Baptizing the Cat

When does murder enter the heart? Who knows?

For the first time in 15 years, it dawns on me that the condo here in St. Pete, even with three bedrooms, is not as large as Grandpa Emile’s home in Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up in that rambling, multi-roomed farm house on two acres of land with only two other people, my mother and grandfather. But here, in this condo in south Florida, there are five, five bodies: Susan my wife, Nursey the maid, my daughters—April and May—and me, all crammed in together. A $500,000 condo, and not enough room to swing a cat. Not enough room to breathe. An artist needs breathing room. Susan, even right now, is taking up all the air.

I place imaginary hands around my wife’s fat neck and squeeze, but the rolls of flesh get in the way of closing off her thorax completely. It’s a fantasy I often indulge in: the resistance of tissue and finally making it through to the breakage of cartilage ridges under my fingers. But, of course, the daydream does nothing to curtail Susan’s wheezing comments.

“Phillip, you’ll never believe who I thought I saw at the pool today,” she says. “Father Clive, and with the most interesting-looking woman. Of course, I was mistaken. The man had a beard like Father Clive and a towel over his head, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I couldn’t tell at first. But she was very pleasant. A real smile. Not one of those phony, pretend things you get from the Yankees down here in St. Pete. She spoke to May, too, said, ‘Little girl, you’re going to be a great swimmer.’ Really, quite nice.”

I sit on the couch, drink my first Rob Roy of the day, and Susan sets the table. She wears a flowered muumuu, orange and yellow, one she’s slipped over her naked body after a quick shower. It’s not a becoming color for her monochromatic complexion. Her pale hair, frizzed out by sea water and wind, is a brownish-red halo around her face. Her skin is freckled and red from the sun, and her breasts hang in two longish folds from the middle of her chest toward her underarms. I close my eyes against the sight. Regretfully, I cannot close my ears. She speaks in a clotted rasp, as though she needs to blow her nose. My wife is one of the few people on earth who suffers from allergies at the beach.

But Susan’s observant—I’ll say that for her—sees things I would otherwise miss. Still, she can be fooled by a smile or a congenial wave. Of course, she was totally different when we first met, which, I imagine, is what most husbands say about most wives after 15 years of marriage. Still it’s true of Susan. She went from bold spirit, a hippie of long yellow hair and bra-less wonder, into a thick-waisted, cautious matron in what seemed like overnight. I felt her change, saw the transformation from the beginning, yet never anticipated the end product: Susan turned into her own mother, Miz Mildred—short, seventy-five pounds overweight, rim-less glasses, mousey hair permed into reddish corkscrews—the whole little-old-lady package.

The proof stands before me now, a carbon copy of my mother-in-law, setting stiff aqua place mats out for dinner on our all-purpose, Florida-condo table. Susan’s careful to protect the glass surface. That’s my wife these days, careful, watchful, dull. Next, she’ll put down the big solid-colored dinner plates, chargers, then smaller ones with a fish pattern, and then cloth napkins. I know this table-setting routine by heart. Long ago, I gave up on the argument about extra plates under plates, for no other reason except they looked better, right to Susan. “We have the china; why not use it?” was always her answer. Her mother arranges her own dinner table this way, and Susan will do no differently.

She prepares the settings while Nursey cooks our evening meal. Surely the old black woman has a real name, but I don’t remember it, that is, if I ever knew. She’s been Susan’s nanny from birth, and she’s in there now, “fixing”—that all-purpose southern word—a seafood concoction in our minuscule condo kitchen. The spicy aromas of shellfish drift in and soothe me somewhat. April, Susan’s thirteen-year-old daughter from her “wild days” and my adopted child, and six-year-old May, ours together, sit outside in the swing on the narrow patio, drying from the swimming pool in the last bit of daylight.

