Sunburn (33 page)

Still, his step was blithe as he moved to what he thought was the West Building of the complex and opened up the downstairs door. He got in the elevator, reveling in the naked lightness of traveling with nothing whatsoever, starting a new life without so much as a familiar coffee mug from the old. He rode to the third floor, went the wrong way down the corridor, then wheeled and found the penthouse. By a mix of filtered sunlight and flickering fluorescent, he tried his key in the door. It didn't work.

He withdrew it, tried it upside down. He went back to the first way. He finessed, he jiggled. He was stooped over the lock, one hand on the key and the other on the doorknob, when the door was suddenly, violently yanked open, pulling the Bra King halfway into someone else's unit.

Bewildered, guilty, feeling like a burglar in a dream, Murray Zemelman looked meekly up. He saw an Indian. A very angry Indian who was wearing a chamois vest with fringes and jabbing a thick finger back toward someone Murray couldn't see.

"Just forget about it," the Indian was saying. "No way you're gonna suck me into any of your greedy bullshit white-ass—"

'Tommy, Tommy," came a drawling and conciliating voice from behind a living room wall, "all I'm saying, I'm saying think about this opportunity."

"Opportunity my fuzzy red balls," said the Indian, and he turned to go. Only then did he seem to notice Murray, still half-crouched above the doorknob. For just an instant the two men met each other's eyes. The Indian's were very black and flat, so wide-spaced that they seemed to wrap around his temples; they turned down at the outside corners, gave him a look that was solemn, judging.

He hissed at the Bra King, "And you're a white asshole too." Then he pushed past him and was gone.

Murray stood there. He wasn't about to follow the Indian, and he didn't know what else to do.

After a moment, the mellow and conciliating voice turned bored and mordant and said, "The stupid savage didn't even close the door. Lock it, please, Pascal."

A muscular young man appeared in the foyer. He was wearing a hair net and a red kimono. He saw Murray standing there, rumpled and unshaven, fugitive and baffled, fraudulent key in hand, and said, "And just who the hell might you be?"

Murray had a sudden impulse to cry. What day was it, where was he, and just how exactly had he gotten there? "I'm very very tired," he said. "I think I'm in the wrong place."

"I think that's obvious," said Pascal, who coaxed him, not gently, out the door.

In his own apartment finally, his directions sorted out, the Bra King felt better, reassured by the sharp smell of a recent cleaning, layers of fresh towels on all the racks. He gave the place a cursory onceover, didn't really notice much. He hadn't come to Florida to sit indoors; he went onto the L-shaped balcony to suck the air and feel the sunshine and let the view nourish his resilience.

To the south—it had to be the south, he realized now—a parade of candy-colored convertibles streamed by on A1 A; the trucked-in sand of Smathers Beach looked as moist and crumbly as the topping on a coffee cake. At his feet, the Paradiso's gracious quadrangle appeared a perfect map of the easy life of Florida. A big tiled pool shimmered a minty blue. Two tennis courts contributed a soothing geometry; a pair of cheery yellow flags waved above a putting green made of Astroturf.

Murray looked at tended plants, lounge chairs in neat rows: calming things. He told himself it would all be fine. And yet he paced. Fear of change, and loneliness, and weirdness, chafed against exhilaration. He needed to sleep; he couldn't sleep. Too much had happened; was happening. He had too much to say, too much that he could only now explain. A sort of emetic candor overtook him, he had to talk like he had to breathe. He dove into the living room to work the phone.

He sat on the edge of a huge sofa upholstered in a nautical stripe and called his second wife.

"Murray!" she said. "Where are you? I called work, I called the police. I was worried, Murray."

She didn't sound worried. In fact she sounded like she'd been placidly asleep until the phone rang. God forbid that anything like madness, upheaval, death, or salvation should intrude on Taffy's beauty rest. God forbid that a shard of early light should violate her eyeshade, a snore or a fart or a garbage truck send vibrations past her earplugs.

There was a pause. A muffled rustling of bedclothes came through the phone. "What are you talking about, Murray? What's over?"

