In the last week of February Joey made four hundred and eighty dollars and decided to celebrate by inviting Bert the Shirt over for filet mignon and a couple bottles of Valpolicella. It was time, he felt, that Bert and Sandra met. It was time he learned to use the gas grill at the compound. It was time, maybe, to get on terms with such basic social ceremonies as having a friend to the house on Saturday night.
Sandra bought a new blouse for the occasion. It was thin white cotton stamped with small pink birds, and it hung on the back of a chair while Sandra brushed on her eyeshadow and dabbed on her lipstick. She was beginning to have what was, for her, a tan. On her face and shoulders, orange-pink dots were strewn across her blue-white skin, gradually coloring her in the way a comic strip is colored in. The resulting blush made her light eyes seem a crisper green, green like a vegetable with crunch, and her short hair closer to silver than to yellow. "You know," she said, lifting a bra strap to better examine her tan lines in the mirror, "sometimes I think I'm the only person in this town who wears a bra."
Joey had a quick flash of Vicki, and banished the image.
He regarded Sandra's chaste white appliance, with its rim of dainty lace, its girding of clasps and elastic. "Well, you don't have to wear one," he said, feeling on safe ground saying it. It was about as likely that Sandra would give up her foundation garments as that the cardinal would stop wearing a hat.
"Well," she said, and left it at that. Turning half profile, she appraised her chest with that amazing dispassion women can muster when looking at their bodies. When Joey looked in the mirror, he tended to see muscle definition that wasn't quite there, tended not to notice the merest beginnings of a tummy. But Sandra duly recorded every crease and flaw, pitilessly noted every lack or excess. Humbled by such realism, Joey changed the subject.
"So the potatoes are in, the lettuce is washed. What else?"
"I wish the plates matched."
"It's a rented place. Bert'll understand."
The evening, even by Key West's relentless standards, was beautiful. A slow and undramatic sunset had left the sky pale yellow in the west, lavender backed by pearl gray at the zenith, velvety blue like the inside of a jewel box in the east. The air was the temperature of lips and there was just enough breeze to lift the smell of jasmine from the hedge. The compound was given over to uncomplicated pleasures. Wendy was sitting chin-deep in the hot tub while Marsha massaged the tension out of her shoulders. Luke the musician and Lucy the mailman dangled their feet in the still blue pool, their twin headsets plugged into a single Walkman. Steve the naked landlord, draped now in a towel against the relative chill of dusk, had dozed off in a lounge chair, a paperback about clones rising and falling on his ample stomach.
Joey ushered in Bert the Shirt just as Peter and Claude, dressed in peppermint-stripe tunics, were heading off to work. He introduced them.
"And who's this little fur-face?" cooed Claude.
Joey could not help cringing a little. Fur-face?
But the retired mobster held his chihuahua forward in the palm of his hand so Claude could pet him. "This useless thing? This is Don Giovanni."
"Like the opera," Peter said, and he burst into a scrap of tune.
The tune sounded vaguely familiar to Bert, though since he'd died notes all sounded more or less the same to him. Still, the episode put him in a buoyant mood. It reminded him somehow of his wife. "Joey," he said, gesturing around him as they approached the cottage, "ain't this paradise?"
Sandra had come to meet them. "In paradise," she said, "the plates match."
She held out her hand to shake. But Bert had the dog in his right hand, and so took her fingers in his left, raised them to his lips, and kissed her on the knuckles. "You're as lovely as Joey says you are."
"Joey who? If Joey paid me a compliment, I think I'd plotz." She wagged her finger at Bert, admiring his perfectly draped shirt of midnight-blue voile. "But you're as sly as Joey says you are, and that's the truth."
"So Bert," said Joey, "glassa wine? We'll sit out by the pool awhile."
He brought a tray and put it on a small wooden table just outside the sliding door of their cottage. The wine seemed to draw into itself the last rays of dim light, and glowed a shimmering garnet.
"Salud," said Bert the Shirt, and Joey could not help noticing that the word made Sandra wince. The Italian sound, the Italian wine in stubby glasses, a certain old-fashioned and very appealing swagger in the way Bert lifted his drink to toast-these things, to Sandra, were a threat, unintentional but real. They were the old ways, the family ways; their warmth and comfort bound a person to the neighborhood as much as did the promise of easy earnings, maybe more so, and made it hard to change. At any moment a gesture or a word could pull a person back to the small, sad, cozy place he'd come from.
"And how do you like it down here?"
Sandra barely heard the question. "Me? Oh, I like it fine. The weather's great, the girls at the bank are nice."
She stopped talking, but Bert just looked at her. It was a simple trick he'd developed decades before to get people to go a little farther.
"But ya know," Sandra obliged, "for me, it's not that big a change. A bank's a bank. Money's money. I mean, if you think about it, money's the least interesting thing there is. There's no variety about it, you know what I mean? Seen one dollar, you've seen 'em all."
"Yeah," said Bert, "but until you've seen a helluva lot of 'em, it doesn't really seem that way."
"I guess," she said. "But people. That's what's interesting. Now, with Joey's job…"
Joey looked down at the wooden table and gave his head a modest shake. This job. It was confusing, this job. He couldn't decide whether to be proud of it or embarrassed. It was like the time he painted some autumn trees and won an art contest in grade school. He was happy to win, happy to see his mother flush with satisfaction, but at the same time felt that making pictures was for girls. Of course, with the job, it had a lot to do with who was asking. With Sandra, yeah, he was proud, he could tell it made her happy. Around Bert, well, it wasn't like Bert was putting it down, it was just that, let's face it, Bert had a different sense of what a man should be. Joey wondered if he'd ever have a more firmly held opinion of his own. He had to believe that life would be easier if he did.
