by Sean Rowe
I was about to say it would be even cheaper than that to just spend the night with the guy, but maybe he snored or something.
“He’s going out to L.A. with Tim in the morning,” she added. “I’m supposed to wake him up at nine and put him on a plane. Tim’s trying to dazzle him into producing a movie.”
“You’re not going?”
“I don’t fly.”
Some tourists came down the steps to get in a taxi, and I had to move to the side.
“You’re welcome to join me for a drink,” she offered. “I think I’d like to know who you are exactly.”
So I introduced myself and sat down at the table. Julia Bonnell was who I was sitting with.
“Are you a cop, Matthew?”
“I run the security department for a cruise line.”
“So you’re an ex-cop.”
“I’m an ex-FBI agent. I retired three years ago.”
“You look pretty young to be retired from anything. Didn’t you like it?”
“I liked parts of it. Toward the end I became a supervisor, which was probably a mistake. It got to be like an office job.”
“I see you’re missing an important digit.”
She was looking at my right hand resting on the table, the stump of the index finger. I put my hand in my lap. “A bad afternoon with a garbage disposal.”
“Show me,” she said.
I reached across the table. She took my thumb in one hand and held my fingers in the other, narrowing her eyes.
“An intern did this on a busy night. You can see here where he didn’t pull the flap quite tight enough as he was sewing it up.”
When she turned my hand over, I smiled.
“What?”
“I’ve never had my palm read,” I said.
“I see long life and good fortune. And healing problems.”
“The bone got infected.”
She let go and leaned back in her chair. “Try an alligator bite next time.”
“An alligator bite?”
“Garbage disposals don’t leave clean shear marks. You need to work on your fibbing.”
The waiter came by, and Julia ordered a drink.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what were you doing at the Delano earlier tonight?” she asked.
“I was supposed to meet a friend at the bar. He never showed up.”
“He?”
“Yeah. Another retired agent. We used to work together. He wanted some feedback on an investment we’ve been looking at.” This was mostly true, I figured.
She thought about that. Then she smiled. “You’re sweet.”
“I am?”
“I just figured it out. You don’t have any money with you.”
“I’ve got about a dollar and forty cents.”
“You want a drink, but you wouldn’t be caught dead letting a woman pick up the tab.”
“A considerably younger woman.”
“You’ve been sitting there thinking how you’d like to pour yourself a nice big slug out of that bottle, haven’t you?”
“The management would frown.”
I couldn’t get her in focus. She seemed very direct, but it felt like was she was coming around corners from odd directions.
“Let’s go upstairs and I’ll get us some ice and glasses,” she suggested. “That way you can be the one who’s buying. How does that sound?”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Why not?”
“You hardly know me. It’s late.”
“This is how people get to know each other. I’m just inviting you up to my room for a drink.”
Not defensive, just saying it like it was.
WHATEVER I IMAGINED was going to happen, it turned out to be something different. When we got to Julia’s room, I had a sense of how they built things in the fifties, which is to say, small: two double beds, a kitchenette through one door. The thing that caught my eye was a big brown case in one corner near a set of doors that led to a narrow balcony. It was a case for some kind of musical instrument, with a handle on the side and three metal clasps. Across the room I noticed a stethoscope hanging from a hook on the door.
Julia went to get ice while I looked around and found a pair of those brittle plastic cups they put in hotel bathrooms, all covered with saran wrap. When she came back, I poured the drinks.
She took a cello out of the big case and started to play. After about two minutes someone pounded on the floor upstairs, and she opened her eyes and stopped.
“I guess it is late,” she said.
“I liked that. What was it?”
“Part of a sonata. It’s by a Hungarian guy named Zoltán Kodály.”
We went out onto the balcony. Two miles offshore we could see where all the ships were anchored while the channel was getting cleared.
“It seems like there’s a lot of boats out there doing nothing,” she said.
“The port closed down for a couple days. They’re just waiting until it opens again.”
She nodded. “I heard something about that. There was an explosion.”
“Yes.”
She took a sip from her glass. “Bourbon has gotten fashionable. My father used to drink Maker’s Mark back when it was just whiskey. He was from Tennessee.”
“Yeah? My dad was from Kentucky. A coal miner, he and his brothers. They all drank Jim Beam.”
“Southern gentlemen,” she said, and we clicked our glasses together.
“You said ‘used to.’”
“He died when I was nineteen,” she said. “He was a music teacher. That’s what concert pianists become when they don’t quite make it as concert pianists. He and his wife adopted me.”
“Well, you’ve followed in his footsteps. With the music, I mean.”
“I try to be a pragmatist, Matt. The music is just for fun. How long were you married?”
“How do you know I was?”
She laughed. “Lots of reasons. One is you’ve been wearing a wedding band until just recently. There’s still a circle of white skin around your ring finger.”
I held up my hand and saw she was right. “We got married right after college. She died two years ago.”
“Kids?”
“No.”
“No?”
“When the time came, she wasn’t able to. And I didn’t want any. So it worked out.”
“Did it?”
