Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  You. Standing on the dock, hands in the pockets of your white shorts. Blue and white–striped T-shirt, topsiders. Hair back in a high ponytail. You didn’t dress for me. You never had to.

  You’re one of those women. Effortless. Creamy skin and golden hair, the symmetry of your face, the magnificent proportions of hip to waist to bust. You’re the trophy. The prize that goes to the right man for a job well done.

  I think you could have been more than that. Don’t you?

  “Sleep in one of the state rooms,” I say to Sean.

  He hops from the stern to the dock. You step back, barely acknowledging him.

  “I gotta get back,” he says. “Mom waits up.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “Great night, man,” he says with that old smile. “Glad you’re home.”

  “Me too.”

  Home. It is—this sleepy beach town, now overrun with tattooed Airbnb tourists from the sticks, aquarium, beach day crowds. Tiny motels leveled, giving way to towering behemoths with hundreds of rooms, surf shops, parking garages. No matter where I go in the world—isn’t it odd? I always want to come back here and feel that humid salt air on my skin, watch the palms sway. Florida is the butt of a national joke, ripped to shreds by the intellectual elite. But those of us who really know it, we keep the secret of its savage beauty.

  * * *

  You climb aboard and I show you around. Your blue eyes don’t register anything but vague acknowledgment.

  “Same layout as my dad’s,” you say. “Much newer, of course.”

  “He still has it?”

  “No.” It comes out as a scoff. “They got tired of it—all the work, the expense. They’re downsizing these days.”

  There’s a note. Something wistful. “That’s what happens, I guess.”

  You run a tender hand along a silver cleat.

  “Get and get and get,” I say.

  “Then purge,” you finish. “Free yourself.”

  You turn to the hulking shadow of the house. It’s a dark mass, dwarfing the other large houses around it, houses that glow with lit landscaping, warm lights burning in windows. They fought the construction of the house, my neighbors. Too big, they complained. A monstrosity, more rooms than a B&B. But I won. Of course I did. I don’t lose often. Except when it comes to you.

  “It’s huge,” you say, staring at it. Your back is to me and I can’t see your face. So I imagine it as it was earlier this evening—a little angry, suspicious, something else.

  I climb down the stairs and step off the swim platform of the boat onto the dock. We walk across the silent street that separates the dock from the property, pass the house. We stroll across the wooden walkway that leads to the beach. You always loved those, remember? The more rickety and overgrown with sea oats, the better. Then the jewel at the end, the sugar sand, the silky blue-green of the ocean.

  The gulf is usually lazy, languid, with waves that can barely be bothered to lap, much less crash, against the shore. But there’s a storm out at sea, a no-name, threatening Texas and Louisiana. So the surf is wild. We stand a moment side by side. It’s a time warp; we’re twenty-two again, everything ahead of us.

  I try to take your hand, but you pull it away.

  “What do you want, Scottie?”

  Your eyes are sad. I see it now, the disappointment in it all. All the things they tell you you’re supposed to want. How once you have it, you’re left to wonder what, if anything, comes next.

  The world is crumbling. The planet dying, people diseased by greed, by technology, medicating to avoid the pain of their empty lives. But here we are, all the same.

  “I want to go back to that night. I want you to make a different decision.”

  You just laugh. You were the one with the brains, the real talent for code, for numbers, for science. I was just a Florida cracker in flip-flops and board shorts. You did my math homework while I snorkeled, raced the optis with the sailing students.

  You should have been the one to go, and I the one to stay.

  “Betsy.”

  We spin to see his thick shadow at the base of the walk. The soft reverence, the sweetness, are gone from his voice, replaced by the timbre of the bully he always was. You draw in a breath and start to move toward him, but I grab your wrist.

  He moves quickly until he is in front of me, you between us, pushing back on his chest. He’s a steamroller. You’re a blade of grass. But he stops.

  “Betsy, let’s go.” Voice granite-cold.

  “Who’s with Piper?”

  “Your mother.”

  “You called my mom?”

