After Her: A Novel Read online

  Among the detectives in the Marin Homicide Division—and beyond that, the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and probably beyond that too—it was known that nobody was better at breaking down a perpetrator than Anthony Torricelli. “His own mother could have had this secret she swore she was taking to her grave,” his friend Sal told me once. “Ten minutes in the room with Tony, she’d be crying into her hanky that she had sex with the milkman. That’s how good he was.”

  Not just good. The best.

  ONE OF THE SKILLS REQUIRED of a person if he or she is to be a first-class detective, our father told us (he or she, he said; that was like him), was the ability to pay close attention. You had to know the questions to ask, and how to listen well when the answers came. You had to recognize when the person you were talking to was handing you a line, and spot all the things he wasn’t saying too.

  But as much as anything else, you had to pick up on all the things besides the words he handed you (he or she; women could be criminals too after all, as well as objects of worship).

  You had to pick up on a person’s body language. Can they look you in the eye when they say where they were last night? What does it mean that their hand is on their hip, that they keep crossing and uncrossing their legs? Are they picking at their sleeve when they tell you they never heard of some guy named Joe Palooka that sold crack down in Hunters Point? Why is it their nails are chewed down to the quick, or past it? Widow Jones might be wearing black, but why is it that three days after the funeral she’s got a hickey on her neck?

  (That last observation of our father’s was nothing he ever shared with my sister and me, actually. I overheard that one when he was cutting Sal’s hair, and he was explaining to his friend how he broke a case in which the wife of some banker type got her lover to do him in for the insurance money. What our father forgot sometimes, when we were around, was that at least one of his daughters had inherited the attributes of a good detective herself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: I pay attention.)

  My father didn’t stop paying attention when he went off duty either, if he ever went off duty, and I doubt he ever did. Most of all, he paid attention to women, but not in that way some men have, of turning their gaze to the breasts, or sizing up a woman’s rear end and grinning. He listened to what every woman he talked with had to say and seemed to take it seriously. He might like to see her naked, but he would also like to massage her feet or touch the skin on the inside of her wrist. He would ask about her children, if she had them, but he also made it plain that in his eyes, a woman was never simply a mother. She could be eighty, and he would still manage to locate the girl in her. I am not sure he ever met a woman he didn’t look at without picturing how it would be in bed with her.

  WE WERE AT A CONVENIENCE store one time. Buying cigarettes, his usual Lucky Strikes.

  “Don’t move,” he said to the woman behind the counter, with a sudden urgency that may have left her thinking this was a stickup.

  He reached over the counter toward the side of her face, and for a moment his hand seemed almost to disappear in her hair. When it emerged, he was holding an earring. So small you had to wonder how he had ever spotted it.

  “The back must have fallen off,” he said. “I didn’t want you to lose it.”

  She just stood there then, with the small gold cross in one hand, the other reaching for her naked lobe.

  “Don’t expect to find a guy like him when you start dating,” one of the waitresses told me one night when he had taken us out to Marin Joe’s—our regular tradition. “Because there aren’t many like that.”

  Our mother would have said this was good news.

  HE HAD A GIFT FOR hair, inherited from his father, and he loved brushing ours. He cut hair like a professional—using his dead father’s scissors.

  “Sometimes I think I should have been a hairdresser,” he said—though in fact he could never have settled for that. “A man could do a lot worse than spend his days with his fingers running through women’s hair. Instead of chasing down a bunch of low-life mutts.”

  First came the shampoo in our sink. He’d test the water with his wrist before he poured it over us, and when he lathered our heads, it was more like a massage. He used a special brand, with peppermint, that made the skin on your scalp tingle. All my life I’ve looked for that shampoo.

  He put a record on. Dino, probably, but it might be Tony Bennett or Sinatra, and he might sing along, though never when he got to the cutting part, where all his concentration was required. That and a steady hand.

