The next morning at the San Francisco airport, the ticket agent warned the Trimbles that the Miami airport would be closing down soon. Their flight might be diverted. Woody told her they’d chance it. The agent asked if they’d ever experienced a hurricane.
Woody glanced at Isolde, who said that she hadn’t. Woody said that he had.
Isolde had a bad feeling about Hurricane Ernestine. Her marriage to Woody was new, but their house in Miami was old. They’d lived in it for five months. They had metal hurricane shutters for only the front and back porch windows. In June, Woody had stored water, hurricane supplies, and plywood sheets in the garage. Now they had to get back in time to cut the plywood sheets to size and bolt them over all the other windows.
Woody remembered his last hurricane, when he was a kid living in Coconut Grove. He remembered their shuttered house, the humidity, the god-awful noise outside; and, next day, the high water mark on the walls downstairs, the thin layer of stinking mud on the floor, and his twelve-year-old younger brother Chip hosing out the television set, singing “I’m All Shook Up.” Aha, umm, ooohhh yeah. Chip said he loved hurricanes.
Woody and Isolde first met at an exhibition of Brazilian art at the Bass Museum on Miami Beach. He was peering at a drawing by Mira Schendel when he noticed a tall, tanned, athletic-looking blond woman with gray eyes leaning toward the same drawing.
Woody knew as soon as he saw her that she was his woman, he was her man. Call it coupe de foudre, flash of lightning, pure insanity, Woody didn’t care. He wanted Isolde with a fierceness he’d never felt with any other woman. He looked around for rivals, thinking, Why not throw her over my shoulder and scamper into the night?
Isolde looked at him and saw a man with thinning blond hair, not tall, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. He radiated confidence, a sense of fun. She heard something in his voice that disarmed her, and she trusted him. He’s an honest man, she thought.
By the time she began to focus on the meaning of Woody’s words, they were drinking Chardonnay in the museum courtyard, and she was wondering, Why is he talking about Byron and Don Juan? Is he an English professor?
But before she had a chance to verify this, she’d agreed to join him for sushi at a nearby restaurant. They were walking away from the museum, and he was describing a Thai restaurant in Coconut Grove, where — he mimed pulling something like string out of his mouth — he found the elastic waistband from a pair of women’s underpants in his Pad Thai. “Fruit of the Loom,” he told her. “Size ten.”
Over sushi and warm saki, she learned that Woody had been a graduate student of English, but now was regional manager for Cardiotron, a company that made cardiac CT scanners — very, very expensive machines. He sold them to hospitals and doctors’ groups in Brazil, Argentina, and other countries in South America. He spoke fluent Spanish and Portuguese. He said, “Our scanner gives you a real-time, beating, 3-D rendering of the human heart. Amazing! I love it.” Woody laughed and clinked his glass against Isolde’s. “Can you see it? My business is the human heart.”
Isolde told Woody that she was studying Early Childhood Education at Florida International University. She’d just moved to Miami. Before that, she’d spent seven years, the years since high school, working as crew on big, ocean-going sailing yachts, spending her summers in the Mediterranean, her winters in the Caribbean.
She’d grown up in Colorado, an only child. Both parents were dead. She’d always wanted to be a sailor. She asked Woody, You know that Mediterranean blue? Her favorite color since she was five. She’d wanted to live in that color.
Her favorite song was an oldie version of “Somewhere Beyond the Sea,” sung in French by Charles Trenet, who made love sound dreamy and poetic, but also sexy, in a genial way. When she heard it, she imagined love on a clear day, with no memories.
“So now,” Isolde said, touching the rim of her wine glass to Woody’s, “I’ve told you everything important there is to know about me.”
There was something important Woody didn’t tell Isolde until they were living together in a rented apartment in Coral Gables and were talking about marriage. He’d been married and divorced when he was a graduate student in English at the University of Georgia. Isolde, after a stunned silence, asked if they’d had children. Woody said no.
Isolde packed a suitcase and drove away in her white Volkswagen Jetta. Woody thought he’d lost her for good. She left a message on his office voice mail the next day. She said she felt confused and needed to be alone, so she’d driven to Key West.
She returned in two days. She’d cut her lovely blond hair and wore a Jenny Holzer T-shirt that said: When someone beats you with a flashlight you make the light shine in all directions. Woody kissed her, told her how worried he’d been, how he’d missed her.
He said, “Don’t you have anything you regret, too?”
Her face took on a complex, haunted look that frightened Woody. He thought, She wasn’t angry at For the first time, he tried to imagine Isolde’s seven years as a sailor.
The house was on a half-acre of unincorporated Dade County, west of Red Road, between Coral Gables and South Miami. It was a one-story, two-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow with a tiled roof. The pool lay just beyond the back porch. A botanist who worked at Fairchild Gardens built the house in the 1930s. He planted gardenia bushes near the house, and lychee, orange, grapefruit, key lime, avocado, and mango trees in the yard. He also planted a calamondin tree from the Philippines, and, from Brazil, a jacaranda tree and a jaboticaba bush, which bore purplish-red, thick-skinned fruit the size of a cherry directly on its trunk and branches.
“I love this,” Isolde said to Woody. They were strolling around the yard. They’d been together a year and were getting married. It was April, the sun was shining, the jacaranda tree was a purple cloud of blossoms, and the real estate agent, who sensed that the house was selling itself, drifted away.
Isolde placed a hand on Woody’s shoulder in a beseeching gesture that startled and moved them both. She looked as if she were going to cry. “Oh, Woody. This is paradise. Can’t I have this? Please?”
Woody had never seen Isolde so unguarded, and he told her of course she could have it, he wanted her to have it. When they embraced, he felt Isolde’s hand move up to the back of his head, support a woman only offers a baby or a lover. Over her shoulder, Woody too had a vision of paradise, with green grass, flowering shrubs, fruit trees, birds arriving and departing, and their real estate agent furtively field-stripping a cigarette.
Everything fell into place. When they visited Woody’s mother in Bolinas, she and Isolde got on right away. “Such a beautiful girl,” Woody’s mother told him. “What an interesting life she’s had.” She smiled at Woody. “You’re going to learn a lot from Isolde.” Woody’s mother helped them buy their house. Knowing she didn’t have much time to live, she gave Woody a loan against his inheritance. Isolde came up with some money too, quite a lot of it, money she said her grandmother had left her. So they married and put a hefty down payment on the house.