Sheryl frowned. “Mother, we are away somewhere. Remember, we live in New Jersey?”
Sheryl and Mimi went down the hall to Rita’s suite, and Sheldon started pacing around the living room. Wilma sat on the sofa reading a religious magazine with a picture of a family dressed like her on the cover. Steve sat across from her watching TV.
“I’m really nervous about the trial,” Sheldon said.
Wilma put the magazine down. “Don’t worry, Shelly. Morty will get you off.”
“I don’t even want to go in there.”
“Really, Shelly, it’ll be all right. Now let me read in peace.” She picked up the magazine again.
Sheldon walked over to the window and opened it. He looked out at the ocean. Over his shoulder Steve could see two girls wind-surfing in wetsuits and a sailboat with an orange sail that was headed downwind fast. Steve turned back to a story about Vietnamese refugee families being resettled in Palm Beach.
“Sometimes I feel like committing suicide,” Sheldon said.
Wilma was engrossed in her magazine. “Don’t be silly, Shelly,” she said, without looking up.
Sheldon stepped out onto the window ledge. Wilma put the magazine down and looked around. “Shelly?” she asked. “Shelly? Where are you?” Steve looked up.
“I’m out here,” Sheldon called from the window ledge. “I’m committing suicide.”
Wilma and Steve jumped up and ran to the window. They both stuck their heads out and saw Sheldon, standing stiff against the wall of the building. Steve looked below. It was a long fall.
“Oh, my God, Shelly, come in here this minute,” Wilma said. “You could kill yourself out here.”
“I’m trying to, Wilma. But I never liked heights. I’m feeling nervous.”
“Sheldon, come inside,” Steve said. “Here, take my hand.” He held his hand out as Wilma pulled back into the suite. She ran around the room, and then opened the door to the hall.
Sheldon did not take Steve’s hand. In the background they could hear Wilma calling, “Mother! Mimi! Sheryl! Is anyone around? Help! Shelly’s on the window ledge!”
“Come on, Sheldon, you can do it,” Steve said. “Just give me your hand.” Steve inched his hand along the rough stucco wall, feeling every bump and crack against his palm.
Down below, people strolled through the gardens and a mother dragged two little kids in bathing suits toward the pool. Sheldon said, “I feel dizzy,” and started to sway on his feet.
Steve said, “Give me your hand, Sheldon.” He braced himself against the inside of the window sill, grabbed Sheldon’s arm and dragged him back into the room.
Wilma and Mimi came up behind them. “What’s the matter with you, Sheldon?” Wilma asked. “You want us to have to lock you up in a room with bars on the windows?”
“I think the state of Florida will take care of that for you, Wilma,” Steve said. “But Sheldon, you can’t go jumping out the window. That’s not going to solve anything.”
“I never get to do anything I want to do.” Sheldon walked over to the bathroom and locked himself in.
Wilma stood at the door. When Steve started to talk she said, “Shh! I’m trying to hear if he opens any pill bottles but all I hear is Sheldon sitting on the toilet and passing wind.”
From then on there was always someone assigned to watch Sheldon. All that evening and into the next day, Sheldon was not allowed to leave his room alone, to go to the pool alone, and certainly not to leave the hotel grounds alone.
That night Steve slipped away at quarter to six and drove down Collins Avenue to Dolores’ apartment. That was one positive side effect of the fire, he thought; he was a lot closer to Dolores. A tall, handsome Latin man was leaving Dolores’s building as Steve walked up. He looked vaguely familiar, but Steve couldn’t place him. He shrugged; maybe a friend of Dolores’s.
It took Dolores a couple of minutes to buzz Steve into the building, and when he got up to her apartment he found she wasn’t ready to go. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The afternoon just got away from me. I’ll be ready in a flash.”
It was more like half an hour, but Steve didn’t mind. He was happy just watching Dolores move around the apartment, putting her earrings in, slipping on her shoes. She checked her lipstick in the mirror and blew her reflection a kiss.
