Wherever There Is Light (10 page)

They were walking up Ocean Drive when Julian suggested that they get a drink. Kendall, as if explaining the situation to one of the less astute seagulls winging above them, replied, “I have to be off Miami Beach by sundown. You have to cross the causeway to get to Overtown, the guard at the gate will ask me for my pass, and I'll get arrested. They say the police chief down here once caught a colored boy without a pass and beat him to death.”

“I wouldn't let someone hurt you.”

“We're in the South, and I'm not white.”

“We can have a drink here,” Julian said, nodding at the building behind them, a five-story, white-stucco hotel that brought to mind a steamship, with porthole windows shaded by mauve concrete eyebrows and a vertical marquee with an orange-neon sign.

“The owner's a friend of yours?”

“Your friend too. Me.”

Kendall looked at the sign and laughed. “Hotel Jerusalem?”

“My little joke. The drinks are up in my suite. So's your pass. Joe's owner knows this cop, and I bought one from him.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I did. I said I wouldn't let anyone hurt you.”

Julian's suite was on the fifth floor, and after he poured two glasses of Chablis in the galley kitchen, he led Kendall out to the rooftop deck. They stood at the railing, gazing over the palm trees and traffic. The ribbon of beach glowed whitish gold, and the ocean was pale green close to shore, turning a darker, more ominous blue as the Atlantic spread out to the horizon, all of it bathed in the violet and peach light of sunset, as though flowers and fruit had burst into flame.

Kendall said, “I wish I could paint it.”

“The beach?”

“No, this moment.” Kendall smiled, which was when Julian realized—and this he never forgot—that Kendall had sixteen or seventeen different ways of smiling, and he didn't fully understand any of them.

Kendall sipped her wine, and Julian guzzled his like seltzer, an effort to blunt his jitters.

“I love the Florida weather,” he said. “I could stay here all—”

“Will you kiss me?” Kendall asked.

Their kiss was long and slow and soft, and Julian felt a tremor of panic when she broke away.

“I have my own room at the Mary Elizabeth, so no one will know I'm gone if you take me back before breakfast.”

“You planned ahead?”

“Options are a girl's best friend.”

When Kendall came out of the master bath with her hair brushed out and wearing the Brooks Brothers button-down she'd found on a hook behind the door, Julian was in his boxers, smelling of Pinaud-Clubman aftershave and lying under the sheets of the double bed. It seemed to take forever before she joined him and they lay facing each other in the light of the hurricane lamp on the nightstand.

“Who goes first?” Kendall asked, treating him to smile number six or seven, he couldn't be sure, and Julian answered by kissing her neck. She shifted on the sheets like a cat stretching in the sun, and he inhaled the vanilla tanginess of her perfume and unbuttoned his shirt. He caught his breath at the sight of her breasts, so round and full, her nipples unbearably sweet in his mouth. His hand went under the ivory silk of her panties and gamboled in warm damp curls, while she tugged down his boxers and her hand stroked him—slow and fast and slow again.

Julian reached over to open the drawer of the nightstand and removed a tin of Trojans.

Kendall whispered, “I haven't done this.”

“You're very good at it.”

“I mean I've done what we're doing but not what you're getting ready to do.”

“You don't have to whisper. No one else is here.”

She had a sheepish expression now. “I was taught to hang on to my virginity till a boy marries me.”

“We can wait.”

“I don't want to wait anymore except—does it hurt the first time?”

“We'll go slow. Gentle.” He kissed her chin, then headed down past her breasts.

“Julian, where you going?”

“Sightseeing.”

“Why?”

“It's Florida. Everybody goes sightseeing.”

“Not down there they don't.”

Thinking she'd be less shy in the dark, Julian paused to switch off the lamp.

Kendall said, “What're you—”

“A surprise.”

“I don't always like surprises.”

“You'll like this one. Trust me.”

She allowed him to slide off her panties, but kept her legs close together, so he worked his hands under her firm buttocks, massaging her until gradually her thighs parted, and he buried his face against her, losing himself in the brazen spices of her body. Her back arched and every one of her sinews seemed as taut as piano wire as she strained against his darting tongue, moving closer and moving away, and moaning as waves of pleasure rolled through her.

Julian spooned himself around Kendall, and she said, “Quite the education I'm getting. Where'd you learn—”

“The library.”

“From a book?”

“A librarian.”

She chuckled, and fleetingly, Julian thought back to Berlin and Trudie. He was so young when they started, and when it was over he was never young again.

“I should send her a thank-you note,” Kendall said, and pressed backward. Julian felt the full length of her nakedness against him, and he touched her shoulder so that she turned toward him. They began again, their languid rhythm broken only by his sliding on a Trojan. Then he was above Kendall and, in that velvety instant when he entered her, he nipped at one of her earlobes to distract her from any pain. She gasped and lay still, though evidently her discomfort was brief: she scissored her satiny legs around him, thrust upward, and rotated her hips with a nimble deliberateness that Julian struggled to match. For a while they could hear their murmurs and the thrumming of bedsprings, but soon enough they heard nothing at all, and in that astonishing silence their movements seemed no more under their control than the rising and falling of the tides.

