Tropical Depression Page 10

  "I am interested," she said, but from the way she said it, Murray could picture her leaning away, ill at ease, looking through a doorway to make sure her guests were comfortable without her.

  "The book club ladies—they there right now?"

  Franny sounded exasperated. "They're in the garden."

  "Good. I wanna proposition you."

  "For God's sake, Murray."

  "Two days from now, there's gonna be a treaty signing. A historic occasion. I want you to be there, spend a few days with me."

  "A few days?! Just like that I'll spend a few days with you? Murray, what kind of girl do you think I am?"

  "Franny, we were married twenty-one years!"

  "And we've been divorced for six."

  The Bra King squirmed against his pillows, his shoulders looking for those six years of lost comfort, the memory of being home. "I know, I know. But look, this treaty, he signs a piece a paper, it says he promises he won't declare war on the United States. How often you get to witness someone promising he won't attack your country? Besides, dammit Franny, I'm proud of this, I want you to be there."

  She hesitated, the pause was as full of promise as something gift-wrapped. She sighed. Then she said, "Murray, I have to get back—"

  "Please, Franny," Murray said, but he said it only by reflex. His hopes were dashed, he knew he'd been turned down, the phone in his hand had taken on the tragic aspect of a broken doll.

  When she spoke again, it was almost in a whisper. "Maybe I'll come. But I'm staying in a hotel."

  Murray sat bolt upright in his bed, stared crosseyed at the wand of sunshine that gleamed between the panels of the curtain. "You'll come?!"

  "I said maybe."

  "Franny, I'm thrilled! But a hotel? C'mon, I got a penthouse heah."

  "How many bedrooms?" asked his wife.

  "Three."

  "I'll think about it, Murray. Maybe I'll come. Maybe I'll stay in a guest bedroom. When's this treaty thing?"

  "Day after tomorrow, four o'clock, the courthouse." .

  "Maybe I'll be there."

  "What maybe? Tell me, I'll make arrangements, I'll pick y'up."

  "I'm going now, Murray. Anna Karenina is waiting."

  "Anna Karenina," the Bra King said, though the phone had already clicked down in his ear. "Marlon Brando. What about me? I'm the one who's waiting. I'm sitting here, Franny, I'm blotto, I'm waiting."

  17

  The courthouse in Key West was a stout and square brick building in a town of flimsy, leaning wooden homes, a monument to order and solidity in a place whose charm and wonder was the lack thereof.

  Fortunately, though, the structure's august appearance did not stand up to close inspection. Decades of ferocious sun and tropical cloudbursts had cracked and pitted its mortar, had flaked the paint on its phony fluted columns. Fecund trees dropped leaves and fronds and seed pods faster than the maintenance crew could pick them up, and the lawn and even the courthouse steps were generally strewn with spent and rotting greenery. Groaning air conditioners sought to filter out the tropics from the shut-up building, but even so, there was something dislocated, contrived, in the stockings and pumps worn by the lady lawyers, the mail-order suits and ties modeled stiffly by the prosecutors. In all, the building felt less like a sanctum of domestic government than like an embassy of some foreign nation whose mores were peculiar, whose costumes were quaint, and whose exotic capital was very far away.

  At a quarter to four on the day of the treaty signing, Murray and Tommy stood in the courthouse hallway, shuffling their feet and cracking their knuckles.

  "Nervous?" Murray asked.

  By way of answer, Tommy burped then wiped his damp palms on his pants. They were khaki chinos, the only pants he had aside from a couple of pairs of jeans. With them he wore his one blue shirt, a shirt of such vintage that the collar was not worn away, but cracked from so many years of being folded. He'd had his hair trimmed and he wore it parted on the side: damned if he'd dress up like a minstrel Indian ever again, for Barney LaRue or anybody else.

  "How 'bout you, Murray? You nervous?"

  "Me?" the Bra King said. The courthouse wall had a molding at eye level, it was one of those crazy things old public buildings always had. He plucked at it, it rocked against its ancient nails. "Wha' do I got to be nervous about?"

