Nine Island (5 page)

It's the kind of thing you can figure out with a phone bill and suspicion.

A month or so after the fact.

Scusi, dov'e un panificio?

The lyrics in my head all that time, had I been paying attention:
Why'd ya do it, she said, why'd ya do what you did?

Catalogue of comical disasters.

Mind like a museum of them, those men's bodies cast in postures of crime.

There
he
is, on our Venetian bed on the phone. There's the Devil, in the airport charging hard the other way. There
you
are, too, beloved Sir Gold, bidding me be a courtesan.

And others.

I might also have committed some crimes.

Fine: those who think so can put me in their museums.

Venus, meanwhile, clear and bright in the sky!

Like Marilyn Monroe, dancing in that funny red boat.

On both sides of the Venetian Causeway young people display their lovely bright or dark flesh as they run, cycle, skate. Not always but this evening the man whose arms and chest are dense with blue tattoos ran by. He had earbuds in and panted too violently: couldn't hear how loud he was, I guess. A woman jogged past in supershort shorts, with model legs and designer breasts and braided black hair swinging like beads. A man peddled near and wobbled wild when he got to her, yowling at her behind.

Yo mami mami mami!

Mamacita!

Ai.

I walked fast toward the sunset, counting steps. I understand that counting's a symptom but knowing this won't stop me. The number of steps, boats, balconies, strokes, lines of Latin, pages.

Also, I suddenly thought, days since I've had sex.

No matter what your mind wants, no matter what it's resolved to do, Mr. Body still makes trouble.

Thirty-two days is the answer. Ever since Sir Gold.

Solitary pleasuring does not count as sex.

What about atrophy? Does it count against that?

A word my mother whispered to me once. She'd been at the gynecologist's, and when he stepped outside she quickly swiveled her chart:
vaginal
atrophy,
in his blue ink.

Started doing kegels as I walked. Something new to count. Now this would be a full-body workout: FitFlops for legs and behind, arm-circling to fight the tender dewlaps hinting from my upper arms, kegels for submarine muscles. I found it easiest to time the squeezes with cracks in the pink sidewalk. Hold tight for ten cracks, release for four, tight for ten, and take it to the bridge.

Should I take 'em to the bridge?

Take 'em to the bridge!

In the middle of the bay flows a quick current of sea that looks like a pale green river. Always something floating in it, bottle, coconut, cup. Easier to be killed by a coconut than lightning. Or shark. I always check the coconuts tumbling in the water, hoping one's a head. Ditto palm fronds re shark fin.

At Di Lido, turned left. Each of the Venetian islands (except mine) is an ellipsis or circle with a single ring road running within, along coral-rock palaces or huge white postmodern boxes, nested in explosions of green. Fan palm, royal palm, poinciana, banyan, orchid tree, bottlebrush, mango. To say nothing of schefflera, bombax, coral tree, cycad, fishtail palm, and banana!

Once upon a time, just sulfurous mangroves, manatee nosing about.

Manatee = mermaid = siren.

Look it up.

In the driveway of an enormous white house-box at the end of San Marino were three black SUVs. The license plate on one was HAREM3, on the next, HAREM1. The other I couldn't see but oh, yes, I could guess. Belonging to the owner of a club? Talent agent for women at Publix? Were some of them in that white house right then? Even when those women lie on their backs, their breasts stand up: you see it on the billboards for augmentation.

I walked on, squeezing and counting. Ten hold, four release. Below huge leaves and a cluster of green bananas dangled a long umbilical cord, from which hung a magenta flower, heavy as a heart. Tiny anoles waited in the grass until my foot was about to strike the sidewalk, then ran out recklessly so I had to lurch to save them. Cats lay stretched in white tribes or black atop Ferraris and Maseratis. A pink crab like a hand clambered into a hole on the sandy edge of the sidewalk.

I used to hallucinate severed hands.

At the time of the end of that architect.

Something to do with a stepfather, no doubt. And trust and fear et cetera.