  He set a chair in the yard. When we were little, he carried out whichever one of us he was working on that day, with a towel around our shoulders. The way he stepped back to study us was as if he was an artist, and we were his artwork. Then he began to cut.

  He could sing like Dean Martin, to my ears at least, and he knew all the words to the songs, including the Italian ones.

  THERE WAS A THING HE did for us, a trick he could perform, that no other human being I ever met has known how to re-create. Something so strange and amazing, just describing it is difficult.

  You’d be sitting on the couch next to him. The person sitting there would be me, or my sister. Maybe he’d done this once for our mother, but if so, that day was long past.

  Then he’d pull a hair from the top of your head, so swiftly it never hurt. My sister and I kept our hair long from when we were little. So he had plenty to work with. And black, like his.

  You never knew when he might do this. You’d be sitting there watching TV next to him, or reading, and there’d be this sharp little tug at your scalp, no more than a pinprick. Then you’d look over at him, sitting next to you, and he’d be twirling this hair between his fingers. They moved so fast I never understood how he could do this. But after a few minutes, he’d hold your arm out in front of you and on your skin—olive colored like his—he’d set this creation he’d made that looked exactly like a spider. Made out of your hair.

  It never worked to ask for a spider. Months might pass that he didn’t come up with one for you, and then he did. They were so tiny and delicate, it was impossible to hold on to one. Just breathing could make it blow away. Or when he exhaled his cigarette smoke.

  The first time he made a spider and I lost it, I cried. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said. “There’s plenty more of those in your future.” For a surprisingly long time, that’s how I thought my life would be—men would perform magic for me—and for a longer time, that’s how I thought it should be, even when it wasn’t.

  Years later—in my twenties, when I met a man I thought, briefly, that I’d marry, I asked him if he knew how to make spiders.

  “Spiders?” he said. He had no idea what I was talking about.

  “You know, out of my hair.” I actually thought for a long time that this must be something all men did for the women they loved. Their daughters or their girlfriends or their wives.

  But it was only my father who did that. The only person ever who did that, in the history of the world, possibly.

  PATTY AND I ADORED OUR father, simple as that. Young as we were back then, he taught us to wrestle and instructed us in self-defense moves to protect against the unwelcome advances of the boyfriends he told us would pursue us tirelessly all our lives. But he also ran us bubble baths and lit candles for us when we got in the tub. He put on Sinatra and taught us to slow dance, with our toes resting on his shiny black shoes.

  If she had the right dance partner, he said, a woman should be able to close her eyes and let him take her anywhere. But steer clear of a man with a limp hand. You want to feel strong pressure on your back, and his hand pressing against yours, as he led. It’s fine if he smells your hair—you want a sensual man—but not his hand on your rear end. And if he doesn’t walk you back to your table after the dance, he’s danced his last with you. Then again, how could a man ever stop dancing with either of the Torricelli girls?

  Never let a man disrespect you, he said. You deserve a man who
treats you like the queen of the world.

  We were not yet six and eight when he told us these things. What did we know of love and romance then, or cruelty and rejection? We took his words in anyway, to file for later.

  He never yelled at us. He never had to. If one of us had done something we weren’t supposed to, it only took one look from him to stop what we were doing.

  Often he worked late, but if he came home early enough, he was the one who’d cook for us. Garlic was always involved—those large, beautiful hands of his finely chopping and sautéing it in good olive oil. He prepared his sauce from scratch, and pasta too, hung up all over the kitchen like laundry, with meatballs made following his father’s recipe. He claimed to speak Italian, and sometimes spewed out foreign-sounding words while he cooked, but at some point we figured out they were made up.

  After the meal, if he had to yawn, he’d stretch his arms as wide as possible, open his mouth all the way, and let out a roar. We’d curl up on the couch with him to watch TV—The Rockford Files, his favorite—and he’d rub our feet. When we got tired, he’d carry us to bed, one in each strong arm, then sit in the dark and sing to us.

