Welcome to Paradise

by Laurence Shames

  Coincidence? Up until that moment he'd assumed so; his misfortunes had come too thick and fast for him to think about them in any other way. Luck, after all, good or bad, was famously streaky. He'd seen that on the selling floor, the ballfield.

  But there were limits to what could be ascribed to luck alone, and now, finally, it dawned on Alan Tuschman that perhaps there was some other cause for his misfortunes. A pattern. The shark, okay, that was an act of God. But the other disasters—they were bizarre, ridiculous, but maybe there was a pattern to them nonetheless.

  He pondered as he strolled. Was someone mad at him? He ran a catalog of those he might have wronged. Salesmen were not above exaggerating the merits of their wares—might there be a seriously disgruntled and deranged customer lurking out there somewhere? Possible; not likely. His ex? She was happily remarried, their relation cordial though distant. For better or worse, there were no scorned women in his recent past, still less jealous husbands. Who then?

  Strolling now along streets lined with hibiscus shrubs and shaded by enormous banyans, he scanned his conscience and found it basically clear. He was an okay guy, not a saint, but a person of average virtue, ordinary decency. He was gentle with animals and would return a wallet if he found one. Essentially honest. Peaceable. Preferring to be kind than otherwise.

  Such people were supposed to be rewarded. By God, or the universe, or however you wanted to put it. If not with gaudy gifts, then at least with neutral fortune and peace of mind. This Al had been taught, and this he still believed.

  So why did he have less peace of mind than he'd had three days ago? Either the universe was out of whack, or he was looking at it wrong.

  The universe, he couldn't fix. So he finessed his point of view.

  These calamities that kept happening to him—maybe they weren't what they seemed. He'd been seeing himself as chosen victim, singled out for misery—but maybe that was a mistake. This unlikely, pinpoint malice that found him time and time again—maybe the real intention was something altogether different.

  He walked, he pondered, then suddenly it hit him.

  Hit him so abruptly that he laughed out loud from the bottom of his burning lungs. Of course! Of course that's what it was! No one was out to get him. He wasn't targeted for torment after all. A great wave of relief swept warmly over him, coupled with humble amusement that he hadn't caught on, solved the riddle sooner. He shook his head, and laughed some more, and wiped his eyes, and his dog looked back at him across her shoulder as though he'd lost his mind.

  *

  "Nicky," said his friend Donnie Falcone, "don't even think about it."

  "How can I not think about it?" Nicky said, fingering the collar of his turtleneck.

  In New York it was already dusk, one of those brown dusks that buries a gray day with people barely noticing the fade. They were having a cocktail in Tribeca. This was no dim and somber Mob joint but a hip place with an artist or two crammed in among the brokers. The waiter for their miniature table was skinny and wore black. There were women at the bar with straight, lank hair and bags under their eyes. Donnie, lean and lugubrious in his big black coat, almost looked like he belonged.

  "I'm there," Nicky Scotto went on, "I'm runnin' things again—how can I not think about it?"

  Donnie rubbed his long and concave face. "Find a way," he urged. "Be practical, Nicky. Skim your twenty, thirty, whatever you can manage in a week, and let it go."

  "Twenty, thirty," Nicky said dismissively. "It's not about the money."

  Donnie sipped his martini. "Don't make me laugh, I got chap lips."

  "Okay, it's not just about the money. It's about who's the right guy—"

  Donnie was rolling his cocktail napkin up around the damp base of his glass. "Nicky," he broke in, "lemme ask you somethin'. How'd you get the job?"

  Nicky leaned in closer across the table that was barely big enough to hold two sets of elbows. "I tol' ya. Tony decided—"

  "Fuhget Tony decided. How did you actually get the job? Who tol' you you had it?"

  "Carlo," Nicky admitted. "Carlo called me up—"

  "Exactly," Donnie said. "Carlo. Not Tony. Carlo. Zat tell you anything?"

  Nicky looked stubborn in his bafflement.

  "Here's what it tells me," his friend went on. "It tells me that who runs the fish market for one lousy week is exactly the kinda piddly bullshit that Tony don't wanna be bothered havin' a sitdown about."

  "But if I just explain to him—"

  "Explain what? Look, you want my advice, here it is: fuhget about lookin' ta sit down wit' Tony."

