Suddenly, they heard an explosion nearby; the electricity went off. Isolde and Woody lit the lamps and passed one over to Chip and Perry, and for a moment the four of them sat in the flickering lamplight, unspeaking, Woody watching Perry, who was watching Isolde, who seemed to be listening to something special in the noise of the storm. Chip was wearing his dark glasses, so nobody could tell what he was looking at.
“I love boy-meets-girl stories,” Perry said to Woody. “How did you and Isolde meet?”
“It’s the old story.” Woody, scenting danger, got to his feet. He picked up their lamp, saying in a bad Bogart imitation, “Of all the rooms in all the museums in the world, she had to walk into the room where I was standing.”
“Waiting for me?” Isolde said, getting to her feet.
Woody nodded.
Chip slowly clapped his hands. It was, for Woody, an appalling sound. He noticed the dim smile on Perry’s face as he looked from Woody to Isolde. Woody imagined braining his brother with the empty Cabernet bottle. Chip finally stopped clapping and Woody held out his hand for Isolde and said that now they were both too tired for words and needed to say goodnight. He led Isolde into their bedroom and shut the door. They lay on their bed, holding hands.
The hurricane moved over them. Water and debris pelted the house. The noise was big, and it was everywhere. It sounded to Isolde as if they were caught inside the engine of an insane machine. Then she felt the pressure change and saw the doors creak and strain against their fastenings. The house was breathing like a giant lung.
Around 4:00 in the morning, as the eye of the hurricane was passing and the other side of the storm approaching, Isolde got up to use the bathroom and felt damp air blowing through the house. She walked onto the back porch and saw that the door to the patio was open. She walked outside. The wind was rising. It was dark, dank, humid; there was a strong smell of earth and brine. Perry had brought a folding chair out to the pool deck and was sitting alone, smoking. She touched his shoulder.
The fresh, moist air awoke Woody too. He sat up, looked around, then slipped out of bed. Wondering about Isolde, he walked onto the back porch. He heard voices outside, from the pool deck. Isolde was talking to Perry. Woody saw them and stepped back inside the dark open doorway, where he could listen and see, but not be seen.
Isolde was saying, “It’s no joke.” Her voice was raised against the noise of the wind. “You can’t stay out here. The hurricane’s coming back.”
Perry got up and moved closer to her. He said, “I love you.”
“I don’t love you,” she said.
Perry said, half-shouting, “Four bullets, Isolde. Not many people survive four bullets. What kept me alive in that Kingston hospital was the determination that we’d meet and I’d apologize for the terrible things that happened, and we’d live together again.”
“Perry, I divorced you.”
“I didn’t divorce you.”
“We are divorced. This is my life.”
“I got four bullets. You got our Miami bank account. That’s fair, is it?”
“I didn’t know you’d been shot,” Isolde said. “Anyway, it was a joint bank account.”
“For emergencies only.”
“I needed medical treatment, money to live on. I knew that money was all the settlement I’d get from you.”
“Half this house belongs to me,” Perry said. “Your paramour — husband, whatever you choose to call him — should know that. I will tell him.”
“If it makes you happy, tell him.”
“I’ll do it. And I’ll tell him that you are my wife.”
“That’s insane.”
“I’m perfectly sane!” Perry shouted into the wind. He reached out and took her arm. She tried to jerk away, but he held on and leaned in closer, raising his voice to be heard, saying, “Please listen, darling, you’ve got to listen,” but she wrinkled up her nose and shouted, “God, Perry, you stink, you’re disgusting!” and she pushed him hard toward the pool, saying, “Go take a bath.” Perry lost his balance, stepped back, and went feet first into the water, still holding onto her arm and pulling her into the pool with him.
Perry’s feet, descending, landed on the alligator’s back. The alligator had been asleep underwater and now it erupted off the bottom, all four hundred pounds of it, snapped its mouth shut around Perry’s right foot, rolled over, and dragged him back down to the bottom of the pool. Isolde was dragged down too, and then Perry’s hand, which had been gripping her forearm, was yanked away.
In its frenzy, the alligator tore off Perry’s right foot, then fastened its jaws around Perry’s left thigh and began twisting and banging its head with terrific force back and forth on the concrete pool bottom.
Isolde saw nothing, but as she was kicking upwards through the warm water, the alligator’s tail thumped her right leg, and she thought, Alligator, and then she was clawing to the surface and a hand grabbed her arm and pulled her up onto the deck. She saw Woody.
“Oh my God,” Isolde said, panting. “Oh my God.” She got up onto one knee and then Woody helped her to her feet. They looked at the water, which was covered with leaves and coconuts and other debris. Something was happening down there that was roiling the surface. The wind was strong now, the trees around them bending and lashing the sky. A powerful gust almost unbalanced both of them and sent them into the pool.
“Come inside!” Woody shouted. Isolde was moaning and trembling; she looked at him and then back at the pool, where the water was still heaving.
“That’s over with!” Woody shouted. He was filled with a fierce exultation, and he put his arm around Isolde and moved her toward their house.
A branch blew past them and clanged against the metal shutters of the porch. Over with? Isolde thought, as Woody pulled her inside. He slammed the door shut and slid the bolt home.
But Perry’s in the pool, she thought. He’d always be down there, and what did that leave them with now?
Part III
Vices of Miami
The timing of unfelt smiles
by John Dufresne
Sunny Isles
At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger’s consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words. He had been trying to explain to the doctor why he no longer felt comfortable being in the same room with his shadow. He’d said, If light can pass through the universe, why can’t it pass through me? But now he could only manage to hum and to shake his head. I highlighted a speech in my script. Dad’s contention, as near as I could figure it, was that light had a mind of its own and had taken to behaving arbitrarily and recklessly in the last six months or so. After Dr. Hamburger clicked off his desk lamp, Dad took off his eyeshade, blinked, rubbed his rheumy eyes, and asked me who I was. Dr. Hamburger tapped the side of his prescription pad on his desk blotter, leaned back in his squeaky Posturetech office chair, cast me a glance, raised his articulate brow, and lifted his upper eyelids. Lid-lifters tend to be a tad melodramatic.
Dr. Hamburger had diagnosed Dad with Alzheimer’s. Dad said he was merely closing up shop. He hadn’t lost his ability to make metaphor, not yet. And he did have his lucid moments. He was in and out, however, and he was hard to read. His expressions were often without nuance or blend. He was extremely angry, extremely happy, or extremely vacant. He could remember what he had for breakfast on June 15, 1944, in Guam (gumdrop candy, two cookies), but not that he just turned on the gas without lighting the pilot; which is why I had to move him into an all-electric, assisted-living facility.