Florida straits kwm-1

by Laurence Shames

  — 14 -

  "Hi, folks, how ya doin'?… Beautiful day, huh?… Y' enjoying Fantasy Island?… Great. Where ya from?… Minnesota, whaddya know. Me, I never been to Minnesota, but hey, there's lotsa places I never been. Minnesota, that's where the Packers play, right? Nah, wait a minute, what's wrong with me, that's Wisconsin, that's the other side of the lake or whatever it is they got up there. Minnesota, that's the Vikings… Whassat, you hate football? Me too, to tell ya the truth. Silly game, ain't it? Buncha big galunks breakin' each other's legs. Hey, who wantsta wear helmets and shoulder pads and get flattened by three-hundred- pound galunks when you can wear practically nothing, lay under a palm tree, and get flattened by a pitcherful of margaritas, eh? Speakin' of margaritas, how'd ya like to take a look at the most beautiful resort in Key West? Sand beach, pool, balconies, the works. Tour takes about ninety minutes… Whassat? You're meeting friends in an hour? Great. Bring 'em along. Come back here with 'em, take the tour, and you'll all go out for dinner on me… That's right. Forty-dollar meal voucher. Per couple. Good at twenty-five of Key West's finest restaurants. Conch chowder, key lime pie. So you'll come back?… Great, I'll be here. You see this little square of sidewalk? You'll recognize it? It's got a crack over here, a curb over there? Awright. This is where I'll be.

  …"

  Joey slid off his sunglasses, wiped his forehead, and watched the Minnesotans recede into the crush of Duval Street. They'd be back, of that he had no doubt. Not that they'd take the tour. No. They'd be back because tourists who walked Duval Street in one direction always walked it in the other. It was that, or swim to the motel. Sometimes people bantered on the return trip, pretending they were still considering. Sometimes they crossed the street a half block away to avoid a second pitch. Now and then they got hostile. People reacted in different ways to being charmed. Human nature.

  Take the Minnesotans. Joey, as per Zack's advice, was studying up, trying to read them. They'd seemed perfect prospects. Fifty or so, wedding rings, family types, normal. The woman wore green pants with an elastic waistband whose puckers quickly stretched to accommodate her fallen bottom; the man had a fishing hat with a trout fly in the band. Joey, who had no wife, no children, belonged to no church, no civic associations, had never been farther inland than downtown Philadelphia, had never caught a fish, and had been part of the legitimate economy for nine days now, tried to imagine their life. The wife, he gathered from a certain softness around her mouth, didn't work, and probably felt a little bad about it, now that all four kids were gone. The husband was an assistant vice president in… in… What the hell did people do in Minnesota? What did they have up there, cows? O.K., a place that made cheese, something like that. So of course he liked to fish, to get away from the cheese smell. The wife, well, she mostly liked to do stuff at home, stuff with thread, that's where she really felt confident. Joey wanted to think that after they'd walked away, she said to her husband, What a nice young man. It must be hard just to talk to strangers like that. But the husband, he'd want to show that he was the worldly one, he knew what was what. Once they get you inside, it's hard sell, Martha. Real hard sell. This fella Bill, he was once in Puerto Rico, and one of these fellas got him to go inside, and four hours later…

  "Hey, New York, how ya doin'? Your friends are gonna hate ya when they see that tan, ya know. But that's why you're here, right? So your friends'll hate ya? Looks good. Use that sunblock, though, don't be a wise guy. What parta New York ya from?"

  The fellow in the Yankees baseball cap just kept walking, urged along by his ladyfriend, who was tugging at his elbow. Across Duval Street, shadows were lengthening in front of T-shirt shops and narrow stores selling frozen yogurt. The first early drunks were starting to bob and weave, and the steady hum of noise was occasionally punctuated by a tattooed grotesque in a sleeveless leather shirt going by on a Harley.

  "Hello, folks, you enjoying our beautiful weather today? What are you, Japanese, Hawaiian, what?"

  "Hello, folks, how's Key West treatin' ya today? Hey, that is a fabulous hat you have. How they get all that fruit to stay in there like that?"