  Nicky pouted, chased condensation down to the bottom of his glass of scotch. "Ta you it's piddly bullshit," he complained. "Ta me it's like a whole new chance."

  "Fine. Except it isn't."

  "How you know it isn't?" Nicky challenged. "How you know it isn't a tryout, like, a test."

  Donnie raised his neat hands in surrender. "Okay, okay, I don't know nothin'. I only know that Tony's gonna be aggravated, ya waste his time wit' this."

  "Waste his time? It's an opportu—"

  "Nicky, you're makin' a mistake."

  Nicky Scotto, annoyed but not dissuaded, gestured for another round of drinks. The waiter, more than cool, answered the gesture with the most elegant of tiny nods, and wove toward them through the crowded place as silent as a fish.

  *

  Al Tuschman was still chortling off and on when he walked into the office of Paradise and asked to use the phone. He was flushed and disheveled, and the desk clerk with the eyebrow studs looked at him with politely smiling disapproval.

  "Been drinking, Mr. Tuschman?"

  "Only half the ocean. If you'll excuse me, this is gonna be long distance."

  He dialed, leaning on the counter. The clerk moved off just to the edge of earshot.

  Waiting for the call to be picked up, Al got giddy once again. It's what happened when a man was allowed to crawl back from the precipice. Relief became a species of dementia. His chest heaved, his nose ran, and when Moe Kleiman finally lifted the phone and said a friendly, salesmanlike hello, Al had no breath to speak.

  "Hello?" his employer said again. "Hello? Kleiman Brothers Furniture."

  "You guys," Al Tuschman managed between snorts. "What a buncha kibitzers!"

  "Who is this?" asked his boss.

  Al wheezed through soggy passages. "The lobsters. The calamari. Jesus, howdya manage?"

  "Al?"

  "Really had me goin'. Thought... Christ, I don't know what I thought."

  "If this is Al—"

  "And about the car, I mean, jeez, the trip was prize enough. Ya didn't have to glom the car—"

  "What car?"

  "—pay off the lease—"

  "Are you meshuga altogether?"

  "Come on, Mr. Kleiman. Joke's over. Time to let it go."

  "Are you okay, Al? Let what go?"

  Al hesitated, cleared his throat of salt. Belatedly, it dawned on him that he must be sounding like a lunatic. He tried to cling to his giddiness, which was also his hope, but it was going, fast; emptily he watched it slip away like a loved one at the airport. Desperate now, he said, "Really, Mr. Kleiman, about these pranks—"

  "Pranks? Al, trust me, I don't know what you're talking about. Is something wrong?"

  He struggled for a normal breath and strove now for a sober tone. "Wrong? Oh, no. Coupla funny things have happened. I just thought maybe . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "Really I'm just checking in. Things okay up there?"

  "Fine, Al, fine."

  "Checking in, and thanking you again for the trip. This is quite a place."

  "You like it?"

  "Love it. Thanks again."

  "You're welcome, Al. You earned it," Kleiman said, and Al could picture him kindly smiling, the thin mustache stretched into gray rays across his lip. "Enjoy and get home safe. We miss you here."

  Al almost said he missed them, too, but then was stopped by the galling and ridiculous sens
ation that if he said it he would start to cry.

  Instead he said, "Hey, I'll be back soon. You'll see, I'll be tan and sell my ass off. Better than before."

  17

  "So what now?" asked Chop Parilla.

  "I wish you'd quit askin' me that," said Squid. "Every time I'm baskin' inna glow of something, you're already buggin' me what's next."

  They were sitting at a beachfront restaurant at the south end of Duval Street. It was a seafood joint but they were having burgers; ever since the calamari they hadn't felt like fish. Chop looked off at the ocean. The last light was skimming across it, making it look both thick and glassy, like if soup could be a mirror.

  "Somethin's up my ass about this job," he finally admitted.

  "Yeah," said Squid. "You only got to steal one car." He was eating french fries. He ate them one by one, the long way. He blobbed the tips in ketchup then held them up above his mouth like a trainer dangling herrings to a seal.

  "Nah," Chop said, "it isn't that. It's ... it's ... ah the hell with it."

