Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “What?” I said, fighting the urge to cross my arms, to treat the moment like a standoff. I reminded myself that Dennis was my husband, whom I loved.

  He flipped a switch to let fuel into the carburetor. “It’s no big deal,” he said, “but there’s a chance that if we call the Coast Guard, they might impound the boat.”

  “This boat?”

  “Yes, Frances.”

  “Is it drugs?” I couldn’t comprehend why it would be, but these were my natural associations: boat, Coast Guard, drugs.

  “Baby, of course not.”

  We looked toward the Becks’ house. The wind was stronger and the bay choppier than the day before, and the white package was moving more quickly. I sat on the gunwale. “Why?”

  He watched the compass on the console, the needle bobbing even though we were headed nowhere. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d worry, and you wouldn’t want to use the boat, and we’d have to cancel the weekend.” I stared at him, my gut tight. He said, “I got a call from the police this week. Apparently, the guy who sold us the boat didn’t own it.”

  We’d bought the boat from a man in Key Largo who’d just gotten divorced, who was, as he put it, liquidating his ass. I’d stood admiring the boat—our first!—while Dennis shook the man’s hand. Dennis said, “Technically, it belonged to his wife’s brother.”

  “But that has nothing to do with us,” I said. “We didn’t know that.” He looked at me but didn’t say anything. “You knew?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I had a hunch.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I just need to prove that I didn’t know the guy before he sold me the boat.”

  “You didn’t know him, did you?”

  “I didn’t know him. I didn’t. But”—he lowered his voice—“I knew something was wrong. He was too eager to sell, and the boat was too cheap. Really, Frances, think about it—we couldn’t have afforded this boat. And I wanted it for us.” Dennis had known colleagues to be disbarred for less. It was nothing I’d worried about before. In the past year, we’d built an addition on the back of the house, a high-ceilinged family room with a wall of sliding glass doors. We’d hired Kyle Heiger, Marse’s brother, to be the contractor on the job, and though he’d done excellent work, the whole project had ended up costing more than we’d expected. Also that year, Dennis had been invited to join the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, and though money was tight we didn’t feel we could turn it down. This was the year, too, that we’d become partners in the stilt house, and so had begun the annual lease payments, the taxes, and the sharing of upkeep and repairs. It was, I knew, typical of many Miami families to live above their means, to hunker under a mounting precipice of debt, but I hadn’t thought of us as the type.

  “We should sell the boat,” I said.

  “Really, it’s not that big a deal. I’m just not sure where the paperwork stands. It might be that technically, on paper only, we’re driving a stolen boat.”

  “Are you concerned?” I said.

  “No,” said Dennis, coming to comfort me. “It’s just a hassle, that’s all.” I turned away from him. Our boat wasn’t ours—it was some guy’s petty way of getting back at his wife, whom he had probably loved once, a long time ago. I stepped onto the dock and looked up at the stilt house. I felt cold and unsteady, as if I’d shed a more confident version of myself. I could already feel myself losing the version of me who’d wake to her husband’s mid-night caress, the girl who’d have sex against a porch railing, arms flung over the water, as if submitting to the sea itself.

  Beneath the Becks’ dock, the white package continued its tortoise journey to sea. “Let’s go get it,” I said.

  “Frances—”

  I shouted for Paul and Marse, and they joined us on the dock. Marse read my face for signs of stress. I told them what I wanted. “Are you sure?” said Paul.

  “If we don’t do a little research,” I said, “we’ll never know.”

  “What if the pickup comes while we’re there?” said Marse.

  “It won’t,” said Paul.

  Dennis climbed into the boat and started the engine. Paul untied the spring line and threw it into the well of the boat.

  “It’s the sharks or us,” I said to Marse.

  “Us,” she said, stepping into the boat.

  Paul handled the lines and we drifted from the dock. The channel was choppy and Dennis took it slow. I watched the horizon for planes and boats. My heart pounded. We coasted up to the package and Paul readied himself, an arm extended. The package seemed irrelevant now, a detail; Dennis’s deceit loomed. The boat tipped as Paul leaned over the side. To Dennis, I said, “I’m nervous.” Dennis looked at the package, then at me. He came to me and we looked around: the bay, the ocean, stilt houses in the distance, compact and still.

