Nine Island Page 2

  Floating in the hourglass pool . . .

  Its slender waist, voluptuous volumes of blue.

  Touch a woman where she most likes, says Ovid, touch her just right in her tiny pond, and you will see her eyes glow.

  Opened legs to the water and winged out my arms, shutting eyes so only they knew if they glowed.

  Twenty laps later, I clung gasping to the concrete lip, the building’s nine o’clock shadow cloaking the pool. Twenty-four floors (I counted, I count things, even when I already know), twenty-four stories times seven balconies (it’s good to do math when you can, keeps the brain sharp), all those balconies and potential eyes looking over this pool, jungle, and bay to Miami. But no one on any of them, no one in any of the lounge chairs surrounding the pool.

  Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide—

  No. Jorge was hosing philodendra in his rubber boots and white hat. I slung a wet wave his way; he waved back. A green heron on a branch above the koi pond stared into the water.

  I climbed out, wrapped torso in towel, walked along the cracked pink path through the paradise jungle, past the hot tubs nestled in shiny dark green. One still bubbled a chlorine bloom, and on the path—a trail of wet feet. Followed. But they grew fainter and smaller in the sun and were gone by the spiraling concrete steps to the dock. Spiraled down myself, past the silver-pink tree that is in fact a girl who ran from something and had to shoot headfirst into the ground to escape. Her slender trunk rises from the soil to a belly, then splits into two slim legs; between them, a delicate girl-cleft.

  So lifelike: I admire her each time I pass.

  No one on the wide, curving dock, just a bucket and another trail of wet on the planks at berth number five. The dock has berths for thirty-six boats—I don’t have to count, they’re numbered. Tango and All In! and others just like them, all sleek-shark yachts except my favorite, Paradise Found. That is its name, in happy white cursive. A miniature ferry, red with chrome trim. From the dock you could step over the water to its little back porch and open a door to a cabin with sliding windows, white-cushioned couches along the sides, a wet bar, you can see it—a place just like a honeymoon. Imagine living there, bobbing on the sea. Good morning! Sailor cap on head, blouse knotted at waist, stepping out into warm blue from happy warm sheets. Ahoy! And at night, at night, the stars aglow, music veiling the glittering dark.

  A place for Marilyn Monroe. Yes. I can see her slinking around in there, creamy and gold, with a glass of champagne and those big eyes, shy.

  Oh, Marilyn. Who couldn’t have babies and didn’t want to grow old.

  Deep below the boats, through the transparent green, lie sunken concrete chunks, barnacled and slick with kelp. Also a labyrinthine-brain coral I check on often to make sure it’s alive. Long needle-nose fish hang in the water, sometimes Portuguese men-of-war with their blue balloons and wicked tendrils, or moon jellies, tarpon; sometimes a manatee rolls up and snorts.

  Always worth peering into the water. Almost living the life.

  A large darkness down there suddenly stirred—I froze. From it moved a slender black length that became a fin, and then a black-gloved hand. A head appeared, slowly turned, and Heathcliff eyes stared up at me through a mask before slipping below the hull.

  Hurried to the other side of the boat and peered into the depths: nothing. Down there slithering invisibly around?

  Heathcliff! It’s me! I’ve come home!

  Went to the end of the dock and squinted up at my building, so tall it seemed to tumble from the blue and the clouds. On a high balcony appeared someone—that incredibly thin woman with white-blond hair, could see how skinny she was from all those stories below. She looked out at the bay, then straight down to the ground. She stepped from view, came back to the rail. Then reached out her arm, paused, and let something drop.

  She leaned out to watch it fall.

  I looked at where it must have landed, then back up the building to her. But she was resting her elbows on the rail now, neck stretched long, gazing far.

