Virgin Heat (22 page)

So they ate with meager appetite, their faces toward their plates. Ziggy, from the start, was drinking heavily. He'd rub a wedge of lime on the meaty place between his thumb and index finger, then salt the spot, then lick it, then toss back a swallow of tequila, followed by a good long suck of beer. Uncle Louie, to his later sorrow, became intrigued by this technique and tried it on his own. He liked it.

The sky dimmed, a half-moon brightened near the zenith. Michael and Angelina finished eating, threw away their Styrofoam plates. Ziggy and Louie surrendered their plastic forks and knives but not their glasses. Locusts buzzed. Michael got up to leave, and rest, and then go out to look again for romance, reassurance.

"Thanks for dinner," Louie said, eyeing the sweet glaze on the mango cake still perched on a snack table.

Michael smiled and withdrew. Angelina followed him, saying only the tersest of good nights. Ziggy bitterly watched her hips as she walked around the pool.

He kept drinking. Louie tagged along. For a while there was not a word of conversation. Ziggy was in a sulk, and he was one of those men who had a gift for it, a boundless stamina, so that, for him, a funky mood could dig itself broader and deeper until it became something bleakly spiritual, a morbidly ecstatic meditation on the subject of gloom and festering resentments. Uncle Louie, however, had no such talent for silent, self-glorifying woe; drinking made him chatty, curious, emboldened him to inquire into things that, sober, he would only meekly wonder about.

After a time he heard himself saying, "Ziggy, no offense, it's none a my business, but I gotta tell ya, the way you're being so cold t'Angelina, I just don't get it, I think you're acting like a putz."

"How many men are ever loved like that?" said Louie. "Ten years she waited for you! You should throw yourself at her feet, you should drink the water she bathes in."

Ziggy drank beer instead. Tree frogs croaked out answers to other tree frogs croaking from across the courtyard. Louie raised his glass for emphasis, took a bigger pull of liquor than he'd meant to.

"Ya know what drives me nuts?" he said, against the sour burn that was raging in his throat. "What drives me nuts is a guy who doesn't know how lucky he is."

Ziggy lifted an eyebrow, looked away. The attempt to seem uninterested was the first crack in his lack of interest.

"Ya think about it," Louie rambled, "why should anyone love any of us? We're funny-looking, hairy in ridiculous places. We snore, we're moody, we smell bad—"

"Speak for yourself, old man—"

"We make terrible mistakes, we promise things we can't deliver, we disappoint in bed, in life . . . Ziggy, ya think about all that, and ya don't see how lucky you are, how amazing it is, to have this woman love you?"

Ziggy turned toward Louie then, but it was hard to read his face, a face whose flesh and hinges had been rearranged long after the emotions had been formed, a disconnected face whose tragedy was that its expressions, made of reused parts, could not be trusted to match its owner's feelings. He leaned in close to Angelina's uncle, beer and cactus on his breath. His eyes gleamed dully in the blue light that spread upward from the pool. His voice was a clenched and gravelly whisper. "You think I don't know that it's amazing? I'm fuckin' ashamed, it's so amazing. That doesn't mean it makes me happy."

"It should," said Uncle Louie, softly and simply, sure beyond all argument that he was right.

*

The mango torte was not a good idea.

Louie had eaten a big hunk of it after Ziggy went to bed, licking glaze and runny custard off his fingers, and when the sugar hit the alcohol already coursing through his veins, it sent up fumes that made him dizzy. Still sitting in his lounge chair, he'd closed his eyes and shallowly dozed, nauseously dreaming that he was an astronaut under whose humid capsule a wobbly earth was rocking. He woke to a wheeling sky and blundered off to his room, where he fell heavily on his own side of the barricaded mattress. Ziggy grunted, then went back to snoring.

Louie slept, peed, drank water, slept again. By five-thirty he was no longer drunk and not yet hung over, arrived at a sort of delicate oasis. His mind seemed improbably clear, though his nerves felt scraped and raw, his emotions as fresh and full as fruits just peeled. He rose silently and went downstairs to watch another day begin.