  “We’ll be OK,” he said.

  “Got it,” said Paul. It was larger than I’d thought, and the plastic was light gray, not white, as it had seemed from a distance. It was tied like a gift with burlap string. “It’s light,” said Paul. He laughed. “It’s way too light.”

  Paul brought the package to the bow and set it down. Dennis knelt across from him, and Marse and I watched over their shoulders. Dennis used a key to tear the plastic, then Paul spread the tear open with both hands. The plastic was thick; he had to put some muscle into it. When a portion of the contents was visible, Marse said, with unconcealed disappointment, “Newspaper.”

  “What’s inside?” I said.

  “It’s just a newspaper,” said Paul. He widened the tear in the plastic and pulled out a crisp, neatly folded New York Times. “Sunday edition,” he said.

  “There’s more,” said Dennis.

  Inside the package, bundled in the same gray plastic, was a smaller parcel. This one was tightly packed and lumpy. “Here we are,” said Paul.

  Dennis was tentative with the keys this time. He made a small tear in the corner of the parcel and widened the tear with his thumb. Paul hovered impatiently. Inside the widening hole, something silver reflected the sunlight, and I caught a whiff of the contents. Dennis stepped back to let Paul take over. What Paul revealed, after a few seconds of working at the package, was six or seven whole fish—bonitos, I believe. Silver scales came away on Paul’s hands.

  “Fish?” I said.

  Dennis was delighted. “What the hell?” he said.

  Marse picked up the New York Times and folded back the sections, one by one. In a crease of the classifieds, she found an envelope. Paul started to grab it but she stepped away from him. She read: “ ‘Marc and Kathleen—Another touch of civilization couldn’t hurt. Hope the champagne didn’t get too bubbly in flight. Crossed fingers that you catch something big with this bait. Any marlin yesterday? Happy anniversary, Mimi and Ronald.’ ”

  “Holy shit,” said Paul.

  “Anniversary?” said Dennis.

  We dumped the bait into the bay. Dennis started the engine and we headed back to the stilt house. Paul and Marse sat side by side on the gunwale, their legs dangling in the well of the boat. Within a few weeks, they would split up. I never had any reason to believe this had anything to do with me. She wouldn’t know what had passed between me and Paul until many years later, long past the time when it would have made any difference. And although Dennis would see less and less of him, eventually Paul would burst back into all our lives and stay there, a surprising but permanent fixture. All around us, couples whose weddings we’d attended, whose unions we’d toasted, broke up: Kyle, who’d married a potter named Julia shortly after I’d moved to Miami, was first; then one of Dennis’s law partners, with whom we’d become friends; then Benjamin O’Dell, Bette’s ex-fiancé, who’d married a girl he’d met while traveling in England.

  A month later, Dennis sorted out the paperwork with the boat, and we sold it and started saving for another. With the money from the sale, we paid off the addition on the house. Grady offered his boat when we wanted it, which meant more outings with Dennis�
��s parents, which I didn’t mind. Margo loved being with them—Grady carried her piggyback and never told her to keep her voice down, and Gloria kept sugary cereals on hand and let her try on her good jewelry. We kept our membership in the yacht club—Grady had gone to bat for us, and declining would have been humiliating—and for a long while we didn’t take vacations or go to restaurants, and we put off sending Margo to summer camp. Whenever I grew frustrated with living lean during that time—and this would not be the last tight period during our life together—I reminded myself of the boat we’d never really owned, and thought of the choices we were making in opposition to the choices we could have been making, and I was relieved. It was so easy, I understood now, to take a wrong turn.

  That afternoon, before returning to Miami, Marse and Paul napped in the downstairs hammock and Dennis went into the big bedroom with a book. I finished packing our things and made light trips to the boat, prolonging the process to have something to do. There was a lot of garbage to tow in to shore. There was always, no matter what efforts we made, a lot of garbage. At one point when I came downstairs, Paul was alone in the hammock. “Where is Marse?” I said.

