Nine Island (11 page)

Well, it's only because you're too involved with that dead poet and those hopeless guys you write to. Plus all the men here are gay. I know it's a cliché, but it does reduce the possibilities. And I guess you don't want to try the inter . . . ? No, I guess not. Is it a sort of paralysis? No, I see. Maybe you're just not
interested
. Okay, well. Come up and have a drink with P and me. Not that it will help, but you know. Next Thursday. No, I see the hypnotist Thursday. Come Friday. You'll like P. I guess you will, anyway. I mean,
I
like him. But then, I did
marry
him. Anyway, he's younger than I am.

Nice change, I said.

But only by four years. Still, I'm the older woman. I had to teach him so many things, and she laughed the dry laugh.
Politics
, for instance, she said. It was the early seventies, and he was such a baby he didn't know anything. But I came from an old lefty Jewish family, I knew everything. And other matters. You can imagine.

Certainly can.

I'm only sorry—

About what?

Well, that he has to put up with me now. He wouldn't like me saying that. Poor P, he takes such good care of me. . . . He doesn't like me to do anything, not pay bills or clean or anything. When I used to be a nurse! I can't even be a real
wife
anymore. When he still seems so
young
to me, and vital! You know what I mean. Me being so broken and— She shook her hands and looked down at herself as if amazed that this was
her
.

What do you mean? And what hypnotist?

I didn't want to bore you with all of that. It's just . . . Oh, it's just I have so much pain.

Excruciating but invisible pain, she told me then, that began with running and yoga until her cartilage was worn away and she was just bones rubbing bones. Made worse by a surgeon who claimed he'd fixed her but hadn't. The pain was even worse after that, she said, although he said she imagined it. Nothing to do but believe her. Even if she walks erect and looks free as she floats in the pool: I believe her because she says it and because her eyes are always being abducted by something that seems to swim up from inside and wrench her back into hell.

But it's
okay
, she said. I'm working on it. Okay, so the therapist wasn't really that helpful, because you know
talking
doesn't do much. And the chiropractor was sort of a joke, but the massages can be good, and sometimes the acupuncture. For a bit. Don't get me started on herbalists. I can't believe I've become a person who does all this stuff. I never used to be this skinny. Look at me! But anyway, there's an energy therapist, that's where I'm going now. He's supposed to pull energy away from the pain or something. Also the hot tub can be helpful. And the pool . . . Well, the pool. We're lucky to live here, you know. It's paradise, right, she said, and shrugged, and bent herself into her car.

B
ONE TISSUE =
calcium phosphate
+
collagen
. Makes bone rigid, like coral. Calcium phosphate is not organic, unlike calcium carbonate (of limestone, cement, and concrete), which is.

It's getting clear that I've been wrong about N and her husband, their being Want and Want Nothing. When she gets up, agitated, from a lounge chair and stalks over the cracked pool deck, her bone fingers clutching her riddled back, from beneath the brim of his baseball cap, her husband's eyes keep watch. They turn to his paper only when she looks back.

O
N THE CAUSEWAY this evening, across the road from the silhouetted duck was a silhouetted iguana. Iguana gazing pensively south. Gazing north, the duck.

And suddenly I saw a painting in the dusky air:
An annunciation angel floats on one side of a column, a virgin sits amazed on the other. Between them, a beam of light.

I bring you a message from our lord! says the angel
.

Messages, messages. Faraway men.

Blue-ink letters from the other side of the world.

Messages now are blue light.

Farther along, on Rivo Alto, a hen and five long-legged chicks jerked and clucked over the lawn of a palace, then rushed flapping across the street, making a Maserati swerve.

The sky just then: coral dunes.

Dancing light-girl on the west side of the bay; her mate, the huge clock on the east. The clock can be the angel here, delivering his message.

Guess what
, the angel clock's saying.
It's time
.

