Sea Creatures (8 page)

I found several pieces that might suit the gallery's needs. In one, a squid and an octopus brawled, tentacles locked, while a barracuda looked on wearily. This one was titled
Combat
, and the date was January 11, 1985. This man had lived in the middle of Biscayne Bay, drawing his pictures, since before Graham and I had moved into the cottage, since long before Frankie even existed.

I heard a door open and shut and Charlie appeared. By this point, Frankie had arranged items from my tote in a line on a clear patch of the floor—a lip gloss, a pair of sunglasses, a pen—and was jumping over each, then spacing them farther apart and starting again, a rudimentary hopscotch. He was restless.

Charlie had changed into green swim trunks and a white T-shirt. He carried a few business envelopes in one hand and held them out to me, watching Frankie as he hopped. “For Riggs,” he said.

“I'll take them today.” I put the envelopes in my tote.

Frankie went up to Charlie and signed a few times.

Charlie said, “Swim, swim, yes. Are you ready?”

Frankie nodded.

Charlie raised his eyebrows at me. “Are
you
ready?”

“Right downstairs?” I said, forcing him to maintain eye contact. “Where I can see you?”

“Right downstairs, yes.”

The alternative to letting him go was not letting him go, which wasn't a great option, either. I saw nothing suspect or even heedless in Charlie, and I believed I could trust him.

I helped Frankie pull off his shirt. “Wear your shorts,” I said. He'd left diapers behind early at his own insistence, but I'd brought spare clothes just in case. “
Be very safe
,” I said to them both, hearing the anxious quiver in my own voice.

“We will,” said Charlie, and Frankie followed him out of the room, sending a wave in my direction.

At the window I watched them make their way down the dock. The clouds had gone and the breeze had died. My son's shoulder blades cast slim shadows on the pale canvas of his back. Charlie said something and Frankie nodded eagerly. They lay down on their stomachs, heads bobbing over the dock's edge. Charlie splashed at the water and Frankie did the same. A silver swim ladder bucked gently on its hinges, and Charlie got up and stepped down a couple of rungs, then held out his arms. Frankie was hesitant, but then he leaned forward so Charlie could ease him into the water. The water reached Charlie's chest. At first, Frankie clung to him, but eventually he started to point his chin and scoop his hands and kick wildly, splashing and letting a little space grow between them. My heart buoyed. I watched for another minute or two, then went back to work.

 

AFTER AN HOUR—I CHECKED ON
them regularly, wishing badly that I could abandon my task and just stand at the window spying, studying my son's joy like a scientist—they came upstairs wrapped in faded blue towels. Frankie trailed Charlie, eyelids heavy.

Sleep
, he signed.

Every time he made the sign—and it wasn't rare for him to request sleep, even to beg for it—I'd had the same hopeful thought: maybe it skips a generation. I knew that many three-and-a-half-year-olds were sleeping less during the day or refusing naps entirely. For Frankie, this seemed far out of reach. Every day, no matter what was going on, he insisted on napping for a couple of hours or more.

“In here,” said Charlie, opening a door.

In the room, there were two full beds and a wooden chest of drawers. Over the chest of drawers hung two oil paintings similar to the ones in the living room: wide poinciana canopy in one, palm trees and sandy beaches in the other. I'd seen enough of Charlie's work to know that he hadn't painted these himself. The beds were pressed against opposite walls, and the one that shared a wall with the room where I'd been working—the office, as I now thought of it—was the most carefully made, so I assumed the other was the bed where Charlie slept. Charlie pulled dry clothes from the dresser and left the room, tucking his chin to his chest as he went, as if he'd been intruding. After I helped Frankie wiggle into dry underwear, he climbed into the neatly made bed and pulled the sheets to his chest.

Read
, he signed.

No book
, I signed.

He pouted.
Sing
, he signed.

