by Ann Beattie
Royal took a deep breath and exhaled, looked around the room where their suitcases sat—did Kegan putting his duffel on the sofa mean he was claiming the foldout, and Dick and Royal could share the king? Royal suddenly decided what the hell and took out his cell phone and called the number Yuliana had given him. Good she’d written her name: Who’d know how to spell that?
An hour later, after he’d showered and bought a pack of American Spirits and smoked two, Yuliana—as arranged—came out the unmarked back door of Titters and led him by the hand (bony fingers!) around the corner, opening a side door of the hotel there and turning on the lights, then leading him through the laundry room (what the fuck!) to a Murphy-bed sort of contraption: a converted closet with a mattress on some sort of platform shoved three quarters of the way inside it, and dusty navy-blue curtains stretching over the mattress from ceiling to floor, held down by hooks in the concrete. Inside the weird bed/tent, she told him to lie down, then unfastened her bra, a cheap purple lace thing that did nothing for him, zero, then she sat on his stomach and told him about her family (her “famblee”): her brother; the violent father (of course). All the while, laundry machines shook and rattled, and every so often someone slammed a door and Yuliana held her breath, though it didn’t seem like anyone entered the laundry room. He told her about his family—the truth, even. That his girlfriend had left him. His mother had died of bone cancer. His older brother ran a corporation in New York and was a big success: He kept his distance, Brandt was in A.A. and thought much social contact with anybody who wasn’t—with the exception of Brits, for some reason Royal couldn’t fathom—was potentially dangerous, but he looked out for Royal and was generous, and even if his brother didn’t have a great sense of humor, his secretary Jacki did. The only lie he told Yuliana was that he’d come to the Keys to go fishing.
“When I first get here,” she said, “I’m thinking dolphin are fish like Flipper, and I can’t understand who would eat Flipper. But they just call this fish that, you know, as fisherman. Nobody is eating the nice guy from the movie.” He asked why they didn’t go to her place instead of some closet in a hotel laundry room. It depressed him to be on the dirty, uncomfortable little bed when anybody might walk in. Also, she hadn’t yet mentioned money. “I don’t have bed until six A.M.,” she said. “You know warm bed? Three people share bed, everybody eight hours.” He’d never heard of such a thing, but it had the ring of truth to it. He suggested they leave the closet and go to his hotel room, figuring he could leave a note on the door for Kegan or Dick to get lost for an hour or so, if they even came back while he was going at it with Yuliana. The idea didn’t much excite him, though: She seemed young and asexual. He suspected that she, too, might enjoy a pizza and a biplane ride more.
“You know the Hallelujah Chorus?” he asked her. He was making a point not to touch her in this ridiculous setup; his hands folded below his collarbones grasped only each other. “Okay,” she said reluctantly. At first he thought that she hadn’t understood but was afraid to say so, but then she said: “Not knowing it by heart. You can hear that at some churches here.”
“How old are you?” he said.
“Twenty,” she said, too quickly, he thought.
“And how much is my night with you going to cost me?”
She shrugged.
“You don’t have a price?”
“I have prices, but I like you.”
“That really isn’t possible, Yuliana. I’m a fifty-two-year-old guy with love handles, and I stink five minutes after taking a shower. I didn’t shave today. It’s been a stressful day of roughing up, tying up, a former friend who cheated my partners and me out of some money.” He suddenly had an idea that did excite him. “Would you be up for going to his house, maybe you and me putting on a little show for him? After I duct-tape his mouth?”
“You are criminal?” she asked.
“Who’s going to admit to being a criminal?” he said. “I’m an executive. I work in New York City.”
“Then I charge more, because I never see you again,” she pouted. The cheap brassiere dangled loosely in front of her breasts.
“What if you don’t charge me anything, and I give you a really beautiful piece of jewelry?”
“Crap jewelry,” she shot back.
