The Paradise Gig

by Laurence Shames

  He went to a place called Dee’s, down on Simonton Street. The location is significant, because Simonton was sort of neutral turf in the undeclared but seething war between locals and tourists. The Duval Street places—Sloppy’s, Rick’s, Margaritaville—had long ago been ceded to the visitors; if Callie’s gig had been at one of those, it’s unlikely she and Pete ever would have met. The locals mostly hunkered down in unhyped and sometimes unsigned places on side streets near the cemetery; then again, it was tough for staff to make a living in those quiet lairs, especially in summer. But Simonton lay between the two domains, a kind of flat and humid Switzerland. It wasn’t an exciting or distinctive street but it welcomed anyone who straggled by.

  Pete was a quasi-semi-regular at Dee’s. When he went there, it was usually for the fish sandwich, which came with melted cheese and sautéed mushrooms and caramelized onions and was the kind of messy, sloppy, two-hands meal that the usually fastidious Pete would only order when he was dining alone and there was no one watching. When he saw how pretty the new bartender was, he almost changed his mind about having it. It was a slow night. The place was nearly empty. Pete would feel conspicuous and undignified sitting there in front of this pretty woman with grease dripping down his chin and a sliver of onion trying to escape at the corner of his mouth. But a fish sandwich was what he felt like having, and he ordered it anyway. He ordered without looking at a menu. He also knew exactly what sauv blanc they offered by the glass.

  “You know the joint better than I do,” said the pretty bartender. “Guess that means you’re local.”

  Pete nodded that he was.

  “I’m Callie. Nice to meet you.” She reached out a hand that was cool from holding cocktail shakers. Her smile was unguarded and it stretched all the way to perfectly symmetrical laugh lines in her cheeks. She wore small blue earrings that matched the color of her eyes. Her breath was sweet and warm and Pete suspected it was perfumed with bourbon, though there are lots of whisky smells in bars and it’s often hard to tell exactly where they’re coming from.

  He introduced himself. She poured his wine. She poured what would have been a normal serving, hesitated, clinked the lip of the bottle against the rim of the glass, glanced at Pete from underneath her eyebrows, then poured some more. He said, “That’s a righteous glass of wine.”

  She shrugged, lifting delicately rippling sinews in her neck and shoulders. “Dead in here,” she said. “Maybe I’m hoping you’ll hang around a while, be good company. You seem like a nice guy.” She smiled at him again. It was a different smile from the first one, and, while it’s extremely difficult to ferret out the nuances in the smiles of someone you’ve only just met, this smile was tipped a little sideways and accompanied by a lowering of eyelashes and seemed to Pete to be the kind of a smile that launched a conspiracy of some sort; maybe even the kind of sweet conspiracy generally known as romance. “I’ll put your order in,” she said after a pause.

  He watched her as she walked away from the bar and toward the kitchen. Tan, taut legs. Slim hips; straight strong back. He sipped some wine and told himself not to be a jerk. For better or worse, he’d had a lot of practice being a single man, and he’d developed certain rules about how to do so properly. One of the rules was: Don’t hit on the bartender. It wasn’t fair. She usually didn’t want to hear it, almost certainly had heard it all before, and was stuck at her post with no choice but to listen. Not fair. Plus it got you nowhere. Plus you wound up feeling like a schmuck.

  But what if the bartender hit on you?

  He was pondering this when she came back. She refreshed the drinks of a couple of other customers then sidled over and stood near him again. Keeping her hands low, she reached for a bottle near the sink and poured three fingers of whisky into a squat glass. No ice, no soda, just booze. “No drinking on the job,” she said. “Our little secret, okay? Cheers. So talk to me. What’s your story?”

  They discreetly clinked glasses and he told her the basics. No mention of the detective part. He never told anybody that if he could help it. He would have felt ridiculous.

  “So you’re retired already?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Caught a couple breaks in business. Got out as soon as I could.”

  “Lucky you. You rich?”

  “No. Not at all. Just lazy and more or less content.”

