He was standing in a pizzeria while this was happening, waiting for his calzone to be warmed up. The air smelled of oregano and yeast, flashes of heat shot forth from the ovens. He sipped his soda through a straw. He didn't really think that he should call, but he looked around for a pay phone. He saw one in the dim alcove that led on to the rest rooms. He asked the counter guy for change.
Names and numbers were scrawled in pencil on the wall around the phone. Louie's heart was pounding. He shouldn't call because he didn't know what he would say. He picked up the receiver, heard the dial tone, put it down again. He was afraid he'd catch hell, afraid he'd be asked too many questions. He felt a desperate impulse to brag, and he knew this would only lead to trouble. I found Angelina!, he yearned to tell his wife. Then what?
He again picked up the phone, nestled it between his shoulder and his ear as he dialed numbers, readied change. Quarters plunked, dimes tinkled. His hand shook. There were two rings, three, and then his wife said, "Hello?"
Louie heard the rasp of many decades' smoking, the thick tongue of an evening measured in cocktails. The TV was on, must've been a sitcom, he heard clustered laughing.
"Hello?" she said again, impatient now, aggressive.
Louie wanted to speak but he couldn't. Behind him, trays clattered, peels rang, a counterman sang out, "Spinach calzone!"
Rose demanded, "Who the hell is this? You there? You there?" Her own heart thumped now, she felt a burning in her tightened chest. Was this news? A ransom call? "Hello?"
Louie understood he had to talk, couldn't let things hang like this. But when he went to move his mouth, the best he could manage was a kiss, a wet and awkward smacking kiss into the phone.
There was a moment's disbelieving silence, the receiver felt like a dead fish in his hand.
Then Rose said, "Drop dead, ya fucking pervert."
The phone slammed down in Louie's ear. He blinked, then cursed himself. He knew if he called back, the line would be busy, off the hook. Why did he always make things worse when he tried to make them better?
He waited till his breathing slowed, then went up to the counter. He paid for his calzone but left it sitting there. He wasn't hungry anymore.
24
Ziggy was dreaming of lamb chops.
Or at least that's how the dream had started off. A pair of lamb chops, perfectly pink, were set before him on a clean white plate. He was ravenous. He had a big napkin tucked under his chin, and he contemplated the chops in the perfect rapture of appetite peaking, fulfillment in plain view. He admired the delicate and arcing bones, licked his lips at the prospect of the juicy resilient flesh between his teeth. But when he picked up knife and fork, the lamb chops began to change themselves into Angelina. Their curving bones became her sides, her face appeared like a medallion on the plate. The dollops of meat began to breathe; he saw them pulse, alive again, and with lascivious confusion, he pondered the dubious anatomy. These succulent pink morsels—were they her thighs? breasts? buttocks offered on a clean white plate?
The phone rang, kept ringing.
Ziggy whimpered, groaned, turned over. At last, with flustered effort he freed a hand from underneath the tangled sheet, brought the receiver to his ear beneath a sweaty pillow. "Yeah?"
"We need you here at noon," said a flunkey of Carmen Salazar.
Ziggy forced an eye to open, squinted at his watch on the bedside table. "It's not even fuckin' nine," he groused.
"It's important. Don't be late."
"Have I ever been fuckin' late?"
The flunkey hung up on him. Ziggy called him an asshole as he fumbled the phone back into its cradle.
Then he put the pillow on his head again and tried his best to dive back into sleep. He needed rest but more than that he needed sustenance; he longed to recapture the dream he now felt, bitterly, he'd been gypped out of.
His eyes closed tight, he labored at bringing back the images of nourishment and lust, projecting them like slides against his eyelids. It didn't work. The pictures were there, but without the all-acceptingness of sleep, they were ridiculous and crude, and Ziggy dimly understood he'd lost his chance to savor Angelina without the guilty weight of will, to relish the miracle of her availability without the dread of consequences.
Cursing, he gave up on rest and trundled out of bed, moving resentfully into another day of a life that, as he couldn't help noticing more and more, didn't fit him as a person's own life ought to, but pinched and drooped like someone else's borrowed clothes.
* * *
Another day, thought Angelina, another mango muffin.
Though this day, she realized, was very different from all the others that she'd spent at Coral Shores. The breakfast buffet was the same—the same thwarted bees hovering outside the tiny tents that covered the fruit. The poolside spectacle was more or less the same—the same mix of sleepy smokers and pinkened bare behinds. But everything was tinged now with the sepia of departure. Colors faded as things seen were already becoming things recalled; round objects flattened, the better to fit in the never adequate luggage of memory.