  She won’t be happy, a stern, cold woman. Never kind to you, a drunk. One of those who drinks slowly all day just to feel normal. It never shows until after dinner when the five o’clock cocktails take it up a notch. She never liked me. I saw right through that patrician facade to the piece of white trash she was at her core. The cruel, careless things she said to you. How you used to cry.

  How they all conspired to keep you here with them. She by undermining your self-esteem since childhood. Your dad, a titan in business, a weak enabler of her dysfunction at home. And him, Big Brad the college football star, golden, reflecting back to you the person you thought you should be. Hypnotizing you with your own warped, subliminal expectations.

  “Don’t go,” I whisper.

  But you’re already gone, disappearing into his shadow.

  * * *

  The next day while I idle at the club, I see her with a gaggle of her tween friends. Piper.

  She’s your very image. And then as I stand there watching her drink a milkshake, laugh at something her friend said, another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

  * * *

  When he comes to the boat later that afternoon, all his polish, that bright smile, has rubbed away. He has an aura of wild desperation, hair mussed, tie loose, the purple shiners of a sleepless night.

  I’ve seen this look before. The man about to lose everything. I saw it in grad school as people flailed under the mammoth workload. I saw it in 2007 when the market crashed. When my company went public. Dropouts. Debtors. Naysayers, short sellers proved horribly wrong. How I love the bitter truth, the authenticity of that look. I feel it in my gut. We all know what it feels like to lose, to fail. The agony of defeat.

  “Drink?”

  “You left them,” he says from the dock, not climbing aboard. I sit on the aft bench, cross my legs, and lean back. “You can’t just come here now.”

  The truth is, I didn’t know.

  You never told me.

  That night on the dock, you said that no, you weren’t coming to MIT. Your father needed you to help with the business. You mother was ill; she was fighting breast cancer then. You were, in fact, staying here, you said—to be near them, to be with him. We couldn’t be together anyway, you told me, as cold and stern as your mother ever was. We were too different. Surely, I could see that.

  All of it lies.

  You two. Betsy and Bradley.

  Married with a baby before I could blink the bitter tears from my eyes. I was too stupid, my ego too gigantic, swollen, and injured to understand what you did.

  You let me go. Let this little town keep you here.

  I wept over the wedding pictures on Facebook like a lovesick teenager. How happy you were.

  How stunning. You were so tiny, you didn’t even show. Maybe if you had, I could have done the math. Figured it out before it was too late. I decided to hate you instead, hate myself for not being the man you wanted to marry.

  Enigma. There are seven layers to the game. He is a traveler, lost and far from home. They say it’s addictive, that people lose sleep and days at work, make themselves ill trying to get Enigma back where he belongs.

  “That’s true,” I say to Bradley now. “I left.”

  He nods as if we’ve come to some agreement. He turns back to look at the house, then back to me.

  “You could have gone anywhere,” he sa
id. “Why would you come here?”

  People say that a lot, the folks who never left, those who think that there might be something else, somewhere else. Something better. A thing they missed. I want to tell them that there’s nothing out there that you don’t already carry within you. But that’s not a thing people want to hear. They’d rather believe that there’s something more and they simply failed to find it.

  “I’m just back to take care of my dad,” I say. “He’s sick. Did you know?”

  “No.” He looks a little less ruffled. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  The niceties, the phrases that roll off the tongue, a verbal dance designed to keep things shallow and easy. It’s a relief. That’s how people like it mostly, surface—not too deep.

  “Just—just,” he says, working for it, remembering why he came. “Just stay away from them. That’s my family.”

  When we were young he was bronze, with flashing-white straight teeth, a surfer’s body—lean and muscular, fluid. Nice enough on a good day, but with that blank entitlement of privilege, so blessed that he didn’t even know it. He was easy with boats, on a board, he had a way with the weather—knew when a storm was coming. He’s a dimmer version of himself now—softer around the middle, a little gray in the hair, tiny lines around the eyes. Still beautiful, of course, still broad and well-built. I feel bad for him, though I’m not sure why. He was the kind of guy I wanted to be—not the skinny, bespectacled nerd that I was, the son of the club bartender, the camp counselor, but not the child of a member.

