“Marion had to leave,” he said. “She was too smart to stay in what’s basically a suburb.”
“I get why they came down. You can still see vestiges of what it had to be like then.”
“But it changed and got too homogenized, I bet. That’s how we should open, at least the Key West section. Don’t you think? Pan down, like when we landed, what we first saw …”
The lights changed.
“Sure, Pooh Bear. I’d need to get more quotes on what the old version of here was like.”
Andi had a fetish for face time. You could cover half this stuff through emails.
“But you know what I mean, write it as a sort of ghost story?” Josh said, feeling that was lame. He was no intellectual, he’d admit—if there were anyone he knew he could admit this to.
She made a tight frown and Josh thought he knew what she was doing. The not having sex more than once or twice a month anymore— that was his idea. Where had that come from?
“I mean, I know you don’t want to hurry into anything,” he said, covertly panicking.
“I just want it to be the best book it can be.”
And if he said, “Relax, it will be,” he’d just get that back in his face: “Relax—open a bag of weed maybe—get stoned, talk about it? No, Joshua. That’s your solution to things, not mine.”
He loved weed! Weed was your buddy. You didn’t have to do any explaining to the bong.
“What sucks,” Andi said at the next corner, “is I don’t think I even like Marion anymore.”
Uh-oh.
“Why’s that?”
“Joshua,” she said, nodding along to each shaken-out syllable, “marriage is a covenant.”
He agreed. He’d been holding back proposing. Marriage wasn’t supposed to work after five years or so of only living together, and they’d nearly reached the six-year mark. Before that, he’d adored his freedom, those seven or eight precious months of living with a bunch of guys in Greenpoint. He’d tried to talk her out of quitting her M.A. program and moving down. Then he’d had to apologize. “You don’t talk to me,” she’d said, and he’d said, “Sorry, not wired like that.”
The lights changed and Andi continued, “I think of that poor man, literally ruined by her. Look at him, a husk of a human being—I’m sure a mere shell and a shadow of his former self.”
“He’s an old man, Andi. He’s had cancer. He probably drinks all day. It was one p.m.”
“Oh-ho,” she said, “we excuse the intoxicated while the oppressed suffer. Or did. Suffer.”
Marion was in glory, as they said, her career soon to rise phoenix-like after their book. A hit or two and he could believe this shit—it was true, when you were lit. Just get high. The world is better then, enlightened, fun. Loosen up, don’t be mom and dad. Squirm with hot, wet love.
“Seriously, baby. Just write what we saw. I remember the day you came to my dorm room from reading one of her books. You were so alive, on fire. You were this crazy burning bush.”
“I was in trouble at the time. I needed guidance and I thought I’d found it in Marion.”
“She’s your personal record. You spent a year reading her stuff. You got that essay prize writing about her. She means more to you than most people do. We’ve got to follow through.”
She didn’t say anything. She was still tender, confused. She had gone around talking the line about art and art’s power to transform and transmogrify and transcend mere us. She’d gotten drunk at parties in Brooklyn and said, “You don’t understand, dude.” Even girls she called dude. She’d jabbed the chests of older, better-established men and said, “No, what you’re talking about is master narrative, dude. What I’m talking about’s visceral, intellectually challenging, mad-hot visionary—visionariness. The bitch had a vision, but now everybody’s ignoring Marion Jillsen.”
Andi could make Marion sound almost like Madonna, but who cared about writers now? Leo was right, or somebody back there was. Maybe it was Josh himself. End of a fucking era. A new species was called for: this writing thing, even this pop star thing—dinosaur material, man.
She had not come from a reticent family, but Josh had. All he had was his short, humble poems to attend to. They were about nature and the lightly churning epiphanies of a life quietly felt, like a butterfly quickly perceived on the fleet, in the peripheral, before it was gone again. It was fucking gone, but Andi crazily persisted. His favorite Bible verse finished something like
faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
And that’s what he wanted to give her, if he still could. She didn’t care for his religious side, and she was right. Every rational facet of Josh’s soul and his mind said so, but Josh loved his God.
