Nine Island Read online

  Here, she said, and pulled from her bikini a card with a little black image of a dog and cat, her name printed beside it, N.

  Now you have my number in case you need me. Or want to walk, or talk, or anything. Call.

  SO, THE ORIGINAL idea was to be soapstone, wax.

  Erotic Frigidaire, you mean, the spot-eyed architect said.

  No, I told him. Not erotic.

  But the fact that you’re telling me this means you want to be provocative. To tease.

  No.

  But he was right, sort of. Strength has been the goal. First, impermeability. When no go with that, potency: I’ll fuck you, yeah. I’ll fuck you up.

  You could be a courtesan.

  Oh dear, Sir Gold, didn’t you know? My bill—over there, on the pillow.

  BY NOON EACH day the sun has cranked around to the pool and blanched my spot by the trash can, so I stagger in dazzled, then shower, lotion, eat an English muffin with butter and Vegemite, and gird myself for the next stage of work.

  I was out at my green balcony table, looking up from the numbered lines of words, fixing eyes on the horizon to stretch them, and cracking my knuckles, when I realized I’d been hearing a patter. A drip of water on the balcony rail. Rain? No. Only that corner. In fact all along the rail as well as on the glass were old yellow sprinklings and speckles. As I was putting together these complex associations, a shower spattered my arm.

  Hey! Slapped shut the laptop and craned to look up.

  A face appeared above me, then disappeared.

  I’m getting wet down here!

  Silence.

  Are you up there?

  I must water my garden, a voice called.

  Well, can you keep the water up there?

  Silence.

  Hello?

  I shall try.

  Thanks.

  Downstairs, men were blowing leaves from the gumbo-limbos. Across the bay, an alarm wailed. There has been a fire alert reported in the building. Please move to the nearest exit and exit the building. Repeat. There has been a fire alert reported in the building. In the shifting breeze it became: There has been . . . building . . . Blue, blue sky. A boy playing basketball in the court between buildings yelled Fuck! whenever he missed a shot. At Costa Brava, two young couples appeared on a balcony. All four put their hands on the rail and gazed out and opened their arms to the vista and turned to one another and smiled. Then they raced back in, where two danced, one threw herself on a sofa and pedaled the air with her legs, while the other tumbled fruit into a blender.

  You can see almost everything you need to here.

  Requiring binoculars only occasionally.

  Looked into my own apartment through the sliding glass doors. Straight through to the front door, broken doorbell fixture dangling beside it.

  Not much to see in there.

  Back to O. Was working on the eleven-year-old girl on the beach, the one O has climb a bull, but not me. She’s in a bright yellow bathing suit, digging moats, making grinding noises inside her mouth, only just beginning to have an itchy sense of the future of wanting, et cetera, about to come.

  Maybe first check messages.

  No messages.

  There has been a fire alert reported—

  —This itch, she’s thinking as she digs, wet sand grains jamming her fingernails. It’s like some alien thing crawling inside her. Or like she’s about to become some alien thing. Or in fact she wants some alien thing. She does, she realizes all at once. She shoves her spade into the sand and stares at her little girl-mates around her. Oh my god, she thinks, I am so bored. She wants something supernatural, sublime. Last week, for instance, up the beach she found the head of a baby goat. It looked like a conch from far away, but then she saw its tender ears and, closer, the long lashes around its shut eyes. She squatted to study it and delicately dug just enough beneath its matted little chin to know that the rest of the goatlet was not buried below. It’s something like this she wants now. Horrific, marvelous, something to crash in from the other side—

  The drip at the corner of the balcony was now a shining thread. It wavered in the breeze, struck the rail, and jagged down the glass; a puddle pooled on the tiles.

  —Bring something, bring something, bring something! she shrieks in her head to the sand. Spinning, she screams it to the waves, the sky. Break open and bring me something! Make me—

  Messages?

  No messages.

