Nine Island (3 page)

She's reached the pond. He's been willing her there because that will make it easier. That will show she wants it herself. And now—will she do it? She seems to be thinking. She raises an arm and breathes in her own smell.

Gamey. He can smell the tang from here, he can almost taste her. Oh, yeah. She'll go in. And once she does . . . In his skin his knees turn liquid.

She unbuckles her belt, shrugs the dress loose. Before he can breathe she swivels free of the cloth: a pale shoulder, doe-white haunch, breast so quick he's blinded.

Black dazzles his eyes. His toes dig into the soil to spring—

A message: my mother. Disorienting to be on the balcony, surrounded by Miami roar and warm blue, not in lusty woods.

Darling,
she
wrote.
Settled back in? Working on O?

Could see her aim a knotty finger at each key.

Yes! Will call tonight before your Ambien.

Cracked knuckles and looked back at the Latin, book held open with a binder clip. Then looked over at Costa Brava. No naked man today. But in the top-floor gym a man was running in place, staring west through a wall of fogged glass.

—she's running already, naked in boots. Leaves and twigs slap at her arms and tear her hair, but she pulls free just before he can grip her hips because he's that close—he can smell her and almost lick the sweat sheening her back—

Another message:

So you're back in Miami.

One of the gin-drinking old boyfriends. Worst one: the Devil. I knew him when he was a nasty nineteen and got to know his nastier entrepreneurial self on the recent tour of old boyfriends. One who enrages me, but not enough that I won't stay at least a little in touch.

In case.

In case I need someone to send me a message.

He's usually good for that.

Yep, back in Miami.

How glam
.
I hope you fucking have fun down there. Maybe you'll finally find what you want.

Cracked my knuckles again and stared at the bay. A party boat foamed by, beat bouncing over the water. Two girls in neon bikinis danced on the prow. Almost dusk. Three parrots rushed past the balcony, shrieking.

But now I could smell him. Warm gin-vapor rising from his skin in a hotel somewhere, a big bed with too many pillows, long cloven fingernails pressed in my flesh. But he was so poached that when his purple eyes squinted at me he saw not the present version of me, over which a few decades had run, but a version that was still nineteen. An aspect of him I liked.

F
OR INSTANCE
(nothing to do with Ovid, exactly):

In the Devil's car a year ago, driving somewhere that would take a long time to reach, he squinted not quite in my direction, one long finger on the wheel, and said:

I loved everything about you when we were nineteen and you would have nothing to do with me. How you walk and talk and look and laugh and sit and look at people and think. Do you hear me? Everything. I'm telling you too much. I should stop telling you all this. It only gives you more power.

Well, maybe.

Did I notice he was the one driving?

Months later, when in exchange for all the power he gave me I'd given him all he loved, in an airport, spotting friends from home, he spun and strode fast from me to them, arm swinging forward in greeting. He did not turn his black-coiled head when I passed; his eyes took care not to know me.

Fucker
, typed my thumbs to him.

Fucker, fuckee, said myself back to me.

So who told you to climb on the shark?

O
UT BACK TODAY,
two of the hot tubs bubbled. In the first a man with threads of gray hair on a barnacled skull held a leg to the jets, face fixed in excruciated pleasure. In the next a withered woman floated with her eyes shut. By the rail overlooking the dock were two men in scrubs and, between them, the Mummy. Strapped in a wheelchair fitted with bottles and stalks, his hair a white cloud, eyes shut, mouth open, chin propped up by a metal brace. He was probably awfully handsome once, is still a handsome ninety. He hasn't been conscious for a very long time.

Over the cracked concrete to the pool.

Was on my sixth lap when Fran rolled out. She is ninety-nine and enormous. She had on a white robe, orange one-piece, and pink bathing cap, and her face is square with a complex, cragged topography. When she and the aide pushing her got near, Jorge dumped his towels and came to help lower her in.

