Sunburn (2 page)

The second thing that occurred to Arty Magnus was what a maddening and undodgeable pain it was to see one's parents get old and slow and grouchy and alone, to see them insulted by sickness and abandoned by time, useless in the world's eyes and eventually their own. He made bold to put a hand on Joey's forearm. "It's tough," he said. "It's really tough. But there's only so much you can do."

"Yeah," said Joey, "I know, I know. That's why I was thinking, a book maybe ..."

"Joey, listen," the editor said. "I don't want to sound discouraging. Your father wants to think through his memories, write them down—hey, I think that's great. If he thinks of it as a book, what's the harm? But between us, Joey, a book is a different kind of thing. It isn't finger painting. It isn't just somebody remembering."

Joey put a couple of fingers around his glass, helped the streams of condensation run down to the bottom. "Yeah, I'm sure you're right," he said. "I mean, you've done it, right?"

It was an innocent question, it wasn't meant to needle, but it found Arty Magnus's sorest spot as sure as a blast of dentist's air finds the hole in a tooth. No, he hadn't written a book, though he'd meant to for as long as he could remember. He'd meant to write one in college, he'd meant to write one in grad school; he'd filled several dozen spiral notebooks with ideas, sketches, observations. He'd meant to write a book while living in New York, and six years ago, when he'd moved to Key West, part of his reason had been the hackneyed and half-ironic belief that that would be a good place to write a book. But he hadn't.

He'd done a lot of things instead, been impressively resourceful at finding things to do instead.

He'd helped elevate the Sentinel from a fifth-rate paper to a third-rate one. He'd learned to sail a boat. He'd become a fair fisherman and, to his own surprise, an impassioned gardener. But he was forty-one years old, a few silver wires were beginning to wind like tinsel through the brown corkscrews of his hair; it had lately dawned on him that all those ingenious insteads had so far used up half his life, give or take a few years.

Joey looked sideways at him and knew he'd said the wrong thing. "Hey." He back-pedaled. "Doesn't matter."

They drank. Behind the busy bar, Cliff the bartender was in his glory. He had a cocktail shaker in either hand, was taking an order from a fat guy in a lime-green tank top and carrying on a conversation with a plastered redhead. Arty Magnus looked straight ahead and waited for the sting of this book thing to subside. Then he figured it would subside faster if he distracted himself by playing journalist.

"But Joey, your old man: you really think he has a story?"

"Yeah," said Joey. "I really do."

Arty gave a noncommittal nod and tried to picture what Joey Goldman's father must be like. What would his name be? Abe Goldman? Sol Goldman?

A little old Jewish guy not unlike Arty's own father, a retired CPA, warm, decent, unfascinating, a man of lengthy anecdotes and jokes with forgotten punch lines, who at that moment was either playing rummy, striving for a bowel movement, or watching the market final up in Vero Beach.

"Why?" said Arty. "What makes you think he has a story?"

But now Joey got shy. He had dark blue eyes that were a little surprising against his jet-black hair, and when he got to feeling bashful they narrowed down; the long lashes shaded them like awnings. "I dunno. Maybe he doesn't."

Arty Magnus, reluctant newspaperman, had done a one-eighty, had come to feel that maybe he did. "His background? War experience? Wha'?"

"I dunno, Arty. Let it go, it's probably a dumb idea."

"Nah, come on, Joey," the editor coaxed. "If there's really something there—"

Joey Goldman sighed. He leaned a little lower across the padded bar, twined his fingers, and cast wary upward glances over both his shoulders. He pursed his lips, then gave an instant's worth of nervous smile that was erased almost before it could be glimpsed. "Arty, are we, whaddyacallit, off the record heah?"

"Of course we are," said Arty Magnus, but he said it a little too blithely for Joey's taste. Joey raised a single finger, and his face took on a look that Arty had never seen before. It was a look not of threat, exactly, but of purpose and of a solemn pride that carried with it a burden and a sadness. The slight cleft in Joey's chin grew suddenly deeper, his skin appeared suddenly more shadowed with the full day's growth of beard.

"No shit now," he said. "Off the record?"

Magnus, slightly chastened, slightly rattled, said, "Yeah, Joey. Yeah."

