“This heat,” I said. I was burning up and pulled my skirt over my knees. The sun wrapped a thousand rays around my neck.
The boat rocked gently. I clasped the sides while Ruth pulled the string to start the motor. She yanked and the water blades roared.
“The one time you come to visit,” she said.
“Not one time. I’m coming back. I’m glad I’m here now.”
The waves glittered in the breeze. I watched six pelicans sweep inches above the water. She pointed to a fish jumping, then a sailboat in the distance. Clouds near the horizon changed color like distant waters. Slowly, individual trees on shore joined together into one, solid mass. She turned the motor off and we drifted.
“How have you been since Dad died,” I asked.
“Pretty much the same. Mother seems to be doing fine.”
“She’s selling the house.”
“Finally letting it go,” Ruth said.
In her boat, she looked fragile and pretty in a way I’d never recognized. No anger marking her face.
“Don’t you hate him?” The question blurted out of me like a cough. “How can you forgive him?”
“I don’t hate him.” She pulled the anchor line through her hands, looping it through her hands.
“I never helped you,” I said. “I should have kicked him, screamed. Done something. I did nothing to protect you.”
“You were too young, Jennie.” She looked toward a tiny island far from our boat, far as the distance of six years between us. A flock of birds glimmered above that island. “He was a broken man, you know. A broken man. I tell myself this every day.”
“It must have taken everything inside you to come to that,” I said. “More than everything. More than everything,” I said, repeating.
We didn’t speak for a bit, allowing that truth to soak in. But time interrupted. She looked at her watch.
“Let me steer,” I said, reaching for the tiller.
We switched places, carefully moving around each other, stepping over the middle seat. I pushed the tiller too hard at first, then discovered how minor adjustments of the tiller, an inch left or right, kept us on course.
“Easy,” she said. “Works best.”
I felt released from the shadow of violence and settled into that eternal moment of bright sun and sea: watching her relax, leaning back against a gently rising bow, her fingers skimming freely through salty waters.
Heart
The night before leaving for Paris to meet my lover, Raoul, I stood in the shower soaping away sweat, trying to calm myself. I was excited, nervous, a little scared. Neither one of us had been there. After my shower, my dog, Chili, hopped in circles catching her tail while I packed and paced inside my studio apartment, a converted garage behind my landlords’ house in Miami. My air conditioner rumbled in the window, wrestling with Florida’s maniacal September heat.
“Isn’t it odd?” I said, calling Raoul one last time. It was midnight on my side of the world. He lived on the West Coast, in a one-bedroom apartment in the foothills of Los Angeles. We’d been splitting our bi-coastal commute all year. “None of the houses in Miami have basements.” I plopped back on my bed.
“What’s odd about it?”
“Think about it. This very second my bed is supported by a concrete floor, and underneath me is a meter of pure sand and underneath that a millennium-old layer of coral rock. Eons ago my bed would have been underwater.” I stretched my bare legs and feet and looked up at the ceiling fan spinning above me. “I might have been a fish once, a long time ago.”
“Likely,’ he joked. “You sound like one. Go to bed. I’ll see you in one more day.”
“Will you recognize me?” I tilted my cell like an icy drink, sipping the sound of him.
“No.”
“Tell me where you are?”
“In the kitchen, talking to you.”
“Okay, goodnight. Dream about me.”
“I always do.”
“No you don’t,” I said, watching the white paddles of the ceiling fan. I tried to follow one paddle circling.
“I’m dreaming about you right now.”
“Very funny. Goodnight.”
I plugged my cell into its charger and tried to think about Raoul dreaming about me except the inside of his brain appeared dark as outer space, an underwater cave oblique and remote as the ancient ocean lapping at my cottage door. Shadows of his body floated over me like giant sea plants. I lay quietly, remembering the first time we met at a sales conference in L.A. We both sell software packages. He can sell anything because he knows how to smile. Raoul says one shake of my long, natural blond curls closes the deal.
I gave up following paddles in the air. My packed suitcase waited by the door. My landlords, Mimi, a pregnant lawyer, and her urologist husband, Jeff, kindly offered to watch my muzzle-faced angel while I was gone. Chili lay next to me on the cool floor. I leaned over to kiss her. A cricket started up in a pink flowering hibiscus bush outside my window. For a long time it sang by itself waiting for an answering call.
On the flight overseas, I took an aptitude test in a business journal to find out if I had success potential.
Do you have visions? one question asked.
Floor lights in the center aisle looked like iridescent bugs, so I checked yes, then tried dozing on the plane’s bed of vibrations. The long night passed. I landed at dawn.
At the hotel address, I got out of the cab. A neon red sign said HOTEL LISZT at the far end of an unlit arcade, a tunnel lined with chintzy shops. I started toward it. A green arrow pointed the way. As I took tentative steps, glass storefronts flickered past me like an ominous aquarium, a closed-circuit museum where ancient animals once lived. Vendors’ CLOSED signs hung lamely on strings. I reached the original, blood-colored carpet of the hotel. A tall but stern man stood behind a wood-paneled reception desk.
“I have a room, une salle,” I said to him.