  He hadn't told Tommy about Franny. Franny he was keeping as his own delicious secret, as if there could be nothing more sweetly clandestine and illicit than a rendezvous with one's own reromanced wife. Besides, with every passing minute he became more devastatedly sure that she would not appear, and whether you were sixteen or fifty-three, it was embarrassing to get stood up for a date and have your buddies know about it.

  At five minutes to four, Barney LaRue, dressed in summerweight mohair and with his skin aglow from a lunchtime facial, came halfway down the marble stairs that had fossil footprints worn in them. "They're ready for us," he announced.

  Tommy looked at Murray. Murray cast a surreptitious look back toward the door. They headed up the stairs.

  LaRue led them into the book-lined chambers of Judge Walter Beasley. Beasley was a burly man, with a trim gray beard and a sardonic manner on the bench. He'd put on robes for the occasion; if you looked closely, you could see that a seam was opening on his shoulder, threads as curly and black as pubic hairs were twirling toward his neck. Maybe fifty people were packed into the room. Estelle Grau was there. There were legislative assistants and judicial assistants and members of the press. Tommy recognized the gangly reporter who'd asked LaRue questions that the senator didn't like. The two were nodding at each other, when LaRue steered Tommy toward a lectern next to the judge's desk. He made a point of leaving Murray behind, tossing him overboard in the middle of the throng.

  At one minute to four, Judge Beasley cleared his throat and asked for quiet.

  Murray watched Tommy, blinked, and tried without success to smile. He was excited and yet he suddenly felt extremely blue, blue and utterly, insanely removed from what was going on, as if he'd had too many Manhattans at a catering hall and wandered into the wrong affair. He was standing between strangers, in a room that seemed to tip. He felt for his friend a tenderness that yet remained melancholically distant. Tommy looked scared, less like the guest of honor than like something about to be carved up for dinner. A depressed Jew and a bitter Indian, Murray thought: What sort of lunatic confluence had made them friends? How had Murray persuaded Tommy that this moment was his destiny? How had Tommy let him? And where the hell was Franny?

  The judge droned on about the importance of the occasion and about the authority that was vested in him, and Murray winked at Tommy while silently he called himself a yenta, a lonely man with not enough to do but stick his nose in the affairs of other lonely men. Had he ever done a deed that was truly kind, or did he only meddle? Did he trust himself to know what friendship was, or was he only keeping busy? And where the hell was Franny?

  Beasley adjusted his shredding robe, produced a document in a leather binder. Tommy coughed softly into his fist. Then the door to the judge's chambers opened, very slowly. It made just the tiniest squeak against its hinges, and only Murray turned around. Standing in the doorway, half-hidden by a maze of other people's chins and shoulders, was Frances Rudin Zemelman Rudin. She was wearing white silk pants and a big red shirt whose tails reached down to her knees. Her curly brown hair was flecked with gray, she wore big silver earrings and a necklace made of amber.

  "Franny!"

  Murray thought he whispered it, but still somebody shushed him.

  His wife slipped across the room as the judge, reading through elegant half-glasses, intoned a bunch of sentences that started with "Whereas."

  She stood next to him now. She wasn't tall, she wore flat shoes, he remembered exactly where the top of her head came to, the exact angle at which he had to hold his neck to see her face. She used herbal creams and hair stuff, she smelled like rosemary and peaches.

  Tommy sa
w her standing next to Murray. He narrowed his somber eyes, and smiled.

  Walter Beasley ran through a few more Whereases. Then he pronounced, "Therefore, in recognition of their mutual sovereignty, this treaty is hereby concluded between the United States of America and the Matalatchee Nation of Kilicumba Key, Monroe County, Florida, each side pledging to respect the territorial prerogatives of the other and to live together in peace."

  The judge swept off his glasses, held the treaty's final page up for display. "The document, as you can see," he said, "has been signed by the President himself. It will now be executed, on behalf of the Matalatchee Nation, by Mr. Tommy Tarpon."

  He put the treaty on the lectern and handed Tommy a pen. The already quiet room went into a deeper hush. Murray thought Franny was standing closer to him now, though he might have just imagined it. Tommy pulled back the sleeve of his old blue shirt that was frayed where the ancient folds had been, and signed the treaty. Everyone applauded.