He smiled. “Maybe you should look at it first,” he said. “Let’s get out of here, take a stroll, check out how my former frat brother’s doing, the former head of the IFC, you know what that is? I didn’t think so. Fraternity council. A Jefferson Scholar in his youth, now a loser tied up in a La-Z-Boy. Maybe the two of us can interject some fun into his life, put on a little show.”
“I only do private,” she said.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, shifting his weight onto one hip to stand up. “You see what you think of my crap ring, and if you like it, it’s yours. Then maybe we’ll talk about your moving to New York.”
“Why did you say about Hallelujah Chorus?” she asked, standing, the blue curtain hanging just behind her. One of the washing machines clicked off loudly, sending a vibration through his legs.
“Because I think that should be our special song, Yuliana. Because if you stay in this country, you’re going to hear it at Christmas for the rest of your life.”
“Not hear it just in this country,” she said.
“True,” he said, “wherever you go, every time you hear it, you’ll think of me. You’ll tell your grandchildren: Once, when Grandma was an exotic dancer in Key West, she had sex with a man from New York who gave her a beautiful ring and, being a materialistic girl, she fell in love with him, and their special song was the Hallelujah Chorus.”
“You think I am that kind of girl?”
“Wait till you see the ring,” he said, fingering his pants pocket, where he’d thought to drop it, since that pocket seemed safer than his shirt’s. “Allow me to introduce myself, Yuliana. I’m a man of wealth and taste.”
She frowned, dropping her long thin legs to the floor as if dropping oars into water, then leaning forward and standing. He said, “You don’t know what that is, do you? It’s another song, almost as famous as the Hallelujah Chorus. But it was certainly before your time. It was the soundtrack in another lifetime of mine. Back when I was young and never thought I’d have money to lose, let alone tie up a guy who fucked me out of my money, who once walked half the Appalachian Trail with me, which was a considerable distance, and who tutored me in History of Diplomacy, and who used to be one of my best friends. And if you don’t mind, I’d really like to get out of the laundry room now.”
“Okay, follow me,” she said. He watched her walking. She had a very nice ass. She went to the back door, unbolted it, then turned to him. “Let’s see so beautiful ring,” she said suddenly.
He looked at her and wondered if she was as old as twenty. He’d be in big trouble if she was Belle’s age. The room they’d been in smelled of detergent, and the fumes caught up with them as the door opened, its smell even more overpowering as it was diluted with the salt air. She locked the door from the outside. He reached in his pocket and withdrew the little bag, carefully removed the ring, and held it out to her under the ugly yellowish overhead lights in the parking lot. He held it upright, between thumb and first finger. “My God,” she said.
He said, “Try it on. We’ll walk over to my former friend’s place. I think you and I can work something out.”
* * *
Dick left Titters last, after the second lap dance by the same girl, who had a fire-breathing dragon blowing down a tree or something on her thigh, wandering Duval Street for a while, then going to a movie at the Tropic Cinema, an art deco place with a statue of Marilyn Monroe outside and a concession stand where he bought a bag of popcorn and a glass of wine. The movie was about some guy who went crazy, an ordinary sort of guy in some nowhere place who got fixated on building a bomb shelter to protect himself and his family from whatever coming disaster he feared. As he watched, he thought: Imagine being Reynolds.
