Florida Straits (11 page)

"Hey, New York, how ya doin'? Your friends
are gonna hate ya when they see that tan, ya know. But that's why
you're here, right? So your friends'll hate ya? Looks good. Use
that sunblock, though, don't be a wise guy. What parta New York ya
from?"

The fellow in the Yankees baseball cap just
kept walking, urged along by his ladyfriend, who was tugging at his
elbow. Across Duval Street, shadows were lengthening in front of
T-shirt shops and narrow stores selling frozen yogurt. The first
early drunks were starting to bob and weave, and the steady hum of
noise was occasionally punctuated by a tattooed grotesque in a
sleeveless leather shirt going by on a Harley.

"Hello, folks, you enjoying our beautiful
weather today? What are you, Japanese, Hawaiian, what?"

"Hello, folks, how's Key West treatin' ya
today? Hey, that is a fabulous hat you have. How they get all that
fruit to stay in there like that?"

"Hello, folks, great afternoon, huh? You
been puttin' your time in onna beach, I see. Those blisters'll be
gone in a coupla days, don't worry. But hey, since you're outta
commission anyway, how'd ya like ta see the Clem Sanders Treasure
Museum ..."

"Hello, folks. Hey, what's with the
crutches? ..."

"Hello, folks, awesome weather, huh? Hey,
you really go to Harvard, or you just wear the sweatshirt?"

"Hello, folks, gorgeous day, isn't it?"

"Yes, ittis," said a small, white-haired
lady in crisp khaki pants. She put a lot of bite into her t's, and
Joey was so surprised that someone actually answered him that he
found himself leaning forward on the sidewalk, his arm stuck out in
a hooking gesture, his smile frozen, momentarily unable to
speak.

"Ittis, indeed," said the husband. He was a
silver and pink old fellow who didn't seem to like the sun. He wore
a Sherlock Holmes cap with one brim for his forehead and another
for his neck, and his plaid shirt was neatly buttoned at the
wrists.

Joey knew immediately that these were people
who would take the tour and would never in a thousand lifetimes buy
a time-share at Parrot Beach. But that was not his problem. They
wanted the meal ticket. They wanted something to do. Probably more
than anything, they wanted to sit down.

"Where you folks from?"

"Ottawa," said the lady. She bit the
t's.

"Zat in England?"

They thought Joey was kidding. They laughed
politely. Joey felt suddenly the way he sometimes used to feel when
trying to get a girl to go to bed with him.

All parties wanted the same result, for all
intents and purposes the matter was settled. Yet there were certain
forms and rituals that needed to be adhered to, still the awkward
business of maneuvering her into the bedroom or onto the couch. So
Joey spieled, and the nice old couple from Ottawa played along. A
Harley-Davidson roared by, trailing a string of mopeds like a goose
with goslings. Sunlight flashed off the tin roofs of downtown Key
West. Finally, when all the ceremonies had been observed, Joey led
the nice couple up the path to the Parrot Beach office. They would
sign the guest book. They would admire the scale model. They would
ride the shuttle bus to the property, sip fresh-squeezed orange
juice, let themselves be hammered for a while by the sales staff,
and Joey Goldman would get his forty bucks, forked over from the
mysterious coffers of the legitimate world.

Returning to his post, he resolved to put
the commission toward a pair of tennis shoes. The black loafers he
was wearing were stylish but wrong. They let too much heat come up
through the sidewalk and their thin soles passed along the pebbled
texture of the concrete. He figured he'd keep this job at least a
few more weeks, till he found the right way back to his true
calling. This was temporary, very temporary, but for as long as it
lasted he might as well be comfortable.

—
15 —

In the last week of February Joey made four
hundred and eighty dollars and decided to celebrate by inviting
Bert the Shirt over for filet mignon and a couple bottles of
Valpolicella. It was time, he felt, that Bert and Sandra met. It
was time he learned to use the gas grill at the compound. It was
time, maybe, to get on terms with such basic social ceremonies as
having a friend to the house on Saturday night.

Sandra bought a new blouse for the occasion.
It was thin white cotton stamped with small pink birds, and it hung
on the back of a chair while Sandra brushed on her eyeshadow and
dabbed on her lipstick. She was beginning to have what was, for
her, a tan. On her face and shoulders, orange-pink dots were strewn
across her blue-white skin, gradually coloring her in the way a
comic strip is colored in. The resulting blush made her light eyes
seem a crisper green, green like a vegetable with crunch, and her
short hair closer to silver than to yellow. "You know," she said,
lifting a bra strap to better examine her tan lines in the mirror,
"sometimes I think I'm the only person in this town who wears a
bra."

