Stiltsville: A Novel (13 page)

W
e were standing on the dock, getting ready to head out to Soldier’s Key for some snorkeling, when the Cessna returned. It was late morning, and we’d eaten breakfast and packed up in anticipation of leaving that afternoon. Dennis shushed us. “Listen,” he said.

The low hum turned into a louder hum with a putter in it, and then the plane appeared in the blue sky. “Holy shit,” said Paul.

Dennis didn’t say anything. There was a fierce, protective quality in his expression. The plane started to circle.

“It won’t drop anything with us standing right here,” said Marse. “Will it?”

“No way,” said Paul.

“I’ll get the binoculars,” I said, but Dennis caught my arm.

“Wait,” he said, as if he knew that at that moment, after circling the Becks’ house only two or three times, the plane would drop another rectangular white package. It did.

“Unbelievable,” said Paul.

“Call the Coast Guard,” I said to Dennis.

“I told you—the boat registration.”

We looked at each other, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t have the whole story. Something inside me seized up and brought to surface a fear I would experience only a few times during our marriage: What if everything was not as it seemed? What if all the walls fell away and revealed a world turned upside down, inside out, defiant of everything I’d taken for granted? Before that moment, I would have said that Dennis had no secrets from me at all. The sound of the Cessna’s engine faded as it headed, once again, out to sea. Dennis stepped onto the boat and I stepped after him, feeling it totter with my weight. Paul and Marse went inside.

“What?” I said, fighting the urge to cross my arms, to treat the moment like a standoff. I reminded myself that Dennis was my husband, whom I loved.

He flipped a switch to let fuel into the carburetor. “It’s no big deal,” he said, “but there’s a chance that if we call the Coast Guard, they might impound the boat.”

“This boat?”

“Yes, Frances.”

“Is it drugs?” I couldn’t comprehend why it would be, but these were my natural associations: boat, Coast Guard, drugs.

“Baby, of course not.”

We looked toward the Becks’ house. The wind was stronger and the bay choppier than the day before, and the white package was moving more quickly. I sat on the gunwale. “Why?”

He watched the compass on the console, the needle bobbing even though we were headed nowhere. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d worry, and you wouldn’t want to use the boat, and we’d have to cancel the weekend.” I stared at him, my gut tight. He said, “I got a call from the police this week. Apparently, the guy who sold us the boat didn’t own it.”

We’d bought the boat from a man in Key Largo who’d just gotten divorced, who was, as he put it, liquidating his ass. I’d stood admiring the boat—our first!—while Dennis shook the man’s hand. Dennis said, “Technically, it belonged to his wife’s brother.”

“But that has nothing to do with us,” I said. “We didn’t know that.” He looked at me but didn’t say anything. “You knew?” I said.

He shrugged. “I had a hunch.”

“Oh my God.”

“I just need to prove that I didn’t know the guy before he sold me the boat.”

“You didn’t know him, did you?”

“I didn’t know him. I didn’t. But”—he lowered his voice—“I knew something was wrong. He was too eager to sell, and the boat was too cheap. Really, Frances, think about it—we couldn’t have afforded this boat. And I wanted it for us.” Dennis had known colleagues to be disbarred for less. It was nothing I’d worried about before. In the past year, we’d built an addition on the back of the house, a high-ceilinged family room with a wall of sliding glass doors. We’d hired Kyle Heiger, Marse’s brother, to be the contractor on the job, and though he’d done excellent work, the whole project had ended up costing more than we’d expected. Also that year, Dennis had been invited to join the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, and though money was tight we didn’t feel we could turn it down. This was the year, too, that we’d become partners in the stilt house, and so had begun the annual lease payments, the taxes, and the sharing of upkeep and repairs. It was, I knew, typical of many Miami families to live above their means, to hunker under a mounting precipice of debt, but I hadn’t thought of us as the type.

“We should sell the boat,” I said.

“Really, it’s not that big a deal. I’m just not sure where the paperwork stands. It might be that technically, on paper only, we’re driving a stolen boat.”

