by Lyle Howard
“Crazy American!” the oldest man yelled at her in broken English, once he and his friends reached the safety of the grass-covered median strip.
Crystal pulled her Burberrys sunglasses onto the tip of her nose until she was positive that the tourist’s eyes had locked onto her own steely grays. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” Crystal yelled over the blaring music.
The older tourist cautiously directed his companions to the beach side of the street before answering her with a nod of his head. “I understand English.”
The light turned green, but Crystal held her left foot on the brake while she revved the engine past the red line with her right. “Then go home, Adolph!” she howled, as the Corvette’s rear tires screeched to life. The innocent group of tourists stood dumbfounded as the noxious cloud of carbon monoxide and road dust settled over them.
If her father, Walter Barnes, would have heard her, for the first time in her twenty-six years, he might have raised a hand to her. Walter Barnes was a self-made billionaire who had amassed his vast fortune in the cruise line industry. With the nation’s economy in virtual shambles, the Barnes Lines Cruise Ships that sailed out of Port Everglades and the Port of Miami depended on foreign visitors like the ones that his daughter had just harassed for the family’ s financial survival. But, as usual, Crystal, who had never worked an honest day in her life, couldn’t have cared less.
Crystal glanced down at the dashboard clock and realized that she was running late. The movers were supposed to arrive at some time around one o’clock, and it was already nearly two. With the condo only a few blocks away, the forty-story unpainted monolith still managed to obstruct the sun. Its far-reaching shadow slowly stretched itself over the neighboring buildings like a gloomy quilt.
The top six stories of the building were still under construction and workers wandered in and out of the sparsely furnished lobby like carpenter ants. As Crystal’s convertible rolled up the horseshoe-shaped driveway, she immediately noticed that there was no doorman on duty. This was to be her grand entrance, and now it was ruined! As the red Corvette pulled to a stop in front of the lobby, two burly electricians carrying a ten-foot length of metal conduit shuffled out of the building.
“Hey, be careful near my car!” Crystal yelled from behind the wheel.
The electrician bringing up the rear snarled at her. “Hey, lady, you shouldn’t even be parked here. Take it around to the side entrance!”
“Watch that pipe,” Crystal warned. “If you scratch the paint, I’ll sue!”
As if they had run into a brick wall, the two men stopped dead in their tracks. Their jeans and work shirts were stained with dirt and sweat and they both chomped on the longest cigars Crystal had ever laid her eyes on. The lead electrician rolled his Macanudo between his lips, politely smiled, and then blew out the darkest, slimiest, wad of spittle he could summon up on such short notice. It landed on the sidewalk, a few feet from the car, with a sickening splat.
Crystal was appalled. “I want your names!”
“You can have them, as soon as we’re done with them,” the second worker said with a nod of his hard hat.
Crystal threw the transmission into drive, and tore away from the entrance, leaving the two men laughing amongst themselves.
If that’s going to be the attitude around here until construction is finished, Crystal worried to herself, then I’m going to have to have a serious talk with Daddy! It probably never entered Crystal’s narrow mind to let her future husband handle the problem, because whenever there was a major crisis in her life, she always ran home to Daddy. Little did she know that “delirious” was too mild an adjective for Walter Barnes to describe the fact that his little albatross was finally leaving the nest. If she hadn’t left home soon, her father was seriously considering having Crystal’s name legally changed to Remora, after the small fish that clings to larger fish in order to feed itself.
Pulling around to the building’s underground garage, Crystal slid her car into the parking space closest to the elevator and shut off the engine. Stepping out of the car, she reached behind the back seat and removed two plastic bags of groceries that she had planned on letting the doorman carry upstairs. As she reached behind the black leather bucket seat, her skin-tight red miniskirt hitched up over her buttocks, revealing quite an eye-opening surprise to anyone who happened to be strolling behind her. It was fortunate for Crystal that the garage was empty, although she was far from bashful and never minded giving the opposite sex a little tease now and then.
The basement elevator doors opened to reveal that the lift was crowded with half-filled buckets of plaster and planks of discarded wood. As Crystal stepped inside and pressed the button for the seventh floor, she wondered how much longer she was going to have to put up with all this clutter and chaos. She didn’t fancy the idea of living in a partially constructed building, but her floor … and all the ones below it … were finished and approved for occupancy. That meant that the payments would be starting right away, and Brandon saw no reason why they should wait another six months for the rest of the building to be completed.
Crystal shook her head in disgust as the elevator stopped at every floor to let workers carrying different odds and ends on or off. “Are they going to have an elevator for just the residents?” Crystal asked a plumber who had just stepped on at the third floor.
“This is the resident’s elevator, lady.”
Crystal switched the groceries into her other hand. “You’re kidding me, right?”
The plumber smiled at Crystal, revealing very few teeth in his mouth. “Sorry, lady. There’s only two elevators, and unless you want us to take the stairs, we gotta use ‘em both. If we didn’t, this joint would get finished around the turn of the century.”
