Nine Island (13 page)

F
AR OUT AT sea are waterspouts. Wavering lines of gray that dance between sky and sea or suddenly lift from the sea, disappear into cloud, then dip again, grow thick and blurred and race over the ocean. When exactly a waterspout becomes a tornado I'm not sure: over land vs. sea? A few clicks and I'd know, but I'd rather sit here on the balmy balcony and type with eyes far away, watching waterspouts waver. The smudged corollary of heat lightning, maybe. Watery corollary of smoke?

Hurricane in German =
Orkan
. The word used to sound to me like something alive. They'd rage over the Schwarzwald, ripping up pines being grown to be paper: I'd watch through our wide glass wall.

Forgot to mention July Fourth. Fireworks clear up the coastline. From the balcony I could see only the reflections of fireworks across the bay in the windows of Costa Brava, but at least they gave the sound for the others far to the north that I could see but not hear. Single bright lights silently rising, slow cascades of sparkle falling, silent but then an invisible boom. Are fireworks still made of pulped books?

W
HEN I PASSED by on my walk this evening, there of course was the
duck
, in silhouette, gazing at the bay.

She warbled and came wobbling toward me for Grape-Nuts, but I just walked right by. Did not even turn my head. Kegeled.

I did not, do not, want to be a weird lady involved only with a duck.

And cat.

I
don't
.

Was walking over the drawbridge as a motorboat glided below—like a 1967 Mercedes convertible skimming the milky green. The one I learned to drive on, my stepfather turning from the dunes and darkening sea to regard my hand on the knob, my blowing hair, tanned colt knees, eyes unblinking toward the road. With a flick of a finger he bid me take it to sixty-five, seventy, who gave a goddamn what the sign said, this was a
Mercedes
: only fools followed the rules.

His rare, narrow-eyed smile.

Squinted own guilty eyes so only they knew if they glowed.

In the butter-yellow boat below me: two men, shirtless with firm, bare arms resting on polished sideboards. Healthy
pinguis
look to their flesh. The setting sun made their skin emit light, and by now my kegeling had resulted in my own lower glow—because the Human Body does what it wants and stirs up trouble no matter
what
you think best, and these men with their smooth lit arms and trunked laps slung into low leather seats—I couldn't help it, I glided up onto the bridge's balustrade and with uncommon grace stepped off and floated, floated, gently down, and was caught by the man on the left. He looked surprised but then seemed glad, and said to his friend, Look what I caught. That one glanced over and grinned; he had on sunglasses even though it was dusk. He placed his free hand on my calf, as it seems that I was suspended between the two, my head on the thigh of the other, cheek against a growing plumpness inside his trunks. His fingers—how hadn't I noticed?—had casually begun undoing my top, and now there were my breasts in the warm blowing breeze, as we motored out to sea!

F
OUND THAT MAN with a boat you were hoping for in glam-land, now that you hate me again?

The Devil.

Two, in fact! Just today.

Y
EAH, WELL,
what's wrong with fantasy.
Phantasia
. Born of visions. Even if Aristotle calls it a feeble sort of sensation. An active fantasy life is
good
, as K says. Self-pleasuring
does
ward off atrophy.

Although why atrophy should worry a tree, I don't know.

Atrophy, emotional anorexia, paralysis.

Solipsism?

Oh, for fuck's
sake
: one does what one can.

In the middle of the park today, when I was on my way back from Publix with pink umbrella and heavy bags of milk and cherries and litter and cat food, sweat trickling down my arms, N emerged from the shade of the banyan. She stepped into the sun and held up a long yellow hand to stop me, squinting into the blaze from beneath her white hat.

Let me ask you, she said. Do you still have desire?

Blinked the salt-sweat out of my eyes and told her that I did, yes, but only in the abstract, no longer tethered to anyone real because Sir Gold, alas, was only ideal. Added a few scientific points about the healthfulness of fantasy, satisfying the need for blood to rush through and plumpen lower tissues and explode, brain simultaneously exploding in stars, etc.

