Florida Heatwave (6 page)

Candace was flummoxed.

“You’re going to California?”

“Just for a day or two.”

“What’s going on, Johnny? You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you?”

“No, no, it’s not any kind of trouble.”

“What then?”

“The woman,” he said. “Myra.”

Candace said nothing, but she wasn’t pleased by this turn.

Johnny felt the air dying in his lungs. A vice closing against his sternum.

“I need to go,” he said.

“Why, for godsakes?”

“To see her, to speak with her. For my book.”

“For your book?”

The television was running. It was always running. The cable news, the blather of the world. Their dinner plates were on their laps. Chicken with rice and mushrooms. He’d taken a bite and felt it turn to lead in his gut. And then he’d set off on this exercise in insanity.

“The woman I had a crush on. I spoke with her. I tracked her down and called her on the phone. And somehow it came out that my dad and her, my dad and her had some kind of affair, or relationship, or something, I don’t know. She hung up.”

“Where have you gone, Johnny?”

“What?”

“Where have you gone off to? What’s happened to you?”

“Nothing’s happened. I was writing the story and this came up and I started thinking about Myra and trying to imagine her, where she was today, and I don’t know, I just reached for the phone.”

“You called a woman in California. A stranger from fifty years ago.”

“I’m nuts.”

“I’d say so. I’d call that a little nuts.”

“I want to interview her.”

“You’re not a reporter, Johnny. You’re a retired guidance counselor who’s been spending long hours alone in your room. You’ve cut yourself off from the world and it’s made you spooky and off-balance.”

“Spooky?”

She peered at him with a touch of dread as if his body might be disintegrating before her.

“Yes,” Candace said. “I’ll stand by that. Spooky.”

He left Candace a note. He told her that he loved her. But he had to do this. He felt compelled. She’d hate him. She’d never forgive him. She might not be here when he got back. But Johnny Fellows had jumped from the ledge where he’d stood for decades alongside Myra and he was falling weightless through the immeasurable air—nowhere to go but down.

Lila’s house was hot pink. Vivid and glowing beside her neighbors’ whites and beiges. Gaudy bougainvillea cascaded over her front porch, and the blooms of an ancient jacaranda sent a flurry of blue snow across her patio. The bungalow was old Spanish with a view down an alley to the Pacific, a block away.

Johnny parked his rental car at the curb, switched off the engine and sat for a while trying to remember who he was.

He was, he had come to understand, his father’s son, the drab and spiritless man Johnny had never even tried to get to know. He was in involuntary lockstep with him, following the breadcrumbs to a holy grail programmed into his blood. He was on a quest to confront the woman who’d stoked his inner fires and stoked his father’s as well. The woman who had undermined his marriage in ways both subtle and profound.

Is that why he was here, to save his life with Candace? To dispel Myra’s spell? To break the hold her nakedness had on him? To set himself free?

Or had he come with some dim yearning to seduce her? To charm her to her bed and draw aside her clothes and view the body, that thick nest of hair that had obsessed him so, to curl his fingers through its snarls, to take a fistful of it, to bury his face in its coils, its musk, to draw into his lungs the atoms of her hidden realm? Was he still an undeveloped eight years old? Was he still trapped in the basement, in the darkroom, still dizzy and insane from inhaling the glue, and the pans of harsh chemicals?

A woman was tapping on his window.

She stood in the street. Her hair was short and graying, but he recognized her eyebrows, still thick and dark, her cheekbones, her bold chin, her wide-set eyes. The flaunting, aristocratic look.

He rolled the window down.

“Johnny?”

“Yes.”

She wore jeans and a loose white shirt with green vines embroidered across her heavy breasts. On the vines were small red buds, hundreds of them, tight, unopened buds.

She held out a padded mail envelope. No label, the flap sealed.

“This is for you.”

Johnny took it from her and lay it in his lap.

“It’s everything we did,” she said. “Arnold and I. It’s all there. That’s the sum total of everything that happened.”

“I want to talk to you.”

She shook her head and her smile was grave and final.

