Chapter Eight #2
“I don’t have the appropriate attire,” I say.
“And yet again,” she says, “I’m proven correct that clothing matters.”
Well, now I want to spite her. I shrug my jacket off and throw it down onto the sand, and then I start to undo my tie, unbuttoning my shirt.
I see that she has stopped swimming, and is watching me with rapt attention.
My heart begins to beat faster, and if this were any other situation, and any other woman, and I were a different man, it would feel like a flirtation.
Her eyes are fixed on me, and she isn’t even trying to pretend she isn’t waiting for a glimpse of my body.
In fairness to her, she’s given me a spectacular view of hers.
And so I suppose I should return the favor.
I loosen my tie, and unbutton my shirt, taking it off and letting it fall down to the sand.
Then I undo the closure on my pants, kick off my shoes, my socks.
I strip off everything but the tight pair of black boxer briefs that I’m wearing.
And I’m rewarded with her absolutely rapt attention.
Both of my arms are fully tattooed, and my neck, most of my torso.
It has always been my form of penance. A reminder that the sins you commit don’t vanish just because you get rid of the evidence.
That you’re changed forever when you engage in violence.
It changes you, on a soul level, and I feel that it’s only fair for it to have altered me on the outside as well.
She bites her lip, then slowly floats onto her back and begins to paddle away from me. Though I have never been a casual beachgoer, I’m a strong swimmer. And I get into the water and go after her quickly.
She laughs, moving away from me, and a strange light feeling overtakes my chest. I find myself smiling. Looking at the joy on her face.
Just beyond her are my men in their boats, and it is a reminder of the reality of the present situation. Of the eternal situation. But somehow, it feels easy to block out now. Somehow, it feels like something I don’t want to think about, and so I don’t.
There is an eternal amount of heaviness to cope with. I can’t deny that. But in the salt water, everything feels weightless, including me.
She disappears beneath the surface, paddles away, and back up onto the sand.
There is a wooden structure there on the beach, one that served as a cabana for my grandparents.
A place where they would often sleep on nice nights, and it’s outfitted with everything you could possibly want.
I go after her, grabbing the picnic basket, and then I gesture toward the cabana. “Let’s go inside,” I say.
She cocks her head and looks at me, and then follows me up the steps, and into the small, simple structure.
“Your grandmother definitely had a hand in this,” she says, looking around the room, done up in gold, magenta and natural wood.
“Yes. As I said, my grandfather worshipped her.”
“Did your mother come here as a child?”
She should know it isn’t as if I’ve ever sat around with my family exchanging pleasant memories.
She should know because it sounds like, in many ways, she had a broken sort of childhood just like I did.
“I don’t know,” I say, pushing away thoughts of my mother, because whenever I think of her, my imagination is invariably full of violence.
“Oh. I just assumed…” She looks down at her hands. “I know that your family is dysfunctional. But in many ways, it seems like you have more people to love than I do. Even though I’m mad at Vittoria… I know she loves you, Ciro. Even though she told me lies, I don’t think that’s one of them.”
“I don’t know that anything is quite that simple.”
“You said that you had a lot of other half-siblings. Why don’t you ever talk about them?”
I don’t have to tell her. But in truth, no one has ever asked about me. God, what a stupid thought that is. Everyone is always cowering in my presence, begging for their life, taking orders. No one wants to…chat.
For some reason, it makes me want to.
“My brother Antonio was an evil son of a bitch. He was killed in a shootout, and good riddance. I have three other sisters. Belladonna, Elizabeth and Genevieve. Belladonna and Elizabeth were married off to some of my father’s enforcers.
Genevieve is a model. She lives in Switzerland.
Has nothing to do with the family, including me.
She apologized to me for it once. Said it isn’t personal, but it’s too difficult for her to try to maintain a boundary and keep in contact with me when I’ve not… She finds me too dark.”
“She’s probably not wrong,” she says.
