Winter 2007 (12 page)

“I’ll tell you later.” He
shifts onto his side. “So what do you want? What would make you happy?”

She sets the laptop on the
floor and comes over to the bed and makes a shooing gesture. “Scoot over. If
this is going to be a deep conversation, I want to lie down.”

He’s slow to move, but she
pushes onto the bed beside him and he’s forced to accommodate her. She plumps
the pillow, squirms about, and, once she’s settled facing him, arms shielding
her breasts, hands together by her cheek, she says, “I used to want to be a
singer. I was in love with Tori Amos, and I was going to be like her.
Different, but one of those chicks who plays piano and writes her own songs.
But I didn’t want it badly enough, so I just bummed around with music, gigged
with a few bands and like that. One of my boyfriends was a bartender. He taught
me the trade, and I started working bar jobs. It was easy work, I met some nice
guys, some not so nice. I was coasting, you know. Trying to figure it out. Now
I think, I’m pretty sure, I want to be a vet. Not the kind who prescribes pills
for sick cats and treats old ladies’ poodles for gout. I’d like to work out in
the country. Over in DuBarry, maybe, or down south in Broward. Cattle country.
That would make me content, I think. So I’m saving up for veterinary college.”
She grins, fine squint lines deepening at the corners of her eyes. “Someday
they’ll be saying stuff like, “Reckon we better call ol’ Doc Marley.”

He’s shamed, because this
is all new information; he’s known her for three years and never before asked
about her life. He recalls her singing about the house and being struck by her
strong, sweet voice, how she bent notes that started out flat into a strange
countrified inflection. He doesn’t know what to say.

“You look perplexed,” she
says. “You thought I was just an aging beach bunny, is that it?”

“That’s not it.”

“I suppose I am,
technically, an aging beach bunny. But I’m making a graceful transition.”

A silence, during which he
hears cars pass. The beach is extraordinarily quiet, all the spring breakers
sleeping in, waiting out the rain. He remembers a morning like this when he was
eleven, he and some friends rode their bikes down past the strip of motels
between Silver Beach and Main, hoping to see girls gone wild, and seeing
instead spent condoms floating in the swimming pools like dead marine
creatures, a lone girl crying on the sidewalk, crushed beer cans, the beach
littered with party trash and burst jellyfish and crusts of dirty foam, all the
residue of joyful debauch. It never changes. The gray light lends the
furnishings, the walls, a frail density and a pointillist aspect—it seems
the room is turning into the ghost of itself, becoming a worn, faded engraving.

“Why do you always act
scared around me, Cliffie?” Marley asks. “Even when we were together, you acted
scared. I know the age thing bothers you, but that’s no reason to be scared.”

“It’s complicated,” he
says.

“And you don’t want to talk
about it, right? Guys really suck!”

“No, I’ll talk about it if
you want.”

She looks at him
expectantly, face partly concealed by dirty blond strings of hair.

“It’s partly the age
thing,” he says. “I’m fifty-four and you’re twenty-nine.”

“Close,” she says.
“Thirty.”

“All right. Thirty. Turning
a year on the calendar doesn’t change the fact it’s a significant difference.
But mostly it’s this…blankness I feel inside myself. It’s like I’m empty, and
growing emptier. That’s what I’m scared of.”

“Well, I don’t pretend to
know much,” Marley says. “I could be wrong, but sounds to me like you’re
lonely.”

Could it be that simple?
He’s tempted to accept her explanation, but he’s reluctant to accept what that
may bring. Rain begins to fall more heavily, screening them away from the world
with gray slanting lines.

“What do you see in me?” he
asks. “I mean, what makes someone like you interested in a fifty-something used
car salesman with a bad back. I don’t get it.”

“Wow. Once you start them
up, some guys are worse than women. Out comes the rotten self-image and
everything else.” She glances up to the ceiling, as if gathering information
written there. “I’ll tell you, but don’t interrupt, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’re friends. We’ve been
friends for going on four years, and I like to think we’re good friends. I can
count on you in an emergency, and you can count on me. True?”

He nods.