“Well, it worked out how it worked out.”
She didn’t say anything for a time. Then she sounded angry.
“You think she was a saint, don’t you, Matt?”
“She was a good person. I couldn’t find much fault with her.”
“Maybe you stopped looking very hard.”
“It was a quiet marriage.”
“What does that mean, ‘a quiet marriage’? Was she happy?”
“Toward the end? Of course not. She was dying of cancer.”
“Not toward the end. At all.”
I didn’t answer. I wondered why we were talking about any of this.
“So no kids, huh?”
I looked at her. She had her back up against the balcony railing, watching me. And now I was angry. Who was she to ask about my wife, what we had had together? Who was anyone to ask about that?
And more to the point, maybe: what the hell was I doing here, on this balcony where I had no business being? Trying to get laid? Christ, what a joke. I hadn’t been on a date in twenty-five years, and I wasn’t particularly good at it then. As for sex, I could barely remember what it was like. Or not sex; fucking wasn’t what I had begun to forget. You couldn’t: it catcalled and smirked and beat a dinner gong from the cover of every magazine; it cut farts and lit them on fire and shot itself out of a cannon on all five hundred channels of every TV set nowadays. No, I mean the edges of it, not the outright act; what it’s like to hold someone. The ache of that and the sheer weirdness of it, the terrible nakedness you feel skin to skin with someone you care about. The mystery parts.<
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“She got pregnant our first year together, before we were married,” I said, surprised I was saying it. “It was bad timing. Money was tight. I’m not sure we knew we were going to stay together at that point, anyway. She wouldn’t have an abortion, even if we could have found a way to do that. You have to understand how different it was then.”
“So?”
“So we decided—she agreed to give up the child. I told her there would be plenty of time later for kids, but it didn’t work out that way. It was a girl. It could have been you.” I looked at her and wished it was.
She went inside, and I looked over my shoulder as she walked toward the kitchenette, watching the way she moved in her jeans, no bra, the T-shirt pulling tight.
“Do you want some coke?” she asked.
I was going to explain that soft drinks hurt my teeth, but she was in the kitchen doorway holding a Baggie with a half inch of white powder. She sat down at a desk against the wall and cut out four lines and went to work on one without waiting for my answer.
“I didn’t really expect to see you again,” she said. “Or at least not so soon. I wasn’t very discreet the first time, was I?”
“I’m not complaining.”
She rolled her eyes and then stood up and offered me the chair and a length of soda straw. I shook my head.
“The sugar baron is beginning to bore me,” she said. “Not beginning, in fact. So I’m looking for the next gig. That’s not an advertisement, I’m just trying to explain how I’m a little crazy lately. This is awkward, isn’t it? I normally keep my socializing separate from my work.”
“When’s this gig up?”
“Tomorrow. I’m going to take a few weeks off. I’d like to go someplace where there’s snow.”
She seemed content to stand there, sipping the bourbon and looking at me, swaying slightly, like she could still hear the echo of music.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” she said, glancing at the table, giving an exaggerated sniff.
“What about after your vacation?”
She shrugged. “I have a couple of offers.”
She was looking at me carefully now, her gray eyes sparkling.
“At the Delano, we were having drinks at the inside bar, and I saw you get on the elevator. You went to the fifteenth floor.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Later on you came back down with some people, including a certain Jack Fontana.”
“That’s where your next gig is coming from?”
“I like to know a little bit about who I’m dealing with. Before I deal with them.”
“What’s he offering?”
“Union scale.” She smiled. “He mentioned a real-estate project that’s about to pay off. So?”
“Fontana’s OK,” I said. “We mostly knew each other years ago. I’m not sure where his head’s at these days.”
She kept looking at me, her pupils seeming even darker, the irises full of light. I wanted to touch her.
“Where did you meet him?” she asked.
I thought about that. It would have been when we were boys, eight or nine, at a crossroads town called Etna Furnace.
“He’s my brother,” I told her. “My stepbrother.”
She had been on her way to taking another sip from her drink, but the glass stopped in midair. “Oh, shit,” she said.
“Yeah.”
At the door I took her hand. As she was letting go, she ran her fingers along my wrist in a way that was better than any kiss.
“See you around, Matthew Shannon,” she said. “Let me know how that investment turns out. Yours and Jack’s.”
I walked down the hall; then I went back and knocked. She opened the door and laughed when she heard what I wanted.
She went inside the room and came back, handing me the whole Baggie.
ON THE WAY DOWN in the elevator I had a bump, then another for good measure. She had set me thinking. On the street outside I walked and thought about things and kept coming back to my wife, how we had lived together, why it seemed so important. The mornings, for instance, something as simple as that. I had liked the mornings best, the hour we had together before we went to work, waking up and getting in each other’s way in the bathroom or getting dressed, that private lack of privacy. We were always together that way, whenever we weren’t working, and our off-hours weren’t about lounging on the couch with our clothes off. We did things; we got things done; it was a partnership. She was better at certain things, and I was better at others, and some of those things were backward from what you might expect. I liked washing dishes, for example, and didn’t particularly mind vacuuming floors. Vacuuming reminded me of plowing; so I would vacuum away and pretend I was a giant, plowing. On the other hand, I didn’t enjoy cooking things on a grill; I could never get it quite right, so she did that. And lots of other things. When I had to practice at the firing range, she would go with me. She was amazing with a shotgun, a lot better than me; she was better than I was the first time she picked one up.