He looked past the parted curtains and open sliding door to effervescent sunlight. "This cockamamie deal we call a marriage. It's finished. Kaput. Finito."

"Taffy, allow me a spasm of honesty. Marrying you was the stupidest fuckin' thing I ever did in my entire life. No offense. I blame myself, not you. Fact is, start to finish, it had nothing to do with you. Why couldn't I just bang you on the desk like a normal human being? Once, and get it over with. Boss shtupps model. Happens every day, right? Zip up and get back to work. But no, for me it's the first infidelity, I have to make a big deal out of it, turn my whole life upside down. Why? Conscience, that's all. 'Cause if it was love, I wasn't such a turd for doing it. Except, Taff, let's face it, it wasn't love. What we had, you and me, it was no big deal. Never was."

Again, a pause. Murray pictured her sweeping off the eyeshade, running a hand through the thick auburn hair that was part of what seduced him half a dozen years ago.

"Murray," she said at last, "I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm gonna assume you're cuckoo. But if you're not, you son of a bitch, if you've got the faintest idea what you're saying, I am going to take you to the cleaners so bad—"

"Yes!" hissed Murray in a kind of pyrrhic transport. "I want you to! Get a good lawyer, tell him how I took advantage of you just because you took your bra off in my office and wagged your bubbies in my face. Grab all you can. The house, it's yours. I never wanna see it again. Goo'bye."

He hung up, stared with wonder at the silent telephone, as if the instrument, and not himself, had done the talking. Truth. Flat-out, in-your-face directness—what a wild and intoxicating mystery. Where did it come from, this reckless truth, what was it made of?

He sprang up from the sofa, took a spin out to the balcony. When he got there the sun was just emerging from behind a small and fluffy cloud. The ocean twinkled, clean heat returned to the world, and absurdly, the Bra King took this as an omen. He scratched his head with gusto, was on top of things once more. He went back to the striped sofa, which was already taking on the potent feel of headquarters.

He called his office in the garment district of Manhattan, got his friend and number-two man, Leslie Kantor, on the line.

"Murray," Kantor said, "you okay? Taffy called last night. You didn't go home, you didn't come in—"

"I started to come in," the Bra King interrupted. "But the day got off to a really shitty start, so I said fuck it and retired."

The line went silent save for the faint scream of tearing paper. Murray had known Les Kantor for a lot of years, knew him like a book. He knew Les had retrieved his pack of Tums from his left-hand trousers pocket and was trimming down the wrapper with a perfect thumbnail. "Coconuts," he murmured at last.

"Coconuts, Les. And I'm divorcing Taffy."

"Murray, you spoken with Max?"

Max Lowenstein was Murray's psychiatrist.

"He's next on my list," the Bra King said.

"Maybe he should be first on your list."

An affectionate singsong came into Murray's voice. "Les. Les. You're beautiful, bubbala. So reasonable. So levelheaded. This is why I feel perfectly at peace leaving you to run things."

"I don't wanna run things. Murray, you don't just walk away like that. Milan's coming up. The big promotion with Bloomie's—"

"I don't care."

"You have to care," said Kantor.

"This is where you're wrong," said Murray. "It's where I was wrong till yesterday."

More Tums went into Leslie Kantor's mouth, the Bra King heard them clatter softly against his high-priced teeth. Then the partner said, "So Murray, what'll you do down there?"

Not until the question was asked did the Bra King realize he had no idea what he would do. He knew where he would do, and that was as far as he'd gotten. "I guess for awhile I'll do nothing."

"I've known you a long time," said his friend. "You're incapable of doing nothing."

Murray couldn't deny it. His only response was to chew a fingernail.

"Go fishing," Kantor suggested.

"Fishing?"

"It's as close as you can come to doing nothing and still be doing something."

"Les, I've never gone fishing in my life."

"All the better. You'll have something new to learn."

"Great," said the Bra King, "a fifty-three-year-old
shmegeggi
with a hook in his eye."

"Try it. It's very soothing. And Murray, hey, what about the ads?"

