I put on a fresh shirt, grabbed a handful of dollars, made sure I had pocketed my magnetic room card, and went out to the elevator.
I walked through the bar, through those big picture-window glass doors, and out to the pool area, a complex miniature landscape of white concrete. The heat was heavy, steamy, and my English trousers,
shoes, and socks felt ridiculously heavy. For sure I wished I had brought a hat.
There were only a few people by the pool. A group of thirty-something women, bronzed, in bikinis, a little overweight, had gathered on sun loungers and were cooing over images in a digital camera — housewives attending the hotel’s health club, perhaps.
There was an ungated gap in the rear wall of the pool area. I passed through and walked down a short path edged by long grass. I found myself on a boardwalk, a long wooden walkway standing over the sand and grass on low stilts. It stretched to my left and right, to north and south. Before me, beyond a broad stretch of pale gold sand, was the sea. There was a breeze in my face, hot but blustery. I could see nobody swimming, and a red flag fluttered over a small stilted structure, maybe a Coast Guard station. Hurricane Jonathan was rattling around the west Atlantic; it wasn’t expected to touch down on land but was creating swell and wind.
I wasn’t planning to swim anyhow.
I knew that if I walked south I would approach the town center, so I turned that way and set off. I walked briskly past a series of gargantuan hotels, great art deco confections of concrete in shocking pink or electric blue, like spaceships parked along the Atlantic coast. The boardwalk was easy on the feet, but I seemed to be the only stroller. A few people passed me, or overtook me, joggers or speed-walkers, mostly young professional-looking types, dressed in Lycra or sweat suits, tiny headphones clamped to their heads, their faces closed, unseeing. At regular intervals there were little open kiosks, with big buttons you could press to call for police help.
This was my first time in Miami Beach. Gina had moved here only nine months earlier. She ran a small company in partnership with her husband of fifteen years, a New Yorker called Dan Bazalget. They had met in New York during an electronics product-launch event; they had both been working in PR, for the same company on different sides of the Atlantic. They had already been in their forties, with the complicated pasts you acquire by that age; Gina had a childless divorce behind her, and Dan actually had a twenty-year-old daughter, whom I’d never met. But once they had glommed onto each other they had soon gone into business together, and then sailed into parenthood, producing two fine boys as easily as shelling peas, despite Gina’s age. Now, based on Gina’s Florida inheritance, they sold something called “conference visioning and management” — coordinating probably unnecessary conferences for senior business types.
My father the accountant had always mocked Gina’s job title. “I mean, can you take a degree in ‘conference visioning’?” he would ask. Well, actually, yes, you could. I didn’t begrudge Gina her thoroughly modern choice of career or her commercial success — not much, anyhow, given the usual sibling-rivalry envy for a sister who in every aspect of her life had always seemed to do better than I ever had.
When I had passed most of the big hotels I cut inland, passing through an alleyway. I crossed Ocean Drive, where even the police officers wore skintight shorts, to reach a main street called Collins Avenue. I bought a small tourist map for a few dollars from a drugstore and briskly toured Miami Beach’s highlights. There was an art deco area, a small district peppered with ornately decorated buildings — hotels, private homes, banks, bars, some set behind heavy security gates. The most beautiful building of all seemed to be the town’s main post office, a pointlessly grand edifice across whose magnificent floor queues snaked desolately.
I couldn’t quite get the city into focus. There was a faint sense of sleaze about the place, of a past of dirty money and menace — and yet somebody had made a determined effort to clean it up, as witness the alarm buttons on the boardwalk. And I knew my sister well enough to know she wouldn’t bring her kids to a place she couldn’t make them safe. Still, I was relieved to get back to the boardwalk, and the huge physical presence of the sea.
I never watch American TV. Those constant ad breaks make me feel hyperactive, as if I’ve been taking too much sugar. I ordered up a movie, a comedy, and a room service “snack,” bigger than most Sunday lunches back home, with a half bottle of Californian Chardonnay. I was asleep before the movie was over.
“George. Lovely to see you, et cetera.” She took my shoulders and actually gave me an air-kiss, her left cheek brushing mine, her lips missing me by a good couple of inches. Automatically I shaped up for a second kiss on the right, but I’d forgotten that’s the European way — in America you get just the one.
Well, that was about as much affection as I generally got from Gina.
She said, “As you can see I took time off work to see you, though Dan couldn’t get away. The boys are on their way home from school. I secured them a half day off.” Her accent was vaguely mid-Atlantic.
“I appreciate that …”
Her house was modern, the walls wooden, perhaps a little sun-bleached around the front door. The rooms were filled with light, lined with bookcases and TVs — it seemed there was a set in every room, and in most a computer — and there was a bright but slightly irritating smell, perhaps of pine-scented air freshener. This was a big, sprawling homestead set in an extensive acreage of finely cut lawn, over which sprinklers hissed, even at this hour, eleven in the morning. There is always so much space in America, so much room.
But the first thing I saw when I walked into her hallway was Dad’s grandfather clock.
It was a big, moth-eaten, unmistakable relic, whose heavy, tarnished pendulum and time-stained clock face had made it a kind of focal point of our childhood. I hadn’t noticed it missing in my clear-out visits to the house in Manchester. But now here it was — it looked as if it might even have been renovated — and I realized that Gina must have taken it from Dad, presumably with his consent, before he died.
She saw me looking at the damn clock. We both knew what it signified. It wasn’t that I wanted the clock, or would have stopped her taking it, but I would have appreciated some discussion over this bit of our shared heritage. It wasn’t a good start to the visit.
She took me to a breakfast room, sat me at a polished pine table, and loaded a coffee percolator. We sat and talked, inconsequentially, about the continuing fallout from our father’s death: the sale of the house, his business affairs. She didn’t ask me about my own life, but then she never did.
She looked her age, midfifties, but good with it. She looked physically relaxed, the way you do if you work out just enough. She’d let her thick blond hair fill with gray, and it was swept back from her temples and forehead, a little severely. I always thought of her face as a far more beautiful version of mine, her features more delicate, her chin smaller, her nose not quite so fleshy. Now wrinkles spread around her eyes and mouth, and her skin was a little weather-beaten, polished by the Florida sun. But she still had the family eyes, limpid and clear gray, what one of her boyfriends used to call smoke-filled.
We ran out of facts to swap, and the silence was briefly awkward.
She said, “It’s good of you to come. It’s important to be with family at a time like this. Et cetera.”