He said, “Baby, when we get the hell out of here we can think more clearly about stuff.”
She liked that. They passed a house where the front door was open and this guy paced the weathered porch. She could hardly see a second guy inside yelling out at him, “I know what you do, you think I don’t know? You’re going down to the beach every day looking for that pootie!”
She and Josh stopped on the next corner and flat-out laughed. They did have fun together. At the topless bar the other night, she’d tried to get up on stage. Busted hangover the next day.
The hostel was in a better neighborhood. They still weren’t convinced that their itches in the middle of the night weren’t caused by bed bugs, and the staff was one sourpuss after another.
They had paid full price, but the pale dreadlocked girl working the night shift had tried to sneak an unbathed European onto a cot in their room one evening while they were out at dinner.
“This way I won’t charge you the same,” the girl had said when they’d complained. Even with the overhead light on, Euro Boy had stayed sacked-out: “This way is better for everyone.”
The windows were transom windows they had to get on a chair to crank open. They had him booted, making the girl wake him up and explain it to him in their mutual language. But the smell hovered near their faces in bed and there was no fan and the screens had holes in them, and they’d lain awake laughing, remembering their trip to Europe and the continent’s irritable service.
A major surprise now to see Dreads again—as they’d started calling the girl—behind the front desk so early in the day. Josh did the honors of explaining the situation, their stored bags.
She wouldn’t let him get behind the desk and go into the closet himself.
“Okay, take your shit,” she said once she’d retrieved them. “I hope you enjoyed your all-important privacy. My friend was very tired. He traveled for two days, sleeping in airports. Two whole days! I hope you get rich so you never have to stay here again. I want to leave the United States, where money is so prized—where the world’s resources and space, they are so prized.”
“Surprised?” said Josh.
Andi said, “Tell your friend thank you for leaving his scent behind, so we could savor it. Is that one of the amenities included here, free BO? All-night armpit and garlicky anal stink?”
Dreads stood behind the bunkering desk, smiling, not blinking, out the window. She said with rich, moist Carpathian consonants, “You know the number for a taxi to the airport, I trust?”
Leaving the office, they met her friend coming from the unisex washroom in a sarong.
“Have a nice trip,” the now obviously clean traveler said, not uncheerfully—and glad to be completely through with airports for a spell, it was safe to say. “This is goodbye, correct?”
Feeling a bit foolish, Andi said, “That’s right. Well, have a nice stay. Nice meeting you!”
A sarong, Josh thought. A really nice sarong.
The ride out to the airport was lovely, down the highway lined with quivering palms. The driver listened to something ethnic and draggy on the radio clamoring ebulliently. He reached to turn down the radio and said, “Hey, look at that front coming in, might be your lucky day! Might not have to leave after
all. Yep, might just get to hang out another night on old Cayo Hueso!”
Up ahead, the front was clearly defined and dark, an anvil of purple-gray-black swirling at its outer edges with fog or whatever, a condensing or evaporating moisture, whichever stage was relevant. The top of the anvil head gathered and expanded outward, leering forth it seemed.
Andi dropped her jaw and was hushed for an instant, then said, “But we can’t afford it.”
Not another night with Dreads! She wanted to wake up and go to their own coffee shop.
“Anything bad like that coming from the mainland, they shut her down. Puddle jumpers.”
But an hour and a half later, they were up in the air. The front had dissolved, going from a deep bruise to a bright platinum gray and veering right then moving out to sea before it could hit.
She had given him the window, and when he looked down saying bye-bye to the island of Key West, Josh believed that Andi felt his sadness, too—the one they shared whenever they left a place together, as they’d done many times from many places. A sort of going-away-from-but-not-moving-toward-anything-especially-important sadness.
little reef
Jo’s looked small from the street, but go inside and you’d be amazed how spacious it was. Nets covered the walls, electricbulbed paper lanterns were swagged along the ceiling, and behind the bar, tropical fish hung luridly in a tank the size of a picture window filled with eyeball-achingly bright saltwater.
