by Tara Conklin
But I ignored Henry. I waved the man forward. After a brief, confused hesitation, he climbed the steps to the stage two at a time. There was a folding chair propped against a wall, and he pulled it, legs squeaking, to sit beside me.
“Come closer,” I said, and he did. I heard the rapid rhythm of his breath.
“Give me your hand,” I instructed.
It was very quiet in the auditorium. I saw Luna watching the scene with her head tilted as though watching a minor but deadly event unfold in nature, a bird pulling a worm from the ground or a cat toying with a mouse. Something of morbid interest that had nothing at all to do with her.
“Did you know I trained as a palm reader?” I said to the man. “After the accident I searched for many years for reason and truth in a variety of different disciplines. I wanted to understand why people put their faith in things like palm readers, clairvoyants, mediums. Was it simply desperation, or was there something we didn’t quite understand? Magic or God or whatever you want to call it, something that explains those events that science cannot.”
“Well?” the man said.
“Well. I never found an answer. Only that people are gullible. And playing on that gullibility has given rise to a great number of professions. But”—I held up a finger—“I don’t believe there is anything wrong with offering a gullible person hope, so long as that person believes it to be genuine. In fact, I think hope, even if premised on a falsehood, can be a thing of great power.”
I took his hand gently in mine and turned it palm up. My fingers were wrinkled sausages, the nails unpainted, my own palm unreadable now, though I can tell you what my reading once said: A long and eventful life. Love and pain and love again.
This man’s skin was rough, pocked with calluses, flaky and dry. I smoothed it with my fingers, rubbed my palm against his to warm it. I felt those calluses, like a clutch of small pebbles fetched from the bottom of a pond.
I put my glasses on my nose. “Let me see here,” I said, and peered first into the man’s eyes—which had gone from wild to calm and beseeching—and then at his palm. Yes, there it was: the lifeline. It curved and cracked and started up again and cracked a second time.
“Your life has been hard,” I said.
The man grunted, shrugged his shoulders.
“But the future holds much promise. Your love line is strong. See here?” I traced it with my index finger. Beneath, I felt the pulse of the man’s blood.
What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.
But before I could begin, the man leaned forward, his head nearly touching mine. “Really?” he said. “A strong love line? You see that?”
I straightened. On his face I saw the faintest, brightest tremor of hope.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I do.”
Chapter 9
Joe lived in Miami for fourteen months before he met Luna. Later he would consider those days a series of trials, like the stories of a besotted knight who must first steal a horse or battle a horde of ogres or spin a hundred spindles in a day before the king would allow him to marry his daughter. That was what Joe had been doing: suffering through the trials of his days without Luna.
On the day he first met Luna Hernandez, Joe left work early. He walked with the goal of putting sufficient distance between his drinking and the office. It hadn’t been a bad day; he just needed out. That grinding-of-teeth feeling, the sweat rising along his hairline and inside his shoes, the headachy drone of too much talking. Outside, the sidewalks heaved with people, and a car with its stereo volume turned way up sent its gut-thumping bass line straight into the space between Joe’s eyebrows. Some days Joe yearned for New York in a way that before he’d associated only with sex, but today he lifted his gaze to the Miami sky, the Miami sunshine. They felt familiar and nice. They felt almost like home.
Joe slung his jacket over his shoulder and crisscrossed block after block until the stream of tourists thickened, seagulls circled overhead, and he tasted the saltwater tang. He’d been walking for about twenty minutes when he saw a discreet, low-hanging sign: revel bar + restaurant. Joe stopped. He’d never noticed the place before, never heard of it, but he stepped inside.
A long, darkly polished bar faced a half bank of windows that looked out toward Biscayne Bay. The floors were black, the couches black, too. Beyond the bar Joe glimpsed a vast restaurant area with shiny glass-topped tables, all empty at this hour. The place had the feel of a deep crevasse lit by a slash of sun glittering far above.