S
MITH & WOLLENSKY
: a fancy restaurant at the south tip of the Beach, with a bar out by the water that rushes through the Government Cut. Cruise ships pass on their way to sea, making the atmosphere festive. I perched on a stool, sipped a French 75, and spun around now and then to watch spangled chunks of city float by, miniature people waving. Bar-mates: two couples, a young trio, and a man on his own. I texted K that I was on a stool in public with waxed legs and candy-floss hair, solo man not distant. He ordered a rye and likewise cast his eye around, a glance that flicked on me, but passed; he focused on his rye and phone. Maybe Latin, maybe Anglo, but mostly not one of the deadbeats I know and thus
cento per cento
implausible.

Imagine an alien face drawing near.

I don't know how people do it.

When I was fifteen, the idea of a boy's face coming so close that it would dissolve in my vision made me panic. Like Zeno's arrow: for another body to get that close, it must not only blur but
melt
into me, and this was so paralyzing I'd laugh and bolt.

Was thinking this as I pondered the cheekbones of the Smith & Wollensky man. They glowed from his cell, and occasionally he smiled at the glow, looked up as if the phone-person were there, then shuttered again, dropped screenward.

Sipped and turned slowly around and around on the stool. After a while I wiggled off and walked to where the coral-rock path meets boulders that hold back the rushing water, and stared at ugly Fisher Island, and out to the black, black sea.

That's once
, wrote K.

• • •

Two days later. Will do it three times because three points confirm a line. This time, an Italian restaurant and sports bar up the Beach. The owner, I've noted in reconnoitering, is tall and slim and has the face of a panther and a lustrous gray-black mane. As I walked in tonight he was speaking closely with a high-hoofed girl, twenty to his fifty, beneath a frangipani tree.

Frangipanis are so nice. They bear flowers before leaves: five smooth petals of coral or lemon pinwheel from branches that look like burnt bones.

Walked through the table-set garden, lights strung between branches as they'd been strung along the decks of the cruise ships, and took a seat at the bar inside, a U-shaped bar made of something like Bakelite, smooth and cool, soft greens and reds from a Latin sports station glowing on its surface, how nice to lay your cheek down and sleep. The bartender, I'd noticed earlier, rode a motorcycle with another woman stuck to her back. Low jeans, tough-boy T-shirt, slick dark hair, rough voice.

Dimmi
, she said.

Ordered a truffle pizza and prosecco, leaned back, crossed slippery legs. A woman sat two stools down, her hair highlighted and cotton-candied like mine, skin damp on her upper lip.

She grinned at me, crooked. Howdy, she said. I've been here since five—and her foot skidded off the stool rung.

That's a good long time, I said. Having fun?

Oh, she said, oh, if you'd been here at six, was it six? Maybe six. A soccer team was here. Italian. Don't know why they were here but I have never, ever, seen such men. I'm hoping they'll come back. Do you think?

She swung her head toward the door, clutching the edge of the bar for balance. Just checking! she said, her face reeling back my way.

Not yet, I guess, I said, and looked at her pale pink fingernails and the smudged gloss on her lip.

But really, she said in a lower voice, really I just come for him—and she nodded toward the panther.

Yeah?

Oh, absolutely, she said. I'm here every day. Every night. And I know, she said in the same low tone, that he's got a thing for me.

At that moment he was consulting with one of the cooks, knuckles on his square linen hips. The high-hoofed girl sat outside at a table, staring at her cell, lovely olive face aglow, black hair a glossy stroke. The panther went gliding out with a glass he placed before her.

He does? I asked my bar-mate.

Well, yeah! she said. He always gives me special drinks and a discount on whatever I eat. Wait. Have I eaten? No—I mean, have I ordered anything? Giovanna!—she waved her pink nails at the bartender. Am I eating?

Of course you are, M. We always make sure you eat.

See? said M, and bobbed her head.

My pizza came, and M's tagliolini, and she told me she worked at the convention center and came here because she was sick of the other places on the Beach and besides: the owner. At some point a man came in, a conventioneer, and stood between the garden and bar, looking unsure where to sit. The panther glided over to him, glanced at the room, then smiled and led him to the bar and placed him between M and me.

