A plane coming toward the airport descended quickly, motors roaring, and Marshall looked at it, there below the clouds. What a sky, blue with white clouds, the ideal sky, the sort of sky that was supposed to make people feel life was miraculous. Instead, the vastness of the mesmerically blue sky made him think that his birth had been an accident. Of course it had been: the perfect son already existed, and his mother’s attentions toward him — her attentions toward Marshall-the-Baby — clearly incensed his father. There was every probability his father had not wanted a second child; especially not one who was emotional, cowardly, his nose always in a book, welded to his brother’s side — not even clinging to their father, but dependent on Gordon, which must have offended their father. He had blocked out that night for so long for the obvious reason that he found it all so painful — his role in disturbing the family, his being the center of attention even when he absented himself, the thorn in his father’s side. That was why their father had insisted on talking about his wife’s having favorites when she was terminally ill — that was why he insisted on telling her her deficiencies as she was preparing to tell her sons she was going to die.
“Gordon,” Marshall said, “do you think he loved her?”
“The Texan?” Gordon said.
He looked at his brother. Gordon had pulled the brim of his cap low over his eyes and was resting, one knee crossed over another, hands clasped on his stomach. Amazing but not surprising: Gordon’s thoughts really did not return to their parents — to that time or that place. Certainly not to that night.
“Yeah, the Texan,” Marshall said, for the hell of it.
“Mm,” Gordon said. “He probably loves her. Yeah.”
“Do you think our father loved our mother?”
He could hear the slight annoyance, mixed with resignation, as Gordon sighed, “No. I doubt it.”
“Evie?” Marshall said.
“What’s this? Cupid’s love survey?”
“What do you think?” Marshall persisted.
“What does it matter?”
“I’m curious.”
“I realize that. How about going into the store and getting us a couple of beers? I want to take a ten-minute catnap, then maybe we can wander over to Mallory Dock, give you the required touristic experience of watching the performers and the tourists strutting their stuff as the sun goes down. Beth’s selling air plants for a friend who’s out of town. You know what? I think Beth is a good person. I’m fond of her. I admire her. But I don’t think I love her, if I ever did.”
“You’ve read all those things,” Marshall said. “About your early life and how you form relationships later on, I mean.”
“I form relationships to get laid and to have one woman who doesn’t hate me, who isn’t after me night and day to marry her because I already have,” Gordon said. “How’s that for the confessional mode?”
“I’m not saying that anything that happened to us makes us unique,” Marshall said.
“I fucking think you are unique,” Gordon said. “How about two Coronas?”
Marshall got up, limping slightly on the first few steps because his left leg had gone dead sitting in the chair. Gordon probably did have the right approach to life: stretch out beneath the sky, don’t cause yourself any unnecessary problems in Paradise, have a cold beer and a brief nap. He and Hank nodded silently as Marshall passed him, heading into the office to get beers out of the refrigerator. He stepped carefully through the clutter, looking briefly at a calendar that had not yet been changed from January. A bare-chested woman holding a pink heart-shaped lollipop between her enormous breasts smiled down at him from the wall to the left of the refrigerator. On a bulletin board to the other side hung a photograph of Mr. Watanabe, Gordon, Hank, and six women in sparkling evening gowns with plunging necklines. They were in a nightclub somewhere, clustered around a small round table. Mr. Watanabe’s eyes, on closer inspection, looked like pinwheels. Gordon’s eyes … it frightened him to look at Gordon’s eyes. With a hand curled halfway around one of the blond women’s jewel-studded breasts, the other arm dangled at his side as if it were a useless appendage. Looking at the arm, you would be certain the limb had no feeling — that you were looking at a handicapped person’s flaccidly dangling arm. The more he looked, the more he realized Gordon was just very drunk; he seemed to be propped up in the chair, more like a mannequin than a real person, except that his eyes told you he was human. They weren’t just empty, they were dead. They were eyes that had died.
He shuddered as he pulled open the refrigerator door. A blast of cold air hit him, causing him to double up as he reached quickly in, taking two beers from several dozen bottles crowded onto the top shelf. He shut the door quickly and looked around for an opener. He saw one on the wall, under the calendar, and opened both bottles, letting the bottle caps fall to the floor amid ant traps, crumpled paper, and many other bottle caps. He carried them out, looking down so as not to meet Hank’s eyes again. It was as if he’d seen something shameful in the room, or as if he’d partaken in something shameful — a thought he didn’t want to come any closer to articulating.
A breeze had blown up outside, disturbing the surface of the water. From the roof, the sound of a staple gun punctured the silence. Gordon reached up for the beer without changing his position in the chair, and Marshall’s heart missed a beat, he was so delighted to see Gordon’s right arm move. My God, he thought: I must have convinced myself something was really wrong with Gordon’s arm. He stood there as if he’d awakened from a bad dream, grateful to be back in the world, silently embarrassed he’d been elsewhere. He handed down the beer, fascinated at Gordon’s hand as it gripped the long neck of the Corona. Elbow bent, he moved his hand to his mouth and swigged from the bottle. It was ordinary — the most quintessentially ordinary thing Marshall could imagine — but the motion seemed beautiful, inherently fascinating, and beyond that a relief. It was a huge relief. Gordon was not the Gordon of the photograph; that had been a sudden flash that produced a deceptive photograph.
The rooftop reggae devolved eerily into Jim Morrison, singing “Wishful Sinful.” For a minute, amid hammering, he listened. A stronger station had overtaken Bob Marley. It was Morrison in the lead, Marley second, darting in for a fuzzy word, a sung phrase, Altiss loudly rooting for Marley until a Skil saw overwhelmed both words and music When it resumed, Marley had triumphed, though Marshall’s thoughts were no longer on the music. Hearing Jim Morrison had reminded him of Gordon’s friend the bartender. He was replaying going into the Green Parrot, watching the ambidextrous bartender perform, frantically keeping up with drink orders while washing glasses and holding simultaneous conversations. It seemed that in Key West everyone was either completely wired or very laid back. How amusing, then, that high-energy Gordon was pretending to sleepwalk, turning over the possibility of leaving his wife, travelling in his mind to places like Hawaii while he sat sprawled in a butterfly chair near the water’s edge, picking under a fingernail with one of the toothpicks he always carried in his shirt pocket. What a shirt, Marshall thought, appreciating the bizarre colors — a shirt that reminded him of a tequila sunrise, pinks settling into orange, a watery concoction of electric color that blurred more the harder you tried to focus.