  Our mother stayed home mostly, but on his days off, we’d pile in his car (bench seats, before he got the Alfa Romeo) so Patty and I could both snuggle up in the front—and take off on the most winding roads. He drove stick and took the curves like a race car driver, which made me want to be one.

  “Don’t tell your mother,” he said—his regular refrain—as the speedometer reached seventy-five. Of course we never did.

  One time he took us to Candlestick Park for a Giants game. “That guy on first?” he said. “Number forty-four? Take a good look at him. For the rest of your life you can tell people you saw Willie McCovey play.”

  Once, standing in line with our father at the supermarket, a man just ahead of us started giving his wife a hard time, or maybe she was just his girlfriend. “Shut your trap if you know what’s good for you,” the man told her.

  Our father stepped out of the line then to face him. “Does it make you feel like a big guy, bullying a woman like that?” he said.

  “Listen hard to what I tell you here, girls,” he said after, in the parking lot. “I wouldn’t normally use this language, but you need to hear this plainly: Never let any man give you shit. One stunt like that and you’re out the door.”

  He took us on the cable cars and out to dinner at some grown-up restaurant, not McDonald’s or Chuck E Cheese. He brought us gardenias, or a 45 rpm single he thought we’d like, a ring with our birthstone. One time he took us to a double feature of his two favorite James Bond movies—Thunderball and Goldfinger. That was supposed to be a secret except that when Patty came home, she told our mother she wanted to get a cat and name her Pussy Galore.

  Our mother had been, briefly, the object of our father’s adoration, but he moved on early, while she stayed in the same place. Hard to say which one of them gave up on the other first, but it happened, and once it did, there seemed no way back for either of them. Our mother must have seen him slipping away—like a piece of an iceberg that breaks off and drifts out to sea to form a whole new continent—and there was nothing to do about it but stand there and watch him go.

  HE MOVED OUT WHEN I was eight, Patty six. After that he lived in an apartment back in the city, with a hideaway bed for Patty and me when we came to visit, which we hardly ever got to do. We stayed at old number 17, with its small dark rooms and thin walls through which the sound could be heard of cars on the highway, and keeping a secret would have been impossible. It was through those too-thin walls I learned the reason for my father’s departure. A woman of course. Margaret Ann.

  Chapter Three

  In the early years, when our father still lived with us, there was a set time when we ate dinner. Our father’s cooking filled our house with wonderful smells: onions and oregano simmering in the tomato sauce, and garlic of course. Red wine on the table, and candles, even on weeknights. Music, always.

  Our mother tried cooking for a while after he moved out, but she gave up on that early on. Then we were left to heat up frozen dinners or soup. The good nights were the times our father came to take us out to the restaurant we favored, Marin Joe’s, where we had our special booth and the waitresses all knew what to bring us: a plate of spaghetti with marinara sauce, garlic bread, tiramisu.

  Back on Morning Glory Court, there never seemed to be enough money. We got used to the fact that we didn’t get TV at our house anymore. We owned an old Zenith, but its sole function was to hold a plant, and the piles of books our mother brought home from the library, the bills that came and sat, mostly unopened, until their replacements showed up, with even bigger print on the front, in red: Last Chance.

  In those first days after they disconnected the cable, my sister had drawn a picture exactly the size of the TV screen, which she taped on the front where the pictures used to be, featuring a person who looked like a news anchorman with a bubble coming out of his mouth and the words “Traggic News!” (The spelling is Patty’s.) “The Torricelli Girls cant watch their favorite shows any more! Mean mother says USE IMAGINASHUN.” Now even Patty’s drawing was barely visible, since the philodendron leaves had wound their way over the front of the set, curling clear to the floor.

  The notion of a life without TV had felt harsh, briefly, though in truth, we replaced it with better. We invented a ritual called Drive-In Movie for watching our shows. When darkness fell—earlier in fall and spring; later in summer—we cruised the backyards of the houses along Morning Glory Court until we found a spot in the backyard of one of them where the TV set was on. This part was never difficult. Every house on Morning Glory Court featured an identical picture window, and at nearly every one the TV set had been placed directly in front of it, facing that hillside. All we had to do was find a set tuned to a channel we liked and hunker down low to look inside and watch.