“You make my head quiet,”
she says. “Not last night, not when I’m in party mode. But most of the time,
that’s how I feel around you. You steady me. You treat me as an equal. With
guys my age or close, I can tell what’s foremost on their mind, and it’s always
a battle to win their respect. Like with Tucker. That may explain why I’ve got
this thing for older men. They don’t just see tits and a pussy, they see all of
me. I’m speaking generally, of course. I get lots of horny old goats hitting on
me, but they’re desperate. You’re not desperate. You don’t have a need to get
over on me.”

“That might change,” he
says.

She puts a finger to his
lips, shushing him. “Everything changes, everybody’s kinky for something. Some
guy shows up at my door with a muskrat, a coil of rope, and three pounds of
lard, that’s where I draw the line. But normal, everyday kinks…They’re cool.”
She shrugs. “So it changes? So you’re fifty-four with a bad back? So I’m kinky
for older men? So what? And in case you’re going to tell me you don’t want to
be a father figure, don’t worry. When I’m around you, I’m always wet. Some
times more than others, but it’s pretty much constant. I don’t think of you as
my dad.” She blows air through her pursed lips, as if wearied by this
unburdening. “Fucking is just something I do with guys, Cliff. It doesn’t
require holy water and a papal dispensation. It’s not that huge a deal.”

“That’s a lie,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says after a
pause. “It’s a fairly huge deal. All right. But what I’m trying to say is, if
it doesn’t work out, I’ll cry and be depressed and hit things. My heart may
even break. But it won’t kill me. I heal up good.”

The rain beats in against
the window, spraying under the glass, drenching the ledge, spattering on the
floor, yet Marley doesn’t bother to close it. She sits up and, with a supple
movement, shucks her t-shirt. The shape of a bikini top is etched upon her skin
and in the half-light her high, smallish breasts, tipped by engorged nipples,
are shockingly pale in contrast to her tan. It strikes Cliff as exotic, a solar
tattoo, and he imagines designs of pale and dark all over her body, some so
tiny, they can only be detected by peering close, others needing a magnifying
glass to read the erotic message that they, in sum, comprise. She lies down
again, an arm across her tight, rounded stomach. Sheets of rain wash over the
window, transforming it into a smeary lens of dull green and silvered gray,
seeming to show a world still in process of becoming.

“So,” Marley says. “You
going into work today?”

“Probably not,” he says.

Chapter Seven

Before going into work the
following day, Cliff stops by the cottage. It’s a sunny, breezy afternoon and
all should be right with the world, but the stillness of the place unnerves
him. He peels police tape off the doors, hurriedly packs a few changes of
clothes and, an afterthought, tosses his copy of
Sword Of The Black Demon
into his bag. If things get uncomfortable at Marley’s, he’ll move to a motel,
but he has determined that he’s not going to spend another night in the cottage
until the situation is resolved, until he can be assured that there’ll be no
reoccurrence of blue witches and flashing lights and two-hundred-foot tall
swordsmen.

He pulls into Ridgewood
Motors shortly before two and, from that point on, he’s so busy that he
scarcely has a chance to glance at the Celeste. Jerry’s in a foul mood because
Stacey Gerone has run off and left him shorthanded.

“She’s been screwing some
rich old fart from Miami,” Jerry says. “I guess she blew him so good, he
finally popped the question. That bitch can suck dick like a two-dollar whore
in a hurricane.”

Dressed in his trademark
madras suit and white loafers, Jerry cocks an eye at Cliff, doubtless hoping to
be asked how he knows about Stacey’s proclivities; he’s brimming over with
eagerness to divulge his conquest.

Jerry’s pudgy, built along
the lines of Papa Smurf, with a tanning-machine tan like brownish orange paint
and a ridiculous toupee—he cultivates this clownish image to distract
from his nasty disposition. Thanks to this and an endless supply of dirty
jokes, ranging from the mildly pornographic to X-tra Blue, he’s in demand as a
speaker at Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce dinners and has acquired a reputation
for being crusty yet loveable. He acknowledges Cliff as a near-equal, someone
who has the worldliness to understand him, someone in whom he can confide to an
extent, and thus Cliff, knowing that Jerry will vent his temper on the other
salesmen if he doesn’t listen to him brag, is forced to endure a richly
embroidered tale of Jerry’s liaisons with Stacey, culminating with an act of
sodomy described in such graphic detail, he’s almost persuaded that it might
have happened, although it’s more likely that the verisimilitude is due to
Jerry’s belief that it happened, that through repetition his fantasy has become
real.

