Something for Everyone

by Lisa Moore

  He’s not ready, say the Caretaker. Maybe when he’s ready.

  There’s no rush, says Angelo.

  Why rush him, says the Caretaker.

  But you like this one? asks the Caretaker’s wife.

  I like him, says Angelo. He’s back with Lucia, new diaper, and he holds her to his chest and wiggles her nose with his nose. Angelo’s phone dings several times on the table.

  I like him a lot, Angelo says. Somebody, please. Take this baby. I have to get to class.

  The shed with the pieces for the pool net pole, unscrewing them, each cuff, and dropping them into the cardboard box with one side buckled and only holding together because of a strip of old packing tape, gone crackled and yellow, the sodden side of the cardboard bulging. There’s a smell, he could swear, somebody’s been smoking pot in the shed again. His cellphone, a text, and they have already started cutting his shifts for next week, he’s down a shift, and the shame he feels, how much he does not want to tell his wife about the loss of this shift which, they were counting on this shift.

  I pick up a tambourine off the kitchen counter, and the young man tells me his name is India, hippie parents, he says, and takes off the thong necklace, jerking it back and forth to get the turquoise ornament to slide to the bottom and off the leather thong, and he takes off his shirt. He makes me a gin and tonic, like that, half-naked, with a twist of lemon and he shakes the ice in the glass, a sound like a rattlesnake. The heat is like cotton batting.

  Do you have rattlesnakes here? I ask.

  We have rattlesnakes, we have a Viper, he says, lifting the cold glass toward his living-room window before he hands it to me. His window looks out on an expanse of treetops, and rising above, a billboard, the giant snake of a roller coaster, the white fangs, a green gem for the eye, wavering in the heat.

  What are you? I ask. Some kind of musician? He touches my bare shoulder with his cold glass and I shiver. He makes a throaty hiss, pretending to be the snake, and turns me to him, his crotch pressed into mine, grazing my lips with the tip of his tongue. It is slow because there’s no rush. He doesn’t go to work until late, much later, he’s got a gig, he’s percussion, and I will meet the others at the restaurant, the place Jack says he thinks we’re going to like.

  Let’s go slow, I say.

  Whatever you say, he says.

  Two weeks ago, the Caretaker and his wife, getting ready to go over to Manny’s for beer but then they say Let’s not go, because the effort, after work, you just want to stay home with the kids, but his wife is all, We never go out. Angelo will take care of the kids.

  Angelo splayed out on the couch with Lucia asleep on his chest, watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s on his phone again and saying, I’m here, I’ll take care of the kids. I’m staying here. You go.

  They are ready to go out, maybe cards, maybe bowling, go to a club, his wife texting this one and that one, getting the gang together for drinks, Friday, he’s just finished his shift at the Rosen Plaza, he walked across the skywalk through the conference centre but everyone had left, miles of white marble, one guy on a Segway, upright and officious, flying through soundlessly on the big wheels.

  We’re naked on a red microfibre couch and he says he makes soundtracks for Hollywood films, makes them here in Orlando, slicked with hot sweat and I am shivering because this is slow.

  Tell me about the Viper, I say.

  He says the Viper’s Revenge is a ride where not only you go up and down but the individual seats spin all according to who you have in there with you. He’s flicking his tongue into my belly button, over my ribs.

  You’re my first, he says. I’ve never done a librarian.

  Tasting the tree of knowledge, I say.

  Salty, he says.

  Afterward, still naked, he moves through the instruments and turns on a digital delay that he says manipulates reverb and echoes. He turns some dials, flicks switches. He tinkles the keyboard with two fingers and the sound repeats, and deepens, like water dripping on a cave wall, two or three lonely notes, repeating, elongating, overlapping, and he has two hammers with furry marshmallows on top. He hits the cymbals, one, two, three, ringing out, and those sounds, too, repeat over the first tinkling notes from the keyboard, which it seems will go on forever, morphing slightly with each iteration. He sits on a stool behind the drums and plays hard. He crashes the cymbals, then touches them so the sound is cut off.