  "Hello, folks, great afternoon, huh? You been puttin' your time in onna beach, I see. Those blisters'll be gone in a coupla days, don't worry. But hey, since you're outta commission anyway, how'd ya like ta see the Clem Sanders Treasure Museum…"

  "Hello, folks. Hey, what's with the crutches?…"

  "Hello, folks, awesome weather, huh? Hey, you really go to Harvard, or you just wear the sweatshirt?"

  "Hello, folks, gorgeous day, isn't it?"

  "Yes, ittis," said a small, white-haired lady in crisp khaki pants. She put a lot of bite into her t's, and Joey was so surprised that someone actually answered him that he found himself leaning forward on the sidewalk, his arm stuck out in a hooking gesture, his smile frozen, momentarily unable to speak.

  "Ittis, indeed," said the husband. He was a silver and pink old fellow who didn't seem to like the sun. He wore a Sherlock Holmes cap with one brim for his forehead and another for his neck, and his plaid shirt was neatly buttoned at the wrists.

  Joey knew immediately that these were people who would take the tour and would never in a thousand lifetimes buy a time-share at Parrot Beach. But that was not his problem. They wanted the meal ticket. They wanted something to do. Probably more than anything, they wanted to sit down.

  "Where you folks from?"

  "Ottawa," said the lady. She bit the t's.

  "Zat in England?"

  They thought Joey was kidding. They laughed politely. Joey felt suddenly the way he sometimes used to feel when trying to get a girl to go to bed with him.

  All parties wanted the same result, for all intents and purposes the matter was settled. Yet there were certain forms and rituals that needed to be adhered to, still the awkward business of maneuvering her into the bedroom or onto the couch. So Joey spieled, and the nice old couple from Ottawa played along. A Harley-Davidson roared by, trailing a string of mopeds like a goose with goslings. Sunlight flashed off the tin roofs of downtown Key West. Finally, when all the ceremonies had been observed, Joey led the nice couple up the path to the Parrot Beach office. They would sign the guest book. They would admire the scale model. They would ride the shuttle bus to the property, sip fresh-squeezed orange juice, let themselves be hammered for a while by the sales staff, and Joey Goldman would get his forty bucks, forked over from the mysterious coffers of the legitimate world.

  Returning to his post, he resolved to put the commission toward a pair of tennis shoes. The black loafers he was wearing were stylish but wrong. They let too much heat come up through the sidewalk and their thin soles passed along the pebbled texture of the concrete. He figured he'd keep this job at least a few more weeks, till he found the right way back to his true calling. This was temporary, very temporary, but for as long as it lasted he might as well be comfortable.

  — 15 -

  In the last week of February Joey made four hundred and eighty dollars and decided to celebrate by inviting Bert the Shirt over for filet mignon and a couple bottles of Valpolicella. It was time, he felt, that Bert and Sandra met. It was time he learned to use the gas grill at the compound. It was time, maybe, to get on terms with such basic social ceremonies as having a friend to the house on Saturday night.

  Sandra bought a new blouse for the occasion. It was thin white cotton stamped with small pink birds, and it hung on the back of a chair while Sandra brushed on her eyeshadow and dabbed on her lipstick. She was beginning to have what was, for her, a tan. On her face and shoulders, orange-pink dots were strewn across her blue-white skin, gradually coloring her in the way a comic strip is colored in. The resulting blush made her light eyes seem a crisper green, green like a vegetable with crunch, and her short hair closer to silver than to yellow. "You know," she said, lifting a bra strap to better examine her tan lines in the mirror, "sometimes I think I'm the only person in this town who wears a bra."

  Joey had a quick flash of Vicki, and
banished the image.

  He regarded Sandra's chaste white appliance, with its rim of dainty lace, its girding of clasps and elastic. "Well, you don't have to wear one," he said, feeling on safe ground saying it. It was about as likely that Sandra would give up her foundation garments as that the cardinal would stop wearing a hat.

  "Well," she said, and left it at that. Turning half profile, she appraised her chest with that amazing dispassion women can muster when looking at their bodies. When Joey looked in the mirror, he tended to see muscle definition that wasn't quite there, tended not to notice the merest beginnings of a tummy. But Sandra duly recorded every crease and flaw, pitilessly noted every lack or excess. Humbled by such realism, Joey changed the subject.

  "So the potatoes are in, the lettuce is washed. What else?"

  "I wish the plates matched."

  "It's a rented place. Bert'll understand."