Jeanette had come in by herself and sat at the booth near the front door. At nearly eighty, she was well preserved, with convincingly auburn hair still and a cream complexion and flaring green eyes, an “Irish” look. It was early, and she probably wouldn’t need to vacate the booth for a smaller table before she and Wesley left for dinner at one of their chains. Jeanette had stopped watching the door by the time Buster mixed and delivered her margarita before she’d even had to order it. Not for hours would it swing into boogie at Jo’s. Buster had the itchy, poached eyes of every chain-smoker Jeanette ever knew. He was friendly, a little too. He set her drink down and hovered, smiling. He wore a shiny teal and gold and black Jaguars jersey and denim short shorts, his legs dark and hairy. His face as well, though not the baby-smooth top of his fireplug head so pinkly flushed from high blood pressure going purple by his slightest exertion. He always asked after Wesley. Buster was eager, kind, chatty, and lonely. It was unimaginable what communities like this did to men like Buster. Buster scratched his shoulder, then his right tit, blinking rapidly.
Jeanette ignored the simian bit of nervous grooming and dipped her forehead toward him and said, “Thank you, Buster,” reaching in to dig around in her bag and soon finding her wallet.
“If you’re staying a while,” he ventured wryly, as always, “I could run you a tab.”
A tab wasn’t her style, as by now he should’ve deduced, and she said, “I don’t think so.”
She handed him a ten—she wasn’t one of those demure biddies— and he took it instantly.
Closing his lips and drawing them forth, Buster said, “Wes coming in, Miz Blake?”
“He’ll be along directly, I expect. At least I hope. How are things for you, Buster?”
“Had a nasty cold last week, but I’m on the mend now. Nice day out there, you’ll note.”
“Real pretty day,” she said, nodding, waiting for him to skedaddle.
“Be right back with your change,” he said, and his heart seemed to be bursting bright.
Jo’s was a bar for women, but Buster ran the day shift. He opened at an unthinkable two in the afternoon. While in her thirties, Jeanette had left inland Jacksonville to be closer to her job and after retiring stayed out here. The beaches had a more bohemian feel, which did not disturb her enough to make a fuss over. In general people minded their own business, Buster and Alison being the only two exceptions. Alison, as usual, was at the bar and had been leaning over it with one of her cocktails, something concocted of juices and hard liquor, when Jeanette had first come in. Alison had also been in love with Wesley, who’d lived with Jeanette since he was a tot, since before that—since he was born and after Jeanette’s only daughter, Lisa, had passed away. Alison had eventually gotten over her crush for Wesley, unlike Buster. She was young still, living with her father, and as far as Jeanette could tell she’d never worked a day in her life. She called her father the Bastard. You got used to stories like this. Jeanette reckoned by now she’d heard them all and most of them here at Jo’s Little Reef. In her agnostic way, she prayed that her Wes would meet a nice boyfriend (not here, God almighty, no!) and thus have no further use for Jo’s. At times she’d try to see what this man looked like in her imagination, playing her game of mental slot machine. He was a tad older than Wes, gainfully employed, something of a father figure, and very sensible with money—in short, a male role model. Shouldn’t be any harder than hooking a bride, and yet meeting your grandson habitually in bars on Friday nights hardened you not just about gays. Her only husband, all that time ago—well, people were people. She liked the salt crystals around the cool sweaty rim of the curvaceous glass. The first few sips, like breaths drawn in the cool depths of a cavernous rainforest. She wanted to go to Brazil someday alone, ensconced in a tour group.
The electric-blue and uncannily gilt fish flicked bigly with their self-possessed dignity off to one side of the tank, hovering unblinking. Buster’s hemorrhoids were killing him. He’d done a sugar reading just before and it topped off at 80, a triumph. Everything was medical. Get after the age of thirty in life and it was just numbers, stats you filed with medical authorities. He lived alone. Buster wanted a lover, but not as much as he needed tips. To live, he served.