  There’s a xylophone, and he leaves the drums and picks up two violin bows, one in each hand. He runs the bows over the xylophone, and the thrum is low, it goes through me, through my goose-bumped skin and sweat-slicked naked belly still with the trail, the tip of his tongue, I have tears running down my cheeks without crying, or it might be sweat, but the music, so slow to build and accumulate, is gathering volume and layers. It is making sense; a post-coital intensity, Orlando heat, maybe jet lag, the violin bows drawn up and pulled down, the concentration on his face.

  Until he lays down the bows and steps silently to the digital delay, turns the dials so that, one by one, each sound fades, until we are in silence, a silence that has a heartbeat, a pulse. He joins his hands in front of his chest, as though to do a little bow, but instead does a curtsy, pinching between his fingers and thumbs the hem of an invisible dress. His cock swings and hops.

  The Caretaker’s wife slumped against the wall, texting, texting and sliding down the wall, with a loose fist over her heart, keening. She makes a keening noise. On the floor in a huddle, Why won’t he answer, why won’t he answer? The Caretaker on his knees trying to lift her but it’s like she’s boneless, and shivering.

  The Caretaker tries to take her into his lap, there on the floor. He’s hefting her into his arms, onto his lap, he’s down there on the floor with her, in such a way her cheek is on his chest, her tears, and he’s got his arms around her because she’s cold, even on this sticky night.

  Tugging the net in methodical lines over the long pool, removing from the net a saggy brown napkin, up and down, up and down. His wife during the construction of the Viper, clerical, and getting the tattoo when the ride opened, which to this day she hasn’t gone on, but she’s the one who hired the film crew, shot the demo with the dummies in the seats, the struts swaying as the car tips, a vertiginous, suspenseful incline, a chugging to the top after which the speed makes slits of your watering eyes and you can’t lift your head off the headrest. Just as your car dips into the curve that begins the descent, there is the head of the Viper. The optical illusion is that it has reared up, and the car swings back and forth in half circles and the head appears to be jerking side to side and you pass right under the fangs, down into its throat. The illusion is the jaws snap—crunch you.

  And his wife changed her mind, No, forget it, I don’t want cards, let’s stay home.

  Angelo saying, You’re not going out? I’ll go. Because now that song on the radio from the apartment next door, and his wife is swaying her hips out by the filthy pool of their apartment complex, her arms in the air, and my god, even after three babies, what a body.

  I’m going, says Angelo, to Pulse, you guys stay, stay here. The Caretaker and the three babies asleep, all three of them? Zonked.

  You go, Angelo, you have fun, the Caretaker says. The Caretaker is terrified Angelo will feel trapped if he doesn’t go out.

  Go, you have friends, you work hard with your studies, go, says the Caretaker.

  I’m going, Angelo says. What he’s wearing, this guy, a muscle shirt all covered with silver sequins, and pleather shorts, in this heat.

  You’re young, the Caretaker says. But they are more or less the same age, the three of them, Angelo is just a year younger than the Caretaker’s wife, but he is her baby brother.

  So he’s going, to Pulse, where there is a blue palm tree outside, lit a beautiful blue — the whole palm tree incandescent — and drinks come in miniature aquariums with candy jellyfish
floating and the alcohol is blue, and on the stage, male dancers in thongs and chaps with leather whips and biceps like basketballs, cross-dressing chorus girls with peacock-­feather headdresses, smothered in sequins, and some weird-shit music with reverb and delay, all kinds of instruments, some arty house music. The Caretaker never went to Pulse, but he has an idea, what it was. He steps out of the shed with the leaf blower strapped to his back, the pool is done, he will blow the leaves off the lawn.

  The sliding door open a crack so they can hear the kids if they wake, his wife raises the cold beer to her mouth, the frosty smoke coils up and she has on bright red lipstick, her white teeth, her brown eyes, the eyelashes, she sways the bottle back and forth to the music. The song on one of the radios, somebody has a radio, a balcony on the third floor. His wife starts singing along, she’s standing up and the slow swivelling of her hips, just for herself out there, for the music, she has a good voice, was in the choir at the First Baptist Church until she was twelve, some of her brothers and sisters too. When her Mama died they all scattered except she and Angelo, and she raised him, or they raised each other; the Caretaker was warned, where she goes, there goes Angelo. You marry me; you get the two of us. That’s what she told him.