I was aware of Charlie beyond the doorway, within earshot. I sang the two lullabies I always sang, the two my mother always sang to me: “I See the Moon” and “Sleep, Baby, Sleep.” When I was done, Frankie's blinks were long. I didn't see Charlie as I went back into the office, and for two hours I worked uninterrupted. The world was so quiet that the sound of the papers brushing together in my hands had the volume of another person in the room, speaking to me. I found myself humming as I sorted, and I stopped every so often to straighten my back and glance out the window. I made it through another box and opened a third. I'd begun to rethink my strategy of only sorting for a dozen subjects at a time, as it looked as if it could be days before I made a real dent that way, so I started ten new piles. I had to stop and straighten the increasingly messy stacks into a grid on the floor to allow for walkways. My back ached from bending. A boat passed, towing a skier. An airplane rushed overhead. Some of the piles grew to an inch thick, but some were still a single sheet by the time Frankie knocked on the wall between us.

Charlie appeared in the office doorway. “Is that the boy?” he said. “Ready for lunch?”

It had not occurred to me until that moment that he might have been lonely for companionship. Of course he was alone almost all of the time, but it seemed to me that a person who chooses a solitary lifestyle might be impervious to loneliness, or at least significantly more so than most of us. Maybe this isn't always the case. Maybe there are people who choose solitude for different reasons entirely.

Charlie prepared the same lunch, more or less, as the first time we'd come. Frankie, eyes swollen from swimming and sleep, wedged himself into a corner of the sofa and sucked down a cup of water. Charlie brought the food to the table, then went back to the kitchen. When he returned again, he handed me a cold bottle of beer.

“It's like work and vacation at the same time,” I said.

“It seems you'll never get through it, I know.” He ate two cherry tomatoes at once. I watched his jawline as he chewed. “I've been putting it off for years.”

“Why now?”

“Riggs has been nagging me. He says there needs to be an inventory, they need to be in storage.”

“He's right.”

“He's worried about a hurricane.”

To mind came an image of his magnificent illustrations carpeting the ocean floor. Maybe an eel, flashing by, would catch a glimpse of its own frozen self.

He chewed on an olive, then pulled the pit from his mouth. “Get the pitted ones next time, for the kid.”

“Okay.” The heat drained me of energy, of appetite. I finished my beer. I said, “How long have you been showing your work?” The words sounded stiff and formal in my ears. It was hard to talk to an artist about his art without sounding like a dilettante or a rube.

“I met Henry Gale years ago,” he said. “His father and my wife—anyway, they know each other. Henry put me in touch with a friend who had a gallery. We've done half a dozen shows, thereabout.” He met my eyes and glanced away. “The money is pretty good. My wife—there are medical bills.”

I'd forgotten that he was still married. He turned away a little, as if closing the door on that line of conversation.

“I've found a few options for the show,” I said. I rose to fetch the pieces I'd culled. There were two of clipper ships being attacked—consumed, really—by giant octopi. In both, the modern Miami skyline fanned out behind the ship, giving the piece an apocalyptic quality, as if monstrous creatures and ghost ships might rise from the bay at any time. There was a menacing sea horse, dark lines along the scallops of its face, eyes slanted and cold, charging toward a smaller, milder sea horse. There was a whale shark stalking something off the page, zombie eyes cold as marbles. There was a sea snake flashing its fangs, its oily body suspended in midslither.

The last, which Charlie lingered over before setting it down with the others, was of a fish lying in a puddle of water on a dock, its mouth and eyes gaping. The scales of the fish—it was a bonefish, I think—were delicate and pretty, laid out in a pattern that reminded me of a nautical stencil. The scales were art in themselves.

“Drawn from life?” I said.

“From death.” He pulled a stubby pencil from the table, turned over the drawings, and scribbled on the back of each. I gathered these were notes regarding color. “Take them to Henry Gale,” he said.

I went into the office and found a file folder for them, then put it in my tote. When I returned, Frankie was pulling the last chunk of banana from a bowl. I bent to gather the dishes.

Charlie's eyes rested on my neck. “Can you stay awhile?” he said.

Please
, signed Frankie to me.

“A little while,” I said to them both, signing and speaking at the same time.

