by Ronald Malfi
“It’s like a completely different place,” the girl said, facing the storm. “It’s as if we’ve been uprooted and dislocated and we’re trapped here, now and forever. It’s like a dream, a bad dream, but I know I’m not asleep and I’m not dreaming. It’s hard to find sleep thinking of it in that way, and thinking of us uprooted and dislocated that way. It’s so sad, to think how wonderful and bright and sunny yesterday was, and all the other days, and then how dreary and sad it all was today.”
“It’s only rain,” he told her. He tried to recall the sensation of her warm legs and cold feet against him beneath the sheets as he had experienced it as recently as the night before. But it seemed a distant memory, and it was as though something deep within him refused him access to it. He remained on his back, unmoving, his eyes locked on the patio doors across the room, and on the shape of the girl standing before them. “Everything,” he said, “will be better and back to normal once it passes.”
“Do you promise?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think it’s possible for the whole island to drown?” the girl asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure? It seems like something I might have heard once, or maybe read in the papers.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a tremendous amount of rain.”
“It’s a very large island. Anyway,” he said, “they’re prepared for storms like this.”
“I saw that,” said the girl.
“Saw what?”
“The blue signs posted along the highway on the drive in. Didn’t you see them? They were big blue signs with a picture of a hurricane on it. We drove in along the evacuation route.”
“This is just a storm,” he said, “not a hurricane.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Hurricanes are different. They’re stronger and there’s more wind and they come much more suddenly than a regular storm.”
“Have you ever been in a hurricane?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
He shifted his eyes away from the patio doors and stared up at the ceiling. The room was suddenly very dark. He watched for quite a while the blinking red eye of the smoke alarm above him.
“How do you know?” she said again.
“Excuse me,” he said, peeling the sheet off and standing and moving across the small room to the bathroom. He turned the light on and washed his face in the sink. There were seashells placed randomly around the sink basin; she had spent yesterday afternoon collecting them at the edge of the water. He continued to wash his face and to examine it in the long mirror above the sink. What a long, sad, old-looking face you are, he thought. You’ve only been on this earth twenty-seven years, and what an old-looking face you are.
The water felt good. Until now, he hadn’t realized he’d been perspiring. It was a small, deeply enclosed bathroom, claustrophobic and damp. The moisture from their morning shower still hung in the air. They’d gotten their clothes sandy and wet yesterday down by the water, and she had hung them across the retractable clothes line over the tub to dry them out. He went to them and felt them now. The clothes were still damp and stiff with sand.
Back in the room, he was somewhat relieved to find the girl asleep in the big bed. He stood for some time, listening to the unlabored ease of her breathing over the strong rush of the storm, and did not move.
—Chapter II—
He dressed quietly in the dark, not wanting to wake the girl, and slipped out of the room into the narrow, peach-colored hallway of the hotel. Here, the lighting was poor and there were no windows along the hallway. The wallpaper was undeniably floral in pattern, though faded with age and vaguely nondescript, the way shapes on the horizon may sometimes look to someone suffering from nearsightedness; sections peeled at the corners and rolled up in brittle, curled, cigarette shapes. They were on the sixth floor, six doors down from the stand of elevators, and as he walked to the elevators he counted down the numbers on all the doors silently in his head as they gradually descended.
Downstairs, the lobby was quiet. Nick walked its length, conscious of the urgent rush of rain against the lobby skylights, and of his footfalls desperate and lonely on the linoleum. It was an old hotel, and the ground-level corridors were not open and spacious and brightly lit but, rather, small and serpentine and hard to find. At times, it was like wandering lost through the subconscious mind of a senile old man. Before a blank wall toward the rear of the lobby, Nick paused and, hands wedged in his pockets, looked up at the rough sketching there done with a series of graphite pencils, completed over the past two weeks. Completed? he thought. Is it really? Colorless, unfulfilled, the sketch was like the ghost of some long-dead reality. It was rough, raw. He stepped back to take it all in. He did not like it, he realized. He’d given it two days to sit, had thought he would like it, or at least would be contentedly pleased with it, but standing here now, he found he did not like it and was not pleased with it at all.
The sketch was of a quaint summer courtyard, not dissimilar to the hotel’s own courtyard, dense with magnolia blossoms and tropical fronds, abutted by a great sprawling sea and bisected by a winding stone path. There were people, various people, populating the landscape, but their evolution had been temporarily stunted at rough caricatures, their sexes indeterminable, their emotions nonexistent. He had sketched them then discarded them then sketched them again. He had sketched until his sketching hand ached and pained him and became so insubordinate that he could no longer work. Looking at the drawing now, he felt it was too naked to move forward, and he silently wondered when he would feel right—or if he would ever feel right—about moving ahead with the process.
