10, 9…
He sighs, squeezing the fingers of his left hand with his right. Is that a tremor? Is he actually developing a tremor? Deep in his body, he feels something shift, as if his bowels were loosening.
“That’s a certain type of girl.”
6, 5…
He stares at her. “Oh, now, Esme.”
“You’re in over your head with that one.”
The elevator doors swish open to the marble lobby. “Just so you know.” Esmeralda strides out into the watery light, one hand curled up behind her back to wave at Brian as she goes. He remains in the elevator, watching. Twenty years ago he and Esmeralda had carried on an energetic flirtation. He’d been distracted by her topaz eyes, her tiny feet and waist, the way her upper lip curled back when she smiled, creating a minuscule dimple. But they were both married, and Brian wasn’t actually interested in taking things any further. He’d even wondered if there was something wrong with him for not going after Esmeralda, pursuing her the way he heard upper management pursued affairs. And in all those years of secretaries, escorts, interns, the rumored private trysting apartments supposedly shared among the vice presidents, the junkets and conferences and the trading-in of spouses for ever-younger models, Brian had never seriously entertained the idea of having an affair.
She’s jealous: he winces and smiles. He strides across the lobby, briefcase swinging; he feels rising indignation on behalf of both himself and Fernanda. These… Cuban women—he thinks—with their village minds.
Rufus steps forward and holds the door. Brian walks through, so preoccupied, he barely notices the man. Rufus says something. He turns. “What was that?”
Rufus’s face is like a piece of carved mahogany. “Didn’t say nothing, Mr. Muir.”
Brian holds his shoulders squared all the way to the car. His hand shakes as he turns the key in the ignition and he checks his rearview at least a dozen times as he backs out. What is wrong with him? He needs to have that pressure in his lower abdomen checked out. If only he still believed in doctors. He cranks his big steering wheel, pouring his car into the stream of traffic — the speed demons and sudden-stoppers and befuddled elderly — the deep madness of Miami embodied in its drivers. The sky is backlit with high, dense clouds, a fast-approaching system. He passes the dinosaur crouching outside the Museum of Science. In the middle of the traffic, creeping and stopping and loitering for miles along the Dixie, he turns on the radio. The Miami skyline, pale as a leisure suit, glistens in his rearview. It’s only 5:50 but the sky darkens, gathering clouds. Brian creeps ahead one car length as he tries, once again, to listen to the angry chanting of rap. It may take him an hour and a half to travel the seven miles back to the Gables. There’s a rumble he assumes is a jet. Then another — this one so close he flinches, the floor of the car vibrating.
He drives under a canopy of poinciana and spiky palmettos growing up along the highway, then passes a wreck taking up the right-hand lane, and finally the traffic begins to move. Brian muttering along with the music as if there’s nothing wrong at all.
Felice
FELICE AND EMERSON STRETCH OUT ON A BIT OF lawn in Flamingo Park by a stand of fragrant, inky trees, the night overhead tinted lilac by the city lights. First Emerson lies back, then he holds out his arms and she laughs but she lies down and rests her head on his chest, the fabric of his T-shirt warm and smelling of outdoors air. At first he holds as still as if she were a sparrow that’d miraculously lighted on him, only gradually relaxing. Felice thinks they will just lie there for a while, her hand riding the rise of his chest, listing to the chirp and creaking of geckos and the watery swish of cars. She remembers being six years old, sprawled in the stiff, sun-warmed grass — not quite asleep or awake — while Stanley picked the tiny strawberries in his garden. “Hey, hey, hey,” Emerson murmurs into her hair, soothing her. She hears the clip and snap and thump of people getting into their cars in the parking lot — off to the clubs. There’s a burst of French nearby, then some German from another direction. She doesn’t even notice when she hears Spanish. Her best friends Lola, Bella, Yeni all spoke Spanish at home. She feels, as she listens to the rush of air through his chest, that it’s been years since she’s experienced the luxury of falling asleep, instead of passing out from exhaustion or drinking or both. It has felt, for such a long time, as if there was always something to watch out for.
ON THE DAY FELICE ran away, she brought almost nothing with her: a cosmetics bag, a tube of her mother’s expensive sunscreen, a bottle of water, the sweater her brother had given her. Nothing to eat. It was cool and dry, an early March morning; still dark. Her parents had learned to watch her at night: they weren’t expecting her to get up early. She watched for police cruisers and stayed on the back streets, walking from the Gables through the chain-link Shenandoah neighborhoods, then crossed U.S. 1, weaving through lanes of stopped traffic, into Coconut Grove. There were so many roller bladers, baby carriages, and dog walkers on Bayshore, she risked strolling along the big thoroughfare, taking in the view of white Biscayne Bay. It took hours to walk and by the time she’d made her way into downtown, the morning commuters were clogging the narrow street and the air was ripe with exhaust. Felice was sweat-soaked before she was even halfway across the Venetian Causeway, but before her were plains of silvery water and the mirage horizon of high-rises. She had a feeling like struck sparks flitting through her body: anticipation and scraped-away dread and grief, and clear drops of joy.
Felice hadn’t wanted to move to the beach. But an older girl at a Gables party talked to her about it in a low, serious voice — you could so totally be a model. She’d heard it all her life; this girl had actually done it. She had a trapezoidal jaw and listless eyes: a strange ugly-beauty that made you stare. Felice had seen her on covers, her concave stomach and shoulders and peach-pit mouth. She said: Go do it, now, while you’re young. Felice was scared and crazy enough to think it would work — she would leave the thing behind in another time; she would be changed and lifted out of her life.
After she got to the beach, she napped in a wooden booth at the back of an Internet café, and that night Felice partied with the kids out on the sand. This became her regular practice — stealing naps in cafés, partying on the beach, along with spring-breakers, drunks, transvestites, homeless kids, bums, skate punks, illegals — everyone rooting through each other’s coolers, setting huge, illegal bonfires, trashing the beach grasses and dunes. Someone always had Quaaludes or Ecstasy, or tabs of acid, which she particularly enjoyed. She fell in with a group of tough, pretty Mexican girls who worked as chambermaids: they had hard brown arms and shoulders from bed-making and vacuuming. Sometimes they let Felice sleep in an empty room at night; but the air-conditioned spaces were so clean and silent she felt as if she didn’t sleep there so much as float, drifting on the slab of her body. Hilda, a tiny, dark girl, gave Felice her skateboard just before she moved to Orlando. Hilda said: Skateboarding is wearing wings — which Felice found was especially true when she was high. Felice and the girls used to drop acid together — the girls favored it mainly for the extra kick of speed. They dared each other to run through the sizzling edges of the bonfire. Once, Felice got to her feet and walked into the fire. The low flames rippled and bent around her feet like water, sealing up behind her. The beach rats faded beyond the scrim of heat. She dashed across the burning wood and the bottoms of her flip-flops melted. After that, the beach patrol started to crack down; they arrested the kids who were too strung out to run away — some had to spend two months in jail — and that was the end of bonfires for a while.