Nicholas the Naked Sicilian, and Other Stories

NUDE WOMEN WITH SILLY SMILES

Jerry Swan, the neatest man in the world, was sitting down at Angela’s reading the funnies and waiting for his burger to arrive when the restaurant blew up. For the next two weeks he lay awake nights on his mechanical hospital bed. When he was finally released, he took a taxicab home and went straight to bed. The following morning he was back at work.

Jerry was a doorman on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Everybody said that it was just like him to return to work on a Friday, but Jerry had his reasons. He knew that Richard Gray, from apartment 16 A, was back in town for a couple of days. He had made it a point to mark it down in his calendar book. Gray, the famous freelance photographer, and Jerry were friends.

The friendship began years ago on a very cold winter day. Jerry had rescued Gray’s cameras after two thieves had knocked him down in the street and snatched them from his shoulder. Jerry chased the thieves two long city blocks. When he finally caught up with them, a terrible fight ensued. Jerry put one of the thieves in Bellevue Hospital; the other one barely got away. He was bruised and bleeding, his uniform torn when he staggered back clutching Gray’s cameras to his chest. Gray was very impressed.

Richard Gray was a world traveler, one of those men who had only known success. He had no vices to speak of, he drank in moderation, never smoked, and he generally took good care of himself. The one weakness that stood out, however, was his passion for chatter. Gray loved to talk, he was a man who could talk another human being to his or her death. The chemistry between these two was perfect.

Gray needed somebody to listen to him and Jerry was a born listener—not that he really listened or even understood for that matter, he just had this unique ability to keep his mouth shut while other people got obnoxiously caught up with themselves. Gray could and would go on all night about the places he had been, the women he had seduced, and so on, all the while believing in his own mind that he was only speaking to a neatly dressed statue, but what Gray couldn’t have realized in a million years was that Jerry 1 couldn’t have cared less. All that Jerry wanted was to meet the woman in the photograph, the photograph of the ‘Nude Woman With the Silly Smile.’ Jerry wanted to touch her, but it wasn’t lust. Jerry had no sexual desire for her at all. The truth of the matter was he simply didn’t believe, not for one minute, that she was real.

Time and time again Gray insisted that the woman in the photograph was a personal friend of his and that he would be more than happy to introduce her to Jerry whenever their schedules permitted. It had been two years, and it still hadn’t happened.

Jerry had his reasons for not believing a word Gray said on the subject. He had been a doorman for eighteen years, and in all those years he had seen thousands of people pass him by. Thousands of faces with every conceivable expression imaginable and it seemed to him that every expression on every face fit the moment. He watched their faces tighten in the winter and drop back down again in the spring. Every face he saw had a history that spoke for itself.

Jerry knew if one was observant enough he could clearly see that silent eyes spoke, that tight or else opened lips explained volumes, that trembling hands always told the truth, and that bowed heads never lied, but the woman in the photograph, she couldn’t have been true. She had to be a lie, some clever deception put to print somehow.

Jerry knew he was different. He knew he was a little slow on account of his childhood accident. Sometimes he would get confused, and on occasion he would lose his sense of direction for a while, but he was still positive that he was right. Whenever he found himself in Gray’s apartment he would look at the glossy on the wall, a shot that Gray was extremely fond of, and he would shake his head in confused disbelief.

This went on for years right up until the time that Gray passed away and his sister and her husband came to clear out the apartment. One of the last items they came down with was the photograph of the ‘Nude Woman With the Silly Smile.’ Jerry was standing on the sidewalk. He was wearing his white gloves. The sister’s husband thoughtlessly handed it to him. Jerry held it tightly in his hands and placed it very carefully into the trunk. He took one last look at it. Then he closed the trunk shut and followed the car

with his eyes as they slowly drove away. Just then another face walked by.

THE CITY OF NEW BEGINNINGS

Nobody spoke in long sentences anymore in the ‘City of New Beginnings.’ They were all too busy pressing keys and gathering up information. It had been five years since I walked out of the Times Building in New York City for good, five blankish years since I had held a decent job. Then one evening, out of the blue, I got a phone call from an old friend of mine who offered me a job working under him on a new promising national news magazine. He informed me that he had already hand-picked his staff and that he wanted to put me in charge of the research department. I accepted his offer without hesitation. When I strolled into his office the next day he almost fell out of his chair, and he probably would have if he wasn’t holding on to the handles so tight.

Yes sir, there I was with a big grin on my face, forty-five pounds overweight, give or take a few pounds. My complexion was as white as the chalk marks on an old school nun’s costume. My eyes were dull, filmy dull and bloodshot. I had become, and Jimmy saw it the moment he laid eyes on me, the unfortunate victim of my own degenerating lifestyle. For years I had been drinking, eating, and smoking in excess. I had lost my social instincts. I had become a rerun junkie. I hadn’t held a good novel or a decent-looking woman in my arms in what seemed like ages. In short, I was a mess. Jimmy was blinking his eyes at me like crazy; he looked like someone who had been left in the dark for too long. It was quite a reunion.