“Tanqueray and tonic,” Joe told the bartender, and he pulled out a stool. The man worked fast, a flash of bottle, the sharp patter of ice. Then the glass set before Joe, the bitter spill down his throat. One swallow, another.
Better.
Yesterday Joe had played baseball, and his body hurt in the most satisfying way. He rolled his head and massaged his right shoulder, then the left. After thirteen years away from the game, Joe was starting up again. Center field had always been his position. The length of him, the reach and stretch of his arms with those extra two inches of webbed, stinking leather, transformed him into an unbreachable wall of grace and muscle. Now he played on a team of middle-aged men with bellies and mortgages, but still Joe could reach. He’d felt it again, the delicious tension of the pitcher’s preparation, head snapping at ten-degree angles, staring down the hitters at first and third, shake, shake, nod to the catcher. And then the ball itself, a blinking blur of white speed, and crack? Would the batter hit? Joe’s legs springing, arm reaching before his mind registered an answer. Thunk into the glove, and the ball’s trembling weight thrown immediately away. Second base. Out.
Sip, swallow. Sip, swallow.
Why had he ever quit? He remembered pressure, the taste of vomit at the back of his mouth. That coach at Alden College, every at-bat like a goddamn audition. His throwing arm would have come back. After college Renee had told him to start again. It’s never too late, she’d said. Not with something you love. At twenty-two, at twenty-five, at thirty, he had not believed her. But on that field again, now, thirty-two years old and slack in every single way, Joe realized that Renee had been right. It wasn’t the same. Of course it couldn’t be the same, but it was still something.
“One more?” came a woman’s voice, and he looked up. The bartenders had changed. Dark eyes, long black hair, a pea-size mole high on her right cheek. Her gaze was impatient and closed, not even a suggestion of helpful or nice or sympathetic, nothing to generate a tip.
Joe nodded, and he watched her, watched her ass, as she made the drink. He felt that at-attention kick of interest—his own, certainly not hers. The drink landed on a napkin, her back turned again before he could even mumble thank you. Charming? Maybe once. That had been a long time ago, too.
* * *
Luna got to work late and shook out her hair. Rodrigo the restaurant manager was always telling her to wear it up, but she liked it long, liked to feel the swing against her back. Dima was out there already, pouring for a man who seemed gray and sad, hunched over on the stool, not looking at anything. Luna tied her apron, squinted into the small mirror she kept in her purse, and rubbed a mascara smudge away from her lash line.
Dima passed her on the way to the kitchen. “More limes,” he said.
The man drank fast, three swallows, maybe four. The ice rattled.
“One more?” Luna asked, and he raised his head. His face was puffy, pink around the edges, the eyes a clear blue. Their brightness took her by surprise. He didn’t strike her as a drunk, not a true drunk, but he looked tired and habitually sad, or perhaps ill. A depleting illness, Lu
na thought. Or a poisoned diet. She’d been reading recently about pesticides, BPA, the casual infiltration of chemicals into organs and muscle.
The man nodded, and Luna turned to make him the drink. He was eyeing her up and down, she could see him reflected in the mirror behind the bar. Luna knew men looked at her like that, they always had.
Luna deposited the drink and turned away to cut the limes that Dima had delivered. By midshift they were always running out of limes.
“Um, miss?” the man said. “You dropped something.”
She turned and faced him. “What? Where?”
“There. It looks like a flower.”
It was. It was a sprig of blooming thyme she’d cut from her herb box. She’d dropped it into her purse because she liked the smell and because it gave her comfort to carry something she had cared for and grown, though it had become mashed and bent in the jumble of her bag.
“Oh. Thank you,” she said, and she picked up the thyme and put it back into her purse.
“Was it a flower?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Luna admitted. She felt embarrassed, as though she’d been revealed to this man in some small but complete way. She faltered. She smiled.
* * *
On their first date, Joe took Luna to a restaurant on the top of a tall building made of pale green glass. Everything in the place shone and flickered. Over their artful, tiny meals, Luna asked Joe about his work.