  She can belt it out when she wants to, running her hand down her thighs, and turning so her ass is jiggling fast while her hips swivel slow, which is a move she learned in pole dancing class, she and the girls from work, slapping her own ass as if she’s a jockey riding a winner, glancing back to see who is in her dust, half-serious but really she grew up Baptist; this is it, this is what they do everything for, on a very hot night, Angelo gone out, and she turns back to him, shimmying her shoulders and around again so the smutty snake raises its head up over the orange terrycloth short-shorts she puts on in the evenings, it grins at him, the fangs, sways side to side with each hip thrust like it’s deciding to swallow him whole, which she can do and this is why the children and the jobs and talking nice to the washer repair guy who, if you’re polite, will maybe give you a break on the washer.

  Are we doing this? he’s asking. You’re kidding me. He’s checking the balconies all around, because, were the neighbours watching?

  The neighbours, he says.

  What about the neighbours, baby?

  Are you kidding me, here?

  I’m not kidding you, she says and she has her arms up over her head and do you think one of the youngsters wakes up then, bawling out in her sleep, Lucia, like one of them does every night at this time, they take turns, the three kids, one falls asleep and the next one starts, all night, do you think they wake up then?

  They do not. The children don’t wake. They sleep on until morning. The snake rising up, swaying, green-yellow eyes, and she’s singing. They’d paid good money for the snip to that snake oil doctor, one in fifteen thousand go wrong, if you can believe. They are not drunk, not even tipsy, there hasn’t been time; they didn’t go to Manny’s, they didn’t even call to say they weren’t going. But they are definitely feeling it, the beer, the heat, and she takes him by the collar of his shirt, her fist twisting up the fabric with the plastic insert inside to keep it pointy, she’s destroying his shirt and, for whatever reason, this makes him even more horny. They don’t get to the bedroom; they turn off the lights and right on the tiles of the so-called kitchenette. Her hand gripping the leg of the table. After which, they watch TV and then her phone starts hopping. It’s her phone on the table. She leaps up. She’s standing in front of the TV and he knows at once by how she stands. What is it?

  My god, my god, she screams. She turns to him with her hand holding her forehead, as if it might explode.

  At Pulse, she says. At Pulse, there’s a shooter.

  Phone him, the Caretaker says. And he grabs his phone and he’s phoning. They’re both phoning.

  He’s not answering, she says. Why doesn’t he answer?

  Let’s go, she says. She’s putting on her sandals.

  We can’t leave the kids, he says. And she turns to face him, because she has forgotten she has children, and she has her phone clutched in both hands, pressed to her chest, near her heart, and she slumps against the wall.

  So the leaf blower roars loud and his head is swathed in clouds of blue smoke he can taste at the back of his throat and the leaves race across the lawn, they are tumbling every which way before him, hurling themselves across the grass, scattering in all directions, clotting together and spraying out, trying to escape the charge of driving air, he’s left his triple tall Starbucks cappuccino without drinking it, in the shed, and the noise of the leaf blower is a vibration in his skull, just above his ears, but he’s remembering the song his wife was singing because honest to god, somebody is playing it over the speakers here now, poolside, he can hear the strains of it over the leaf blower, that same song his wife was dancing to on the night of the massacre.

  * * *

  A child was eaten by an alligator in a couple of feet of water, my taxi driver says.

  Tu Tu Tango Café, I say. And I give him the address.

  There’s the Eye of Orlando, that Ferris wheel, he says. It turns real slow. I’ve been up there. Moves slow as can be. They call it the Eye of Orlando because you get up to the top and you can see all of Orlando. You can see everything.

