Years ago I lived with my then girlfriend, Beth, in an old house on Hunter Street which had been divided into eight squalid chambers, four upstairs, two downstairs, one in back, and one in the basement. I won’t pretend that times were good, or that the rent was reasonable—they weren’t—but the people I met there still hang around in my memory like old coats in a hall cupboard. You remember them every so often when you are looking for a scarf or a vacuum cleaner.
Bonello was one of those people.
By any standard, Bonello was a fat man. He lived in the single room beside our apartment, and shared his telephone line with us. He took our calls and we took his. Once a month a woman would call and ask for Denny.
I was hungover the first time I took her call. I’d been out all night. The landlord had sent a crew around to cut down the sycamore trees that shaded our bedroom window. She kept calling.
“Look,” I said, “Denny doesn’t live here.”
When Bonello returned I went into his room. He was watching his favorite real life cop show, smoking weed, and drinking cans of root beer.
“Some woman was calling all morning, asking for Denny.” The TV cops were arresting a prostitute with long legs and tattoos.
“That would be my wife.” He offered me the joint.
“Who the hell is Denny?” I said.
The first time we met Bonello he was wearing a baggy t-shirt, which read ‘Malta’ and a pink towel. The leasing agent showed us into the landing, and Bonello appeared at the top of the stairs. He said he was a baker, and he promised us fresh bread. He had just finished showering in the communal bathroom. His t-shirt was dirty, and his stomach sagged over the towel. From the bottom of the stairs we could see the moles on his neck.
“You two girls will be alright here,” he said, and then we were led us up the stairs, and into the rooms we would live in for the next three years.
We didn’t know Bonello when he walked into our apartment, sharpening his knife. That morning one of the restaurants that bought his bread cancelled their account, and switched to another supplier, we’d heard him swearing in his room. He walked very slowly. He flicked his knife across the steel, a quick, deliberate stroke. He took another step forward, stood there silently, and then another pass, until he was in our living room, sharpening the blade.
He got in because we kept our doors open, so that our dog, Sadie, could have the run of the hallway and the stairwell. She would sit at the top of the stairs, or lay around in the landing. No one could come or go without passing through her, and so we felt comfortable living with our door wide open.
Bonello stood in our living room for a few minutes, dead silent with his blade. Then Beth put on a bad New York accent and said, “Okay, Bonello, give it up.” He started laughing. “I had you girls,” he said, “I really had you that time!”
We were all out of work when Bonello started complaining of fatigue. Beth woke me up and said we had to take him to the hospital.
“Something’s really wrong with him,” she said.
We had been fighting a lot around that time, and she had taken to talking to him in the mornings, sharing all our problems, she decided to pull down the Harley Davidson towel from his window. She thought he needed light and fresh air. She said he looked pale, and that she’d never heard him complain before.
“I’m serious,” she said, “I’m worried about his heart.”
Before he came over here, Bonello lived in Israel; he grew up there but fled to Malta to avoid doing national service. He told me he was too fat even back then, to go into the army for three years – “It would have finished me” he said, and I believe it would have. While in Malta, Bonello had found work as a chef in a tourist town. He said someone walked into the kitchen during service one night, and shot his dishwasher. A month later he had a heart attack, and came here – he had cousins here or something.
Turns out that a bee had stung Bonello on the neck while he was passed out drunk in his chair on the porch, he came home from the hospital with his head wrapped in bandages. The doctor said he had an abscess in his neck the size of a plum, and that he was diabetic.
“The size of a plum,” he said, and raised his arm.
I’d never noticed his tattoo before. The ink was faded, and the Star of David warped and blurred into a badly drawn lion.
“When did you get that tattoo?” I said.
He said he got it when he was sixteen, when he lived in Tel Aviv. He said that’s just what you did just before you went into the military. I asked him if it was smaller and more obviously a lion back then and he breathed out angrily, and said I had a fat ass, much fatter than Beth’s. Bonello never cared about our relationship – or if he did he never showed it. He wanted to sleep with Beth, that much was obvious, and when we were arguing, she would go and hang out with him for days, smoking his weed and eating his chocolate bars.
“So, no more chocolate?” I said, pointing to the packets of insulin on his table.
“Not everyday,” he said.
Then Bonello got a job the other side of the city. Chris, the guy who opened the pizzeria was Maltese, and they hit it off immediately, talking about the old neighborhood. I drove him up there despite the fact that whenever he got into my car, it would sink. We went to a Chinese buffet on the way home and he broke the passenger seat. A friend of his had given him four free gift vouchers. We filled our plates with noodles and sauce, fried chicken, prawn toast - refilled our drinks, and drove home, stuffed.
The seat wasn’t too badly broken.
“Bonello,” Beth said, “you should sit down more carefully!” She helped him out of the car and took him inside to make tea. I remember she didn’t even look at me.
The second time I drove Bonello to the pizzeria; he looked around the kitchen, and told Chris what they would do with the menu, and how they would drum up business. I wasn’t around when they negotiated the pay, but Bonello called us a month or so later and said he was sleeping on Chris’s couch. The pizzeria was about to go under, and he hadn’t been paid. He said he be back in a week to pick up his barbeque.
Bonello did come back, several months later, but he didn’t stay long, and he didn’t have much to say to us. A few weeks before he returned, a couple guys came by with a van. They loaded the barbeque into the back, and drove off.
***
I still talk to Beth. She calls me sometimes to remember the past. She has forgotten about most of the fighting which drove us apart. She says her memory is gone. It’s an old argument, and I’ve heard it many times. The medication they have her on is stealing her memories. Pill by pill, she is losing it. Soon there will be nothing but blackness. My response is always the same. I say, “Well, you haven’t forgotten my phone number.” But I don’t mean to joke.
Beth’s obsession with her memory began after she returned home from six months in the hospital. She started collecting books about memory. Psychology textbooks, memoirs, the lives of the Saints, anything about memory she would find, check it out, and bring it home. She didn’t read these books. She just liked to have them around. The library overdue notices piled up, but she ignored them. It caused a great deal of stress between us. She’d blocked her memory with her fear of losing it – that’s what I thought - but she insisted that it was totally gone.
The last time Beth called I asked her if she remembered the day we moved out of the house on Hunter. She said she didn’t.
Our last year in that house we rented the room next to Bonello’s. The plan was to use it as a studio space, but mostly it served as a separate apartment where we could get away from each other. When we moved out we hadn’t paid any rent on it; we were behind on our main rent too; we were actually squatting in Bonello’s old room; and we still owed money for utilities.
We were loading boxes into my car when the landlord pulled up in his Jeep. It was a beautiful afternoon in August, and he was smiling. He asked me if we were moving out. I told him we were. He said he wished we’d stay. He said it was hard to find good tenants.
“Do you remember that?” I said, and laughed. She said she didn’t. I began telling the story again, when I realized that Beth was crying. I said, “It’s supposed to be funny, why are you crying?”
“I was in the hospital,” she said, “I don’t remember.”
I told her I was sorry, and asked her if she remembered the night I brought our dog Sadie home. It was the end of May, balmy, but dark and raining.
“I remember,” Beth said, “Bonello made us pizza to celebrate”
“He did,” I said, “He did.”
© Lucinda Pang, 2008
House of Cards was read by Annalie Wilson at the Liars’ League War & Peace event on Tuesday November 11, 2008.
Lucinda Pang (Ray to her friends) is a third year creative writing student at Bucks New University and an insomniac, with an addiction to Pepsi and the written word.
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