Okay, she said. If you still have desire, you're still viable. That's how it goes.

Like purring and eating, I said.

Sure, she said. Why not.

• • •

But as I passed the synchronized swimmers and the fountain chortling its chlorine bloom, I decided she was wrong. Desire can't be desire if it doesn't slant out toward an object. That is a snake eating its tail.

Still, one does what one
can
.

P
HANTASIA!
HERE
we go! Location, location, location!

When I was young the dream spot was always a green hillside at night, a golf course maybe, somewhere wide and dark and free, and I had an even softer brain then so made those hillsides Arcadia. Stretches of dark sloping lawn, perhaps a white pool of sand from which a hunter would rise. Alone, the two of us, in all that cool green, night sky above us full of pinwheeling stars, some of them once Ovid's girls who winked down to tell me I wasn't alone.

When I was older, the location became bars, dark and nasty and underground, me sitting on a stool as one man spoke to my face to distract me while another from behind undid buttons and zippers as I pretended not to notice, as my shy breasts appeared in the air, men's wet lips sliding all over them. Other men watching, always, a thicket of eyes.

It troubles me to have self-exploitive fantasies.

But not much.

These days I prowl around choosing new locations. They include the green verge where the bad men fish, a place where you can be made to lean over a rock and have all kinds of things done unto you. Or that big banyan in the oval park, that huge tree whose roots drop to the ground and form a dusky forest, with many dark bullish trunks you could be made to lean back upon. Also, the cave beneath the white spiral steps: always twilight down there. You could just pause after an evening walk and venture in there to find—

Most often, it's the red boat with chrome. Dancing and slinking, champagne bubbles, bobbing on the dark sea.

In the innocent mornings I walk in my bikini, with towel draped over head if the sun broils, and look at the boats, into the boats, into that small red paradise boat. And blush to think of what I'd imagined there the torrid night before, alone beneath the popcorn ceiling, as Buster cried and paced the mirrored walls.

Was walking farther on the causeway than usual the other evening, beyond Rivo Alto, beyond Di Lido, past San Marino, all the way to the next island whose name I can never remember, when I looked across the road where a black truck had parked, and a man in a wet suit stepped out from behind. He glanced my way, grinned, and disappeared into the ground.

I had to wait until five cars and a moped had passed until I could hurry across the street to see.

Mirage? Stepped from a dock just beyond, in fact, and not from behind a truck?

Nope.

Into a manhole.

Man. Hole.

So then that man, grinning before stepping into the ground; and the wet-suited one beneath
Paradise Found
, who looked up through the black brow of mask; and that one who rowed a surfboard, one I still think about nights alone—they've all become a single man. In my mind. Whether he lives in water or sea caves or a boat in the bay, I don't care.

There's nothing wrong with any of this.

Given that I'm capable of nothing real. Just a deadline for a dead poet, an old cat in diapers, a duck. And a mother not ready for Sunset.

Sunrise.

Use it or lose it!

A gynecologist's voice. Although just now can't remember whether the gynecologist said this to my mother, or me.

R
AN INTO GOOD OLD Par-T-Boy today while walking on Di Lido. Was passing his house as fast as I could, and just then he emerged from the vegetal wrack. He stood among the broken tiles, beside a tilting hedge, and looked at me with comic outrage, hands in the air.

You walk by my house, he said, but don't knock on the door?

(Am translating his language here.)

Well, sorry, I said, but I'm walking. Walking is exercise, not stopping to chat. You'd want to chat.

Why would I want to chat? I don't want to chat. I'll walk with you.

(Oh, no: he waddles.)

But you like to pause, I said. No exercise that way. Nope. Sorry. Going.

Okay, okay, he said. Such a hard-ass. Let's go kayaking later, then.

(His kayak is mildew-slick and missing a seat and cracked along a side. He hides it beneath a neighbor's banyan, unknown to the neighbor, a fancy neighbor with frontage. To get to the kayak you have to scurry from palm to palm alongside the palace and hope the twin giant poodles who grow hysterical near humans are napping deep inside.)