"Anybody hungry?" he said. "If I can figure out how to work the stupid grill, we can eat sometime tonight."
The hiss and pop of propane being lit reminded Joey how quiet the compound had become. The women from the antique store had abandoned the hot tub and gone inside; Luke and Lucy had disappeared into the thickening dark; Steve, under his towel, seemed down for the count. Joey looked at the blue flame of the grill, felt, rather to his own surprise, the prideful contentment of being the host, then went inside to get the steaks. Walking past the wooden table, he saw that Bert the Shirt was now holding Don Giovanni on his lap. All that was visible of the tiny dog was the thin silver spikes of its whiskers and a morbid gleam from its oversized eyes.
"You really love that little dog, don't you?" Sandra was saying.
"The dog? I hate the dog. The dog is like a rock I can't get outta my shoe. You ever heard of a dog being, whaddyacallit, not a kleptomaniac, a hypochondriac?"
Joey slapped the steaks onto the grill, then poured himself another glass of wine. Standing there above his hard-earned dinner, holding a giant fork in a fire-proof mitt, he had to laugh at himself: a citizen having a cookout. What would come next in this groping toward respectability, a goddamn sing-along?
The filets were delicious.
They had moved into the Florida room to eat them, at a table covered with a plastic cloth, knives and forks of random pattern, and unmatched plates whose stripes and borders had been scratched and nicked by many hungry renters.
"Joey," said Bert the Shirt as the younger man re-filled his glass, "this is more like it, huh? This is what I been tellin' ya. Come to Florida, take it easy, enjoy what there is to be enjoyed. Look at him, Sandra- nice and relaxed. Joey, the other week when we talked, jeez-"
"I'm more relaxed 'cause I'm makin' some money," Joey said, gesturing with his fork. "But it hasn't been that easy, Bert. I mean, my feet hurt. Besides, the little I'm making-"
"It's not bad money," said Sandra. "Especially for right at the beginning."
"It's O.K.," Joey said with a shrug. "But it's all according to how ya measure. Bert, you know what I mean. Our friends in New York, one night out, they spread around in tips what I make in a week."
Sandra dabbed her lips. "So they're big shots," she could not resist saying. "Real sports. I'm impressed. But Joey, let's keep things in proportion. It's not like you were in that league when we were up there anyway."
Joey started to protest, then chewed some steak instead and realized he had nothing to protest about. "It just makes ya wonder. That's all I'm saying. Am I better off doing what I'm doing, or am I better off doing what I was tryin' to do before?"
"There's no comparison, Joey," Sandra said.
"Excuse me, Sandra," said Bert the Shirt, putting down his wineglass. "I'm a guest in your house, I don't wanna get in the middle of a disagreement or anything. But I think there is a comparison. The comparison is called money. Legit, not legit, that's not the point. Results is the point. Lookit the guys I play gin with." He counted them off on his long yellowish fingers. "A retired judge. A guy who ran a big Buick dealership. A doctor. Why are we all of a sudden inna same club? Not becausa what we did. Because we all got the same kinda results. We all ended up to where we could buy condos onna beach. That makes us equals, friends almost. Legit, not legit, that isn't how people add it up. You wanna end up respected, you gotta go where your best shot is."
"But that's just it," said Joey. "I don't know where my best shot is."
Bert neatly laid his knife and fork across his plate as Joey poured more wine. "Well, kid, there's nobody that can tell you that. That you hafta decide for yourself."
Sandra had her hands in her lap and was making a point of looking past Joey, through the louvered windows at the empty night. "Well, I've had enough," she said, referring to her dinner. "Bert, how 'bout some steak for the dog?"
"No, Sandra, no thanks. Dog's a vegetarian."
"A dog vegetarian?" said Joey. "This I never heard of, a dog vegetarian."
"Not by choice. Meat don't agree with 'im. Kinda clogs 'im up. You don't wanna hear about it, believe me."
Then the telephone rang.
This was a rather rare event, as the only people who ever called were tellers from the bank who wanted Sandra to take a shift for them, or avid young men looking for a former tenant named Pippy. Joey got up. In his concern to be a gracious host, he'd been pouring wine at a brisk clip, and was a shade unsteady on his legs. The bedroom phone was on its fifth ring when he reached it.
By the time he returned to the Florida room, the table was cleared and coffee cups had been placed around a tray of pignolia nut cookies. 'That was my brother Gino," Joey announced. "He's here. In town."
The news was sufficient to spoil the evening. Gino Delgatto had a gift for that kind of thing. Every face clouded over, although each for a somewhat different reason.
"Why's 'e here?" asked Bert, wondering how much, if anything, Joey had told Sandra of the family business that was, strictly speaking, none of her business at all.
"He says he's on vacation." Joey had had just enough to drink so that he heard his own voice from the inside of his eardrums, and he didn't like the steely sound of it. "Says he figured he might as well come down and pay a visit."
"You believe that?" Sandra asked.
Joey took a heavy breath that had a tough time coming in and going out again around a bellyful of steak. "Yeah, right. I believe it. He's here to fuck things up for me."
"Joey, don't-"
He cut her off quick and hard. "And don't tell me not to curse."
"That isn't what I was gonna say," she came right back. "Don't fucking let him, Joey. That's what I was gonna say."