  Buster appeared at the sliding doors. He’d been doing his circumnavigation of the walls, and since the sliding doors are open, he stopped and sniffed the outside air, long white whiskers and eyebrows alert. Gingerly he placed a paw over the sill. Another paw. A lurching scramble, and out. He swayed. Left or right? Right would take him along the sliding door to where it met the balustrade and, if he kept going, the runnel of water. Wouldn’t that be a surprise. He wavered: then leaned his right shoulder against the glass and began to creep. The water now fell in a Morse pattern: runnel-drip-drip, runnel-drip.

  There has been a fire alert reported in—

  —Now she thinks she actually sees something far out in the water. Really? Out there, yes, where the waves smooth out, or maybe it’s the other way around, where they start to swell. She puts a gritty hand to her stomach. Yes—something that is definitely not water is out there, white the way the surface of the moon is white, meaning not really, a curved thing, slicing in—

  The other girls are looking, too, huddling dovelike, hands at throats and mouths in girl-terror. Oh, god, do they disgust her. She stamps the sand from her knees and steps toward the water—

  Pure drip now. Halfway there, Buster stopped. The diaper with its blue stickers made his little hips so thin, wobbling above his bony shanks. Almost no skin on those shanks.

  —What are you doing! the girls cry. Are you crazy? You can’t go in! It’s a—

  Three feet from the puddle now.

  Am feeling guilty. Knee juddering with anticipation.

  —oh, yes, she can go in if she wants. The itch in her is now a rip, a rip that wants more ripping. She wants—

  A long drop slowly formed, not ready to fall. It swayed.

  If the breeze surged—

  Buster didn’t even know if it was daytime or night.

  Once a prancing little boy-cat! A brave small kitten boxing my hand.

  Wavering with opaque eyes, skinny hips, in diapers.

  He pressed his head to the glass, pushed on.

  The breeze lifted—

  And water flew and fell and showered his head, streamed into his eyes, leaked over his fur, his old curled paws.

  Wet fur at my nose, nails in my arm.

  I’d never drown my baby baby baby cat.

  AM THINKING:

  Maybe too soon to have cat as only love interest?

  Maybe not retire just yet?

  Because those giddy moments come, they do, those delirious, ecstatic moments when I’ve had a little to drink and the garlic sizzles and funk plays loud and I dance, I dance to “Pass the Hatchet,” I do the bump with the granite counter and spin and bump again, and I think, yeah—I want I want I want I will!

  Flash images then of men reeling in and out of the place, me greeting each at the door and dancing somewhere, driving full speed, everything moving quick as light, then waving each good-bye again, a superfast imaginary life.

  This is what I’d seen in the sky of spinning ions when I arrived in paradise. This idea of how it could be, once I’d left my poor death-in-life marriage and resolved to live the life.

  Before setting all hopes on Sir Gold.

  When in fact what happened, what happens, is that the numbers change slowly on the microwave clock as I wait for the pasta to cook, again.

  TWO

  A NOTICE HAS appeared by the mailboxes: there’ll be a board meeting this week to discuss the pool. Now everywhere in the building—lounge chairs, elevators, lobby, garage—white heads nod cl
ose and whisper, with quick looks around in case someone hears. Millions of dollars at stake, they say, as much as eight million dollars. It’s all about concrete and whoever’s most connected to the business.

  Worst news.

  Did the math as I spiraled down to the dock. Eight million dollars divided by three hundred thirty-six apartments (if you say the Tower and Penthouse apartments each count as six) = about twenty-four thousand dollars each. Which my landlord will pull out of me in nasty big pieces I don’t even nearly have.

  Although I might in six years, if I drown Buster now.

  Out on the Venetian, then, walking fast among the jogging and cycling panthers and sylphs.

  Once upon a time, when you were maybe fifteen, you didn’t even want to be seen, and all the same, out you walked, and honks, shouts, maybe even a crash caused by you as you passed.

  Now, not so much.