  The evening, even by Key West's relentless standards, was beautiful. A slow and undramatic sunset had left the sky pale yellow in the west, lavender backed by pearl gray at the zenith, velvety blue like the inside of a jewel box in the east. The air was the temperature of lips and there was just enough breeze to lift the smell of jasmine from the hedge. The compound was given over to uncomplicated pleasures. Wendy was sitting chin-deep in the hot tub while Marsha massaged the tension out of her shoulders. Luke the musician and Lucy the mailman dangled their feet in the still blue pool, their twin headsets plugged into a single Walkman. Steve the naked landlord, draped now in a towel against the relative chill of dusk, had dozed off in a lounge chair, a paperback about clones rising and falling on his ample stomach.

  Joey ushered in Bert the Shirt just as Peter and Claude, dressed in peppermint-stripe tunics, were heading off to work. He introduced them.

  "And who's this little fur-face?" cooed Claude.

  Joey could not help cringing a little. Fur-face?

  But the retired mobster held his chihuahua forward in the palm of his hand so Claude could pet him. "This useless thing? This is Don Giovanni."

  "Like the opera," Peter said, and he burst into a scrap of tune.

  The tune sounded vaguely familiar to Bert, though since he'd died notes all sounded more or less the same to him. Still, the episode put him in a buoyant mood. It reminded him somehow of his wife. "Joey," he said, gesturing around him as they approached the cottage, "ain't this paradise?"

  Sandra had come to meet them. "In paradise," she said, "the plates match."

  She held out her hand to shake. But Bert had the dog in his right hand, and so took her fingers in his left, raised them to his lips, and kissed her on the knuckles. "You're as lovely as Joey says you are."

  "Joey who? If Joey paid me a compliment, I think I'd plotz." She wagged her finger at Bert, admiring his perfectly draped shirt of midnight-blue voile. "But you're as sly as Joey says you are, and that's the truth."

  "So Bert," said Joey, "glassa wine? We'll sit out by the pool awhile."

  He brought a tray and put it on a small wooden table just outside the sliding door of their cottage. The wine seemed to draw into itself the last rays of dim light, and glowed a shimmering garnet.

  "Salud," said Bert the Shirt, and Joey could not help noticing that the word made Sandra wince. The Italian sound, the Italian wine in stubby glasses, a certain old-fashioned and very appealing swagger in the way Bert lifted his drink to toast-these things, to Sandra, were a threat, unintentional but real. They were the old ways, the family ways; their warmth and comfort bound a person to the neighborhood as much as did the promise of easy earnings, maybe more so, and made it hard to change. At any moment a gesture or a word could pull a person back to the small, sad, cozy place he'd come from.

  "And how do you like it down here?"

  Sandra barely heard the question. "Me? Oh, I like it fine. The weather's great, the girls at the bank are nice."

  She stopped talking, but Bert just looked at her. It was a simple trick he'd developed decades before to get people to go a little farther.

  "But ya know," Sandra obliged, "for me, it's not that big a change. A bank's a bank. Money's money. I mean, if you think about it, money's the least interesting thing there is. There's no variety about it, you know what I mean? Seen one dollar, you've seen 'em all."

  "Yeah," said Bert, "but until you've seen a helluva lot of 'em, it doesn't really seem that way."

  "I guess," she said. "But people. That's what's interesting. Now, with Joey's job…"

  Joey looked down at the wooden table and gave his head a modest shake. This job. It was confusing, this job. He couldn't decide whether to be proud of it or embarrassed. It was like the time he painted some autumn trees and won an art contest in grade school. He was happy to win, happy to see his mother flush with satisfaction, but at the same time felt that making pictures was for girls. Of course, with the job, it had a lot to do with who was asking. With Sandra, yeah, he was proud, he could tell it made her happy. Around Bert, well, it wasn't like Bert was putting it down, it was just that, let's face it, Bert had a different sense of what a man should be. Joey wondered if he'd ever have a more firmly held opinion of his own. He had to believe that life would be easier if he did.

  "Anybody hungry?" he said. "If I can figure out how to work the stupid grill, we can eat sometime tonight."