“Are you concerned?” I said.

“No,” said Dennis, coming to comfort me. “It’s just a hassle, that’s all.” I turned away from him. Our boat wasn’t ours—it was some guy’s petty way of getting back at his wife, whom he had probably loved once, a long time ago. I stepped onto the dock and looked up at the stilt house. I felt cold and unsteady, as if I’d shed a more confident version of myself. I could already feel myself losing the version of me who’d wake to her husband’s mid-night caress, the girl who’d have sex against a porch railing, arms flung over the water, as if submitting to the sea itself.

Beneath the Becks’ dock, the white package continued its tortoise journey to sea. “Let’s go get it,” I said.

“Frances—”

I shouted for Paul and Marse, and they joined us on the dock. Marse read my face for signs of stress. I told them what I wanted. “Are you sure?” said Paul.

“If we don’t do a little research,” I said, “we’ll never know.”

“What if the pickup comes while we’re there?” said Marse.

“It won’t,” said Paul.

Dennis climbed into the boat and started the engine. Paul untied the spring line and threw it into the well of the boat.

“It’s the sharks or us,” I said to Marse.

“Us,” she said, stepping into the boat.

Paul handled the lines and we drifted from the dock. The channel was choppy and Dennis took it slow. I watched the horizon for planes and boats. My heart pounded. We coasted up to the package and Paul readied himself, an arm extended. The package seemed irrelevant now, a detail; Dennis’s deceit loomed. The boat tipped as Paul leaned over the side. To Dennis, I said, “I’m nervous.” Dennis looked at the package, then at me. He came to me and we looked around: the bay, the ocean, stilt houses in the distance, compact and still.

“We’ll be OK,” he said.

“Got it,” said Paul. It was larger than I’d thought, and the plastic was light gray, not white, as it had seemed from a distance. It was tied like a gift with burlap string. “It’s light,” said Paul. He laughed. “It’s way too light.”

Paul brought the package to the bow and set it down. Dennis knelt across from him, and Marse and I watched over their shoulders. Dennis used a key to tear the plastic, then Paul spread the tear open with both hands. The plastic was thick; he had to put some muscle into it. When a portion of the contents was visible, Marse said, with unconcealed disappointment, “Newspaper.”

“What’s inside?” I said.

“It’s just a newspaper,” said Paul. He widened the tear in the plastic and pulled out a crisp, neatly folded
New York Times
. “Sunday edition,” he said.

“There’s more,” said Dennis.

Inside the package, bundled in the same gray plastic, was a smaller parcel. This one was tightly packed and lumpy. “Here we are,” said Paul.

Dennis was tentative with the keys this time. He made a small tear in the corner of the parcel and widened the tear with his thumb. Paul hovered impatiently. Inside the widening hole, something silver reflected the sunlight, and I caught a whiff of the contents. Dennis stepped back to let Paul take over. What Paul revealed, after a few seconds of working at the package, was six or seven whole fish—bonitos, I believe. Silver scales came away on Paul’s hands.

“Fish?” I said.

Dennis was delighted. “What the hell?” he said.

Marse picked up the
New York Times
and folded back the sections, one by one. In a crease of the classifieds, she found an envelope. Paul started to grab it but she stepped away from him. She read: “ ‘Marc and Kathleen—Another touch of civilization couldn’t hurt. Hope the champagne didn’t get too bubbly in flight. Crossed fingers that you catch something big with this bait. Any marlin yesterday? Happy anniversary, Mimi and Ronald.’ ”

“Holy shit,” said Paul.

“Anniversary?” said Dennis.

We dumped the bait into the bay. Dennis started the engine and we headed back to the stilt house. Paul and Marse sat side by side on the gunwale, their legs dangling in the well of the boat. Within a few weeks, they would split up. I never had any reason to believe this had anything to do with me. She wouldn’t know what had passed between me and Paul until many years later, long past the time when it would have made any difference. And although Dennis would see less and less of him, eventually Paul would burst back into all our lives and stay there, a surprising but permanent fixture. All around us, couples whose weddings we’d attended, whose unions we’d toasted, broke up: Kyle, who’d married a potter named Julia shortly after I’d moved to Miami, was first; then one of Dennis’s law partners, with whom we’d become friends; then Benjamin O’Dell, Bette’s ex-
fiancé
, who’d married a girl he’d met while traveling in England.