The doors opened on the fifth floor, and four more construction workers stepped inside, jamming Crystal to the rear of the lift. “Hey did you hear the one about the daughter who wanted to borrow the car keys from her father?” one of them started to say.
“Hey, Dale,” another one warned, “cool it, there’s a lady in the back.”
Crystal suddenly understood what a rib roast hanging in a butcher’s shop window must have felt like, as every eye on the elevator zeroed in on her. She cleared her throat self-consciously and spent the remainder of the ride staring down at her grime-covered, ruby pumps.
“Seventh floor!” a low-pitched voice from somewhere in front of her rang out.
“That’s me!” Crystal yelled thankfully, “let me through!”
Two carpenters had to step out of the elevator to allow Crystal to pass. As she stepped past them, they turned to each other and grinned, yearning for what they knew they’d never get like visiting all the exotic locales displayed in a National Geographic magazine. The swaying of her hips was hypnotizing, and both men stood enraptured by God’s exquisite handiwork until she turned the corner.
Suite 726 was a two-bedroom corner residence with an eastern exposure overlooking the Atlantic, and a southern exposure looking out toward the city of Miami Beach. The sliding glass windows that opened onto the balcony had been left ajar to ventilate the apartment of paint fumes, and when Crystal went to close the entry door behind her, the strong crosscurrent grabbed the knob from her hand and slammed the door shut with a thundering boom that reverberated throughout the desolate apartment.
Crystal had hoped that the apartment would have been partially furnished by the time she arrived, but it was obvious from the barren living room that the movers were running late, too. All the better, she thought, as she stocked the food into the refrigerator. At least this way, she’d be able to tell them where all the furniture was to be positioned.
Crystal took a tour of the apartment, noticing a few places on the walls that needed to be spackled and repainted. As she strolled into the empty bedroom, she gazed out through the panoramic window that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. A wall of ominous black cumulus clouds were steamrolling in from the east, perched upon a sheet o
f gray rain. As the dark clouds rumbled closer, they boiled the salt water beneath them with barbed bolts of yellow lightning. Crystal prayed that the movers would arrive soon, because the last thing she wanted was for all of her new furniture to get soaked.
As she wandered slowly back into the living room, envisioning where all the new furniture would go, something stuck her as peculiar. When she and Brandon had first walked through the models, every room seemed much larger. After pacing along one wall, she was able to comfort herself … the rooms were indeed the correct size. Crystal wasn’t shrewd enough to realize that decorators and builders were notorious for filling their prototype rooms with smaller pieces of furniture to make the rooms appear more spacious. Now, she wondered, how was she going to fit all of those huge pieces into such an inadequate area?
The wind howled like an oncoming freight train through the partially opened sliding glass doors. Crystal strained with her legs spread wide for balance to slide the southern doors open all the way. With them finally open, the howling subsided, but she was pressed back into the living room by the pressure of wind rushing through the apartment. It felt like a huge invisible hand pushing her away from the balcony. Thunder from the approaching storm rocked the building. It felt to Crystal like nature had decided to declare war on her new apartment.
The dark squall line moved quickly ashore. Crystal barely had enough time to slam shut the sliding glass doors that faced east before the marauding rains began their onslaught on the fourteen-story condominium. Even with the southern doors wide open, the apartment stayed dry and there appeared to be no signs of water leakage. It was better that she found out now rather than with an apartment full of expensive furniture, she thought. Maybe there was a reason the movers were running late today. Fate sometimes touches lives in mysterious ways.
Like so many southern Florida rainstorms, the downpour blew itself out in less than fifteen minutes and was replaced by a wonderful rainbow that arched across the horizon like a multicolored bridge to infinity. The sky over the ocean once again turned pale blue as the sun reappeared like a long-lost friend. Crystal stepped onto the balcony and the smell of salt sea air saturated her senses. The air that trailed behind the storm front was crisp and invigorating, and Crystal held her face up to the breeze to savor its bracing stimulation.
Leaning with her stomach pressed flat against the railing, Crystal peered down to the roof of the lobby, six stories directly below her. The rooftop was filled with an assortment of scattered copper pipes and other construction equipment that the laborers had set aside for later use. The pipes leaned up against the main central air-conditioning compressor at odd angles like an abstract sculpture.
To the east of the main building, the nearly completed swimming pool and beach deck was spotted with puddles of water. In the deep end of the empty pool sat two pallets of boxes on which Crystal could read the words “Tiles Imported from Italy.” She didn’t know how they would do it, but the builders had assured her that the pool would be ready within two weeks. Crystal didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that unless these afternoon rains stopped, keeping their promise would be all but impossible.
With no real intention in mind, Crystal grabbed onto the metal railing in front of her and tried to rattle it loose. The railing felt strong and secure. Then, she rubbed the toe of her shoe against a small square of the damp marble tile the patio had been surfaced with. The veneer felt perilously slick. Kneeling down, she tested the tiles again with the tips of her fingers. They felt almost oily to her touch. This could be dangerous, she thought to herself. Except for the sandy grit left from the salt sea air, the tiles were extraordinarily slippery. Crystal looked over the railing and then down at the tiled patio floor again. Images of her affluent party guests plummeting over the railings like lemmings over a cliff suddenly filled her mind with dread. Either the tiles would have to be replaced with ones that offered more traction, or at some future date they would have to enclose the patio.
