Nine Island Read online

  WELL, YOU KNOW: the devil you know.

  GIMY, he used to type, for me to figure out.

  First I thought it meant Get in my yard!

  He said, Well, not exactly.

  In fact it meant God, I miss you.

  Who wouldn’t trust a devil like that?

  AIWITSONWY.

  I did enjoy figuring.

  All I want is to spend one night—

  So, yeah, the devil you know.

  Medical necessity. Atrophy and all.

  And won’t count as a new partner, as gynecologists say.

  Any new partners? they ask, with that casual lilt.

  God no, of course not. I stick with historic deadbeats.

  Despite the ions spinning up there, singing siren songs.

  There’s the man who hated real human females and decided to manufacture his own. He prepared drawings on architect’s trace and molded three models the size of a Barbie until he had her right. Then he sculpted and rubbed and polished his dream, a life-size, candle-cool girl. Smooth, of course. Dream girls are smooth. Hair other than cascading from the top of her head? God, no, not on a dream girl.

  Lucky that at Publix you can buy kits for home waxing, although more hands plus a mirror on the floor would help. I can’t afford both waxing and highlights, and highlights I can’t do myself. It hurts, waxing, either way, but at least this way it’s cheap.

  No swimming for a day to let the rashes subside.

  It’s only the Devil. What harm in that?

  Swift shopping at Macy’s. Cheap new dress.

  I WAS SITTING in a salon on the Beach, with tinsel all over my head, when a white BMW pulled up right outside the glass doors. A young woman swung in with tight jeans and high shoes and lively breasts and gold jingling from her ears and wrists, and she swept through the salon until she found the person she wanted, a woman having a keratin treatment, and got the keys or money she needed and swirled out again, leaving our chairs spinning.

  What was that? I asked Richard, foil and paintbrush in his hands.

  Oh, her, he said. She’s nasty. I mean she’s gorgeous but she’s mean. She’s one of the girls who does the boats.

  The what?

  You know, he said. You hire them to be on your boat. In a bikini and what all. You’ve seen them on the front of those yachts.

  Just be on the boat? An ornament?

  Or maybe more, he said and shrugged.

  Cross between figurehead and hooker?

  He didn’t answer, but after a moment said, There was another girl like her who used to come in all the time—and come to think of it, just three weeks ago she was sitting right where you are now—and he looked at me in the mirror, his face very sunned and creased. She was getting her hair unruined, he said. She’d done so much awful stuff to it, I had to strip everything away and get right back to nothing and then, anyway. She was here getting done for a show that night—she didn’t actually do the boats, she was a dancer or something at one of the clubs, but the same type as that one just now—and she left here gorgeous, although she was not a very nice person, I have to say. But the next morning she was found in a Dumpster.

  What?

  Maybe you saw the story.

  No.

  Mm-hmm. Burned up in a Dumpster.

  We were silent as he wrapped strands of hair in foil. I looked at him in the mirror, smelled hot hair.

  Burned? I said.

  Mm-hmm. Someone threw her in and lit it, or maybe killed her first, not sure. I guess she made her boyfriend or whatever man mad, and he was one of those types. I forget the details. I think she was Russian, maybe Ukrainian. Who knows? Maybe he didn’t even know her.

  SIRENS SCREAMED everywhere on the way home, trucks raging red over Alton and Dade. Smoke tumbled into the sky.

  New notice in the mail room: old board out, new board in.

  Good riddance! said Lino in the elevator. Told you I’d get rid of them.

  He smiled with overlarge, overwhite teeth, eyes pink and small, a rabbit’s.

  SEE THE FOLLOWING in blurred blue light, please, and please play it fast:

  Devil takes a cab from the airport, sending curt message with thumbs as he rides. Devil gets in the building, gets in the door, has long arms and legs spidering around me at once, trips me down on the bed. Mirrored walls watch—all this in blue light. Drinks are drunk on the balcony, smoke sent in rings from his jaws to the sky. Cab is taken Beachward, scotch drunk by Devil, sunny magenta Camparis by me. Devil rarely meets my eyes, although when I catch his shady violet ones they are always looking and glance away fast. Punish him by making him come in by the Dumpsters. So N won’t see, or Virgil. Ovid wouldn’t like what he saw. Or at least what I remember, because this is what I do with the Devil: make sure I won’t remember.