Joey had a quick flash of Vicki, and
banished the image.

He regarded Sandra's chaste white appliance,
with its rim of dainty lace, its girding of clasps and elastic.
"Well, you don't have to wear one," he said, feeling on safe ground
saying it. It was about as likely that Sandra would give up her
foundation garments as that the cardinal would stop wearing a
hat.

"Well," she said, and left it at that.
Turning half profile, she appraised her chest with that amazing
dispassion women can muster when looking at their bodies. When Joey
looked in the mirror, he tended to see muscle definition that
wasn't quite there, tended not to notice the merest beginnings of a
tummy. But Sandra duly recorded every crease and flaw, pitilessly
noted every lack or excess. Humbled by such realism, Joey changed
the subject.

"So the potatoes are in, the lettuce is
washed. What else?"

"I wish the plates matched."

"It's a rented place. Bert'll
understand."

The evening, even by Key West's relentless
standards, was beautiful. A slow and undramatic sunset had left the
sky pale yellow in the west, lavender backed by pearl gray at the
zenith, velvety blue like the inside of a jewel box in the east.
The air was the temperature of lips and there was just enough
breeze to lift the smell of jasmine from the hedge. The compound
was given over to uncomplicated pleasures. Wendy was sitting
chin-deep in the hot tub while Marsha massaged the tension out of
her shoulders. Luke the musician and Lucy the mailman dangled their
feet in the still blue pool, their twin headsets plugged into a
single Walkman. Steve the naked landlord, draped now in a towel
against the relative chill of dusk, had dozed off in a lounge
chair, a paperback about clones rising and falling on his ample
stomach.

Joey ushered in Bert the Shirt just as Peter
and Claude, dressed in peppermint-stripe tunics, were heading off
to work. He introduced them.

"And who's this little fur-face?" cooed
Claude.

Joey could not help cringing a little.
Fur-face?

But the retired mobster held his chihuahua
forward in the palm of his hand so Claude could pet him. "This
useless thing? This is Don Giovanni."

"Like the opera," Peter said, and he burst
into a scrap of tune.

The tune sounded vaguely familiar to Bert,
though since he'd died notes all sounded more or less the same to
him. Still, the episode put him in a buoyant mood. It reminded him
somehow of his wife. "Joey," he said, gesturing around him as they
approached the cottage, "ain't this paradise?"

Sandra had come to meet them. "In paradise,"
she said, "the plates match."

She held out her hand to shake. But Bert had
the dog in his right hand, and so took her fingers in his left,
raised them to his lips, and kissed her on the knuckles. "You're as
lovely as Joey says you are."

"Joey who? If Joey paid me a compliment, I
think I'd plotz." She wagged her finger at Bert, admiring his
perfectly draped shirt of midnight-blue voile. "But you're as sly
as Joey says you are, and that's the truth."

"So Bert," said Joey, "glassa wine? We'll
sit out by the pool awhile."

He brought a tray and put it on a small
wooden table just outside the sliding door of their cottage. The
wine seemed to draw into itself the last rays of dim light, and
glowed a shimmering garnet.

"Salud,"
said Bert the Shirt, and
Joey could not help noticing that the word made Sandra wince. The
Italian sound, the Italian wine in stubby glasses, a certain
old-fashioned and very appealing swagger in the way Bert lifted his
drink to toast—these things, to Sandra, were a threat,
unintentional but real. They were the old ways, the family ways;
their warmth and comfort bound a person to the neighborhood as much
as did the promise of easy earnings, maybe more so, and made it
hard to change. At any moment a gesture or a word could pull a
person back to the small, sad, cozy place he'd come from.

"And how do
you
like it down
here?"

Sandra barely heard the question. "Me? Oh, I
like it fine. The weather's great, the girls at the bank are
nice."

She stopped talking, but Bert just looked at
her. It was a simple trick he'd developed decades before to get
people to go a little farther.

"But ya know," Sandra obliged, "for me, it's
not that big a change. A bank's a bank. Money's money. I mean, if
you think about it, money's the least interesting thing there is.
There's no variety about it, you know what I mean? Seen one dollar,
you've seen 'em all."

