“It’s like when you go to the doctor,” Lee said to Dross. “You go to the Hurricane in your sandwich board, you wear your new Kleins.”
“Bet you he’s wearing a jockstrap under those shorts,” Dross said. “Bet he ain’t swinging under there.”
Lee said, “Courage has its limits.”
The guy in the sandwich board was pulling it off. His embarrassment was crimson, even in the falling light of a memorable sunset, but he was managing a sort of determined, boyish grin. The grin was killing women all over the roof. Lee could see that plainly enough.
Thongs and sarongs drifted toward the guy, forming a circle. Men were backpedaling toward the copper parapets, looks of confusion or grudging admiration on their faces. Hoping the guy would flame out, but thinking, Hell, he might set a standard we’ll all have to meet.
A fortyish redhead in a lobster-red bikini was the first to step forward. Her thighs had somersaulted through the pep rallies of yesteryear, but now they’d grown some cottage cheese. She started reading the sandwich board aloud in a Joan Rivers voice.
Dross turned to Lee. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “I pronounce it brilliant.”
Lee had to admit it was the best idea he’d seen in months. Maybe not brilliant, but very damned good.
A hand-lacquered résumé, the sandwich board told the guy’s life story. It was entitled: The Visual Aid of Love. The perfect antidote to the nauseating small talk of life-seeking-life in the temperate zone. The text began: What’s my sign? I’m an Equestrian. If you get the joke, I want to talk to you.
It gave the guy’s job (CPA, small firm, specializing in corporate tax accounts), his salary (middle six figures), his car (Lexus, understated off-white), his hobbies (board sailing, jet skiing, jogging, good literature — Patterson, Ludlum, Nora Roberts — and long walks on the beach at sunset with YOU...). There was some stuff about his philosophy of life. (I believe in maximizing my potential, minimizing my negative effect on others, and letting YOU do the same thing. I believe we can work this out together.) It ended with his address and phone number and... (I’m secure in my masculinity. Anyone want to buy me a drink?)
The bouncy redhead finished reading the résumé aloud, and the crowd cheered again, even the guys.
Frank Dross turned back around and faced the rows of glittering bottles. “Thing is,” he said, “you can only use it once. Guy comes in here tomorrow night in that thing, the women’ll throw his ass over the side. What’s he gonna do for an encore?”
“He’s got imagination,” Lee said, watching three women offer to buy the guy a drink. “He’ll think of something.”
“Expecting somebody?” Dross raised his glass and gestured at the elevator. “The way you keep looking over there.”
“Maybe,” Lee said. She was late. He was beginning to think maybe not.
Across the bar, a whippet-faced brunette lifted her chin sharply when Lee said maybe. Dross shot the cuffs of his brown polyester coat and winked at her. She peered at him like she might have to speak to the management. Then Dross said, “Look at that one,” gesturing his glass again at the elevator door.
Lee looked. She was beautiful in ways that only a few women could ever be, and she was the type who kept it forever. Someday she’d be ninety-five, and all of the women in the assisted-living facility would hate her for the glory of her bone structure. But that would come later. Now she looked late thirties, about Lee’s age, with honey-brown hair, long legs, and big brown eyes. And she was staring right at Lee Taylor. “I’m looking,” Lee said as the woman walked toward him through the maelstrom of sex, alcohol, and thwarted expectation that was the Hurricane roof bar on a Sunday at sundown.
Lee gave Dross a last glance as the big guy lifted himself to offer the woman his pew. Lee heard ice clatter against Dross’s front teeth but didn’t see him fade away into the crowd.
The woman sat next to Lee and delicately pushed Dross’s empty glass aside. The cheaply handsome bartender asked her what she’d have.
“White wine, Chardonnay,” she said without looking at Lee.
The youth glanced at Lee’s umbrella. Only partly cloudy. “Come on, man,” he said, “justify my existence back here.” Lee smiled, gave the umbrella a nose nudge, and poured the sweet hot Bacardi onto his tongue.
The woman turned her wineglass on the bar in the wet ring left by Frank Dross’s bourbon. Still not looking at Lee, she said, “Don’t you recognize me?”
Lee examined the side of her face. From any angle, she amazed. The polite thing to say was, “Well, you do look sort of familiar.”
And then a door opened in his mind, opened just enough so that a little light shone on the past, and then opened wider. In full brightness Lee saw his chemistry class, freshman year. It was one of his extraordinary stories.
The lectures were held in an amphitheater that seated two hundred. Numbers were painted in ominous black on the backs of the seats. Each number represented a student. A bored graduate assistant sat at the front of the room taking the roll by recording numbers not obscured by the bodies of aspiring young chemical geniuses. In chemistry, Lee was far from a genius.
At the University of Florida you had to have a major, or at least you had to answer the question, “What’s your major?” when asked by a fellow student. As a freshman, with no idea when or how he’d actually declare a major, Lee had understood one thing: “I’m majoring in premed” sounded good to girls.
He’d made the mistake of announcing this to an academic adviser at registration and the guy had put him in this teeming chemistry class. The guy had Lee’s high school transcript in front of him, and he’d explained to Lee with a stern and worldly expression on his face that Lee’s record was spotty at best. So the guy had stuck Lee in this cattle-call chemistry class where Louis Pasteur could not have found a legitimate premed major.
Lee was never sure if his adviser had reposed faith in Lee’s ability to mature in his understanding of the periodical chart of the elements or if the guy had just played a little joke on the freshman from Panacea, Florida. Whatever it was, soon enough Lee saw that he had no particular aptitude for chemistry. The lectures were showy demonstrations of explosions and beakers of liquids that changed colors dramatically when they were mixed. The showman lecturer was, Lee later learned, a drudge whose research career had fizzled years ago, but the guy knew how to dazzle.
Lee and the other two hundred students were assigned to discussion groups taught by grad students. So it was the big show on Mondays, and then the small group meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays where the mysteries of explosions and lurid liquids were analyzed in detail. Lee never caught the analysis, failed the weekly quizzes, and barely made the deadline to drop the class before receiving a well-earned failing grade.
After that, dropping things was easier, and he drifted through classes he didn’t get, some he got but cared nothing about, and discovered Gainesville’s bars and strip joints. In the middle of the spring semester, he left Gainesville after declaring himself a building-construction major, and with that credential in hand, went home, then drifted down to St. Pete Beach to work as a carpenter’s helper in the construction trade.
But the extraordinary thing was what happened one day early in the fall down in the pit of the big amphitheater where the students gathered after the lectures, some to ask questions of the lecturer, most to chat with friends or, lacking friends, to try to meet someone.