It’s another one of my wife’s rituals, the cocktail hour, incorporated into our lives because her parents honor that activity. The girls know to stay outdoors and be quiet as their mother sets the table, and I have my first drink, and supposedly we “talk.” Which means my wife speaks at me. She doesn’t expect answers. Under her words is the muffled screech, back and forth, of the porch glider, marking the minutes before our daughters can come inside and set me free. Metal grates on metal: screech, screech. I promise myself to oil that damn rusty mechanism tomorrow, that is, if I don’t forget, again.

My first Rob Roy, cold and sweetly tart, the best part of the day, is some consolation. I try, without being too obvious, to scan the room and locate my folded-up newspaper containing the crossword puzzle I started this morning.

“The man wasn’t too bearded, just a five-o’clock shadow as Daddy calls it. I’ll find out the number of their condo tomorrow, so we can get together. It’ll break up the week if we have another couple to spend some time with. I know you’ll like her. She’s your type, blonde, very attractive.”

There is a sticky quality to these words; it’s Susan’s way of criticizing my previous marital record without coming right out and saying what she means. I was a two time loser when we met in the artists’ colony at Taos, sort of at the tag end of the free-love and communal-living era. But Susan said those unions didn’t count, said they were not real marriages because they were not “blessed by the Catholic Church.”

I’d never had any kind of religious training, never been baptized, so I took to all the rituals and rules set down by Catholic tradition. It was different, almost comforting. The Church had an answer to every question, gave boundaries and meaning to Susan’s and my disjointed lives and pulled things together, especially for me. It was a way of starting over; confession gave me a clean slate. My conversion from nothing, the big white-dress wedding for Susan, topped off with my adoption of one-year-old April, won my place into the Bower family, and, without any plotting or planning on my part into the Bower fortune. “The Bower Bankroll,” I secretly call it, all started from an ancient grandmother’s candy recipe.

Susan prattles on: first she thought the man with the towel over his head was Father Clive, but that couldn’t be because he hadn’t been a pastor at Sacred Heart Church for years. Talk about confused. She’s sure, now, she was mistaken, but she wants to find out where the couple lives, so we can all be jolly good friends on the basis of a smile and a word to May. How like Susan, carried along with what comes along.

I finish my drink, glance up at my wife with a look I hope she mistakes for interest, and then contemplate my hairy white leg stretched out on a hassock. I’m only forty-five years old, but lately I’ve grown disgustingly flabby and old mannish. My brown runner’s legs of college days vanished completely. The blue-green of the veins branch down my ankle and into my sandled foot and match the blue-green upholstery of this condo, an aqua print of fish and drifting plants.

All the furniture in the apartment: couches, cushions, and drapes are all that same wearisome hue. It’s irksome that this entire three-bedroom condo, down to the dishes and glasses, is furnished in that peculiar shade, a sort of a powdery verdigris that apparently decorators think is a requirement for the Florida Gulf Coast. I’ve spied into several of the condos at this complex, called—what else?—Sandhills, and they’re all decked out in pretty much the same hues, aqua with a sprinkling of coral. You’d think with these people’s money, the interior designers they hire could come up with a few more original combinations, some more interesting color schemes.

But, what harm. It’s just that I’ve had too much time, months actually, to study upholstery, rattan arms and legs of furniture, metal mirror frames, and even the plates and glasses of this condo. I usually sketch and paint landscapes, but lately it’s been the interior of this all-purpose living room, and the blues and greens in my water-color case are continually running out.

To rid my eye of these disgusting hues, I concentrate on the Baccarat martini glass in my hand. The late afternoon sunlight slides through the patio door, strikes the amber of the scotch, the pink-red maraschino cherry to the side, the clear wide slope of the glass’ rim arching down to a diamond circle at the bottom. This composition of polish, sunshine, glass, and liquid would be hard to render on paper. I’m always painting pictures in my head, all of them perfect, that is if I never pick up a brush.