  ACTUALLY, THAT white-blond woman is a key. Part of the code re the economics of love. That skinny woman and her man: I’ve looked at them a lot this past year. Out by the pool, he reads the paper, he never looks up, he rests ankle on knee and reads. His hand reaches for a drink, but his eyes don’t leave the page. His flesh is smooth and tanned and full, pinguis in Latin, health glowing through his skin; as the sun rolls over, his shoulders shine, his golden-gray hair gleams. Supreme self-possession is what I see. Beside him, she agitates. In her skinny skin, those thin, thin bones, those large liquid eyes running in her drawn face. She lies down, sits up, looks around, twists, stands, paces with big hands locked behind her back, looks over the bay, turns to stare at the building, the pool, the man she married, who all the while sits absorbed in his paper. She’s half his size: tanned bones.

  A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years. Penia and Poros. Echo, Narcissus.

  Another female like that is an Ovid monster named Hunger. One hundred percent ravenousness, Hunger whistles and whirls into your room at night, crouches on your chest, glues her nasty mouth to yours, and breathes her neediness into you. From then on you are full of want.

  Wanting is exactly what I’ve never wanted.

  I drew Echo once as a skeletal girl like Hunger, bone hand reaching, face all mouth, to explain what I feared most.

  The golden boy considered the drawing, looked pained, then slid it back over the table.

  Some things, he said, should probably stay private.

  ONE VERSION OF the birth of erotic love:

  Penia (female, = Want) raped Poros (male, = Want Nothing), because she wanted what he was.

  The child Penia bore, the child of Want and Want Nothing?

  Eros, a.k.a. Love.

  You can spend some time pondering the logic and logistics of this.

  SO:

  Should I stay?

  Or should I go?

  Just what is meant by “I,” anyway?

  Look at it! Skinny little skeletal stalk, so simple and neat, coming not even close to conveying the runny, yolky mess it stands for.

  “Ego” is better if you want to say “I.” Even ich. Or io or je or yo.

  Let’s be decisive and say, Go.

  Yes.

  It will be tonic, throwing away want all at once. Closing the door and saying, I’m done.

  Sono chiuso, as an Italian lady once said, pushing away her plate. I’m shut.

  What a relief!

  Seal the leaky jar.

  And remember? It was always difficult, from the start. From the start, you didn’t want to be touched. Remember? Splendid isolation! You wanted to be marble, slate, glass, chrome: anything but flesh.

  Until you saw Sir Gold that day. Split open evermore.

  FOR INSTANCE (here comes a transmutation of Ovid):

  A tough girl strides through the forest, a girl who’d be made of wood if she could be. She doesn’t want anyone near her. She’s being watched. She doesn’t know. Pacing through huge green leaves she brushes aside, she’s stalking something elusive. She has on clothes, of course, she isn’t naked, but her dress is hiked up so high to stay out of her way that with each stride (he’s watching from behind a tree) the cloth flicks enough for him to see the dark moist shadow of what he wants. He’s not an animal, exactly, but saliva slides into his mouth and he swallows, licks his lips. When he first saw her, a moving glimmer in the green while he went about his dirty business in the trees, he stopped—something hurt his chest. Something he’d never felt: a rip. His eyes haven’t shifted from her since, and although he’d deny it, what he feels—his gaze sliding up her thigh, over the soft cloth with those gentle swells and swayings inside, then dipping as far as possible through the shadowed armhole, slipping up her neck slick with tropical sweat—what he feels is a lust rooted as much in groin as teeth, the lust of the hunt.
He swallows again, salty, rubs his lips.

  He wants to get all of himself inside her. Tongue, teeth, nails, cock. Not hurt her, not exactly. Or if he does—well, that’s not his intention.

  She’s reached the pond. He’s been willing her there because that will make it easier. That will show she wants it herself. And now—will she do it? She seems to be thinking. She raises an arm and breathes in her own smell.

  Gamey. He can smell the tang from here, he can almost taste her. Oh, yeah. She’ll go in. And once she does . . . In his skin his knees turn liquid.

  She unbuckles her belt, shrugs the dress loose. Before he can breathe she swivels free of the cloth: a pale shoulder, doe-white haunch, breast so quick he’s blinded.

  Black dazzles his eyes. His toes dig into the soil to spring—

  A message: my mother. Disorienting to be on the balcony, surrounded by Miami roar and warm blue, not in lusty woods.

