Nine Island Read online

  Someone must have fucked her up, he said, staring at her hard. Somebody really screwed her.

  Maybe, I thought. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to let anyone in. What’s wrong with that? Who made it obligatory?

  Porosity: some have it more than others.

  Say, girls.

  You have a hole, a boy said to me when I was eight. He and another had cornered me with their bikes against an alley wall.

  You have a hole, he said, that I can put my thing in if I want.

  For fuck’s sake!

  That boy’s bike crashed to the ground.

  MY FRIEND S has just typed me his opinion:

  Boys look at porn from the time they’re nine. Girls are only body parts.

  MORE BUSTER PUDDLES today. Spending a lot of time wiping; knees are getting bruised.

  Went outside to paradise—who would not be ecstatic here! How could your heart not flood with solitary joy when walking on the blistering concrete and beholding the hot blue sky and hot green grass and flowers so red they flame your eyes and all that milk-green water? Sometimes there are only depths and depths of dizzying blue up there, but mostly there are heaped white dunes of clouds, sheets and wedding cakes and tire treads of clouds, fata morganas in the sky.

  Was brave this morning and left the building not one of my favored back ways, via dock or garage, but boldly through the lobby, past the doormen who love to know who’s doing what, past the valets who sneer at my Mini and at the groceries borne home in my bare arms if I’ve dared venture carless into the tropics to shop. Walked through the revolving doors, past the burbling chlorinated fountain, down the swooping entry ramp, past the row of green fronds and scaly trunks and more girl-trees diving into the ground. Five of them, with silver-pink bark, slim torsos rising from the soil and splitting into long satin legs with tender dark clefts between. They look like naked preteen synchronized swimmers, plunging into the mulch.

  Not sure they got away from whatever chased them, with their poontangs eye height and bare, though.

  Girls! Close your legs right now, you fools!

  To get to Publix, you follow Island Avenue around the oval park, from my building (Nine), past Costa Brava, Sixteen, Belle Plaza, the Venetian, then walk over the last causeway bridge to Miami Beach. In the water are always needle-nose fish—and, gliding below them today, a ray. A spotted eagle ray, I think, having memorized one once and hurried home to consult my Audubon Field Guide. Undulating leopard wings, blue light wavering upon them.

  What a place, where you see something like this on your way to buy milk.

  Enough to make you forget your chronic life concerns.

  Almost.

  Just then a Jet Ski boy with a girl stuck to his back swerved by. Engine scream, arc of spray, the fish shot off, the ray glided down into silty dark.

  Landed a curse on the pair with my eyes.

  Walked over the bridge, past the marina, along a shady block of restaurants and bars, to Publix, which looks like a silver space-shell and is full of porn stars and fabricated beauties strolling the aisles in shoes not made for human feet. Their silhouettes seen from the coffee aisle, down near the illuminated fruits, are extreme. Their natural predators prowl the aisles, spying around boxes of soup.

  During the last hurricane, when electricity was out all over the Beach so there was no AC, they say that in the fancy buildings lining the bay the porn stars all went nude.

  The sort of statement you can believe.

  Like:

  You could be a courtesan, as Sir Gold said to me.

  He looked like he was actually thinking, those hazel-green eyes concerned, proposing what I might try next, now that he was done with me.

  Not that I knew this yet, lying naked in his sunny bed, with no desire to leave.

  Anyway.

  Yogurt, cookies, kale, cat food. Diapers. But no one makes diapers for old cats, only puppies, which I don’t understand, so after a while I wandered over to the aisle of baby things. Happy yellow, blue, pink, dimpled bottoms, sweet plum mouths. I found diapers for babies from two down to zero, almost small enough for a skinny old cat. The newborn diapers were a better deal than the ones for dogs, and I was reaching for a packet and feeling golden light sift upon me, feeling a transformation—when I realized the problem of the tail. Returned to the puppy diapers: not cheap.

  Shedding money galore for diapers plus litter plus cat food plus pills for both seizures and thyroid. If I drowned Buster today I’d have three hundred dollars a month for my mother.