They went downstairs while I washed the dishes and wiped down the kitchen counter. The dish soap was running low, and I made a note to pick some up. When I came out onto the porch to check on Frankie, they were standing on the far square of the dock below. Frankie was watching as Charlie cast a fishing line and reeled it in. He handed it over and Frankie braced himself and took it, and together they reeled, Charlie's hand over Frankie's. Finally the lure, an iridescent plastic thing, burst out of the water. Charlie showed Frankie again how to cast the line, and when Frankie tried it by himself, the unwieldy pole got away from him and shot into the bay. In a flash, without removing his clothes, Charlie dove in after it, and when he emerged he had the pole over his head. He was grinning. He grabbed at the dock with his free hand and said something to Frankie—I didn't catch it—then hauled himself powerfully out of the water. He stood there dripping, breathing hard. He peeled off his wet shirt and dropped it to the dock, then started squeezing out the hems of his shorts. I felt the rare pleasure of watching an attractive man without being seen doing so, and I actually felt myself blush, standing there in the hot wind. I heard Charlie say, “That's quite an arm you've got, kiddo.”

They went back to copiloting the fishing rod, Charlie in his soaked shorts and bare chest and Frankie in a mode of fierce concentration. I started to return to the piles and the boxes, and was facing away from them when the sound—that unfamiliar, bright beam of sound—reached me.

My son, laughing.

TWO

6

ON SUNDAYS, MY FATHER PLAYED
a late afternoon show on the back patio at Tobacco Road, the oldest bar in Miami. The place was downtown on the river, locked inside a labyrinth of one-way streets and empty warehouses, and though I'd been there a dozen times, the band had already started playing by the time I was able to locate the entrance to the parking lot. It was full; I parked on the street. When finally we wound our way to the table Lidia had saved, we were disheveled and harried. I tried to brush Frankie's hair with my fingers but he pushed me away and scrambled onto Lidia's lap, reaching for her water glass. She pushed a sweaty margarita toward me.

“You made it!” she said.

“Barely,” said Graham.

I shot him a look. He threw up his hands. I believed firmly that as long as he refused to drive, he had no voice in these matters.

I'd watched my father play music in fifty venues in my lifetime, everything from a soulless hotel bar to a gay dance club to a tiki bar in the Keys, where he'd played the ukulele. Now and again he'd played songs he'd written, though it had happened less over the years and I doubted he still wrote songs at all. This was a relief. His original songs had a folksy, bluesy sound, lots of tinny plucked guitar and melancholy piano, and they were, for the most part, love songs. The stories they conveyed, though, had nothing in common with my parents' story, which had started in college and continued through the one unplanned pregnancy and the marriage that followed. The disparity between the objects of affection in his songs and the tone and tenor of my parents' relationship had always confounded me. How is a person supposed to react when her father writes about the way a girl's shoulder slopes in the dawn light? He'd also written wry country songs about old Florida, alligators and airboats and frog legs and swamps, but these songs lacked the beating heart of his ballads. I'd understood early that my father's ambitions were somewhat confined, though I'd never gotten as clear a picture of his talent. Maybe every so often I perceived in his playing a certain tightness, a rehearsedness, that it seemed some musicians outgrew. In the next song it might be gone. I'd played piano as a kid, but my father had been an impatient teacher and I'd preferred to mimic his playing rather than read sheet music—a skill he was certain I needed to learn, though I never understood why—and eventually he gave up trying to teach me. Graham had always asserted that my father had a gift, but for whatever reason I could never wholly agree. I think my father sensed my skepticism, and it might have been one of the many reasons we were never closer. My mother had also played piano, but haltingly and effortfully, and she'd known only a few hymns by heart. As far as I knew, my father never had tried to teach her, though he did point it out when she was doing something wrong.

Though I was relieved that he no longer played original songs, I'd always enjoyed hearing my father's voice at the front of the band, out from under the muffled blanket of backup. He had a beautiful singing voice—throaty and understated and powerful. In life, my father was a poor conversationalist and a terrible listener. If you had something to say, you'd better get it out fast, before his eyes glazed over. One of the reasons I think he and Lidia were a good match was her tirelessness when it came to expressing herself. For Lidia, every day was filled with anecdotes, which she related energetically: the handsome young cashier at the Farm Store had winked when returning her change; stuck in traffic on I-95, she'd watched the man in the next car pick his nose for a full minute; her friend Damaris, in the hospital after minor elective surgery, had sworn the cafeteria served the best
ropa vieja
she'd ever eaten. The first time I met Lidia, she narrated for me her entire family history: she'd been born and raised in Puerto Rico, and her family had had money, though she conveyed that this meant that she'd lived in a nice house and had gone to private school, not that they'd enjoyed the kind of ostentatious wealth so common in South Florida, mansions and private yachts and full staff and so on. They'd moved to Miami in time for Lidia to start high school. Her mother had been Puerto Rican but her father had been Scottish, and from him she got the red in her hair and the pale freckles across her cheeks and arms.