I finish my drink, eat the sweet fruit, twirl the stem between my fingers, and rise. In the kitchen I squeeze past Nursey who’s stirring a pan of garlicky shrimp. Her dark bulk, the fishy smell, Susan’s wheezy chatter in the next room suddenly becomes a lethal combination meant to drive me crazy. I lean my forehead on the cool door of the refrigerator. “Get a grip, man,” I whisper to the white surface. “This routine can’t go on forever.” Or maybe it can, and one day you’ll die here, like this, with an empty martini glass in your hand. Quickly, I pour myself another large pale drink from the shaker and squeeze back past Nursey.

It used to bother me that the old black woman came along on these six-month beach trips—another family tradition—from South Carolina to the St. Pete condo, especially since there are only three bedrooms and one average-sized living room and a dining room, but she is really quite unobtrusive. And it was always Nursey who got up in the middle of the night to take care of May, when she was a baby, and who now grocery shops and cooks, and watches the girls if Susan and I want to go to a movie. A built-in baby sitter.

Funny how my wife cannot see any connection between herself and the “spoiled Southern women” she so often criticizes back in Spartanburg. But a black woman living out her entire life, day and night, with a white family, even though she’s paid $300 a week from the Bower bankroll, and has Social Security, retirement, and a week’s vacation every year to visit relatives, still seems mighty close to slavery to me.

“You Yankees will never understand, Phillip,” Susan says. “Nursey was fifteen when I was born, when she first came to work for Momma and Daddy. I was her one and only baby. We’re her family and she’s ours.” Susan switch-hits on this southern and northern stuff, feels free to criticize both the South and the North in one breath.

“Ready for a freshener, darling?” I call out, even though I know Susan’s already taken her one obligatory sip, and now her glass sits forgotten on an end table. I’ve marked the spot, for later. If I’m quick enough, I can down Susan’s drink before Nursey’s kamikaze cleaning can whisk the glass away and dump the contents. If I didn’t know better I’d swear that old black woman tries to keep me from getting my full quota of alcohol in an evening.

Drink in hand and having spent my required time in “private adult conversation,” I slide the glass door open and step out onto the patio. The Florida heat closes in. Thick, bathroom air, hot and heavy, enfolds me. I force a breath. Sweat starts a teasing trickle from under my arms, down my sides, which will soon glue my shirt to my body. I take out a handkerchief and pat my forehead, ward off the drops that will fall, stinging into my eyes. Too much time inside this air-conditioned condo or in my Tampa studio hasn’t acclimated me to these steam-room conditions. I suppose Susan’s right about being outside, that it gets one used to the heat, but my method of survival these days, existing with her, Nursey, and the girls in this limited space, is to keep my distance, set up perimeters.

“Are you two warmed up enough?” I ask my daughters and immediately hate the syrupy, condescending tone I always take on when I first speak to children. It’s the same sing-songy voice Susan uses all the time, and I’ve picked it up, too. I promise myself to return to normal speech with the next question. The girls nod but don’t look in my direction. Both hold a small computer toy in their hands, rapidly punching with their thumbs and pushing in unison at the floor with their feet to keep the glider moving. The infernal grind of metal on metal, screech, screech, fractures what should be a tranquil evening sunset.

I step out onto the grass and start backing as far away as possible.

From a distance, my daughters, April and May, are adorable youngsters, both blonde and tanned from days in the sun. It’s Susan’s choice of names, something about the months they were born in—another southern thing. April’s 13-year-old nipples peek through the thin fabric of her suit, and she looks so much like Susan once did that my heart squeezes with regret. May still has the roundness of a baby about her, a fine drift of shiny down on her cheeks and arms that gleams in the slanting light.

“Why don’t you ever come to the beach with us, Daddy?” May calls out without looking up from her game or stopping the motion of her thin feet. At six, she’s the more insightful of the two girls.

“I don’t know, honey,” I answer truthfully in my now-adult voice, which I imagine they appreciate after a full day of Susan’s baby talk.

“Which beach did you go to today?” I ask, walking out as far as I can to the edge of lawn where the grass ends and the land falls away to the shore some twenty or twenty-five feet below.