Once in the water, she became queen of the sea, surveying her surf. She shook a hand for her aide to give her a snorkel and mask, fit them on her head, turned, and started motoring around the shallow end. Slow circles, her back a floating isle.

I timed my laps not to collide with her circles, but she's strong as a ship and circled so steadily she created a gyre, and I got caught in her current and swerved. Was getting my footing when I saw her planted nearby. She'd taken off her snorkel and mask and fixed me with a glittering eye.

Guess what, she said.

What?

I've lost almost everything. Both breasts, a hip, my hair, a kidney, and another piece I forget. But you know what?

What?

I don't give a damn!

Good for you!

Nope, she said. I'm ninety-nine and don't give a goddamn. Hell with it all. She looked at me hard, grinned without teeth, adjusted the snorkel, and pumped on.

Floating in the cracked hourglass pool . . .

With Fran's lost parts and a barnacled man and the Mummy.

Stop it!
wrote K.
You are NOT in a retirement home
.

Might be just the thing.

N
OT SURE I'VE
mentioned the deadline for Ovid: twentyfour verse stories in a hundred and one days. Lots of money in work like this, I can tell you. Sort of translation, but only to start: am changing his stories around. I don't think Ovid of all people would mind.

Trans-ferre, tuli, latus
: the kind of pattern you can't shake from your head if this is what you've fed it for thirty-plus years.

Conjugations, declensions. Also lyrics.

A song starts in my head, plays in a loop for weeks, won't stop until a new one knocks it from orbit.

But I believe those songs tell me things, floating to my inner ear from a deeper, Delphic self.

Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday, you'll change your place in this world
.

This one I heard for years, until I finally left my death-in-life marriage in Deutschland, and the song magically stopped.

Had the lyrics wrong, but still, they helped.

Anyway.

Spread my blue towel on a lounge chair, settled upon it, put glasses on nose, fixed the Latin open with a black binder clip, splayed the dictionary on the concrete.

—She had no chance of running away from that hunter, and when she realized this, she changed tack: she caught a trunk, skinning her arms, shut her eyes, and screamed silently but so intensely that the waves of her will went down through her loins, legs, and feet and into the soil, and it was the soil that saved her. Her ragged toenails she'd only ever cut with a knife dug into the fallen leaves and the earth and latched to rocks way deep, and meanwhile such strange things were happening to the rest of the girl still overland! The skin she wanted no one ever to stroke or nibble or lick grew hard and cracked, the dry places at her knees and elbows whorled and stiffened, and her wrists grew long and thin and suddenly split, twiggy fingers reaching up toward the sky, and now so happy, ecstatic, she threw back her head as her long dirty hair metastasized into leaflets, and she had just enough time to think, I am losing all the parts of myself but becoming what I am, when the wind took the words from inside her mouth and they rustled into air.

Put pencil in spine, rolled over, and stared at the sky.

The sky here is so voluptuous, if you're lying on your back on a soft warm towel, letting the world just spin you.

You can keep climbing deeper into that gassy, dark blue.

What are you singing me now, blue ions?

Framed a square of potent sky with my hands.

But—small lump on my index finger. What? It didn't use to be there. On the knuckle, which I wiggled—stiff.

Silhouetted against the sky, in fact, the fingers all looked knotty. The skin looked downright
whorled
.

Well
,
good
.

Head tilted back, I could see clear up the building. And exactly then the thin white-blond woman came out on her balcony. I flipped over fast to see better. She stood by the railing, gazing out. Then disappeared, and reappeared farther down than she'd been the other day.
Deliberate
. She reached out far, opened her hand, again let something fall. Then peered down to see where it landed.

Experiment?

After a minute I couldn't stand it and hurried barefoot along the cracked path between the gym windows and the low concrete rim that holds back the paradise jungle, to where it must have fallen. Poked at the leaves: nothing.

I looked up the building, up the thing's path—and there she was, all those stories above, looking down at me. We gazed up and down at each other, like I was her reflection, or shadow.

