Nine Island (10 page)

A few minutes later the girl-fragrant elevator came back to me, and I rode to my twenty-first floor. And thought about the fact that in the bordello and silver apartment across the way, and the spa downstairs, and bars and bathrooms up and down the Beach, and even in miniature Lino's
tower,
all sorts of sex were waged.

Lay in bed then and stared at the popcorn ceiling in the dark, bones grinding into the mattress.

It wasn't Fury really.

Just Time whetting his knife.

How long can you float in the hourglass pool?

Sudden glow beside my bed:

So?
wrote the Devil
. Ready to deal with me again?

A
NOTICE HAS
appeared in the mail room: next week will be elections for a new board.

Lino!

What do you think? I asked Tina.

She looked up from her logbook, braids jingling with beads. I don't know, she said. I just don't. What I do know is that there is always trouble, no matter what board we have. This one we have now? They've been here a
decade
. They will not leave peacefully.

So there will be trouble?

Oh yes, she said, and handed me my box.

Back on the balcony working on transmutation thirteen—halfway through, done with the stories of hunting and running and on to incest and sex-change—water
again
splashed my arm and, when I craned out to see her, my face.

For fuck's
sake
.

No one up there, only drops falling, bright with sun, out of the deep blue sky.

Stalked inside and down the dark hallway and out into the flaring light to the external stairway and up to the twenty-second floor and down that hall until I reached her door and knocked. Nothing. Knocked again,
pounded
—there was a stirring up and down the hall. Her door cracked open: an owlish face with a quiff of hair and eyes that were small and mean.

Come
on
, I said. I'm soaked.

I cannot do anything about it, she said.

What?

I have a garden. A garden needs water. There is nothing I can do.

You can water more carefully, that's what you can do!

I am doing the best I can, she said, and shut the door and locked it.

If your plants were inside, I bet you'd water better! I shouted at the wood.

When I turned around N stood at her door, sunlight flowing behind her.

Oh my, she said.

It's funny, I said, everyone drops things from their balconies on this floor!

Her head tilted, troubled.

I'm kidding, I said. It's just you and whatever it is you do out there and now this
woman
and her water.

Oh, right, N said.

Okay, I said. Okay. How are you?

Oh, and she let her hand and word float.

What do you think about the new board elections?

Well, she said. It'll be interesting no matter how it goes.

They all seem nuts.

Sure they are. She smiled and after a moment said, Do you know what Harry and Tom on the board call you? Professor Mermaid. Because, you know—she spread out her arms—there you are with the dictionaries and all. By the pool. In the
bikini
.

My face must have looked funny because she quickly said, No, no, they're not teasing you, they like that you swim and work hard. They
admire
it. They're
attracted
to you. If you like, you know, I could—

Attracted! I reeled down the hall. Okay, two eighty-year-old men are attracted to me, two men covered with barnacles. But okay, so is the duck. It doesn't mean they think I'm one of them. Do they?
Am
I? Is this how you find out? Patronizing doctors calling you Young Lady, innocent awful children calling you Old Lady?

• • •

Then, in the pool, after five hard laps, Fran stopped in the shallow end and fixed me with her eye.

Hi, Fran, I said.

She grunted. Guess we've met.

Sure have.

After a minute she said, Got a question for you.

(Oh, no: not again with the plants, pets, and—)

You mean the three Ps?

Huh, she said. Guess I've asked you before. So. You still got 'em?

Only two.

Speak up!

Only two Ps left for me, I said, and sent her a swift wave of pool water.

Bet I know which one you don't have. Well, the sooner you're done with 'em all the better. That's what I say. Join the club.

Hold your face
up
! I shouted in my head as I marched on the causeway, fiercely counting kegels.

Go get highlights,
wrote K.
I can tell from here the gray is showing. Men don't like gray. Reminds them of their grandmothers. Do it and send me a picture so I know it's true.

Lucky we've known each other since we were nineteen,
wrote the Devil
, so I know silence is how you say yes.

W
ELL, YOU KNOW: the devil you know.

GIMY
, he used to type, for me to figure out.

First I thought it meant
Get in my yard!

He said, Well, not exactly.

In fact it meant
God, I miss you
.

Who wouldn't trust a devil like that?

AIWITSONWY
.

I did enjoy figuring.

All I want is to spend one night—

So, yeah, the devil you
know
.

Medical necessity. Atrophy and all.

And won't count as a new partner, as gynecologists say.

Any new partners? they ask, with that casual lilt.

God
no, of course not. I stick with historic deadbeats.

Despite the ions spinning up there, singing siren songs.

T
here's the man
who hated real human females and decided to manufacture his own. He prepared drawings on architect's trace and molded three models the size of a Barbie until he had her right. Then he sculpted and rubbed and polished his dream, a life-size, candle-cool girl. Smooth, of course. Dream girls are smooth. Hair other than cascading from the top of her head? God, no, not on a dream girl.

L
ucky that at Publix
you can buy kits for home waxing, although more hands plus a mirror on the floor would help. I can't afford both waxing and highlights, and highlights I can't do myself. It hurts, waxing, either way, but at least this way it's cheap.

No swimming for a day to let the rashes subside.

It's only the Devil. What harm in that?

Swift shopping at Macy's. Cheap new dress.

I
WAS SITTING in a salon on the Beach, with tinsel all over my head, when a white BMW pulled up right outside the glass doors. A young woman swung in with tight jeans and high shoes and lively breasts and gold jingling from her ears and wrists, and she swept through the salon until she found the person she wanted, a woman having a keratin treatment, and got the keys or money she needed and swirled out again, leaving our chairs spinning.

What was that? I asked Richard, foil and paintbrush in his hands.

Oh, her, he said. She's nasty. I mean she's gorgeous but she's mean. She's one of the girls who does the boats.

