B0092XNA2Q EBOK (13 page)

I didn’t say anything.

“I watched that street for almost a year. Same guy. Every Tuesday. Clockwork. He liked to sing while he worked. No teeth but great voice. I walked out one morning. Sunglasses. Scarf. So he wouldn’t know me. Handed him an envelope with forty thousand cash.” She teared up. Looked away. “When I got back to the balcony he was dancing in the street, singing at the top of his lungs.” She shook her head. “Twenty million didn’t make me as happy as forty thousand did that man.”

I shrugged, pointed. “Those sheets you’re holding, started at about fifty-count polyester but with seven or eight years of wear and tear, they’re probably down to twenty-five threads per inch. Which is a bonus when it gets warm ’cause you get better ventilation.”

She made her bed and said little else.

An hour or so later, I was reading on the porch when she appeared around the corner. She asked, “Do you have any scissors? Like, for cutting hair.” I reached in a drawer and offered them to her. “Thank you.” Two hours later she reappeared.

With short hair.

As in not a hair on her head was longer than a few inches. It looked perfect. The only problem with it was that it highlighted the burn around her neck.

“You did that?”

She leaned against the door frame. “When I was first starting out, I knew exactly how I wanted my hair to look—”

“How?”

“
The Sound of Music
meets
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.” A pause. “So… I worked at it. Once I figured out how to use two mirrors, it got easier.”

I hadn’t had a formal haircut since I started living on the water. When it needs cutting, as in grown down past my shoulders, I simply cut the end. All of it. At once. And I shave every few weeks, whether I need it or not.

I looked at myself in the mirror. Sun-bleached hair past my shoulders. Split ends. Several days’ stubble. Unrecognizable. Perfect.

She swept up her hair and walked out, carrying it in a makeshift dustpan made from a piece of paper. She held it aloft. Chest high. “A busboy in Germany once stole my underwear and sold them online for nine thousand dollars. If you bagged this up you could sell it on eBay. Probably buy another boat.”

“Thanks. Three is plenty.”

She turned, spoke over her shoulder. “In my experience, men with hair long enough to be in a ponytail aren’t all that trustworthy.”

I nodded. “Good policy.”

A
round midnight, she blew out her gas lamp and shut her door. Saying not a word. I sat up, a notebook on my lap, listening to the alligators bellow us to sleep.

The next morning, she woke to find me sitting where she’d left me. She saw my mug. I pointed. “It’s on the stove. A little old, but old and strong is better than none at all.”

She rubbed her eyes and lifted a mug hanging on a nail. She milled around me as the caffeine hit her veins. Always a safe distance. Moments passed. I noticed she was standing on her toes. More fidgety than usual. After a few sips, she set down her mug. “Okay, I don’t think I can hold it any longer.” She proffered with one hand.

“Oh, sorry. Follow me.”

I walked out back, fifty yards through the trees to the outhouse. I opened the door and showed her the roll of toilet paper hanging on a nail. She eyed it, weighed going versus holding it indefinitely, then slowly stepped inside and shut the door.

I got about ten steps away when the door cracked and she said, “Sunday?”

It was the first time she’d called me by that name. “Yes?”

She stepped outside, spoke through terse lips, and pointed. “A roach.”

I nodded. “Yes.” I opened the door. Wider. Showering the walls in light. Fifteen roaches crawled up the back wall. A few scurried along the wooden floor. One poked its head up over the toilet seat. She gritted her teeth. “Is there any other option?”

“Sure. Anywhere on the island, but if you want a seat…” I pointed.

She eyed the white seat, glanced at the crawling wall and the two tentacles fluttering like windshield wipers along the rim, pulled the paper roll from the nail, and disappeared down the trail toward the back of the island.

When she returned, she sat at the far end of the porch, finished her coffee then returned from her bunk with my shears in one hand and a towel over her shoulder. She stood behind her chair, turning the chair slightly toward me. She cleared her throat. I set down my pen. She said, “It’s not often that I offer to do anything for anyone else. I’m used to being served. Not serving. It’s not in my nature.” She patted the chair.