  Bottles on the floor, twisted cloth, smoke.

  Devil departs early as he talks on the phone, flush with the deal he’s struck with the Heat. Striding past the girl-trees by the chlorine fountain, he flicks a cigarette at their bark.

  I MIGHT NOT have mentioned that my walls are mirrors.

  Apartment came that way.

  Showing you your bleak face no matter which way you turn.

  Buster noses along the cold glass; patches of quicksilver are scratched away, black.

  Also might not have mentioned the clock in the sky. Beyond Costa Brava and the Venetian, way over on the Beach, above the distant horizon of sea: a huge square of digital time.

  Huge dancing light-girl west of the bay, and her mate, the huge clock to the east.

  Beside the numbers, smoke keeps rising into the sky, a slow gray slanting tower.

  Arson, maybe.

  Maybe a girl.

  WELL, THAT’S WHAT you get, wrote K. Doesn’t mean you’re ready to quit. That you even let him in is proof. Put on something nice and go sit in a bar and have a cocktail. So someone new with a pulse and a car will look at you, dammit, and remind you you’re alive.

  COULDN’T STAND the apartment or Latin or poor Buster’s howling anymore so went out. Walked not along the Venetian, but east.

  As I crossed over the bridge, a yacht passed, beat booming around it. In the cabin, three men with drinks shouted over the music; on the prow lay two girls in bikinis. Both leaned on their elbows, toes pointed toward sea, long hair flitting, long legs bare, bare hips.

  A posse of Jet Skiers roared by, musclemen in life jackets, engines roiling the surf. They whooped at the girls, bellowed pleasure and lust. The two sets of men, those on board and those on water, regarded each other, regarded the girls. Then all the men grinned and raised their glasses or fists to toast such splendid possessions.

  The boat sped into a red ray of sun, and the girls on the prow: they flamed.

  Walked north, away from the lounge chairs and plastic bottles jammed in the sand, walked north by thirty blocks. On the boardwalk: German family, two Latin ladies talking fast, skinny man selling crickets made of woven palm frond. Music thumped from hotels. But the farther north you walk the quieter it grows, until the boardwalk ends, and wooden steps take you to cool, pale sand.

  A photo shoot. A guy was darting and pointing and shooting a young woman wearing only a thong. She rolled in the sand, rose to hands and knees, swung her hair and bare breasts and roared, then swiveled onto her back and scissored the sky, just a string of cloth between her tender inner world and everything else, broken bottles and jets and Dumpsters. Another woman danced behind the photographer and around him, finally pulled up her shirt, pulled it off, and flung herself on top of the other as her legs cut the sky. Three men had settled in solo spots fifty paces away, to watch. Two had their hands in their shorts.

  Five blocks north lay something large at water’s edge. From far away: beached dolphin? No: human, but not clear if male or female or what. It twisted, it wriggled; from the waist down, in frills of surf, swished back and forth a fish tail. Above the tail, a naked belly and thin,
bare breasts, head flung back, eyes shut, red hair sweeping the sand. No camera to be seen. She stroked her belly with a ringed hand and looked so alone and private I wasn’t sure whether to walk in the water and pass at her tail or walk behind her head. She didn’t care. She swished her sequined tail in the froth, dragged her long red hair in the sand, held both breasts as she writhed, mascaraed eyes shut tight.

  Someone is living on this beach.

  Wrote my heel in the sand, to the sky.

  RAN INTO N on my way back in.

  Look at your hair, she said. How glamorous. Do you have a date?

  No.

  Well, it’s only because you’re too involved with that dead poet and those hopeless guys you write to. Plus all the men here are gay. I know it’s a cliché, but it does reduce the possibilities. And I guess you don’t want to try the inter . . . ? No, I guess not. Is it a sort of paralysis? No, I see. Maybe you’re just not interested. Okay, well. Come up and have a drink with P and me. Not that it will help, but you know. Next Thursday. No, I see the hypnotist Thursday. Come Friday. You’ll like P. I guess you will, anyway. I mean, I like him. But then, I did marry him. Anyway, he’s younger than I am.