This is the first Cliff has
heard of the “rich old fart,” but he’s aware that Stacey played her cards close
to the vest and there was much he did not know about her. He tries to nudge the
conversation in that direction, hoping to learn more; but Jerry, made grumpy by
his questions, orders him out onto the lot to sell some fucking cars.

A little after five
o’clock, he’s about to close with a young couple who’ve been sniffing around a
two-year-old Bronco since the previous Friday, when Shalin Palaniappan strolls
onto the lot. She walks up to Cliff, ignoring another salesman’s attempt to
intercept her, and says, “Hi.”

Cliff excuses himself, steers
Shalin away from the couple, and says, “I’m in the middle of something. Let me
get somebody else to help you.”

“I want you,” Shalin says
pertly.

“You’re going to have to
wait, then.”

“I’ve waited this long. What’s
a few minutes more?”

With her baggy shorts and a
pale yellow T-shirt, her shiny black eyes, her shiny black hair in a ponytail,
her copper-and-roses complexion, she looks her age, fifteen or sixteen, a
healthy, happy Malaysian teenager; but he senses something wrong about her,
something also signaled by her enigmatic comment about waiting, an undercurrent
that doesn’t shine, that doesn’t match her fresh exterior, like that spanking
new Escalade with the bent frame they had in a few weeks before. He leaves her
leaning against a Nissan 350-Z and goes back to the couple who, given the time
to huddle up, have decided in his absence that they’re not happy with the
numbers and want more value on the toad they offered as a trade-in. Cliff feels
Shalin’s eyes applying a brand to the back of his neck and grows flustered. He
grows even more so when he notices a young salesman approach her and begin
chatting her up, bracing with one hand on the Nissan, leaning close, displaying
something other than the genial manner that is form behavior for someone who pushes
iron—then, abruptly, the salesman scurries off as if his tender bits have
been scorched. Most teenage girls, in Cliff’s experience, don’t have the social
skills to deal efficiently with the two-legged flies that come buzzing around,
yet he allows that Shalin may be an exception. The couple becomes restive; now
they’re not sure about the Bronco. Cliff, aware that he’s blowing it, passes
them off to John Sacks, a decent closer, and goes over to Shalin.

“How can I help you?” he
asks, and is startled by the harshness, the outright antipathy in his voice.

Shalin, looking up at him,
shields her eyes against the westering sun, but says nothing.

“What are you looking to
spend?” he asks.

“How much is this one?” She
pats the Nissan’s hood.

He names a figure and she
shakes her head, a no.

“Do you have a car?” he
asks. “We can be pretty generous on a trade-in.”

“That’s right. You always
take it out in trade, don’t you?”

Her snide tone is typical
of teenagers, but her self-assurance is not, and her entire attitude, one of
arrogance and bemusement, causes him to think that there’s another purpose to
her visit.

“I’m busy,” he says. “If
you’re not looking for a car, I have other customers.”

“Did you know I’m adopted?
I am. But Bazit treats me like his very own daughter. He caters to my every
whim.” She reaches into a pocket, extracts a platinum Visa card and waggles it
in his face. “Why don’t we look around? If I see something I like, you can go
into your song-and-dance.”

He’s tempted to blow her
off, but he’s curious about her. They walk along the aisles of gleaming cars,
past salesmen talking with prospective buyers, pennons snapping in the breeze.
She displays no interest in any of the cars, continuing to talk about herself,
saying that she never knew her parents, she was raised by an aunt, but she’s
always thought of her as a mother, and when the aunt died—she was nine,
then—Bazit stepped in. Not long afterward, they moved to America and
bought the Celeste.