The what?

You know, he said. You hire them to be on your boat. In a bikini and what all. You've seen them on the front of those yachts.

Just
be
on the boat? An ornament?

Or maybe more, he said and shrugged.

Cross between figurehead and hooker?

He didn't answer, but after a moment said, There was another girl like her who used to come in all the time—and come to think of it, just three weeks ago she was sitting right where you are now—and he looked at me in the mirror, his face very sunned and creased. She was getting her hair unruined, he said. She'd done so much awful stuff to it, I had to strip everything away and get right back to nothing and then, anyway. She was here getting done for a show that night—she didn't actually do the boats, she was a dancer or something at one of the clubs, but the same type as that one just now—and she left here gorgeous, although she was not a very nice person, I have to say. But the next morning she was found in a Dumpster.

What?

Maybe you saw the story.

No.

Mm-hmm. Burned up in a Dumpster.

We were silent as he wrapped strands of hair in foil. I looked at him in the mirror, smelled hot hair.

Burned? I said.

Mm-hmm. Someone threw her in and lit it, or maybe killed her first, not sure. I guess she made her boyfriend or whatever man mad, and he was one of those types. I forget the details. I think she was Russian, maybe Ukrainian. Who knows? Maybe he didn't even know her.

S
IRENS SCREAMED everywhere on the way home, trucks raging red over Alton and Dade. Smoke tumbled into the sky.

New notice in the mail room: old board out, new board in.

Good riddance! said Lino in the elevator. Told you I'd get rid of them.

He smiled with overlarge, overwhite teeth, eyes pink and small, a rabbit's.

S
EE THE FOLLOWING in blurred blue light, please, and please play it fast:

Devil takes a cab from the airport, sending curt message with thumbs as he rides. Devil gets in the building, gets in the door, has long arms and legs spidering around me at once, trips me down on the bed. Mirrored walls watch—all this in blue light. Drinks are drunk on the balcony, smoke sent in rings from his jaws to the sky. Cab is taken Beachward, scotch drunk by Devil, sunny magenta Camparis by me. Devil rarely meets my eyes, although when I catch his shady violet ones they are always looking and glance away fast. Punish him by making him come in by the Dumpsters. So N won't see, or Virgil. Ovid wouldn't like what he saw. Or at least what I remember, because this is what I do with the Devil: make sure I won't remember.

Bottles on the floor, twisted cloth, smoke.

Devil departs early as he talks on the phone, flush with the deal he's struck with the Heat. Striding past the girl-trees by the chlorine fountain, he flicks a cigarette at their bark.

I
MIGHT NOT have mentioned that my walls are mirrors.

Apartment came that way.

Showing you your bleak face no matter which way you turn.

Buster noses along the cold glass; patches of quicksilver are scratched away, black.

Also might not have mentioned the clock in the sky. Beyond Costa Brava and the Venetian, way over on the Beach, above the distant horizon of sea: a huge square of digital time.

Huge dancing light-girl west of the bay, and her mate, the huge clock to the east.

Beside the numbers, smoke keeps rising into the sky, a slow gray slanting tower.

Arson, maybe.

Maybe a girl.

W
ELL, THAT'S WHAT you get
, wrote K.
Doesn't mean you're ready to quit. That you even let him in is proof. Put on something nice and go sit in a bar and have a cocktail. So someone new with a pulse and a car will look at you, dammit, and remind you you're alive.

C
OULDN'T STAND
the apartment or Latin or poor Buster's howling anymore so went out. Walked not along the Venetian, but east.

As I crossed over the bridge, a yacht passed, beat booming around it. In the cabin, three men with drinks shouted over the music; on the prow lay two girls in bikinis. Both leaned on their elbows, toes pointed toward sea, long hair flitting, long legs bare, bare hips.

A posse of Jet Skiers roared by, musclemen in life jackets, engines roiling the surf. They whooped at the girls, bellowed pleasure and lust. The two sets of men, those on board and those on water, regarded each other, regarded the girls. Then all the men grinned and raised their glasses or fists to toast such splendid possessions.

The boat sped into a red ray of sun, and the girls on the prow: they flamed.

Walked north, away from the lounge chairs and plastic bottles jammed in the sand, walked north by thirty blocks. On the boardwalk: German family, two Latin ladies talking fast, skinny man selling crickets made of woven palm frond. Music thumped from hotels. But the farther north you walk the quieter it grows, until the boardwalk ends, and wooden steps take you to cool, pale sand.

A photo shoot. A guy was darting and pointing and shooting a young woman wearing only a thong. She rolled in the sand, rose to hands and knees, swung her hair and bare breasts and roared, then swiveled onto her back and scissored the sky, just a string of cloth between her tender inner world and everything else, broken bottles and jets and Dumpsters. Another woman danced behind the photographer and around him, finally pulled up her shirt, pulled it off, and flung herself on top of the other as her legs cut the sky. Three men had settled in solo spots fifty paces away, to watch. Two had their hands in their shorts.

Five blocks north lay something large at water's edge. From far away: beached dolphin? No: human, but not clear if male or female or what. It twisted, it wriggled; from the waist down, in frills of surf, swished back and forth a fish tail. Above the tail, a naked belly and thin, bare breasts, head flung back, eyes shut, red hair sweeping the sand. No camera to be seen. She stroked her belly with a ringed hand and looked so alone and private I wasn't sure whether to walk in the water and pass at her tail or walk behind her head. She didn't care. She swished her sequined tail in the froth, dragged her long red hair in the sand, held both breasts as she writhed, mascaraed eyes shut tight.

Someone is living on this beach.

Wrote my heel in the sand, to the sky.

R
AN
INTO
N
on
my
way
back
in.

Look at your hair, she said. How
glamorous
. Do you have a date?

No.