He took her to a romantic restaurant in Coral Gables that Miranda had recommended. Their booth was dark and lit only by candles. There was a special lovers’ menu, which ended with coeur á la creme, hearts made of sweetened cream cheese and topped with a strawberry glaze. After dinner they went back to Dolores’s apartment and made love. He didn’t get back until after breakfast the next morning.
He spent a few hours calling people on his lizard list, getting faxes at the hotel desk, and avoiding comment on wedding plans before taking up his duty on Sheldon watch. He and Sheldon went down to the beach together. It was hot and sunny and both wore baggy plaid bathing suits from the hotel store.
“It’s nice of you to come swimming with me, Steve,” Sheldon said. He had not yet realized that he was under surveillance -- he thought everyone in the family was just being kind to him.
“No problem, Shel,” Steve said. “It’s a good excuse to get away from the craziness upstairs.” Steve had heard as much as he could handle about wedding dresses, hors d’oeuvres and engraved announcements. There had even been arguments over the composition of the wedding bouquet. Sheryl liked daisies and black-eyed Susans, but Mimi leaned toward roses and babies’ breath. For sheer stubbornness, Steve put his money on Sheryl and the black-eyed Susans.
Sheldon pointed to a TV crew filming just down the beach. “I wonder what’s going on over there?” he asked.
“Oh, I heard somebody talking about it in the lobby,” Steve said. “It’s a report about jellyfish. If you’re going to go in the ocean you should be careful.”
Sheldon nodded. “I’m going in now before I lose my nerve.” He started down the beach as Steve chose a chair.
“It’s not that dangerous, Shel,” Steve called after him. “You don’t have to worry too much.”
Sheldon nodded. “Take a nap, Steve. I’ll be fine.”
Steve yawned. “That’s an instruction I can follow.” As he settled down, Dolores appeared from behind him. She came and sat down on the sand next to him.
“Hi,” she said. “Your aunt said you were down here with Sheldon.”
“Yeah. Since he tried to kill himself yesterday somebody’s got to be with him all the time. I figured swimming duty was the least painful.”
“Where is he now?”
Steve sat up and shaded his eyes to look for Sheldon. It took him a long minute. “Where is he? Hey, he’s pretty far out. He’s not that great a swimmer.”
“You don’t think he’s trying to kill himself again, do you?”
“Oh, shit!” Steve jumped up and ran into the water, until it was deep enough that he could start swimming. Sheldon was far out and appeared to be floundering. Steve swam strongly toward him.
The water was cold and the incoming waves crashed over Steve’s head, getting water in his nostrils and slowing down his progress. His arms and legs started to ache. When he reached Sheldon, he took hold of him, and started for shore.
When Steve and Sheldon emerged from the water, the cameraman who had been filming the jellyfish story and the reporter with him approached them. It was clear after a moment that they had been filming the rescue and talking with Dolores. “Mr. Blatnick, is it true that this was a suicide attempt?” the reporter asked.
Sheldon nodded. It took him a minute to catch his breath, and when he spoke he gurgled a little, working the water out of his lungs. “It was. I’ve been depressed about going on trial next week, but when I saw Steve here swimming out to rescue me, I realized that I wanted to live. It’s hard to get down when you have your family around you.”
They talked to the reporter for a few minutes, and then Steve and Dolores walked up the beach together. He was shi
vering, and all his muscles ached from the exertion of dragging Sheldon back in to shore. “Why did the reporter call Sheldon my uncle?” Steve asked.
Dolores rubbed a towel around Steve’s shoulders. “We were watching you swim out and I was trying to explain to him who you both were and it was easier to say Sheldon was your uncle than to get into all the family politics.”
“What a grim thought,” Steve said. “Sheldon Blatnick actually related to me.”
“Come on, Steve, Sheldon isn’t so bad,” Dolores said. “You’d be pretty upset, too, if you were going on trial.”
“But see, that’s the point.” Steve stopped walking and turned to look at Dolores. “Everybody keeps saying put yourself in Sheldon’s shoes. Well, here’s a news flash. I would never end up in Sheldon’s shoes. Sheldon is a moron. I’m not. I wish everybody would get that straight.”