Imagine losing your house, your friends, being on the verge of bankruptcy. There was no excuse for what he’d done, but what if he might still be sitting in the chair? They really couldn’t leave him tied up and just drive away the next day. It wasn’t like his housekeeper was going to find him or anything. He’d looked so wretched, with the prophylactic on his head like one of those infant caps, a buttercup or something, a big rubber nipple pointing up at the ceiling. Nothing that had happened had been motivated by his desire to screw them. Or not directly. What he’d done was wrong, but his own life was more of a mess than any punishment they could dole out. And, after all, it was almost Christmas. In the movie, the nice-guy-crazy-man was climbing out of a big hole that had been bulldozed outside his house. His shocked wife and deaf kid stared in amazement. The problems people had were awful. Reynolds himself had been hospitalized for depression twice that Dick knew of, once during their school years, when he had his choice of either being suspended for a semester or going into a substance-abuse program, though they didn’t call it anything so lofty back then. Another time after he seemed to be doing well, building strip malls in upstate New York, where his parents lived. He’d been in his thirties then, with two failed marriages behind him. Dick remembered Mrs. Reynolds’s face, her eyes narrowed with worry, asking him in the corridor of the university hospital if he thought her son was going to be all right. Then, as ever, lying came easily to him: he’d told Mrs. Reynolds that her son would be fine, and her eyes had opened just enough that he could see their color. Their color, he remembered all these years later, had been green. It was wrong to leave Reynolds tied up, Dick thought—even if he felt more charitable toward the world only because of the fifty-dollar blow job he’d gotten in the backseat of a parked car with painted windows from a German girl who was going off work at Titters. Reynolds didn’t have the money to give them. From the look of his crappy rental, he didn’t have the money for much, though about now he might really be regretting bringing in the one big comfortable chair.
Dick pushed his empty plastic glass under his seat, along with the empty popcorn bag, and walked out of the movie and back to the rental car, pushed a few buttons that eventually opened the door. He got in, turned on the overhead light, and consulted a map of Key West on a place mat they’d gotten at the bar they’d stopped at on the way to Kegan’s that for some reason he’d folded and taken with them.
Dick drove back toward Catholic Lane. He arrived at Reynolds’s house to see it all lit up, the only house on the street that wasn’t dark: A single strand of red Christmas lights wound around the big cactus outside, but the house itself was eerily aglow, like some Thomas Kinkade nightmare. So Reynolds had made his escape. Of course he had. What was he going to do, sit there forever or struggle free? Dick was proud of Reynolds for slipping the bungee cords. He continued toward the front door, prepared to apologize, to hope something could be worked out about the lost money in the New Year.
The music from inside vibrated the walkway. Behind him, two people on bikes rang their bells and waved as if they knew him. Seasonal goodwill! He smiled. Then he walked a bit farther and looked into the house through the front window, assuming that what he saw must be Reynolds and some other people dancing. A party, after being berated and tied up, humiliated? But no: He was looking at Royal, naked, who looked like he was doing an impersonation of a Jerry Lewis telethon. Reynolds was still tied to the chair, his eyes widening as they connected with Dick’s, the bottom half of Reynolds’s face silver, which Dick realized must be duct tape. It was the Hallelujah Chorus—“For unto us a child is born,” the glass panes vibrating in the window—and Royal was chasing some scrawny naked girl around the room, shrieking as he feinted and sprang forward, arms waving madly, every bit as energetic as he’d been back when he played basketball at UVA, and it was so strange, there was no other way to describe it, it was so strange. Here the two of them were, down from New York City, Royal naked and roaring, some woman trying to escape him or, it seemed pretty obvious, pretending to be trying to get away, so that when they collided and fell to the floor, it seemed like part of their game, all of it choreographed. Reynolds’s head, as his neck twisted from side to side, seemed like a metronome helping Royal keep up the frantic tempo. Dick had seen plenty of weird shit before, plenty of it, but now he felt implicated, implicated at the same time he was excluded, so that when Reynolds’s wild eyes met his again, he closed his own. The image that appeared behind his eyes was of Reynolds’s mother, back when he and her son were undergraduates, a woman that, at the time, he’d assumed must be the generic age of all grown-ups, but who he now thought must have been only in her forties, asking whether her son would be all right.
What was he supposed to do? Go in?
