"Who's quarreling?" said Angelina's father.
"I have a suggestion," Mendez went on. "Be my guests for dinner. If you like, we'll see a show, gamble, have some women. Tomorrow we'll go together to Key West, you'll meet our colleague there, I'm confident you'll be more comfortable. Is that acceptable to everyone?"
23
Angelina was feeling glum, unpretty, hopeless. She invited Michael out for a fancy dinner and, as he picked apart his lobster with great deliberation, she told him she was leaving town the next day.
He put down his tiny fork, very thoroughly wiped his mouth, looked out past the terraced tables to the ocean. "You can't do that," he said. "That's ridiculous."
"Ridiculous?" she answered. Her own plate was hardly touched, she pushed it an inch away from her, took a sip of Chardonnay. "What's ridiculous is that I came here at all."
"That's not ridiculous," Michael said. "That's romance. That's destiny."
She made a dismissive sound, fiddled with a roll.
"You can't leave now," her friend went on. "Not when you're so close."
"Close to what?"
Michael flicked his green eyes left and right, leaned low across the table, decided on a somewhat desperate stratagem. "Close to getting laid, for one thing."
Angelina was piqued. "You think I can't get laid?" she said. She said it louder than she'd meant to, heads turned here and there.
He reached for the wine bucket, poured them both some more. "So why haven't you?" he challenged.
She looked away.
"Because you're after the sublime," he answered for her. "Because you won't settle. So why settle now, when you've almost got what you've been waiting for?"
"I don't almost have it," she said. "That's exactly the problem. It feels farther away now than when I was home in my room and didn't even know if Sal Martucci was still alive."
"He's alive," said Michael. "He's here. You've touched him."
"And he practically dissolved," said Angelina. She sipped wine, gathered steam. "And another thing. Just in the last day or so it's finally getting through to me that it's a little pathetic to still be chasing at twenty-seven what you dreamed about at seventeen, especially when it was probably a bad idea to begin with."
"Is twenty-seven so different from seventeen?" said Michael. "Is eighty-seven so different from seventeen. People want what they want. They need what they need."
Angelina sighed, looked out at moonlight on the water, at misted stars that dimmed and brightened as scraps of cloud slipped past them. "It's beautiful here," she said. "And you've been a terrific friend, a godsend. But I'm leaving tomorrow."
Michael stared down at the tablecloth, fingered the base of his wineglass. He hated saying goodbye to people; no matter whose idea it was to leave, no matter what the circumstance, he always felt like he was being punished, renounced, dragged away to someplace dark and cramped and silent.
But then again, Angelina's giving up didn't mean that he had to give up too. After a long moment, he said, "What time tomorrow?"
"Hm?"
"What time tomorrow are you leaving?"
Angelina shrugged. She hadn't gotten as far as making reservations.
"Don't leave before we talk."
"Michael," she said, "there's nothing—"
"Not until we see each other," he said. "Promise?"
She pouted, pulled a deep breath in, smelled sauce and smoke and ocean. "Okay," she said. "I promise."
* * *
Maybe Louie had simply been away too long. Maybe he was tired of walking up and down Duval Street, spinning the same postcard racks evening after evening, seeing the same T-shirts, the same pierced noses, the same tattoos. Maybe he was tired of the moldy smell of his motel room, the places in the towels where the terry cloth had been rubbed away on strangers' bodies. In any case, his traveler's delight was beginning to wear that thin, he was starting to feel homesick.
Homesick for what? he asked himself. For his wife's bad cooking, grains of salt bouncing off of watery mounds of tasteless vegetables? For the not quite kitty-cornered angle of the TV set in the living room, the tangle of extension cords behind it? For the traffic, the cold, the stinking air?
Truth was, he was getting homesick for all those things.
He missed his wife; he felt that now, intensely. Missing her, he afforded her the benefit of every doubt. She wasn't sarcastic, she was witty. Not malicious, but tough-minded and savvy. She wasn't vain, she was respectful of appearances. Not pushy, but high-spirited.
Besides, what did any of that matter? He missed her. She was his wife. Quite suddenly, he wanted more than anything to hear her voice.