Tropical Depression (30 page)

Triumphantly, Murray looked around the table.

Bert d'Ambrosia stroked his drowsing dog. "But he still don't have a place ta live."

"Will ya let it go already?" the Bra King said to him. "Since when are you such a
nuhdge
?"

"Forty thousand's enough for a houseboat," Tommy said. "A nice one. That's all I wanted out of this—to get back to where I started from."

There was a pause. A south breeze carried the smell of iodine from the ocean. Palm fronds scratched and rattled, there was soft splashing from the pool. Across the Paradiso's edenic quadrangle, the senator's penthouse was dark, its curtains drawn.

Old Bert petted his chihuahua. "Bahney's beyond shame," he said. "I'd be very surprised if at this point Bahney even cares about a scandal."

They finished their coffee. Bert got up to leave. Tommy, embracing his old life with the chastened gratitude of a man returned from a bold but calamitous furlough, resolved to hitch his cart of shells to his rusty bike and reclaim his spot in the shade of the southernmost banyan.

Murray walked them to the elevator, and when he came back he found Franny kneeling on the floor of her room, folding clothes into her suitcase. He watched her just a moment before she noticed him, watched her small efficient hands, noted the calm pleasure in her face as she composed a neat mosaic of cotton and linen.

She looked up and said, "You think he'll be satisfied, doing what he did before?"

Murray shrugged. "Ya think about it, it wasn't bad. His own boss. Outdoor work. Who knows, maybe we'll find a business, go into it together."

"You tried that," Franny said.

"So maybe we'll try again. Ya know, he needs me to look out for him."

Franny let that slide. "And the drinking?" she said. "You think he'll go back?"

Her ex-husband shrugged again. A shrug seemed the most honest answer to questions about the heart and mind of another human being, even when that person was a friend, a man whose tribal recollections and forgettings were not so very different from one's own.

A moment passed. Murray looked at Franny, kneeling in her yellow smock. Her room was narrow, it had a single bed, it was like a child's room, or a nun's, it made him shy, he felt rude and blockish standing in the doorway. He heard himself say, "Franny, I really wish you'd stay with me."

She said nothing, just bit her lip and kept on folding clothes.

"We're meant to be together," he said. "Isn't it obvious? Ya don't just turn your back on that."

"You did," she said.

"I was a schmuck. You're smarter than I am."

She didn't disagree.

"Can't we try at least?" he said. "Put me on probation."

She kept packing.

"I'd do anything, Franny. I'd go anywhere. I'd ... I'd give up Prozac."

Franny primped the shoulders of a pale blue shirt, laid it next to a pair of khaki shorts. "You already have," she softly said.

"Excuse me?"

His ex-wife kept on folding. "You haven't had Prozac since I've been here."

Murray's stomach churned inside his bathrobe. His jaw flopped open like the jaw of a skeleton, his eyebrows rose like they were pulled with wires.

"First thing I did," she went serenely on. "I opened the capsules, flushed the Prozac, put in zinc."

The Bra King felt dizzy. He stared vacantly into the room. Walls no longer met at corners, the ceiling seemed to tip. He shuffled numbly across the carpet and sat slumped on the edge of Franny's bed.

"Zinc," he whispered. "Zinc," he said, more firmly. "Zinc?!" he hissed. "I'm fighting the Mafia, making split-second judgments on matters of life and death, on
zinc
?!"

"Don't exaggerate," said Franny.

Murray sat there, as utterly at sea as an executive who's just been fired.

"Although," his former wife conceded, "the way you rescued me, that was pretty clever."

"I thought so," Murray whispered.

Franny started packing sandals and sneakers, packed them soles-out, like a border, around the edges of her suitcase.

"But ya know," the Bra King mused, "it's weird, Prozac or no, I haven't felt depressed in awhile."

"Because you've been too busy," Franny said, "to take your temperature every fifteen minutes."

Murray leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. "No," he said, "it's because you've been here."

His ex-wife looked at him over her shoulder, rather grudgingly. "Very flattering," she said. "Probably untrue. But Murray—worrying about your moods, taking care of you, this is not my mission in life."

He pushed his lips out, thought that over. "You sure?"

Franny looked exasperated, made small adjustments in her already perfect packing job.

"I mean," said Murray, "think about it. Bras. Casinos. Crooked politicians. Gorillas throwing sno-cones. What I'm asking—be honest now—I'm asking, ya look around, ya see this craziness, this nonsense, people making themselves miserable over stupid things—ya see all that, and are ya really sure there's anything more important, more worthwhile, than that two people, they should take care of each other?"

Franny said nothing, lowered the lid of her suitcase. Piled clothes kept it from shutting tight, it needed pushing down but she didn't push it.

"Really, Franny—can you look me in the eye and tell me you've got something more important to do than be my wife? 'Cause I'm telling you, I know it plain as the nose on my face, I've got nothing more important than to be your husband."

She half-turned on her knees, the carpet rubbed her skin. "Murray," she said, "you're driving me crazy."

"So what else is new?"

"After everything you've put me through—"

"Right, Franny. After everything, here we are, you and me."

He reached a hand out toward her. She looked at it, smiled at it as at a daydream, didn't take it.

"Listen," he said, undaunted. "I have an idea. This room, this . . . this dormitory—this is no place to talk about our future. How about we continue this discussion in the bathtub?"

She sat back on her haunches, sighed.
This Murray
, she thought, as she had thought with wary stubborn fondness a million times before, as many times as she had rehearsed her reasons for never seeing him again.

"Steam," he said. "Relaxation. Warm jets on the lower back. We'll unwind. We'll plan a vacation."

"We're on vacation," Franny said.

"We'll plan a better one," said Murray. "I'll run the water. Whaddya say?"

