Virgin Heat (12 page)

She sat; she shifted her position by small increments; around five o'clock, she surprised herself by developing a vivid craving for some alcohol.

She wanted a cocktail, and a cocktail meant going out, but she lacked the ambition to get dressed, and it was much too hot to put on makeup. At length, she shuffled into sandals, wrapped a sarong around herself and tucked it into the bosom of her bathing suit. She headed for the gate with her hair askew, her skin salty, she didn't care who saw her. She was beginning to go native, and the purest part of the process was that she didn't realize it was happening.

Her loose shoes scratched along the pavement. She found a quiet bar, took a tiny table by a shaded window, and ordered up a margarita. Sipping it, her tongue smarting from the liquor and the lime, she gave in to the pleasure of being slightly scandalized by her own behavior. Drinking alone, just for the hell of it. Drinking alone as hazy intimations of lust curled through her mind like wisps of fog. Thinking about Sal Martucci's hands and her own salty body wrapped like a present in its bright-colored cotton.

Her drink was gone. She ordered another. So this was decadence, she thought—hot days, dim rooms, notions of love growing less inchoate and more fleshly as ancient barriers melted in the sun or were vanquished by tequila, as the blank black curtains that had sequestered Angelina from passion proved only to be made of gauze.

She crossed her knees, finished her drink. From the outside she looked demure, maybe just a little sultry; on the inside she was vacillating between carnality and the giggles. She was ready for a good long nap, and the nap itself seemed an emblem of her newfound sense of the luscious. Marvelously illicit, to go to sleep in daylight and wake in all-accepting darkness, refreshed by the night and ready to go out prowling for her lover.

*

It was almost six o'clock, there hadn't been a customer in hours, and Eddie, for the millionth time, was sounding out the flaking backward letters on the window:
serutxif yratinas orama
. At first he hardly noticed when the big dark car pulled up in front of the fire hydrant outside the store.

He became more interested when a thick man in a raincoat got out of the driver's seat, and held open a door for a tall man with wavy silver hair who now emerged from the back. They looked like gangsters, and Eddie watched them like he was watching television, curious, aloof, like nothing that was happening had anything to do with him.

Unease began when it became clear that the two of them were heading for his door; it ripened quickly to a paralyzing fear when the thick man reached up and grabbed the metal shutter that hid the premises from the eyes of the street. With a clatter as loud as a train and a clank as sharp as the ring of a driven spike, the steel curtain rolled down and hit the sidewalk, and Eddie realized he was doomed. Now he knew exactly what was happening: He'd been tempted, tested, and he'd failed. The consequences of his theft were coming due before he'd spent a nickel of the money he'd taken from the register.

The thick man came in first, his right wrist buried in his raincoat pocket. He said, "Okay, Jackson, put your fuckin' hands where I can see 'em."

Eddie was standing behind the counter. He raised his hands. They were shaking, his baggy shirt cuffs moved against his skinny forearms. The man with the silver hair came in. He locked the door behind him and pulled down the shade. All closed up, the store felt very small, the fluorescent lights seemed dim yet harsh.

Eddie was still holding up his hands, his arms were starting to get heavy. He was trying hard to understand what was wanted of him. Finally he said, "You're Mist' Amaro's brother?"

"Very good, Einstein," said the man whose hand was in his pocket.

"He called you," Paul Amaro said again. "He told you my daughter was with him. Did he say where he was calling from?"

"This
melanzan
is fuckin' useless," said the thick man.

"An ice-cream truck," said Paul Amaro. It was April. He didn't think the ice cream trucks had started going around in April. "My brother, he sound scared?"

"He sounded 'bout like normal."

Paul Amaro rubbed a thick hand all over his face, pulled hard at the rubbery jowls. "You told his wife maybe there were people who wouldn't let him call. Why'd you say that, Eddie?"

The kid wiped his nose with his hand. " 'Cause she was crying."

Paul Amaro sighed, began to pace. For the first time, he looked past the marred gray counter to the erector-set shelves with their dusty cardboard boxes. "This place is a fuckin' dump," he said. He paced some more, then said, "It makes no sense. My schmuck brother, he's got family that can help him, and he wastes time talkin' to you."

Eddie heard himself say, "Maybe he don't want no help."

"Shut up, you cross-eyed idiot," said the man in the raincoat.

Paul Amaro looked down at the floor. Then, without another word, he walked to the door and let himself out. The man in the raincoat followed.

Eddie heard their car start, waited till they pulled away; waited an extra minute to be safe. Then he opened the cash register and reached into his pocket. He replaced the cash he'd taken as his wages, removed his IOU and tore it into little pieces. Then he locked up and walked away, and he knew that he was never going back.

Angelina woke up from her nap around eleven.

The air was very still, fragrant with the rueful smell of spent flowers, and she was quite confused. Gradually she remembered where she was, she recalled the mood and musings of the afternoon. But the tequila had worn off, those fantasies were now tainted by the thousand anxieties of the actual, and she was sorely tempted to slip back into sleep. To go prowling at midnight—earlier, the idea had seemed excitingly risque, sophisticated; now it just felt bizarre. To track her lover like a hunting lioness— earlier, the notion had titillated by its boldness; now it just seemed brassy.

