Chapter One

Darlene killed me—the first time—the night we met.

She was having dinner with friends at Moutarde, that faintly French restaurant with the juicy steaks on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. I had felt like some background noise to go with a few glasses of robust red wine, so I had stopped there on the way home. I sat at the bar, just inside the door, well into my third Cabernet Sauvignon and really enjoying a bloody T-bone.

I heard her before I saw her.

Someone at her table must have said something funny because Darlene let out a fat laugh, thick and warm, so alive as it bounded about the room that you wanted to see where it came from.

She sat tall in her corner chair, her complexion more black than brown but neither. Her gray and black hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, hung past her shoulders. I couldn’t make out the color of her eyes, only that they were oval and worked with her high, sharp cheekbones to make her look slightly Asian. Her mouth opened incredibly wide as she chortled, yet even with head tilted back, I could not see past full lips that glistened in the light from the candle on their table. She wore a short leather skirt and silk shirt, both the same midnight black. An inch-wide border of expensive fur rimmed her ankle-high boots.

The wine kept me staring longer than I should have. She felt my gaze and found my eyes with hers. She gave me a Brooklyn look, fearless and noncommittal, the one women lay on you to say: “I see you but that doesn’t mean you should consider it an invitation to come over.” When she turned away, I felt her pull out of my head. Then she was talking to her friends again, bits of her sound floating about the room.

I finished the steak, wiping up the leavings with some excellent Italian bread and chasing it all with the last of my wine. Check paid, I resisted the urge to glance back at her and exited the restaurant, no real idea where I was headed. I didn’t feel like going to the houseboat just yet. It was Friday night, and though I was long past the age where I felt the need to be out on Friday,  tonight that old weekend restlessness rode the wine into my head.

Home would be there.

It was a nasty fall night in the Slope, windy with a cold, sticky rain, the kind most people considered best spent inside. I like being out then. I like the neighborhood. No matter the time of year, Slope streets always feel naked and clean in the rain, like someone hit a giant reset button that flushed the trash off the streets and the smells out of the air.

Rainy nights are ideal to move around if you don't want to be seen. New York is a great place for that even in good weather.

I turned right, into the wind and toward the Williamsburg Bank Tower, now luxury condos, at Atlantic and Flatbush. I knew where to go: Two Hundred Fifth, a Spanish restaurant/bar, which after 9 o'clock on weekend nights held a hot salsa set, was a few blocks up. Unlike a lot of restaurants with live music, the owners regularly defied the city cabaret code and allowed dancing. I heard the horns almost as soon as the thought entered my head. I pushed through the door and into a party.

Two Hundred Fifth occupied three storefronts: two dedicated to the bar, one to the restaurant. A stage was set up against the far wall of the middle storefront, just wide enough for the band to get busy as patrons worked the patch of dance floor at their feet. Parallel rows of five booths rimmed two sides of the dance space. A short wall, standing a few feet higher than the tables, divided each from matching booths on the other side.

A U-shape bar, manned by four tenders, ran the length of the far wall to the right. An accordion wall panel that divided the white-cloth restaurant to the left from the bar was folded in, so that people lucky enough to score a dinner table had an unobstructed view of two rooms.

The eight-man band on stage wore no discernible pattern in their clothing other than sweat and the occasional Panama hat. Didn’t need any. They were flying, hurling walls of urgent horns to chase possessed drumbeats that together snatched the crowd by the feet. They were playing a Celia Cruz tune. I couldn’t remember the title but recalled hearing her sing it back when she was getting her career off the ground.

The dance floor was packed with nearly as many people in the aisles as between the tables. A few couples executed dance-school moves in perfect rhythm, but most just let their bodies flail away, arms and hips bumping into tables, chairs and other dancers along the way.

It was all good.

I wedged my way into a corner of the bar and got another red from the bartender working my end. Wine doesn’t affect me; I can drink barrels of the stuff most nights to no effect. But it wasn’t the wine. Tonight was different, or maybe it was just me. I had a pretty sweet buzz going.

There is nothing like being high at a cool party. The music, alcohol, sweat, perfume, smoke on people’s clothes as they dart back inside after burning a butt on the sidewalk meld together in an energetic soup that makes time not so much stand still as pulse in and through you.

At a swinging party, one where I can let my guard down because of the unlikelihood of any shit starting, I often find myself watching everything and nothing, pulled from sight to sight, caught up in sound after sound, the room thick with noise and smells to be absorbed collectively or a piece at a time: a chorus of voices discussing topics from the weather to bikini waxes, overdue mortgages to Freddie’s nerve for showing up with his new boyfriend when his old girlfriend was nursing a grudge and a drunk in the corner; the floral mash of expensive perfume and cheap toilet water; garlic-heavy breath and lifesavers; and sweat underarms and between legs—all accompanied by a flirty piano chord floating above driving drum strokes.

The horns drive it all home. One saxophone can twist your guts. Four of them wielded by seasoned musicians can be orgasmic: peals on peals, waves tight and seemingly endless, washing over and through you, taking you somewhere you’ve been, sometimes where you’ve never been.

I remembered a hot Havana night, back in the day. The air inside Margarite’s was all sea and salt, sweat, and cigarette and cigar smoke twirling with the slow turns of the overhead fans. Batista and his cronies sat at the head table. He was lazily smoking a fat coheiba, gazing over the room for the women he would take from their men that night, simply because he could.

The band was aflame, every instrument in the orchestra slamming the beat home or twisting in and around it.

Angela and I watched from some bushes near an open window – all of them were open – that fronted the dance floor. She was my neighbor, three or more years older than I. Her mother had sent us to peep through that window to see if her father was there with "that puta." He was not.

We giggled, mesmerized, as a debonair man in glistening black pants and the whitest guayabera I had ever seen casinoed with two attractive women at once, leading them in intricate patterns as he moved independently of each – their flowing skirts; the attention he lavished on each partner, like he danced only for her; a finger across a shoulder as she dipped under his arm; a theatrical smell of the other's hair – all of it was more erotic than watching my first porn movie would be, years later. The give and take of it, the control by the one and consenting submission by the others were all moving drama played out on a sawdust floor.

Angela was digging her thumbnail into my palm. We were dry humping on the hood of a '59 DeSoto two blocks down the street, minutes after we left the club.

That's where I was and why I was smiling when Darlene walked up.

"Hey, Looking Man," she said, leaning in, her lips inches from my ear. The heat of her skin warmed the side of my face.

"You dance, Looking Man? Or do you just like to watch?"

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