On the striped sofa in his penthouse living room, Murray Zemelman gave a little smile. He could not deny that he still liked the idea of wearing the Bra King crown, sashaying like Bert Parks among the ranks of pouting shiksas in their push-em-ups. "The ads," he said, "we'll see. If my public demands it, maybe I'll still do the ads."

"Good. You'll go fishing, you'll do the ads, when you're ready, you'll come back. In the meantime, talk to Max. Soon. Please, Murray."

"Okay, okay," the Bra King said. "I'm calling him right now."

Just then, some twenty feet from the southernmost point in the continental United States, a man named Tommy Tarpon, still agitated from a conversation earlier that morning, was setting up his seashells, which were displayed on a homemade plywood cart that he towed behind his ancient bicycle. His wares arranged, he sat down on a blue plastic milk crate, his back against the fence that cordoned off U.S. Navy property. Sunlight glared off the ocean, but Tommy was shaded by an enormous banyan tree whose unearthly dangling roots were lifting up the sidewalk. He sat there and waited for customers.

Some minutes later, he pretended not to watch as an oldish tourist with a green visor and red knees approached the cart of shells and nonchalantly slipped two fingers into the sun-warmed opalescent orifice of a queen helmet.

"That's how you can tell when they're sexually mature," said Tommy, when the tourist was in

there two knuckles deep. "When the labium gets pink and thick like that."

Caught, the man with red knees quickly swept his hand behind his back. Tommy had seen it again and again. Women always held the shells up to their ear to hear the ocean; men always wanted to finger them, first thing. The old tourist moved to change the subject. "Is it local?"

"You bet it's local," Tommy said. "Gathered by Indians near Cape Sable."

"Is that so? How much ya want for it?"

"Seven dollars."

The tourist took some time to think it over. He peered at the flat ocean, glanced at a knot of Asians photographing each other in front of the marker that said
Havana90 miles. "You
a Seminole?" he said at last.

Tommy crossed his arms against his chest, put on a very Indian expression, said nothing.

"I'll give ya six bucks," said the tourist.

Tommy tugged lightly at the fringes of his chamois vest. "Eight," he said.

"You just said seven."

"Have it your way. Seven."

The tourist beamed. Now he was having fun. Haggling with a real live Indian. "Clever," he said.

Tommy smiled pleasantly, finished the thought for him. "For a Redskin. Seven bucks."

The tourist hesitated. A new concern had seized him. Did he really want a big heavy fragile seashell? He had a drive to Fort Lauderdale and four days in Orlando before flying home to Michigan. Carry a shell all that way only to get back home and find it chipped? "I'll think about it."

"Big decision," Tommy said, and he scratched his back against the Navy fence as the tourist wandered off on pink and scrawny legs.

Murray had meant to call his shrink right then, but somehow he didn't do it.

He was seized by a sudden urge to go for a walk instead, smell the chlorine in the pool. Besides, by now he could no longer hide it from himself that his high spirits were extremely fragile, less a part of him than an overlay, a cheery suit of clothes that could at any moment detach itself and walk away without him. Max Lowenstein—sober, probing Max—would discover that in about ten seconds. And Murray was not so eager to have it pointed out.

So he swept off his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his rumpled shirt, and rode the elevator downstairs to the pool.

He walked the perimeter of the courtyard, brushed past red and pink hibiscus in big clay pots. He watched a fat man sink an eight-footer on the putting green. Along the row of lounges, he saw slender fellows lying side by side in tiny bathing suits, women facedown with their tops undone, dollops of bosom swelling at their sides.

Murray smiled at everyone as he floated past, now and then somebody briefly smiled back. But no one smiled first, everyone seemed too absorbed in paperbacks or backgammon or cancerous communion with the sun, and by the time Murray completed his circuit, he was feeling isolated, apprehensive. His steps got heavy, it was like the instant when an airplane drops its flaps and you understand abruptly that gravity has been there all the while. For a long moment he stood still, couldn't decide which way to move his feet. He choked down panic, told himself this was not depression socking in again, just an understandable fatigue, a temporary winding down that, after all, was part of arriving someplace new.