He smelled chlorine, saw stars erased by the approach of dawn. Vaguely, he recalled the conversation of the evening before, wondered if he'd said anything to regret or be embarrassed by; to his surprise, he didn't think he had. Somewhere a cat mewed; far away, a motorcycle revved. He briefly dozed again, woke up when the streetlamps stopped buzzing.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a sheaf of newspapers come pinwheeling over the fence, heard their slap against the ground. With effort he rose from his lounge, went over and picked one up, carried it back to his seat. There was just enough light to read by, if he squinted.

The paper was wonderfully skinny, a slender testament to how little really happened; the headlines were refreshingly trivial, evidence of how little really mattered. Louie scanned the front page in a minute: The mayor was awaiting trial again; a barracuda had flown into a boat and bit an angler on the leg; a giant crane had fallen into a hole that it was digging. He was about to turn to editorials, had, in fact, already spread the paper and snapped the crease, when his mind belatedly registered a tiny item at the base of a page one column. He refolded the paper, braced it on his knees. He took a breath before he read the ad. The item said:

Louie,

I love you.

Please come back.

Rose

Flagler House,

Room 216

There are times in life when a person does not, should not, trust his eyes, when something wished for takes on such a weight and substance that it seems to caper across one's field of vision though it isn't really there. Louie second-guessed his eyeballs. He rested them a moment. He rubbed them, coaxed sleep out of their corners. He rustled the newspaper and brought it a little closer to his face, in light that every moment was growing brighter. He read the ad again, a third time, a fourth. It was not until he realized he was crying that he really believed he'd read it right, that it actually said what it said.

He put the paper down, sat there in his lounge chair in the exploding yellow dawn, and wept. His wife loved him. This was staggering. It rewrote history. Decades of shame and disappointment, of feeling like a failure and a fool, were washed away by a few smudged lines printed at the bottom of a page. His whole life became more dignified in retrospect. He was, after all, a man worth loving, a man a woman could care for.

Astonishment spread all through his scoured nerves, the glad news was passed along from one transfigured fiber to the next, and for a long time he lay very still, as if his newfound peace was a fine silk blanket that could easily slide off. Tears dried on his cheeks as the morning warmed. He pulled the scents of just-opening flowers into his expanded chest.

Then, as the breakfast table and the coffee urn were being trundled into place, his joy took pause to look at itself, and the first cruel jabs of doubt assailed him.

This ad—it said what it said, but what if it was for some other Louie, put there by some other Rose? The chances of there being a mirror-couple, he realized, were remote; but lives were shattered every day by odds that long, or longer.

Uneasy now, he shifted in his chair, but qualms pursued him no matter how he turned and twisted. His brother Paul was at the Flagler House. Was it conceivable that Rose was in cahoots with him, that this love message was nothing but a horrid stratagem to flush him out?

For that matter, couldn't it be imagined that his wife was not at Flagler House at all, had not cared enough to track him down, was back home in the Bronx, and the whole heartless ploy had been set in motion by his brother?

Having known contentment for half an hour, Louie was already wracked by a dread of losing it again—of learning that he'd never really had it.

Dread ushered in the looming hangover. A headache started clamoring in both his temples. His mouth went dry, his tongue suddenly felt thick. He went to the buffet, brought back juice and coffee.

He fretted as Coral Shores woke up around him, bit his lip as yawning men emerged in boxer shorts or towels. He couldn't stand not knowing if his fragile joy was real or fake. If the ad from Rose was on the level, he longed to hold her in his arms at once; if, God forbid, it was a sham, he needed to find out before the habit of believing he was loved became any more entrenched, making its loss even more of a calamity.

But he feared to go to Flagler House. Paul was there. If the whole thing was a trap, his brother could corner him, threaten him, beat him even, squeezing out the whereabouts of his daughter and his betrayer.