I shook my head. “I’m good. Really.”

She shaded her eyes against a growing sun. “You open for another opinion?”

I tapped the pen on my journal. “Thanks, but—”

She set down the shears. “What are you doing when you write in that book?”

“Record the tides. What we caught. Water temp. What’s biting. Bait choice. Wind direction. Barometric pressure. I look back on it year to year.”

“But we didn’t fish yesterday.”

“I record that, too.”

“Can I see?”

I offered the journal. “You don’t trust me?”

She glanced at the first page. “Your handwriting is the fanciest and neatest I’ve ever seen in a man and better than most women I know. Like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson.”

“I’ve practiced some.”

“I’ll say.” She returned the journal without reading it. I was learning that she liked to lob atomic-bomb questions to catch me off guard. To judge my immediate reaction. Her next question was one of those. “Can I trust you?”

“You can trust that what I tell you is truthful.”

“What about what you don’t tell me?”

“You picked up on that distinction, huh?”

She turned, crossed her arms, and spoke, looking away. “When I was first getting started, I signed a few contracts without really reading the fine print. I was just happy to get in front of the camera and, as it turns out, so were the producers, just with less clothes than when I walked in.” She shrugged. “Now, or rather up until a few days ago, I’d learned to say, ‘define minor nudity.’ Doing so kept me out of more than one tight spot. I know how that must sound. You’ve probably seen my movies and you’re thinking, ‘But I’ve seen you take your clothes off and walk across the screen in your birthday suit—’ ”

I held up a stop-sign hand. “I haven’t been to a movie in over ten years and I can’t say for sure if I’ve ever seen one of yours.”

A pause while it sank in. “Really?”

“It’s nothing personal. I don’t own a TV, so—”

She pursed her lips, her bottom sticking out farther than her top. One eyebrow rose above the other. Her mind calculating. “So, back to the trust thing—”

“It’s your call.”

“So, I shouldn’t trust you past the point where we are now?”

“At what ‘point’ are we?”

“No longer uncomfortable.”

I scratched my beard. “Probably a good call.”

She shook her head. “So, what you’re saying is that you’re not good and I can’t believe in you.” Her head tilted ever so slightly sideways. She was baiting me. “Is that really what you want me to think?”

“In my experience, trust is built over time and we haven’t had much of that. So, let’s—”

She shook her head once. “I once spent two years of my life living with a man who I thought would be the father of my children only to discover one night when I flew home early from a set that he was trying to be the father of my manager’s children.” The other eyebrow climbed to meet the first. She pointed at my journal. “You ask me if I trust you? You’re writing in a journal, quietly, while I walk and talk around you. Several months ago, the firm that handled my publicity, in their infinite wisdom, hired this”—she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“ ‘writer.’ So, I could tell him my story and he could write it and the world could love me more and we could charge more and so they could make more money. Anyway, they told me they’d done their due diligence, that he’d written lots of stories and that I could trust him. He was handsome. They were in a rush to get it published, and he was willing to start right away. Said not to worry about the writer’s contract, that lawyers took forever and he trusted me that it would all work out fine. Said I could trust him. Gave me his”—more quotation marks—“ ‘word.’ So, I did. Some of my secrets.” She shrugged. “Not all. Hardly any, to be honest. Anyway”—she made quotation marks in the air again—“my ‘biographer’—”

I cut her off. “You’re talking about the guy I met in town with the tattoos climbing up his neck and the black fingernails?”

A short nod. “Tricky Dick.”

“You liked that guy?”

No response. She continued. “He spent weeks interviewing me, showing me drafts. He asked a lot of questions. Asked about my childhood, which I’ve always been notoriously private about. I didn’t talk about that, at least. But thanks to the paparazzi, there
was still plenty of material for him to work with. My management team felt this would be my chance to set the record straight.

“I told him how I’d been in a downward slide, had managed to hide it for years. But then my weight started to drop. The papers spread questions that led to rumors. A doctor prescribed something to take the edge off. Combat the circles beneath my eyes.