He turned and wiped the counter, and Alison straightened up from her slump. His slump.
Alison was becoming Alex and so now Alex said, “Shit, I forgot to bring my STP.”
Stand To Pee: a plastic funnel and little hose gadget Buster hoped he’d soon not have to hear about again. He hummed, saying, “I’ll watch your drink. You want to run home and get it?”
He’d been sipping beer and went to the register to make Mrs. Blake’s change, thinking of Wes. Have Wesley Blake and he’d be calm like sipping watery Jack, intoxicated. But he’d never have Wesley, not with Mrs. Blake as gatekeeper. Life got you in its tickling reaches and laughed.
Alison/Alex slumped again and Buster felt a certain love for her, wild beaten-down thing.
“No,” Alison/Alex said, touch of the drama queen, “I’m fine,” tittering to herself. “Fine.”
Kid was a quiz, messed up some at home then shoved out the door to hang out in bars.
Buster came around with three and a half dollars’ change, thinking, nice lady, you do not know. How I’m on the edge, how we’re all on the edge, and I need affection as much as you do.
Tall, fine, bony, lanky Wesley, his Wes. Unable to admit his own tenderness, sweet boy.
“Oh!” said Jeanette, as though surprised by her due, and suddenly bright. “Keep two.”
She taught him to be generous, is where the Blake generosity came from, he thought.
Jeanette wanted to be generous. She had money, the only thing she didn’t have was time.
Buster said, “Well, you know where to find me,” and returned to his spot behind the bar.
“I’ll give a holler, Buster.”
Jeanette wasn’t always sure why she came into Jo’s, except that Wesley liked it so much. She was uncomfortable at times with how inexplicably she allured some of the women, even the much younger ones. A long time ago, when she’d dare to go into one, at any other bar men often hit on her—given to blind-drunk states or hoping to have her soothe their battered egos. Flirting and fishing for compliments. “You’re a good-looking fellow,” they wanted her to tell them, “and believe me, mister, if only I were just a few years younger …” But she’d never been that young.
The beaches were all-or-nothing, a free-for-all, pick-your-rock-music way of putting it.
The “mores” at the beaches could be funkier with so many aging exhippies; you took the good with the bad. She knew what pot smelled like. Jeanette would leave the house, if walking, and pass rows of carports. Under the concrete roofs of the big open airy carports, bearded, long-haired grays listened to loud music hunched over the open engines of their vintage automobiles, tinkering and wailing along. In the air, wafting along to the rock, was the smell of burning sage, she’d thought, and it had taken Wesley at nine to explain to her what this really was: “A sausage smell, Nanna?” he’d said. “No, Nanna. That’s grass, ganja, Mary Jane!” Jeanette walked to the beach to stroll on a windy afternoon. Now always on Fridays she walked to Jo’s to meet Wesley.
She just wanted to have a margarita in peace, or two margaritas. Sometimes she had two.
Here came Alison, Tugboat Annie. Only Jeanette, Buster, and Alison were around yet.
“Can I just come over, say hey?” Alison said, puffing her lips but not lowering her head, a movie-screen timidity that still must “play.” She had lovely eyes, needed to learn about manners. Jeanette loathed poor manners. The violation of others’ personal space was—but Alison dropped her voice to a deep mauve and whimpered, keeping her distance, saying, “Ma’am, it’s just hey!”
“Why, of course,” said Jeanette. “How are things treating you, Alison?”
She made no indication for the child to sit. She valued peace, and even dreamed about a little of it on her own somewhere sometime. But she couldn’t be anything but instantly friendly, being a silly Southerner. The manners to her were a language, not rule of law. A minute passed.
“Oh, Miz Blake.”
“Alison?” said Jeanette, and nodded—her mistake. Manners, perfunctory and invasive.
The girl, what Jeanette supposed they still called a baby butch, made a baby-talk goo-goo sound and dropped her bulk onto the padded bench opposite Jeanette with impressive impact.
“Shit, I have to go into the Center and inject myself the first time. I’m scared, ma’am.”
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 9