  Squid wiped ketchup from his lips. He found it entertaining when Chop tried to explain himself. "Come on," he urged. "What?"

  Chop took a bite of burger, slowly chewed. "It's that. . . it's that ya got no waya knowin' when you're finished, when ya've done the job. Ya see what I'm sayin'?"

  Squid sucked his Coca-Cola through a straw.

  "I mean," said Chop, "ya torch a place, the place burns down, ya've done the job. Ya hurt a guy, he's inna hospital, ya've done the job. But this? Ya bother 'im, ya bother 'im some more—how ya know when ya've bothered 'im enough and the job is really done?"

  Squid folded his hands and serenely smiled, confirmed in his most basic belief—a belief that allowed him to feel his efforts did not go totally unappreciated. He'd always held that an intrinsic sense of art, however rudimentary and inarticulate, existed even in the densest dullard. "So you're saying it's about the structure of the thing?"

  "Fuck structure. What I'm sayin'—"

  "Is that you want a rise and fall, a climax."

  "What I want," said Chop, "is to know when the fuckin' job is over so I can go home to Hialeah and play wit' motors."

  Squid went back to eating french fries. "S'okay," he said, "in your own mind, what would it take for the job to be over?"

  "Fuck difference does it make?"

  "Come on," said Squid. "We're talkin' hypothetical."

  "Fuck hypothetical. Lemme eat my burger."

  Berman sighed. "Chop, ya know what separates us from monkeys? We converse while dining, we make witty conversation. So come on. What would convince you that we did enough, the job is over?"

  Parilla put his burger down. "Okay. Okay. The fucker's hauled off in a straitjacket. Or better yet, he dies."

  Squid clasped his hands together, looked up at the deepening violet sky. "Beautiful! Perfect classic endings. Except that ain't the job."

  "I kinda wish it was. Now lemme eat my fucking dinner."

  He'd had one forkful of coleslaw when Squid was at him again.

  "What this job is," the bandy man said, "the beauty of it, it's modern."

  "Fuck modern."

  "It doesn't finish. It's just there. Like one a those paintings that's just dribs and drabs and slashes all the way to the edge. Forces you to deal with tension."

  Chop put down his fork. "Keep talking and you're gonna deal with my foot up your ass."

  " Ya see the power of that tension? I mean, it even gets to you!"

  "One more word, Squid. One more word."

  The bandy man swallowed viscously and finally shut up. Eating french fries, he stared off at the ocean, which had given up its copper tinge and turned a nighttime indigo. With neither rise nor fall, it spread to the horizon, and was everywhere a climax, since it had no start or finish. The most ancient and most modern picture. He wished he could make Chop see it. He knew he never would.

  *

  Big Al Marracotta, an all-or-nothing guy, could not accept that his vacation had been tarnished, that his carefree, sex-dazed time in Florida should be anything less than perfect. It offended him that problems dared intrude; it frustrated him that he could not shut off the world; it made him bitter that pleasure wasn't simple.

  So his attitude got lousy and he did everything he could to make things worse. The change was very sudden, and understandably baffling to Katy Sansone.

  Things had been going pretty well. She'd been giving him a back rub. They'd been talking about things, he'd been almost revealing. She'd felt like she was helping him, that they were getting close, almost like a real couple. Then the phone rang and she was banished to the bath.

  Now, three quarters of an hour later, she was out of the tub, swathed in a robe, a towel turban on her head, and everything was different. Al looked mad again. "Things okay?" she innocently asked, shaking water from her ear.

  He didn't answer and didn't look at her. He wasn't pacing anymore, just sort of wandering around the room.

  Trying to be helpful, she said, "That phone call—?"

  "There wasn't any phone call," he cut her off. "Remember that." He kept wandering, seeming to look for places where his small feet hadn't yet flattened the carpet.

  "Al, is there anything I can do?"

  There wasn't, and he held it against her that there wasn't. He stared at her from under his eyebrows, and in the stare was an unreachableness that was not very different from hate.

  Katy still imagined that she must have done something to deserve that look. "If you're mad about how long I stayed at the beach—"

  "I don't give a shit how long you stayed."

  He went to the phone and ordered a bottle of scotch. Katy rubbed the towel against her scalp.

  "Why don't you put an outfit on," he said.

