Stiltsville: A Novel (25 page)

“Are you ready?” I said.

She turned toward her baseline. “Right, not my business.”

I regretted immediately the tone I’d taken. “It’s just that there are so many little battles,” I said.

She nodded. “Want to serve?”

She won the set 6–4, and when we finished I found Dennis and Margo in the lounge—they’d wandered away mid-game—drinking iced teas at a table in a corner.

“We can see you from here,” said Margo. “You lost?”

“I never get more than a few games off her,” I said.

“Your coach said to tell him before you leave,” Margo said. I thought I noticed a look on Dennis’s face—slightly peeved—but it vanished. I looked around—Jack wasn’t in the lounge, though he might have ducked into his little office. “I’m going to clean up,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

I showered quickly in the ladies’ locker room. Despite my loss to Jane, I felt a sense of calm pleasure. It was a feeling that often came after exercise, a feeling that I existed in a bubble of peace and leisure, and there was much good ahead. In the hallway outside the locker room, I ran into Jack. From where we stood, all that was visible of the lounge was one side of the bar, where the bartender sat on a stool reading a book. I could not see Dennis and Margo, who were presumably still seated in the far corner of the room.

Jack had changed from his whites into a navy polo shirt, open at the collar. He was a man I could imagine wearing a gold chain, though on most men I found jewelry unseemly. “Nice work,” he said.

“I only won four games,” I said.

“You’re getting there.”

He had a way of staring that glued me in place. “You’re interested in the Thursday night team, right?” he said.

“Probably. I’d like to play some doubles.” The Thursday night team, I knew, assigned doubles partners, and then the players split time between doubles and singles. Every team played on Saturdays, too, but each was known by the evening when they met during the week. There was a Tuesday night team, which was for little old ladies—this was Jack’s assessment—and a Friday night team, which was more or less composed of young moms.

“It’s a good choice for you,” he said.

I took a small step to my right, the start of a move to end the conversation, but he shifted almost imperceptibly to his left, and though he wasn’t blocking me by any stretch, I paused. I said, “We’re off to the Everglades. Margo wants to try frogs’ legs.”

He nodded distractedly. Then he did something that I thought—even in the moment I thought this—was incautious and at the same time uncertain: he reached up and brushed a lock of hair from my shoulder, and then his hand trailed down my arm, and with a look that was both sad and very sexy, he stepped away, through the door of the men’s locker room. There, standing several feet behind where Jack had been, was Margo. Our eyes met. She spoke immediately, which was good because for a split second I feared neither of us would speak. She said, “Are you ready?” and I smiled my most easygoing smile—that smile was, in the end, one of the most duplicitous acts of my marriage—and said, “Yes! This is going to be fun.”

We took an airboat ride through the swamps of Coopertown, population eight, and stopped to watch a family of alligators sunning in the shallows. Water lapped quietly at the tin edges of the boat—it was a flat-bottomed, lightweight vessel with a cage over the propeller, which I knew was standard at least in part because Dennis’s great-grandfather, Grady’s grandfather, had fallen into the blades of an early model and died from his injuries. I had the thought that even though all the gators were at the moment uniformly still and silent, they could burst into frantic, terrifying motion at any moment. And then all at once, the largest one did just that—his tail whipped first, then his gigantic jaw, and he scurried not toward us but away, into the sawgrass. I gripped Dennis when it happened, and Margo gripped me, and we clung to each other, laughing uneasily, as the two smaller alligators followed their leader. Back on land, we shared a basket of frogs’ legs and chatted with the mayor of Coopertown, a salty man in his seventies who wore a silver alligator ring and a trucker cap, and who owned both the airboat company and the café.

If Margo was suspicious, she didn’t say anything, and I convinced myself that what she’d witnessed was nothing a person would find inappropriate. Jack had been blocking me from view, and she might not have been able to see when he’d touched my arm. The rest of Margo’s visit was easy and relaxing. Except that when I drove her to the bus station—this was her preference, though I’d offered to drive her all the way back to school—I gave her a brief lecture about locking up at night and not bringing strange men back to her apartment, and ended with, “I don’t want you to be scared, sweetheart, but I want you to be safe,” and she’d responded by saying, “I want you to be safe, too, Mom,” and then kissed me quickly on the lips—it was something we did sometimes, on special occasions—and stepped out of the car.