My father, when he stood at the microphone, transformed from remote to robust and engaging. He enunciated and made eye contact. His voice sliced through the din. Every band he'd ever played with gave him a song or two per show. Once I heard him sing “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart” with a wedding band in Fort Lauderdale, and—I'm not exaggerating—ninety seconds into the song, every single person in the dance hall was focused on the stage. When over the years he'd introduced me to band mates, they'd always politely complimented his skills, but not until they mentioned his vocals did they betray a glint of real admiration. Why he never was a lead singer, I don't know for certain, but to be a lead singer you have to be a leader in general, which my father was not. I'd always liked about Graham that he strove, professionally. It seemed a sign of maturity, and there was a time when I'd believed it would mean good things for our family.

“I love to watch him,” said Lidia, indicating my father on the small platform that substituted for a stage. “He's so comfortable up there.”

Frankie moved to his own chair and rose onto his knees, trying to spot his grandfather through the crowd. Graham straightened his long legs between our table and the neighboring one, and every time someone walked by, he folded them up, then stretched out again.

“Do you want to trade seats?” I said to him.

“Why?” he said.

I shrugged. I motioned to Frankie and said, “Should we worry about the noise?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You're afraid of drowning him out?”

I sat back. This was the kind of joke he made every so often, and it cooled my blood. I had no idea whether other mothers were asked, subtly, to team up against their children—if I'd accused Graham of doing this, he would have said I was imagining things—but I had no instinct for how to respond. Here I was, worrying all the time about Frankie's speech, about whether I was being overly anxious or overly relaxed, and never could I count on Graham for reassurance. Mostly, he just seemed peeved about the problem, as if he'd been dealt into a game he'd never wanted to play.

We sat quietly through a couple of songs—or at least Frankie and Graham and I did, though Lidia leaned in every so often to make a comment in her stage whisper, about everything from the drummer's lewd T-shirt (“Inappropriate!”) to the menu (“Order something! It's surprisingly good!”) to the waitress's hair (“I think that cut is back in style, don't you?”). I did a lot of nodding. She made every occasion more festive. And if she caught a whiff of Graham's grouchiness or my hurt feelings, she did an admirable job of not showing it.

The last time I'd sat on that very patio, watching my father play, had been just after my mother's cancer had returned. I'd flown down to drive her to appointments and keep her company, and we'd decided on a whim to go out. It was the first time in years that she'd been to one of my father's gigs. Though I don't recall exactly, I think it must have been my idea. She'd mentioned that she and my father were “ships passing in the night,” and maybe I thought seeing him play could help. At the show, she was restless and unsmiling, crossing and uncrossing her legs, taking careful sips of her drink and adjusting her blouse. Midshow, she leaned over to whisper that she needed to use the ladies' room. She hesitated before getting up. Then, instead of going inside, where maybe the line was long or the room smoky and crowded, she crossed the patio and parking lot and stepped onto a narrow strip of grass. There, within dim but full view of the band, she squatted between two parked cars, her long skirt pooling beneath her. When she returned, she polished off her margarita and ordered another, then started humming along, as if she'd unlocked a bit of happiness inside herself. I don't know if my father noticed, though I'm fairly certain that had been her goal: to be seen.

Frankie spilled his water and Lidia and I sopped it up with cocktail napkins. The waitress came by and flung down a stack of fresh ones. The band was Brazilian in flavor, loud for the small space. In the sweltering afternoon, with the parking lot and sluggish river just beyond the patio, the whole scene felt forced and artificial, as if we were all wishing we were either enjoying the show more or that we were somewhere else. I waited another song, then excused myself to use the restroom. Inside, it was dark and the red walls were cluttered with black-and-white photos of Old Miami. In one, dated 1911, a woman sat on a motorcycle wearing a long, heavy skirt, looking stubbornly at the camera, as if wondering what all the fuss was about.