  At first she was happy he said it. Sex opened him up, if anything did. She scanned his face for some hint of the boy-devil grin, the wry, untempered zest that welcomed her into his selfishness awhile. But he didn't look zestful, just craggy and mean. She got worried in her stomach. She tried to sound playful. "Which one would you suggest?"

  "Black."

  She got some things from her suitcase and went back to the bathroom.

  The liquor arrived while she was in there. Al poured himself a tumblerful and picked out a porno film. He pulled down the window shades; the last, dusky light put a lavender gleam around their edges, then faded, squandered, into night.

  Katy emerged, walking stiffly on spike heels.

  She wore a bra that lifted her breasts but didn't cover them, and panties that cinched her waist and thighs but left her sex exposed, made a lewd frame around a picture rendered vivid and obscene by lack of context. With effort she approached the bed. She didn't mind being looked at; usually she enjoyed it. There was a kind of power in what she had to show. But now it didn't feel right.

  It would not have taken much to put her at ease—a compliment or even just a smile would have sufficed. But Big Al couldn't manage it. He seemed aroused yet annoyed that she was there. Dressed but for his shoes, he leaned back on a stack of pillows and gestured for her to join him in the bed. Then, without a word or a touch, he used the remote to start the movie.

  In the film, a man with muscles and a pointy beard was teaching a woman to submit. Leather straps bit into flesh. Wrists stretched in metal rings. Buttocks were pinkened as slaps combined with whimpers on the soundtrack. Cruel things were done to nipples.

  Above the tinkle of chain and the crescendo of moans as pain imitated pleasure, Katy said, "I don't like this, Al."

  He watched the film. He didn't answer.

  "Come on," she said, "let's watch something else."

  Al made no reply.

  On the screen the woman's hair was being pulled, her loins assaulted with a device that looked medieval. Katy wondered if Al would notice if she closed her eyes. She didn't want to watch but she didn't want to make him angry. She narrowed her lids just far enough to make everything a blur, and amid the sounds
of cursing and slapping, she watched a movie of her own. She saw the beach, a bright horizon flecked with distant sails. Green wavelets topped by tiny curls, silver foam sizzling and disappearing through a sieve of cool coarse sand.

  When the film was over, Big Al took off his clothes and climbed on top of her. He wasn't kind; he wasn't unkind. He just started, then he moved awhile, and then he finished.

  Katy Sansone surprised herself by feeling nothing. Nothing bad, nothing good. Still, the nothing that she felt had content. It was made of shame and frustrated caring and a tardy anger that was finally starting to ripen.

  When he was done with her and had rolled aside, she walked slowly to the bathroom to wash. She faced herself in the mirror, regarded herself with curiosity but no expression. She realized after a moment that what she was looking for was something to be proud of. She studied her own eyes, she firmed her jaw. Then she took off the things that Al had bought her, the cupless bra and the panties that put her on display, and dropped them in the trash.

  18

  Al Tuschman didn't leave his room that evening.

  He was wrung out, his chest hurt, and he was half afraid that if he showed himself, yet another ludicrous and dreadful thing was bound to happen. His confidence was badly shaken, and in some primitive, unreasoning way, his feelings were hurt, as if he'd been cast out by all the world, turned into a pariah. He felt like he'd forgotten how to get along with people, how to do the simple things that got a person through the day. Like a voodoo curse, his rim of bad luck spooked him, and thereby brought on more bad luck.

  He took a shower, scraped his belly on a splinter that had somehow become embedded in his bar of soap. He ordered in a pizza, burned his mouth on cheese. He cut up a slice for the dog, and the two of them ate in mopey silence beneath the picture of the greenish women with the greenish breasts. Then they crawled, defeated, into bed. Al watched the slow and mollifying rotation of the ceiling fan, and let his mind go numb.

  But there's no medicine like sleep, and in the morning everything looked cheerier.

  The salesman blinked through his window, saw giant philodendron leaves, pendant coconuts turning yellow, soft mist rising from the hot tub. Perspective returned. Pariah? Come on—he was a well-liked, friendly guy who'd had a few bad breaks. His luck would turn; he knew it. He was on a mission to be happy—Jesus Christ, he thought, when did I really start believing that?—and one way or another he was going to pull it off.