Joey knew immediately that these were people who would take the tour and would never in a thousand lifetimes buy a time-share at Parrot Beach. But that was not his problem. They wanted the meal ticket. They wanted something to do. Probably more than anything, they wanted to sit down.
"Where you folks from?"
"Ottawa," said the lady. She bit the t's.
"Zat in England?"
They thought Joey was kidding. They laughed politely. Joey felt suddenly the way he sometimes used to feel when trying to get a girl to go to bed with him.
All parties wanted the same result, for all intents and purposes the matter was settled. Yet there were certain forms and rituals that needed to be adhered to, still the awkward business of maneuvering her into the bedroom or onto the couch. So Joey spieled, and the nice old couple from Ottawa played along. A Harley-Davidson roared by, trailing a string of mopeds like a goose with goslings. Sunlight flashed off the tin roofs of downtown Key West. Finally, when all the ceremonies had been observed, Joey led the nice couple up the path to the Parrot Beach office. They would sign the guest book. They would admire the scale model. They would ride the shuttle bus to the property, sip fresh-squeezed orange juice, let themselves be hammered for a while by the sales staff, and Joey Goldman would get his forty bucks, forked over from the mysterious coffers of the legitimate world.
Returning to his post, he resolved to put the commission toward a pair of tennis shoes. The black loafers he was wearing were stylish but wrong. They let too much heat come up through the sidewalk and their thin soles passed along the pebbled texture of the concrete. He figured he'd keep this job at least a few more weeks, till he found the right way back to his true calling. This was temporary, very temporary, but for as long as it lasted he might as well be comfortable.
— 15 -
In the last week of February Joey made four hundred and eighty dollars and decided to celebrate by inviting Bert the Shirt over for filet mignon and a couple bottles of Valpolicella. It was time, he felt, that Bert and Sandra met. It was time he learned to use the gas grill at the compound. It was time, maybe, to get on terms with such basic social ceremonies as having a friend to the house on Saturday night.
Sandra bought a new blouse for the occasion. It was thin white cotton stamped with small pink birds, and it hung on the back of a chair while Sandra brushed on her eyeshadow and dabbed on her lipstick. She was beginning to have what was, for her, a tan. On her face and shoulders, orange-pink dots were strewn across her blue-white skin, gradually coloring her in the way a comic strip is colored in. The resulting blush made her light eyes seem a crisper green, green like a vegetable with crunch, and her short hair closer to silver than to yellow. "You know," she said, lifting a bra strap to better examine her tan lines in the mirror, "sometimes I think I'm the only person in this town who wears a bra."
Joey had a quick flash of Vicki, and banished the image.
He regarded Sandra's chaste white appliance, with its rim of dainty lace, its girding of clasps and elastic. "Well, you don't have to wear one," he said, feeling on safe ground saying it. It was about as likely that Sandra would give up her foundation garments as that the cardinal would stop wearing a hat.
"Well," she said, and left it at that. Turning half profile, she appraised her chest with that amazing dispassion women can muster when looking at their bodies. When Joey looked in the mirror, he tended to see muscle definition that wasn't quite there, tended not to notice the merest beginnings of a tummy. But Sandra duly recorded every crease and flaw, pitilessly noted every lack or excess. Humbled by such realism, Joey changed the subject.
"So the potatoes are in, the lettuce is washed. What else?"
"I wish the plates matched."
"It's a rented place. Bert'll understand."
The evening, even by Key West's relentless standards, was beautiful. A slow and undramatic sunset had left the sky pale yellow in the west, lavender backed by pearl gray at the zenith, velvety blue like the inside of a jewel box in the east. The air was the temperature of lips and there was just enough breeze to lift the smell of jasmine from the hedge. The compound was given over to uncomplicated pleasures. Wendy was sitting chin-deep in the hot tub while Marsha massaged the tension out of her shoulders. Luke the musician and Lucy the mailman dangled their feet in the still blue pool, their twin headsets plugged into a single Walkman. Steve the naked landlord, draped now in a towel against the relative chill of dusk, had dozed off in a lounge chair, a paperback about clones rising and falling on his ample stomach.
Joey ushered in Bert the Shirt just as Peter and Claude, dressed in peppermint-stripe tunics, were heading off to work. He introduced them.
"And who's this little fur-face?" cooed Claude.
Joey could not help cringing a little. Fur-face?
But the retired mobster held his chihuahua forward in the palm of his hand so Claude could pet him. "This useless thing? This is Don Giovanni."
"Like the opera," Peter said, and he burst into a scrap of tune.
The tune sounded vaguely familiar to Bert, though since he'd died notes all sounded more or less the same to him. Still, the episode put him in a buoyant mood. It reminded him somehow of his wife. "Joey," he said, gesturing around him as they approached the cottage, "ain't this paradise?"
Sandra had come to meet them. "In paradise," she said, "the plates match."
She held out her hand to shake. But Bert had the dog in his right hand, and so took her fingers in his left, raised them to his lips, and kissed her on the knuckles. "You're as lovely as Joey says you are."
"Joey who? If Joey paid me a compliment, I think I'd plotz." She wagged her finger at Bert, admiring his perfectly draped shirt of midnight-blue voile. "But you're as sly as Joey says you are, and that's the truth."
"So Bert," said Joey, "glassa wine? We'll sit out by the pool awhile."
He brought a tray and put it on a small wooden table just outside the sliding door of their cottage. The wine seemed to draw into itself the last rays of dim light, and glowed a shimmering garnet.
"Salud," said Bert the Shirt, and Joey could not help noticing that the word made Sandra wince. The Italian sound, the Italian wine in stubby glasses, a certain old-fashioned and very appealing swagger in the way Bert lifted his drink to toast-these things, to Sandra, were a threat, unintentional but real. They were the old ways, the family ways; their warmth and comfort bound a person to the neighborhood as much as did the promise of easy earnings, maybe more so, and made it hard to change. At any moment a gesture or a word could pull a person back to the small, sad, cozy place he'd come from.
"And how do you like it down here?"
Sandra barely heard the question. "Me? Oh, I like it fine. The weather's great, the girls at the bank are nice."
She stopped talking, but Bert just looked at her. It was a simple trick he'd developed decades before to get people to go a little farther.
"But ya know," Sandra obliged, "for me, it's not that big a change. A bank's a bank. Money's money. I mean, if you think about it, money's the least interesting thing there is. There's no variety about it, you know what I mean? Seen one dollar, you've seen 'em all."
"Yeah," said Bert, "but until you've seen a helluva lot of 'em, it doesn't really seem that way."
"I guess," she said. "But people. That's what's interesting. Now, with Joey's job…"
Joey looked down at the wooden table and gave his head a modest shake. This job. It was confusing, this job. He couldn't decide whether to be proud of it or embarrassed. It was like the time he painted some autumn trees and won an art contest in grade school. He was happy to win, happy to see his mother flush with satisfaction, but at the same time felt that making pictures was for girls. Of course, with the job, it had a lot to do with who was asking. With Sandra, yeah, he was proud, he could tell it made her happy. Around Bert, well, it wasn't like Bert was putting it down, it was just that, let's face it, Bert had a different sense of what a man should be. Joey wondered if he'd ever have a more firmly held opinion of his own. He had to believe that life would be easier if he did.