  Nice change, I said.

  But only by four years. Still, I’m the older woman. I had to teach him so many things, and she laughed the dry laugh. Politics, for instance, she said. It was the early seventies, and he was such a baby he didn’t know anything. But I came from an old lefty Jewish family, I knew everything. And other matters. You can imagine.

  Certainly can.

  I’m only sorry—

  About what?

  Well, that he has to put up with me now. He wouldn’t like me saying that. Poor P, he takes such good care of me. . . . He doesn’t like me to do anything, not pay bills or clean or anything. When I used to be a nurse! I can’t even be a real wife anymore. When he still seems so young to me, and vital! You know what I mean. Me being so broken and— She shook her hands and looked down at herself as if amazed that this was her.

  What do you mean? And what hypnotist?

  I didn’t want to bore you with all of that. It’s just . . . Oh, it’s just I have so much pain.

  Excruciating but invisible pain, she told me then, that began with running and yoga until her cartilage was worn away and she was just bones rubbing bones. Made worse by a surgeon who claimed he’d fixed her but hadn’t. The pain was even worse after that, she said, although he said she imagined it. Nothing to do but believe her. Even if she walks erect and looks free as she floats in the pool: I believe her because she says it and because her eyes are always being abducted by something that seems to swim up from inside and wrench her back into hell.

  But it’s okay, she said. I’m working on it. Okay, so the therapist wasn’t really that helpful, because you know talking doesn’t do much. And the chiropractor was sort of a joke, but the massages can be good, and sometimes the acupuncture. For a bit. Don’t get me started on herbalists. I can’t believe I’ve become a person who does all this stuff. I never used to be this skinny. Look at me! But anyway, there’s an energy therapist, that’s where I’m going now. He’s supposed to pull energy away from the pain or something. Also the hot tub can be helpful. And the pool . . . Well, the pool. We’re lucky to live here, you know. It’s paradise, right, she said, and shrugged, and bent herself into her car.

  BONE TISSUE = calcium phosphate + collagen. Makes bone rigid, like coral. Calcium phosphate is not organic, unlike calcium carbonate (of limestone, cement, and concrete), which is.

  It’s getting clear that I’ve been wrong about N and her husband, their being Want and Want Nothing. When she gets up, agitated, from a lounge chair and stalks over the cracked pool deck, her bone fingers clutching her riddled back, from beneath the brim of his baseball cap, her husband’s eyes keep watch. They turn to his paper only when she looks back.

  ON THE CAUSEWAY this evening, across the road from the silhouetted duck was a silhouetted iguana. Iguana gazing pensively south. Gazing north, the duck.

  And suddenly I saw a painting in the dusky air: An annunciation angel floats on one side of a column, a virgin sits amazed on the other. Between them, a beam of light.

  I bring you a message from our lord! says the angel.

  Messages, messages. Faraway men.

  Blue-ink letters from the other side of the world.

  Messages now are blue light.

  Farther along, on Rivo Alto, a hen and five long-legged chicks jerked and clucked over the lawn of a palace, then rushed flapping across the street, making a Maserati swerve.

  The sky just then: coral dunes.

  Dancing light-girl on the west side of the bay; her mate, the huge clock on the east. The clock can be the angel here, delivering his message.

  Guess what, the angel clock’s saying. It’s time.

  THREE

  SMITH & WOLLENSKY: a fancy restaurant at the south tip of the Beach, with a bar out by the water that rushes through the Government Cut. Cruise ships pass on their way to sea, making the atmosphere festive. I perched on a stool, sipped a French 75, and spun around now and then to watch spangled chunks of city float by, miniature people waving. Bar-mates: two couples, a young trio, and a man on his own. I texted K that I was on a stool in public with waxed legs and candy-floss hair, solo man not distant. He ordered a rye and likewise cast his eye around, a glance that flicked on me, but passed; he focused on his rye and phone. Maybe Latin, maybe Anglo, but mostly not one of the deadbeats I know and thus cento per cento implausible.

