“Your voice has that bad sound to it.”
He nodded again, face very solemn. “He ended up beating her; by the time Dominga got her away from him they had two boys. The oldest is just like him. There’s something wrong with him.”
“Has he hit any of his dates yet?” I asked.
“I lost touch once I left Dominga’s circle, but her sister remarried a nice guy from all accounts.”
“How do you know that there’s something wrong with the boy then, if you lost contact?” I asked.
“I watched him from a baby, Anita; he’s not right. He’s never been right. That’s not going to change. Men like that are attracted to girls like that.”
“The crazy bitches are attracted to the male equivalent,” Nicky said.
Manny and I nodded.
“Bad boys and girls either like the good boys and girls, or people as bad as they are,” Domino said.
“Agreed; now what are we going to do about Justine and the love of her life?” I asked.
“Anita, he goes back in the grave tonight; you can’t let this girl carry the memory of the one perfect night with her forever.”
“She knows he goes back in the grave tonight, so it won’t be perfect. It’ll be sad and full of her knowing this is the only time they’ll ever have together.”
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet stuff,” Domino said.
“Girls like her eat that tragic shit up,” Nicky said.
“Anita,” Manny said, “someone like her could take the tragic romance of tonight and live on it forever.”
“Is that bad?”
“No man will ever be able to live up to the romance of this, Anita. Either she’ll never date again, or she’ll compare every man to this, and every other man will lose.”
“Why will they lose?”
“Because she’ll build it up in her mind until it was the perfect sex, the perfect man, and if they had been born in the same century then they could have been perfectly happy.”
“You sound like experience talking again,” I said.
“I had a good friend in high school, Maria. She lost her first love in a car accident. She married and had children, but her husband is still fighting the ghost of that perfect love thirty years after they married, and thirty-two years after the boyfriend died. I knew Ricky, he was a good guy, but he wasn’t all that Maria remembers. I’ve always felt sorry for Carlos, because he’s still fighting the perfect boyfriend who will forever be young, handsome, and perfect.”
“You have two stories that are perfect for this moment?” Domino said, and let the suspicion be thick in his voice.
“Hey, I’m in my fifties looking at sixty; you learn a thing or two just by surviving this long.”
Domino smiled. “Okay, I get that.”
“Some people are stupid and mean if they live to be seventy,” Nicky said.
“Or a hundred and seventy,” I said.
We all just nodded and agreed.
“But I’m not one of them, or I try not to be,” Manny said, “and what happens tonight could mark this woman forever.”
“You think I’m being stupid to not just say no.”
“I think you’re letting your guilt and fear override your common sense,” Manny said.
“What he said,” Domino said.
“And I think you need to let the woman decide for herself,” Nicky said.
“You’re a sociopath,” Domino said. “You don’t give a damn for her feelings, or how her life will turn out.”
Nicky shrugged. “True, and not true.”
“What’s the not-true part?” Domino asked.
“I don’t care for this particular girl’s feelings, but she’s older than any of us, except Manny.”
“She’s over thirty?” I asked.
“Thirty-four.”
“You asked.”
He nodded.
“So what’s your point?” Domino asked.
“She’s thirty-four, that makes her old enough to decide for herself. Fucking a zombie no matter how alive”—and he made little quote marks with his fingers—“wouldn’t be my idea of fun, but what if she spends her life pining for the dead guy, so what? She’ll have had one night of absolutely Shakespearian-level tragic love, which is more than most people ever have.”
“That is both one of the most cynical things I’ve ever heard, and the most romantic,” Domino said.
“It can’t be both cynical and romantic,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“So, I’m a cynical romantic?” Nicky asked.
Domino seemed to think about it, and finally nodded. “Yeah.”
Nicky grinned. “I like it.”
I rolled eyes at both of them.
Manny looked thoughtful.
“What if you tell Justine everything you just told us, and Warrington, too?” I asked.
Manny raised his eyebrows. “Good idea, but she won’t believe me. No one ever thinks they’ll make the same mistakes everyone else does.”
“All we can do is try.”
“Besides, if she’s a die-hard romantic she could build not having sex into this great love affair that never happened, and compare all the other guys she dates to that, and then the men really would be screwed, because the only thing harder to compete with than a tragic lost love is a tragic lost love that never actually happened. Fantasy is almost always better, to a certain kind of person, than the real thing.”