“It’s nothing. Boring. Selling stuff. Gathering information. It’s a job.” Joe shrugged and ate a forkful of steak. He’d been lying about the Miami job to Noni, trying to make it sound better, make himself sound better, but why? He was sick of pretending to be someone important. In New York he’d been able to justify it—the money, his office of glass and chrome, conferences and trips and bottles of fifty-year-old scotch. All that had disappeared, most of the money, too: bad investments, bad habits, Sandrine. Now he was a salesman, pure and simple, hawking banner ad space on websites. Click here for whiter teeth, cheaper mortgage, better life.
“So tell me about Revel,” he asked.
Luna told him about the restaurant, the hookers and the wannabes, the manager—Rodrigo—whom they all hated, the other bartenders, the Cuban chef, the French busboy. “It’s a great place to work. The money’s great for now,” she said. “I’ve also started modeling. Just a few gigs, but my friend Amanda says things will take off soon.”
They were on their second bottle of wine and a shared crème brûlée. Joe cocked his head. “You don’t seem like a model. I mean . . .” He laughed. “You’re beautiful, but you seem . . .”
“Too short? Too old?” Luna asked.
Joe looked down, and now Luna laughed.
“I’m twenty-five. You know, I probably am too old to be a model. I was saving for college, but maybe I’m too old for that, too.”
“No. Twenty-five? I don’t think so.”
Luna reached across and grabbed Joe’s hand and the look on her face was not flirtatious but determined.
“I’m growing plants on my windowsill,” she said. “Small things. Herbs. Three tomatoes, and they are beauties.”
* * *
After he took Luna home, Joe sat on the balcony of his penthouse condo, one he had rented unseen from an online broker seventeen months before, and lit a Cohiba. Writing the rent check each month made him shiver, watching the money go, go, go. He didn’t need all this space, the fancy kitchen, the whirlpool tub, but the view he’d come to see as essential. The balcony faced east toward the beach, and he could faintly hear the sound of waves breaking sixteen stories below. Joe loved the way the blanket of city lights ended sharply at the shoreline and the black of the ocean stretched upward and back to the faint line of the horizon and the black of the sky, one black bleeding into another until the lights began again, pinpricks of stars leading up to the white glare of the moon. Tonight it seemed circular and right to him—a city, an ocean, a sky—and himself in the middle, observing it, existing within it.
In New York it was easy to forget you were surrounded by something as elemental as water. It was easy to lose yourself in all that concrete, surging crosswalks, taxi honks, steam and grit. But here in South Beach, the ocean reminded you every day of its authority. Whenever Joe thought about New York or Sandrine or Ace or Kyle, he experienced a small deadly drop in his stomach. Nausea and a sense of shame and shock about what had happened. Remembering was like riding a familiar roller coaster, feeling an agony of apprehension as you climbed the slope even though you knew what was coming. He’d heard from none of his old fraternity brothers, but Joe found himself unsurprised. All those years of friendship burned up and floated away, whoosh, like a pile of dry, dead leaves. He had never belonged among them, not truly. That’s what Joe thought now, and he felt a certain relief at not having to pretend anymore.
Maybe, Joe thought, he should call the guy Felix. Felix wore expensive suit jackets over T-shirts and jeans, half a head of ratty red hair hanging to his shoulders to compensate for the baldness on top. Felix sold mediocre pot but perfect cocaine in tiny glassine envelopes. Most nights Joe went to him—the guy charged more for house calls—but a few times Joe hadn’t planned ahead and he’d ended up on the phone in the darkest hours. Felix traveled with a large brown case that he’d set up on a table and open with a small silver key. Inside, boxes and packets, powders and pills. I’m your friendly traveling salesman, Felix would say, and count the cash and close the case back up again. He was part greasy adolescent, part circus ringmaster, part savvy businessman, and each time Joe decided that he never wanted to see him again.
