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.
You grow up in that neighborhood, you do the right thing.
The prevailing attitude on Staten Island is that men can leave their wives, but only black men leave their kids. Which isn’t fair, Malone thinks—Bill Montague’s probably the best father he knows—but that’s what people think, that black men go around knockin’ they bitches up and then stick white people with the welfare bill.
A white guy from the East Shore tries something like that, he’s got everyone up his ass—his priest, his parents, his siblings, his cousins, his friends—all telling him what a degenerate he is and showing him up by picking up the slack themselves.
“You did that,” the guy’s mother would say, “I couldn’t hold my head up going to Mass. What would I say to Father?”
That specific argument don’t cut much weight with Malone.
He hates priests.
Thinks they’re parasites, and he won’t go near a church unless it’s a wedding or a funeral and he has to. But he won’t give the church any money.
Malone, who also won’t pass a Salvation Army bell ringer without putting at least a five in the bucket, won’t give a dime to the Catholic Church he grew up in. He refuses to donate money to what he thinks is an organization of child molesters that should be indicted under the RICO statutes.
When the pope came to NYC, Malone wanted to arrest him.
“That wouldn’t go down so well,” Russo said.
“Yeah, probably not.” With every cop over the grade of captain elbowing each other aside to kiss the pontiff’s ring or his ass, whichever was presented first.
Malone ain’t crazy about nuns, either.
“What about Mother Teresa?” Sheila asked him, when they were arguing about it. “She fed starving people.”
“If she passed out condoms,” Malone said, “she wouldn’t have had so many starving people to feed.”
Malone even hates The Sound of Music.
