Virgin Heat(8)

Now she was looking out the window of the small clattering propeller plane that made the short hop to Key West.

Below her gleamed the Everglades, a weird inverted patchwork of wet and dry, puddles of grass standing in a desert of hot water. Then the mainland ended, just petered out—no bluffs, no surf, just the flattest of lands dissolving like a dunked cookie into the shallowest of seas. When the imprecise and arcing line of Keys appeared, it looked to Angelina like a spoiled necklace, irretrievable beads rolling off a broken string. Suddenly she was lonely, burdened for the first time by the enormity of what she had begun, rattled by an understanding that, whatever happened, her life had already been changed.

She needed to talk with someone.

She glanced at the man sitting next to her, thumbing with utter lack of interest through a magazine. He wore a lavender tank top that showed strong freckled arms and a stomach from the gym; his light brown hair was just barely longer than a crew-cut, and in his right ear, not the lobe but along the edge, were three stud earrings—diamond, ruby, sapphire.

She caught the corner of his eye and said, "I've never been to Key West before. Have you?"

He closed the magazine and faced her. His teeth were small and even, his eyes a disarming green; the sandy eyebrows had an enthusiastic arch. "A few times," he said. "It's heaven."

"You on vacation?"

"Vacation," he said, and he gave the word some thought. "Actually, I've just been fired. Retail. Just as well. I'm looking for romance. Looking for love. That's my real career, my calling. I'm Michael."

"I'm Jane," said Angelina, and in the next heartbeat she regretted it. Maybe she wasn't such a good liar after all. Besides, the problem with lying was that it was just too lonely, it created a floating world where no one could be trusted, where it would be much too easy to lose one's bearings altogether. "No," she said, "I'm Angelina."

Her seatmate gave a casual shrug. "Hey, it's Key West. Jane, Angelina, Liza Minnelli—what's the difference?"

"No, really. I'm Angelina. Jane—I was just being stupid."

Michael turned up his palms, smiled. There was mischief in the smile, and unbounded acceptance. Angelina felt she had to atone for her first deception with a headlong candor.

"And I'm looking for love, too," she went on.

He gave her a comradely look, the comprehending glance of one pilgrim to another. "Careful, hon," he said. "Remember: safe sex, maybe; safe love, no such thing."

"You don't know the half of it."

He looked intrigued, ready to hear and be nourished by some gossip of the heart. But Angelina went no further, and soon the plane began to bank, leaned against the thick and rubbery resistance of the air.

"Do you know where you're staying?" she asked him at last.

"Coral Shores."

"Nice?"

"Fabulous," he said. "Big private garden. Pool. Jacuzzi. Balconies draped with palms."

"Maybe I'll stay there too."

They were over the harbor now; below them, sails stretched back from masts, foamy chevrons spread out from the sterns of tiny boats. Michael toyed with his three stud earrings. "Not a great place for you to look for love," he said.

"Gay place," she said. It was not a question.

"To the n-th," said Michael.

"You're saying I wouldn't be welcome?"

The plane sank lower, scudded over tin roofs throwing back the sun and over cool blue squares and rectangles of swimming pools. Michael looked at Angelina—the Annette Funicello hairdo, the stretch pants out of some other age. Was she simply clueless, or was there some screwball moxie there, some retro originality? "You'd be welcome," he said. "Of course you'd be welcome."

"Well, then—"

"The question is . . . well, the question . . . I'll be blunt: It's how comfortable you'd be around a bunch of naked queers."

The landing gear clicked down; palms came up so close that one could see the slow dance of their swaying fronds.

"Is that all?" Angelina said. "I got no problem with that."





5


For Ziggy it had not been a terrific day.

He'd awakened in a damp, stale bed with a slightly overweight redhead on his arm and a familiar wish in his mind—the wish that, starfish-like, he could simply shed the limb that was pinned under the heat and bulk of this wheezy stranger, and slink away, returning only after she'd smoked a cigarette and had the decency to vanish from the face of the earth. It hadn't always been this way for Ziggy; dimly, he remembered a time when appetite was not so stubbornly separate from emotion, when passion was not ashamed in daylight. But somewhere along the line some connection had been broken. Lately, night was night and day was day, and once the itch of sex had been briefly relieved, Ziggy craved to be alone, to think and scheme.