  The music made me weep uncontrollably. He touched the violin bows to the xylophone and the sound was human. It was a human cry, two voices entwined and the echoes of everything he had played moments before, building like an orchestra, hundreds maybe, the heat in the tiny apartment jammed with sound equipment, the billboard out his window advertising the Viper’s Revenge.

  When the musician curtsied I gathered my clothes and put them on.

  I mean it, I said. Thank you.

  I get a text. My neighbour. I text back, I don’t want an insurance claim. Too much hassle.

  At the Tu Tu Tango Jack pushes his way to the reception desk and we’re right behind him, elbowing. Not elbowing, but Excuse me. Thank you. We stand there. Place is packed. While the girl, what is she doing?

  I hate that, the no-eye-contact thing, Jack says.

  I hate that too, says Marie.

  They could say, I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Jack says. But instead, refusing to meet your eyes.

  The girl at the counter tells Jack: You’re on the roster.

  They acknowledge there’s a reservation at least, Jack says.

  I ask: Will it be long?

  They’re clearing the table, the girl says.

  And where were you, Marie asks. You disappeared from the aquarium.

  I’m starving, I say. I met someone, a musician, at the aquarium.

  Brittany, the youngest hire at the library, maybe twenty-five, raises her eyebrow.

  The restaurant is full to bursting and it’s got artists painting portraits, or abstract art, and circus performers and dancers cartwheeling between the tables, fire eaters, ballet.

  I told you, Jack says. Didn’t I tell you about this place?

  Jack, I yell across the table. This is crazy. But I am laughing hard. Laughing my guts out. Something Marie said. We are on our third cocktail.

  Then the Human Cobra comes to our table.

  Ladies and Gentleman, the Human Cobra, says our waiter into a microphone. A spotlight roves all over the packed crowd and stops in front of us.

  She has bra cups of scaled gold and her hair is drawn back and her face is painted gold, she’s high-stepping it, trot, trot, trot, knees up, back straight, chin up, because this is not sexy. She is a baton twirler is what she is, and she’s wearing a helmet, a Cobra helmet with yellow-green plastic eyes and the fangs hang down over her forehead and up under her jaw.

  The batons unfurl a thousand strips of Mylar, flickering tinsel strips, but as they spin they form a solid sheet, like a film in a projector, flickering, she twirls faster and faster, an optical illusion, solid whee
ls of light and then there are even words that go by so fast you can’t read, or they’re peace and love and then the face of Einstein, it shimmers through the air, there, not there, then Lucille Ball’s face, then the stingray from the aquarium, swimming toward our table, held back only by her strong arms, she has it by the tail and draws it down. She stops. The Mylar strips slither back into the batons. Both held over her head in victory. The applause is loud and hard until it stops. The girl lights the ends of one of the batons and holds it high, twisting her body this way and that so everybody can see her open, gold face and white fangs, the gritty nastiness of her determination. The burning baton sputters, crackles, an open-throated hiss. She tips it down into her wide open mouth.

  * * *

  The next day, a woman at the American Association for the Advancement of Library Sciences meet-and-greet is a little grey and in a kind of battery-saving mode. Embarrassing, she says. I only had one drink.

  There’s a temporary station in the parking lot behind the Wawa gas bar where we can give blood. Today is two weeks to the day after the massacre at Pulse.

  I’ll get you something, I say.

  They said, Eat. But I didn’t eat.

  I’ll get you water.

  I give blood all the time.

  You want some water?

  It’s a little van they have, a station out in the parking lot. Anyone can give blood.

  Ice?

  They have a form you fill.

  Anybody know where I can get a glass of water?

  Where they say Have you had sex with a prostitute? A tattoo in the last six months? They say rehydrate. Eat a cookie. But I didn’t have anything to eat. I give blood, and here they have a need, you know, with the shooting. So I went in the van they have.

  And I think: what could be more fitting and direct, to let them take the blood out of your body and just hand it over, give it to them. By now, two weeks, surely they don’t need all that blood? But people, wrecked with grief, line up to give. They come on their lunch breaks, after work. They have people dressed as angels, big white fabric wings, and candles, circling the nightclub. The former nightclub.