  The judge held up his hands for quiet. "The document still needs witnessing," he said. "May I ask Ms. Estelle Grau, of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Mr. Barney LaRue, state senator from Monroe County, to serve as witnesses?"

  The woman down from Washington strode with her large slow grace to the podium and witnessed Tommy's signature. But as she moved to hand the pen to Barney LaRue, the Indian intervened and took it.

  "Your honor," he said, bashfully, but less so than he could have said it five minutes before, "if I'm a sovereign and all, I'd like the second witness to be my good friend Murray Zemelman."

  Judge Beasley shot an awkward look at Barney LaRue. The rebuffed politician quickly hid the hand that had been poised to take the pen, and managed a strangled smile, he looked like he was swallowing his gums. "Well, I see no reason—" the man in robes began.

  Franny put her hand on Murray's back, urged him forward to accept the offered honor. He floated toward the lectern in a kind of transport, like a religious man being called upon to read the Torah.

  He signed the treaty, he embraced his friend, and through the thin applause that followed, he looked out to see his wife clapping near her chin, looking truly proud, and older than he remembered her, and very lovely.

  18

  After the signing, the thirsty guests filed out and headed by car and cab and bicycle and scooter to a cocktail reception at Barney LaRue's penthouse.

  Murray had driven the scratched-up Lexus with the Jersey plates, it was parked under a tree that had dropped a yellow fuzz all over it. There hadn't yet been a moment to introduce Franny and Tommy, and only now he presented her as his wife.

  "Ex-wife," she corrected, shaking hands. "He dumped me for some brainless floozy. Nice to meet you. And congratulations."

  It was not a chatty ride. Everyone was slightly drained, felt more than slightly awkward. Tommy sat in the back, fidgeted with the ashtray in his armrest.

  At some point the Bra King said, "Your bags, Franny, don'tcha have any luggage?"

  "I left it at the airport," she said. "I still haven't decided if I'm staying."

  Tommy smiled to himself and looked discreetly out the window. The Straits were calm and had the sheen of green aluminum.

  "Of course you're staying," Murray said. 'Ta shlep all this way to turn around again? Tomorrow I'll rent ya a bike, we'll find the guy who makes the sno-cones. Remember the sno-cones, Franny?"

  She remembered the sno-cones, she looked down at her short unpolished fingernails, neat hands folded in her lap. "Don't get nostalgic on me, Murray. It isn't fair."

  He drove to the airport, he fetched her bags. When he dropped them in the trunk the whole car rocked.

  "Weighs a ton," he said, getting back behind the wheel.

  "I brought you some vitamins and things. That Prozac, Murray—enough already."

  The Bra King let that slide, drove to the airport exit. It was opposite the ocean, he looked at water while waiting for a break in traffic. Thinking aloud, he said, "You care about me, Franny. You want me to be well. Ya didn't care, ya wouldn't carry all that stuff."

  Franny looked away, fingered the chunk of amber in her necklace. "So Tommy," she said, "how's it feel to be a nation?"

  Pascal the masseur, Pascal the secretary, was now Pascal the caterer. Dressed in a tuxedo shirt and lavender bowtie, he greeted guests, poured drinks, delivered hors d'oeuvres and little cocktail napkins on a silver tray.

  Franny Rudin accepted a glass of champagne and maneuvered around the leather sofas and glass- topped coffee tables toward the balcony, away from the cigarette smoke and the jabbering. Murray and Tommy took their glasses of bourbon and followed. But the party almost instantly tracked them down. Everyone wanted to wish Tommy well, to shake the hand of a real live Indian and be able to say they'd met a sovereign. The guest of honor made agonized attempts at chitchat, smiled till his cheeks were cramped, and when Pascal appeared with a fresh tray of drinks, he grabbed a big one with the secret panic of the socially overwhelmed. He watched people blowing smoke in one another's faces, straining to look fascinated by one another's stories.

  "So this is what white people do for fun?" he asked.

  Franny was nursing her champagne, looking out across the swimming pool, the putting green, the screened gazebo. Murray was leaning near her on the rail, smelling her hair on puffs of breeze. Neither felt qualified to answer.

  The gangly journalist came by to introduce himself.

