"Oh, for God's sake."
"In iambic pentameter."
Often I've advised Juan to stay away from the Cuervo. "Emma?" I sing out. Moments later she glides into the living room with three mugs of green tea.
"Juan wants to resign," I inform her.
"No kidding?"
"To do a novel," he pipes up defensively, "and after that, poems."
"The newspaper needs you," Emma counsels. "Unlike some of us," I add.
"I've probably had too much to drink. Way too much," Juan admits, between slurps of tea.
"What would your novel be about?" Emma asks.
Juan looks mortified until I say, "Baseball."
He flashes me a grateful smile. "That's right. Baseball and sex."
"Well, what more do you need," says Emma.
"How about a spy?" Perhaps I'm feeling inspired by the prose of Derek Grenoble. "Try this: The major leagues are infiltrated by a Cuban espionage agent!"
"A left-hander, obviously," Emma says lightly, "but what position would he play?"
"Middle reliever," I suggest. "Or maybe a closer, so he could fix a big game. Say! What if Fidel was gambling on the Internet, betting his whole cane crop on the World Series?"
Juan rubs his eyelids. "Man, am I wiped."
Emma and I guide him to my bed, tug off his shoes, tuck him in and shut the door. Wordlessly she leads me back to the living room and we make love again, intercoupled on one of my consignment-shop armchairs. This time she murmurs and moans, which I choose to read as expressions of pleasure and possibly fulfillment. An hour later she wakes me to ask if I'm really leaving the newspaper, as I'd hinted on our drive to Janet's house. "Hush," I say.
"You are, aren't you?" she persists. "Jack, don't do it. Please." Then she reaches between my legs and grabs me, something no other editor has ever done. As a style of management it proves surprisingly effective, at least in the short term.
Emma and Juan are still asleep when my mother calls at eight in the morning. She says she was planning to drive up from Naples and visit me on my birthday.
"That'd be nice," I tell her.
"Unfortunately, we've got a minor crisis here."
"Nothing life-threatening, I trust."
"At the country club," my mother explains, "a black family has applied for membership and Dave's gone ballistic."
"Dave ought to be ashamed of himself."
"The fellow's name is Palmer. Isn't that ironic for a golfer?" My mother is adorable at times. "The best part, Jack—he's got a five handicap and a teenaged son who can knock a driver three hundred yards. Naturally, Dave's out of his mind. He wrote the nastiest letter to Tiger Woods, of all people, but I ripped it up while he was having his sigmoidoscopy. Dave, that is."
"And you find this an attractive quality in a husband—seething racism?"
"Oh, come on, Jack. He's fairly harmless. It's all hot air."
I ask her what the country-club furor has got to do with my birthday on Saturday, and she says the membership committee is meeting that very afternoon to review the applicants. "If I'm not sitting beside him, Dave's likely to say something he might regret."
"Worse," I say, "there's a chance he'd rally enough support to blackball the black Palmers. Am I right?"
"We've got a few narrow-minded types. Every club does."
"So you need to be there to keep Dave muzzled."
"Let's just say he usually defers to me on public occasions. I'm sorry, son, but this one's rather important."
"Don't worry about it. We'll get together some other weekend," I say. "You stay put and hose down your harmless old bigot."
"Did you want anything special for your forty-seventh?"
"Same as last year, Mom—serenity, a cure for receding gums and a new TV set."
"Don't tell me the Motorola went off the balcony, too."
"Also, I'd like to know when and how my father croaked. Please."
"Jack, honest to God"—my mother, clucking in exasperation—"between you and Dave, I'm ready to pull out my hair."
"Look, just tell me where it happened. Which city?"
"Absolutely not."
"Then which state?"
"You think I'm a ninny? You think I don't know what computers can do?"
"How about the time zone? Come on, Mom, give me something. Eastern Standard?"
"I spoke with Anne—I'm sorry, son, but I was worried about you."
"Well, worry about her.She's marrying a defrocked RV salesman," I say, "and that's also happening on my birthday."
"She certainly sounded happy, Jack."
"Just for that, I'm sending you one of his cheesy novels. But here's some sunny news: I'll be off of obituaries soon."
"Oh?" My mother warily awaits more information before offering congratulations. I carry the phone into the kitchen in case Emma awakes.
"When will this happen?" my mother asks.
"No date's been set."
"But you'll continue to work at the newspaper."
"Not exactly, but I'll still be involved. It's an unusual set of circumstances."
"Can't you tell me more?"
"In a nutshell, Mom, I'm waiting for a crazy old coot to die."
My mother says, "That's not the least bit funny."
"It is and it isn't. The guy's eighty-eight years old and he's got a helluva plan."
"Yes, I'm sure he does. Jack, have you thought about going back to see Dr. Poison?"
Shortly after Anne moved out, I falsely promised my mother I would consult a shrink. I lifted the name "Poison" from a Montana road map, and awarded my fictitious psychiatrist an array of lofty credentials from Geneva, Hamburg and Bellevue. I pretended to attend two private sessions a month, and in bogus updates I assured my mother that the man was brilliant, and that he regarded my lightning progress as phenomenal.
"I would gladly go back to Dr. Poison," I tell her, "if he wasn't lying in ICU at Broward General."
"What?"
"The details are sketchy, but evidently a deranged patient assaulted him with an industrial garlic press. It's very tragic."
A familiar frostiness creeps into my mother's voice. "I wish you could hear yourself from where I sit. Surely there's someone you can talk to, someone who could help ... "
"There issomeone," I say. "You, Mom. You could tell me what happened to my father."
An inclement pause, then: "Goodbye, Jack."
"Bye, Mom. Good luck with the Dave crisis."
By nine Juan is gone and Emma's soaking in the tub. I'm scrambling eggs while listening to another installment of the Exuma sessions. The title of the current track eludes me, but my concentration has been slipping. Screening the material take-by-take has lost its eavesdropping novelty, and now I'm just slogging along in hopes of lucking into a clue.
Somebody had a reason for stashing the master recording aboard Jimmy's boat, but the more I hear of it, the more baffled I am about why it was worth hiding—or killing people for. Some of the cuts are polished and quite good, some are so-so and a few of them are unendurable. The cold cruel fact remains that the problem isn't the music so much as the market. If indeed Cleo Rio is homicidally driven to acquire her dead husband's recordings, the stupefying question is why. The teenagers who buy the vast bulk of the planet's compact discs weren't yet potty-trained when Jimmy and the Slut Puppies broke up. Assuming a loyal remnant of the band's former audience could be found and fired up, there's slender evidence of an untapped public appetite for a kinder and gender Jimmy, dead or alive. Once a screamer, always a screamer in the hearts of the fans. Who'd pay money to hear David Lee Roth try to sing like James Taylor?
It's incomprehensible that Cleo could view her dead husband's album as either a potential platinum windfall, or unwanted competition. Sales of a new Jimmy Stoma release would be paltry compared to those that the willowy widow will rack up when her CD comes out, hyped day and night (pubes and all) on MTV.