Mangrove Squeeze(5)

Aaron tried to smile. He said, "You're on vacation. Why talk about depressing things?"

"Age doesn't have to be depressing," said the wife.

Aaron tried to smile once again. It wasn't easy. He'd been up since five that morning, because the woman who was supposed to do the breakfast called to say her tattoo had started bleeding underneath her skin and she couldn't work that day. So Aaron made the muffins and then he toiled with the gardener till noon, but then the gardener had to meet his parole officer to have a new transmitter fitted to his ankle. Aaron wolfed down some lunch then mixed up a batch of mortar for the bricklayer who was supposed to be finishing the path, but by the time the bricklayer appeared, drunk and bellicose, the mortar had hardened in the bucket, become geology.

The husband, looking off toward the half-painted clapboard building he was being led to, now stubbed his toe against that very pail. Catching his balance he said, "Guidebook says recently refurbished."

Aaron said, "Probably means the last refurbishing.

Climate eats buildings. Sun. Termites. Mildew. Old owners went broke."

"How sad," said the wife.

"They got happy again at the closing," Aaron said.

They'd reached the porch steps of the back building of the Mangrove Arms. Moonlight rained down on gingerbread trim that had been scraped but not yet refinished, on louvered shutters stacked up in a crisscross pattern on the veranda, waiting to be rehung. In the clearing, Aaron's coated hair and skin gleamed morbidly. He said, "Be careful, the banister isn't bolted down."

"Our room," said the wife. "It's finished?"

The suitcases were heavy, Aaron strained to lift them high enough so that they wouldn't bump the stairs. "Your room," he huffed, "is beautiful. Everything brand new. Sconces, headboard. Carpenter just hung the door today."

They entered the building, which had a wonderful and complicated smell, a smell of many layers: of oldness and newness, of work and hospitality. Toasted sawdust cut through potpourri, lavender soap overlay the tang of drying varnish. Aaron motioned his guests to precede him to the second floor, then steered them down a hallway to the right. He stopped just shy of the door to their room, put down the luggage, and fished in his pocket for the key.

But as he moved to unlock the door, it struck him, very distantly at first, that something wasn't right. He knew how to open a door. It didn't take thinking about. But in his exhaustion nothing came easy, nothing flowed, even automatic gestures had to be conceived anew. So he stared at the door as he brought the key closer, and finally, squinting, he puzzled out, still disbelieving, what was wrong. The lock was where it should have been but there wasn't any keyhole. Instead, there was a lever you worked with your thumb.

Aaron froze, the futile key suspended in midair.

After a moment the husband said, "Asylum-style. Lock 'em in 'stead of out."

"Asshole locksmith," Aaron hissed, then caught himself. "Excuse me. Let's try a different room."





Chapter 3


Suki Sperakis hated making sales calls.

But it was a weekday morning; and making sales calls was her job; and it was no worse, she told herself, than other jobs she'd had in the course of twelve years in Key West.

It was no worse than waitressing. No worse than being a line cook, shuttling in a sweat between the griddle and the deep-fat fryer. No worse than driving a taxi in a town where lost tourists in pastel convertibles were always careening the wrong way onto one-way streets.

Sometimes—not often—Suki thought about those jobs, the grimy work for scrape-by pay, and wondered if she should have finished college. Three more semesters, she could have had a psych degree from Rutgers. But then what? Marry the dull, reliable college boyfriend and start a career that would require thirty years of pantyhose. Save up for a little house in a development so new that there'd be no grass to hold the mud in place. Scratch ice off windshields while waiting to deal with the equal terrors of fertility or the lack thereof ... The snare would build up season by season, and for better or worse, Suki was one of those people who could see the whole completed trap before the first piece of it had been nailed down; who understood, moreover, that the first piece was the trap.

So, precociously, at the age of twenty-one, she'd headed south. What made it harder was that she hadn't known what to call herself for doing so. She wasn't a hippie—born too late, and too much of a loner. She was not rebelling against anything in particular, nor fleeing anything more than typically gloomy. She didn't think of herself as especially artsy or original. She was just determined, simply and implacably, to live a pleasant life. She'd given back the scholarship, ditched the boyfriend.