  Counted kegels as I walked the pink sidewalk by the roiling bay. In it: tennis ball, coconut, raft of shorn grass. This causeway has just two lanes, sociable. High proportion of black BMWs, many scooters and bikes. A very dark man walks its length from a shelter in Overtown to Miami Beach and back each day. He mutters, lurching from side to side on bare feet with horny nails, wild black prophet’s beard swinging, ragged pants roped at his waist, ruined bathrobe. He could be forty or sixty, is fit but fetid, and fixes me with a blazing eye but never nods to my nods. On Fridays, other men with long beards hurry east in black hats and black coats. I step quickly out of their path, so as not to infect them with femaleness.

  Femaleness I never even wanted.

  As Hesiod says: Don’t touch the water a woman’s washed in! Dirty!

  Got to the drawbridge as the bell clanged, but one car gunned it and flew through just before the striped gate came down, and the bridge keeper ran out of her little house and shouted. All the other cars, scooters, cyclists stopped, gazed at their cell phones. I wandered onto the grassy verge.

  The ways plants break from the soil here! Royal palms like firecrackers, shooting up straight, then exploding, or mahogany trees no sooner rising than dissolving into a shower of leaves and light. Poincianas like gnarled arms, producing canopies of parrot-green feathers and vermilion blooms; Dr. Seuss trees, bare as bones until pink silky tassels sprout at the tips. Some trees bend back, dig a knee into the soil, and travel underground a few feet before bursting up new.

  Sea grapes do this: my favorites. Shrub or tree? They have bark like eucalypts and big round leaves, and right now they’re producing long dangles of pale grapes. Each dangle lilts like a banana, showing delicate nude grapelets inside. They fall to the sidewalk and are so light and crisp they pop beneath my heel with a perfection that makes me shiver.

  Got my own little sea grape to pop in bed in the dark.

  When striving against atrophy and all.

  You can climb down the verge to the rocks at the water—and there, today, among the rocks and chunks of concrete dumped to create this causeway, I saw a broken Ionic capital. Crouched to be sure. Algaed stone with twin curving ram’s horns in the milky green water, like an actual piece of Venice. Planted on purpose eighty years ago? Did a road engineer or a guy on the crew watch it settle in the muck and think, I hope someone will see this one day and know what a marvelous sense of humor and history someone once had, in Miami? I looked up at the road to tell somebody, but no one seemed likely. Anyway, the drawbridge bell was clanging again.

  A young woman perched on a moped, staring at her phone. Short gold shorts; bare, smooth, slender, long, dark thighs; tall blue high-heeled boots. Behind her, a young man rocked on his bike. He was grinning just seeing her.

  Great look! he called. Love the boots!

  She gazed back at him placidly, lowered her helmet, revved off.

  He still seemed pleased to be behind her, as he pedaled on her trail.

  Looked down at my own legs and realized with impact that I don’t live anywhere near the zone of that woman anymore.

  I’m a tree, I’m a tree, I’ve been caught inside a tree.

  A couple raced by on a motorcycle, fumes stinking, her hair snaking the wind, his hands gripping chrome horns. Jet Skier zoomed below just as I walked over the grates of the drawbridge: his plume spumed high, nearly wet me.

  Draw bridge a head.

  Two men walking a breast.

  Yeah, we were all young once.

  And, also, alive.

  Walked on, kegeling and trying to keep count while calculating how many lines of Latin I’d done and how many still to go, because living the life means chalking off days, the sky turning to sheets of scarlet.

  On the other side of the bridge, on the grass near the water, was that duck. Did it live there? Strange solo silhouette, gazing north toward the bay. I idled and then stealthily walked toward it over the grass, but my FitFlops thwapped, and the duck startled and fluttered away. But did not fly—could not fly? No, one wing was clipped. It flapped into a sea-grape shrub and huddled in the leaves.

  Stranded? On this thin strip between salt water and road? Not so bad at night, but cento per cento hell in daylight. Surely it ate grass. Mosquitoes? But it looked thin, and what about fresh water? I had a water bottle and found a curved leaf, walked gingerly over to the duck, who was trying to back even deeper into the shrub, poured water on the leaf, set it down, backed away. After a minute it poked out its slim black-and-pink-barnacled head and slurped.