* * *
When Royal came back to the hotel room, fumbling his key in the lock sometime after three in the morning, Dick sprang up from bed and tackled him without even thinking. Royal stank of sweat and alcohol and sex. He toppled easily. As he went down, cursing, Dick had a flash-forward in which he was fighting Royal, on top of him on the floor, pounding him. Which would be a different version of what he’d seen through the window, but if he did that, he’d be as debased as Royal. When was there ever going to be any sanity? Why would he fly at his friend like a mountain lion jumping on its prey? He scared himself. But action preceded conscious thought, and he’d been asleep, or passed out after the two double whiskey sours he’d drunk in a bar after he’d slunk away from Reynolds’s place. Where was Kegan? And was Reynolds at least untied, for God’s sake? Dick felt humiliated at their excess. What exactly were they trying to prove? That they could recover money that didn’t exist anymore? Kegan’s insistent calls from Islamorada to both of them in New York had gotten them to Florida, all right—but now, in the middle of the night, almost dawn, Dick had come close to punching out his best friend, and Kegan—where was he? Why wasn’t he leading the battle, if he was so hungry for revenge?
* * *
He was dead, but Dick and Royal had no way of knowing that. Royal’s own thoughts had entirely to do with why his old frat buddy had tackled him that way when all he’d been doing was coming back to their hotel room after a night of animated but very mediocre sex, though it had been pretty interesting being observed by the guy who had fucked them over: Reynolds being forced to close his eyes or watch Royal fucking Yuliana, some random whore who now had what should have been Sharon’s ring—because, hey, he wasn’t a liar. Yuliana was going to turn out to be the liar. She wasn’t going to call him in New York, no way. Did he believe what she’d said as she’d put on her ugly underwear, pulled on her dress, fastened her belt? He’d offered to walk her home, wherever home might be, back to her warm bed. This mediocre lay, this person with whom he had nothing in common, might move to New York, with its piles of dirty snow, the freezing winds off the Hudson whipping between buildings? No. She’d stay amid palm trees, in what was called by the tourist board “Paradise,” wearing her not-at-all-hard-won sparkler.
* * *
The Japanese tourists on Dick Dock called the police when they saw the body facedown, slapping against a pylon. They wouldn’t have been there themselves except that they’d gotten lost searching for the Southernmost Point.
* * *
Half inch by half inch, Reynolds bumped the chair to the front window and knocked his head against the glass so hard when the mail lady finally arrived the next day, it took seventeen stitches to close the gash.
* * *
Yuliana, who was eighteen, moved to New York, studied English in night school, went to Pilates class, renamed herself Julie, and became a well-paid hostess at a restaurant with an unlisted number in the Meatpacking District. On her nineteenth birthday, she married Royal in a wedding paid for by his brother that took place atop the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was the first time Royal met the famous Jacki, who was plump and fortyish, with hair conventionally called “highlighted” that made her look like a jack-o’-lantern, if a jack-o’-lantern had hair. Kegan’s
dog, renamed Islamorada and called Isle, attended the ceremony and the reception. A leash was never necessary; the dog instantly obeyed a firm verbal command. Jacki, by previous agreement, would be taking the dog while Royal and Julie honeymooned on Mustique: A two-week honeymoon, paid for by Brandt, but when the honeymoon couple went to the airport at the end of their two weeks in a beach house with French doors that opened onto a private patio with a hot tub and a keyboard and bench, they were approached by a dark-skinned person in a clown suit that didn’t quite cover his forearms, his features made antic with white face paint, who ran up to Royal and unrolled a scroll saying that Brandt (called “Mr. Brandt” throughout) had rented the house they’d been staying in for another week—they should continue to enjoy their honeymoon. He and Julie laughed and laughed. Two hundred white orchids at the reception, six brass cages of white doves, now this! A year and a half later they had twin boys, and the year after that, Julie left him. A private detective found her immediately, crammed into some other Moldovan’s one-bedroom Hell’s Kitchen apartment with their babies and the other Moldovan’s daughter, but Royal didn’t ask her to come back. Jacki took care of the details of the divorce—Jacki, who now lived with Kegan’s dog in her Park Slope apartment, renamed, after her favorite movie actor, Penn. Of course, this was no ordinary dog and never had been. In his adaptability, he had proved to be flexible, intelligent, empathetic. What human being could hope to be more? His story follows.