  "Arty Magnus," he said, and he held out a cool long-fingered hand. His hair was thick and frizzy, his expression wry and skeptical, not a smile and yet not quite a smirk; he was one of the few who didn't say anything stupid or demand that Tommy respond with something stupid, automatic, and for this the Indian was grateful.

  "I didn't think you'd be invited," Tommy said, "after the questions you were asking the other morning."

  Arty leaned close, spoke softly. "The press is always invited, no matter how much the host or hostess hates them." He sipped his drink. "And they always go, no matter how much they hate the host or hostess."

  Tommy pulled on his bourbon. "You hate the host?" he whispered.

  "Sometime we should talk," said the reporter. He looked over his shoulder. More people were streaming toward Tommy, their eyes slightly droopy with drink, their hands soggy with condensation. "But for now I'll leave you to your public."

  A fidgety Murray moved closer to Franny, just barely brushed her hip with his own. "I'm dying to have some time alone with you," he said.

  His wife looked off at the water, at people walking, running, skating on the promenade. "I don't mind some insulation."

  "How about a nice quiet dinner? Candlelight, a corner table in some little garden?"

  "What about Tommy?"

  Murray frowned, chewed an ice cube, felt the idiot frustration of a teenager trying to be suave, thwarted in a make-out quest by a little brother he couldn't shake. "Maybe he'll get tired."

  Franny had been packing, traveling all afternoon, the word brought on a yawn. Murray watched her closely in that extravagantly intimate instant before she brought her hand up to her mouth; by sunset light he saw her crowns, her gold and silver fillings, remembered with love the way she sometimes dribbled from one side or the other before the novocaine wore off.

  "He won't get tired earlier than me," she said.

  Murray hid his disappointment in his glass. Behind them the party buzzed, made clacking, whirring, scratching sounds that swung between the festive and the infernal.

  Then Barney LaRue strolled out to the balcony, still uncreased in his perfect summer suit. His presence somehow muffled the party noise, he carried with him a pampered smell of body oil and rich shampoo. He barely glanced at Murray, he made no acknowledgment of Franny. He handed Tommy another drink, pushed it on him really, then stood almost rudely close, assaultingly close. "I'd like to speak with you a moment," he said.

  Tommy looked at Murray. Murray raised an eyebrow, took a half-step forward.

  "Not you," the politician s
aid. He said it softly but with the inexorable certainty that he would be obeyed. The Bra King stalled, his weight spread indecisively between his feet.

  The Indian gave a rueful look, shrugged at his friend, and carried his bourbon toward the living room with its whorls and wreaths of smoke.

  Franny turned back toward the sinking sun. "I hate this party," she said. "Do we have to stay much longer?"

  19

  Tommy followed LaRue through the ranks of half- crocked functionaries and local busybodies and hangers-on. He followed him down a hallway, past a bathroom with a couple of people lining up to use it, around a bend in the corridor to where the dimmered lighting didn't reach.

  LaRue paused momentarily before a closed door. His heart was racing. To be doing this here, now, with a judge in the living room, the press nosing through his home—the sheer nasty baldness of it was as bracing as an ice cube on the scrotum. He gave a furtive glance around, quickly opened the door to his study, hustled Tommy through in front of him.

  Inside, sitting at the politician's desk, occupying his regal chair and smoking one of his cigars, was Charlie Ponte, the Mob boss of south Florida.

  "Hello, Chief," the mafioso said to Tommy.

  "I'm not a chief."

  "Sure y'are," said Ponte.

  "A chief is elected," Tommy said. "It's an honor to be a chief."

  The little man kept on. "You're a chief, I'm a chief. Bahney here, he's a chief. The losers out there"—he jerked a thumb toward the living room—"they're a buncha fuckin' Indians."

  Tommy sipped his drink, looked around, noticed Bruno. Bruno was standing hugely in the shadows; he twirled a giant globe, which seemed to fascinate him the way a brightly colored beach ball entrances a gorilla.

  "Mr. Ponte's going to be your partner," said LaRue.

  Tommy said nothing. Ponte blew a smoke ring, fingered it as it hovered near his face.

  "That island of yours," the mobster said. "Handled right, it's an extremely valuable piece of real estate."