Stiltsville: A Novel (5 page)

The girl who came to share my father’s downtown apartment was named Luanne. Although she was young—twenty-seven years old when they met, compared with his forty-five—she had a child from a previous relationship who lived with Luanne’s mother. When I called their apartment, she gave me a polite hello and handed the telephone to my father, and it seemed to me that she was keeping him close at her side at all times, though maybe the situation was reversed. When Dennis met them, he said he thought Luanne looked like a doll, and I shushed him. He said, “There’s appeal, to some men, with that kind of woman.” He swatted me playfully on the rear end. “But it’s not for me.” As a child I’d loved my father very much—he spoke enthusiastically about the physics of space flight and roller coasters, he liked to read about places he’d never been, he called in sick to work when I was five so he could finish building my tree house—but I never grew accustomed to thinking of him as the spoils in a battle between women.

My mother and I had more or less avoided the topic of what exactly I thought I was doing, disposing of my job and disrupting my life to visit a boy in Miami, of all places. But while we waited together on the train platform, she pursed her lips and turned to me. “Miami seems so . . . ” she said, “I don’t know. Far.” She wasn’t one to hold tight, but moving a plane ride away was another story. “It seems decadent.”

“I guess maybe it is.” I thought of the elaborate wedding I’d been to when I first visited, the giant water fountain a few blocks from the cathedral, the sprawling banyan trees lining the streets. I thought of the young girls I’d seen posing for photographs at the Spanish-style arches in Coral Gables, all gussied up for their
quinceañeras
in hoop skirts and capes. Atlanta was lovely—there were lacy white dogwood and redbud trees and dirt roads and orchards, and in the autumn the leaves turned and fell and were raked into colorful piles—but Atlanta was not decadent. “You’ll like Dennis,” I said.

“What will I like about him?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

“Does he remind you of your father?”

I thought about this. “No.”

“That’s better,” she said. She smoothed her chambray skirt and looked around, as if she’d forgotten something. My mother wore a ponytail every day of her life, even into her seventies. “Be nice to his mom, no matter what.”

“I will be.”

“Stay out of his bedroom.”

“Mother.”

“It won’t be easy, but you’ll be glad you did.”

“Mother!”

She sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be giving advice,” she said, and then a whistle sounded, and the white light of my train appeared in the middle distance, as if gunning for me.

I
n the six months since we’d met, Dennis and I had not slept together. When I visited Miami, I stayed with his sister, Bette, who rented a two-room apartment above a shoe store on Main Highway in Coconut Grove. The apartment had a small cement deck that overlooked the street, and a screen door on squeaky hinges, and at night we could hear the traffic and the people on the street below. Bette had a couch with a creaky, shifting bamboo frame and flat square cushions printed with hibiscus blossoms—an uncomfortable place to sleep, made slightly less uncomfortable by layers of mildewy sleeping bags. She was tall like her brother and very thin, with white-blond hair and sharp, tan shoulders. She tended to slouch. She was not beautiful, exactly, but she had memorable, sharp features and lovely skin. She wore huarache sandals—I would wear them, too, after a year or so of being around her—and sleeveless shirts and culottes, and she carried a large crocheted handbag. She walked everywhere; she didn’t have a car. After she’d graduated from high school, Grady and Gloria had offered her their old hatchback if she would go to college and stay in all four years; but she was an indifferent student and the most she’d been able to commit to was a couple of classes per semester. Three times a week after work she walked four miles to the University of Miami, then took the bus home. She took botany and biology and political science and comparative literature. She spoke German—she’d spent a year in Munich during high school, as an exchange student—and she could name every flower, bird, and tree in South Florida. She had never traveled north of North Carolina. She was at that time engaged to her high school sweetheart, Benjamin O’Dell. They’d been engaged for five years, since her senior year of high school, but they had yet to set a date.

