Queen of the Underworld (5 page)

The builder had been a speculator, hoping to cash in on what, before World War II, had been covenanted as an exclusive planned community, with limited commercial activity: “for Caucasians only, no lot to be sold to anyone having more than one quarter Hebrew or Syrian blood.”

But when the builder finished the first villa in 1947, nobody wanted to buy it. Hotels were springing up all around—so much for the “limited commercial activity”—and the new ordinances forbade covenants from containing such restrictive language anymore. Several minor embassies in turn had leased the villa, but no legation had ever moved in. After the builder defaulted on his loan, Paul bought the villa from the bank at auction.

During the war (“You’d just started to grade school”) the long swath of undeveloped oceanfront had been the Army Air Corps’s rifle range.

“You’d see the boys lying single file all along the empty beach, aiming at targets set up along an embankment. No hotels in sight then, no Kenilworth-by-the-Sea, no Ivanhoe, no Americana. Clark Gable lay on his belly on the sand firing out to sea with the rest of them. Without his famous moustache; the Army shaved it off. He trained for the officers’ corps here, you know. Later we had a prisoner-of-war camp on the bay side, mostly Germans captured in the North African campaign. If the barracks were still standing, you could look out and see them from my card rooms upstairs. The prisoners did street repairs along Collins Avenue.

“One afternoon my mother came out of her beauty shop and this POW remarked on her hairdo in German, not expecting her to understand. It was complimentary, but a little too familiar, she said, so she answered him back in his own language and did it take the wind out of
his
sails.”

“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t he have been pleased?”

“Because her German was High German and his was Low. It was a class thing. He wouldn’t have dared to address her on the street if they’d been back in Leipzig.”

“I feel so abysmally ignorant sometimes.”

“Not ignorant, just insulated. It’s natural, you’re an American.”

“But so are you.”

“By birth, yes, but when you’re an only child raised by a mother who recites poetry to herself in French or German and speaks Yiddish on the phone with her friends, and cooks and furnishes the apartment like she’s still back in the Old Country, you’re a different breed of American.”

Tonight Paul drove past the darkened front of P. Nightingale’s, past the tall, wrought-iron gate with its portals topped with golden birds whose eyes glowed red at night during the winter season.

We went around on a side street to the bay entrance. He clicked a hand gadget and the villa’s rear gates floated open, then swung shut behind us as soon as we were inside the courtyard.

“Magic,” I said.

“You never seen one of these before? All the Mafia have them down here now.”

He came around to open my door, old-fashioned-gent style, and I sat with my hands folded on my lap, the agreeable anticipation of getting everything I wanted rising in me, and relished my alien man gliding around to release me into the dark compound of his kingdom.

“Welcome to my private entrance. It’s a different world on the bay side, isn’t it? Especially out of season with no one else around.”

“On this side it’s like, I don’t know, an ambassador’s villa by the sea.”

“Watch out, this girl’s a writer. Shall we take a look at the ambassador’s hideaway upstairs?”

I’d been upstairs when I came at Christmastime for my interview at the
Miami Star,
but I’d gone up from the club side, accompanied by Bev alone, who’d been giving me a tour of the card rooms with their green baize tabletops and wet bars, and the roulette wheel hidden behind a big painting of a fox hunt in the largest room.

“As far as I’m concerned, this part of the operation we could do without,” Bev had said, marching me along snappily. We were both wearing spike-heeled sandals from her closet; she’d vetoed my college-girl pumps as “too old-maidish” and run-down at the heels. “Paul and I don’t get paid extra for the risks and all the
tsuris
so our members can feel they’ve got the best of La Gorce
and
Vegas, but it’s all part of Paul’s hospitality
shtick.
He wants to make it up to them for all those nasty signs they had to bicycle past in their childhoods.”

“Are the members all Jewish?”

“Oh no, we’ve got our noble smattering of goyim. Mostly friends of other members or dice-rollers who dig our wall setup”—flipping her frosted nails airily toward the painting—“our dear down-home foxhunting scene from the old shtetl.”