But tonight the urge was there, that niggling want, want, want that flashed out from Joe’s stomach in ever-expanding circles of light, like sonar. Joe almost picked up the phone, but he reached for the cigar instead. It was more than two years since he’d made that promise to Renee on the sidewalk. I’ll stop, he’d said. I’ll stop the coke. Joe hadn’t meant it then, but he meant it now. He would take one thing at a time. One thing, and maybe the rest would follow. He knew this wasn’t the way you were supposed to do it—sober or not, clean or not, no in between—but this was all he could manage. One thing.
Joe exhaled, and the smoke curled lazily above his head and dispersed out over the chrome railing as the wind took it down and away. He thought about Luna, about her long black hair and the way she talked about the place where she was from: Matapalo, Nicaragua. He liked the way the words felt in his mouth, the exotic lilt of the rounded vowels and trailing end. Joe remembered the way Luna had rolled the r, and he finished his cigar and practiced until he could say it right.
* * *
Two weeks after Luna met Joe, Donny started coming around the bar, trying to talk to Luna as she worked. They had dated for six months, maybe a little longer, but that had been over a year ago, during a period she recalled only as a hazy muddle. The details she had chosen to forget.
But now Donny on a barstool, talking to her, drumming his thick fingers along the side of a brown bottle, brought it all back. Hyped-up nights, the highs shorter and shorter, the want more and more. Donny was good like that: he pushed things through, always had money, knew who to call. She’d only smoked crack the one time; it tasted dirty, and afterward her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
That night Luna had imagined her younger sister, Mariana. Five years ago Mariana had run away from home, disappeared, gone. Where are you? Luna had asked into the darkness of Donny’s bedroom. Are you here? But Mariana hadn’t answered; she’d smiled her smile with two dimples and thrown back her head and laughed.
One morning Luna woke up beside Donny and wanted it over. Your eyes follow other women. I can’t trust you, she told him, but she was thinking of the plain fact that there was nothing real between them, only the fleeting rush of skin against skin, only a cheap companionship founded on weakness.
Now, at the bar, Donny talked as though Luna had wronged him. “You broke my heart,” he said after two beers. “I miss you so much.”<
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At first she acted as though he was joking. “Cut it out Donny,” Luna said. “Go bother your real girlfriend.” But he kept coming back. Every shift there he was, slumped on the same corner barstool. Drink after drink until she wondered how he could stay upright. Once he grabbed her wrist as she cleared an empty glass. She pulled away, but he held tight, a smile carving up his cheeks, and then he released her. A tattooed bat circled his wrist; it must be new, she’d never noticed it before.
He usually came on a weeknight when the bar was slow. Luna tried to stay light with him, answer his questions with few words, laugh as she walked away, but the sight of him made her pulse surge. She knew he watched her as she delivered drinks to other customers, bent to retrieve the ice, unloaded clean glasses into careful rows. His eyes were a muddy brown, and Luna wondered why she hadn’t been more careful. Why she hadn’t seen him for what he was.
* * *
On their third date, Joe told Luna this story about Sandrine:
Joe sits on his couch watching the Knicks game, a collection of empty Beck’s bottles at his feet. He was fired three weeks ago and, in that time, has left the apartment only once. He is waiting for Sandrine to come home, and he is drinking beer after beer in solidarity with his boys getting lashed by the Celtics and with all men everywhere in love with their absent women, wondering who they might be fucking, wondering why love isn’t as soothing and life-affirming as they had always thought it would be.
Finally the game ends, the Knicks have lost, Joe has another beer and another. It is past midnight, 2:00 a.m., 3:30. The key turns in the door, and Sandrine’s heels click across the kitchen floor, her keys and bag hit the countertop with a jangle and a thud, a moment of silence as she removes her shoes, and then she steps, small and stocking-footed, into the living room.
“My God, you’re still up?” She is drunk, even Joe can see that, and he is drunk, probably drunker than she is, but still he can gauge the alcohol in her voice, the slight sway in her movements.