I suggested we head to the Hungry Sailor, a dark bar in downtown Coconut Grove where Marse and Bette and I had found ourselves many nights among a crowd of regulars, under walls ringed with colored Christmas lights. We parked, and Dennis led me up to the rooftop, where patio tables were scattered on tar matting overlooking Grand Avenue. Dennis ordered a round of margaritas and looked down on the crowded street. A rickshaw passed, carrying a tourist couple who hooted with laughter as the driver dipped and circled to entertain them. On the corner, a woman with a high Afro handed out fliers, and down the block a group of kids sat in a circle on a cement patio. Dennis took my hand and sighed. “Good Lord, my sister,” he said. I saw that he cared enough about his sister not to care much about the ruined wedding.
The margaritas were tangy and cold. I let my shoes drop and propped my feet on the low wall of the rooftop, and I held Dennis’s hand. The sun went down, and it grew a little chilly. Dennis put his coat around my shoulders and ordered another round. It seemed we were celebrating after all. Dennis pointed below us, to a mannequin in the window of a lingerie shop across the street—but then I saw that she wasn’t a mannequin at all. She was a live person, wearing red bikini underwear and a lacy pink robe, her legs tucked beneath her in a white wicker love seat, her chin propped on one hand. “What a job!” I said.
“Boring as hell,” said Dennis.
“Some people love to be watched.”
Dennis was looking at me. “When it’s our turn, you won’t run.”
“No,” I said. I knew that all I had to do was turn and meet his eyes. I knew that if I did this, he would sink to one knee and take off his college ring and slide it onto my finger, where it would feel as heavy as a stone. But maybe because we were living a stolen evening, an evening allotted for another activity entirely, or because my love for him raged so wildly that I felt it throbbing in my teeth and pressing against my lungs, I did nothing but sip my drink. After a while, the model’s shift ended. She stood and stretched and tied her robe around her waist, yawned, and walked into the fluorescent innards of the store.
Looking back, it seems that the whole episode, from meeting Dennis to marrying him, went by in a blink. When Dennis did propose—kneeling, on the stilt house dock where we’d met—I believed my love for him was strong. Now, though, I know it was a blip, a farce. A thousand times, my love might have dampened instead of swelled. I had no idea then what would happen to my love, what nourishment it would receive, how mighty it would grow. I thought: I love him. And so, as if it were the only answer I could give, the only answer available to me, I said yes.
We married in Atlanta, in the Baptist church I’d attended as a child. I wore an empire-waist gown with lacy cap sleeves and satin Mary Janes with chunky heels. I was so stunningly, stupidly happy that I remember little outside of what is frozen in photographs: Dennis’s grip over mine as we cut the three-tiered cake; my mother spreading my veil and my father pumping Dennis’s hand; Grady extending his arm in a toast; me posing on the chapel steps with my mother on one side and Bette and Marse on the other. Back in Miami, Dennis’s parents threw us a reception at their yacht club, and then Dennis and I spent a week in the Keys, hopping from island to island in his father’s boat and camping on shallow beaches. One night we woke to the sight of hundreds of glowing anemones drifting by. In the morning, dozens had washed ashore and lay sickly at the foot of our tent. Dennis gave me a book of Wallace Stevens poems with certain pages dog-eared, and sometimes we read the poems to each other before falling asleep.