May murmurs something about the pool, but I barely hear, for the couple Susan’s been yapping about are suddenly there at the water’s edge, walking toward the staircase that leads up to Sandhills: it’s Towelhead and the blonde.

She’s wearing a brown racing-style bathing suit with gold trim, and he’s in baggy, striped swim trunks and a white t-shirt. Coming up from the far end of the beach, I have plenty of time to observe the “interesting couple” of my wife’s enthusiasm. They stroll, not touching, but still close enough to inhabit each other’s circle of privacy, a linking that indicates intimacy to anyone watching. They are separate and yet totally together, and seem to my artist’s eyes united by gossamer shining threads. A few fortunate couples, new lovers especially, possess that connection even if they’re a room apart. It’s an ESP kind of thing I have, I can read people. It would have made me a good CIA agent—what I pretend to be—or spy, or something along that line, if I’d had the chance.

When Susan and I first met, I foolishly hinted, that along with being a full-time painter, that I was some kind of CIA “operative.” How in the hell I came up with that word, I’ll never know. Over our first weeks together, the story grew like a balloon filling with helium, mainly because it made such an impression on this new girlfriend. Susan’s slightly bulging blue eyes opened wider whenever I mentioned my Ranger training and my not-to-be-talked-about CIA connections. In the service of my country, I could be vague, secretive about the particulars. The truth, which I sometimes don’t even remember, is that I went through basic training at Fort Benning and started Ranger school but broke my ankle the first day my outfit practiced parachute jumping. I still can’t believe I landed wrong on the second leap, in spite of years of running track in high school and safely clearing hurdles.

Still, the CIA story comes in handy, more so as the years pass. It gives me leeway. I can walk out of the house in Spartanburg or the condo here in Tampa anytime, morning, noon, or night, and not have to come up with a detailed explanation. I can say, “Have to check in” and be gone for an hour or an evening; it doesn’t matter. Now, I have a vibrating beeper and supposedly it jiggles my leg and no one can tell. I pretend I’ve been summoned and simply leave, sometimes just to walk out onto the beach in the dark, to look back at the lighted rooms of the condo, to see Susan and the girls’ shadows moving against the blinds. It’s a strange game, but I need it.

And right now, I yearn more than ever to be Super Spy, to have a zoom camera with a long-range lens so I can focus on the faces of those two people down there on the beach. I want close-ups: eyelashes and freckles, the view that camera men take of ball players on the mound and of their sweethearts in the stands, registering every blink, every swallow. I want to examine this couple’s expressions, hear what they say. What do they find in each other that is so wonderfully engrossing? Particularly I want to see the woman’s face.

Do today’s private investigators have devices that relay voices from a distance? Maybe. Saw something in a movie once: a detective sits in a car, points a gadget towards an upstairs window, and he can hear every word said inside and snap a picture when the quarry comes out. It was amazing.

But all I can do now from this distance is interpret gestures, the inward tilt of bodies and heads, one covered by a towel, the other possessing an abundance of unruly sandy-blonde hair. They stop walking. She listens intently, judging by her posture. His hands move as though to explain something of great fascination. He reaches out, yet constrains himself, not touching. At one point, the man—I’ve dubbed him Towelhead—slides his long, loose fingers down through the air, inches from the woman’s breasts. She steps a fraction closer. I imagine her perfume, that is if she wears any or, if that artificial scent has been washed away by the ocean air, her own natural female aroma. I imagine it to be a subtle combination of skin and hair, overlaid with the iodine taste of the sea, an essence like the first sweet sip of a margarita and the gritty aftertaste of rock salt lining the edge of the glass.

Their preoccupation with one another—they are walking again—their steps in sync, is a dance they’ve choreographed as they walk, and the depth of their concentration can be seen even from the distance and height of this cliff. Are they in that first stage of affection or perhaps already in love?