I don’t think about my sisters very often. My brother can rot. He was exactly the sort of man my father would elevate. The kind that he wished I were. The kind who would subjugate and harm women, kill anyone who got in his path regardless of whether or not they deserved it.
I only wish that I had been the one to pull the trigger. That’s something my father and brother also have in common.
But my sisters… Thinking about all of them is a strange, futile ache.
Belladonna and Elizabeth are committed to the families they’ve created with very bad men.
And I fear that they have the potential to go the way of my mother.
Because that’s how it always is. Those men are horrible to everyone except their wives, only to a point.
And Genevieve, who has escaped. And I don’t blame her for wanting to put as much distance between herself and the family as possible.
Her mother was a much stronger woman than some of the other women my father had children with.
She was also a model, and he believed that that meant she was unintelligent. That it meant she was easily malleable.
He was wrong.
Genevieve’s mother extracted herself and her daughter from the compound when Genevieve was twelve.
“You aren’t exactly a big happy family,” she says, sitting down on one of the low cushions in the room. I bring the picnic basket over to where she is, and sit down on the cushion next to hers.
“Not exactly. But you are right, in that I had family to go to when I needed them.”
“There would be nothing to get from my parents,” she says. She nudges at the top of the picnic basket, and I open it for her. She makes a noise of delight as she begins to dig through the basket, looking at the sandwiches and selection of bread and cheese.
“Maybe they’re dead,” she says, taking hold of a sandwich and settling down across from me.
“Do you really think they might be?”
“Oh, I think there’s always a chance. And that chance goes up every year.
Especially with the way that drugs are now.
It would be better if it were still meth, honestly.
It’s a horrible drug. But fentanyl…they laced everything with it to make it stronger, and it’s dangerous.
And they don’t care. They don’t care, because all they think about is getting their next fix.
I’m angry at them. It’s hard not to be. But it’s also hard to be furious at somebody who can’t heal for their child, but also isn’t doing anything to preserve their own lives.
Like yeah, they are selfish.” She laughs.
“But in their shitty little kingdom that doesn’t really get you anything.
Nothing but more drugs. All of their money goes to that.
They get drugs, make them, sell them. And then buy more.
They consume half their products. It’s just…
It was a horrible environment to grow up in.
Ugly.” Her eyes glistened, and it’s one of the more genuinely vulnerable expressions I’ve ever seen on her face.
“I just remember everything around me being uncomfortable and hideous. I decided when I was seven or eight that I wanted a beautiful life. One that was soft. One where I had power. Control. And beautiful clothes.” She laughs.
“I feel like your life is genuinely dangerous. Really high stakes. But even though I’m not dealing with crime lords, the effort that it took to fight my way out of it, it felt like a gunfight. ”
I just don’t sit with people and talk like this.
I give orders to the men in my company, but we understand each other’s world.
We know this game. We know this life. And I know that no matter how much violence I was raised around, I had a line.
Moments where I knew that I had to make a change.
I want to know what made her decide that.
“What made you think that your life could be different?” I ask.
I’m fascinated by this. Because I had this same feeling. I was born into a life I didn’t want. I knew, in spite of the fact that crime, selfishness, ruthlessness, was normalized all around me, that I didn’t want that life.
But I don’t know why I was different. Maybe if I can understand her, I can understand myself better.
“It’s the American dream, isn’t it?” she asks, shrugging.
“I’m Italian. So I don’t know what you mean. It doesn’t explain me either.”
“I can’t explain you, but I can explain what I meant. There’s an American ideal, a fantasy, I think, that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and become anything. Anything you want to be, regardless of what you were born into.”
“I see. And do you still believe in that?”
She laughs. “No. I don’t. I don’t really believe that anyone can become anything that they want to.
Life is too unpredictable. Too difficult.
But that idea is what made me believe that I could.
I’m grateful for it, I guess. Because it made me think that I might not be doomed.
Mostly, I just couldn’t accept that my life was going to always be that.
I looked around, and I saw that all of my parents’ problems were drug-related.
So, I knew that I could do better than them as long as I stayed away from all of that. ”