Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  The same three kids were two tables away at breakfast, evidently hungover. Few of the items on the kids’ plates had been touched at all, but their first bloody marys were drained.

  The boy said, “The deal is, I’m not normally comfortable with face-sitting.”

  “Gaah,” said the first girl, “I certainly am.”

  The second girl said, “I myself am a seasoned habituée of that proud li’l practice.”

  All this youthful irony gleaned from old advertisement bravado and smirk.

  “Let me just say,” the boy came back, “that this time, actually, it was totally fun and hot?”

  They were smoking and from the smell of it Scott got the craving. The city of Key West had been smart never to ban smoking in bars and outdoor restaurants, and here they were outdoors, under lightly flapping red canvas umbrellas. Feature that discussion at the Chamber of Commerce with the mayor and a few city councilmen present: “Your honor, tobacco is our bread and butter.”

  The waiter, older and disabused, came and forbearingly took their second-round orders.

  The second girl had trouble stubbing out her ended cigarette in the table’s ashtray and she said, “My mother thinks the only bloody mary worth its weight is a gin one, not a vodka one.”

  “Amazing,” the boy said.

  The first girl said, “Amazing, right? Because, lemme just say, what’s wrong with vodka?”

  “Anyway, that’s what my mom says. I’m just. Admittedly, my mom’s a freaking loon!”

  Moratorium on the word ‘amazing.’ Also ‘impact’ as a verb, as well as ‘impactful’ …”

  Perry laughed over the phone and said, “Are you resisting returning to New York?”

  Scott said, “I don’t want to leave. You know how much I miss you, but I prefer it here.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Perry said—but only would have said it if he were satisfied, too. He was probably lying down, his voice leisurely and groggy. “I never noticed that about ‘amazing.’ How’d you get to be so observant?” Perry was always trying to buck Scott up on the intellect front.

  Outside, one of the island’s many roosters crowed, then it caught fire with the others.

  “It’s just so overused. It’s lost its currency. I could say the same with ‘community.’ Get two of these chickens together, they’re a community, with rights and a common shared history.”

  Another moment and Perry said, “I can’t wait for you to come home.”

  The wild chickens were protected by law, though locals hated them. He and Perry had to pause while the relay of cock crows subsided. Harsh and rustic, they sounded nearly human.

  Before Scott hung up, when the wind rattled the fronds outside his bedroom and Scott lay in the dark, Perry said, “I really had a great time tonight. He was Albanian, and I had no idea.”

  “Idea about what?” said Scott.

  “That in New York, so many Albanians. Apparently they all staff the Italian restaurants.”

  “Duh.”

  “You knew that?”

  “Haven’t you been paying any attention?”

  “This one works at an old tacky joint down on Bleecker,” said Perry—and then his pause seemed to be telling Scott a profound thing about time, about the illusion of place. Either that or Scott wasn’t feeling well. He was losing the illusion of himself, his trace of time slacking up.

  Alone with the frond-rattle, he thought, I’ve eaten nothing today. Nor am I even hungry. And this wasn’t right. The island, trying to please you, was out to kill your sorry ass. Sweetly.

  He was at Fantasy House getting fucked as he lay on his back, legs splayed in the air. He’d lost weight and his curves and bulges had cinched a bit and he’d felt more appealing and comely.

  Fantasy House was an all-male, clothing-optional resort with a pool, wet area, everything. Upstairs, a maze of dark spaces and benches with cushions beneath video monitors playing porn.

  Before the sex, this Cedric had said, “I never wear condoms, just saying.”

  Scott had nodded ungivingly, persisting, and said, “So what do you do for a living?”

  “I work in the health industry. I know, funny, right? I’m an unsafe health professional.”

  “But you don’t work in an STD clinic or anything like that, I hope.”

  “Actually, I’m a respiratory therapist.”

  “And you don’t smoke, I hope.”

  “I do not. But I do figure, about the condoms, if I have anything then I just have it—and what I have I can’t do anything about now, so. It’s just my way of thinking. You have a lover?”

  “I have a lover.”

  “So do I—and I still think whatever I’ve got, maybe I can’t undo it now. It’s my creed.”

  “It’s a position.”

  “Get up on that table,” said Cedric. “I’m going to break my rule, first time in a while.”

  Afterwards, Cedric’s story. Small-town North Carolina upbringing, navy, freedom.

  In the night the sound of a full heavy moon groaning as it wheeled above mechanically—slowly, from the dark-blue starry heavens over the Atlantic toward the constellations above the Gulf, full watery and giving a liquid sound, the sky too, all thought and emotions turbidly saline, a solution lapping at his forehead plaintively as he woke to a dry rasp in his throat. Even his bladder rasped with a painful swelling more jagged and scratchier than the coarse grainy shore that was raked by the light foamy fingers of the soft and cool and incursive sea. The subtly calling night-bright sea.

  That moon as he’d loped home from Fantasy House the night before was a warm, wet wad of wax, dripping friendly, and his peeing now was a trail of quick oblique razor cuts, killing-hot.