“Just for a few minutes,” Johnny said. “Talk with me, please.”

“Go home to Candace. Work harder.”

“Candace? How do you know Candace?”

She looked off toward the beach.

Candace had called her. Found her on the Caller ID, spoken to Lila.

“What did you tell my wife? What did you say?”

“It’s all in there. Everything I could possibly tell you is in the envelope. That’s all there is, all that happened between your father and me. Now go.”

Johnny sat at the gate, waiting for the red-eye flight back home. The envelope lay in his lap unopened. He watched the people in the lounge area. He listened to the announcements. He watched the passengers flow around him with the slow ungainly silkiness of underwater performers.

He made it home by nine AM. Her car was gone. Candace might be at school. She might have gone home to stay with her parents.

Johnny walked inside. He checked her closet. He checked the kitchen and the luggage cabinet. She was at school. He closed his eyes and drew the first breath he’d managed since he’d left Santa Monica. He wiped his eyes dry.

He carried the padded mailer to his study and set it on the desk beside his computer, and jiggled the mouse to wake the machine from its slumber. He watched the cursor blink. Watched it blink on the empty page of his empty manuscript.

He tore open the mailer and reached into it and drew out another envelope. Printed on that envelope was the name of the photography store in

Miami where fifty years before his father purchased fluids and film and an occasional camera or lenses.

Inside the second envelope were dozens of photos of Lila Calderon.

In each she was naked. Some were taken in natural sunlight, outside in patios or screened-in backyards, some were taken indoors against a variety of prosaic backdrops.

She had displayed her body for Arnold Fellows, shown him everything she’d shown Ernest L. James. But as Johnny dealt the photos one by one from the pack in his hand, setting each on the desk beside him, it was clear the woman in these pictures was not the erotic goddess Johnny had worshipped for half a century.

The upward tilt of her jaw came across as crass and petty. Her eyes were guarded, ambiguous or vague. Whatever instructions Arnold had given her had not coaxed from her the defiant authority Johnny had witnessed in the magazine photo. Each of her poses seemed posed. Her arms awkward at her side. Her hands as gawky as broken chunks of brick. Even the lush hair between her legs that thrilled Johnny to his molten core, seemed blurry, indistinct, amateurishly out of focus or overexposed.

There were three sets of photos. One group was taken while Lila was still in her twenties. In the other two she was at least a decade older. But in that interval Arnold Fellows had made little progress in mastering his craft. Whatever artistic techniques he had acquired over the years were insufficient. His passion could not offset his incompetence.

He’d taken dozens of girlie shots and paid whatever fee was arranged, and flown home to bring Lila’s image alive in that basement darkroom. Arnold had to have known his failure. He could not have been so cloddish as to deceive himself into believing he had done justice to his model. Because of his own artistic limitations or deficiencies within his character, he had turned Lila Calderon into a vulgar slut.

Johnny stacked the photos and slid them back in the envelope and replaced it inside the mailer. He went to his desk and pulled out the issue of
Modern Photography
and turned to Myra’s photo on the cliffside. He stared at her body, at the sleekness of her skin against the jagged planes of rock. He studied her glossy black hair, which lifted infinitesimally on a breeze that seemed to swell up from some place within the earth’s unfathomable depths. Her dark eyes looked out and penetrated the lens, looked into the photographer’s eye and beyond him, beyond his shrouded head, off into some distant era that had not yet arrived, into the far-off room where Johnny Fellows sat, his heart finding a new measure, slowing for the first time in a long while to something like a natural pace.

“Well, look who came home.”

Johnny stood in the foyer, waiting, as Candace opened the front door. Through the doorway a slash of golden light was projected across the floor, its dagger tip touching Johnny’s feet.

“Yes, I’m home,” he said. “If you’ll have me.”

She set her purse on the table by the door. She took her time with her school books and her papers. She shut the door and bolted it. She was slim and blond and her hips hardly swelled at all. Beautiful in her own way.