Dennis graduated from law school and passed the bar exam and was hired by a firm downtown. With inheritance from his grandmother, we bought our own home in Coral Gables, a three-bedroom ranch with a large backyard and a ponytail palm in one corner. We culled spare furniture from Dennis’s parents’ garage and secondhand stores, and hung paintings I’d made during college. Within the year I was pregnant. We had a little girl and named her Margo, ostensibly after Dennis’s maternal grandmother but in truth because I loved the name: I thought it was earthy and wise and unmistakably South Floridian, a tropical name for reasons I couldn’t explain. Margo was a fleshy, contemplative baby with Dennis’s blue-green eyes and my pointy-tipped ears. My mother took the train down and stayed a month in our guest room, and during the day we took turns changing Margo and giving her long, warm baths. We sat on a blanket in the backyard and made plans for her future: my mother predicted she would be a stunning beauty, possibly a fashion model, and I predicted she would be a career woman with expensive handbags and a busy social calendar. We told her there had never been a sweeter baby. After my mother returned to Atlanta, it was, oddly, Grady who took time off to help me while Dennis was at work. He brought groceries and held the baby so I could shower, and stepped out to light a pipe when I opened my blouse to breast-feed. While I nursed Margo, she looked up at me as if she didn’t quite know who I was, but she was willing to accept my love anyway, to give me the benefit of the doubt. When she was sleepy, she blinked in a slow-motion way that reminded me of a sloth I’d seen in a nature show on television. Instead of dividing, the focus I’d previously reserved for Dennis multiplied; in the early months of Margo’s life I found myself stunned at my luck. I’d found a person to love, and together we’d made another person to love. It was simultaneously exactly what I’d wanted and more than I could have asked for myself.
When Dennis was home, we took long walks with Margo in her stroller, and on the weekends we put her in a life vest and went to the beach, or out on Grady’s boat, or to Stiltsville, where I held tightly to her and stepped carefully, fearful of falling with her into the water. She clung to Dennis’s chest as he walked the flats and giggled maniacally when he dunked her. She got sunburned and the pediatrician reminded me sternly about sunscreen—the only bottle we owned back then sat on a shelf in the downstairs stilt house bathroom, crusty at the neck and watery with time and disuse. She and I spent hours together in the hammock downstairs, napping and reading, sweaty locks of hair plastered to her forehead. She took her first teetering steps in the stilt house living room, from Dennis’s lap to mine. After that, the stilt house became a kind of disaster area for a time, where I was called on to be ever-vigilant as she darted in each direction, small enough to fit through the porch railing or steps, clumsy enough to slip from the dock. Dennis and I had talked briefly about putting up netting or fencing, but with so many hazardous surfaces—the entire downstairs, the wraparound porch, the T-shape dock—it wasn’t feasible. Instead, Dennis started teaching her to swim when she was just ten months old. When she was two, she spent hours on his lap as he fished off the dock, clapping each time he reeled in a fish. When she was almost three, Marse bought her an orange bikini with yellow polka dots and she wore it every day of the summer, refusing every other garment in her closet. When she was four, she and Bette put on elaborate performances on the porch, wherein Margo played a pirate or schoolteacher, and Bette played a damsel in distress or an insubordinate student, and by the end of the day they were both sweating through their T-shirts and glassy-eyed with exhaustion.
Those early years of Margo’s life, of our marriage, were uncomplicated to a degree that I’ve never experienced again. But every so often, during this period, I would find Dennis sitting in front of a bottle of beer at the kitchen table, or alone on the porch at Stiltsville, and when I asked him what was wrong he would say simply that he did not like his job. I suppose if we had let it, this could have become the ruling discontent in our home. But he was not the kind of man who took to moping, and for years this was a back-burner issue, a low-grade nuisance.
We tried for a time to have a second child, and then when Margo was three I miscarried, and then eight months later I miscarried again, and then five months later, again. It was a terrible time. I felt as if our lives had been put on hold; the future darkened. It’s incredible to realize that one can’t have children simply by taking the usual steps. Doctors couldn’t seem to help, and I might have become bitter in the f
ace of this fact, as so many people do, but later in my life I would need to trust doctors, to be guided by them, so I am glad this wasn’t the case. Then, some months after the third miscarriage, I chaperoned Margo’s kindergarten class on a field trip to the Everglades, and we were walking in the early evening down a swampy path when our guide pointed to an owl perched on a high branch, and Margo’s freckled face when she searched the sky for a glimpse of the creature was so open, so full of joy, that I decided (or I realized, I’m not sure which) I didn’t need more children. Dennis had wanted a noisier household—this was difficult, knowing how he wanted it—but eventually he followed my lead. I concentrated on Margo, our marvel, and the sadness of losing the pregnancies ebbed over time, and I thanked God for her.