  Again the kids—lined up catty-corner from him at the great rectangular bar. They had come in wearing swags of metallic Mardi Gras beads around their necks and were already trashed.

  “Oh my God, it’s you!” said the first girl. “It’s you, right?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I’m Branch.”

  “Nice to meet you, Branch.”

  “And I’m Durriya.”

  “Which means diamond.”

  “Oh my God! That’s exactly what it means. Amazing. How did you know?”

  “I studied a little Arabic,” said Scott. “I was in an Arabic-speaking country for a while.”

  The boy said, “We have to freaking leave at eight freaking a.m., for fuck’s sake.”

  “You studied Arabic? But oh my God, I love this freaking song. You know what? This song came out when my mother was in high school. How’s that for a mind-fuck? I wasn’t even born, and my mother was in high school. Is that not a major skull-fuck? I wasn’t alive …”

  But Scott had been in college back then, too. The boy caught his eye and smiled.

  The boy’s name was Shelby. To save time, Scott lied and said he lived here. The boy wanted to talk about New York only. Shelby was from Pennsylvania but vowed he’d never ever go back.

  “If I could say,” he began quaveringly operatically, by way of a humming, rising prelude, “if I could just say? My life, to be perfectly honest, only got started when I got to New York.”

  They’d had all the sex they were going to have, and Scott said, “But that’s wonderful.”

  “New York? You know what? New York is, like, for rich people. It’s for rich people, or like famous people, or else it’s just for like young people. Luckily I’m young, but just barely.”

  Something tore at Scott and he smiled crookedly and said, “To me, you’re very young.”

  But Shelby was off on a tear, not looking at Scott but refracting himself through others—his peers, his cohort—and this raised his dander: “Are you kidding? Dude, I’m heinous-aged!”

  Which Scott thought rather clever if naïve. He was a cute, pretty boy who was wasting it.

  Outside the cottage, the night rattled the leaves. The moon was on the wane. Just before it was light he noticed Shelby getting dressed. Scott pret
ended to sleep. The spectacle of Shelby stealing out, before the stupid older guy faltering in his delirium woke up, weirdly delighted him.

  Later he thought about his Paris days with Perry, so much earlier. Sex was gone. But the need was still there. Much older Hélène, Perry’s best friend in France, seemed to exemplify this.

  “I never said no to a man,” she’d said, ironically not long before she’d died. “Never!”

  He was remembering this in the hospital, tethered to drips and IVs and monitoring leads, a grotesque of former human shape, a half-mechanical octopus. Sex was this quiet secret, only it was all over the place. You came to it as though secretly, then decided, no, it was quite universal.

  And he was sure that he was almost at the end of his Key West tether, almost letting go of its grip, and it made him sad but, just as equally, satisfied and comforted him. He was through.

  And then several years passed, not as many as Scott might have wished.

  He’d wound down and quit the sex—fatigued, broken some. Perry’s visits became less and less frequent. He’d been cheated, were Scott’s final bursts of thinking. Once, he’d almost bought the American line of a cumulative, building happiness. Better the French noir sentimentality, though he’d never understood that. He’d watched their friend Hélène dying. She had said near the end, “At least I haven’t lost my sense of humor.” But Hélène was perhaps the least funny person he’d ever met, though she’d lived an interesting life. Had Scott? Who was Scott? This intubated guy on oxygen? Everything now was a little like that old drunken late-night, early-pee delirium …

  Hospice had its advantages. If he farted and it turned into shit, he couldn’t be blamed. If the bedding was soiled he need only apologize. The memory of sex preoccupied him. Once he’d hoped that his libido would go away. It was like a thirst or hunger attacking him. Eating him up.

  He was sharing a room with an older man who had a neurological disorder that made him shout and curse obliquely while at the same time he recalled the summer of 1945, a good year as even Scott believed it must have felt like to the lucky folk who’d just seen a delayed apocalypse.

  The man seemed unaware of Scott’s presence on the other side of a neatly pleated curtain which he may have taken as a stage curtain, muttering and rehearsing preshow lines to himself.

  “For months,” the man whose name Scott didn’t know called, “full dancing in the streets! Dancing in the streets you’ve never seen—and believe me, buddy, back then we knew dancing!”

  Was Scott his buddy? Each time Scott wondered if the man didn’t truly sense him there.

  Scott as a boy watching Woody Allen movies on Cinemax when they first got cable could only dream of living in New York one day— the intelligent babble, the backdrop, the being-alive. Even an order of diner french fries had sounded stylish, intellectual, de rigueur. He had come a long way, Scott, and now he was going even farther. Black coffee and fries, intellectual talk, and you’re done. Stick a fork in you, you’re done. How beautiful the world had been so far and how wonderful the sex, the food, the drink. It was drink and smoke that had brought him here. All of life’s pleasures were why he was dying, but in his druggy state he told himself he didn’t mind, he did not mind at all. He’d had the dream of New York and he’d had the reality of living here, too. It had been an incredible ride but now it was done. Mom, Dad. Perry? Was Perry still alive? It was not a bad death, overall. But dying here, on the gray East Side, on a dank-looking February day?

  It had never occurred to him.