Process, he thought. See that? It has become a process, some process. There is no art left here. It is mechanical; it is processed.
He stepped back around to the front of the lobby, suddenly wanting to smoke but knowing for certain it would be unwise to risk stepping outside to do so. Even the sprawling arcade that covered the gravel driveway would afford no protection against the biting wind and strong, driving rain. Still, he wanted a smoke. He’d seen people smoking in the bar, hadn’t he? Yet he couldn’t recall. For a brief moment, he entertained the notion of disabling one of the smoke alarms in the ground-floor bathroom off the lobby, but just the thought of it—and the sense of deviousness and, moreover, self-pity associated with the act—caused him to quickly brush the idea aside. Was he really going to become some lunatic disabling smoke alarms in hotel bathrooms just for a few quick drags?
He saw that the bell captain’s podium was left unattended. There was no clerk behind the front desk, either. The lobby was a mausoleum.
The hotel bar, on the other hand, was still somewhat awake, its limited patrons like defeated athletes who, following the onset of age and unavoidable physical deterioration, had grown bitter and nostalgic in their despondency. Nick straddled the stool nearest the wall of windows so he could listen to the rain at his back. Glancing around, he saw an elderly man with a rough-looking face and a comically bulbous nose seated at the opposite end of the bar, absently peeling the label from a bottle of domestic beer. Across the room at one of the tables sat another man, heavyset, intense and deeply Hispanic-looking, alone except for half a bottle of Chianti served traditionally in its woven basket. It was a good hotel that respected tradition and still served their Chiantis in woven baskets, Nick thought. Then, on the heels of that: Listen to me, sitting here and thinking to myself like some goddamn old man, or like some bitter old war veteran. It must be my old face making me think like this. What a lousy old bastard of a face. Looking up, he saw only the conga-line of bottles above the counter. There was no wall-length mirror behind the bar, and for that he was grateful.
Even at this hour, he could not stop his mind from thinking. It was difficult, he found, to summon the memory of the people they both had been—both together and individually—just a single day ago. Difficult…but not impossible: a
few glittering shards managed to survive deep within him, valued and sparkling like treasure at a moment when it seemed everything else had been demolished by the holocaust…but in uncovering these truths he felt himself torn between the reality of the world he now lived and the utter fakeness of all he wished the world could be. It was a child’s foolish daydream, and he was suddenly very much that child. Yet knowing this did not help anything. There was no getting beyond it. God, he wished he could get beyond it.
Don’t think, he told himself. Stop thinking. It was good advice.
He couldn’t stop.
The bartender eventually made his way down to the end of the bar and Nick ordered a Dewar’s and water.
“I can smoke in here, can’t I?”
“All you want,” the bartender said. “I’ll even get you an ashtray.”
Nick crooked around on his stool and watched the rain pelt the wall of windows. The trees in the courtyard, black and panicked, shook in the tempest: sinners at the foot of an angry god.
“I know how you feel. I’ve been here two years now,” the bartender said, “and I still can’t sleep when it pours like this. They say it takes some time getting used to. I wonder if I have that kind of time.”
“So this is normal?”
“Last summer, we had such a storm blow in that the winds uprooted some of the trees from the front quad and pushed one through those big plate-glass windows in the lobby. The original windows were stained glass and there were jagged little bits of colored glass all over the place. We were finding pieces of colored glass for the next few months. Not to mention all the stuff from outside the wind brought in. You’d be surprised how well bits of glass can hide.”
“I can believe it.”
“Well, at least you had a few good days before the storm came,” the bartender said, setting the drink on the bar. “At least you had a chance to enjoy the beach some, too.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nick said. “The beach.” He sipped his drink then took a deep, healthy swallow. The scotch tasted calm and smoky and the alcohol was quite liberally distributed. “I’d forgotten what it felt like to be out on the water. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen the ocean.”
“You can’t beat the ocean, man,” the bartender said. “I take my boat out on the water every single night. It’s especially impressive at night. Really puts into perspective how small we all are.”
“Yeah, we’re specks.”
“Lost little specks. Like broken bits of glass.”
“I just got real tired of sand without water,” Nick said. “I’m tired of hot and I’m tired of yellow and I’m tired of dry.”
“That’s why the ocean’s good. You’ll see it again. The storm will pass,” the bartender said. “Beginning of summer, it’s always like this. Sometimes it’s worse, too, like I said, when the tree was thrown through the windows. But it’s normal. It’s like some introduction. Wouldn’t be summer without the first big summer storm to set things in motion.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Wonder if it’ll affect the cicadas.”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“Ever seen them? I never have. Sort of curious.”