But that, she told herself, was fear talking, the old bafflement and reluctance that had kept her fallow for so long. She would rise; she would go. She just needed a pep talk.

She pulled on her sarong, went downstairs to Michael's. His room was dark, she tapped on the door. He wasn't there; of course he wasn't there. He'd found his lover; he'd met a possibility and seized it. Angelina pouted. Why was everyone in the world more facile and blithe than she? Why was she hemmed in by qualms and hesitations that no one else seemed bothered by?

In her frustration and in the oddness of the hour, she came dangerously close to asking the question underpinning all those questions: Why, after all this time, was she crazy in love with a man who, for every reason, she should not, could not, have?

That question loomed, Angelina dimly sensed its menace the way a person somehow knows when a speeding unseen car is just about to careen around a corner; her mind stepped back.

On reluctant feet she went upstairs to her room, resolved now, with more bravery than joy, to dress in something pretty, and to do her hair, and paint her lips, and dab perfume behind her ears, and to see what happened when she sat across the bar from Sal and told him they really had to talk.

*

"Hi, Sal," she said, when she had climbed onto her bar stool and placed her purse on the bar and neatly squared her hands in front of her.

His eyes flicking left and right at regulars and tourists, his shirt damp and mostly open, he moved close to her, leaned across the slab of teak. Very softly, he said, "That's not my name."

He didn't answer right away. Suddenly he felt caged in by the bar, squeezed between the thick wood and the pitiless mirror, oppressed by strangers' voices, choked by cigarettes and vines. He should have bolted. He'd already caught a whiff of Angelina's scent, his eyes had already tumbled into the chute between her breasts, and he realized he should have been far away by now, drunk in a hammock somewhere they didn't speak English.

Angelina watched him, saw his pinky delicately splay above the handle of the spoon, noted the mangled index finger that went its own way from the others, observed the round exquisite meetings between the bottles and the glass, the slow momentous pouring from one into the other. Watching, she felt powerful and a little bit nasty, like she was paying him to dance for her.

When he slid the drink across the polished wood between her hands, she watched the grenadine ooze downward and whispered, "So Sal, what is your name?

*

A couple hours later, as it was getting on toward three a.m., she whispered, "Now I get it. Ziggy. He zigs, he zags, you can't catch up with him."

The barkeep glanced over his shoulder at his few remaining customers, then looked at Angelina. He did not want to encourage conversation. Blandly, he said, "I never thought of that. I just liked the sound."

"Nice sound," said Angelina. "Takes some getting used to. Like your face."

He leaned closer to her, she saw dark stubble straining from his pores, a film of perspiration on his forehead. "I wish you hadn't come here," he said. "It's crazy that you came here."

He turned his back on her, washed glasses, emptied ashtrays, stalled for time. When he looked at her again, she had not moved and her expression had not changed. He sucked a big gulp of watery air, looked at his watch, and gave last call.

*

"And that's my fault too?" he said as they walked side by side at the edge of the ocean.

"Fault?" said Angelina. He'd come close to hurting her feelings several times, but now he finally succeeded, and she let go of the thick strong hand she'd waited so long to feel against her skin. "Who said anything about fault? I just thought you should know."

They walked. Underfoot, sand crunched over coral, the sound was improbably loud. An orange moon was slouching toward the west. Its craters were tinged with purple and the light it threw across the water was a greenish gold. Ziggy was surprised to miss the feel of Angelina's fingers surrounded by his own, and missing it, he felt remorse. But when he knew he was wrong, his impulse was to argue.

"The way you make it sound—"

"Ziggy, let it drop. It isn't blame. It isn't flattery. It's a piece of information. I haven't wanted anybody else."

He pondered this, but couldn't really get his mind around it; against the disjunct pile of names and faces and false starts and tangled limbs that his own life had consisted of, this constancy, this continuity was unimaginable. He said, "You've been scared, I bet."

"Scared?" said Angelina. "Scared of what?"

"Scared, ya know, of men. Of sex."

At this she could not hold back a laugh. "Ziggy," she said, "I've been surrounded by naked men since I hit this town. I haven't yet seen anything to be afraid of."

That slowed him down. A flash of something like jealousy, or maybe only prudishness, slipped across his face, which was mapped into bright planes and dark hollows by the moonlight.

"Besides," she continued, "you're a funny one to tell me how scared I am. Your whole life is being scared."

She expected him to deny it. He didn't. He just said, "Yeah, but I got a pretty good reason."

They walked. There was no surf, the ocean ended in the meekest lapping against the shore and made the faintest hiss as sudsy water slipped through nubs of limestone. Angelina took his hand again, remembered again the padded bulk of the heel of it, the fibrous breadth of the wrist. "Ziggy," she said, "let's not argue. I didn't come down here to argue."