  I have taken care of him for eighteen years.

  Time to go!

  It’s been grand!

  So long now!

  No no no. I’d never drown my baby baby baby cat.

  Had just checked out and was shouldering my green Publix bags when—oh, no. Par-T-Boy.

  Haven’t mentioned that there are deadbeats not only north but south: the distant, historic, alluring ones far up I-95, and new ones I’ve met down where 95 ends.

  Par-T-Boy was standing at the cash register about to pay, with five people behind him, when he spotted me and came toddling over, six outraged faces watching. He shrugged, cared not. He’s spent so much time in Miami’s sonic nightclub scene that blitheness rings him, and the words in his mouth seem to have been blasted apart and re-fused to form a marbly language hard to understand. He owns a bungalow on one of the Venetians and hopes to be a magnet for luscious females, but as soon as they see his front yard, with broken ceramic frogs and ravaging weeds and smashed tiles fallen from the roof, they spin on their Manolos and canter away, and he stands there laughing, bereft.

  S’you’re back, he said, as the cashier waved her hands behind him.

  Yep.

  Th’man? he said. Lovoyurlife? Nah? Didn wanyou?

  Shouldn’t you go pay for your stuff?

  He grinned, strands of hair sliding over his eyes. Toldju, he said.

  Told me what?

  He fluttered his hands. Guysr worthless, he said. Cept me.

  Forehead and wrists dripping in the violent sun as I trudged back with my bags, decided I could not face the valets so went around to the side to see Tina in Receiving. I used to think it best to go out in the middle of the day because then, though hottest, the sun is highest, which means that, given that your shadow clings to your feet like a tiny dark puddle, the only parts of you struck by sun rays are the shoulders and head. But after reeling home stupid nine times at midday, I finally ordered a hot-pink UVF parasol on Amazon. The pinkness I hope will camouflage the comedy of walking around sun-bright Miami with an umbrella. I was hoping it had arrived and also wanted to know what Tina in Receiving knew about the problem with the pool.

  She works in a small dark room between the Dumpsters and entry to the freight elevator and garage, and has braids of black and gold coiled on her head, rhinestone appliqués on her fingernails, and crosses and holy cards taped to the walls, among piles and shelves of packages.

  Oh, yeah, she said, they’re always saying something about that pool deck. You haven’t been here long enough to hear it.

  It’s true? It’s leaking?

  Oh, it’s leaking. Everything’s leaking. You know this is an old building. Everything here is old. Pool, koi ponds, all those planters. Go look at the underside of the pool, she said, down where it hangs into the garage. They say that if they don’t do something soon someone will get sucked into the pool’s filter.

  Really!

  Won’t happen. Hasn’t yet. But could. They say. But that’s the kind of thing they do say.

  Who?

  Oh, you know, she said, and zipped her mouth.

  Went from Receiving into the garage, underworld of cars, columns, puddles, dripping. How had I not noticed when I rented the place? Where had my brain been? I walked in the dimness to where the pool’s deep belly hangs down among cars. Stalactites shag its underside, stalactites made of the chemicals Jorge’s poured into the water
for years, the chemicals that have slid from the skin and hair of swimmers, all of it leaching through the concrete and dripping for two decades down here until it’s a grotto, water sliding from the mineral shag even now.

  As I turned toward the grated glare of outside, a slim figure passed. Light slanting through the grate struck her and made her glow like a candle, that floating floss of white-blond hair. She couldn’t see me in the dark, but when she turned I saw that she could be my mother, or me. In her thin straight back and large gray eyes seemed a wild determination.

  Hi, I said, as she pushed the button to crank open the grate.

  She startled. Oh, hi. Her voice was rough. I didn’t see you. It’s so dim down here. But then here it’s so bright. I don’t know. I just didn’t see anyone. Well, so long, she said and passed through the lifted grate.

  Her long skeleton legs carried her out until she turned west on the Venetian Causeway.