  Darling, she wrote. Settled back in? Working on O?

  Could see her aim a knotty finger at each key.

  Yes! Will call tonight before your Ambien.

  Cracked knuckles and looked back at the Latin, book held open with a binder clip. Then looked over at Costa Brava. No naked man today. But in the top-floor gym a man was running in place, staring west through a wall of fogged glass.

  —she’s running already, naked in boots. Leaves and twigs slap at her arms and tear her hair, but she pulls free just before he can grip her hips because he’s that close—he can smell her and almost lick the sweat sheening her back—

  Another message:

  So you’re back in Miami.

  One of the gin-drinking old boyfriends. Worst one: the Devil. I knew him when he was a nasty nineteen and got to know his nastier entrepreneurial self on the recent tour of old boyfriends. One who enrages me, but not enough that I won’t stay at least a little in touch.

  In case.

  In case I need someone to send me a message.

  He’s usually good for that.

  Yep, back in Miami.

  How glam. I hope you fucking have fun down there. Maybe you’ll finally find what you want.

  Cracked my knuckles again and stared at the bay. A party boat foamed by, beat bouncing over the water. Two girls in neon bikinis danced on the prow. Almost dusk. Three parrots rushed past the balcony, shrieking.

  But now I could smell him. Warm gin-vapor rising from his skin in a hotel somewhere, a big bed with too many pillows, long cloven fingernails pressed in my flesh. But he was so poached that when his purple eyes squinted at me he saw not the present version of me, over which a few decades had run, but a version that was still nineteen. An aspect of him I liked.

  FOR INSTANCE (nothing to do with Ovid, exactly):

  In the Devil’s car a year ago, driving somewhere that would take a long time to reach, he squinted not quite in my direction, one long finger on the wheel, and said:

  I loved everything about you when we were nineteen and you would have nothing to do with me. How you walk and talk and look and laugh and sit and look at people and think. Do you hear me? Everything. I’m telling you too much. I should stop telling you all this. It only gives you more power.

  Well, maybe.

  Did I notice he was the one driving?

  Months later, when in exchange for all the power he gave me I’d given him all he loved, in an airport, spotting friends from home, he spun and strode fast from me to them, arm swinging forward in greeting. He did not turn his black-coiled head when I passed; his eyes took care not to know me.

  Fucker, typed my thumbs to him.

  Fucker, fuckee, said myself back to me.

  So who told you to climb on the shark?

  OUT BACK TODAY, two of the hot tubs bubbled. In the first a man with threads of gray hair on a barnacled skull held a leg to the jets, face fixed in excruciated pleasure. In the next a withered woman floated with her eyes shut. By the rail overlooking the dock were two men in scrubs and, between them, the Mummy. Strapped in a wheelchair fitted with bottles and stalks, his hair a white cloud, eyes shut, mouth open, chin propped up by a metal brace. He was probably awfully handsome once, is still a handsome ninety. He hasn’t been conscious for a very long time.

  Over the cracked concrete to the pool.

  Was on my sixth lap when Fran rolled out. She is ninety-nine and enormous. She had on a white robe, orange one-piece, and pink bathing cap, and her face is square with a complex, cragged topography. When she and the aide pushing her got near, Jorge dumped his towels and came to help lower her in.

  Once in the water, she became queen of the sea, surveying her surf. She shook a hand for her aide to give her a snorkel and mask, fit them on her head, turned, and started motoring around the shallow end. Slow circles, her back a floating isle.

  I timed my laps not to collide with her circles, but she’s strong as a ship and circled so steadily she created a gyre, and I got caught in her current and swerved. Was getting my footing when I saw her planted nearby. She’d taken off her snorkel and mask and fixed me with a glittering eye.

  Guess what, she said.

  What?

  I’ve lost almost everything. Both breasts, a hip, my hair, a kidney, and another piece I forget. But you know what?

  What?

  I don’t give a damn!

  Good for you!