It was beginning to seem like the more time Crystal spent around her new apartment, the less she was liking it. She had no concept of how much work went into owning one’s own home. Any time something went wrong in her parent’s house, say, the plumbing, it seemed like the workmen somehow materialized out of nowhere to fix it. Why was she torturing herself with this apartment?
Losing herself in a drowning pool of self-doubt, Crystal almost missed the rhythmical sound of the front doorbell chime. As she slipped off her shoes to avoid losing her balance, she tiptoed back inside and gingerly placed the two-hundred-dollar pumps in an out-of-the-way corner to dry.
The doorbell echoed again within the barren apartment. “I’m coming,” Crystal shouted, “keep your shirt on!”
“It’s the movers, Mrs. Muller,” a muffled voice answered through the door, “sorry we’re late!”
Crystal opened the door and tried her best to look irritated. She put on a grimace that she had been expertly taught to use by her mother. “It’s about time you showed up! I was just about to call your office!”
The foreman was a muscular man who wore a painter’s cap backward on his head. His forest of body hair spewed out of every opening that his tank top would permit. Holding his clipboard against his massive chest, he chewed on his felt-tipped pen like it was a cigar. Glancing over at one of the empty walls, he saw the colored telephone wires dangling from an opened socket. She was bluffing, the phones hadn’t even been installed yet. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Muller. We decided to wait out the rainstorm down in the garage. We didn’t want to take a chance on anything getting wet.”
Crystal waved him in. “Let’s get a few things straight,” she warned, “first of all, I’m not Mrs. Muller yet.”
The foreman scratched something off the top line of his note pad.
“Second of all,” she whined, “I want everything up here quickly. I promised my fiancé that I’d have all the furniture set up by the time he got here.”
The foreman looked down at his wristwatch. “When is he supposed to be getting here?”
“Within the hour.” The foreman shook his head in dismay. “Jeez, lady, I don’t know. You’ve got a truck full of furniture downstairs.”
Crystal struck her best Scarlet O’Hara pose. “I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”
The foreman grumbled something under his breath and pulled a small walkie-talkie out of his back pocket. “Okay, guys,” he said, pressing the talk button on the radio, “let’s get a move on, we’ve got to get all of it up here in less than an hour!”
The foreman shut off the receiver before Crystal could hear the objections from the movers downstairs. “We’ll do our best, ma’am.”
Crystal looked down at her hand and began rubbing her nails with her thumb. “Just don’t break anything for goodness’ sake!”
The foreman nodded politely, but almost bit off the cap on his pen. “I’ll be going down to help my men, please leave this door open for us.”
Crystal walked into the kitchen and crumpled up some old newspaper that she had seen lying next to the sink. Near the old newspaper, attached to the sink’s faucet, was a note from the developer explaining that until five o’clock that afternoon, the water would remain off until the plumbers were through tapping into the main water line. What else could go wrong, she wondered? Taking the wad of newsprint into the living room, she opened the front door and jammed the paper beneath it to act as a crude but effective doorstop.
For the next fifty minutes, a steady stream of movers carried overloaded boxes, eccentric artwork, elaborate furniture and intricate electronics into the apartment. The foreman stood inside the front door and checked off each item as it was brought into the suite. He shrugged sympathetically at his tormented men as Crystal barked out directions.
“Only a few more pieces to go,” the foreman commented as he looked out into the overcrowded living room.
Crystal had to squeeze her way between her new sofa and loveseat. “I hope not m
any more.”
A smile filled with sinister satisfaction crossed over the foreman’s lips. “Four or five, tops.”
Crystal put her hand on her forehead as if feigning a headache. “I don’t know where we’re going to put everything else.”
The foreman nodded. “Yep, it looks a bit crowded to me, too.”
“How many more pieces did you say?” The foreman surveyed his clipboard. “Four or five.”
“Oh my.”
“I think we should stack these last few boxes over in a corner somewhere until you decide where everything is going to go.”
Crystal didn’t answer. As she sat herself down on the arm of her new sofa, she stared in disbelief at the maze of furniture that only less than an hour ago was an empty room. All of her impressive dreams and illusions of her lavish cocktail parties were wafting out the sliding glass doors with every overburdened box that was carried into the apartment. A guest would need a roadmap to guide themselves through this labyrinth of her belongings.
“Are you going to be okay, ma’am?” the foreman asked.
Crystal pointed to the comer where she had placed her shoes. “Just set the rest of the boxes down over there. I’ll have to decide where everything else will go later on, when my fiancé arrives.”
The foreman tried to hide his amusement, but he couldn’t wait to see the expression on poor Mr. Muller’ s face when he walked into this overstuffed warehouse of furniture.
Brandon Muller pulled into the underground parking garage just as the last box was being unloaded from the rear of the yellow and green moving van. “Is that the last of the boxes for 726?” he asked, stepping out of his car.
