Mangrove Squeeze(76)

"Can't have been all bad," Aaron said.

"Wasn't," Suki conceded. Her shoulders lifted and she burgeoned, her presence expanded with promise like rising bread. "But there's a hell of a gap between not all bad, and good."

"So what you wanted—?"

"Had no idea," she said. She put her fork down, picked up her wine. She gestured. Her arms moved wide, her neck bobbed. Space became elastic to accommodate her. "And something I figured out: What you want matters a whole lot less than what you don't want."

Aaron drank wine and pondered that a moment. Then he said, "That make you a pessimist or a mystic?"

"No, really," Suki said, as though he'd contradicted her. "You get rid of the ugliness, the annoyances, the discomforts, the stupid pointless worries... and it's really almost enough."

Aaron watched her. She'd put her plate onto the coffee table and she was half-reclining. Candlelight traced her side, the arc of her tilted hip and the sleigh-ride slope of her torso as it rose up toward her shoulder. His eyes grabbed for hers. He said, "Almost?"

Outside, beyond the porous, slatted walls, fronds were rustling, and cats were scuttling under porches, and Tarzan Abramowitz, suspenders spread around his thick ropy neck, was working his way through his list of suspect addresses, looking for someone to hurt. He cruised Key West's dusty streets, the molding of his electric blue Camaro barely clearing the still-warm pavements.

Suki got suddenly shy. She met Aaron's gaze but then her eyelids came slipping down, her mouth tightened at one corner and her voice had trouble turning breath to sound. "Yes," she said at last. "Almost."

He leaned a little toward her then. His face forgot the habit of appearing self-sufficient, it softened to reveal the true and simple thing that people trembled to admit—that they were lonely, that their own sealed skins did not satisfy as their only home. He didn't mean to whisper but he whispered. "What's missing, Suki?"

She didn't answer and she didn't have to. Her chin lifted, her shoulders opened. Her disconcerting upper lip gave a small slow undulating twitch, and he took her in his arms.

They were still kissing, there on the settee, with burned- down candles sputtering, and wavy shadows clutching at the walls, when a bounding step was faintly heard on the old boards of the office stairs, and a heavy hand smacked down on the little silver bell, its bright and singing tone now turned imperious, infernal.





PART


FOUR


Chapter 40

The woman who sometimes did the breakfast at the Mangrove Arms had tattoos on her ankles and her shoulders, studs through her nose and at the edges of her navel, and bits of mirror glued to the fenders of her bicycle. She believed in ghosts and spirits, cherished unusual beliefs about causes and effects, and saw things that other people didn't see. But in her own way she was very disciplined, even conventional, and when it came to work she had a policy: Some days she showed up, other days she didn't; but she never showed up late.

On the days she went to work, she left her Stump Lane bungalow at a quarter of six. In winter it was still full night. Cats owned the streets. In quiet alleyways, raccoons tested the tops of garbage cans. If it had been windy, broken- backed brown fronds would drape the tops of fences; when it was especially humid, she needed to dry her bike seat with a sleeve.

This particular predawn, however, was dry and still and clear. Street lamps still buzzed, and the crisp stars, like people fated to the young and suddenly, revealed no inkling of their imminent eclipse. She pedaled toward Whitehead Street and thought about the morning's menu. The papayas were a little green; she'd slice kiwis and oranges instead. Banana walnut muffins. Key lime marmalade.

She crossed Duval Street, drained and embarrassed at the end of its nightly debauch. Drunks as trusting as dogs lay stretched full-length in doorways. Transvestites strutted, wigs askew. A tourist woman leaned against a lamppost and wept, grown maudlin and ashamed over something she had said or done or seen her boyfriend say or do, some bleak thing that a too-long evening on Duval had proved about her life.

Whitehead, on the other hand, was peaceful. Tunneling banyans softened the night, as they would soon soften the day. People who worked the early shift at the Aqueduct or the electric company drank coffee on the sidewalk in pools of light in front of countered windows.

The woman who did the breakfast locked her bike and climbed the porch steps of the Mangrove Arms.

She found the front door open, which at that hour it should not have been, but which wasn't that unusual. Guests had keys and guests were careless. Even Aaron, lax like many ex-New Yorkers, as if all crime and danger had been left behind, didn't always bother locking up. She went inside.