Though Bette never said or did anything to make me feel unwelcome, I could tell by the way she lived that she was a private person, and probably didn’t revel in having a regular houseguest. I had the sense that she could snap shut at any time, that any bridge to her could collapse. To make myself useful while staying with her, I cleaned the apartment and left sandwiches in the refrigerator for when she came home for lunch. The apartment was across the street from Bette’s work. She was the groundskeeper for a private home called the Barnacle, which was owned by the family of the original owner, Commodore Ralph Middleton Monroe. Commodore Monroe had founded the first organization in the area—Biscayne Bay Yacht Club—in 1891, when Miami was little more than a fort. The Barnacle was nestled on the bay among ten acres of tropical hardwood hammock. No one lived there, but the family wanted someone on the property during the day, to make sure vagrants stayed out and the lawn was mowed and—most important—that the
Egret
, a schooner docked at the Barnacle’s pier, was kept free of growth and rust. The
Egret
was Bette’s main task, and the only one for which she truly was qualified—she had been sailing competitively since she was ten years old. There was a rumor that the family planned in the future to deed the Barnacle to the state and open the house for tours, and Bette hoped to continue to look after the
Egret
part-time and spend the rest of her time doing what she loved: scuba diving. Nights, she sometimes went into her room and closed the door, and I could hear music through the wall and the low tones of hushed speech as she talked on the phone. Two or three times, she’d stayed out all night—where, I didn’t yet guess—and had come home at dawn, tiptoeing into the living room where I slept. Once, she’d made so much noise coming in that I couldn’t reasonably pretend to sleep through it, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that she had dropped a large canvas bag filled with green and blue glass bottles. I helped her collect them—none broke—and the next day when I glanced into her bedroom from the kitchenette, I saw those bottles lined up on the windowsill, refracting the sunlight.

From time to time I kept Bette company while she did her chores at the Barnacle. This is how I ended up lying on the Barnacle’s pier one Tuesday afternoon during that last long visit, after losing my job in Atlanta. I’d been in Miami for almost four weeks straight. It was January, but still we wore swimsuits without covering up, and the heat on the wooden pier spread through my skin like a warm blanket. Dennis was at class. That morning, he’d stopped by the apartment after Bette went to work, and we’d necked on the couch until the cushions stuck to our skin. This is what I returned to, all day: the rushing, splitting-open feeling of touching Dennis, of being touched by him. My mother was right: it was not easy, staying out of his bedroom.

Bette wore a scarf over her hair and a neon orange bikini top and cutoffs with a red velvet patch on the thigh. She squinted while she polished the brass fittings of the
Egret
’s teak railing. I mistook the squinting for concentration—later I would learn that this was a side effect of her nearsightedness, which, in an uncharacteristic fit of vanity, she had not corrected with eyeglasses. “Those bottles,” she said. “I’ve been dying to tell you.”

I put aside the law journal I’d been reading, an article Dennis had published earlier that year. “Tell me,” I said.

She squatted on the gunwale of the boat. I shaded my eyes to look up at her. She said, “I found them on a wreck. A shipwreck.”

“Where?”

She pointed south across the bay. “Out there.”

My first thought was that surely it was not legal to remove items from a shipwreck. “Can you get in trouble for that?” I said.

She laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re worth much. But they’re beautiful. I found them in the forward cabin the other night. It took me two trips to get them all up.”

“You dove at night?” It seemed impossible that on those nights when she’d been out until dawn, she’d been scuba diving. I’d seen Bette’s boat—it was a seventeen-foot sailfish, a toddler of a boat. Surely it wasn’t fitted with dive lights. This meant she’d been diving with someone else, from that person’s boat.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I go with a friend. It’s safe.”

I thought of Benjamin, a ruddy-faced bear of a man who spoke softly and had the habit, I’d witnessed, of lifting Bette over his shoulder until she battered him into letting her down. I stood up and stepped over the railing of the
Egret
, and maneuvered until I was straddling the gunwale, facing her. “OK, tell me,” I said. It was a little awkward, I admit. She hadn’t ever invited this kind of gabfest, and I wasn’t sure we were suited to it.