She said nothing.

But Murray didn't need an answer. Prozac or no Prozac, brain juices were gushing, jolts of hope made his movements angular, decisive. He stood, went to his room.

Franny looked down at her suitcase. One push, one little push, would be enough to slam it shut.

Murray peered through the window of the master suite, saw palms swaying like island dancers, fronds dipping and lifting like hiked-up skirts. He walked around the unmade bed, turned on the water good and hot in the gigantic jetted tub.

Franny got up from the floor, sat on the rumpled place where Murray had been sitting. She stared across the narrow room, spilled her thoughts against the blankness of the wall. She thought about the losses that you couldn't help and the losses that you could.

*****

Murray watched the water swirl, saw the heat rise up to fog the mirror. He took his robe off, hung it on a peg, and gingerly stepped in.

Franny winced just slightly, thought about the hurtful things that people sometimes did, the unthinkable mistakes, how much they mattered, and how much they didn't. How big a loss, how big a damaged part of your own life, could you cut away before you'd cut off more than you could ever find again?

Murray leaned back in the hot and roiling water. He was confident and he was terrified, he knew his wife would come to him, he knew that she would leave. He closed his eyes, counted to ten, opened them again. In his mind he saw her stepping through the doorway, her face wreathed in steam and forgiveness, her hair curled very tightly by the damp. He pictured her; he hoped; he waited, and the hot caressing water rose around him like a swiftly flooding tide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR— Laurence Shames has set eight critically acclaimed novels in Key West, his former hometown. Now based in California, he is also a prolific screenwriter and essayist. His extensive magazine work includes a stint as the Ethics columnist for
Esquire.
In his outings as a collaborator and ghostwriter, he has penned four
New York Times
bestsellers, under four different names. This might be a record. To learn more, please visit
http://www.LaurenceShames.com
.

ALSO BY LAURENCE SHAMES—

FICTION—

Florida Straits

Scavenger Reef

Sunburn

Virgin Heat

Mangrove Squeeze

Welcome to Paradise

The Naked Detective

NON-FICTION

The Big Time

The Hunger for More

Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

IF YOU LOVED TROPICAL DEPRESSION, BE SURE TO CATCH LAURENCE SHAMES' NEXT NOVEL, VIRGIN HEAT

Paranoia doesn't sleep; a guilty conscience looks over its shoulder forever.

Ziggy Maxx, nearly a decade after he took that name and the new face that went with it, still hated to be photographed, still flinched like a native whenever a camera lens was aimed at him.

Cameras were aimed at him often. A bartender in Key West, he was a prop in a million vacations, an extra in the memories of hordes of strangers. He was scenery, like the scabbed mahogany tree that dominated the courtyard at Raul's, like the purple bougainvillea that rained down from its trellis above the horseshoe bar. The bougainvillea; the beveled glass and polished teak; the burly barkeep in his mostly open shirt with faded palm trees on it—it made a nice picture, a travel poster, almost.

So people shot Ziggy with Nikons, Minoltas, with cardboard disposables that cost ten bucks at any drugstore. They'd raise the camera, futz with a couple seconds, then they'd harden down and squint, exactly like a guy about to squeeze a trigger. If the barkeep wasn't quick enough to dodge and blink, to wheel discreetly like an indicted businessman, the flash would make green ovals dance before his throbbing eyes.

Every time he was captured on film he felt the same archaic panic; every time, he had to soothe himself, to murmur silently, Hey, it didn't matter, no one would recognize the straightened nose with the dewdrop septum, the chin plumped and stitched out of its former cleft, the scalp clipped and sewn so that the hairline, once a prowlike widow's peak, was no a smooth curve, nondescript. Hell, even nine years after surgery, there were hungover mornings when he himself didn't recognize that fabricated face, thought his bathroom mirror had become a window with a dissipated stranger leering through it, begging for an aspirin.

Still, he hated having his picture taken. The worry of it, on top of the aggravation from his other job, sometimes gave him rashes on his elbows and behind his knees.

The guys with videocams, they were the worst.

Like this guy right here, thought Ziggy, glancing briefly at one of his customers. Typical tourist jerk, fifty-something, with a mango daiquiri in front of him and a Panasonic beside him on the bar. Shiny lime-green shirt. The round red cheeks of a clown, and a sunburned head peeling already under thin hair raked in oily strings across the hairless top. Next to him, his wife—pretty once, with too much makeup, too much perfume, sucking on a frozen margarita, her lips clamped around the straw as though claiming under oath that nothing of larger diameter had ever penetrated there. Tourists. It was early April, the ass-end of the season, and Ziggy Maxx was sick to death of tourists. Sick of being asked where Hemingway really drank. Sick of preparing complex, disgusting cocktails with imbecilic names—Sputnik, Woo Woo, Sex on the Beach. Sick of lighting cigarettes for kindergarten teachers from Ohio, Canadian beauticians; nice women, probably, but temporarily deformed and made ridiculous by an awkward urge to misbehave.

A regular gestured, and Ziggy reached up to the rack above his head, grabbed a couple beer mugs, drew a couple drafts. His furry back was damp inside his shirt; Key West was then poised between the wholesome warmth of winter and the overripe, quietly deranging heat of summer. By the thermometer, the change was subtle; still, it was all-transforming. Daytime temperatures went up only a few degrees, but they stayed there even after sunset and straight on through the night. The breeze diminished, the air sat there and congealed, grew freighted like a soggy sheet with remembered excess. Sober winter plants died back, were overwhelmed by the exorbitant rude growths of the tropics—butter-yellow flowers as big and brazen as trombones, the traveler palm whose leaves were taller than a man, weird cactuses that dreamed white blossoms in the middle of the night.