J
ack followed me to my car after practice the following week. I knew he was behind me, but I didn’t turn around. In the lounge, we’d both gotten drinks to go at the same time, and I’d gone into the ladies’ room to brush my hair and apply lip gloss, and when I’d come out, Jack was standing on the exterior stairs with Rodrigo. I’d walked by, and our eyes had met, and I’d known he would follow me. At my car, I looked back at him.

He kept his voice low. “Want to go windsurfing?”

I scanned the parking lot—there was no one close by. “We could just watch,” I said. I followed him to his car and he opened the passenger door for me. That day at practice he’d stood at the sidelines while I’d served, and every time I’d sliced one perfectly over the net he’d clapped or said, “Nice one,” or—this was the thing that made my stomach pitch—“Good girl.” With each serve I’d felt myself getting brighter and hotter, as if channeling a great energy into each toss and hit, until he was called over to another court. My serves had grown messy and uneven then, and I’d had to sit down.

We drove through Coconut Grove toward Key Biscayne. We passed my first residence in Florida: the apartment over Main Highway, where I’d lived with Bette before marrying Dennis. I knew I jeopardized my marriage by even being in Jack’s little sports car, both of us in tennis clothes, his knee next to my knee, his forearm next to mine. I’d spent hours thinking about what it would be like to really touch him, to run my hand over his chest or along his arm. But I didn’t believe that until that day I’d done anything Dennis should have known about.

We passed the giant moving billboard for the Seaquarium, its circling mechanical shark like a restless zombie, and Jack handed a dollar to a woman in the tollbooth. Then as we started again on our way, the blue bay stretching out on either side of the causeway, I moved my hand just an inch, and the back of my fingers met Jack’s arm. He glanced quickly at me and shifted gears, then touched my knee with his fingertips, then shifted again. My heartbeat quickened. We pulled into the long asphalt strip of parking lot that ran parallel to Virginia Key beach. Before Jack turned off the ignition I knew that I’d made only part of a decision and could still change direction. I thought that another woman’s fantasy of Jack might involve candlelight and music, whereas mine involved tongues and fingers and a certain roughness I wasn’t used to. We looked at each other quickly before getting out of the car. Jack’s jaw was set—he was nervous, I realized. This was discomforting; if something was going to happen, it had to happen because he made it happen. He opened the trunk and pulled out the towel he’d brought on our last trip to the beach. In my memory the sunlight that day had been clear and white, whereas on this day the light was golden and thick. The two beaches were very different: Bill Baggs Park, where we’d gone the first time, was wide and white-sanded, clean. The slender strip of sand where we stood now was wet and dark, laced with seaweed. Rickenbacker Causeway, where cars raced to and from Key Biscayne, was a stone’s throw.

Jack closed the trunk and we took off our shoes and moved toward the water until our feet were wet. The windsurfers were all there, as if they’d come beforehand to set up. They wore brightly colored shorts and their hair dripped onto their shoulders. They were all men. They were muscular and confident, even when they fell, even when climbing back onto the board and lifting the sail out of the water. Jack walked away from the shoreline toward a short, fat date palm. He spread out the towel. I followed him, and we sat down with a foot of space between us. The view of the windsurfers, the breeze, the warm air—it was all lulling. I hugged my knees, then rested back on my elbows. My ankles were pale; my toenails were painted light pink. Jack got up and went to his car and came back with a sweatshirt and another towel, and he balled up the sweatshirt and handed it to me, so I could use it as a pillow. When he sat down again he was closer to me. We lay back. The traffic was only twenty yards away, but I felt invisible to the passing cars and to the men windsurfing, who were absorbed utterly by the task of staying afloat. I felt Jack’s body next to mine, parallel, untouching, and I closed my eyes and concentrated on the heat between us. It felt like a blanket, but like a blanket when it’s being pulled slowly off of one’s body, the slither against the skin. Jack’s forearm lay over his eyes. “Are you sleepy?” I said softly.