  CONCRETE = WATER + aggregate + cement

  Aggregate = crushed limestone (for example)

  Cement = powdered (e.g.) limestone

  Limestone = calcium carbonate from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as (for instance) coral

  NOW THE MOURNFUL LAWYER has made contact. Dine with me, he says.

  Another southern deadbeat.

  Or not a deadbeat, that’s not right, just one of the ones who make me go dead.

  He’s always driving somberly up and down the causeway in his boatlike car, so if I say no but dare go for a walk he might see me there refusing to dine, and then there’ll be long, hurt messages.

  The look and sound and smell of him—he’s like one of my mother’s men from the seventies, the Parents Without Partners men, the hopeless Al Anon men, the men who’d roll up in old white Cadillacs or battered vans for a few weekends to take her out once her husbands had gone, cologned and haunted men (Cadillac), or wild-eyed and briny men (van). The Mournful Lawyer is their kin, their age and as dusky and fragrant, cheeks that are fallen, riven. He drives a funereal Impala, is hard of hearing in the passenger-side ear, furrows his brow if you try to inspire in him a different point of view. His cases involve terms I cannot comprehend, never a word not abstract.

  Just plug your nose and do it, says K. Important to get out, get exposure.

  Soon he is laying out the plan for an early-bird dinner at a place very quiet and cheap and far away. Google Maps says forty-two minutes even without traffic.

  Impossible to focus on O with this looming. Started going out to the balcony with binoculars to see how cars were moving west on the MacArthur Causeway at five o’clock. Slow. By five thirty—what was this?—they had nearly stopped.

  When I came down on time he was already waiting with arms folded, his long face in folds of discontent inside his car’s musty depths. A raindrop had fallen so he’d taken the precaution of rolling up the windows, air-conditioning blasting thick former scents, windshield fogged with breath.

  He leaned over to kiss my cheek, dry lips peeling apart.

  Off we went.

  So tell me, he said. How have you been.

  Well—

  Let me tell you first, he said, what I’ve been working on. I think it will interest you.

  He paused, summoning power.

  And spoke, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what he said as the land of living passed us by. The Impala moved down the ramp, along Island Avenue, past the oval park, and turned right—

  Wait—you’re not taking the Venetian?

  His shoulder cringed and he pursed his lips. The toll, he said.

  (Dollar twenty-five.)

  There’s a Heat game or something, I said. I could see from the balcony the MacArthur’s blocked.

  Long furred hands clasped the wheel tight.

  There is not a Miami Heat game, he said with a hard patient smile. It is not basketball season.

  Well, a concert or something. It’s blocked.

  I’ve already turned in this direction, he said. So we will take our chances. Besides, this will give me enough time to explain—

  And that’s the last thing I remember.

  LUCRETIUS AND THE atomists before him saw human senses like this: tiny semblances of people and pine trees and oxen and so on were always flying from their source-objects through the air, and if they struck your eyes or nose or ears, you saw, you smelled, you heard that thing. But to have your sensibilities deeply stirred, to be smitten with erotic love—only the rarest semblances could slip through the fine pores of your soul and smite you with that, infect you with desire.

  The opposite of erotic love: every pore you own, squeezed shut.

  WELL, IT’S GOOD to be out among people, said my mother when I called her after my early-bird dinner and she was still fresh from her own.

  Maybe, I said. Anyway. How’s the research?

  About what?

  You know. Your plan for the next stage.

  What next stage?

  For god’s sake. Your dizziness, mother.

  It isn’t dizziness.

  Your loss of labyrinthine function, the fact that one day you’re going to fall. And not be able to get up!

  After a moment she said, Maybe I just don’t want to think about it.

  You don’t say.

  What about you, she said. Getting anywhere?

  With what?

  Your research. Your Ovid.

  Yes, I said. Of course I am. I am someone who gets things done. Every day I type out thirty lines of Latin and turn them into something else. Ovid and I are locked at the hip.

  Well, good, she said. I look forward to seeing him.

  You know, I said, it might help if you thought of it like going to college again. What would be a fun place to go?

  She was silent and I hoped she was thinking. Then she said, That just doesn’t make sense.

