Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  Without realizing it, they have been waiting, not for a moment alone, but for a party, a crowded room—any situation where at last they can achieve some connection across the tumult of bodies and suggest escape. It is Britta’s birthday. There are streamers and hats. It has all been Sabine’s doing. She throws the party at lunch beside the motel pool so Bill can attend. She isn’t sure who else will come, but it turns out she need not have worried. Everyone shows up right on time. Britta sits in her usual seat in the laundry hut, a few of the motel’s guests round out the occasion, and it feels strangely comfortable.

  “K-O-S-C-I-U-S-Z-K-O,” the bookseller from room 9 says. “It’s Polish, spelled like the hero of the Revolutionary War.”

  “Oh,” says a woman. “I don’t know anything about Polish history.”

  An old man with a liver-spotted forehead pats the bookseller on the knee. “I think it’s an excellent name.”

  Slices of watermelon lie on a plastic tray atop the washing machine, and an old record player has been pulled out of the storage room. From it comes the voice of a woman who seems to have lost everything.

  Bill is trying to read the name on the spinning record when the old man passes by.

  “Piaf,” he says. “Edith Piaf.”

  Bill and Sabine step away from the party without really meaning to. He has a plate with nothing on it but a little icing. She has an empty wineglass. It is fall, spring, summer, winter; it makes no difference.

  “How is Frankie?”

  “Frankie B or Frankie K?”

  “Either.”

  They’re walking down Gulf Drive. He throws his plate in a neighbor’s garbage can.

  “Frankie B got a letter from his lady saying she hopes he gets out soon so she can sue his ass for nonpayment. ‘That’s some girlfriend,’ another guy said, and Frankie said, That’s my wife,’ and he got in a fight over it, and he’s not working in the laundry no more. He said he had an ulcer, but when they couldn’t find that, he said it was his tooth that was hurting. I watched him eat all through dinner, though, and he doesn’t look like his tooth is hurting.”

  Her profile has become a fixed shape at the edge of his vision. He stops to inspect it, and she stops, too. This moment before they kiss—of which he will recall only the damp odor of champagne, of which she will recall only the taste of tobacco—this is the oxygen of love.

  “What about Frankie K?” she says.

  “I don’t speak to him anymore.”

  A little while later, they sit beside the pool with the liver-spotted man between them. The man is going into the hospital in Bradenton tomorrow for an operation.

  “They used to have to crack your chest right in half. That’s how they did it to my daddy.”

  “Is that right?” Bill is watching Sabine, who sits across from him avoiding his gaze and sipping from a glass of champagne.

  “Now they just go in through the back. I’ll be home with my feet up next morning. Peggy? What do they call it?” His daughter, an old woman in her own right, sits nearby, but she either hasn’t heard him or chooses not to respond. “Lazaruscopic,” he says. “Something like that.”

  Sabine looks at Bill, then turns to say goodbye to a departing guest.

  “That’s modern medicine.”

  The next week, she forgets her purse at home, and a few blocks before they get to the motel, she turns off the main road. Most of the houses sit out on a dry square of crabgrass, baking in the sun, but the house she shares with Tom is tucked back in a huddle of trees and vines and banana plants, almost purple in its shadow. Bill follows her up the walk, and steps after her into the house’s cool, dark air.

  The front hall is narrow and dark. No lights are on, and the only sound is a fan running in the room beyond. A black-and-white cat prances out of an unseen hall and frisks about their ankles.

  She goes upstairs to hunt for her purse, and he looks around, trying to decide what is Tom’s and what’s hers. The collection of National Geographics, the paperweight with flakes of gold suspended in its mass, the walnut end table: these must belong to the husband. But the dried-up orchid, the coffee cup of highlighters, the tear-off calendar: these can only be Sabine’s. Hers, too, would be the photographs of cruise-ship cabins, and the photogravures of stern-looking Prussian women and of boys on ice skates. He feels a kind of kinship with Tom, the way one looking out across the ocean feels kinship with the person they imagine on the opposite shore. Is it raining over there? Has he had lunch?