  “Content,” she said, and took a moment to savor the word. “Boy, does that sound nice.” She pressed her lips together and looked at his wineglass. It wasn’t empty but it was close. “Have one on me,” she said and filled it up again.

  A bell dinged in the kitchen. She went to grab his sandwich. She returned and placed it down it in front of him. He was starving and it smelled delicious but he wished he hadn’t ordered it. He wished he had ordered something tidy, something tameable, something he could eat with a knife and fork. Without meaning to, he’d be making a false impression with this sloppy sandwich, presenting himself as a loosey-goosey guy who didn’t mind getting sauce on his fingers. That wasn’t who he was, and false impressions always led to trouble, but it was too late to correct it now. He offered her some of his fries.

  “Thanks, not hungry,” she said, and sipped some bourbon instead.

  He looked down at the daunting sandwich. He knew that once he picked it up and started nibbling and struggling to hold the thing together, it would be a while before he could talk again. “So tell me about you,” he said.

  She did that shrug again. He admired her collarbone. “Not much to tell. Raised in Kentucky. The part where the miners are, not the thoroughbreds. Left as soon as I could pay my way. Just sort of started drifting south. I don’t mean like on a road trip, I mean over the course of years. Quite a few years, I guess. Lived in Tallahassee for a while. Then Orlando, Lauderdale, Miami. Liked Miami, but it sort of burned me out. Came down here around three years ago. Seems to suit me. Hope it does, ‘cause once you’ve made it to Key West, where the hell else is there to go? How’s the sandwich?”

  His mouth was full. He nodded and managed a vague and embarrassing grunt of approval.

  “You seem to be enjoying it.”

  He was and he wasn’t. His fingers were oily and he didn’t like that feeling. He took one hand off the roll so he could dab it on his napkin. A couple of mushrooms slid out and bounced onto the plate.

  That was when the door of the place swung open and a big group of men piled in. They entered in a long unruly line and it seemed the line would never end. Turned out there were ten of them in all, Germans or Danes or Scandinavians, who could tell, cut-rate and sunburned summer visitors on a pub crawl. Callie greeted them nicely then turned a chagrined but private glance on Pete. Softly, she said, “This is gonna take a while. Can we get back to talking later?”

  “Sure,” he said, thinking that she meant in ten or fifteen minutes when the big group had been served. “I owe you a drink.”

  “Great. I get off at two.”

  “A.M.?” Pete said stupidly and with a hint of dread. It was around nine-thirty at the time. He was tired from travel and expected to be in bed by eleven or so. He was almost always in bed by eleven or so.

  “Yes, two a.m. The wee hours. When bartenders get off.”

  Now, both of them should have realized in that moment what an unworkable match they’d be. Maybe they did both realize it but pretended they didn’t. People often ignored their own red flags when physical attraction was involved.

  “Maybe we should take a raincheck, Callie. I’ll be sound asleep by then.”

  The group of men were sorting out their places, jockeying for position, settling onto stools. Callie’s voice got breathier and softer.

  “You a good sleeper, Pete?”

  “No, not especially.”

  “I’ll bet you are. ‘Cause you’re content.”

  “Hm?”

  “A little while ago you said that. That you’re content. It struck me. I’m envious. Me, I’m a terrible sleeper. Especially when I sleep alone. The nightmares start sometim
es before I even fall asleep. Does that seem fair to you? The nightmares without the sleep?”

  Her face was very close to his. He could feel the tiny breeze made by her eyelashes. He said, “No, it doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t happen if I was sleeping next to you. Maybe some contentment would rub off.”

  He tried to answer but his mouth was dry and in any case he couldn’t decide on any words.

  “If you were sleeping and I just snuggled up,” she went on. “Maybe rest my cheek against your back. Nothing more than that. Just see how it feels. See if it’s nice. If it doesn’t feel right, nothing lost. Whaddya think?”

  “You’re serious?” he managed.

  “I don’t make casual suggestions, Pete.”