But happily this ended, so I now have no fear of scuttling pink crabs that happen to look like hands.

Headed back east, sun sinking behind me. As I got near the drawbridge, saw an odd silhouette on the grassy verge. A bird: a duck. But a strange one, somehow
exotic
. And big. A big strange duck all alone, gazing north toward the bay. It seemed noble, or sad. A wave of warmth flowed through me. Resumed my pace and counting.

Near a sign on the bridge for NO SWIMMING NO DIVING NO FISHING were three men fishing. They were not hidden at the foot of the bridge, where the grass meets rocks, and one of them glanced up nastily as I passed. A coconut floated by. Not a head. Also a long palm frond, finlike flange slicing the water. Not a shark. Then a man standing on a surfboard.

He wore thin wrinkled trunks and was lean and dark and elegantly muscled, standing on the choppy water beneath the purpling sky, long pole in his hands. He concentrated on his pole and the water, but as he drew near he glanced at the men fishing, then at the bridge, and then his eyes rose to me.

Lightning bolt!

He reached the bridge and, eyes still on mine, bowed his head to go under.

I stood still as he glided below.

Five kegels later, he emerged on the other side of the bridge and rowed into the watery haze.

I saw again the gray eyes, lean legs. Then saw myself lounging on my back on his long wet board, and the water lapping my hips was warm, and his toes let themselves be tangled in my newly regoldened hair, and I reached languidly up to stroke a strong calf as he rowed, water slipping over the edge of the board and keeping me wetly warm, and it appeared that I was naked, and now he lifted the long oar dripping water and gently touched it to my knee, then drew it up my thigh—

Hot
. My face steamed, sweat slicking the small of my back. Turned away from the setting sun and walked back to my sinking old Love Boat.

A
N ACTIVE FANTASY
life is good
, wrote K.
But I wish you'd find something with a pulse
.

Buster had one. Picked him up, his claws like pins in my arm, long tail sweeping my hip.

When I change his diapers, we sit on the cork floor, and I clasp him close between my knees. He stretches out his skinny black legs, tufts of yellowing white fur on his belly, and purrs and purrs when I wipe him clean. As I fasten the pieces of blue tape at each side, his forepaws knead the air, reach for my chin, and he gazes my way with blind glass-green eyes beneath long white whiskery eyebrows.

So peaceful.

Certain songs I used to whistle to him, back when he could hear.

His favorite was Gato Barbieri's theme from
Last Tango in Paris
. At the first four notes he'd come bounding.

O
KAY, AN ATTEMPT
to find a pulse. By chance was on the list for a book party last night and made myself attend. It was up on the Beach, by the golf course. Swinging guests. Sure to be
much
interest in Latin.

When there, behaved Germanly, marching right around the room, outside to the patio, and over to the drinks table introducing self to all I met, offering my hand to shake.

Finally a scruffy man stopped me, holding my hand in his hot one, and said, Wait, I know you.

Oh?

He stepped closer, cracked open his whiskey mouth, and tongued a lip to think, peering up and down at me.

Yeah, he said, I definitely know you.

Had slinked my hand from his by now but something— something in that dissolute face, oh, it called to my heart. The snake-slit eyes?

Got it, he said. Your picture. In a catalogue. Yeah. Book catalogue. Same spread as mine. Oh, yeah.

He looked at me now with those glittering eyes, and I realized he might be right.

I'm right all right, he said. Know how I know? Cuz I masturbated to that picture for a week.

Oh, how my heart called to him! Exactly the kind of deadbeat I love!

But sadly (I learned) he was due to marry the following week, and there's only so much of that sort of thing one should ever give or take.

W
ELL, IT'S TRUE:
you started out knowing what you were made of and knowing you wanted to stay like that—stone—but then out of the blue one day somebody split you, and where you'd been solid now was a space.

The mechanics of this baffle me, even at this late date.

In her heart opened an inconsolable pain
, Ovid says.

In another story, it's an unhealable wound.

Same thing. No revirgination.