“All right, ssh,” Dolores said. “Here comes Sheldon.”
Sheldon had finally finished with the TV cameras and the well-wishers and caught up with Steve and Dolores. “I’m gonna go upstairs and take a nap,” he said. “Nearly drowning really takes it out of you.”
“I’ll come up with you,” Steve said.
Sheldon held his palm up. “No, you stay down here with Dolores. Don’t worry about me. I won’t do anything stupid. I really did learn something out there. This trial thing, it’ll pass. Maybe I’ll go to jail, maybe I won’t. But it’ll be all right in the end. And I know I’ll feel better knowing you’ll be in the courtroom there with me.” He shrugged. “You guys have a good time.”
Sheldon walked off toward the stairs and Steve and Dolores snuggled together. They sat on the hard sand at the farthest edge of the beach and kissed and hugged. Somewhere in the distance rap music was playing on a boom box, and people walked past them on the boardwalk laughing and talking. A gentle breeze ruffled the leaves of a sea grape and lifted the edge of their towel. Steve felt terrific, buoyant, as if there was nothing broken that he couldn’t fix.
30 – Mary’s Discovery
The landlords at Mangrove Manor pulled the plug on Steve and Richie’s tab at the Neuschwanstein after two days. Mrs. Blatnick wouldn’t hear of them getting away from the hotel when there was still so much work to be done, so she offered to pick up the bill until after the wedding.
Steve spent Sunday evening on a phone brigade, calling distant relatives and old friends of the Blatnicks to let them know about the wedding. It reminded him of a fund-raising telethon for some disease, a bank of volunteers sitting by the phones talking about sick people, though even a telethon wouldn’t help the Blatnicks. He had never known how much work went into a wedding. And he had never realized how intractable people could be when it came to the safety and security of small reptiles.
Harold went down to the Florida Club office nearly every day, but he and Steve didn’t discuss anything related to the Everglades Galleria. Steve felt like they were soldiers from opposite sides, forced by circumstance to live together. It reminded him of the Civil War, brother fighting against brother.
Proposals flew back and forth for the nature preserve where the pink-bellied swamp lizards would live. Everything from the size of the preserve, to the flow of fresh water through it, to the number and kind of trees in the area was discussed, reviewed and evaluated. How much money would Thornton put aside for research, under the auspices of the on-site Nature Center? What was the wording that would be attached to the deed, protecting the preserve against change in ownership?
Steve thought he understood how Hannibal must have felt, coaxing that team of elephants over the Alps. Monday afternoon he called Uncle Max to discuss the latest negotiations. “All the scientists have agreed that ten acres is large enough for the preserve,” he said. He sat on his hotel bed with piles of papers all around him.
“Ten acres! That’s impossible. We only have a seventy-acre site.”
“Come on, Uncle Max, the other day you said you could live with ten acres.”
“Go on,” Uncle Max said.
“We’re all agreed on the flow of fresh water and the types of vegetation to be planted. They want a full-time naturalist on staff to do research on the swamp lizard and the overall ecosystem.”
“I’ll pay half,” Uncle Max said. “Let the Florida Club raise the rest. I run a business. Where would Macy’s be if they had to pay salaries to naturalists? Where would Gimbel’s be?”
“Gimbel’s went out of business,” Steve said.
“See! Some nature group probably did it to them.”
“I’ll have everything together for the meeting on Friday,” Steve said. “I’m still waiting for a couple of faxes from the Smithsonian and the MetroZoo.”
“I was always partial to zoos when I was a boy,” Uncle Max said. “I used to spend hours in front of the monkey cages, just sitting there....”
Steve interrupted. “I’ve got to check the front desk for faxes. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He spent most of every morning running to meetings, or sitting at the hotel trading faxes with people. He was on a first-name basis with all the desk clerks at the Neuschwanstein, and even joined in when they had a birthday cake for one of the assistant managers.