  Their eyes were locked. He didn’t break the gaze as he scrawled his address on a cocktail napkin.

  She took the paper and swooped even closer, so close that he thought she was going to brush his lips with a kiss. But she didn’t. She just whispered, “Sweet dreams,” and went to serve the other customers.

  

  So that was the beginning. The middle and the end take less time to describe.

  For a couple of months it was all adventure and discovery. Swimming naked in Pete’s tiny backyard pool. Having long talks in the hammock on Callie’s porch on Whitehead Street. Riding bikes together to catch the moonrise from White Street pier. Lots of candlelight dinners, lots of wine, lots of cognac.

  At some point they took the bold step of showing up at parties as a couple. This was done with full hearts and high hopes but turned out to be a terrible idea because the parties that Pete was invited to were totally different from the parties thrown by friends of Callie’s, even though, Key West being a small town after all, there was occasional overlap in the guest lists. Cooch Cuccinelli, for example, being a good tennis player, an amusing if not always linear conversationalist, and a discrete and generous supplier of weed, seemed to get invited everywhere. Still, all in all, Pete’s parties and Callie’s parties had very different feels to them, and the differences between the parties became a kind of shorthand for the differences between the lovers.

  The parties Pete was invited to tended to be rather staid cocktail affairs that began around five-thirty and were winding down by eight or so. They generally included writers and editors and artists and tennis bums who got quietly lit while sometimes making witty remarks and sometimes boring each other half to death with genteel talk of books and films and politics. The people at those parties were always charmed by Callie, but she was too intimidated to savor their attention and she drank too much in an attempt to be at ease. Pete tried not to notice how often her glass was being filled.

  Her friends’ parties started late, sometimes went on till dawn, and were full of people who had real jobs—waiters, concierges, mates on tourist boats. It was hard to say if they drank more than the folks at Pete’s soirees, but they did so more flamboyantly. Their parties were loud. There was music, sometimes dancing, sometimes fashionable drugs that Pete was basically clueless about, though he occasionally suspected that Callie was slipping off to do stuff on the sly. Her friends were always nice to him and he wanted to be interested in return but the truth was that he usually was not. Sometimes he just perched on the edge of a sofa and talked with Cooch. Sometimes he went home early and alone, and sometimes he sensed that Callie was mad at him for leaving. Sometimes he found himself getting mad at her for staying.

  Small resentments piled up and things started to unravel. There were still great moments but there were also tiffs and sulks, dinners when a bottle of wine would disappear with hardly any conversation and Callie’s food would go nearly untouched before she moved on to the cognac. Pete finally said that maybe they should talk about the drinking. Callie snapped at him and told him not to judge. He said he wasn’t judging, he was just concerned. She told him he was condescending and could be a real drag sometimes. Over the course of several weeks, they had various versions of this argument. Each time, they walked back the more hurtful comments and made up. But each time there was a bit less conviction in the reconciliation.

  Ironically, the end came on what had been the nicest night they’d spent together in a month. They’d had a splurge dinner at Luigi’s. They’d gone back to Pete’s place and made slow and tender love. They’d fallen asleep with their arms looped around each other’s shoulders.

  Then, at some point, he heard Callie talking in the kitchen. He opened an eye. The clock read three a.m. He went downstairs and saw her drinking bourbon, her phone snug against her ear. Wearily, he said, “Callie, what are you doing?”

  Into the phone, she said, “Hold on a sec.” She’d put on a tiny bathrobe. She pressed the phone against a lapel and said to Pete, “I’m talking to someone.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. It’s the middle of the night.”

  Her eyes were fierce and her voice was utterly unapologetic. “Thank you, I know that. And I’m talking on the phone.”

  “And drinking whisky.”

  “Right. And drinking whisky. And trying to have a conversation. And I’d like a little privacy.”