How would I explain that to Julia Bonnell, even if I wanted to? And if you didn’t explain the whole thing, every part, why get into it at all? I sat down on a bench and let my mind run.
She liked flowers. It sounds hokey, but she did, and I mean really liked them. She knew all their names, and that wasn’t any easy trick because Miami’s full of oddball plants—bromeliads, for example, as big and bright as the birds out in the Everglades. She wasn’t as good with the birds—spoonbills, purple gallinules, night herons—but damn near.
When you work for the Bureau, you start early, seven a.m., and work late. The mornings are like a contest, especially with the younger guys. Younger gals, too, I should say, because by the time I retired there were quite a few of those, which at first seemed strange but later I thought was a good thing. You get together in the squad room, go over the duty roster and get ready for the day, check weapons and drink coffee and shoot the bull, the young ones all acting bold and pretending they didn’t wish they were still home in bed instead of wearing a suit and a gun. Toward the end, I was in charge of some of them, and after a long weekend I would ask them how they had spent it. One of them might have a boat, and they’d all be out on Biscayne Bay, fishing, or at the clubs up in Lauderdale, drinking, chasing tail. Very occasionally one of them, maybe looking to score some points, would ask me what I’d done. And they would try not to laugh when I told them. Yes, I took my wife to Fairchild Tropical Garden. What, and looked at flowers? That’s right. Trees, too, all kinds. The guy who started the place, some rich cat, he collected them from all over the world. A part of the garden even had cactuses, which I couldn’t believe the first time I saw them because it rains every day in Miami in the summer. But there they were.
How could you explain that? Or the zoo? We went to the zoo all the time. I damn sure wasn’t going to tell anyone in the squad room about that, but we did go, and we both liked it, although neither of us was too keen on reptiles. At night, in bed, we would play a game, pretending to be different animals. We would make all sorts of sounds, cracking each other up, until things got serious, and we sort of shifted into the old human sounds, the human-animal sounds that go along with all that.
She had been really shy. For the first couple of years we were together, she would wait until I turned the lights off before she got undressed and slipped into bed. But she liked everything between us, I could tell by the sounds she made; softly and sometimes not so softly at all. There’s no faking that.
And here’s the thing: sometimes, after she fell asleep, I would close the bathroom door and look in the mirror and ask myself what there was to love in that? I was sure no movie star. My shoulders were thick and narrow. My hair was a sandy color that was no color at all, nothing anyone would remember, and always too thin to stay in place very long after I combed it; and my eyes were the color of mud puddles. I had, it seemed to me, too much in the way of fur on my chest, and my legs were bony, the one polka-dotted with
shrapnel scars. I mean, why would a woman like any of that? But she seemed to. No, she did. And she had been the homecoming queen of Frostproof High; she was beautiful.
She wasn’t one of these touchy-feely people, but at odd times, out of the blue, when we would be walking together, I would be surprised to feel her take my hand. It was like what happened on a lot of mornings: she would put both her arms around my shoulders and look into my eyes, not saying anything; or some mornings just lay her head against my neck and stand there in the kitchen. Not every day, but more mornings than not. I would wait for it. I came to live for that, secretly, a part of me waiting for it to stop happening, but it never did. I played a game with myself, counting the days before it would happen again. Sometimes there would be three or four or five even, but never a week—never. It was just something she did for her own reasons, and I never asked her about it.
She had never seen snow or been on a ship. She hadn’t been around as much as I had, but she sure had read a lot more. I liked to read too, even if I didn’t see the point in fiction. To judge from the number of bookstores, we were the only two bookworms in Miami, at least when we first moved here. There was one store, though, Books & Books, that a guy had started, and he hung in there. We went to it a lot, and we both loved it.
Once in a while we’d decide to watch TV—we owned one mainly so people wouldn’t think we were strange—and she would bring me her hairbrush. I would sit on the couch, and she would sit on the floor between my legs, and I would brush her hair. I was terrible at it at first, but I got better after I realized she wasn’t so delicate as all that, and it was OK to pull on her hair, at least some. Her hair was a whole world. I dreamed about it all the time.
How could I explain that to someone like Julia Bonnell? Or to someone even younger, say the club kids I had seen on the street when I walked here, the ravers and body-piercers? They swam in a different sea. Maybe we all did; six billion souls, six billion seas.
Which one did I swim in now? With her gone, nothing was left between me and the conclusions I’d drawn that I wished I hadn’t. I remembered a map of the moon I had seen, with the name of the biggest crater spelled out in letters so official looking you almost missed the joke: the Sea of Fertility. I thought I understood the guy behind the telescope somewhere who’d named it that.