  Getting himself a glass of water from the sink, he thinks of all the times she has done exactly this. Picked up the glass, felt the water cool her palm as it is filled. The room is alive with her having touched it. He looks in the dishwasher. He hefts a remote control in his hand. At the far end of the room are a door, half-open, and a desk and bookshelf. It is maybe there that she writes his letters, and her whole life seems to him as near and knowable as the contents of that room. He longs to spend five minutes in her closet, to flush the toilets and interrogate the cat. The cat, sitting with his nose nearly touching the glass doors, watching a sparrow on the patio, his tail twitched by the delicate recollection of feathers on the tongue—he must be hers.

  She stands at the top of the steps with her purse under her arm, simply listening to the sound of the man loitering in her living room. What is she listening for? She doesn’t know and doesn’t need to.

  The day has turned hot by the time they get to the motel, and by the pool, they find the lounge chairs filled with guests: a little girl missing her front teeth; a biker with a neck on which thorned tattoos are nearly invisible beneath the sunburn; a sleeping woman with her mouth open. The sun sits high and pompous over the afternoon, and Bill gathers up used towels and dumps them in a pile for Britta. Sabine goes to check in a couple from Alaska, and then she carries an armful of linens up to the honeymoon suite and finds Bill there, lying with his eyes closed on the tile floor.

  They say nothing as they tumble toward the bed. It is as though they’ve memorized the same equation. Sweat burns in his eyes. She lies beside him. He might kiss her forehead or her elbow, but instead he breathes out and lets his thoughts loll. He thinks it has begun to rain, but when he looks, it hasn’t. Sometime later, he reaches out and runs the backs of his fingers down her sternum, but she has fallen asleep, goes on dreaming, remains far away, as unreal to him as you are to me.

  The next Saturday, he pesters her without end —follows her from the office to the laundry, the laundry to the storeroom, saying she’s beautiful, saying he can’t live without her—and she is sure at any minute Tom will walk around the corner. She swats away his hand again and again but then, in a hallway, allows him to trace the line of her neck with kisses. He begs her to meet him, anywhere, anytime, he only wants to see her, to talk to her. She doesn’t say no, because she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of an answer, and because she isn’t sure she could make it sound as though she meant it. But after lunch she relents and, carrying an extra set of linen, goes to wait for him in the second-floor suite. Now he dallies. He asks Britta about her childhood, talks with Tom about the gutters, sticks pieces of grass in the parrot’s cage. When he can think of absolutely nothing else to do, he runs up the stairs. The room is half-dark, the curtains drawn, and his eyes have not adjusted when from the bed she tells him to bolt the door, as if he doesn’t know to do this already. He tries to take off all his clothes at once.

  How do they see themselves in this moment? They take this passion as proof of their need for each other. If nothing else, they have this. Bill thinks of it as harmless fun, and knowing—how could he not—that this represents for him a fantastic alteration of circumstances, he begins to embroider his visions of parole with acts of fornication and porterhouse steaks. Sabine feels returned to some younger version of herself, made almost a girl again.

  They change the sheets—she on one side of the bed, he on the other—and when they leave and close the door behind them, the room looks as though nothing has ha
ppened.

  The weeks pass. The spring begins to warm. It’s been well over a month now since the bookseller arrived for the convention in Sarasota. The conventioneers have long since packed up their things and departed, but the bookseller remains. In plaid trunks, he lounges by the pool with a copy of Ulysses open on his lap, waiting for someone to walk by and ask him about Leopold Bloom. For the first few weeks, he’d made up excuses about his delayed departure. He had to become increasingly cunning; a person can have only so many mix-ups with the airline, so many canceled flights. One day, he declared he was done with air travel. He’d be taking the train home instead, though—terribly inconvenient —he’d been asked to look over the holdings of a certain private collector first. Who? He gave out a smile of secrets beyond secrets and ran his hand over the faint beginnings of a goatee.