He raised his eyebrows when I mentioned Raoul’s name.
“Monsieur Raoul is already upstairs. You may go ahead. Fourth level.” He pointed to an elevator at the end of another dim hall.
When the elevator didn’t respond to my call, I opted for the narrow, spiraling stairs. One level, two levels, turn; three levels, turn. It grew darker as I climbed upward, lugging my suitcase, my carry-on bag, too. Where were the lights in this grim, empty vault of a stairwell? Anxiety sucked away my breath. My suitcase felt heavier with each step. I tried imagining lovers spawning on the misty cliffs of Niagara Falls, but this darkness overwhelmed me. I felt a terrible foreboding. All I could see were crusty chips of ceiling plaster.
“Raoul! It’s me.” I knocked.
He opened the door and tried to kiss me.
“I can’t stay here.” I pushed past him.
“What?”
He opened his arms, both incredulous and welcoming.
“Sorry. No.”
In front of me, I saw an old bed sunken to the floor; one French window opened onto a blank, concrete wall of the 21st century. When I walked over to the window, I looked down at a tumble of concrete blocks piled like bodies of suicides in an alley below.
“This is awful,” I said.
“Jen, goddamn it,” he said affectionately. “Give me a kiss hello.”
I turned and kissed him quickly, noting the bedspread’s sickening yellowish hue. “I can’t stay here.”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “Look at me.”
“I can’t. I want to leave right now.”
“I paid already.”
“I know. But it’s putrid. Look.” I pointed to the bed.
“Kiss me,” he said again.
“How can you in this place?”
Other items clicked through my head: No lace canopy. No poofy quilt. Where were the pleated lampshades? Two pillows
lay in flimsy cases. I spotted a rip in the duvet.
“Raoul. It’s torn. See that? Let’s go.” I nodded to the depression in the bed, at the leftover outline of sleepers, confirming my doubts. I turned to the door.
He crossed his arms, immovable.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Did you sleep on the plane?” His dark eyes, full of endless expressions, searched mine for clues.
“I took an achievement test for success.”
He laughed and took a step. “Hun. Put your bag down. We’ll look for something else tomorrow. It’s early,” he said, checking his watch. “We’ll get some breakfast, come back and sleep. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere else. You’ll feel much better. There are hundreds of hotels in Paris. This isn’t the greatest but it’s not that bad. We’re in Paris.”
“You don’t understand.” I sat down on the single chair against the wall, ready to combat my heart’s minutiae. “I had a completely different vision. Hotel Liszt. It was the music. The famous name fooled me. It’s my fault. Why did they call it Hotel Liszt? It’s insulting.”
“For people like you. It’s a gimmick. So what?”
I pulled open my overnight bag, squirmed my fingers between bunches of cotton clothes, and found the hard corners of the guidebook.
I read aloud. “Charming, restored Victorian in what was once the fashionable Opera district tucked away—blah, blah—what crap. What lies! Once—hear that? Was. Get it?” I tossed the book on the bed. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You’re exaggerating. Come on. Listen to yourself.” He stood in front of me.
“Some Paris,” I said, noticing his thighs in his jeans. I leaned toward him and wrapped my arms around his waist. Everything about him felt built to last. I pressed my face into his front zipper.
I nudged my forehead between his legs and thought about alternatives. I was tired, overcome with the idea of having to move, depressed by waves of the room’s ugliness and my disappointment. I opened my eyes. “Some Liszt. It really is an affront to call it that. For that reason alone we should leave.”
He took my hand. “It’s got nothing to do with reason. It’s economics. If we leave now we won’t get our money back. Neither one of us is rich.”
“We’re not poor and I hate that kind of excuse.” I leaned away from him. I didn’t want to be reduced to money. I hadn’t come here for that.
“The shower’s new, see?” He urged me up. “We’ll take a shower. You’ll feel better. Come on.”
Raoul’s optimism and drive stemmed from his immigrant roots. He knew how to reinvent his landscape. If something wasn’t working, he made a plan to better it. His parents, Cuban Jews, fled to Miami when he was three. His father worked multiple jobs, eventually bought a small bungalow on Calle Hocho, the Cuban section of Miami, and opened a hardware store. If Raoul insisted on staying in this hellish place, perhaps I was missing something.
I walked into the bathroom and admitted the sink looked modern. Even the wall tiles looked new. He helped ease off my skirt and blouse, underwear and bra. He undressed, too.
“Don’t put them on the floor!” I cried. I reached for my clothes and piled them into the sink, then tiptoed into the shower stall.
“Maybe it’s a girl boy thing,” I said. “This sorry decor. It’s upsetting.”
He turned up the hot water and adjusted the dials. “Forget the hotel. You’re here. I’m here. Right? That’s what counts.”
He smoothed his hands along my hips and I relaxed into his chest. The warm water flowed down through my toes, then rose in a pool around my ankles; the shower basin was filling up. This set me off again. “See? The drain’s not working. I must be blind,” I said, “falling for a place like this. I’m leaving. We have to. This is ridiculous.”
“Right. So stop.”