A month later, Dennis sorted out the paperwork with the boat, and we sold it and started saving for another. With the money from the sale, we paid off the addition on the house. Grady offered his boat when we wanted it, which meant more outings with Dennis’s parents, which I didn’t mind. Margo loved being with them—Grady carried her piggyback and never told her to keep her voice down, and Gloria kept sugary cereals on hand and let her try on her good jewelry. We kept our membership in the yacht club—Grady had gone to bat for us, and declining would have been humiliating—and for a long while we didn’t take vacations or go to restaurants, and we put off sending Margo to summer camp. Whenever I grew frustrated with living lean during that time—and this would not be the last tight period during our life together—I reminded myself of the boat we’d never really owned, and thought of the choices we were making in opposition to the choices we could have been making, and I was relieved. It was so easy, I understood now, to take a wrong turn.

T
hat afternoon, before returning to Miami, Marse and Paul napped in the downstairs hammock and Dennis went into the big bedroom with a book. I finished packing our things and made light trips to the boat, prolonging the process to have something to do. There was a lot of garbage to tow in to shore. There was always, no matter what efforts we made, a lot of garbage. At one point when I came downstairs, Paul was alone in the hammock. “Where is Marse?” I said.

“I have no idea.”

I put down the bag I was carrying and looked around. The downstairs bathroom door was open and she wasn’t on the boat or the dock. I opened the door to the generator room, but there was only the loud motor and the many shelves of salt-crusted shoes. I went back to the hammock. Marse could certainly handle herself, but nevertheless I felt protective of her. “Really, where is she?”

“I really don’t know.” He had an arm under his head. The hammock swung leisurely.

“Get up.”

“Why?”

“Go find your girlfriend.”

He smiled. “She can take care of herself.”

“I know she can, but I’d prefer to know roughly where everyone is at any given time.”

He gave a mock look of concern. “You think she drowned?” He was baiting me; of course he knew where she was. He sat up in the hammock and I stepped back. “I don’t bite,” he whispered. I heard Dennis talking upstairs, then Marse’s laugh. Paul said, “I have no intention of hurting Marse, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

I took a breath. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

He was sitting down, but still I felt dwarfed by his intensity and charm and looks. “I can be discreet,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt Dennis either.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s been a while,” he said, “me wanting you.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You think you’ll never do it, Frances?”

There was a warm wind coming from the north. I willed it to carry our words, and my memory of them, out to sea. “No,” I said, “I’ll never do it.”

His voice was calm. “You will,” he said. “One day you will, and you’ll realize that what people say about it isn’t true. You won’t feel guilty, you’ll just feel happy and horny and you’ll think back and realize you could have done it with me.”

He was broad and sexy. He would be good at sex, I guessed. He would put his heart into it. He would be generous and complimentary, would inspire an eagerness to please, a dismantling of inhibition. He would moan without checking himself. He was a man who loved plants, who worked for himself, who had great sex: I felt a brief flush of desire for him.

When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, then looked off. “That goddamn package,” he said. He seemed truly to shift his attention. In the end, he turned away and walked upstairs, and I remained, overcome by sorrow for many reasons, not the least of which was this: I had a feeling that Paul was right about what he’d said. We were still at the start of a long road together, Dennis and me. The future was still so murky. For a long moment it seemed almost inevitable that our happiness would not last, could not last, and that at some point, after Margo left home or before, I would find myself in a similar situation, and this time I would want it badly enough to let it happen. And—this thought was incredibly sad to me—I might not even feel terribly ashamed. I might come to consider it just one episode in the life of the marriage, just another wave in the windy channel. Not a hurricane at all.