Suddenly, an invisible projectile, too sharp and painful to believe or identify at first, flies upward from their bodies toward me. I see the barb coming but cannot move out of the way. It’s the poison-tipped dart of envy––spiny and piercing––and it finds its mark in my gut with an intensity that is physical. I have never looked at or had a woman look back at me with such complete absorption. The sensation of loss is tangible, and it is all I can do to keep from bringing my palm to my midsection in that ancient, melodramatic gesture. I feel an involuntary “Uh” somewhere deep as if I’ve been hit, and I find myself mouthing Susan’s words for consolation and explanation: “Yes, they are attractive and interesting.” And I add, with the sourness of indigestion, as if I’ve known those two people all my life, “And welcome to each other.”

In a fog of half anger, I turn back to find that my daughters have gone inside, and Susan stands with her dimpled arms folded under her breasts, her inflated blue eyes wide, accusing. She bleats, sarcastic, and not for the first time, I’m sure, “Do come in for supper, Phillip.”

In the mornings I usually stay in bed with the door closed, read newspapers, do the crossword, and watch television until everyone but Nursey has left for the beach or the pool. Then I rise, have a bagel and coffee, and sketch. Nursey cleans, washes clothes, but I’m used to her quiet bustling. At lunch time, to avoid the noon sun, the girls and Susan return to the condo, and my wife takes a stab at home-schooling. I escape to my studio in Tampa, to paint, to collect the mail, and while away the hottest hours, checking on ocean and sand conditions farther up the coast road. In the last few months, the water in front of Sandhills has become frothy with brown scum, and huge slabs of peat or something like that are exposed in the embankments cut by the waves. The condo manager says the city officials are debating whether or not to leave the ugly things where they are, depending upon what purpose they serve, like keeping down erosion.

I grumble, “Only makes the water filthier than it already is.”

This current manager, a leathery refugee from some unnamed country and whose accent I cannot place, is a hireling of the condo association. He spends his days fielding much noisier complaints than mine, so he pretends not to hear. In the evenings, over dinner, I report back to Susan the best spot along the coast for her and the girls to go swimming the next day.

But today, as soon as the condo’s door closes on Susan and the girls’ noisy departure for the beach, I rise, dress, grab a cup of coffee from the counter, and leave. “Going to take pictures,” I half explain to Nursey’s uninterested, bowed head. Her plaits, a complicated weave, run from a center part into a pattern of greased coils. She doesn’t look up from the newspaper.

I sometimes take candid shots of dunes and sea gulls, catamarans on the water’s edge, waves, and sail boats. Watercolors of these prosaic scenes sell well down here in St. Pete. People can’t seem to get enough of what they could see just by looking out their windows. In the reverse, pictures of pines and lakes retail equally well back in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I used to think just the opposite, but it’s not so. I admit I’m no great shakes as a sketcher or watercolorist. I’m adequate, nothing more, nothing less. At my best, a two or three-hour afternoon of painting is all I can muster. And in the last year or so, the wild enthusiasm I once felt for a blank sheet of cold-pressed watercolor paper has ebbed to an all-time low. Now, it’s an ordeal to face the easel in the store-front studio I’ve set up in a strip mall in Tampa, and I’ve wasted the last two months in the condo painting odd light patterns on furniture.

Still, I’m haunted by the little drama on the beach with Towelhead and, who is she? his wife? his girlfriend?—does a wife ever hold such fascination? This vision has convinced me to upgrade my Cannon 200 to a Leica with a telephoto lens. I can take clearer slides for paintings, and better yet I’m planning to have the new camera fitted with the long-distance listening device that I imagined. Surely, my buddy, good ole Harry at the pawn shop can get me one. He’ll know right where to go.

Harry Rigger’s Pawn & Gun Shop sits two blocks down from my Tampa studio, and he assures me that a Leica is a better camera all the way around and that such a listening device comes in a variety of models for every need.