  “I have no idea.”

  I put down the bag I was carrying and looked around. The downstairs bathroom door was open and she wasn’t on the boat or the dock. I opened the door to the generator room, but there was only the loud motor and the many shelves of salt-crusted shoes. I went back to the hammock. Marse could certainly handle herself, but nevertheless I felt protective of her. “Really, where is she?”

  “I really don’t know.” He had an arm under his head. The hammock swung leisurely.

  “Get up.”

  “Why?”

  “Go find your girlfriend.”

  He smiled. “She can take care of herself.”

  “I know she can, but I’d prefer to know roughly where everyone is at any given time.”

  He gave a mock look of concern. “You think she drowned?” He was baiting me; of course he knew where she was. He sat up in the hammock and I stepped back. “I don’t bite,” he whispered. I heard Dennis talking upstairs, then Marse’s laugh. Paul said, “I have no intention of hurting Marse, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  I took a breath. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  He was sitting down, but still I felt dwarfed by his intensity and charm and looks. “I can be discreet,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt Dennis either.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s been a while,” he said, “me wanting you.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You think you’ll never do it, Frances?”

  There was a warm wind coming from the north. I willed it to carry our words, and my memory of them, out to sea. “No,” I said, “I’ll never do it.”

  His voice was calm. “You will,” he said. “One day you will, and you’ll realize that what people say about it isn’t true. You won’t feel guilty, you’ll just feel happy and horny and you’ll think back and realize you could have done it with me.”

  He was broad and sexy. He would be good at sex, I guessed. He would put his heart into it. He would be generous and complimentary, would inspire an eagerness to please, a dismantling of inhibition. He would moan without checking himself. He was a man who loved plants, who worked for himself, who had great sex: I felt a brief flush of desire for him.

  When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, then looked off. “That goddamn package,” he said. He seemed truly to shift his attention. In the end, he turned away and walked upstairs, and I remained, overcome by sorrow for many reasons, not the least of which was this: I had a feeling that Paul was right about what he’d said. We were still at the start of a long road together, Dennis and me. The future was still so murky. For a long moment it seemed almost inevitable that our happiness would not last, could not last, and that at some point, after Margo left home or before, I would find myself in a similar situation, and this time I would want it badly enough to let it happen. And—this thought was incredibly sad to me—I might not even feel terribly ashamed. I might come to consider it just one episode in the life of the marriage, just another wave in the windy channel. Not a hurricane at all.

  1982

  On a Saturday evening in February of Margo’s sixth-grade year, Dennis and I drove her to a slumber party in a gated community called CocoPlum, ten minutes from our house by car. The hostess was a girl named Trisha Weintraub, whom I’d met only once. Trisha was a year ahead of Margo in school. When we drove up, her mother, Judy, was sitting on the terra-cotta porch with her boyfriend, drinking white wine. Judy’s boyfriend wore a loose linen shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and Judy wore hammered gold earrings and an embroidered caftan. When I complimented her on the top, she told me she’d brought it back from Lima, where she’d been on retreat. Dennis asked the pertinent questions: How many girls were sleeping over? Was Trisha excited to be turning thirteen? (Margo was still only eleven.) Did Judy have our number, in case? Would any boys be dropping by? (He managed to slip this last one in jokingly; if I’d asked, I would have seemed uptight.) Judy didn’t say anything about it, but I assumed that she’d heard Dennis was unemployed. All the ladies must have heard—it was exactly the kind of thing that got around.

  Margo hopped from one foot to the other while the adults spoke, waiting to be released. When we ran out of small talk, I kissed my child good-bye. She thanked Judy for the invitation, and Judy cupped her chin and said, “Qué linda.” It was a trend in certain circles, I’d noticed, to learn just enough Spanish to drop some into casual conversation, but not enough to have a discussion with the housekeeper. I handed Margo Trisha’s birthday gift—a pricey blow-up pool float with a layer of reflective coating for even tanning—and she ducked through the oversize front door. I glimpsed Trisha and a marble staircase and heard a shriek from inside. Dennis and I said good-bye to Judy and her boyfriend and spent the following hours in a dark bar and grill on the Miami River, drinking beer and eating popcorn in lieu of ordering a meal.

