Nine Island Page 4

  Yo mami mami mami!

  Mamacita!

  Ai.

  I walked fast toward the sunset, counting steps. I understand that counting’s a symptom but knowing this won’t stop me. The number of steps, boats, balconies, strokes, lines of Latin, pages.

  Also, I suddenly thought, days since I’ve had sex.

  No matter what your mind wants, no matter what it’s resolved to do, Mr. Body still makes trouble.

  Thirty-two days is the answer. Ever since Sir Gold.

  Solitary pleasuring does not count as sex.

  What about atrophy? Does it count against that?

  A word my mother whispered to me once. She’d been at the gynecologist’s, and when he stepped outside she quickly swiveled her chart: vaginal atrophy, in his blue ink.

  Started doing kegels as I walked. Something new to count. Now this would be a full-body workout: FitFlops for legs and behind, arm-circling to fight the tender dewlaps hinting from my upper arms, kegels for submarine muscles. I found it easiest to time the squeezes with cracks in the pink sidewalk. Hold tight for ten cracks, release for four, tight for ten, and take it to the bridge.

  Should I take ’em to the bridge?

  Take ’em to the bridge!

  In the middle of the bay flows a quick current of sea that looks like a pale green river. Always something floating in it, bottle, coconut, cup. Easier to be killed by a coconut than lightning. Or shark. I always check the coconuts tumbling in the water, hoping one’s a head. Ditto palm fronds re shark fin.

  At Di Lido, turned left. Each of the Venetian islands (except mine) is an ellipsis or circle with a single ring road running within, along coral-rock palaces or huge white postmodern boxes, nested in explosions of green. Fan palm, royal palm, poinciana, banyan, orchid tree, bottlebrush, mango. To say nothing of schefflera, bombax, coral tree, cycad, fishtail palm, and banana!

  Once upon a time, just sulfurous mangroves, manatee nosing about.

  Manatee = mermaid = siren.

  Look it up.

  In the driveway of an enormous white house-box at the end of San Marino were three black SUVs. The license plate on one was HAREM3, on the next, HAREM1. The other I couldn’t see but oh, yes, I could guess. Belonging to the owner of a club? Talent agent for women at Publix? Were some of them in that white house right then? Even when those women lie on their backs, their breasts stand up: you see it on the billboards for augmentation.

  I walked on, squeezing and counting. Ten hold, four release. Below huge leaves and a cluster of green bananas dangled a long umbilical cord, from which hung a magenta flower, heavy as a heart. Tiny anoles waited in the grass until my foot was about to strike the sidewalk, then ran out recklessly so I had to lurch to save them. Cats lay stretched in white tribes or black atop Ferraris and Maseratis. A pink crab like a hand clambered into a hole on the sandy edge of the sidewalk.

  I used to hallucinate severed hands.

  At the time of the end of that architect.

  Something to do with a stepfather, no doubt. And trust and fear et cetera.

  But happily this ended, so I now have no fear of scuttling pink crabs that happen to look like hands.

  Headed back east, sun sinking behind me. As I got near the drawbridge, saw an odd silhouette on the grassy verge. A bird: a duck. But a strange one, somehow exotic. And big. A big strange duck all alone, gazing north toward the bay. It seemed noble, or sad. A wave of warmth flowed through me. Resumed my pace and counting.

  Near a sign on the bridge for NO SWIMMING NO DIVING NO FISHING were three men fishing. They were not hidden at the foot of the bridge, where the grass meets rocks, and one of them glanced up nastily as I passed. A coconut floated by. Not a head. Also a long palm frond, finlike flange slicing the water. Not a shark. Then a man standing on a surfboard.

  He wore thin wrinkled trunks and was lean and dark and elegantly muscled, standing on the choppy water beneath the purpling sky, long pole in his hands. He concentrated on his pole and the water, but as he drew near he glanced at the men fishing, then at the bridge, and then his eyes rose to me.

  Lightning bolt!

  He reached the bridge and, eyes still on mine, bowed his head to go under.