He looked at me, at my eyes and forehead and lips. “Yes. Are you?”

I nodded. My mouth was open. My body was still but pushed to the limits of stillness—I was poised on the edge of moving, toward him or away from him, I wasn’t sure. He, too, was on the verge of moving, I could sense, but we stayed still and I closed my eyes again, waiting for either his mouth on me, or his hands on my body, or for nothing at all. He might have been waiting, too. We ended up dozing on the sand, and as I half-slept I felt the shade of the palm fronds moving over my body, back and forth in the breeze like a hand.

We slept for just under an hour. When I woke, Jack was sitting up with his legs crossed, facing the water. I touched his back and smiled when he turned around. A look briefly appeared on his face—a cross between fear and desire. I was hot, sweating along my brow and behind my knees. I got up and walked to the surf while Jack shook out the towel and folded it up and put it back in his car, along with the sweatshirt and towel we’d used as pillows.

“My body feels like Jell-O,” I said when he joined me at the shoreline.

“You’ll be sore tomorrow,” he said. He was referring to practice that day, to the dozens of serves and volleys.

“I can feel it starting already,” I said.

All of a sudden he’d moved behind me and pressed himself against my back, his mouth in the hair at my neck. His hands pulled against my hips. I felt off balance, like I might fall, but he was solid on his feet and held my weight. He hardened against my back. His breath on my neck came in bursts, like he’d been running. He made a sound like a soft grunt and his hand slipped under the front of my shirt and pressed against my stomach. I put my hand over his and his breathing in my ear slowed. I felt his mouth and nose move against my neck, his hot breath. Then he moved away. By the time I turned around he was walking back up the beach toward the car. He stopped at the door on the driver’s side and looked back at me, and I followed, still catching my breath. He got in, and I got in, and for a moment we sat there, not saying anything. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I wanted to say, I’m not. But then I thought that if I wasn’t now, I would be. “Don’t be,” I said.

“You do something to me.”

“We do it to each other,” I said, and I knew that by saying it aloud we’d cut the taut line that ran between us, and it would fall.

M
arse’s brother, Kyle, married his second wife in late August in the Church of the Little Flower, down the street from the Biltmore Hotel, and the reception was held in the Biltmore’s main ballroom. Kyle had been there the day Dennis and I had met, and we’d hired Kyle’s contracting firm when we’d built the addition on the house, and so I suppose he’d felt obligated to invite us even though we hadn’t seen each other socially in years. Or maybe Marse, who was in the wedding party, added our names so she would have someone to dish with.

Bette called while I was getting dressed for the wedding, and I answered the kitchen phone in my panty hose while fishing with one hand through my purse for lipstick. “Suzanne wants to move,” Bette said. I pictured her rolling her eyes, her tight-lipped grimace. “She thinks the house is too small. She wants a garage, for crying out loud.”

I loved her house, which is what I told her. “But if Suzanne’s not happy there . . . ,” I said.

“She’s concerned about the investment.” She exhaled loudly. “She says we need to put our money where it can grow.”

“It is growing.”

“She said something about closet space.”

“Well, she has a point there.”

“And she says she’s tired of Miami.”

I put down my purse. “What does that mean? Where does she want to go?”

“I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d panic.”

“I’m not panicking,” I said. She’d never mentioned moving away before, not even once. It had never occurred to me that this was even possible.

She said, “Maybe what I need is a new girlfriend,” but she didn’t sound convinced.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I guess I have a decision to make,” she said before hanging up. “I hate that.”

Later that night, I found myself huddled with Marse on a divan in the corner of the Biltmore ballroom, a plate of hors d’oeuvres between us. Marse was telling me about the bride, a management consultant with very fresh-looking breasts and heavy white-blond bangs. “She’s not quite as young as she looks,” she said. “Kyle was drunk at the rehearsal. He was saying all sorts of crap. He said women our age are bitter, so he steers clear. He said he hoped she didn’t get bitter. I told him it was inevitable.”