  He stands a moment, waiting for my response, which is just a vague nod I’ve mastered. It implies consent without being a commitment. He seems satisfied, if a bit confused by my calm, then walks off. I text you.

  Biff was just here. Warning me off.

  That’s what we used to call him, remember? When you used to make fun of guys like him. I watch the little dots pulse on the screen, but you don’t answer. You never do.

  A few minutes later, there’s a text from Sean.

  Wanna go to a party tonight? Should be fun. At Ronnie’s.

  We’ve fallen back into the ease of our childhood friendship. It’s like putting on an old baseball glove. It’s as if I’ve been around the world, and I have, been to hell and back—that too. Then in a box in the garage of my childhood home, I find it. When I slip it on, that old glove, the grooves of my hand are worn in deep. I never left.

  Sure.

  Will you be there, Betsy Lynn? I’m betting you will be.

  * * *

  A towering “Mediterranean-inspired” McMansion—barrel-tile roof and terra-cotta walls, a double-height outdoor foyer with a wrought-iron lighting fixture hanging overhead. We ring the bell and it chimes deep inside the home; after a moment Ronnie’s at the heavy wooden double doors.

  She looks back and forth between us. She slits her eyes at Sean.

  “Scottie,” she says, turning to me, fake smile, “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Thanks for inviting me,” I say, though I’m guessing from her demeanor that she didn’t.

  I hand her a bottle of Veuve, which I know to be her very favorite.

  “How sweet,” she says, accepting it and standing aside. “Welcome.”

  Her eyes linger on me, something unreadable there. Then she glances back into the crowd. I don’t see you. If you’re not here, I’ll beg off quickly. This is not my scene.

  The place is packed, lights dim, music loud. EDM throbs from mounted speakers in the corners. There’s a bar set up by the pool, with a hip, goateed mixologist dispensing something pink in martini glasses. The room is a field of smartphones, faces turned as often to those screens as to each other. People crush together for selfies; laughter is raucous, conversation a dull roar. Sean lights up a joint, hands it to me, and I take a deep drag. The hard edges of my awareness soften.

  Enigma travels alone through the layers of the game; he has no friends, no allies. On level four, he might earn a lavender pouch and in it there are various weapons—a wand that hypnotizes, a cloak that makes him invisible, a watch that turns back time just ten seconds. The place where most people lose over and over is at the disco, a glam nightclub where a strobe flashes and beautiful creatures whisper and stroke, wind their lithe bodies around him. They offer mysterious drinks and plates of cakes and if he can’t avoid them or ward them off, this is where he’ll stay until his lives run out, the player powerless to save Enigma from his own appetites.

  I wander away from the party and down to the dock. The water whispers, lapping against pilings, the halyard on the sailboat across the water clangs. Homes on the Intracoastal glow all around me—the typical Florida hodgepodge of towering new construction and flat split-level ranches from the sixties. Modest bungalows like my parents’ place, in the shadow of gigantic modern additions to this man-made island. I can see in windows, sliding doors—a man and woman recline on a couch watching a game. Some kids gather around a firepit, tossing rocks into the water. A woman sits at a kitchen counter with a glass of wine, staring at her laptop.

  Voices. Loud. They lift over the din of the party. And then someone’s storming down the path leading to the dock toward me. A couple others trail behind, reaching.

  He was always an ugly drunk, the kind who got nasty after that third beer. I saw the bruises on your arm the other night, the way you folded your arms across your middle when you saw him approach us on the beach.

  “So this is what you do?” he asks when he’s in front of me. “You just show up where you’re not invited?”

  “Stop it,” you say, holding his arm. “Let’s go home.”

  You are exquisite tonight in white—a simple top, jeans, silver thongs on your feet. The golden wisps of your hair. I only see you, in all of this. Your eyes rest on me—there you apologize and plead.

