Tropical Depression Page 23

  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 sile
ntly, 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.

  When the wet heat of summer started kicking in, Key West seemed to drift farther out from the familiar mainland, became ever more an island. Ziggy Maxx had lived here six years now, and he'd noticed the same thing every year: less happened in the summer, but what happened was more strange.

  Another tourist caught his eye. Ziggy's glance slid off the face like it was a label in the no-frills aisle, fixed instead on the jerky slogan on the tourist's T-Shirt: WILL WORK FOR SEX.

  The tourist said, "Lemme get a Virgin Heat."

  Ziggy stifled a grimace. Of all the idiot drinks he hated to make, Virgin Heats were among the ones he hated most. Fussy, sticky, labor-intensive. Substitutes for conversation, they drew people's attention away from each other and toward the bottles and the bartender. The building of a cocktail like a Virgin Heat sent people groping for their cameras.

  And sure enough, as Ziggy was setting up the pony glass and reaching for the Sambuca, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the man with the sunburned head was readying his videocam. Ziggy flinched, turned a few degrees. He poured the thick liqueur, then felt more than saw that the camera was sliding off his manufactured face to focus on his busy hands. An artsy shot, the barkeep thought, with something like relief. Another jerk who'd seen too many movies.

  Ziggy made the drink. He made it with riffs and flourishes it never dawned on him were his alone.

  Although he wore a short-sleeved shirt, he began by flicking his wrists as if shooting back a pair of cuffs. When he inverted the teaspoon to float the Chartreuse on the 'Buca, he extended a pinky in a gesture that was incongruously dainty, given the furry knuckle and the broad and close-cropped fingernail. Grasping the bottle in his right hand, he let his index finger float free; mangled long ago from an ill-thrown punch, that bent and puffy digit refused to parallel the others. He didn't bring the bottle directly to the glass, he banked and looped it in, like a plane approaching an airport. Slowly, with the pomp of mastery, he poured a layer of purple cassis over yellow Chartreuse, green creme de menthe over purple cassis. He topped the gross rainbow with a membrane of grenadine, then delicately laid in a cherry that sank with a portentous slowness, carrying with it a streaky red lascivious rain.

  He slid the drink across the bar to the tourist who had ordered it. "Five dollars, please," he said.

  He took cash, glanced around. The videocam had been switched off, for the moment everyone was happy.

  A light breeze shook the bougainvillea on its trellis, the papery flowers rattled dryly. A woman, a nice woman probably, from Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, fumbled in a big purse for a cigarette. She didn't have a match, she looked at Ziggy. Damp inside his faded shirt at the beginning of that season when things got only damper and only stranger, he snapped his lighter and cupped his hands and lit her up. She smiled, then blew twin streams of exhaust through her nose. If she was out to misbehave, and if she could stay awake till closing time, and if she didn't get a better offer in the meanwhile, maybe she would misbehave with him.