When I got back to the table, I found Frankie had fished crayons from my bag and Lidia was talking to Graham, who kept his eyes on the band and grunted in acknowledgment. When I sat down, she leaned toward me, without breaking stride. “He just has this quality!” she said. “A twinkle in his eye when he plays. You know I don't like to stay up late—but your father! The energy he has! I swear, I'm younger but I feel older. Sometimes I drag myself out and I can't take my eyes off him. I mean, look at him! He's so handsome. This margarita is getting to me.”

She possessed an emphatic, even-handed girlishness. In casual conversation, she mentioned people from her high school years with such regularity that you'd think she was in her twenties instead of her fifties. And at their wedding, she'd worn a tea-length peach taffeta dress that reminded me of an old-fashioned prom gown. She'd looked radiant.

“Do you sing?” I said over the music.

“Not a note. I know your mother had a good voice.”

“She couldn't carry a tune,” I said.

This was true. My mother had loved to sing, especially while playing the piano, but she'd had a painfully bad voice. It was something you got used to. Or, rather, it was something you were never not used to, if she was your mother.

“That's not what your father told me,” said Lidia.

“Nevertheless,” I said.

It irritated me that my father had told this particular lie. It was just like him, an unreservedly judgmental person, to refrain from speaking ill of the deceased, as if this could erase all prior unkindness and jigger history into a rosier light. I was defensive of my mother's inarguably bad voice. Who but me was willing to keep straight the facts of her life?

My father noticed us watching him and blew a kiss.

“Charmer!” said Lidia.

It's striking, the difference between one part of life and another. The man we watched perform was both my father and not my father. Lidia's husband, yes, but not my mother's. A second marriage was a different animal entirely from a first one. The mortgage, the raising of children, the deciding where to live and for how long—this was in the past. There should be another word for a second marriage like theirs, which was as distinct from the first as retirement from work.

Beside me, Graham was focusing intently on the band. Whatever I might have labeled his mood—grumpy at best, malicious at worst—there was nothing I could do to snap him out of it. So quickly, I knew, his work had started inspiring as much anxiety as energy and enthusiasm. There was a project in the late stages, a new way of studying extreme weather, and he'd been tossed into the thick of it. He'd been given a research fellowship, but his salary came out of two separate grants, including one from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, which named his position as associate scientist. He was making more than he'd ever made at Northwestern. Larry—this was Graham's old friend from McGill, who had gone out of his way to help Graham get the fellowship—had said that after the next round of grants came through at the end of the following summer, Graham had a good chance of being hired on the tenure track. This made me nervous—the carrot of tenure had been, for us, a dangerous one—but it excited Graham. He thought he'd earned it.

I leaned forward to kiss his cheek. He didn't move at first, but then his cheek nudged my lips, a gesture toward harmony.

Frankie tugged at my sleeve.
Milk, please
, he signed.

Milk was the object of a small, daily tug-of-war: he always wanted more, I always wanted him to have less, or else he wouldn't eat enough.

This time, before I could manage to reach into my bag, Graham turned, saying, “Wait.” To Frankie, he said, “
Milk
. Can you say
milk
?”

Frankie rocked up onto his knees. Lidia and I looked between them. Frankie believed—I could see it in his face—that he was being asked to repeat himself more nicely, as I'd asked him to do no fewer than one thousand times. (I'd realized fast that there is a nice way to sign, and a not-nice way.) But this time, he'd asked nicely in the first place.

He faced his father and made the signs again: one hand opening and closing, thumb extended, then the same hand rubbing his chest in little circles, driving home the magic word. He wasn't typically defiant, my son—if anything, he was supplicant, sometimes desperately so. With Frankie, it was a matter of reading his body language and expression more than anything else. Maybe with another child, a verbal child, Graham wouldn't have gotten it so wrong. When you ask yourself if someone might have what my mother had called a
taste
for parenting, you might as well ask if that person has a taste for subtlety, that close cousin of compassion.

Frankie's little Thermos was in my bag. It would have taken a blink for Graham to pull it out, but instead he said again, “Can you
say
milk
,
Frankie?”

Frankie's hands dropped to his sides. He sat on his rump, his feet tucked beneath him. He picked up a crayon, drew a line, put it down again. The air grew thin.