The next morning Steve had to go to the Lizardarium, a special lizard zoo in Fort Lauderdale, and Dolores came along, because it was her day off. “We always had lizards where I grew up in Puerto Rico,” she said in the car on the way there. “I trained them to line up on my arm and eat from my fingers.”
“Yuck,” Steve said.
The Lizardarium was a low, modern building of cedar and glass, in a residential neighborhood along the New River. Steve had spoken to the curator, George Eisenstein, on the phone a few times. George was a short, stubby man with a brown ponytail; he came out to lead them to the research laboratory, a large, brightly lit room that reminded Steve more of a computer lab than a science station. There were a few lizards in cages and a couple of lab tables, but most of the room was taken up by computer terminals.
“We do habitat research and run computer models here,” George said. “Right now we’re working on simulations to review what’ll happen to the lizards in the Everglades as the area where they can live gets smaller.”
From the lab, George took them to a big glassed-in room overlooking the river. It was hot and damp inside, conditions George said that the lizards loved. Thousands of them were loose among the tall trees and low bushes that flourished under the glass roof. Some were poised on trunks or frozen on the gravel paths, while others skittered around. There was no one in the room but the three of them.
“There really are a lot of lizards here,” Steve said.
“I think they’re cute.” Dolores stretched her hand toward a gecko, which scrambled up her arm.
“How can you do that?” Steve asked. Dolores just smiled.
When George left to collect some brochures for Steve, Dolores turned to him, put her arms around him, and whispered into his ear, “I’d like to make love to you here. With the lizards crawling all over us. I think that would be very sexy.”.
“I think that would be very weird,” Steve said, as the lizard scrambled across his back and under his shirt collar.
Steve was hopping around in a strange dance when George came back in. “What’s the matter?” George asked.
“There’s a lizard in my pants!”
George said, “Drop them!” When Steve hesitated, George said, “I’m sure this young lady has seen you without your pants on, and the lizards and I, we don’t mind.” Steve unbuttoned his pants and dropped them to the ground. The lizard scrambled out and ran away.
An elderly couple rounded the corner outside and looked in at Steve’s polka dot boxer shorts and his pants around his ankles. They turned away quickly. Steve pulled up his pants and took the brochures, which further explained the family Gekkonidae, the varied tails in the species, their nocturnal habits and their suitability as pets.
Dolores snuggled up next to him on the ride back to Miami. Halfway the
re, she said, “Pull over. There on the shoulder.”
He pulled over immediately. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t wait until we get back to my place,” she said. “I want you. Those lizards really turned me on.”
“Dolores.” She was already stroking his thigh and then pulling on his zipper. “People will see us. Maybe a cop will come by.”
“Don’t worry.” She kissed him and pushed her leg over his, and they slid down in the seat. When they were finished, Steve slumped back against the door. It took a long time to regain his natural breathing.
He dropped Dolores off at her apartment and drove back to the Neuschwanstein Palace. Rita was sitting in the living room of her suite, tying ribbons around candied almonds in little mesh packets as reception favors. “Sit down,” she said. “You can help me with these.”
Steve sat. “Not that I would ever say anything,” Rita said, popping a pink-coated almond into her mouth. “But if Sheryl was a normal girl, she’d have an engagement, and months to do all this before the wedding. She also would not be pregnant, but that’s another story.”
Rita picked up her lavender mesh and started to cut. “You see, life is really very simple.” The phone rang, and she had to put the mesh down again. “Honestly,” she said. “How can I get anything done? I hope that’s not Mimi with something else she desperately needs me to do.”
It was Mimi. Steve watched his mother as she smiled at the phone, as if Mimi could see her. “Certainly,” Rita said. “I’m sure Steve can do it. He’s just helping me with the favors.”
Steve jumped up and started waving his hands. “No! I’m not doing anything more!” Rita waved her hand at him and said goodbye.
“She just wants you to drive her and Sheryl over for the final fitting on the wedding dress. That way the two of them can sit in the back seat and talk.”
Invasion of the Blatnicks Page 26