  I stood still as he glided below.

  Five kegels later, he emerged on the other side of the bridge and rowed into the watery haze.

  I saw again the gray eyes, lean legs. Then saw myself lounging on my back on his long wet board, and the water lapping my hips was warm, and his toes let themselves be tangled in my newly regoldened hair, and I reached languidly up to stroke a strong calf as he rowed, water slipping over the edge of the board and keeping me wetly warm, and it appeared that I was naked, and now he lifted the long oar dripping water and gently touched it to my knee, then drew it up my thigh—

  Hot. My face steamed, sweat slicking the small of my back. Turned away from the setting sun and walked back to my sinking old Love Boat.

  AN ACTIVE FANTASY life is good, wrote K. But I wish you’d find something with a pulse.

  Buster had one. Picked him up, his claws like pins in my arm, long tail sweeping my hip.

  When I change his diapers, we sit on the cork floor, and I clasp him close between my knees. He stretches out his skinny black legs, tufts of yellowing white fur on his belly, and purrs and purrs when I wipe him clean. As I fasten the pieces of blue tape at each side, his forepaws knead the air, reach for my chin, and he gazes my way with blind glass-green eyes beneath long white whiskery eyebrows.

  So peaceful.

  Certain songs I used to whistle to him, back when he could hear.

  His favorite was Gato Barbieri’s theme from Last Tango in Paris. At the first four notes he’d come bounding.

  OKAY, AN ATTEMPT to find a pulse. By chance was on the list for a book party last night and made myself attend. It was up on the Beach, by the golf course. Swinging guests. Sure to be much interest in Latin.

  When there, behaved Germanly, marching right around the room, outside to the patio, and over to the drinks table introducing self to all I met, offering my hand to shake.

  Finally a scruffy man stopped me, holding my hand in his hot one, and said, Wait, I know you.

  Oh?

  He stepped closer, cracked open his whiskey mouth, and tongued a lip to think, peering up and down at me.

  Yeah, he said, I definitely know you.

  Had slinked my hand from his by now but something— something in that dissolute face, oh, it called to my heart. The snake-slit eyes?

  Got it, he said. Your picture. In a catalogue. Yeah. Book catalogue. Same spread as mine. Oh, yeah.

  He looked at me now with those glittering eyes, and I realized he might be right.

  I’m right all right, he said. Know how I know? Cuz I masturbated to that picture for a week.

  Oh, how my heart called to him! Exactly the kind of deadbeat I love!

  But sadly (I learned) he was due to marry the following week, and there’s only so much of that sort of thing one should ever give or take.

  WELL, IT’S TRUE: you started out knowing what you were made of and knowing you wanted to stay like that—stone—but then out of the blue one day somebody split you, and where you’d been solid now was a space.

  The mechanics of this baffle me, even at this late date.

  In her heart opened an inconsolable pain, Ovid says.

  In another story, it’s an unhealable wound.

  Same thing. No revirgination.

  But then, on the other hand, there are phenomena like this: I came in the building, collected my mail, stepped in the elevator, and pushed the button for the twenty-first floor, when that golden-gray pinguis man rounded the corner with his arms full of magazines. I flapped my hand in the invisible beam to keep the doors from shutting.

  Thanks, he said. Thanks. Twenty-two, please. But wait—oh—

  The doors were rearing to slide shut.

  Come on, N! he cried,
his head darting dangerously between them.

  I’m talking, called a dry voice from the mail room.

  In one motion he laughed and shrugged and leapt back out, just before the doors shut.

  In the new enclosed silence, I could almost see that invisible beam running between him and his wife, the white-blond woman, N.

  It was like the shaft of light in paintings, between the girl and the angel come calling. Something inviolable: love?

  It hung in the mirrored marble cube as I rose.

  IT’S NOT AS IF I don’t understand the problem, you know.

  Part of the problem, anyway. About climbing on sharks, etc.

  Private etiology of failed love.

  Starting out, trailing my mother as she sailed her seas, I had two fathers: the real one we’d left far away, and the false one who was right there. Daddy distant; stepfather near.