Par-T-Boy was sliding a sprig of hair up his forehead. Am a man with a boat, y'know, he said. Thought that was what you wanted, now that you struck out with your dream boy. We'll sail around the Venetians. I'll pick you up at eight.

Exactly
what I deserve, with the fantasies I've been having.

• • •

So now an afternoon of dread: impossible to focus on O. Went out on the balcony every half hour to check the sky for rain. Glowering, purple-blue in the distance, but no definitive rain. At five before eight gathered supplies, descended in the mirrored box, trudged through the paradise jungle, and spiraled down the steps to await Par-T-Boy on the dock.

After a time a small form emerged in the thickening light across the bay by Rivo Alto. It paused, and an oar shook at the sky, but when a motorboat thundered by I could see him weebling in its wake. Sat on the dock and shed sandals. The tide was rising—water sloshed at my toes—that sea current rushing through the bay, the anchored boats swiveling toward the sinking sun.

Then there he was, wobbling toward me in a slim plastic-shelled puddle, wrappers and bottles floating around his feet.

No little bench to sit on?

He waved at this preposterousness. You don't need a bench, he said. Sit Indian-style on the bottom.

Not wearing a bathing suit.

So what? he said. It's water.

What?

Come
on
, he said, so I gripped the boards of the dock and flopped into the dirty puddle.

I have done little kayaking and none with half an oar, and I couldn't tell if he was doing his part perched behind me on the bench, because we kept lurching one way, lurching the other, spinning around, and the seawater was suddenly so
dark
and slapping, and from the middle of the bay it was odd how far away Belle Isle looked as we rounded it, and I kept thinking, single scull, single skull, going all wrong in this single skull, but once we'd finally slashed our way to the middle current and were winging along in it, careening right toward the big iron drawbridge and then whooshing below it to circle the island, the purple sky I'd forgotten about suddenly exploded and waves reared up, the boat skittered down and up slopes, and the current hurtled us toward the Standard just as zags of lightning crashed through the sky, and at the Standard a party throbbed underneath awnings, bikini girls undulating in strobing lights, a gala Par-T-Boy wanted to attend but somehow he was not on the guest list, and so he'd concocted a stealthy entry, not via street but by water, and with luck a wave did slop us right at the wooden dock, I caught the edge of it just before we went tunneling under, and once I'd muscled us back and clear I climbed out, blistered, weak-kneed, and streaming, with a pink wrapper of something glued to my calf, as Par-T-Boy waved to a Manolo girl and flung an arm toward his bark to indicate the dangers he'd gone through to reach her, and I thought all
right
already and shouldered my soggy bag of supplies and squelched back safe across the road to Nine Island.

G
OT HOME TO LEARN the college girl has been found. P was right.

In Ovid, this girl would have become a bear, or maybe, if lucky, a star. That's if she'd been taken and ruined, but then been shown rare mercy. But if, in Ovid, she'd instead managed to get away—if, once her hunter had shoved into his car her long legs and arms and slender central portion with its inviting passages; once he'd dragged her out of the car again and into a field to jam every part of himself into her as well as whatever came to hand, bottle, flashlight, gun; if, when he began to do all of this, to throw her onto the ground and begin his blissful pounding, she'd managed to scream into her legs to run, run, fucking
run
, and this girl was strong and fast and could
really
run, she had been faster than this big man and gotten free—maybe, in Ovid, she'd now be a tree or stream or airy wind.

Not what happened. He got her, got what he wanted. Doesn't take long. And this girl is no tree, star, or rush of wind. He just left her out there when he was done. She's a tumble of bones in a streambed.

N
OT SURE I'VE really mentioned coral rock.

The most beautiful thing in Miami.

A limestone of fossilized reef that, when cut, shows in patterned section the different petrified corals. Elkhorn, staghorn, sea fan, starlet, labyrinthine-brain.

D
OES IT SEEM fair to you that there's such a difference between the words “misanthropy” and “misogyny”?