He slept till four, and woke up feeling the dryness and dislocation that are the price of daytime sleep. His eyes itched, his arms hurt, he smelled his own sweat on the pillow. Gradually he remembered where he was: not just in Key West but in a Key West that was free of Gino. A pleasant place, an easy place, a place he had chosen for himself. He rolled over, stretched, and slowly started noticing things he'd been too nervous to notice for the past few put-upon weeks: the smell of the air that was sometimes dusty, sometimes flowery, depending on how humid it was and where the wind was coming from; the way the curtain fluttered over the louvered window, like the skirt of a woman walking. His eyes half open, he groped on the nightstand for his sunglasses.
He pulled on a bathing suit, threw a towel around his neck, and went outside. No one was around, and Joey jumped feet first into the pool. Waves rolled from his body, collided with the sides, and started back again, converging at a dozen angles like the roiled water over a coral reef. He threw himself backward and tried to float. For a few seconds the water held him; then, as if overburdened by the added weight of his doubt, it sagged and let him sink. One of these days, he told himself, he'd learn to swim. To live in Florida and not know how was crazy.
He toweled off and settled into a lounge chair under a palm tree. He was looking up absently through the interlaced fronds when Sandra came through the wooden gate of the compound. She was wearing a straight white skirt with a zipper on the side, white shoes with low heels, and a short-sleeved pink blouse whose shoulders stuck out an inch or two beyond her own. She walked with quick, compact steps around the hot tub and sat down next to Joey on the lounge- sat with her usual precision so that she was as close as she could be without putting her skirt against his wet bathing suit. "You're back," she said.
"Sure I'm back. You worried?"
"A little, yeah," she said. "It's been a long time since we spent a night apart, Joey. Besides, I'm always worried when you're with Gino." She reached out and touched Joey's hair, brushing it back from his forehead. Her fingertips felt good against his scalp, and he surprised himself by clutching her wrist and kissing it.
"Well, Gino's gone," he said. "He's back in New York by now."
Sandra said nothing, and Joey was grateful for her restraint. If she'd come out with too much relief, he would have had to take Gino's side somehow because he was family. That's just how it was. But she kept still and looked down at the blue shimmer of the pool.
"Yup," Joey resumed, "he's history. So, Sandra, now I can start making good on some a the promises I been making."
"Promises?" said Sandra. "You, Joey? You've been making promises?"
"Yeah, ya know, like having friends and all, doing stuff. I'm ready."
"Just like that?" said Sandra. "Ready for what, exactly?"
"I don't know. Ya know, like life. Hey, what day is it?"
"It's Thursday, Joey."
"Right. Well, like, on Saturday. Zack and Claire, let's have 'em over to dinner. And Bert."
Sandra started to smile but could not help letting a quick flinch tighten the comers of her mouth. Joey, just then discovering the comfort of small affections, put a cool hand on her knee.
"Sandra, hey, I know what you're thinking: Bert isn't gonna fit in, it's gonna be, like, awkward. But ya know what I think, Sandra? I think the more ya try to keep one part of your life over heah, and another part over theah, the more it doesn't work. I've tried it, believe me. You're embarrassed, ya try to keep things separate, they just get more bollixed up together. Ya can't go around feeling like ya all the time gotta apologize for where ya came from, who ya came from. Ya gotta, like, trust that people are gonna adjust, adopt, adapt, whatever. Ya know, like lighten up and get along."
Midway through dinner, Joey started yawning, and afterward, when he and Sandra made love, it had some of the floating bafflement and tender discontinuity of sex in dreams. He did not feel her slip out of bed to straighten up the kitchen.
But by three a.m. he was all slept out. His eyes popped open, and the moonlight filtering through the curtains was more than bright enough to guide him to the stove to put up coffee. He pulled on his bathrobe and took a cup out by the pool.
The night was just barely cool enough for the coffee to steam. Overhead, the palm fronds rustled dryly; the sound was almost like brushes on a snare drum. The closed flowers had lost their individual perfumes and gave off a generic sweetness like that of wet paper. Joey sipped from his mug and thought about the last time he'd been out by the pool at three a.m. It was only ten weeks or so ago. His prospects had been zero and a sense of failure was keeping him awake as stubbornly as a toothache. He'd had no job and he was running out of money. Sandra was getting fed up and the one person he could talk to was a resurrected mafioso who talked to his neurotic dog. He was trying to concoct a way to pull a living out of Florida, and all he could think of was baby alligators, suntan lotion, pencil sharpeners in the shape of oranges.
He shook his head and laughed softly into the night. From baby alligators and pencil sharpeners to real estate and emeralds. O.K., Joey admitted, he wasn't home free yet, not every last piece was in place. Still, at three a.m., everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, and Joey indulged in the rare pleasure of paying himself a compliment. It was an unusual compliment for Joey in that it was not bullshit, it was not bragging, it was not meant to impress anybody. He took a sip of his coffee, put his head back against the hard webbing of the lounge, and basked in the belief that, for a kid from the neighborhood, he wasn't doing too bad down here in Florida.