For whatever reason, though—she was excited, bursting—this was not a secret she wanted to keep. “I met this woman,” she said, throwing me for a loop. “Her name is Jane. She’s a professional salvor. You know what that is?” I shook my head. “She has an engineering degree or something, and she works with dive teams to raise shipwrecks. They have to do it without hurting anything, inside the wreck or outside it. It’s very complicated work. Anyway, I met her at the club.” The club was the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, where Bette taught sailing lessons on the weekends in exchange for a discount on her boat slip. “I’m teaching her to sail.”

“And she’s teaching you to—salve?”

“Salvage,” she said. She looked off, as if remembering. “No, we just dive together. She knows the best spots. There’s a wreck she’s bringing up soon, and sometimes we just go there to hunt around, see what we see. It’s an old hull freighter that sank on its way from Venezuela. Nothing valuable aboard, just trinkets. Memories.”

I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever done that was nearly as exciting as scuba diving in a sunken ship. “Does Dennis know?” I said.

“Of course not. Are you going to tell him?”

“Not if you’d rather I didn’t.”

“Jane said we should keep quiet about it. I guess the state wouldn’t be too happy that she was diving the wreck before bringing it up.”

“When are you going out next?” I said.

“Tonight, probably. I don’t know why I told you.”

“I’m glad you did.” We sat quietly for a moment, and Bette returned to polishing the railing. “Are you ready to get married?” I said.

She dropped the polishing cloth onto the pier and stepped over the railing. “I guess not,” she said. “Are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. But I believed I was.

She dropped her shorts to the pier, pulled neon snorkeling gear from a bag, and put it on—first the flippers and then the mask. She held the snorkel in one hand and a flat metal tool—for shucking snails and barnacles off the boat’s hull—in the other. “It’s not as simple as it always seemed, is it?” she said. Her voice was nasal from the mask, but she was unself-conscious. She walked to the end of the pier and turned her back to the water, then put her hand over her nose and mouth and stepped backward into the air. Once I’d heard her resurface and begin knocking around the hull, I relaxed. I felt we’d just had our first real—albeit stilted—conversation, and now could become friends. With no end to my visit in sight, this was fiercely important to me. To have a few friends in Miami—Marse and Bette, plus Dennis—felt like the start of a real collection, a treasure trove of my own.

That evening, rather than wait for Dennis to pick me up after work, I dressed in a linen sundress and walked half a mile to the bus stop, where I caught a bus to the University of Miami. There, I waited on a low cement wall under the wide canopy of a poinciana tree outside the law school until Dennis emerged, carrying a satchel in one hand and combing his hair with his fingers. I could not reconcile the disheveled student, sunburned nose and shaving nicks, with the suited lawyer he was working to become. Dennis saw me and waved, and as he walked toward me, in the moment between being alone and being with him, I experienced the sensation of being stunned by the instant. The breath left my lungs. I looked at the boy coming toward me, who in my arms, by my side, seemed familiar, but in those baffling seconds revealed himself to be a stranger, essentially. It was like moving too quickly toward a painting, such that it distorts in proximity. Was this person my boyfriend? This lanky gait, this lazy posture, this wide smile? He reached me finally, and swept me into a hug that seemed to start before he was even beside me, and the moment of disorientation I’d experienced dissolved, the painting snapped back into perspective.

That evening, we made our way not to Bette’s bamboo couch but to Dennis’s apartment on Miami Beach. The pretext was that Dennis would cook us supper—a noodle dish he was fond of, a bachelor recipe with too much soy sauce—but I suppose during the long, windy ride down the palm-lined highway, I knew we had both signed up for something more, and I was nervous as we drove. We had both slept with other people: I with a boy in college, a close friend, just three times after we’d studied together and opened a bottle of wine, and Dennis with his ex, with whom he’d lived for three months.