  Pete stood there for a moment. It didn’t really occur to him to wonder who she was talking to. Probably one of her late-night party pals. Maybe even an old boyfriend or new suitor. He really didn’t care much who was on the other end of the line. To him that wasn’t the point. He wasn’t jealous, he just felt hopeless and worn out. If ever there had been a night for easy closeness and peaceful sleep, this had seemed like it. He heard himself say, “Callie, I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?” She fairly spat the words at him.

  “This. Be with you. I can’t do it. It’s too exhausting. It’s too chaotic. Your life is just too…too disorderly for me.”

  “Disorderly?” she said, with a mocking laugh that half-stuck in her throat. “My life is too disorderly? Well, maybe your life is a little too fucking dull and perfect for me, okay? Now will you let me have some privacy?”

  He went back upstairs and rolled into the still-warm bed but he didn’t fall asleep. For a while, he heard the muted sound though not the words of Callie talking on the phone. Then he heard his front door open and close, and after that it was very quiet. Callie must have walked home in her tiny robe. It was the kind of thing she would have done back then.

  7

  O kay, back to now, and back to me, Nacho.

  So Callie walks into the bar at Luigi’s, and I’m the first to see her. I’m not bragging about my eyesight or anything, it’s just that I have the best vantage point. I’m laying down in master’s lap looking right at the walkway that leads in off the sidewalk. So I see her walking in and of course I’m excited to remember that wonderful moment of eyeball-to-eyeball equality while she was standing on her head, so I stand up and sort of start to spin around on top of Master’s private parts, which sort of tells Master that something’s going on, so then he looks up and sees her and just blurts out, “Jeez, what a coincidence or you might say unexpected happenstance. We was just talkin’ about you.”

  Understandably, Callie looks a little puzzled by this. Who could blame her? I mean, you meet an old man on the beach for about two minutes and then three or four days later he just happens to be sitting in a bar and talking about you with some stranger? The reason I say stranger is that she and Pete haven’t seen each other yet and she has no reason to imagine that Pete’s the guy who Master and me are hanging with. He’s got his back to the entrance. She’s still a step or two away and has barely had time to recognize Master and me. So in a kind of bewildered tone, she just says, “You were?”

  “Yeah. I was a little worried about ya, the way ya left the beach wit’out your stuff and all. That’s why I got in touch wit’ Pete.”

  “Pete?” she says, sounding even more bewildered, and then there’s one of these funny sort of slow-motion moments where so much is going on though hardly any of it actually shows, or not to human beings at l
east. She keeps walking closer to our table. Pete swivels in his seat so he finally can see her. Their eyes meet. He’s still sitting, she’s standing up, so he has to lift his chin, and his eyes have to open up a little wider, and her chin has to swivel down and her eyelids have to drop a bit, so the angle between them almost looks like…I don’t know, almost looks like someone praying to a saint or angel. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Callie is or was or isn’t or wasn’t a saint or angel, because there’s way too much we don’t know about her yet. I’m only talking about the angle of their faces.

  But meanwhile, Pete, being a gentleman and all, is rising from his chair, and once he’s standing up and their two bodies are very close together, they both start to blush. Now, speaking as a dog, let me tell you what I mean when I say blushing. I don’t mean that their cheeks turn pink. That’s the very least of it. What I mean is that their blood vessels open and their hearts start pumping faster and their skin gets warm and certain glands that control things like emotion and desire begin to do their thing. So all these chemical messages, these glandular perfumes, start flying through the air, and if you happen to have an acute enough nose, you can read a pretty sexy story just by taking a sniff or two.

  But like I say, most of the richness of the moment is wasted on humans. Probably all that humans would have noticed is that two people are standing close together but not touching. The space between them is sort of wobbly, which might suggest some leaning or maybe even trembling, which might in turn suggest that one or both of them would like to hug but can’t make the first move. So they just shake hands and say how are you, and this very bland exchange is all that really shows.

  Still, you can tell that there’s some voltage in the moment because Callie sort of nervously pulls her eyes away from Pete’s and looks at Master, as a kind of escape, I guess. Still looking confused, she says, “But why would you tell Pete? What’s Pete got to do with it?”