I took a seat and waited for him to recover. Finally he cleared his throat and filled me in on the operation. The millennium was only a few weeks away, and like every other major news publication in town we too were doing a condensed review of the century. A piece of cake, I thought, and I told him as much, but Jimmy went on and on about it anyway, and I tried to look attentive. He hadn’t changed a bit over the years; he was still as enthusiastic as ever.

At first I found the job tedious and suffered through some wicked headaches. For the first couple of weeks I went on a dangerous aspirin binge, but once I got relaxed the headaches took 5

off. During that period of my life it seemed I was always suffering with a bad cold, and I was forced to carry at least two handkerchiefs around with me. In those days I walked around with a ruby-red nose, which by that time had become too small for my face. My lips were always chapped and bled occasionally. Beside the colds I also had a lousy stomach to deal with, which rebelled the only way it knew how. A stomach that sometimes expressed itself without warning in public. My co-workers, I don’t like to use the word subordinates, kept their distance whenever possible, and I didn’t blame them a bit.

Sitting there alone at my cluttered desk under that row of fluorescent lights I would often get light-headed. It was hard to believe that just a few years earlier I was thought of as a handsome, bright, personable fellow.

At lunch time, instead of waiting for the elevator, I would hurry down the five flights of stairs to save a few precious minutes. There was a good Irish bar right across the street that served up inexpensive hot dishes. After I had finished my lunch, I always stopped at their long bar for a shot of Jack Daniels and a cold beer chaser. Then I would step outside and have a smoke.

It was a dreary winter’s day, the day after a heavy snowfall. The streets were sloppy, and I had to jump over a rather wide snow puddle to get across the street and onto the sidewalk. A couple of doors from my building an elderly Salvation Army volunteer dressed neatly in her crisp blue uniform was ringing her bell. I stuffed a five-dollar bill into her red pot and bought myself a sincere smile and a loud God Bless You for my trouble. I looked at my watch. I had four minutes to make it up to the office. I squeezed myself into the revolving doors and right into the warmth of the lobby, where the fragrances of mixed perfumes are always thick, especially in the winter time. I was enjoying my whole routine, and the whiskey and the fresh air had taken care of my headache. I was thinking that maybe I should have had just one more drink, but I knew I did the right thing. I couldn’t afford to take any chances, not anymore. I was patting myself on the back for my good judgment when I spotted her. The lobby was crowded, and it was as if she were on a big movie screen and coming right at me. She brushes by me as she passes. She looks right at me, but she doesn’t recognize me. I stand there, and I watch her like some crazed holy man as she goes through the revolving doors. How in the world, I wondered, did I come to such a day? How in the world did I manage to lose her in the first place? I asked myself this for the thousandth time. But there is no explaining it, no way to understand such passion. Not even my memory could explain it away, and I remembered everything from our first frantic fuck in her soft, clean bed to that last squeaky walk down the stairs, and so now the elevator is going up, up, up and everything else is going backwards.

The experience overwhelmed me. I knew then that I had to do something about the terrible condition I was in. On Saturday I would start a rehabilitation program, and this time I was serious. I was still in a nostalgic mood when I got home from work. I slipped an old Diana Washington disc into the CD player, poured myself a long drink, and went over to the couch to relax for a while. I stretched my body out as tight as I possibly could, flipped off my black Florsheim loafers, and loosened up my tie. I was just about to lift a smoke from my shirt pocket when the doorbell rang.

It was Miss Lena, my neighbor from down the hall. She was dressed in shorts and a tank top, and she was barefoot. She introduced herself, and at first I did not reply. My eyes were too preoccupied. I had never seen anything like her before, not in person anyway. Her entire body, from her delicate little neck right down to the tips of her slender toes was completely covered with tattoos. There wasn’t a trace of bare flesh on her. When I looked into her face, I saw that she was wearing an uncomfortable expression. I caught myself and invited her in. She thanked me, then nervously explained that she had locked herself out of her apartment. She would need a locksmith and could she use my phone. I showed her to the phone and walked back into the living room to finish my drink.

She appeared a few minutes later and explained that the locksmith would be at the building in about an hour. She thanked me again and was about to leave, but I offered her a drink and she accepted. It was better than making her stand outside in the hall, I thought. She took a sip, sat down opposite me, and began to talk. Miss Lena, as it turned out, was a local cult celebrity. She was the wacked-out hostess of a bizarre talk show which aired every Saturday at midnight on one of the local cable stations. The show explored alternative lifestyles.

She had a sidekick who called himself ‘Gorgeous Boy.’ Gorgeous Boy was an ugly