“What do you think was wrong?” Marshall said.
“Oh, Marshall, forgive me, but why would you look for some one thing to be wrong? The two of them could blink in unison, and suddenly they were actors in a soap opera, and to tell you the truth, I think they got off on it. They understood each other. They got off on the pain. Forget the fact that real things might happen to other people that might be painful; all they could think about was themselves. There was a summer night on the back porch that I remember.…”
“You understood so much more than I ever did,” Marshall said. “Just those few extra years you had on me — they gave you a perspective I never could have had.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Gordon said. “I might have been around to observe some unfortunate stuff. I might have known some things they would just as soon I didn’t know anything about. But don’t assume that gave me any advantage. Whatever I saw, whatever I knew, the only way to keep the peace was to shut up about it. So what good did it do that I had their number? They closed down, and I was expected to do the same.”
“Because the marriage was bad, you mean?”
“Because the marriage was bad,” Gordon echoed. “Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. When I think about them, that certainly comes to mind: that their marriage was bad.”
“But what are you remembering?” Marshall said. “You saw them fighting, but you weren’t supposed to let on? They were fighting on the back porch?”
Gordon looked at Marshall. “What do you want, Marsh? You want me to fill in details? Tell you about every tragedy, major or minor? Look: he married somebody who was nothing like him, didn’t he? Not that Evie was much more like him, but he wasn’t afraid of her. All I remember about that particular night when he went out into the storm was that Evie thought she was having a heart attack and Mom was drunk, going into one of her religious fits, and the two of us were sitting there as their captive audience. I mean, give me a fucking break. You were so scared I thought you were gonna have the fucking heart attack. That place was a fucking zoo sometimes.”
“Do you think he married Evie so we’d have a mother?” Marshall said.
“I think that sounded as good as anything else he could come up with. Do I think that? No, not really. I never knew him to do anything except for himself. I think he was boffing her long before Mom died. I mean, think about it. All that running around at night. It used to wake you up. You were the lightest sleeper in the world. You’d wake up and get afraid and wake me up. I still never sleep through a night, man. Beth was feeding me pills with a name I can’t pronounce — Tryp-something — that worked pretty well, and then they got yanked off the market. I’m not complaining, I’m just telling you: I do not sleep through a fucking night, no matter how tired I am.” Gordon looked at Marshall. “So now you know everything I know.”
Marshall was walking fast to keep up with him. Past Faustos, Gordon had turned right, onto Simonton. The conch train passed by, filled with tourists. Alongside it, a one-armed boy on Rollerblades kept pace. They caught up with him at the next red light, wheeling in backward circles.
“Do you wish you knew more?” Marshall said.
“More?” Gordon said. “Do I wish I knew more? No, I don’t wish I knew more.”
“Don’t think it would help you sleep?” Marshall said.
“Maybe it would. Never thought about it.”
“But you don’t wish—”
“There was more to know. I realize that,” Gordon said. “You know what I think? If I knew that stuff, there’d still be more to know. I talk to Beth more than I’ve ever talked to every other woman combined, and you know what? I will never know it all. I’ll know what she says that day. I’m not saying she’s a liar, or that she doesn’t want to talk to me. She’ll talk till she’s blue in the face most of the time. But every time she surprises me, I realize that I am simply never, ever going to have enough information to predict what she’ll do. Here in the Conch Republic, there’s a tradition I’ve come to depend on. Stand down at Mallory Square, or anywhere the tourists are, and when the sun sinks below the horizon line, everybody claps. I take it as a sign that people like a grand finale, but when they’ve had one, they’ve had one. Something like the sun gradually sinking is very distinct. You figure things out about people when they rush off or you see them stick around to see the sky get more colorful, because that’s what happens. The colors deepen. It gets orange and bright blue and battleship gray. It gets real pink, and sometimes the pink’s shot through with lavender. A pink and purple sky. If you applauded all the while that spread out above you, you’d never get to drink your drink.”
A cat tried to rub against Gordon’s leg. He raised a foot in its direction, and it darted away.
“Fuck, man, you just got here, and look what I did. We missed sunset,” Gordon said, pushing open the front gate. “Can’t have you missing dinner, too. Hey, babe! How are those coals coming?” Gordon hollered.
They had burned to ash, they saw, but Beth, still meditating, had not restarted the fire.
22
HE SAT IN A canvas butterfly chair behind the dive shop, waiting for Gordon to get off the phone. The phone was a cordless, and Gordon kept wandering in and out of the store, so there wasn’t any way to tell from his end of the conversation whether Gordon was pleased or displeased by what Mr. Watanabe was saying. Marshall picked up Gordon’s sunglasses from the seat of another butterfly chair, put them on, and looked at the water, and the boats docked nearby, through the yellow lenses. The dive shop was closed for the day while Gordon’s partner, Hank, took inventory. Altiss, the Trinidadian roofer, was installing a skylight in the loft above the store. Mr. Watanabe had called from Fort Lauderdale and would not be coming to have dinner with Gordon that night — that much Marshall had understood.
“This is the good life,” Altiss said to Marshall, climbing down to get a cold drink from his Styrofoam cooler that sat near the cluster of butterfly chairs. “I recommend to you the profession of roofing. Very good money, and not as dirty as plumbing. I go once a month to Orlando to Walt Disney World, where there is always work to do on the roofs in the Magic Kingdom.” Altiss wore khaki shorts, a red T-shirt, and a many-pocketed vest. He also wore argyle socks and purple basketball sneakers. He grabbed his boom box and took it with him when he climbed the ladder to the roof.
Four days spent driving to Key West; three in Key West, four days until he would be home again in New Hampshire. Today, day three, when he had just begun to unwind, was his last day in what was alternatively referred to as Paradise or the Conch Republic. There had been a sunset sail planned with Mr. Watanabe, but when that plan fell through Gordon had rented the boat to a Texan and his girlfriend. Though the store was officially shut, Gordon hadn’t been able to resist answering the door when the man knocked, grinning from ear to ear and holding up his wallet, pointing his thumb in the direction of the boats moored off the dock. His wife or girlfriend had flirted with Gordon as Gordon pointed out the reef on the navigational map. “Check his bank balance before you turn your attentions, sugar,” the man had said, cupping his hand over her ass. It was all good-natured: the flirting was as obvious as her sparkling gold jewelry. The woman had been surprised when she couldn’t draw Marshall in. He had never liked being the object of someone’s flirtation. It usually had an edge he distrusted. He remembered Cheryl Lanier, drinking his Jack Daniel’s as he talked to Sonja on the telephone. If it was McCallum she’d been interested in, why had she bothered to flirt with him? Maybe he had been a backup flirtation. Or a flirtation within a flirtation, like a play within a play. A sailboat with PUCK written in fancy calligraphy had caught his eye, making him think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As he watched the boats bob, he realized he’d been wrong: it was a too fancily drawn L, not a P. What did that mean, he wondered — that the person who owned the boat had good luck, or that the person hoped to invoke it?