"Well, Gino's gone," he said. "He's back in New York by now."
Sandra said nothing, and Joey was grateful for her restraint. If she'd come out with too much relief, he would have had to take Gino's side somehow because he was family. That's just how it was. But she kept still and looked down at the blue shimmer of the pool.
"Yup," Joey resumed, "he's history. So, Sandra, now I can start making good on some a the promises I been making."
"Promises?" said Sandra. "You, Joey? You've been making promises?"
"Yeah, ya know, like having friends and all, doing stuff. I'm ready."
"Just like that?" said Sandra. "Ready for what, exactly?"
"I don't know. Ya know, like life. Hey, what day is it?"
"It's Thursday, Joey."
"Right. Well, like, on Saturday. Zack and Claire, let's have 'em over to dinner. And Bert."
Sandra started to smile but could not help letting a quick flinch tighten the comers of her mouth. Joey, just then discovering the comfort of small affections, put a cool hand on her knee.
"Sandra, hey, I know what you're thinking: Bert isn't gonna fit in, it's gonna be, like, awkward. But ya know what I think, Sandra? I think the more ya try to keep one part of your life over heah, and another part over theah, the more it doesn't work. I've tried it, believe me. You're embarrassed, ya try to keep things separate, they just get more bollixed up together. Ya can't go around feeling like ya all the time gotta apologize for where ya came from, who ya came from. Ya gotta, like, trust that people are gonna adjust, adopt, adapt, whatever. Ya know, like lighten up and get along."
Midway through dinner, Joey started yawning, and afterward, when he and Sandra made love, it had some of the floating bafflement and tender discontinuity of sex in dreams. He did not feel her slip out of bed to straighten up the kitchen.
But by three a.m. he was all slept out. His eyes popped open, and the moonlight filtering through the curtains was more than bright enough to guide him to the stove to put up coffee. He pulled on his bathrobe and took a cup out by the pool.
The night was just barely cool enough for the coffee to steam. Overhead, the palm fronds rustled dryly; the sound was almost like brushes on a snare drum. The closed flowers had lost their individual perfumes and gave off a generic sweetness like that of wet paper. Joey sipped from his mug and thought about the last time he'd been out by the pool at three a.m. It was only ten weeks or so ago. His prospects had been zero and a sense of failure was keeping him awake as stubbornly as a toothache. He'd had no job and he was running out of money. Sandra was getting fed up and the one person he could talk to was a resurrected mafioso who talked to his neurotic dog. He was trying to concoct a way to pull a living out of Florida, and all he could think of was baby alligators, suntan lotion, pencil sharpeners in the shape of oranges.
He shook his head and laughed softly into the night. From baby alligators and pencil sharpeners to real estate and emeralds. O.K., Joey admitted, he wasn't home free yet, not every last piece was in place. Still, at three a.m., everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, and Joey indulged in the rare pleasure of paying himself a compliment. It was an unusual compliment for Joey in that it was not bullshit, it was not bragging, it was not meant to impress anybody. He took a sip of his coffee, put his head back against the hard webbing of the lounge, and basked in the belief that, for a kid from the neighborhood, he wasn't doing too bad down here in Florida.
— 38 -
At 8:55 a.m., which felt to Joey like the middle of the afternoon, he walked into the Parrot Beach sales office, wearing his pink shirt, his by now broken-in khaki shorts, and his confident watchband that told the world he frowned on flash. When Zack Davidson showed up a few minutes later, Joey handed him nine hundred and seventy-three dollars in cash. It was what was left from Gino's thousand after the rowboat and the nautical chart had been paid for.
For Zack, however, nine a.m. was not afternoon, it was first thing in the morning. His sandy hair was still damp from the shower, he hadn't even had his second cup of coffee, and he glanced down at the wad of bills as if they were a face that looked familiar, but only somewhat. "What's this about?"
"The little motor?" Joey said.
Zack tilted his head expectantly. Yes, he knew the little motor.
"I lost it."
Zack sat down in his desk chair and drummed his fingers on the blotter. He had a fair amount of experience with outboard engines. Many things went wrong with them. Their spark plugs got gummed up. Their water pumps crapped out. Their propellers fell off, their starter ropes came away in your hand, their shifters jammed so you could only go backward. Outboards were a plague, an affliction. But how did you lose one?
"You lost it," he said, plucking a dark thread from the sleeve of his pink shirt. It was not a question. He just needed to hear it in his own voice.
Joey nodded.
"I don't imagine you wanna tell me how it happened."
Joey shook his head. "Sometime maybe. Zack, I don't know what they cost. If that isn't enough…"
Zack waved away the offer. Nine hundred and seventy-three dollars was in fact more than the old motor was worth, less than a new one would cost- in that gray area where insurance adjusters quibble and gentlemen do not. "You get done what you needed to do?"
"Yeah, I did," said Joey, and though he hadn't meant to smile so soon after telling Zack of the loss of the motor, he couldn't help it.
Zack slipped into sales manager mode. It was something he could comfortably do while half asleep. "So the cockin' around is over? You're gonna get out there now and sell some goddamn real estate?"
"Bet your ass. Tons. But Zack, listen, Sandra and me, we'd like you and Claire to come over for dinner on Saturday night. Can ya do that?"
Zack hesitated just an instant, and Joey felt suddenly shy. A strange and basic thing, the courting stage of friendship. The offers of alliance and the gestures of warmth got passed back and forth like wampum. "Pretty sure we can," Zack said. He hoped it didn't sound like he was reserving himself an out. "Sounds real nice."
"Florida," said Joey. "Sounds like Florida. Grilling steaks. Eating outside with shorts on. How sweet it is, huh, Zack?"
Zack rubbed his reddish eyebrows, and Joey headed out, pausing for a second to contemplate the Parrot Beach scale model with its Saran Wrap pool and miniature residents on beach chairs. Boating, barbecues, company-his life was getting to where it could almost fit right in with that ideal of ease under sunny skies and Plexiglas.
At around eleven, with two commissions in the bag, Joey took a break and called Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard in Queens. He could picture the old maroon phone booth at the back of the green-painted store, with the pebbled metal walls that were always cold to the touch and the accordion door that always fooled you about whether you should push or pull. Joey asked for Sal Giordano, but his buddy wasn't there. He said he would call back in a couple of hours, and if Sal came in, he should leave a number and a time he could be reached. This meant that Sal would organize his afternoon around getting down Northern Boulevard or over the Gowanus Bridge in a timely fashion, before rush hour if possible, and hoping that when he got there, his public telephone had not had its coin box chiseled out by a crack addict or its metal- sheathed wires yanked apart by an aggravated patron who had lost his quarter.
When Joey called back at two he was given a number where Sal could be reached at four, and when he called at four Sal picked up almost before the phone had rung. The first thing Joey heard sounded like the screaming whine of jet engines close enough to blow your hat off. "So Sal," he screamed, "you're at the Airline Diner?"