But the fret ended almost before it registered. Two guys rattled empty mugs and Ziggy, a good bartender and even, sometimes, a charming one in spite of himself, sprang forth to refill them, dowsing the worries of his other life in a foamy spray of someone else's beer.
* * *
"Michael? Michael, you ready yet?"
"Just a second, hon," he said from behind his door at Coral Shores.
Angelina was standing on his tiny patio, cowering in the crosshatched shade of an oleander. The sun, though very low, was just barely relenting in its heat, slipping from broil to bake; it threw purple shadows in distended shapes of languid palms and overhanging roofs. Angelina tapped her foot.
Then the door opened, and Michael stood there in shorts and a tank top and sandals.
"I don't understand it," Angelina said. She herself wore a pearl-gray camisole, a blue blouse chastely buttoned over it. Her hair was neatly poufed, her eyes were on, pale lipstick smoothed the shallow crevices of her slightly sunburned lips.
"Understand what?"
"I wear all this stuff," she said. "You put on a couple shreds of clothes. You have like half an inch of hair. And I'm always waiting for you."
Michael closed his door, pocketed the key. "Attention to detail," he said.
"Like what details?"
"Like teeth, okay? I don't go out until I floss."
"Flossing doesn't take that long. What else?"
"Sweetheart, you don't have to know everything."
They wove through the courtyard, around scraps of hedge and groups of lounging men, past the Jacuzzi where naked people sipped champagne from plastic cups. At the gate, they turned left, toward the noise, the crowds, the bars.
It was a ritual by now, the kind of thing that old friends did without having to make plans. They convened at six or so, they drank and talked till nine or ten. They watched men's hands together, analyzed them. They'd been served by gay hands and straight hands, lean hands and pudgy hands, hairy hands and smooth hands, hands whose fingernails were dirty and one hand that was missing a pinky, ended in a shiny stub. They'd drunk margaritas and frozen daiquiris and Mai Tais—drinks that were sometimes a little sickening, but that gave them a chance to appraise the bartender's style. They'd been in bars with guitar players, bars with pianos, bars with karaoke and bars with giant speakers hanging from the ceiling. Maybe thirty bars so for, with no sign of the hands Angelina had come to find.
Leaving Coral Shores behind them, Michael said, "I have a good feeling about tonight."
"You say that every night," said Angelina.
He toyed with his stud earrings. "And every night I do."
"Perennial optimist."
He didn't deny it. They walked. Slanting sunlight skidded off the pavement, sapped strength from their legs.
After a moment Angelina went on. "Me, I'm kind of nervous tonight. I don't know why."
Michael didn't answer, just watched reddened tourists walking past.
"Really nervous all of a sudden," Angelina said. "Like jumpy. I feel it in my throat."
They crossed a street, dodged pink rented scooters.
"On edge," she said.
They crossed Truman Avenue; the crowd began to thicken. She said, "Michael, would it be okay, I mean, would you think it's really stupid, if we held hands?"
He stopped a second, looked at her. Then he held out his hand, she took it, and they moved on toward the crush.
* * *
Uncle Louie sucked like a kid at a mango-flavored sno-cone that was melting as fast as he could eat it.
He wove through the sunset crowds at Mallory Square, among guitarists and magicians and a flag-draped man on stilts, and admitted to himself, a little guiltily, that he hadn't felt so alive in many years. He'd enjoyed his vacation with Rose, sure, but that was different. That was . . . vacation, an allowed and strictly bordered break between vast tracts of duty and routine. Besides, being with Rose—well, she made him nervous. Little things—was his hair messed up, his bald spot showing? Did he sound wimpy, unsophisticated, asking for a table in a restaurant? It was a nervousness he put on himself, he knew that, but still, it was nicer not to feel it. And it was strange—now, in the face of the overriding dread that he was ruining his entire life, all small nattering worries vanished and he felt marvelously light and unconstrained; the relief was like the profound and secret pleasure of reaching under the table and undoing the top button on a too-tight pair of pants.
So he strolled among the musicians and performers, and he lapped his liquefying sno-cone, and everything delighted him. He held the edge of the paper cone between his teeth and clapped as house cats leaped like miniature tigers through flaming hoops. He dipped and swayed in communion with the tightrope walker silhouetted against the setting sun. He dropped dollars into the hats of jugglers and bagpipe players.