  At two a.m., Margo called and begged us to pick her up. We drove there in our bathrobes and found her waiting alone on the dark porch, shivering in her denim jacket. She was barely coherent; we couldn’t get anything out of her until she’d swallowed some water and—this was Dennis’s idea—half an inch of whiskey. After she’d calmed down, she explained what had happened and told us very solemnly that she was never going back to school, then fell asleep against Dennis’s shoulder on the living room sofa. He didn’t move until light started to stream in through the blinds and Margo stirred.

  What happened at the Weintraub home that night was the direct result of a meeting Dennis and I’d had eight months earlier, at the end of the previous school term, with Margo’s fourth-grade teacher. Mr. Oxley was a lanky blond man with a thick white mustache and western-style blue jeans. He was older than most of the other teachers by a decade, and had the habit of winking at the close of a conversation. After Back to School night that year, Dennis had commented that Mr. Oxley had clammy hands, and Margo had said, “Mr. Oxley would never say that about you,” and requested an apology on her teacher’s behalf, which Dennis had provided. Mr. Oxley inspired in my daughter—and in her friends, from what I could tell—kindness and respect. His was a well-mannered class.

  We met with Mr. Oxley in the fourth-grade classroom at Sunset Elementary, where Margo had been a student since kindergarten. Dennis and I sat in the front row of student desks. I fit snugly in mine, but Dennis’s knees chafed the underside of his, and his elbows extended over each side. He fidgeted, knocking around. Behind him, cluttering the low shelves along one wall of the room, were two dozen models of Miami’s proposed new public transportation system, the Metro Rail. The television news had been filled for months with sketches of the new system, which, upon completion four years later, would end up costing the city $215 million. Margo’s model was wedged in the middle: cars fashioned from
orange juice containers and tinfoil, pillars from balsa wood, and grass from sticky green felt. The project had taken us the lion’s share of a weekend the month before. Blue ribbons—for participation—hung on sickly gold strings from most of the projects, including Margo’s. The red-ribboned winner was partially obscured, but I could see that the railway was made from toothpicks. I started to care, but then all at once I didn’t. While we’d worked on the model, a lock of Margo’s brown hair had dipped into the jar of glue, and we’d ended up over the kitchen sink, giggling and soapy. This is where Dennis had found us when he’d arrived home from fishing. We’d thought his raccoon-eyed sunburn was unbearably funny, and he’d put on a Kenny Rogers record, moved the half-finished model off the breakfast table, and laid down newspaper so he could teach Margo how to gut a fish.

  Mr. Oxley ushered a pair of boys out of the back of the room. When he’d called the house, I’d worried that Margo was in trouble for talking too much—this was the complaint we’d heard most often. On the contrary: it seemed he was suggesting that we consider promoting Margo to the sixth grade after the fourth, thereby allowing her to skip fifth grade entirely.

  “Altogether?” said Dennis.

  Mr. Oxley nodded. I could see that we amused him—because we were stuffed into the little desks, maybe, or because Dennis was there with me, a house-husband. I admit that I was proud of Margo. But Dennis, who years later when Margo applied to colleges would tell her to discriminate not by rankings but by how she was treated when visiting, was immune to this kind of smug satisfaction. He said, “Are other kids skipping?” and Mr. Oxley shook his head. Dennis looked at me. “She’ll leave all her friends,” he said.

  She’ll make new ones, I thought. At that moment, I could see Margo through the vertical blinds of the classroom: she was standing in the courtyard with her best friend, Carla, using her hands as puppets. One hand opened to talk, then shut as the other yammered on. I’d embroidered a red rose on the front pocket of Margo’s jeans, and it wiggled as she moved.