Joey Goldman sat up straight, gently tugged the placket of his shirt, gave his neck a rearranging twist. He put his palms flat on the bar, leaned close to Arty Magnus, and softly said, "My old man, he's the Godfather."

The blender was slushing up a batch of frozen daiquiris. The air conditioner was whining. There were conversations all around them, and here and there cigarette lighters were rasping into flame.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"Cut it out."

But Joey just looked at Arty, and Arty understood he wasn't kidding. He drained his beer, held the empty bottle against his lips an extra second, and tried to think. Then he said, "Goldman?"

"Try Delgatto," Joey said. "Vincente Delgatto."

"Holy shit," said Magnus.

Joey lifted an eyebrow. The momentary hardness had gone out of his face, was replaced by a wry look, a little bit self-mocking but tempered by years of settling into the oddness of his beginnings and making a life that by now felt hardly odd at all. "So whaddya think?" he said. " 'Zere a book there?"

"Jesus Christ," said Magnus.

"Well, do me a favor," Joey said. "Fuhget we talked about it. It's a very dumb idea."

"It isn't dumb—"

"It's impossible. It's against everything the old guy thinks is right. He'd never do it. It's just tavern talk."

"But—"

"Nah, I shouldn'ta brought it up. I guess I figured, Hey, you work for the paper, you probably know guys who write books."

Magnus put his bottle down and twisted it against his soggy coaster. The noise of the bar flooded in on him, surrounded him like puffs of cotton, both buffered him and kept him pinned. "Guys who write books," he said. "Yeah, I know a few."

"OK, ya don't want religious, fine, it don't have to be religious. But I'm tellin' ya, really, somethin's gotta go there. A birdbath, a Cupid, a fountain, somethin'. The way it is, it's like . . . naked."

Sandra Dugan nodded, smiled politely, and let her father-in-law continue with his decorating advice. They were standing out on the patio, which was, in feet, somewhat radically austere. An expanse of chalky flagstone gave onto an apron of pale blue tile around the pool; on the far side were clustered a few simple lounges. A modest iron table and chairs hunkered under a broad umbrella. Beyond the flagstones, there was no lawn, just white gravel; palms sprouted wherever there was earth for them to root. Aralia and oleander hedges framed the property, and here and there herbs and flowers sprouted in clay pots that reminded Sandra of the French Riviera, a place she had never been.

"And ovah heah," the Godfather was saying, "this empty corner, look, ya put a little love seat, ya have a guy build a trellis for ya, better still an arbor, like. Ya put grapes. Beautiful. Ya sit inna love seat, ya look up at grapes. Fabulous."

Sandra nodded. She wondered if she could possibly explain to Vincente that what she really enjoyed looking at was air. This, for a girl who'd grown up in cramped and cluttered Queens apartments, was the great novelty, the design breakthrough. Air. Not hassocks, drapes, or doilies. Not torch lamps, end tables, or souvenir ashtrays stuffed with crumpled butts. Not weird-shaped glasses with pink spiral stems, not decanters filled with colored water, not radiator covers with little octagons. . . .

"Or even, like, heah," Vincente said, "when you first come out the house. There's no drama to it, it's boom, all of a sudden you're onna patio. But maybe, some kinda archway like—"

———

Later, in bed, Sandra said, "Joey, I hate to complain, but it's getting to me, it's been almost two weeks, your father is driving me a little bit bananas. "

Joey swallowed his first impulse, which was to stand up for blood no matter what. Married just short of three years, he still sometimes had to remind himself who his life's true ally was. He exhaled slowly, stroked his wife's short blond hair.

"I know he means well," she went on, "but he's got this way about him. Like he knows what you want better than you know what you want. He's sweet but he's bossy."

"Force a habit," Joey said. "He's the Boss."

"Not in my house, he isn't," Sandra said.

Joey leaned back on his pillow and pondered this. He knew his wife was right, and it was a breathtaking notion: They were the grownups here, this was their place; they owned it and they ran it. True, the old man might occasionally conduct his coded business on their phone, might now and then commandeer the study to receive an emissary from New York or Miami, but it was still their house, it lay beyond his father's power like an embassy lay beyond the power of the country it was standing in.

"Joey, try to understand. I just don't like someone telling me I need more furniture. I don't like someone telling me I need a carpet. It's my dining room, I don't want a stupid chandelier—"

"Sandra," Joey interrupted. "Coupla days, Gino'll be down. "It'll take some a the pressure off."