“A pill here. A little sleep there. Another doctor’s order almost anywhere. I cycled much like regular folks and then the pain would pile up, I’d give in, pop the top off the bottle. Pretty soon I was eating them like Skittles. Sold-out shows were canceled.

“I checked myself into this treatment center for the burned out and soon to be burned up. My people kept it a secret. A hundred and sixty thousand later I was back on the stage, clean, and judging by my outward appearance, stronger than ever. Somewhere, some group gave me another award. Another spotlight. Another movie. Another number one. And then there was this biography that was supposed to tell how I’d gotten through it all.

“Anyway, my”—she held both hands in the air for more quotation marks—“ ‘biographer’ fills up this recorder and goes off to write it. Next thing I know, instead of sending me the draft to review, he’s selling my precious story to the highest bidder. Because he never signed a contract, there was little we could do to stop him. Where I hadn’t answered his questions, he filled in the blanks on his own, altering the context and many of the facts. By the time he was through, I looked like a very different person than when I look in the mirror. And he didn’t even know the worst parts.” Her finger unconsciously traced the scar on her wrist and then her hand traced the outline of the angered collar on her neck. She made eye contact with me. “In my experience, ‘time’ doesn’t prove one trustworthy and has very little to do with trust.”

“Then, if I were you, I wouldn’t trust me.”

“But I want to.”

“Then do.”

“But you just said, ‘don’t.’ ”

“Okay, don’t.”

A long pause. “Don’t you want people to trust you?”

“Did you learn to do that in acting?”

“What?”

“Pause like that. It was ‘pregnant.’ ”

“The camera does strange things to time. My timing is hardwired.”

I shook my head. “No. That’s why I live out here and why you and Steady are the only two people who know I exist.”

“Do you have family?”

“None that I know of.”

“Well, what do you know?”

“I know how to fish.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Will you teach me?”

“You want to learn?”

“I want to learn to do a lot of things I’ve never done.”

“You’ve never been fishing?”

She shook her head.

“Really. As in, never?”

“Not once.”

I tried to process this and spoke out loud. “That’s like saying, ‘I’ve never taken a breath before.’ ”

“So—” She slid her hand inside mine.

“I tend to spend a lot of long hours on the boat. Often daylight to dark, and the only bathroom is the one off the back. As in, out in the open. Sound travels. Not much privacy.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Is this important to you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She held on to my hand for a bit longer. “Before we go, tell me one thing about yourself.”

“Why must you know?”

“What’s the harm? Just one thing. I mean—” She waved her
hand across the cabin,
Evinrude
. “How can you afford all this? We both know you’re no hermit. No man devoted to penance and prayer. And I’m pretty sure your name isn’t Sunday.”

She was good. A quick study. “I was in manufacturing. I owned a company. Took it public. Sold it at the height. Made some residuals off recurring sales. Now I fish.”

She had yet to let go of my hand. “And hide.”

I nodded. “Yes, I do that, too.”

“And your name?”

“I’d rather not.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“I told you I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Yeah, it’s getting you to talk that’s the tough part.” She tapped her front teeth with her fingernail. “Guess you’re stuck with ‘Gilligan.’ ”

She eyed me. As in, walked up and down me with her eyes. She said, “Is it difficult for you to be around me? I mean—” She ran her fingertips along the curves of her figure.

I shook my head. “No. Not really.”

“So, if I sunbathe without my bathing suit, you’re okay with that.”

I bit my bottom lip. “I’d probably go fishing while you did that.”

She shrugged me off. “You don’t think I’m pretty?”

“I’ve tried not to think about it.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause Steady asked me to care for you. Not—”

She nodded, half smiling. “You don’t need to be so flattering. It took a lot of money for me to look this way.”

“Really?”

She pointed to her chin. Then her nose. Above her eyes. And finally, her breasts.

“Well—”

She chuckled. “Your face is turning red.”

“Look, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with women.”

“You gay?”

“No, I just mean I don’t date much.”

“When was the last time you went on a date?”

“About eleven years ago.”

“You ever been married?”

I shook my head.

She raised an eyebrow. She was a quick study. “You ever been with a girl?”