It always struck me as funny that Bev, of the goyim herself, liberally decorated her remarks with expressions taken from Yiddish, whereas Paul hardly ever availed himself of that colorful lexicon.

I’d briefly looked in on Paul’s bedroom at Christmastime, with commentary by Bev: “He stays overnight when the card rooms are busy. Sometimes there’s an argument and he has to provide his calming influence. I offered to fix the room nicely for him, but he preferred hand-me-downs from Aunt Stella.”

Last December, Paul had put me up at the Kenilworth, where I paid my own bill—with his money. He visited me in the afternoons and then “officially” picked me up around eight in the evening for dinner and dancing at the club with him and Bev and sometimes Aunt Stella, who would wear one of her ancient Chanel suits from when she worked for Guerlain in Paris in the thirties.

By the time we arrived, Nightingale’s would be in full swing with the charcoal smells, the dance band, the stand-up comedians making jokes against themselves (a perplexing new brand of humor for me), the noisy exchanges between tables. The members were friends who’d grown up together on the Beach, had gone to the same high school, belonged to the same synagogue, did business with one another all week, and most of them old enough to remember bicycling past those notices on the lawns, the word “Restricted” on the marquees of hotels, the signs in the windows of a certain rooming house on the causeway—
EVERY ROOM WITH A VIEW WITHOUT A JEW
—that the landlord took down only after convoys of American soldiers began to use that route and military headquarters complained.

Bev suspected nothing. She considered me her ingénue, ever since she’d taught me how to walk properly. She knew—indeed, had suggested it herself—that Paul drove me back to college at the end of the summer while she and Stella stayed behind to close the Inn. When I came to Miami last Christmas for my interview at the
Star,
she, along with Paul and Aunt Stella, had had her fingers crossed that I would get this coveted job. She also believed that, though Paul got me a special rate, I was paying my own hotel bill with Christmas money from a rich aunt in Alabama.

There was one close call when Paul and I were in bed in my room at the Kenilworth and she phoned up from the lobby to announce she had come to take me shopping. That was the day we bought the low-cut black dress I was wearing tonight. It was expensive and she wanted to pay half.

“Oh, Bev, I couldn’t,” I said, admiring myself in the three-way mirror.

“Okay, go ahead. Deny me my
nakhes.
”

“What are ‘knockas’?”

“Yiddish for the satisfaction parents get when their child does well.”

“But I haven’t done well yet.”

“Emma, you’re a work of art in that dress. And you’re going to be a college graduate in six months. The world is yours. Won’t you let me put my money on it?”

“Well, thank you, if you’re sure.” Our eyes met in the mirror and it struck me that in this dress and with our pink-and-white complexions and look-alike French twists we could pass as relatives. Not mother and daughter: though Bev was old enough to be my mother, she simply didn’t come across as motherly. She’d told me once, with no sign of regret in her voice, that she couldn’t have children even before the hysterectomy, and nothing more was said. Perhaps my older, glamorous, more worldly-wise sister, then? Or, I remember fantasizing this as our eyes met in the mirror, a pair of courtesans, the younger in training to the older, both under the care of the same protector.

P
AUL HAD
a fetish about cleanliness, intensified, he thought, by Aunt Stella’s stories about never being able to get clean enough in the French internment camp before she got her visa to come and live with him and his mother in Florida. Paul’s first lover’s compliment to me, as we lay coiled around each other, had been that I smelled clean all over.

“You’d be surprised how many women neglect their hygiene,” he confided dismally. “I’m talking about fastidious, well-groomed women who need two hours to make up their faces before anyone’s allowed to see them. Their oversight is just a fact of life, I guess, but it makes
him
wither right up. None of my family were practicing Jews, but there’s something to be said for those ritual baths couples take separately before having sex on the weekends.”

Because Loney had often hinted to me that lack of attention to “down there” could lead to loathsome disorders, I had from an early age been scrupulous about my nether regions. But after Paul’s first compliment, I became overenthusiastic and burnt my insides once or twice with strong douches I bought at the drugstore.