  I’m so focused on you that I don’t even see the blow coming. It lands squarely on my jaw and I go down, the world wobbling and tilting, the dock hard and splintering under my palms. More yelling—from Sean, and Ronnie’s husband. Then some other guy I don’t know pulls Bradley away as he struggles, roaring. He’s drunk, obviously, all his darkness right on the surface. You and Ronnie bend and help me up. My hand comes away from my mouth red with blood.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Scottie,” says Ronnie. Her brow is creased with sorrow and concern. She touches my arm. “Please go.”

  I nod. Yes, that’s obviously best. The pain, it’s not that bad, not compared to other pain I’ve felt. Later it will hurt, though. My teeth are intact, I think. Ears ringing. I’m not much of a fighter, not in that way.

  “I’m sorry,” you say.

  He’s yelling your name. Everyone’s staring, come to gather on the patio to look at us.

  “Come with me,” I say softly.

  You look back at the party guests, who now avert their eyes. Whispering. Muttering. Someone issues an uncomfortable laugh. We can still hear him yelling.

  You take my hand and we run around the side yard to my waiting car, a black Tesla gleaming like spilled ink. I don’t feel bad about leaving Sean; he’ll understand and Uber home. It is the unwritten rule among men; if she says yes, it’s okay to disappear.

  I make a smooth turn in the cul-de-sac. I expect to see him run out after us. But no. You cry softly in the passenger seat.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, my voice low in the dim leather interior.

  You look at me a moment, almost blank with disbelief.

  “Why didn’t you guess?” you say. “How could you not have known?”

  You’re right, of course.

  “You always wanted me to read your mind.”

  “But you never got the hang of it.”

  You lace your fingers through mine, hand shaking, a tear trailing down your face. We’re back there on the dock, that moment when you told me to leave. And I, angry, hurt, let my ego drown out my instincts. The truth is that I never believed someone like
you could love someone like me. I always thought you’d leave me for someone who came from money, who won that genetic lotto of beauty. You were just saying what I had been expecting to hear all along. If I’d just asked a few questions, who knows what path we’d have walked together.

  Enigma. All he does is choose paths—the lighted way, or the dark one, the high or the low. He knocks on doors and sometimes they open. More often they don’t. If the player makes it to the final level, everything he needs to know about the game has been revealed, all the tricks and pitfalls have been navigated. He must draw on what he’s learned to find his way. The stakes are highest here. One misstep and he has lost. He must begin again, all progress erased.

  * * *

  On the beach, our beach, the place we fell in love, where I made love to you the first time, where we’ve logged hours hand in hand, where we likely conceived the daughter I have never known, you fall into me. As easily as if we have not been apart for the last thirteen years. Thirteen years that passed in a blur of aspiration and acquisition, a kind of blindness, an emptiness of heart and spirit that looks to most people like outrageous success. Every gift and luxury falling to me like rain from the sky. And all of it ash until this moment.

  When Enigma finally finds his way on that last level, he walks down a long tunnel which morphs into a forest path. He passes a still, glistening lake that sits surrounded by towering pines. The sun dances on the water, and the soundscape is dominated by wind and birdsong. When he comes to the final door, he finds it locked. Surprisingly, this last moment is where many people stay stuck. They can’t figure out how to open the door. They look all around the scene for a clue, something that might act as a key. But the area all around them has stopped interacting—there are no more doors, or hidden passages, no more buried treasure, or wands, or bags of tricks.

  It is only a very few who come to realize, in that final phase of the game, that the heart on Enigma’s chest holds the key to the last door. When the player clicks on it, the key—golden and shining—floats into the air and hovers a moment. Then it’s in his hand. He fits it in the lock, looks back at the player, and disappears. There’s little fanfare, just a swell of music and he disappears inside the door. Some people rage at the simplicity of it all, the utter anticlimax. Others describe feeling a profound sense of peace, of accomplishment. Enigma, I have come to understand, is all about what you bring to it. Some people don’t like that idea very much.