  The truth, which he has learned better than to consider, is that he would rather die than return to Binghamton. He has fallen in love with this little motel, and when he thinks of his home, the halls choked with books and the mantels shouldered with dust, he can follow the brick path up, he can put a hand on the front door, but he cannot open it. And anyway, how much more lively to stay on and uncover the ties that bind this odd troupe of characters together. He is charmed by Britta, who seems to him a figure out of a Thomas Mann novel, cast perpetually in a clean forest light. He finds Tom inscrutable. And Bill is just the sort of lighthearted rogue a picaresque requires. Sabine awes him. She blows through the motel with an Übermensch will. He has a volume of Bartram’s Travels that he plans to bestow upon her when he leaves, though he has yet to ascertain her feelings about rare books. It would be a shame to waste so fine a specimen on one who hadn’t developed the faculties to appreciate it, he thinks, but then, recalling a line from Least Heat-Moon, he reminds himself that the value of a gift derives from its dearness not to the recipient but to the giver. And having settled the matter again (already he has had this conversation with himself a number of times; it is a very fine Bartram) and feeling ennobled by the grandeur of this uncommitted act, he drapes a towel over his eyes and drifts into dreams.

  It is from these dreams that he is roused by the unmistakable, energetic sound of coitus. He lifts the towel and finds Tom standing just a few feet away, staring fixedly up at the door of the honeymoon suite.

  “Ah, Thomas,” says the bookseller. “Love, love on a spring night. The cotton lace of her nightgown, the fresh perfume . . .”

  The little man remains unmoving and the bookseller decides perhaps a different tack is in order.

  “I was just saying to your wife that Lord Byron himself could not have asked for—”

  This anecdote, a favorite which never fails to elicit chuckles and adulation, and which he knows to be a particularly delicious little mot juste, is a rather dramatic allusion to the travails of one of literature’s great heroes, but he is cut short by the sight of Tom’s face, which is now looking at Sabine as she exits the upstairs suite. Before the bookseller can go on, Tom strides to the office and slams the door.

  12: Homecoming

  Wearing a hairnet and a frayed gray apron, Bill works his morning shift in the mess, and out of nothing more than water and white powder, he creates a beige glue that could almost be mistaken for mashed potatoes. He has a motherly sort of feeling for his fellow inmates and is liberal with the salt. In the afternoons, he works out, a series of stretches and exercises he learned from watching his father, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he puts on a pair of donated black-rimmed glasses and attends typing classes. The classes are taught by a former accountant serving a ten-month sentence for wire fraud. The men are given a sheet of paper with certain patterns of letters and symbols, and without looking at the keyboard, they are supposed to replicate the pattern. Sometimes the letters arrange themselves in ways that suggest fragments of words—flor, proc, decl, ing, into, abra—and for no reason that he can understand, Bill always associates these occurrences with Sabine.

  At night, he brings a book back to his cell. He has not yet discovered the books of George R. R. Martin, and so it is a Western novel he often carries with him. From the time he lies down until the lights go out, he follows the story of a hero wandering along the Mexican border, leaving behind him shot-up Main Streets and the graves of villains. When the lights flick out, Bill turns down the corner on his page and puts the book aside, and then he lies perfectly still on his back. Now, with the prison in the hold of night, the coughs and wheezes of the other inmates come to him from another world far removed from his own. The past weeks are compressed into a frenzied strobe-like story that comes all at once to a grating halt over the memory of her body, and lying quietly on his back, his thoughts drifting over her as a haze drifts above water, he slips into a deep and harmless sleep.

  One morning, he awakes and it’s the day of his release. With his belongings in a paper bag beneath one arm, he steps through the chain-link fence into a parking lot blurred with heat. It’s the final day of August. Sabine stands with her arms crossed and her hip against the door of the car, wearing one of those light cotton dresses that make one think everything will be all right.

  “What are you smiling about?” he says, and they nearly topple together into the open convertible.

  Wind, blown north from the Caribbean, swings the streetlights over the empty intersections. It tugs at the perms of the elderly women on the tennis courts and clears the sky of clouds. After a few quick turns, they are out on the highway, the top down, tearing along. He places a hand on her thigh and finds it warm from the sun. The wind is deafening.

  “Where to?” she says.

  He shrugs. He has absolutely no idea.