As for my new hometown, I’d fallen quickly and surely in love with it. I loved to drive through the dense neighborhoods with my car windows down and smell the rotting sweetness of a ripening mango tree. I loved to eavesdrop on the loud conversations of the ladies at the deli counter, ferreting out select phrases using the lazy Spanish I’d acquired over the years. I loved the lychees and star fruit that fell into my yard over the neighbor’s fence, and I loved the bright bougainvillea that dropped its papery pink petals onto my lawn. I loved the rusty barges loaded with stolen bicycles that plodded down the Miami River and out to sea. I loved the half-dozen chilly February nights, all the windows in the house open and the fireplace going. I loved the limestone and the coral rock, the fountains and the ocean and the winding blue canals. I loved the giant banyans and the dense wet mangroves and the gumbo-limbo trees and the many-sized, many-shaped palms. I loved the pelicans and manatees and stone crabs and storms and even the thick, damp summers.
Miami is the only place in this country where Stiltsville could exist, and for a while I had the good fortune of spending time there.
I lived in Miami through scandals and riots, through dozens of tropical storms and one devastating hurricane, through the Mariel boat lift and the cocaine cowboys. Outside Florida, I’ve never met anyone else who lived in Miami or cared to, or even anyone who is not somewhat surprised to hear that I lived there for half of my life. Perhaps what is still most surprising to me about Miami is that in spite of its lurid excesses and unreal beauty and unreal ugliness, it was possible for me, a girl from Georgia, to create a life there. Overall, an excellent life. A life I knew even as I was living it, I would miss when it came to an end.
1976
When Margo was five, we left her with Bette one summer weekend and took Marse and Dennis’s old friend Paul, whom Marse had been dating on and off for a year, to Stiltsville. The morning after we arrived, I was in the downstairs bathroom changing into a swimsuit when I heard an airplane’s engine. The noise drew me into the sunlight on the dock and I watched as the plane—a Cessna with twin propellers and a red stripe down the fuselage—swept into the sky above our leg of the channel, then banked and circled over the Becks’ stilt house to the northeast. Dennis was fixing breakfast while Marse and Paul dressed. Stiltsville was five miles from downtown Miami: from land, the plane would resemble a quiet mosquito, and the houses perched on stilts in the bay would dissolve in the blurring of waves and sky. But from where I stood, the plane’s noise and proximity were overwhelming. It was seconds before I heard Dennis shouting over the sound. I turned to find him waving frantically from the upstairs porch for me to come inside.
I walked back up the dock, trying not to run, and up the stairs. Paul stood at the kitchen window holding binoculars to his face, and Marse stood beside him in her pajamas. Paul handed me the binoculars. “Looks like we have company,” he said.
The Cessna’s fuselage was pockmarked and the paint was faded and nicked. There was one man in the cockpit, but I couldn’t make him out. “Drugs?” I said.
“What else?” said Paul.
“We don’t know it’s drugs,” said Dennis.
“Who owns that house?” said Paul.
“The Becks,” said Marse. “Marcus and Kathleen. They’re hardly the type.”
I thought of Kathleen Beck in her floral sundresses, and of the stork-shaped cookies she’d brought when Margo was born. Every so often I saw her in the parking lot of Margo’s school, picking up her twin daughters. I’d thought she and Marcus had planned to be on the water that weekend, but they must have changed their minds.
A hatch door opened beside the cockpit. “Here we go,” said Marse. We waited, and then a package dropped into the water ten yards off the Becks’ dock. There was a small splash and the bright white package bobbed immediately to the surface. The Cessna circled once more and headed southeast, away from land.