“Never seen them,” Nick said.
“They’re supposed to be enormous. That they come out and swarm all over everything. Kill the trees, lay eggs in the bark…”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“So how much longer will you be here, Lieutenant?”
“Until I’m finished,” Nick told him.
“Will it take you long to finish now?”
“I don’t know. I can never really tell until it’s nearly done.”
“Every morning I look at it, and then I look again every night when I close this place down to see what you’ve added to it throughout each day. Past few days it hasn’t changed much. I just figured you might be done. Are you finished with the sketching part?”
“With the sketching part,” Nick said. “Yeah, I think so.”
“It’s really damn impressive. I mean, I’m no artist, you know, but it’s certainly something to see. You have a talent.”
“Thank you.”
“So will you start painting it soon, do you think?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Unless my lousy goddamn hand refuses to cooperate.”
“Is it giving you trouble?” the bartender said, but would not look at the hand.
“It’s all right for now. Sometimes it aches and goes stupid and useless on me, but right now, sitting here, the damn thing is fine. It’s working with it that’s the tough part. And, really, the sketching is the hardest part. It’s the fine details that make the hand weak.” It certainly was the fine details, Nick understood, although he was new in understanding all of it. The mural was the first thing he’d attempted to paint since coming back from Iraq.
“Well, the sketch looks really damn good, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not so happy with it.”
“Seriously?”
“It lacks nuance.”
“Oh,” said the bartender.
“You know anything about nuance?”
“Not in paintings,” the bartender admitted. “No.”
“Nuance,” Nick explained, “is what makes it all real and worthwhile. It’s the details. It’s the things we incorporate that you need to see and experience firsthand to even know they exist in order to recreate them and give them a sense of honesty.”
“Hell, I’m sure there’s nuance, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not so sure,” Nick said. “And can we quash the lieutenant business?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. D’Nofrio.”
“My name is Nick. You’re just about the same age as me, Roger, for Christ’s sake.”
“All right,” the bartender said, then added, “Nick.”
“Forget it. I didn’t mean to jump on your back. Call me whatever you want.”
“It’s fine.”
He drank some more scotch and could tell the bartender was thinking something but he could not tell what it was. “Come on, Roger. I’m just sulking here.” He tried hard to sound pleasant. “Don’t they sulk much back where you’re from?”
“Milwaukee,” Roger said. “And yes, they sulk. But it’s Wisconsin. They have a hell of a lot more to sulk about.”
“All right, all right,” Nick said, bested. “I’m just giving you a hard time because I’m tired and dissatisfied with the sketch and, anyway, my hand’s been hurting like a bastard lately. Come on—no more back jumping.”
“You didn’t jump on my back,” Roger said. He was tall, very tall, with close-cropped, sand-colored hair and severe blue eyes—eyes that were much steadier than Nick’s own. “I didn’t feel any jump, sir.”
“Good for you, then.”
Roger, the bartender, chuckled good-naturedly.
“Tell me why I feel like I’m fifty years old, Roger.”
“I think sometimes you look twice that.”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you’re just tired.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, nodding. “Tired. Good. Always tired. What a son of a bitch, right?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a little cold in here.”
“Is it?”
“Do you feel it?”
“I think it’s warm, actually.”
“Oh.” He felt a skip in the groove of his own warped consciousness. “Are you married, Roger?”
“Sir?”
“Are you married?” he said again.
“I was at one time,” said Roger.
“How long?”
“Seven years.”
“Wow. That’s some time. You’re young, I mean.”
“We married very young.”
“On purpose?”
“I’m sorry—?”
“What I meant was, there weren’t any, ah, extenuating circumstances, if you…well, you know…”
“Oh, no. No.” Roger said, “She wasn’t pregnant.”
; “Did you love her?”
“Of course.”
“Was she pretty?”
“She looked just like you would want a wife to look.”
“Did you have any kids together?”
“One.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
“This is like extracting teeth, Roger. What’s her name, this girl of yours?”
“Faye,” said Roger, suddenly digging around in his rear pocket. “She’s the reason I moved to the Carolinas.” He produced a worn leather wallet, flipped it open, and slid out a creased, dog-eared photograph of a beautiful, dark-haired, smiling girl.
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Roger said, looking at the picture as if to commit it to memory. He then slid it back into his wallet and tucked the wallet away in his pocket.
“Children need a good, healthy place to grow up, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” Roger agreed.
“And you’re no longer married?”
“No, sir,” the bartender said.
“Why?”
“It didn’t take.”
“It didn’t take?”