  The hiss and pop of propane being lit reminded Joey how quiet the compound had become. The women from the antique store had abandoned the hot tub and gone inside; Luke and Lucy had disappeared into the thickening dark; Steve, under his towel, seemed down for the count. Joey looked at the blue flame of the grill, felt, rather to his own surprise, the prideful contentment of being the host, then went inside to get the steaks. Walking past the wooden table, he saw that Bert the Shirt was now holding Don Giovanni on his lap. All that was visible of the tiny dog was the thin silver spikes of its whiskers and a morbid gleam from its oversized eyes.

  "You really love that little dog, don't you?" Sandra was saying.

  "The dog? I hate the dog. The dog is like a rock I can't get outta my shoe. You ever heard of a dog being, whaddyacallit, not a kleptomaniac, a hypochondriac?"

  Joey slapped the steaks onto the grill, then poured himself another glass of wine. Standing there above his hard-earned dinner, holding a giant fork in a fire-proof mitt, he had to laugh at himself: a citizen having a cookout. What would come next in this groping toward respectability, a goddamn sing-along?

  The filets were delicious.

  They had moved into the Florida room to eat them, at a table covered with a plastic cloth, knives and forks of random pattern, and unmatched plates whose stripes and borders had been scratched and nicked by many hungry renters.

  "Joey," said Bert the Shirt as the younger man re-filled his glass, "this is more like it, huh? This is what I been tellin' ya. Come to Florida, take it easy, enjoy what there is to be enjoyed. Look at him, Sandra- nice and relaxed. Joey, the other week when we talked, jeez-"

  "I'm more relaxed 'cause I'm makin' some money," Joey said, gesturing with his fork. "But it hasn't been that easy, Bert. I mean, my feet hurt. Besides, the little I'm making-"

  "It's not bad money," said Sandra. "Especially for right at the beginning."

  "It's O.K.," Joey said with a shrug. "But it's all according to how ya measure. Bert, you know what I mean. Our friends in New York, one night out, they spread around in tips what I make in a week."

  Sandra dabbed her lips. "So they're big shots," she could not resist saying. "Real sports. I'm impressed. But Joey, let's keep things in proportion. It's not like you were in that league when we were up there anyway."

  Joey started to protest, then chewed some steak instead and realized he had nothing to protest about. "It just makes ya wonder. That's all I'm saying. Am I better off doing what I'm doing, or am I better off doing what I was tryin' to do before?"

  "There's no comparison, Joey," Sandra said.

  "Excuse me, Sandra," said Bert the Shirt, putting down his wineglass. "I'm a guest
in your house, I don't wanna get in the middle of a disagreement or anything. But I think there is a comparison. The comparison is called money. Legit, not legit, that's not the point. Results is the point. Lookit the guys I play gin with." He counted them off on his long yellowish fingers. "A retired judge. A guy who ran a big Buick dealership. A doctor. Why are we all of a sudden inna same club? Not becausa what we did. Because we all got the same kinda results. We all ended up to where we could buy condos onna beach. That makes us equals, friends almost. Legit, not legit, that isn't how people add it up. You wanna end up respected, you gotta go where your best shot is."

  "But that's just it," said Joey. "I don't know where my best shot is."

  Bert neatly laid his knife and fork across his plate as Joey poured more wine. "Well, kid, there's nobody that can tell you that. That you hafta decide for yourself."

  Sandra had her hands in her lap and was making a point of looking past Joey, through the louvered windows at the empty night. "Well, I've had enough," she said, referring to her dinner. "Bert, how 'bout some steak for the dog?"

  "No, Sandra, no thanks. Dog's a vegetarian."

  "A dog vegetarian?" said Joey. "This I never heard of, a dog vegetarian."

  "Not by choice. Meat don't agree with 'im. Kinda clogs 'im up. You don't wanna hear about it, believe me."

  Then the telephone rang.

  This was a rather rare event, as the only people who ever called were tellers from the bank who wanted Sandra to take a shift for them, or avid young men looking for a former tenant named Pippy. Joey got up. In his concern to be a gracious host, he'd been pouring wine at a brisk clip, and was a shade unsteady on his legs. The bedroom phone was on its fifth ring when he reached it.

  By the time he returned to the Florida room, the table was cleared and coffee cups had been placed around a tray of pignolia nut cookies. 'That was my brother Gino," Joey announced. "He's here. In town."