  Awfully, awfully near.

  Does a person still need to spell these things out?

  So the real father was tucked away on the other side of the world and slowly turned to blue ink. Dear J: so faint. Love, Daddy: so faint! Even if you pressed your nose to the page, no scent remained of his hand.

  The other father, though: oh ho. Hot breath of scotch, smoke like thunder around his dark head, jangle of jazz and slamming of doors and quick bright shatter of glass. And the tall silhouette in the doorway, if you know what I mean.

  Surely a person doesn’t have to spell these things out.

  My friend K, though, prefers to.

  You’ve got intimacy issues, she says. That’s why you keep making bad choices. Mm-hmm. That bastard in Venice vs. your sweet helpless husband. The Devil vs. Sir Gold. All the same thing: the awful sexy monster vs. the distant one you’ll never have. You’re just replicating the childhood—

  Yeah, yeah.

  So what I say is: I am no country for men.

  What a boy on the radio’s singing, however:

  Your body is a wonderland.

  WITH GOOGLE MAPS you can see not only this Love Boat but click in close to see the hourglass pool. Click even closer to measure it, which I’ve just done to calculate how far I swim. The pool = eighty feet × twenty lengths = sixteen hundred feet. If I were to swim that every day from when I got back to my deadline for O, that’d be a hundred sixty thousand feet = thirty miles. Could make it all the way south to the Deering Estate if not drowned or eaten first.

  I went down to the pool to cross-measure the length by foot, hiding that I was counting as I paced (three feet per pace) the straightest line possible along the pool’s curving lip from shallow end to deep. Reconfirmed count by pacing back to the shallow end, which was reckless because the pool was still empty and limpid and the last thing I wanted was to miss my chance to have it all to myself. Fran rolled out the door. I started to panic, but by the time she’d reached the pool steps I’d dropped my dress and lunged in so the pool was mine first.

  Watched her descent. Majestic is the word for it, her aide removing the robe from her shoulders: half Venus being born, half Titanic. She attaches her bathing cap, fixes the snorkel and mask, stares hard at the water, pushes off.

  When I’d done my laps and had just gotten my footing on the edge of her gyre, she came steaming toward me.

  Hi, I said.

  Hi. She seemed put off but then gathered strength and said, Haven’t seen you here before.

  Oh, yes, you have.

  She stared at me. Well, maybe I have. Okay. But anyway there’s something I want to know.

  (Put on an encouraging face.)

  Do you still have the three Ps?

  The what?

  Her lips pulled back to a grinning pink cave.

  The three Ps, she said. I’ve given up on ’em all.

  But what are they?

  Her eyes went wide and wicked as she leaned forward and barked: Plants. Pets. And penis!

  She fit on the snorkel and mask and plowed off.

  A bee was floating by my elbow, wing faintly fluttering. I cupped it in two hands of water and sloshed it on the concrete.

  FIVE SIX SEVEN eight nine ten eleven twelve one two three four five six seven eight—

  SETTLED ON THE lounge chair that gets shade the longest as the sun wheels around the building, although this means my head’s by the trash can. Latin clipped open, dictionary splayed.

  A pool of water: let’s say a spring. Think of those mineral springs in Florida that bubble up from caves. Clear, but so deep—you never know what’s down there.

  A girl appears. Not the girl who turned into a tree, but the trees she passes might have recently been girls like herself: that’s the kind of world we’re in. Sighing trees, fingering with green sprigs the air they adore. Their trunks might one day be cut down but will never be fucked, and for this they shiver in relief. This girl walking through them is an athlete, strong and firm and right now, sweaty. It’s hot. Her hair sticks to her forehead and neck, and her arms rubbing at either side are slippery—same between her legs. Gnats keep flitting at her eyes. She smells the spring first, and when she sees the gleam, her mouth waters. She sprints, feet in old leaf-dust and grass and then squelching at the silky, grassy rim of the pond. She can’t rip off her dress fast enough but there, it’s gone, thrown behind her, and she lurches in to her knees. Water! There is nothing better, parting cool before her hands and welling up around her. She ducks under and kicks, bare bottom with its cleft in the air a silly moment, but it feels good and who’s there to see?

