"You just sounded, you know, for sure distracted. And then I thought… hey!" His tone became hopeful. "Maybe my call interrupted something, huh? Holiday romance? A game of lock-'n-load?"
Close, but not quite. I looked at Dewey, who was now standing at the mirror. It had been more than a year since I'd last seen her. In that time, she had abandoned the mannish pageboy cut and let her hair grow, perhaps in an attempt to appear more feminine. It seemed unnecessary… and a little sad, too. Why is it that we find the small failed gestures of others so endearing? Dewey has one of those California unisex beach girl faces: pale-lipped, high-cheeked, smile bright, but without the delicate, vacuous leer. There is nothing vacuous-or delicate-about Dewey. She has a square chin, a nose broken by a grade school hockey stick, luminous deep-set gray eyes with a webbing of smile lines at the corners, a right forearm that is nearly as thick as my own, and the sort of knobby wrists and knees more commonly seen on gawky fourteen-year-olds. But Dewey is a dozen years past fourteen, and she is neither gawky nor adolescent. She was once rated among the world's best tennis players; she is now working her way onto the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour. She is a superb athlete with all the endurance and grace that that implies. Perhaps it is because she also happens to be one of my best friends that I find it less easy to note that her body is unmistakably female, though she herself often jokes about it. "With my pelvis, I could foal a pony, no trouble." Even though she is lean-butted and muscular. "I hate this! I get cold, anyone standing chest high should wear safety glasses." That, at least, is true.
Sitting there watching her-she was now combing her hair-I allowed the slow swell of physical wanting to recede, holding emotion at bay with perverse logic: because she was my friend, we couldn't be lovers.
Besides, Dewey already had a lover-a fading star on the professional tennis circuit named Walda Bzantovski, known to her close friends as Bets. A Romanian woman.
Over the phone, Tomlinson was pressing the issue. "That's it, isn't it? Romance. Jesus Christ, Doc, it's not like I called about the weather. So my timing's off. I interrupted."
"Not at all," I told him. He was more like the cavalry. Just in the nick of time.
Dewey had arrived that afternoon, Friday afternoon; flew in from New York on the cirrus fringe of December's first cold front. West Florida's cold fronts are something you won't read about in the travel brochures. They begin with a musky southeast wind that blows warm out of the Bahamas until the air congeals into an oily calm. For Christmas newcomers, it must be strange to see storefront holly wreaths and plastic snowmen baking in the winter heat, yet it's ideal tourist weather. Ideal weather for shelling and sunbathing and snook fishing and drinking margaritas on restaurant patios where snow-dazed midwesterners can lounge around in summer clothes and congratulate themselves on their balmy vacation choice.
But then it all changes and it changes quickly. Palm trees begin to clack and clatter in a nervous breeze. The breeze grows and builds, and then, as if guided by the boom of a sail, it swings compass-hard out of the northwest, hunkering there while a high-pressure system slips into the void. Then the wind blows Minnesota cold, roiling the green Gulf of Mexico until it's the color and texture of jagged marl, leaching the heat out of an ineffectual sun, sending the tourists scrambling and skittering back to their heated condos and expensive motel rooms to brood about money and their rotten luck.
Dewey had arrived unexpectedly with the first freight-train swing of wind. I'd been working on my thousand-gallon fish tank out on the deck of my stilthouse, fitting a new Styrofoam cover to insulate it from the predicted cold snap. Nearly a year before, my place had been all but destroyed by an explosion and I was still putting on finishing touches, rebuilding this, fixing that, trying to get things back to normal. No easy job. The problem with the Styrofoam cover was that I had sufficiently changed my new tank's PVC piping configuration-the raw water intake, exhaust, and overflow systems-so that the old cover could no longer serve even as a template. So I had spent the whole morning building a cover from scratch, measuring and fitting, cutting Styrofoam to size, then bracing the thing with marine plywood stripping. Every so often, someone from the marina would wander over to inspect, then comment on my handiwork, usually as prelude to some new bit of marina gossip or an invitation to a party on the mainland or up on Captiva-this was the holiday season, remember?-and they would generally finish by observing that I was being way too fastidious. The cold front wouldn't last for more than a week, so why didn't I just throw a tarp over the damn tank? It would save a helluva lot of time.
I listened to them. I smiled. I went right on working. One of the great frauds promoted by New Age mystics and other mind-control profiteers is that we are exactly what we envision ourselves to be. Imagine success, they tell us, and success will beat down our doors. Visualize big goals and big money; don't sweat the small stuff. But I think it is far more likely that we are directed less by our dreams than we are steered by our fears. We don't run to success- whatever success is-we flee in its general direction until success hits us in the face. The best executives, best salespeople, best tradesmen, builders, promoters, and professionals all have, at the bedrock core, a healthy fear of not living up to their obligations. The obligations vary-each craft and discipline creates its own-and they range from the great and grand to tiny little nit-picking details that demand long hours, short weekends, and a full ration of stubbornness. The duties of obligation are not flogged on the late-night infomercials because there is nothing flashy about commitment. Hard work without shortcuts or excuses just doesn't sell on cassette, disc, or video.
I wasn't about to throw a tarp over my fish tank because I am one of those people who sweats the small stuff. "Anal retentive" is the current euphemism. I am compulsive about details. I am a neatener and a straightener. Whenever I try to cut corners by slopping together some makeshift remedy, I suffer a nagging anxiety at belly-button level. The solution? I don't cut corners or slop together makeshift remedies. There are "What if?" people who are nostalgia junkies. I am a "What if?" person who is driven by fear of the future. What if I covered the fish tank with Pliofilm and the temperature dropped below freezing? My tank contains immature snook, tarpon, and sea trout, all carefully collected and painstakingly maintained. Most of them would die. What if the nor'wester blew a gale? The Pliofilm would be ripped away in strips and the wind would damage sea squirts, tunicates, anemones, and the shrimps and squid that live among them. Odds were that it wouldn't freeze and it wouldn't blow a gale… but what if it did? Sanibel Biological Supply, purveyor of marine research specimens, is a small company but it's my company, my obligation, so I sweat the details. As Jeth Nichols, one of the local fishing guides, has told me more than once: "You big dumb shit, what with all the tah-tah time you spend looking through a microscope and cutting open fish, no wonder you live alone. What woman's gu-gonna put up with that?"
Jeth's stutter doesn't affect his powers of observation; he's probably right on all counts.
So I was squatting over the cover, barefooted and dirt-streaked, when I felt the earthquake-tremble of footsteps on the dock that connects my house to the mangrove beach. Looked up expecting to see one of the marina regulars, but there stood Dewey instead. Her hands were shoved into the pockets of her Day-Glo red warm-ups, her blue visor cap was tilted back. She gave me a long look of appraisal, then shook her head solemnly. "Jesus Christ, I've been gone only, what? A year? That fast, you've gotten fat and let your personal hygiene go to hell."