F
OR INSTANCE
(also not Ovid, exactly):

There was a girl in college who ran. A real runner, yeah, but this was more: she was running
away
. She wanted no flesh that wasn't muscle, and then she wanted her running to eat the muscle, too. That really made her eyes glow. Make me bone, those eyes said. Something so hard no one ever gets in.

Long wild chestnut hair, the sort you can easily see turn into twigs.

A so-called boyfriend of mine with sad eyes had an awful thing for her. She let him touch her once, he said, he almost managed to get her in bed, but that was more than she could take. She ran. From him, other men, everyone. You'd see her pale legs flitting outside the windows of the eating clubs, down the tree-lined streets at night.

Someone must have fucked her up, he said, staring at her hard. Somebody really screwed her.

Maybe, I thought. Or maybe she just doesn't want to let anyone in. What's wrong with that? Who made it obligatory?

Porosity: some have it more than others.

Say, girls.

You have a hole, a boy said to me when I was eight. He and another had cornered me with their bikes against an alley wall.

You have a hole, he said, that I can put my thing in if I want.

For fuck's sake!

That boy's bike crashed to the ground.

M
Y FRIEND S
has just typed me his opinion:

Boys look at porn from the time they're nine. Girls are only body parts.

M
ORE BUSTER PUDDLES
today. Spending a lot of time wiping; knees are getting bruised.

Went outside to paradise—who would not be ecstatic here! How could your heart not flood with solitary joy when walking on the blistering concrete and beholding the hot blue sky and hot green grass and flowers so red they flame your eyes and all that milk-green water? Sometimes there are only depths and depths of dizzying blue up there, but mostly there are heaped white dunes of clouds, sheets and wedding cakes and tire treads of clouds, fata morganas in the sky.

Was brave this morning and left the building not one of my favored back ways, via dock or garage, but boldly through the lobby, past the doormen who love to know who's doing what, past the valets who sneer at my Mini and at the groceries borne home in my bare arms if I've dared venture carless into the tropics to shop. Walked through the revolving doors, past the burbling chlorinated fountain, down the swooping entry ramp, past the row of green fronds and scaly trunks and more girl-trees diving into the ground. Five of them, with silver-pink bark, slim torsos rising from the soil and splitting into long satin legs with tender dark clefts between. They look like naked preteen synchronized swimmers, plunging into the mulch.

Not sure they got away from whatever chased them, with their poontangs eye height and bare, though.

Girls! Close your legs right now, you fools!

To get to Publix, you follow Island Avenue around the oval park, from my building (Nine), past Costa Brava, Sixteen, Belle Plaza, the Venetian, then walk over the last causeway bridge to Miami Beach. In the water are always needle-nose fish—and, gliding below them today, a ray. A spotted eagle ray, I think, having memorized one once and hurried home to consult my
Audubon Field Guide
. Undulating leopard wings, blue light wavering upon them.

What a place, where you see something like this on your way to buy milk.

Enough to make you forget your chronic life concerns.

Almost.

Just then a Jet Ski boy with a girl stuck to his back swerved by. Engine scream, arc of spray, the fish shot off, the ray glided down into silty dark.

Landed a curse on the pair with my eyes.

Walked over the bridge, past the marina, along a shady block of restaurants and bars, to Publix, which looks like a silver space-shell and is full of porn stars and fabricated beauties strolling the aisles in shoes not made for human feet. Their silhouettes seen from the coffee aisle, down near the illuminated fruits, are extreme. Their natural predators prowl the aisles, spying around boxes of soup.

During the last hurricane, when electricity was out all over the Beach so there was no AC, they say that in the fancy buildings lining the bay the porn stars all went nude.

The sort of statement you can believe.

Like:

You could be a courtesan, as Sir Gold said to me.

He looked like he was actually
thinking
, those hazel-green eyes concerned, proposing what I might try next, now that he was done with me.

Not that I knew this yet, lying naked in his sunny bed, with no desire to leave.