  Imagine an alien face drawing near.

  I don’t know how people do it.

  When I was fifteen, the idea of a boy’s face coming so close that it would dissolve in my vision made me panic. Like Zeno’s arrow: for another body to get that close, it must not only blur but melt into me, and this was so paralyzing I’d laugh and bolt.

  Was thinking this as I pondered the cheekbones of the Smith & Wollensky man. They glowed from his cell, and occasionally he smiled at the glow, looked up as if the phone-person were there, then shuttered again, dropped screenward.

  Sipped and turned slowly around and around on the stool. After a while I wiggled off and walked to where the coral-rock path meets boulders that hold back the rushing water, and stared at ugly Fisher Island, and out to the black, black sea.

  That’s once, wrote K.

  • • •

  Two days later. Will do it three times because three points confirm a line. This time, an Italian restaurant and sports bar up the Beach. The owner, I’ve noted in reconnoitering, is tall and slim and has the face of a panther and a lustrous gray-black mane. As I walked in tonight he was speaking closely with a high-hoofed girl, twenty to his fifty, beneath a frangipani tree.

  Frangipanis are so nice. They bear flowers before leaves: five smooth petals of coral or lemon pinwheel from branches that look like burnt bones.

  Walked through the table-set garden, lights strung between branches as they’d been strung along the decks of the cruise ships, and took a seat at the bar inside, a U-shaped bar made of something like Bakelite, smooth and cool, soft greens and reds from a Latin sports station glowing on its surface, how nice to lay your cheek down and sleep. The bartender, I’d noticed earlier, rode a motorcycle with another woman stuck to her back. Low jeans, tough-boy T-shirt, slick dark hair, rough voice.

  Dimmi, she said.

  Ordered a truffle pizza and prosecco, leaned back, crossed slippery legs. A woman sat two stools down, her hair highlighted and cotton-candied like mine, skin damp on her upper lip.

  She grinned at me, crooked. Howdy, she said. I’ve been here since five—and her foot skidded off the stool rung.

  That’s a good long time, I said. Having fun?

  Oh, she said, oh, if you’d been here at six, was it six? Maybe six. A soccer team was here. Italian. Don’t know why they were here but I have never, ever, seen such men. I’m hoping they’ll come back. Do you think?
r />   She swung her head toward the door, clutching the edge of the bar for balance. Just checking! she said, her face reeling back my way.

  Not yet, I guess, I said, and looked at her pale pink fingernails and the smudged gloss on her lip.

  But really, she said in a lower voice, really I just come for him—and she nodded toward the panther.

  Yeah?

  Oh, absolutely, she said. I’m here every day. Every night. And I know, she said in the same low tone, that he’s got a thing for me.

  At that moment he was consulting with one of the cooks, knuckles on his square linen hips. The high-hoofed girl sat outside at a table, staring at her cell, lovely olive face aglow, black hair a glossy stroke. The panther went gliding out with a glass he placed before her.

  He does? I asked my bar-mate.

  Well, yeah! she said. He always gives me special drinks and a discount on whatever I eat. Wait. Have I eaten? No—I mean, have I ordered anything? Giovanna!—she waved her pink nails at the bartender. Am I eating?

  Of course you are, M. We always make sure you eat.

  See? said M, and bobbed her head.

  My pizza came, and M’s tagliolini, and she told me she worked at the convention center and came here because she was sick of the other places on the Beach and besides: the owner. At some point a man came in, a conventioneer, and stood between the garden and bar, looking unsure where to sit. The panther glided over to him, glanced at the room, then smiled and led him to the bar and placed him between M and me.

  I knife-and-forked my pizza and sipped prosecco, neck stiff because now I couldn’t face M and had to stare straight ahead. Big screens silently showed young men in red, green, and white running. In the garden, the panther sat with his girl, long fingers stroking the table. At the next table, beneath the lights strung from slim Manila palms, a plump older man with a cigar leaned back and eyed three young women in short dresses sipping red drinks. Between his table and theirs, among the philodendra and citronella candles, a small furred face appeared.