But then, on the other hand, there are phenomena like this: I came in the building, collected my mail, stepped in the elevator, and pushed the button for the twenty-first floor, when that golden-gray
pinguis
man rounded the corner with his arms full of magazines. I flapped my hand in the invisible beam to keep the doors from shutting.

Thanks, he said. Thanks. Twenty-two, please. But wait—oh—

The doors were rearing to slide shut.

Come on, N! he cried, his head darting dangerously between them.

I'm talking, called a dry voice from the mail room.

In one motion he laughed and shrugged and leapt back out, just before the doors shut.

In the new enclosed silence, I could almost
see
that invisible beam running between him and his wife, the white-blond woman, N.

It was like the shaft of light in paintings, between the girl and the angel come calling. Something inviolable: love?

It hung in the mirrored marble cube as I rose.

I
T'S NOT AS IF
I don't understand the problem, you know.

Part of the problem, anyway. About climbing on sharks, etc.

Private etiology of failed love.

Starting out, trailing my mother as she sailed her seas, I had two fathers: the real one we'd left far away, and the false one who was right
there
. Daddy distant; stepfather near.

Awfully, awfully near.

Does a person still need to spell these things out?

So the real father was tucked away on the other side of the world and slowly turned to blue ink.
Dear J:
so faint.
Love, Daddy:
so faint! Even if you pressed your nose to the page, no scent remained of his hand.

The other father, though: oh ho. Hot breath of scotch, smoke like thunder around his dark head, jangle of jazz and slamming of doors and quick bright shatter of glass. And the tall silhouette in the doorway, if you know what I mean.

Surely
a person doesn't have to spell these things out.

My friend K, though, prefers to.

You've got intimacy issues
, she says.
That's why you keep making bad choices. Mm-hmm. That bastard in Venice vs. your sweet helpless husband. The Devil vs. Sir Gold. All the same thing: the awful sexy monster vs. the distant one you'll never have. You're just replicating the childhood—

Yeah, yeah.

So what I say is: I am no country for men.

What a boy on the radio's singing, however:

Your body is a wonderland.

W
ITH GOOGLE MAPS
you can see not only this Love Boat but click in close to see the hourglass pool. Click even closer to measure it, which I've just done to calculate how far I swim. The pool = eighty feet × twenty lengths = sixteen hundred feet. If I were to swim that every day from when I got back to my deadline for O, that'd be a hundred sixty thousand feet = thirty miles. Could make it all the way south to the Deering Estate if not drowned or eaten first.

I went down to the pool to cross-measure the length by foot, hiding that I was counting as I paced (three feet per pace) the straightest line possible along the pool's curving lip from shallow end to deep. Reconfirmed count by pacing back to the shallow end, which was reckless because the pool was still empty and limpid and the last thing I wanted was to miss my chance to have it all to myself. Fran rolled out the door. I started to panic, but by the time she'd reached the pool steps I'd dropped my dress and lunged in so the pool was mine first.

Watched her descent. Majestic is the word for it, her aide removing the robe from her shoulders: half Venus being born, half
Titanic
. She attaches her bathing cap, fixes the snorkel and mask, stares hard at the water, pushes off.

When I'd done my laps and had just gotten my footing on the edge of her gyre, she came steaming toward me.

Hi, I said.

Hi. She seemed put off but then gathered strength and said, Haven't seen you here before.

Oh, yes, you have.

She stared at me. Well, maybe I have. Okay. But anyway there's something I want to know.

(Put on an encouraging face.)

Do you still have the three Ps?

The what?

Her lips pulled back to a grinning pink cave.

The three Ps, she said. I've given up on 'em all.

But what are they?

Her eyes went wide and wicked as she leaned forward and barked: Plants. Pets. And
penis
!

She fit on the snorkel and mask and plowed off.

A bee was floating by my elbow, wing faintly fluttering. I cupped it in two hands of water and sloshed it on the concrete.

F
IVE SIX SEVEN
eight nine ten eleven twelve one two three four five six seven eight—