"We started something a long time ago," Angelina said. "I was thinking we should finish it."
He watched her. Her lips stayed parted when she'd finished speaking; her chin tilted up, her shoulders lifted. His hand began to move toward her, toward the moonlight on her skin, but then it stopped, paralyzed by guilty fear, by a sudden sickening belief that at the moment he felt her flesh, bullets would rip into him, the revenge he'd dodged for so long would surely overtake him at this new affront.
His hand fell to his side, his lungs grabbed for breath. "Angelina," he said, desire and foreboding stretching his voice very thin. "Listen, this is crazy."
"Maybe it's supposed to be," she said.
He clenched his jaw, his feet pawed at the sand. "Before . . . ," he said. "Look, you were a kid and I was a different person."
"You had the same hands," she said. "The same eyes.
He hid his hands. He looked away. "I had some feelings then," he said. "I had, ya know, a place, a future."
"And now?" she said. "You don't have feelings now?
He stared at clumps of sand. He shook his head.
"You're lying, Ziggy. I know you are."
She looked out across the flat and softly gleaming water. The sky was clear to the horizon. There would be a moonset soon, a perfect orange slice, and she understood she would not be in a lover's arms to see it.
She crossed the small space of beach between them, put her hands on Ziggy's chest, then craned her neck to kiss him, very chastely, on the cheek.
"I've waited ten years," she said. "I've imagined a lot of things but I never imagined I'd have to beg you to make love to me. I'll wait a little longer."
She turned and walked away.
20
Uncle Louie had for decades been an early riser.
After the first years of his marriage, there hadn't been much keeping him awake at night, and besides, he had a shy person's preference for being at large when most people were not. He loved to be the guy waiting on the sidewalk as the lights were switched on in the diner, as the Venetian blinds blinked open and the fellow in the paper hat crouched down by the door to lift the deadbolt that was pegged into the flooring. He loved to be there when the grounds still swirled in the just-made coffee, before the ink was quite dry on the newspapers, when the glaze on the Danish was sticky and warm.
So now, with the sun barely up, he emerged from his motel room and headed to Duval Street for some breakfast. Shadows were long, oblique and baffling, tall children who bore no resemblance to their parents. Dogs yawned under cars; cats stretched, scratching their flanks against garbage cans. Occasionally people went past on bicycles whose fat tires hummed against the silent pavements; Louie tried to figure who was awake already and who hadn't been to bed yet.
Down on Duval, he bought a paper, sat at a cafe a few steps above the sidewalk. He ate a croissant, drank a cappuccino, and allowed himself to feel that watching the scene was enough to make him part of it. Transvestites still vamped, impressive in their stamina to strut all night in high-heeled shoes. Now and then a police car listlessly rolled by, cops held vials of ammonia under the noses of people passed out on the curb. The town seemed utterly peaceful in its aberrations, and, looking without judgment, Louie felt worldly and extremely calm.
He watched a hooker half a block away, could barely imagine how, for her, night phased into morning. Her dark hair was tousled and wild, her makeup, though faded, still seemed alien and guilty in the new light of day. Her bright dress was wrinkled, sexily sloppy in the way it creased across her chest. Her stride was inconsistent, less like she was drunk than like she was trying to spread around the wear on aching feet.
She moved closer, and Louie, spasmodically blinking behind his paper, saw that the hooker was his niece.
His broad-mindedness caved in like a failed soufflé and he was suddenly abashed and appalled. Panicked, he hid behind his wall of newsprint to stall for time. He thought of hiding there till she had passed, to spare them both mortification. But he remembered, even if self-mockingly, his resolve to be a hero; a hero wouldn't chicken out like that. He lowered the paper and meekly called her name.
She looked up from sidewalk level, walked slowly over, and in a voice that was not the least embarrassed but very discouraged, said, "Oh hi, Uncle Louie."
"Want some coffee?"
She came up the steps, noticed the discomfort in his face. "It's not how it looks," she said. "I wish it was, but it isn't."
Flustered to be caught in narrow, judging thoughts, he tried to splutter out a denial.
Sitting down, she said, "It's okay, Uncle Louie. You think I look like a slut. I see it. And I tried. God knows I tried."