By way of answer, Ziggy salted his hand and licked it.
"How many men are ever loved like that?" said Louie. "Ten years she waited for you! You should throw yourself at her feet, you should drink the water she bathes in."
Ziggy drank beer instead. Tree frogs croaked out answers to other tree frogs croaking from across the courtyard. Louie raised his glass for emphasis, took a bigger pull of liquor than he'd meant to.
"Ya know what drives me nuts?" he said, against the sour burn that was raging in his throat. "What drives me nuts is a guy who doesn't know how lucky he is."
Ziggy lifted an eyebrow, looked away. The attempt to seem uninterested was the first crack in his lack of interest.
"Ya think about it," Louie rambled, "why should anyone love any of us? We're funny-looking, hairy in ridiculous places. We snore, we're moody, we smell bad—"
"Speak for yourself, old man—"
"We make terrible mistakes, we promise things we can't deliver, we disappoint in bed, in life . . . Ziggy, ya think about all that, and ya don't see how lucky you are, how amazing it is, to have this woman love you?"
Ziggy turned toward Louie then, but it was hard to read his face, a face whose flesh and hinges had been rearranged long after the emotions had been formed, a disconnected face whose tragedy was that its expressions, made of reused parts, could not be trusted to match its owner's feelings. He leaned in close to Angelina's uncle, beer and cactus on his breath. His eyes gleamed dully in the blue light that spread upward from the pool. His voice was a clenched and gravelly whisper. "You think I don't know that it's amazing? I'm fuckin' ashamed, it's so amazing. That doesn't mean it makes me happy."
"It should," said Uncle Louie, softly and simply, sure beyond all argument that he was right.
* * *
The mango torte was not a good idea.
Louie had eaten a big hunk of it after Ziggy went to bed, licking glaze and runny custard off his fingers, and when the sugar hit the alcohol already coursing through his veins, it sent up fumes that made him dizzy. Still sitting in his lounge chair, he'd closed his eyes and shallowly dozed, nauseously dreaming that he was an astronaut under whose humid capsule a wobbly earth was rocking. He woke to a wheeling sky and blundered off to his room, where he fell heavily on his own side of the barricaded mattress. Ziggy grunted, then went back to snoring.
Louie slept, peed, drank water, slept again. By five-thirty he was no longer drunk and not yet hung over, arrived at a sort of delicate oasis. His mind seemed improbably clear, though his nerves felt scraped and raw, his emotions as fresh and full as fruits just peeled. He rose silently and went downstairs to watch another day begin.
He smelled chlorine, saw stars erased by the approach of dawn. Vaguely, he recalled the conversation of the evening before, wondered if he'd said anything to regret or be embarrassed by; to his surprise, he didn't think he had. Somewhere a cat mewed; far away, a motorcycle revved. He briefly dozed again, woke up when the streetlamps stopped buzzing.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a sheaf of newspapers come pinwheeling over the fence, heard their slap against the ground. With effort he rose from his lounge, went over and picked one up, carried it back to his seat. There was just enough light to read by, if he squinted.
The paper was wonderfully skinny, a slender testament to how little really happened; the headlines were refreshingly trivial, evidence of how little really mattered. Louie scanned the front page in a minute: The mayor was awaiting trial again; a barracuda had flown into a boat and bit an angler on the leg; a giant crane had fallen into a hole that it was digging. He was about to turn to editorials, had, in fact, already spread the paper and snapped the crease, when his mind belatedly registered a tiny item at the base of a page one column. He refolded the paper, braced it on his knees. He took a breath before he read the ad. The item said:
Louie,
I love you.
Please come back.
Rose
Flagler House,
Room 216
There are times in life when a person does not, should not, trust his eyes, when something wished for takes on such a weight and substance that it seems to caper across one's field of vision though it isn't really there. Louie second-guessed his eyeballs. He rested them a moment. He rubbed them, coaxed sleep out of their corners. He rustled the newspaper and brought it a little closer to his face, in light that every moment was growing brighter. He read the ad again, a third time, a fourth. It was not until he realized he was crying that he really believed he'd read it right, that it actually said what it said.
He put the paper down, sat there in his lounge chair in the exploding yellow dawn, and wept. His wife loved him. This was staggering. It rewrote history. Decades of shame and disappointment, of feeling like a failure and a fool, were washed away by a few smudged lines printed at the bottom of a page. His whole life became more dignified in retrospect. He was, after all, a man worth loving, a man a woman could care for.