I knife-and-forked my pizza and sipped prosecco, neck stiff because now I couldn't face M and had to stare straight ahead. Big screens silently showed young men in red, green, and white running. In the garden, the panther sat with his girl, long fingers stroking the table. At the next table, beneath the lights strung from slim Manila palms, a plump older man with a cigar leaned back and eyed three young women in short dresses sipping red drinks. Between his table and theirs, among the philodendra and citronella candles, a small furred face appeared.

I leaned forward: not a rat—too big. Not rabbit or raccoon, something cartoonish about it. Eyes too large for the face, and face too large for the body, which was the size of a puppy and ended in thin tail. The creature nudged between philodendron leaves, nudged near a woman's pearl-toned heel, came close to having its ear ashed by cigar. Foreign rat? Imported with bananas from Ecuador? A big boot landed near it just then, and it slipped back into the leaves. When I turned to the bar, the conventioneer was leaning close to M, who whooped and skidded half off her stool, but he caught her elbow; her nails set themselves in his sleeve.

She noticed me over his shoulder and said, Wait—hi! Weren't you here earlier? When the soccer team was here?

He snapped his eyes toward me.

I'm heading out, I said around his shoulder. Want to walk?

Oh no no no! she cried. I just got here! Didn't I?

Way too soon to go, the guy said, and gave me his back.

Paid and left.

And walking home in the sulfurous light, I realized: baby possum.

The third outing was last night. This has taken almost a week. This time, a place closer to home: over by Publix, across from the marina with aisles of restless shark boats, their internal red lights blinking. There was the old faux New York restaurant and the new Corsican place—chose New York. Cold and loud inside. Walked up to the bar. Boiled eggs sat inside a big jar; I slipped one out and ate it. Ordered fish and wine and swiveled to face the situation. Two men, each alone. No. A woman appeared—one of Lino's Russian light-girls! Neither she nor her man spoke. She pointed to the menu, and soon a plate of raw meat arrived. She pulled at it in tendrils with her fingers while he studied his cell.

The other man also looked at his phone. Then suddenly palmed it over and stared dead at me. And bark ran over my skin.

Sono chiuso!
I wrote K beneath a street lamp.
All done.

Nope
, she wrote,
you'd rather bury yourself alive with those deadbeats and your dead poet and that dying old cat. It's a kind of emotional anorexia—

Switched off the phone.

The moon was full, tide high, salt water slopping the seawall of Belle Isle. From the manhole bubbled foam. Airy pale damp puffs rose through the grate, hovered in a tender, jiggling mass, then drifted free and blew along the curb, flitted and skittered over the road.

Sea foam. Sea girls once, who traded tails and tongues, in love, for legs that felt like knives.

R
EAD TONIGHT THAT
a
college girl has disappeared. Cameras on shop fronts show her, tall and lovely, loping along in the dark, looking drunk or drugged. These days, sure, she's been drugged. What some boys like to do. Thin beauty loping along like a deer. A jewelry-store camera shows her amble past, then shows a man in an alcove see her. He waits a moment, looks around, follows. She lumbers into another camera's view, the man now close behind.

Think I'm lost
, she texted a friend.

Then she shows up no more.

And now have read a long awful story: another college girl told a reporter she was raped. Drugged, yeah, and taken upstairs. But not drugged enough to forget what she saw. The faces of the seven above her in the dark, shining bottles in their hands.

Seven men, or boys, or dwarfs, or gods, or wolves, or uncles, whatever.

Turns out she imagined this story.

This
story.

My friend S types me what he thinks:
Why wouldn't girls imagine rape. They're being raped the moment they're born.

T
EN MORE O STORIES
of wanting and not wanting to transmute, and it's already July.

There's the story about the girl in love with her father who sneaks into his bed when he's drunk. But I'm saving this for nearly last.

There's the girl who tries to sleep with her brother.

And the one in love with another girl who can't figure out what to do.

The first gets what she wants, her father, then begs to be extinguished. The second does not get what she wants and weeps until
she dissolves. The third turns into a boy, gets the girl, is happy ever after.