My wife bangs her tea mug down on a glass end table and walks out of the room, leaving an airless quiet in her wake. I know what the problem is. She’s tired of my complaining. She’s heard it all before.
Lara picks up the abandoned cup and takes a sip from it, a breezy look on her face, as if to dismiss my wife’s behavior. We’ve both noticed her sour moods, but it’s not something we could talk about. My wife has made no effort to commiserate with Lara about her breakup. In the old days, she would’ve, but now it’s as if she’s unwilling to acknowledge that she’s in a position to pity anyone, to hand down aid or wisdom.
Lara and I look over toward the TV. It feels like we’re allies, yet we avoid each other’s gaze. There’s a press conference on the screen. A black man in a three-piece suit is slouching against a podium. He could be talking about anything. Next to him, a stone-faced woman scans the crowd.
There’s a spot on the edge of town where you can pull off the roadside and view alligators from the safety of your car. My wife and I haven’t made our way over there, and now Lara has started campaigning that we go, that we pack some sandwiches and find a radio station and stare at the huge languorous reptiles for an hour or two. She thinks it’ll cheer us up. I tell her maybe we’ll go tomorrow, if the rain stops. Then, because I can tell my wife has no interest in this field trip, I try to talk Lara out of it altogether.
What the alligators do nowadays, I say, is wait for old ladies to walk their pooches too close to a drainage ditch. They collect indigestible collars in their guts. That shouldn’t cheer anyone up. I tell her there’s wildlife right outside the window, and it’s true — a tall white bird is out there in the drizzle, stabbing the soft ground with more urgency than seems necessary. The bird is in the rough and beyond the bird is the fairway. Beyond that, peering out from screened lanais, are pairs of dismayed old folks. They promised themselves they’d die in lovely weather, and now that they’re here it’s just raining and raining and raining.
The note on my car says: HOW ABOUT GIVING US A BREAK, WE CANNOT GET IN AND OUT WITH OUR BIKES AND BUNDLES. It’s been taped to the driver-side window inside a plastic baggie. It’s not signed. Whoever left the note wants me to believe I’m blocking the front walk by parking where I’ve parked, in the closest space, but he and I both know why he doesn’t want me there. That space is bigger than the others. It’s wider. I park my little Honda there on purpose for the good of our game. My wife suggests we put a new note on my car window, one that will read: IF YOU WANT A BREAK, GO BREAK YOUR FUCKING HIP.
We won’t do it, though. We’re not sure why, but we won’t do something like that. It’s the teenagers and old folks who do whatever they please. And there’s no one else in this town, just teenagers by the hundreds and old folks by the thousands.
Each evening, we go to a restaurant in the ritzy downtown, our only outing of the day, jogging in the rain from the car to the closest awnings. I limp when I jog, but still, I can jog. The restaurants are too expensive for us, but we can’t let the old folks win. If they’re going to have red snapper in a tangerine and rum sauce, so are we.
We enjoy food more than they do. And we know the wines from when we were out west. We hope, each of us silently, that when the old folks see us sighing and cooing and letting our jaws roll luxuriantly, they’ll think about the sex they once had.
***
The condo we rent still has all the landlady’s figurines in it. The day we moved in, we piled them all in the spare room, enough ceramic and porcelain to fill a grave. Except one, a foot-and-a-half statue of a dark-haired angel in a tuxedo. That one we move from room to room with us. We take it out to the porch, and on car rides. The angel’s chest is puffed, his waist petite. He looks sort of like an exasperated maître d’ and sort of like he’s about to break into song. His hands are empty, his wings folded against his back. He stands sunk to his shins in a cloud, like someone in quicksand.
The condo complex is immense. You could claim it’s ten square miles and no one could argue. The pool, which we have yet to walk over to, is the largest in this region of the state. The deepest it gets is four feet.
The last night of her visit, Lara wins 20-Point Turn. She’s got a Nissan she’s taken great care of, that she takes religiously for waxes and transmission flushes and new tires even when it doesn’t need them, and an old man trying to park runs right into it. Now her Nissan has a dent in the quarter panel. Lara decides not to care. She decides that her incessant car upkeep is getting sad. The dent is a blessing. It’s worth a dent to win the game, because she could really use a win.
When the guy finally gets into the space and rises up out of his Grand Marquis, the three of us stand and cheer. I hold the angel statue up like a trophy. It seems like the old days for a moment — Lara is genuinely giddy and my wife’s smile is full, unfettered. She’s not withholding a part of herself, not acting reluctant in order to make some point. And I feel I’m partly responsible for getting us here, having been a steady, buoyant presence in our little home.
The next morning my wife gets up early. That’s not unusual; most nights, one of the two of us slips out, sleepless, to watch the wee-hour newsfeeds. An hour or so later I get up, too, and make a full pot of coffee. The night is just subsiding; by the time the coffee is done brewing, I can see out the windows. I pour myself a mug and carry it to the back of the condo to check out the birds on the golf course. As I pass through the living room, I see that my wife isn’t on the couch.
I can hear now how quiet the condo is. I walk to the front end and ease Lara’s door open a couple inches, sensing that her room is empty. I set my coffee down on the Formica table in the kitchen. Maybe the two of them went running together, though that would surprise me. Out the front window I can see that Lara’s car isn’t there.
I decide to forgo a bowl of cereal, in case they went out to pick up something for breakfast. I head back to the rear windows and lean on the sill. A mismatched gang of water birds is advancing up the fairway. It’s like they’ve fanned out to look for something one of them dropped. There’s a blue heron and an ibis and a snowy egret — a few distracted gulls, not helping with the search, nestle on the clipped grass like it’s a calm bay.
When I’m too hungry to wait any longer and my coffee is cold, I return to the kitchen. The angel statue catches my eye, proud-looking, planted over on the white sideboard. And then I see the note pinned underneath it. The stationery bears the logo of a hospital, and the hurried writing tells me that my wife and Lara drove up near Sarasota for the day, to hang out on Lara’s friend’s boat. And that they may stay the night. It’s my wife’s handwriting. She didn’t put her name at the bottom, or put my name at the top — didn’t sign off with the word love. She’s being petty, Lord knows to what end.
I dump my coffee and pour a fresh mug. No name for this friend of Lara’s? Near Sarasota? I suppose I should be happy the girls are reconnecting, returning to one another’s favor, but happiness isn’t the feeling that’s arriving. The note didn’t say whether they were going to sit at the dock or take the boat out, but I assume it’s raining in Sarasota too. It feels like the whole state has been under these clouds.
I sit in the kitchen until my coffee is lukewarm again, then I grab my keys and head down the front steps. I’m not sure where I’m driving until I pull into the grocery store. I fill a hand basket with fruit and grab a sixer of cheap beer. I can already envision the apples and limes in bowls in the kitchen, already feel how they’ll help the condo, and I can see the forthright, cheerful cans of beer on a shelf in the refrigerator. At the checkout I take a newspaper too.