He’s a pudgy, bowling-pin-shaped man with a smooth bullet-round head to match, and no matter how early or late I drive over from St. Pete, there he is, anchored behind his show cases of guns and jewelry. I like this character. His single mindedness and plain mercenary view of the world appeals to me. With Harry there’s no homey facade about good will toward the customer. I feel he likes me for the same reason. We share a common thread, an appreciation of cause and effect. I always spend more than I intend and yet come away from his crammed counters and shelves feeling as though I’ve struck a good bargain. Just recently I purchased a rare over-and-under shotgun with silver scrolling on the stock for only $1,750.

“Harry,” I say, “I’m looking for a good camera and a long-distance bug. You know what I mean. I saw one on TV, I think.”

Harry bubbles, rubs his grimy, conical hands together in financial delight. “Sure do, Mr. Craine, a great ‘catch-um-with-their-pants-down’ surveillance miracle. Wolf Ears, a parabolic microphone. You can buy them almost anywhere now. Maybe I can scare one up for you.”

Whether this means Harry will contact other pawn brokers in the area or that he will utilize more nefarious ways, I don’t ask. Harry has made it clear in the past that he has “contacts.” It was vague back then, whether he had drugs or guns in mind. But now, I intimate that I know what he means, that I have contacts, too. We both smile knowingly and then are silent, giving the macho bullshit a rest. My goal is to own this “pants-down” mechanism, as Harry has so aptly described it. I can already imagine the slick black case it will come in, the protective foam padding inside, the pamphlet explaining its many uses, and the crystal clear sound of whispering voices in the dark. The blonde’s voice coming in through ear phones.

Buoyed by this vision of my new toy, I leave Harry’s at noon and take up the other part of my daily schedule, which is a couple of beers and lunch at a little Tampa bistro three or four streets down. The place, called Bayside—can you believe the originality of these people?—is full of seashore kitsch. Lobster traps and fishing gear hang from the ceiling, while a bunch of grizzled retirees lean on an acrylic bar embedded with shells, sand dollars, and starfish. Bayside’s two redeeming features are a remarkable fish sandwich, a thick slab of fried sea-perch, and mugs so cold the beer forms a cloud of frost in the middle. The old guys at the bar and I exchange “Hello” and “How’s it going?” but I neither prolong the greetings nor encourage them. I sit in my customary place in a booth by the window. To show the old codgers that I’ve more important things to do, I keep a notebook open by my plate, sketch ideas for paintings, and make it clear that I’m not open for chit-chat.

After lunch, I head toward the finale of my daily agenda, a stop at a diminutive shop, part gallery, part art supplies, called The Paint Box, another name that also irks my need for originality. Belle, the owner, a fleshy, weathered redhead in her early fifties and I have a mild flirtation going, so I can excuse the title of her establishment. I sometimes think she really likes me and I could turn the full-body embrace she greets me with into an on-the-side fling. Either because of nerves or laziness, I haven’t followed through, haven’t made that quick grab that would erase or draw a line between us. I’ve been faithful to Susan, to our vows in the Catholic Church for 15 years—a record of sorts, I guess, for any man. Hard to remember, now, why I wanted such fidelity, a “till death us do part” arrangement. Plus if Belle took an advance the wrong way . . . well, where would I go for art supplies, and who would display my one or two better paintings and talk them up into sales each month?

I open the shop door and Belle, from her customary spot at the display window, where she can see everything going on in the street, waves me in. Though not fat, the woman is abundant, from her dense purple red hair to full rounded hips. She wears long colorful skirts or white pants cinched in at the waist with silver or gold metal belts, a hippie chic that appeals to me. The low necklines of her gathered blouses fall into folds over her substantial breasts. Still, I can’t quite imagine her naked. Is she one of those females whose tits drop to their waists when they take off their brassieres? The straps and snaps that show through the back of her blouse don’t look too supportive, so I’m encouraged. And she’s so amiable, always right there to greet me as soon as I walk into her shop. Sometimes I feel she must be watching my studio—diagonally across the way—to be so Johnny-on-the-spot every time I visit. But since I have entrances at both front and back, she couldn’t be that intuitive.