  Well. I mentioned the depths of this pool, those caves. That’s where he is. He’s been saving his strength for when someone, a girl, might venture in. It has been a very long time. He feels almost hollow with hunger—

  • • •

  You can see where this is going. Another attempted rape. She staggers out of the pond and runs and streams with panicked sweat and gets so slippery she realizes that’s what she wants, to be liquid—no one can hold her that way. She turns into a stream. What had been a sweaty bare girl suddenly dissolves, only a puddle reflecting sky, then sinking, shrinking, sunk, gone.

  I put my pencil in the spine of the book, laid it on the concrete beneath my lounge chair, rolled over, stared deep into the blue, shut my eyes.

  That’s not how O’s story actually ends, but I didn’t feel like following it. She turns into a stream, but it’s a river thing she’s been running from, so this won’t help. He just turns back into a river so he can flow with her. Into her, through her—the Latin prefix means it all. Exactly what she did not want.

  No skin of your own, he’s everywhere, everywhere.

  Leaving mud, smudges, scratches, bites, itchy infections between the legs, bruises that blue you awhile but then green and go. These are the things they leave behind. And thoughts that live a long time in your caves. Words, words, words.

  Fascist from the architect; limpid from Sir Gold. Poontang, fockin’, hil-ah-rious from the Devil.

  Can’t get rid of them once they’ve got in.

  Dried riverbeds left at least, waiting to be filled again when the next man-rush rages through.

  In the kitchen wall of the house my husband had when I met him, before the grimness of Germany, were termite tracks, dried rivers I could follow and crush with my nail.

  And on a spring morning, transparent wings lay scattered on the blue floor, left from the termites’ nuptial flight.

  I let them lie there awhile, iridescent in the sun.

  Still so hopeful, those early days.

  Warm sun on my legs now, dark eyelids a-sparkle. From somewhere far came the clang of rope on mast. Also, a leaf blower droning. Breeze ran over the light down of my thighs, the only female-thigh down extant in Miami. As the sun rolled around the building, I could feel the impending bell of warmth before the strong sunlight itself.

  A shadow blotted my eyelids.

  Hello, said a husky voice.

  (The white-blond Echo woman: N!)

&
nbsp; Did I wake you? she asked. I didn’t mean to wake you.

  No, no, just thinking, I said and leaned up on my elbows.

  This close she looked even more like a cross between my mother and me—my mother’s nose and chin, body more like mine, but thinner, and so erect. A floss of hair, and in that straight back and jutting jaw what seemed like determination: to endure things you could almost see in her large, gray, watery eyes.

  I’ve seen you in the pool, she said. I usually come out a little earlier than you. To swim. Then I like to sit in the hot tub. Boy, are we lucky here. What a place.

  Unless they demolish it.

  Which they will, she said. One day. A shame but not a tragedy. I keep telling people that. Even though it’s the only place . . .

  Yes?

  Oh, and she shook her head. It isn’t interesting. But I have a question. Do you have any pets?

  Yes, I said and thought, For fuck’s sake. I then told her about Buster and his diapers and pills.

  Poor little fellow, she said, looking stricken. It sounds like you’re taking good care of him, though. But, well, I’m sorry—I tricked you. I lied. I knew you had a cat because I saw you on the causeway walking from Publix with a big bag of cat food. And that interesting pink umbrella. So he still eats?

  And purrs.

  Well. She spread out her thin yellow hands. Well, then he’s alive. You’ll know when it’s time. I’ve been there. Oh, it’s sad, but you’ll know when the time comes. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you is that if you need me, I’m here to help. I care for pets. That’s what I do. To keep busy. I retired way too early, it was a mistake. I used to be a nurse. I just like caring for things. And now I have all this time and— Her large hands opened up arcs of nothing in the blue sky.