a goddamn hand on you,” Malone said. He’s done a lot of bad things in his life, but hitting a woman is not one of them.
“No, that’s right,” she said. “You stopped touching me altogether.”
Problem was, she had a point about that.
Now he shaves carefully, first down and then up against the grain, because he wants to look clean and refreshed.
Good luck with that, he thinks.
Opening the medicine cabinet, he pops a couple of 5 mg Dexes to give him a little boost.
Then he changes into a pair of clean jeans, a white dress shirt and a black wool sports coat to look like a citizen. Even in the summer, he usually wears long sleeves when he goes home because the tats piss off Sheila.
She thinks they were a symbol of his leaving Staten Island, that he was getting all “city hipster.”
“They don’t have tattoos on Staten Island?” he asked her. Hell, there’s a parlor every other corner now and half the guys walking around the neighborhood have ink. About half the women, too, come to think of it.
He likes his tattoo sleeves. For one, he just likes them, for another, they scare the shit out of the mopes because they’re not used to seeing them on cops. When he rolls up his sleeves to go to work on a mope, they know it’s going to be bad.
And it’s hypocritical, because Sheila has a little green shamrock down by her right ankle, as if you couldn’t tell she was Irish just by looking at her, with the red hair, green eyes and freckles. Yeah, it doesn’t take a $200-an-hour shrink to tell me that Claudette is the exact opposite of my soon-to-be ex-wife, Malone thinks as he clips the off-duty gun to his belt.
I get it.
Sheila is everything he grew up with, no surprises, the known. Claudette is a different world, a constant unfolding, the other. It’s not just race, although that’s a big part of it.
Sheila is Staten Island, Claudette is Manhattan.
She is the city to him.
The streets, the sounds, the scents, the sophisticated, the sexy, the exotic.
Their first date, she showed up in this retro 1940s dress with a white Billie Holiday gardenia in her hair and her lips a vivid red and perfume that made him almost dizzy with want.
He took her to Buvette, down in the Village off Bleecker, because he figured with a French first name she might like that, and anyway, he didn’t want to take her anywhere in Manhattan North.
She figured that right out.
“You don’t want to be seen with a ‘sistuh’ on your beat,” she said as they sat down at the table.
“It’s not that,” he said, telling a half-truth. “It’s just that when I’m up there, I’m always on duty. What, you don’t like the Village?”
“I love the Village,” Claudette said. “I’d live down here if it weren’t so far from work.”
She didn’t go to bed with him that date or the next or the next, but when she did, it was a revelation and he fell in love like he didn’t think was possible. Actually, he was already in love, because she challenged him. With Sheila it was either a resentful acceptance of whatever he did or an all-out, red-haired Irish brawl. Claudette, she pushed him on his assumptions, made him see things in a new way. Malone was never much of a reader, but she got him to read, even some poetry, a little bit of which, like Langston Hughes, he even liked. Some Saturday mornings they’d sleep in late and then go get coffee and sometimes prowl bookstores, something else he never thought he’d do, and she’d show him art books, tell him about the vacation to Paris she took all by herself and how she’d like to go back.
Shit, Sheila won’t come to the city by herself.
But it isn’t just the contrast to Sheila that makes Malone love Claudette.
It’s her intelligence, her sense of humor, her warmth.
He’s never met a kinder person.
It’s a problem.
She’s too kind for the work she does—she hurts for her patients, bleeds inside from the things she sees—and it breaks her, makes her reach for the needle.
It’s good she’s hitting the meetings.
Dressed, Malone grabs the wrapped presents he bought for the kids. Well, he bought all the presents for the kids, but Santa gets the cred for the ones under the tree. These are Malone’s gifts to them—the new PlayStation 4 for John and a Barbie set for Caitlin.
Those were easy; finding a present for Sheila was a bitch.
He wanted to get her something nice, but nothing romantic or remotely sexy. He finally asked Tenelli for advice and she suggested a nice scarf. “Nothing cheap, from a street vendor like you assholes usually do last minute. Take a little time, go to Macy’s or Bloomie’s. What’s her coloration?”
“What?”
“What does she look like, dummy?” Tenelli asks. “Is she dark, pale? What color is her hair?”
“Pale. Red.”
“Go with gray. It’s safe.”
So he went down to Macy’s, fought the crowd, and found a nice gray wool scarf that set him back a hundred. He hopes it sends the right message—I’m not in love with you anymore, but I’ll always take care of you.
She should know it already, he thinks.
He’s never late with the child support, he pays for the kids’ clothes, John’s hockey team, Caitlin’s dance classes, and the family is still covered on his PBA health insurance, which is very good and includes dental.
And Malone always leaves an envelope for Sheila because he doesn’t want her working and he doesn’t want her to have a what-do-you-call-it, a “diminution” of her lifestyle. So he does the right thing and leaves a fat envelope, and she’s grateful and hip enough never to ask where the money comes from.
Her dad was a cop, too.
“No, it’s good you do the right thing,” Russo said one time when they were talking about it.
“What else am I going to do?” Malone asked.