Her green eyes glinted a faint silver in the dimness. "Gino? Take the pressure off? That'd be a first."

Sandra, on a roll, was right again. Had Gino Delgatto, Joey's older, legitimate half-brother, ever in his life made anything easier for anybody? Not that Joey could remember. Gino was a schemer, and not bright enough to keep his scheming simple. He pulled other people in, used them. Last time he'd been in Key West, he'd almost gotten Joey whacked. True, that misbegotten caper had bankrolled Joey in his new, civilian, perfectly legal career—but that hadn't been any thanks to his big brother.

"I just mean," Joey said, "Pop'll have someone else around, other things to talk about."

Outside, a light breeze made the palm fronds rattle, moved the thin curtains around the open bedroom windows. Moonlight filtered in. The air smelled of jasmine and cool sand.

"What kind of other things?" asked Sandra. "Hm?"

"Gino. Why's he really coming down? He's doing business in Florida again?"

"Sandra, hey, his mother just died. He wants ta spend some time wit' his father. 'Zat so hard t'understand?"

Joey didn't say it loudly, didn't get up on an elbow, but there was enough of a rasp in his voice to let Sandra know he shared her qualms about Gino's visit. It let her know, as well, that his restraint was about exhausted, that the reflex to stand up for blood might now be triggered by a single syllable. Sandra simply snuggled up against her husband's shoulder. When a marriage works, it is in no small part because a woman and a man have come to recognize in precise measure when enough has been said.

But while Sandra had griped and was now serene, Joey was less so. He blinked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, let it out so it puffed his cheeks. "Sandra," he said, "don'cha know why Pop is askin' ya these things? About carpets, statues, furniture?"

"He isn't asking me, Joey. He's telling me what—"

"He wants to buy us something. A housewarming, like. He's tryin'a figure out what you want. ... I know him, Sandra. Innee old days, he woulda took me aside and handed me cash. But money, ya gotta understand, money is a gift but it's also control, a way ta remind ya who ya gotta go to ta get it. Now he's tryin' ta do somethin' different. Somethin' for both of us. For the house. It's like his way a sayin', OK, ya got your own life now."

There was a silence. Shadows of palm trees played on the bedroom curtains.

"Now I feel like an ungrateful bitch."

"Nah, there's no reason for you to feel like that. Pop, he doesn't make it easy. I mean, someone else, he'd just say, 'Hey, I'd like ta get ya somethin',' you'd say 'Thank you,' and that'd be it. Wit' my old man, it's more complicated. His way, I guess he thinks it's more elegant, more dignified. More somethin'. It's like he's talkin' a different language. A language from a different time. T'understand it, I guess ya gotta know 'im a lotta years."

He paused. He pursed his lips, considered what he'd just explained to Sandra, and realized that he'd also just explained it to himself, but incompletely. He worked his arm under his wife's blond head, then added, "An' ya gotta give 'im the benefit a the doubt. I guess what I'm sayin', ya gotta love 'im."

The offices of the Key West
Sentinel
, like everything else about the paper, were shabby, cheap, and disheveled.

They were located on the second floor of an unhistoric building on a cheesy block of obnoxious Duval Street. To get to them, you squeezed into a corridor between a T-shirt shop and another T-shirt shop, then went up a narrow stairway that not infrequently smelled of urine or of barf. Behind a frosted glass door with flaking letters on it, a suite of tiny rooms snaked away. Dampness lived in the ancient wooden floor, it felt unwholesomely spongy underfoot; light came from egg-box fluorescents that made eyes nervous. Certain privileged cubbyholes had windows, certain privileged windows were equipped with archaic air conditioners. These air conditioners no longer refrigerated; they only dribbled condensation on the rotting floor and threw the same air back at you. Their real value lay in their pulsing, rumbling whine, a strangely restful noise that muted the bad amplified music, unmufflered motorcycles, and drunken cackles from the street.

It was around eight when Arty Magnus returned from the Eclipse Saloon. No one was working late, because at a paper like the Sentinel no one ever did. He went to his desk, switched on the AC and his obsolete computer, and opened up the bag of pretzels he'd brought for dinner. He hooked into the database, typed in the name
delgatto, vincente,
and started eating.