But I leapt out and swiped a rag of terry cloth down my sides. Then I tiptoed to my suitcase, put on clean socks and jeans, and walked over to the 21st century wall again. It was more gray than white, reflecting an uncertain future.
“Now you are driving me crazy,” he called from the bathroom. I heard him turn the shower off. He came out and put on another pair of jeans and a raspberry-colored shirt, my favorite. A cool Easterly wind blew in from Hungary, or so I imagined. He shut the window.
“What’s the matter here? It’s you and me in one of the most famous towns on earth. What else do you want? Let’s get to the bottom of this.”
“Maybe you’re here because of Paris, not me. I don’t understand what I’m doing with my life.”
“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” he said, gallantly swinging his arms into the air.
This, I knew, signified his near breaking point. But the thing about Raoul, even in his sternest moments, he forgave me.
“Maybe I am here for Paris and,” he said, clasping his hands, “I love you.”
This silenced me. We had talked about liking, wanting, needing each other, but now this word, love. I heard the elevator cranking. So it really works, I thought, distracted by that word. Love. Wanted it. Needed it. Scared of it.
I walked over to the suitcase and pulled out my soft, blue sweater thinking I had not been successful with previous lovers. There had been a pattern of attraction, sex, then the troubling commitment factor settling in like a dangerous weather pattern—reckless winds, torn branches.
I bent over and closed the bag. It took months for me to surface when Richard wanted out. Then there was Seth and a flurry of serial dating. Adam, the gynecologist. He wanted me but I coveted his beautiful kitchen, those straw-colored cupboards, sunlight stippling through his micro Venetian blinds, as if such tangible things could bring happiness, not mediocrity in bed—my mind traveling walls, awkward kisses; feeling numb.
All that, until I met Raoul.
Raoul was different.
I smiled, remembering.
“You look beautiful,” he said to me.
“Oh,” I said, tying up my hair, letting stray hairs fall any which way. Richard thought so, too, in the beginning. There was Kevin, the musical egotist, and that summer of one-nighters; and Seth, the confused college student who went overseas to study economics—he didn’t talk about beauty; and another doctor who wanted to wrap things up—get his practice, house, future wife in order like polished medical reports. After Boston and Providence, I moved to Miami—geographic dislocation, environmental shift—to find something better than what I had.
“Darling,” I said, taking two more steps across the room. “Admit it. It’s ugly here. I just want to leave. Why don’t you want to?”
“Why don’t you want to stay?’
“I don’t know.” I shrugged and studied my socks but they had nothing to say. I looked at my feet lined up next to his. My socks faced the window, his feet faced the door. The window flapped apart and knocked against the wall.
From the start Raoul had a sense of humor, a lightness of heart. At the sales seminar he asked me to go for a run before dinner. We circled a worn track outside the convention center; he, mindless of the heat, the farting, the sweat-smeared strings of hair plastered to my forehead. Our first kiss tasted of salt, ice cubes and lemonade.
“What are you thinking?” he finally said.
I took a longer look at the room. “Everything, I guess. I had this idea that everything would be spacious.” Seeing the armoire for the first time, I went over and opened it. Inside a yellow blanket hung from a hook. I smelled dusty odors, like old, lonely thoughts. A plastic bag for laundry lay folded on a shelf, never to be used.
“Come on. Jen. Stop. It’s been two weeks—.”
“I know.” I stepped closer to him. “Two weeks is too long. That’s the problem. It’s too long and I’m tired.”
“I’m tired, too.”
He held my arms and leaned back on the bed. I fell on top of him and rested my chin on his chest. Another gust of
wind curled and rippled the curtains back into themselves.
“I get it now. This happens every time,” he said, flipping his head back to look at the curtains flailing.
“What do you mean?”
“Every time we haven’t seen each other, you go through this. You give me a hard time.”
He held me and we rested for a while without saying anything. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the coffin, which was really the armoire, but at that point everything looked moribund. His chest rose and fell in silent rhythms. I pushed away lint on his shirt and he awakened.
“Don’t go to sleep,” I said. “I want to stay, but not here. We’ll sleep somewhere else. I’ll call some hotels. Don’t worry. I won’t get fooled this time.”
I spotted a phone book on a shelf next to the bed. “Look at that. Old Franz even has a set of yellow pages.” This livened me up. I lifted myself off his chest and padded around the bed to the telephone. I closed the window again.
“The next one could be worse,” he said without inflection.
“The next one could have a recording of Beethoven.” I laughed sadly. “Who knows what that’ll do to me? Maybe you should call.”
“I’m not calling anyone.”
“I’ll call the Ritz. No surprises there. ” I picked up the phone.
“You’re out of your mind. We can hardly afford this.” He sat up and looked around him.
“It’s an ugly this and ugliness is never affordable,” I said feeling determined again, hyper-focused on my darker turn of mind. “What’s the price of a room when the immaterial costs are so high?” I started dialing. “Don’t worry, I won’t call the Ritz.”
Instead, I called seven places. Every single hotel was full.
“That’s it,” he said. “What’s going on here? Hand me the phone.” He jumped over the invisible sleepers in the bed and took the phone from me. “It’s early. Nobody’s checked out yet. Talk to me,” he said.
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