  Nope, she said. I’m ninety-nine and don’t give a goddamn. Hell with it all. She looked at me hard, grinned without teeth, adjusted the snorkel, and pumped on.

  Floating in the cracked hourglass pool . . .

  With Fran’s lost parts and a barnacled man and the Mummy.

  Stop it! wrote K. You are NOT in a retirement home.

  Might be just the thing.

  NOT SURE I’VE mentioned the deadline for Ovid: twentyfour verse stories in a hundred and one days. Lots of money in work like this, I can tell you. Sort of translation, but only to start: am changing his stories around. I don’t think Ovid of all people would mind.

  Trans-ferre, tuli, latus: the kind of pattern you can’t shake from your head if this is what you’ve fed it for thirty-plus years.

  Conjugations, declensions. Also lyrics.

  A song starts in my head, plays in a loop for weeks, won’t stop until a new one knocks it from orbit.

  But I believe those songs tell me things, floating to my inner ear from a deeper, Delphic self.

  Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday, you’ll change your place in this world.

  This one I heard for years, until I finally left my death-in-life marriage in Deutschland, and the song magically stopped.

  Had the lyrics wrong, but still, they helped.

  Anyway.

  Spread my blue towel on a lounge chair, settled upon it, put glasses on nose, fixed the Latin open with a black binder clip, splayed the dictionary on the concrete.

  —She had no chance of running away from that hunter, and when she realized this, she changed tack: she caught a trunk, skinning her arms, shut her eyes, and screamed silently but so intensely that the waves of her will went down through her loins, legs, and feet and into the soil, and it was the soil that saved her. Her ragged toenails she’d only ever cut with a knife dug into the fallen leaves and the earth and latched to rocks way deep, and meanwhile such strange things were happening to the rest of the girl still overland! The skin she wanted no one ever to stroke or nibble or lick grew hard and cracked, the dry places at her knees and elbows whorled and stiffened, and her wrists grew long and thin and suddenly split, twiggy fingers reaching up toward the sky, and now so happy, ecstatic, she threw back her head as her long dirty hair metastasized into leaflets, and she had just enough time to think, I am losing all the parts of myself but becoming what I am, when the wind took the words from inside her mouth and they rustled into air.

  Put pencil in spine, rolled over, and stared at the sky.

  The sky here is so voluptuous, if you’re lying on your back on a soft warm towel
, letting the world just spin you.

  You can keep climbing deeper into that gassy, dark blue.

  What are you singing me now, blue ions?

  Framed a square of potent sky with my hands.

  But—small lump on my index finger. What? It didn’t use to be there. On the knuckle, which I wiggled—stiff.

  Silhouetted against the sky, in fact, the fingers all looked knotty. The skin looked downright whorled.

  Well, good.

  Head tilted back, I could see clear up the building. And exactly then the thin white-blond woman came out on her balcony. I flipped over fast to see better. She stood by the railing, gazing out. Then disappeared, and reappeared farther down than she’d been the other day. Deliberate. She reached out far, opened her hand, again let something fall. Then peered down to see where it landed.

  Experiment?

  After a minute I couldn’t stand it and hurried barefoot along the cracked path between the gym windows and the low concrete rim that holds back the paradise jungle, to where it must have fallen. Poked at the leaves: nothing.

  I looked up the building, up the thing’s path—and there she was, all those stories above, looking down at me. We gazed up and down at each other, like I was her reflection, or shadow.

  FOR INSTANCE (also not Ovid, exactly):

  There was a girl in college who ran. A real runner, yeah, but this was more: she was running away. She wanted no flesh that wasn’t muscle, and then she wanted her running to eat the muscle, too. That really made her eyes glow. Make me bone, those eyes said. Something so hard no one ever gets in.

  Long wild chestnut hair, the sort you can easily see turn into twigs.

  A so-called boyfriend of mine with sad eyes had an awful thing for her. She let him touch her once, he said, he almost managed to get her in bed, but that was more than she could take. She ran. From him, other men, everyone. You’d see her pale legs flitting outside the windows of the eating clubs, down the tree-lined streets at night.