She turned to him and in her eyes was something more solid and more certain than he’d detected there before. For five decades Johnny had failed to see her clearly, failed to capture her carnality in the thousand snapshots he took of her every day. He’d blurred her beauty, cheapened her essence with his own insufficient craft.

“You need to tell me everything.”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely everything.”

“I will.”

“If you skip anything, I’ll know it. I will, I’ll know, Johnny. No matter how hard it is to tell me, you have to do it. If you’re going to save this, you have to say it all, down to the smallest detail.”

“I’m ready.”

“So do it right now. Look me in the eye and tell me everything.”

He could feel the truth rising into his throat. Not scared of it. No longer alone in the basement with the secret woman, her unbearable perfection.

“I’ve been away, Candace. I’ve been off somewhere for a long time.”

She nodded. Yes, she knew. Maybe she’d always known.

“So that’s the first thing,” he said. “I’m here, I’m finally here. And now I want to get this right. You and me. I’m going to give it everything I have.”

“Well, that’s a start,” she said. “That’s at least a start.”

BY JAMES O. BORN

“He’s just another New Yorker,
not the damn Queen of England,” Dale said, shaking his head at his partner’s frantic effort to bring out a shine on the brass banister that separated the five stairs up to the landing.

“Dale, haven’t you learned anything through our association? All New Yorkers
think
they’re royalty. What he sees is what he’ll think of us. If we look rich he’ll think we’re rich.” Randy Hubbard directed his attention to a smudge on the bay window that looked across the Intracoastal then out over the Atlantic Ocean. He smiled thinking that the exorbitant rent he’d paid the stuck-up Philadelphia-based landlord was worth it. For Fort Lauderdale it probably wasn’t even that bad. It didn’t matter, he’d move out after two months and declare bankruptcy. No one would collect a dime. Not the landlord, not the investors, not even the Goddamn phone company. This would be sweet, just like the last time. Then, next time, maybe he could do it for real. If there was enough money in it.

Dale followed along like a shadow as Randy shined and polished every surface in the office. It made him nervous the way Dale was sticking closer than he normally did, and sometimes the squat little man could be a close talker.

Dale finally said, “How much you gonna ask for?”

Randy turned, his eyes scanning for something to step around and put some distance between him and his chubby little business partner. He wondered if Dale would be worth the trouble without his securities license. Randy finally said, “We’ll get five, six hundred K today then hit him for another six hundred on the real estate end.”

“You really think he’ll go for both?”

Randy was back polishing the window. “You think he’ll be satisfied with just one fortune when we offer him two? I’m tellin’ you Dale, this fish is easy. It’s that tall Mick from Boston who’s coming in on Friday that’ll be a challenge. We’ll have a few drinks with lunch, that’ll soften him up. If it weren’t for the liquor, them Irish would rule the business world. They’re a fierce bunch.” He backed away from the window to survey his efforts. It looked like a clear force field from a
Star Wars
movie. Randy could even see a person on the deck of an open fishermen not far offshore from the public beach.

He bumped into his partner. “Goddamn, Dale, why are you underfoot today? Give me some space.”

“Sorry,” mumbled the shorter man as he opened the gap between them but kept pace as Randy hustled through the quiet office. Their first business venture had been a bust-out computer parts firm. Randy had opened the company and convinced a dumbass construction worker with some cash from pot sales to invest eight grand in the start-up. He even told the idiot that he could be president of the company. They got paid to set up a patsy in case anything went wrong. What a great country. Dale lined up credit using a shaky Dunn and Bradstreet report that showed the construction guy as a former Xerox executive. The dipshit couldn’t even spell Xerox. They used the credit lines to order computers and parts from every company that accepted their bullshit, which was basically everyone. Then they undercut the competition on bids to other corporations as well as the military. Since they didn’t intend to pay for the parts it was all profit anyway. And good profit. Once the bills for the parts came due they simply shut down their grungy little office in the cheap part of Ft. Lauderdale west of I-95, and said they had failed in the computer business. No harm, no foul. Just a bunch of debts that the corporation owed. They didn’t intend to resurrect that little company. And the president still laid drywall up in Palm Beach County. Beautiful.