  Well, I have done both research and math, and it’ll be Sunrise, that’s where she’ll go, seven miles from her house. She will not live with me, she says: Miami is too hot. She can’t live on Meals on Wheels forever, or the fancy foods I sometimes have delivered. And the guy I found to bring in the paper and hose the deck and fix the dryer turns out to be bipolar, plus he smokes secretly in her rec room. No. Sunrise is sunny, people play Scrabble, a lumpy old Labrador roams around to be petted. I do the math often now as I walk or swim, something to add to the menu of counting: how much she’ll need and how much she has and the difference between them and what must be done.

  What must happen most: this pool must not be demolished.

  SWIM, TRANSFORM thirty lines of Latin, walk the Venetian Causeway at dusk. Living the life: that’s me.

  Have to avoid this wicked sun, which mottles my chest. The pink parasol has come, but I don’t have the nerve to carry it at sunset. I’ve found that if you walk with a palm frond or large sea-grape leaf angled right, you can ward off the worst of the sun’s late rays, and if you angle it higher you can also avoid the looks of those walking past who are amused by your freakishness. Why be in Miami Beach if you don’t like the sun?

  Yeah, well, we all have our stories.

  Each evening I head out, either the back way down the spiral steps to the dock, or through the grates of the garage, or the front way through the revolving doors and past the chlorine fountain, out to the pink sidewalk ringing the park. Turn left into the searing late sun over more pink sidewalk, and I don’t know why the sidewalks are pink although I have looked it up and even read that there’s a secret recipe for that hue. Powdered skeletal fragments of (for instance) coral? Then past the subpar Morris Lapidus building, past the Standard across the way, over a low bridge to the green verge, over the drawbridge to the other green verge, over more water to Rivo Alto Island, then Di Lido and San Marino. Venetian names, sort of. Why Venetian makes sense when you walk over a bridge and milky green swells wave along an island’s bulwark. Especially with kelp swaying in the wave, a boat’s beak bumping the wall.

&n
bsp; Romantic fockin’ Venice.

  Where I lived a few months with the tall black-haired architect who had long trembling hands and a spot in one eye, a spot that struck me as solar.

  Like everyone, a liar.

  I’d known it going in, regarding his adventures with women before me.

  But—me, too?

  Could it be?

  We’d laughed about his past deviousness, and he’d shaken his dark head and been amazed at himself and his prodigious deceits, describing the strategies, how he’d tell his current girl of course he’d go fetch the milk she wanted for coffee so he could sneak off to phone the new girl. Even though I knew all this, it still came as a surprise.

  In my case, it was bread.

  And actually, it was me who was sent out for bread, so he could make the phone call from the comfort of our Venice apartment.

  I see him lolling there on the bed, long brown legs slithered out from his parted black silk robe. Probably running a hand through peppery hair as he gazes toward the window thinking, Ah, Venezia.

  Anyway.

  It’s the kind of thing you can figure out with a phone bill and suspicion.

  A month or so after the fact.

  Scusi, dov’e un panificio?

  The lyrics in my head all that time, had I been paying attention: Why’d ya do it, she said, why’d ya do what you did?

  Catalogue of comical disasters.

  Mind like a museum of them, those men’s bodies cast in postures of crime.

  There he is, on our Venetian bed on the phone. There’s the Devil, in the airport charging hard the other way. There you are, too, beloved Sir Gold, bidding me be a courtesan.

  And others.

  I might also have committed some crimes.

  Fine: those who think so can put me in their museums.

  Venus, meanwhile, clear and bright in the sky!

  Like Marilyn Monroe, dancing in that funny red boat.

  On both sides of the Venetian Causeway young people display their lovely bright or dark flesh as they run, cycle, skate. Not always but this evening the man whose arms and chest are dense with blue tattoos ran by. He had earbuds in and panted too violently: couldn’t hear how loud he was, I guess. A woman jogged past in supershort shorts, with model legs and designer breasts and braided black hair swinging like beads. A man peddled near and wobbled wild when he got to her, yowling at her behind.