this nervous?"
This time he shook his head.
"Only me?"
Nod.
"Good," she said, and smiled, and the smile practically knocked him backward it was so wonderful. "Would you like to join me and my friends?"
He shook his head again. Just barely.
"It's hard to keep asking yes-or-no questions." When he shrugged, she said, "Because you're a snob and you think they're assholes? My friends, I mean. Is that why you don't want to sit with us?"
He nodded. The unhappiest nod of his life.
"Hmmm. Well, I kind of agree. So do you mind if I join you?"
He shook his head. The happiest shake of his life.
After she signaled the waiter for a drink, a dark beer, Caroline said, "Don't you want to know why I'm sitting with you?
He nodded.
"Because I love this music. And my friends don't get it. And I could tell you do, just by watching you. So I wanted to sit with someone who got it. Do you believe that?"
Another nod.
"Good. As long as you know that's the only reason. Because otherwise I don't think you're at all interesting or different, you're clearly just like everyone else I know, and on top of that you're not at all handsome."
"Do you like Italian food?" he asked. The first words he ever said to her.
She looked at him, as if surprised that he really could speak, then she nodded.
"You want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?"
She looked at him again, this time not surprised, but it was a long look, searching for something. And whatever it was she was searching for, she found, because she nodded again. A firm and decisive nod.
"What's the matter," he said, "can't you speak?"
This time she smiled another one of her smiles and shook her head, a long, slow, gentle, lovely, absolutely perfect shake.
They were together almost every minute after that. But it took four more months before he would know that he was truly in love with her, that he would have to marry her.
It was the day she met Dominick Bertolini.
– "-"-"AFTER JACK'S MOTHER died, Jack moved into Dom's two-bedroom Hell's Kitchen apartment. It was the most natural thing for both of them. They were good company for each other and they each provided a necessary and comforting tie to the past without ever having to talk about it.
In his early teens, Jack went to work in Dom's meatpacking plant on Gansevoort Street, spending most of his afternoons and evenings in the meat district. It wasn't a strange environment for Jack, just the opposite – it was where he felt most comfortable, where he felt grown-up. Doni paid him good money and young Jack had an affinity for the work. He was strong enough to lift and carry whole sides of beef, strong enough even to hack through just about anything. The blood didn't bother him. It was simply part of the job, something to deal with. The fact is, he liked the cold rooms, the sawdust on the floors, the stark walls, the carcasses hanging from hooks, surrounding him. He loved being around Dom, listening to his stories of the old days in New York, the saloons, the personalities, the infamy that had followed him around when he was young. It was most definitely a man's world and Jack was comfortable living in it. And he stayed there quite happily until he was old enough to move eighty blocks uptown and go to college.
But it took Jack quite a while before he could bring Caroline downtown to meet Dom that first time, to see the other side of his life, which she knew nothing about. Even after several months of dating, he was nervous about it. It was an alien world to her, as alien as her world, as she described it, would be to him. If hers was a world of privilege and refinement, his was dominated by sweat and hard work and the need to survive. He was afraid to bring her there, he told her. And the fear was not that she wouldn't like his world – that would not make him happy but he could deal with it – it was that she would cause him to dislike it also.
She didn't say anything when he told her this. Just said that she understood. Then,