We stepped onto the porch. There was little current, and any movement of the package was almost imperceptible. “What are we waiting for?” said Paul.
Dennis watched the package through the binoculars. It seemed to be heading toward the Becks’ house; if so, it would slip under the dock, past the pilings, and out to sea. The whole process would take three hours, or five at the most. “Could be messy,” said Dennis.
“We can’t just leave it there,” said Marse. “We should call the Coast Guard.”
“Why would we do that?” said Paul.
I said, “Calling the Coast Guard isn’t a bad idea.”
“I’d rather not,” said Dennis.
“Why?” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “Because the registration on the boat is—well, it’s lagging.”
“I don’t think they’ll care about our boat registration, honey. Besides, the Coast Guard is federal.”
“They could call the marine police.”
Paul said, “How well do you know these people, the Becks?”
“Fairly well,” said Dennis.
“Kathleen’s a Girl Scout troop leader,” said Marse.
“Marcus plays the tuba, for goodness’ sake,” I said. “This has nothing to do with them.”
Paul took the binoculars. “Someone could be in there,” he said. We all looked at the Becks’ stilt house, which was a smaller version of our own, painted white with blue shutters. “They could be waiting until dark to make the pickup.”
It had become apparent that all the cloak-and-dagger talk was just that. But I was glad the men had found something to occupy them. Weekends at Stiltsville—our little island, our weekend oasis—tended to stretch out when we entertained guests. “Let’s just keep an eye on it, see what happens,” I said. “I’ll finish breakfast.”
“I smell adventure,” said Paul.
“You always smell adventure,” said Marse.
They were not a demonstrative couple; I’d rarely even seen them kiss. Dennis and I had set them up after years of having said we should; we’d had them over for dinner, and the following weekend they’d attended an office party at Marse’s firm, and after the party—I knew this because Marse told me—they’d gone for a midnight cruise in her boat, and wound up having sex on the deck. For a time, Marse had been smitten. A month before the weekend at Stiltsville, though, she’d told me they were through—something about an argument at a wedding, where friends of his had not known who she was, or had mistaken her for someone else—but then he’d popped back into her life and their relationship had resumed. I didn’t know the particulars. When it came to her love life, if nothing else, Marse was reluctant to give details. I could count on one hand the number of men she’d introduced me to. That’s not including Dennis, of course.
When we’d arrived at the stilt house the day before, it had taken half an hour to dock. Our boat, which we’d bought after Dennis had been invited to join Grady’s yacht club, was a nineteen-foot Mako with a single outboard engine and a center console—a boat for skiing and day trips, not serious seafaring—and the current kept fighting us off. I stood on the gunwale, knees buckling with the waves, prepared to jump to the dock—but every time we came close, Dennis shifted too soon into neutral and the tide pulled us away. The downtown skyline shimmered in the heat, supporting the sunset on its s
houlders. Night advanced from the east. If we didn’t dock soon, I thought, we’d have to open the house in the dark.
Marse climbed onto the gunwale beside me and stood there in her bikini, her hair wet with spray from the choppy ride. “I can make it,” she said. “No offense, but I’m lighter than you.”
I moved out of her way. “Be careful.”
“Don’t sweat it,” she said, crouching. I was afraid she would slip off right then, while Dennis was bringing us around again. The dock was yards away, and the water in the channel was soupy with roiling sand and seaweed. I planted my feet. Dennis stood at the console, sweating and gritting his teeth, his too-long hair spiking into his eyes, and his beard—which he’d cultivated over the last year—dark with perspiration. He was a good captain. Over the years, we would upgrade to a twin-outboard sports fisherman, then to a thirty-six-foot Hatteras with a tuna tower. Now, though, in the midst of the docking fiasco, with only 175 horsepower at his disposal, Dennis was dejected. “This has never happened before, I swear,” he called out. Marse laughed, and Paul slapped Dennis on the shoulder.
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