J
ulian awoke dreaming of Trudie and felt guilty that she'd appeared with Kendall nestled beside him. In his dream, Trudie—a pixieish blonde in a beaded black dress—had been passing through the neon green of the sign outside
Ekstase
. The proprietor of Ecstasy, known as Kaiser Wilhelm, was an ex-cop who had all his graying hair and most of his yellowed teeth. He took a liking to Julian, a rangy fourteen-year-old who was always hanging around the nightclub, and the Kaiser paid Julian to pick up cocaine for him and to carry payoffs to the police doctors who issued cards certifying that his girls were free of disease.

Trudie was the star of the Kaiser's stable, with a genius for keeping middle-aged men drinking overpriced champagne. Julian had a crush on her but was too shy to talk to her until the evening a drunk Russian nobleman tried to fuck her on a tabletop. Julian cracked a champagne bottle over the nobleman's head, and Kaiser Wilhelm emphasized his no-fucking-downstairs policy by tugging on the knob of his cane, withdrawing an eighteen-inch blade, and carving a KW on the palm of the drunk's right hand.

“You are very brave,” Trudie said, her German accented with the lilt of Bavaria. Emboldened by her compliment, Julian offered to escort her home. She lived in a basement flat in one of the dreary buildings near the Alexanderplatz railway station. It was a single room, with a toilet and bath down the hall, and the sole place to sit was on the lumpy mattress of the four-poster. Trudie removed a record from the stack on the bureau and put it on the gramophone.

“What's that music?” Julian asked.

“Bessie Smith. An American blues singer. When my last boyfriend sailed off to Australia, he left me his records. I wish I understood English.”

Julian liked Bessie Smith's clear, plaintive voice and that he could translate the lyrics of her songs, which he did several nights a week along with the repertoires of Ma Rainey, Big Bill Broonzy, and several other blues singers. As the music played, Trudie smoked greenish chunks of hashish in a vermilion porcelain hookah. Julian hadn't smoked before and he discovered that the hash made the blues bluer, and when he got hungry, Trudie gave him coffee and slices of pumpernickel with strawberry jam.

“You're shy,” she said to him one night. “That's not unusual. But you're too sad for a boy your age.”

Julian hadn't mentioned that he'd never kissed a girl and hated seeing her with the men at
Ekstase
. He said, “Why don't you get a different job?”

“I haven't decided whether to be a film star or the Queen of England.”

That summer, Trudie announced she was going to cure Julian of his shyness, and for six weeks she was good to her word, teaching him to perform acts that he'd been too timid to imagine. As school started he could only see her at night, but she was in no condition for sex. She was taking pills, Eukodal—like codeine, she said—which left her flat on her bed gazing at the water-stained ceiling. And Eukodal wasn't her most dangerous problem. She was skipping work, enraging Kaiser Wilhelm, who limited his girls to six days off a month for their periods.

One evening, Julian arrived at
Ekstase
to find the bartender cleaning up shards of glass and explaining to the girls that Trudie had come in earlier and swept the liquor bottles off the shelves, hollering, “I quit!” and stumbling out. When Kaiser Wilhelm had heard about it, he'd said, “I better go talk to that lazy cow.” Julian was unnerved that the Kaiser was still gone. Riding the underground, he had a sickening feeling, which didn't improve when Trudie didn't answer her door. Removing her spare key from behind the baseboard, he went in. Trudie was lying on the floor, blood spread across the front of her shirtdress. She had a jagged hole in her throat, and in a flash Julian understood what had happened. The Kaiser had spoken to her through the door as if all were forgiven, and Trudie, stupefied on Eukodal, had let him in, and the Kaiser had plunged his sword through her neck.

Bending over her, Julian pressed his lips to her bare shoulder. He felt no sadness at her death, only a glacial rage. The next afternoon, Julian went to Kaiser Wilhelm's place. He lived a block from
Ekstase
, in a stone house with crumbling scrollwork around the windows. Julian had been there to deliver the doctor's certificates. As instructed, he'd used the back door, since it was left unlocked, and he rapped on that door now. If the Kaiser appeared, Julian would ask if he had any errands for him. No one came to the door, and Julian entered the kitchen. He'd expected silence and almost fled because classical music was leaking from a stairway. Julian went up, gripping the paring knife in his coat pocket.

Down a hallway, past a half-open door, he saw Kaiser Wilhelm sitting in a claw-foot bathtub. A radio shaped like a church window was on a three-legged stool at the other end of the bathroom, and Julian stepped in, startling the Kaiser, who snapped, “You ass-fucked turd! What are you doing here?”