  “Hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  They’ve come to a light. It’s still early in the morning. The day hasn’t yet made up its mind. There are no other cars to be seen. She puts on her turn signal, and this act brings up in him a feeling he has often had while reading her letters. Neither of them knows where they’re going.

  “Thanks for getting me,” he says, but she doesn’t hear. The light has turned green, and the motor howls to life, and as the road swings around and straightens out ahead of them, it no longer seems important.

  They spend the day aimlessly. Breakfast in a diner where the waitresses tap their computer screens with long fingernails curved like corn chips. They browse the lot at a used-car dealer. Coffee and juice in the afternoon at a roadside shack, where one wall opens up on the highway like an eye. Then an abrupt turn for the Gulf, and they stop at a tiki bar, where they drink something full of tequila and coconut. She tells him about the place she’s rented for them: how perfect it is, how she found just the right color for the walls, just the right couch for the living room. It never occurs to him until they pull up alongside the apartment and he sees the string lights glittering through the bushes that maybe she has been wasting away this day on purpose.

  They sit in the car and look at the crowd on the patio. A hand-lettered banner hangs between two palms: welcome home bill!! No one but Sabine could have made it.

  “Britta helped. She has such nice pens.”

  “Just steer me toward the fridge,” says Bill.

  Prison prepares a person for many things, but a cocktail party is a test all its own. Sabine whispers in Bill’s ear the name of each guest, and he repeats the names to himself while looking at their faces. Holding containers of raw asparagus are the Greevys, Ellen and Chuck, both retired from public schools in Minnesota. At the table near them stands Britta, and beside her another German, Karin, reads the labels on the food.

  “Eck,” says Karin without uncrossing her arms. “Why do they call it German potato salad? We do not have this in Germany.”

  On the other side of the table is Sabine’s trainer, Armando, who has been roped into conversation by Roberta Smith, Tess’s mother, the director of the local theater. (“A volunteer position,” says Karin.)

  Roberta sweeps her arm to take in the table, the guests, the wor
ld. “A feast!”

  There are other guests—an orthopedic surgeon in seersucker shorts, and his mother; a number of loud Australians; a failed stand-up comedian; a few small children running after one another, as there always are at these parties.

  Bill spends the first hour excusing himself from one conversation or another to use the restroom, and once there, he looks at his face in the mirror and fingers the bottle caps in the pocket of his jeans. But at some moment—maybe it is the alcohol—the party begins to find a rhythm. Like an orchestra tunes its instruments, the crowd finds its register, and to the surprise of everyone, Bill most of all, it ceases to be an obligation. Armando wraps Britta in his long brown arms and two-steps her across the flagstones. Karin reappears (when had she left?) with a bag of ice, a bag of limes, and a blender. From nowhere, a pink-and-yellow donkey piñata appears on a table, and the two children, a boy and a girl, emerge instantly from the shadows to ask what’s in it.

  “It’s full of little candies,” says Karin.

  “I bet it’s full of rubbers.”

  “Shush, Roberta.”

  “I think it’s full of kittens,” Bill says, and wanders off in the direction of the food.

  He catches sight of Sabine on his way. She is coming out of the kitchen, holding a cake in both hands. She has cut her hair still shorter, and it gives her a schoolboyish look. There is a resolve in her movements, in the way she strides through the hedges, and it makes him love to watch her.

  “William,” says Ellen. “We’re talking about France. Have you ever been?”

  Before Bill can say anything, there is a thump behind him, and they are showered in candy.

  “Little candies!” says Karin with a bat in her hand, while the children anxiously gather the sweets off the ground.

  The party is nearly over. Brie fused to a plastic cutting board, soft green grapes scattered across the pavers, crackers and stale bread, maroon cocktail napkins crumpled around shrimp tails and a knife crusted with white frosting in the bushes. Ellen is explaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to no one in particular while Armando nods off in a chair. Britta gathers the paper plates and puts them in the trash. Inside the apartment, a little girl sleeps on the couch, her hand hanging limply into a potted geranium. The stars are out, but only Roberta sees them.