Nine Island (7 page)

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.

S
O, 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.

S
O 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?

F
IVE 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 the 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.

A
NOTHER 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.

T
HIS 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.

Nope. Who's P?

My chaperone.

What?

Just kidding. My husband. So what were you doing? You looked very
furtive
.

There's this duck, I said and told N about her.

Really? she said. She's stranded?

And alone, which doesn't seem right.

No, N said, her head tilting. How do you know it's a she?

She's smaller and warbles, which is what they say the females do.

Well, it's very concerning that she's stranded, N said. What will she do for fresh water?

Exactly what's worrying me.

Well. Maybe we should try to do something.

I plan to bring water every day. And Grape-Nuts. I can't walk by and see her helpless like that. She's getting thin.

N looked at me for a time, her eyes like deep pools: you could almost see something swimming inside them.

I think that's good, she said. I think that's
good
of you. You care for creatures that need care. This is important for people to do. And when I walk on the Venetian, I'll also bring her water.

But what I really want to do, I said, is transport her to a place with other ducks.

She considered me again.

Well, that sounds like the right thing. Yes.

But I think it'll take more than one person. She's skittish and waddles fast.

N's expression went cloudy. So . . . you want help? You do. Oh, she said, oh, no. I can't. I mean of course I
want
to. Given how I love animals. But any kind of running and quick bending . . . I can't. I have this . . . oh, it's too boring. I have a lot of pain.

She shook her head and put up a hand before I could ask. No no no, she said, it's not worth talking about. Bad surgery, that sort of thing. But anyway.

I'm sorry, I said.

Well. She unfolded her long bone legs and stood up Pilates straight, ribs looking beached, in her tiny bikini. But she didn't walk away. She took off her white hat and turned back to me as I sat with the dampening book in my lap.

But that wasn't actually my question, she said, about you and the duck. And you didn't even ask me yours! Do you mind? It's none of my business. I don't want to pry. But I can't help it. So if I might ask . . .

Yes?

Well, you seem to be by yourself all the time, and I'm wondering, isn't there someone in your life?

The lounge chair was soggy from overnight rain, and wet had seeped into my towel and gone cold. I put my hands on the Latin and thought, For fuck's
sake
. Then looked up at her brightly.

Not just now, I said. But I've got O!

She smiled the slow, sad smile. Okay, she said. You have O. And the cat in diapers. And the duck. Those are your loves. Okay. Maybe that's all you need. Who knows? Maybe that's enough. I don't know. It's none of my business. But wait a minute, she said. What were you going to ask me?

Oh, I said, my face afire, it was just about the duck.

Okay, well, she said. Maybe I'll see you at the board meeting tomorrow.

Yeah, I said. But—

Yes?

I mean, I did have a question.

We looked at each other, and again it felt as if she were the face and I were the pool.

What do you drop?

Her eyes went away. Excuse me?

From the balcony?

Oh, she said, how embarrassing. And she laughed her strange dry laugh and unfolded her limbs and wandered away, that white-blond hair like a halo.

J
UST WHEN I was getting some
clarity
, he sailed back into my in-box.

Looked at his name a long, long time.

Counted the letters, again.

Calculated their worth in Scrabble.

Twenty-one.

Each one golden no matter its worth. Golden still,
still
.