"Yeah," said Bert, "but until you've seen a
helluva lot of 'em, it doesn't really seem that way."

"I guess," she said. "But people. That's
what's interesting. Now, with Joey's job . .."

Joey looked down at the wooden table and
gave his head a modest shake. This job. It was confusing, this job.
He couldn't decide whether to be proud of it or embarrassed. It was
like the time he painted some autumn trees and won an art contest
in grade school. He was happy to win, happy to see his mother flush
with satisfaction, but at the same time felt that making pictures
was for girls. Of course, with the job, it had a lot to do with who
was asking. With Sandra, yeah, he was proud, he could tell it made
her happy. Around Bert, well, it wasn't like Bert was putting it
down, it was just that, let's face it, Bert had a different sense
of what a man should be. Joey wondered if he'd ever have a more
firmly held opinion of his own. He had to believe that life would
be easier if he did.

"Anybody hungry?" he said. "If I can figure
out how to work the stupid grill, we can eat sometime tonight."

The hiss and pop of propane being lit
reminded Joey how quiet the compound had become. The women from the
antique store had abandoned the hot tub and gone inside; Luke and
Lucy had disappeared into the thickening dark; Steve, under his
towel, seemed down for the count. Joey looked at the blue flame of
the grill, felt, rather to his own surprise, the prideful
contentment of being the host, then went inside to get the steaks.
Walking past the wooden table, he saw that Bert the Shirt was now
holding Don Giovanni on his lap. All that was visible of the tiny
dog was the thin silver spikes of its whiskers and a morbid gleam
from its oversized eyes.

"You really love that little dog, don't
you?" Sandra was saying.

"The dog? I hate the dog. The dog is like a
rock I can't get outta my shoe. You ever heard of a dog being,
whaddyacallit, not a kleptomaniac, a hypochondriac?"

Joey slapped the steaks onto the grill, then
poured himself another glass of wine. Standing there above his
hard-earned dinner, holding a giant fork in a fire-proof mitt, he
had to laugh at himself: a citizen having a cookout. What would
come next in this groping toward respectability, a goddamn
sing-along?

The filets were delicious.

They had moved into the Florida room to eat
them, at a table covered with a plastic cloth, knives and forks of
random pattern, and unmatched plates whose stripes and borders had
been scratched and nicked by many hungry renters.

"Joey," said Bert the Shirt as the younger
man re-filled his glass, "this is more like it, huh? This is what I
been tellin' ya. Come to Florida, take it easy, enjoy what there is
to be enjoyed. Look at him, Sandra— nice and relaxed. Joey, the
other week when we talked, jeez—"

"I'm more relaxed 'cause I'm makin' some
money," Joey said, gesturing with his fork. "But it hasn't been
that easy, Bert. I mean, my feet hurt. Besides, the little I'm
making—"

"It's not bad money," said Sandra.
"Especially for right at the beginning."

"It's O.K.," Joey said with a shrug. "But
it's all according to how ya measure. Bert, you know what I mean.
Our friends in New York, one night out, they spread around in tips
what I make in a week."

Sandra dabbed her lips. "So they're big
shots," she could not resist saying. "Real sports. I'm impressed.
But Joey, let's keep things in proportion. It's not like you were
in that league when we were up there anyway."

Joey started to protest, then chewed some
steak instead and realized he had nothing to protest about. "It
just makes ya wonder. That's all I'm saying. Am I better off doing
what I'm doing, or am I better off doing what I was tryin' to do
before?"

"There's no comparison, Joey," Sandra
said.

"Excuse me, Sandra," said Bert the Shirt,
putting down his wineglass. "I'm a guest in your house, I don't
wanna get in the middle of a disagreement or anything. But I think
there is a comparison. The comparison is called money. Legit, not
legit, that's not the point. Results is the point. Lookit the guys
I play gin with." He counted them off on his long yellowish
fingers. "A retired judge. A guy who ran a big Buick dealership. A
doctor. Why are we all of a sudden inna same club? Not becausa what
we did. Because we all got the same kinda results. We all ended up
to where we could buy condos onna beach. That makes us equals,
friends almost. Legit, not legit, that isn't how people add it up.
You wanna end up respected, you gotta go where your best shot
is."