His brow furrowed, his scalp pinched, he went to the buffet for another cup of coffee. Ahead of him in line was a tall slim man in a green kimono, with eyebrows that were plucked and arched, a memory of rouge across his cheeks, a hint of shadow beneath the powder on his upper lip. An idea slipped like a fish through Louie's mind, was dismissed almost before it could be tracked. He got his coffee and went back to his lounge.

He sat there. Heightening sun scorched his eyes; inside his skull, hope and apprehension were colliding like a hammer and a gong. Finally he thought: Why not?

He walked over to the man in the kimono, stood before him as he sipped his coffee and smoked a thin brown cigarette, and said, "Good morning."

Louie leaned in closer, couldn't keep his eyes from flicking left and right. "I was wondering," he whispered, "if you have some woman's clothing you could loan me."

"Key West!" said agent Terry Sykes, as he filtered Flagler House coffee through his brushy blond moustache and looked out at the flat green water of the Florida Straits. He was wearing a loud floral bathing suit, a Miami Dolphins T-shirt, and the kind of chunky sunglasses cops wear when they want to look relaxed. "McCullough, you really get the postings."

"It's not vacation," said the undercover man.

Sykes fingered his way through a basket of warm rolls, touching every one. With the grin of the chronic shirker, he said, "It isn't hardship duty, either."

McCullough swallowed his annoyance, glanced off through the sweetly muted sunshine of their umbrellaed table to the tiki wing where, as far as anyone could tell, Paul Amaro was still asleep. "Hardship's not the point," he said. "Results is the point."

Sykes pulled his Marlins cap lower over his forehead as his light eyes tracked a woman in a thong bikini. "Supe thinks results'll be zilch."

That's why he sent you, thought McCullough. He said instead, "Supe always thinks that. Comes from sitting on his ass too long."

Sykes fished out another roll, thickly smeared it with strawberry jam. "This Ziggy guy, how long's the hit been out on him?"

McCullough searched for patience. "Amaro came here for something else. What, we still don't know. That Ziggy's involved, that's a lucky break."

Sykes swabbed his moustache on the back of his hand, gave a goofy laugh. "Not too damn lucky for Ziggy."

McCullough kept an eye on the hotel's long and arcing row of cottages. Sykes watched a woman with her top undone, taking sun across her back.

"Not lucky for Ziggy at all," McCullough said.

"Which is why, when the screws get just a little tighter, Ziggy's gonna crawl to us and beg to be allowed to spill his guts."

Sykes said nothing, hoping for a glimpse of breast.

"And when that happens, Terry, I hope you'll be paying attention."

"Sure thing, Keith," he said. "No problem."

*

"Where's Uncle Louie?" Angelina asked, shading her eyes and looking up from her lounge at Ziggy.

Ziggy swigged coffee before he answered. "Guy's my roommate, not my wife. How the hell should I know where he is?"

"I see you're gonna be all charm again today," said Angelina.

Ziggy's eye sockets felt too small for his eyes. He wasn't quite awake yet, and mid-morning sun was already scorching the back of his neck. He surprised himself by going on the offensive, and realized only afterward that the attack was a sure sign he was caving in. "Don't talk to me about charm," he said. "The way
you're
acting—that's charming?"

Angelina looked away, gave her thick black hair a shake, successfully tweaked him by her silence.

"First you're all over me," he went on. "Flirting. Kissing. In my bed, for Chrissake. Then it's like, I don't know, I became a frog, a leper. When a woman acts like that, there's a name for it, Angelina."

"And I'm sure it's a quaint and lovely name," she said.

He turned his back, looked out across the pool. Men in tiny bathing suits stood thigh to thigh and talked. Another man rubbed suntan lotion on the bare shoulders of a friend. Did it make him queer, Ziggy vaguely wondered, that he realized this whole place pulsed with sex, that the atmosphere seeped into him, that it was a lousy setting in which to have satisfaction dangled then withheld?