“I think you’ll find everything you need in the bathroom,” Paul said when we were inside his bedroom at the club. “You’re welcome to my dressing gown, it’s on the hook inside the door.”

On our quick Christmas tour of Paul’s quarters at P. Nightingale’s, Bev hadn’t included the bathroom, and I was surprised by its sleek fixtures and thick towels. I had been imagining something more like the camplike facilities in the cabin Paul had let me use last summer when I was working at the Nightingale Inn.

I toed off my shoes, folded my dress on the cushioned wicker bench, tucking stockings and underwear out of sight, and turned on both sink faucets medium force and refreshed my hygiene, although I’d gone over myself thoroughly back at the Julia Tuttle. I then briskly rubbed down my whole body to give it a glow and dropped the towel into the wicker hamper. I undid my French twist and laid the hairpins on the marble counter, being sure to remove all stray hairs so Paul wouldn’t be put off by any untidiness if he had to use the bathroom. I examined the figure in the mirror. I was well proportioned and several boyfriends had told me I looked best in the altogether.

Paul was waiting for me under the covers. “That robe suits you. I’ll make you a present of it.”

“What will you wear, then?”

“I’ll get another one. We can be twins.”

I slid in beside him. When our bodies touched he gave a little gasp.

His body was years younger than his face. There was something touchingly boyish about it. Slim and rather soft-muscled, much paler than his face and neck, with just a few sprigs of curly hairs in the middle of the chest, none of them gone gray like on his head.

“Oh,” he shuddered, slipping inside me in one smooth motion.

The blackout curtains that covered all the upstairs bay-side windows of the club were drawn in this room also. “No need for things to look too busy up here,” Bev had commented during our Christmas tour of Paul’s quarters. “It’s nobody’s business outside how many card rooms are in use, or whether the owner is sleeping over or not.”

Paul’s green-shaded desk lamp cast us in a flattering underwatery light: two enfolded creatures in their passion aquarium.

“We’re plugged in again,” said Paul.

“Yes.”

It really was like being recharged, and I could feel the same current going through him. Joining with Paul was a planet away from my previous experiences with men. Connecting with him always made me feel fortified rather than raided. He really
was
my alien lover, from a place where lovemaking was practiced as a precise and artful mutual refueling. Each time I came away sharper and stronger and he came away happier.

But tonight, as he separated from me, I felt bereft and started to cry.

I don’t know which of us was more surprised. For a whole year we had been cunningly building toward living in the same city, and here I was sobbing as though we were about to say goodbye forever.

“Hey, kid, what’s going on here?”

“I suddenly had this feeling I’m going to lose you.”

“Because I have to go away for three days? I told you I’ll be back for your birthday.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Then what? You were never like this when we had to say goodbye for much longer periods of time.”

“I don’t know what, but when we separated just now I had this awful feeling, it was so strange, I’d get dressed and you’d drive me back to the hotel and tomorrow I’d go out into a different world and we’d never be as close again.”

He had been poised above me in an awkward half push-up, but now he pulled me to him and turned us sideways so I lay sobbing into the armpit of the shoulder that supported me.

With his free hand he covered us up with a sheet and then gently traced his fingers up and down my spine.

“You
are
going out into a different world tomorrow,” he said in a gentle, fatherly voice, which only set me off again. “It’s what you’ve been working for all these years, and look what you’ve already accomplished. You’re not even twenty-two yet, not until Thursday. When I was your age, I was night clerk at the Miramar, which didn’t even have its own postcard. I was a skinny little Jew boy with no college who still lived at home with his mother and had no idea what he was good for. And look at you. Educated, talented, and determined. You know what you want and you’re already good at it. You got here on your own steam, and tomorrow your rise to fame and fortune begins. No, I mean it. I trust my instincts and my instincts tell me you’re gonna make it, regardless of setbacks.”

He continued to run his fingers softly up and down my spine, as though he were annointing my backbone with his faith in me.

“I’ll never forget you stepping down from that bus last June. Jesus Christ, here I’d come to pick up the fresh, appealing college girl I’d hired the day before in Mountain City, and out comes . . . Well, you were a pretty grim sight with that shiner.”