  Mostly we’d position ourselves in the yard of our elderly neighbors, Helen and Tubby. Their viewing habits weren’t always to our taste, but they had the biggest TV, which made it easier to make out the faces on the screen.

  We’d lay out a blanket—the one we’d used for picnics, in the old days when our parents were together, and we used to spend Sundays with our parents at Golden Gate Park. (Maybe we only did that once, but we remembered it.) If the evening was cool, as evenings tended to be by that hour, we’d huddle close to each other and wrap the blanket around ourselves. If there were saltines at our house or those little packets of oyster crackers people buy to scatter into their soup (though for our mother, those sometimes amounted to breakfast), we’d have brought those along to munch on while we watched.

  Charlie’s Angels was a favorite, but Tubby and Helen seldom watched that one. After Tubby died, Helen’s personal preference appeared to be Little House on the Prairie—a show that got on our nerves. But she also tuned in to Brady Bunch reruns. Eight o’clock every night, the show came on, and we’d be there on the hillside out back, waiting.

  You had to squint to see the faces on the screen, from the outside, but we knew well enough what all the characters looked like that it didn’t matter. There they’d be, the nine happy-looking faces of Mike and Carol Brady and their six children and housekeeper, each one occupying a separate box on the checkerboard displayed across Helen’s TV screen. We couldn’t hear the sound, of course, but we could get the basic idea and make up the rest.

  “I think Cindy’s in some kind of trouble,” I told Patty during one scene. Not very big trouble. We always knew it would work out. In our version of the show, in which we supplied the dialogue to accompany the silent images flickering on the screen in Helen’s living room, Mike could turn to Carol and tell her he was leaving her and running off with the housekeeper, Alice (this was so implausible as to be funny), or one of the kids needed a kidney transplant, and they had to figure out which of the others was a match. (Lots to choose from, luckily.) I made up a story where Marcia got pregnant, a
nd one of Mike’s sons was the father. Not a blood relative, so at least their baby wouldn’t be retarded.

  In some ways watching the show this way, without the virtually needless element of dialogue, allowed for a level of entertainment that the real show—the one Helen was watching from the comfort of her blue Barcalounger—failed to deliver. Outside, Patty and I would be practically wetting our pants from laughing so hard, while in her living room, there sat Helen, knitting some sweater and taking a sip from her cup now and then.

  What was in that cup anyway?

  “I bet she’s a wino,” I told Patty. “She just pours her whiskey in a coffee cup so people won’t suspect.”

  “She wouldn’t need to hide it in her own house,” Patty pointed out. “She’s not expecting that we’re looking in the window at her.”

  “So what do you think is going on?”

  “Maybe the Bradys got a dog,” Patty offered. She was always working hard to keep up with her own interesting contributions to our conversations, but sometimes it was hard for her thinking up ideas. One topic that held abiding interest for her, however, was dogs.

  “Then what?” I said.

  “They named him Skipper.”

  Other times, the story lines I thought up concerned the people whose living rooms we looked into, rather than the shows on their television screens.

  “Maybe Helen sneaks into people’s houses when they’re away at work and steals their jewelry and money,” I suggested. “Maybe Tubby figured it out, and she killed him, and now she keeps his body in the basement. That’s why she’s always burning those vanilla candles. To cover the smell.

  “She got fed up with him asking her to cook him dinner all the time, so she did him in,” I went on. “He was always wanting to have sex.”

  In fact, Helen’s husband, Tubby, had been suffering from what my sister referred to as old-timer’s disease for years before he died, and he had mostly just sat in his chair for as long as either of us could remember. But the idea of anybody wanting to have sex with Helen was pretty funny. The idea of sex was funny, period—funny and terrible and thrilling.