  Stranded. Desperate! And maybe it didn’t eat grass: it plucked a blade and let it droop listlessly from its beak.

  I walked full of fervor toward the Love Boat. Rescue and relocate? Bring water every day? Food. What sort? Seeds?

  A thudding came alongside me, and here was an all-but-naked young man, not too tall and nicely fleshed, skin glistening wet. He was so close, I could feel that slippery skin in my hands and I tell you I could taste it, taste his wet skin on my tongue all the way up that lissome sleek back to his young neck and then around his throat and up over the chin to lips I’d part—and then I could feel his wet young tongue. His glance fell on me as he thudded past, then it slid away.

  SO, IMPERMEABILITY never possible. Ditto revirgination.

  Left with objectless want.

  This idea of being a cell that’s originally intact but is then split open and weakened with want is a reductive way to think, I know. But I find reductiveness helpful. Ideas drawn from Ovid’s systems of transformation, plus ancient atomism and eighth-grade science.

  Positive vs. negative valence, for instance. Need being negative valence.

  But how about if we convert need to desire?

  Positive valence that way?

  Potency, even? Can we say that?

  Seems to work that way for males.

  SO HOW’S THE glam life down there? wrote the Devil, as I was researching Muscovy ducks.

  Super glam! Lots of fun poolside. Bikini getting action!

  Happy times for you.

  Darling, wrote my mother, doing fun things? Seeing friends?

  FIVE THOUSAND a month is what she’ll need, and selling her house will buy her only five years, even with Social Security. She’s got more years in her than that. Ten?

  Or maybe we should not sell her house. Maybe I should quit paradise and go rent her house and just become her now.

  An old painting I suddenly see in the filmy air: A fallen woman sits pondering her future, her past. Her hand rests on the warm bone of a skull she’s set on the table, candle flame tilting with her breath, the intensity of her thought. That ring of light, of consciousness, bells into the blackness.

  Over at Costa Brava, large squares flash and glow in apartments: one shows a car chase; another, a shooting; a third, a man pouncing on an orange ball, the same man pouncing on the same ball two windows over. On one balcony stands a man with his back to the large bright square, looking at a small bright square in his hand.

  Living the life, that’s us.

  Way to t
he right, a cruise ship has just broken from Miami and glides slowly through the Government Cut. A fragment of lit, spangled city, steaming out to sea.

  Got up and leaned over the railing, bending artfully in two. And became N on her balcony, figurehead at the bowsprit.

  ANOTHER FORAY for a pulse. You can’t say I’m not trying.

  This at least had the quasi-benefit of being research for something I need to know about pigments.

  Pigment: Pygmalion: don’t ask.

  Had heard through good old Par-T-Boy of a painter who might help me, a photorealist painter of, it turned out, perfect ladies who were naked except for high heels as they strode among cheetahs in art galleries. Anyway, went to visit his “studio” (living room). Sat politely as he demonstrated on a painting how he blended tones, pointing first at the nether area of one of his naked ladies and then drawing a little circle upon a more focused bit of her groin and then moving his quick little finger in tighter and tighter and more frantic circles over the dream girl’s painted crotch until that patch of painted lady was a gloss and his eyes had gone to glass.

  The room was AC-dry but I made myself not even lick my lips.

  THIS MORNING, went swimming early. N had just stepped from the hourglass pool: a wet animate skeleton in a bikini, hands and head too large. With her hair slicked back she seemed a young dancer, or a quite old one.

  After I’d swum, she wandered over in a towel and white hat almost the size of my pink umbrella and asked if she could ask me a question.

  Sure, I said, if I can ask you one back.

  But wait, she said with her husky New York voice. Didn’t I see you on the causeway the other night, over by the water? Sort of . . . squatting? It was almost dark. What were you doing? I hate to say what it looked like. I told P you were not the type to do that on the causeway.