After our semi-lascivious hello hug, she motions me to sit on one of the stools in front of her high counter. I ease up onto the flimsy piece of furniture and think how a small arts gallery like this is not a bad way for a woman her age to pass the time. It’s certainly something Susan could handle if I were not around, especially since she wouldn’t need the income. Yet I suspect earnings are important to Belle. Maybe her sweetie pie manner is nothing more than smart salesmanship.

“Phil, honey, it’s been a week since I’ve seen you,” Belle says in a slightly petulant but teasing tone.

She rests the tips of her fingers on the crook of my bare forearm. Her hands are large for a woman, and the nails polished a bright pink and filed into points. Her caresses would scratch. Little needles of electricity fan up into my shoulder. It’s an almost come-on. She knows it; I know it. Her wide white face on its strong neck is within inches of mine. Her complexion is pearl-like with make-up, and her hennaed hair spirals in damp-looking ringlets from under a tortoise-shell clasp placed squarely above her forehead. I think about painting her with a sinister shine, as though she has a secret she will hint at but never tell. The scent of citrus and sandalwood wafts toward me in waves. I breathe deeply.

“You ever been married, Belle?” I ask, for no better reason than it’s something to say, to pass over the moment, to pretend my arm isn’t tingling. After all, it’s a standard question, isn’t it? A preliminary to a closer friendship or something more?

“Sure,” Belle replies, “hasn’t everybody been spliced at one time or another?” Before I can answer, she slides off the stool. “Want coffee?” she asks, and then brushes past me to get the hot drink we always share during these visits. In spite of her size, there’s the springiness of youth in her movements, and the word “splice” makes me feel loose around the edges.

I nod yes both to the notion that everyone’s been married at least once and to the drink. Coffee wouldn’t be my first choice, but since I had three beers with lunch, I figure I can hold out until Susan’s cocktail hour. No need to tell Belle that I would prefer a good single-malt scotch or that Susan is my third wife, although thoughts of those previous two marriages are distant, nebulous memories pierced by great drunken holes.

Does a six-month alliance, right out of high school really count? I’ve asked myself, too often. My single clear recollection of Emily, my first wife, is high school graduation night on the dock of her parents’ lake house. Completely naked, she stretched out on a webbed chaise lounge, her arms above her head. In the flood of moonlight, she was an Incan virgin ready for sacrifice, the dark vee between her legs the center of mystery, the center of the world.

Jenny, wife number two, was an airline attendant for Delta. After Fort Benning and my wash-out at Ranger training, I went back to school—still Ohio State—and in a beginner’s art class found I had some facility, a flash now and then, an intuition, a linking between hand and eye that worked. The professor was complimentary, probably too much so, considering the job market for art graduates, but at the time I needed to be told I was good at something, that I had “talent.” For tuition and living money, I bartended, sold a little pot on the side, anything to get by. On a few low-key weed runs from Ohio to El Paso, Texas, and back, Jenny was a diversion, or so I thought, only to wake up married in Las Vegas. No memory of a ceremony but there was the license on the night stand and a thin gold ring on her finger. That marriage lasted three years, though I wouldn’t call it a union, just a series of couplings since our meetings on her days off were spent in motels or friends’ apartments. That final year we hardly saw each other, mostly we talked on the phone. I grew to like her as a sounding board, a disembodied, non-judgmental voice on the other end of the line. Eventually she found another airline passenger, someone more accessible and surely with more money.

The sound of running water brings me back to the present, back to Belle, half hidden by a drapery of stringed spangles, moving around in the small kitchen. I smell fresh coffee and swivel on the stool to look out through the large plate-glass window toward the other stores across the street, a plaza arrangement around a tiled fountain. Directly in front of Belle’s Paint Box is an alteration shop, Violet’s, its front painted a pale lilac; and beyond that, a clothing boutique, Second Chance, painted a Chinese red, and in between, my studio, painted white—the one good acquisition I bought with the Bower bankroll. In contrast to those two bright shops, my place has an unnamed, sealed-up appearance, the chalky horizontal blinds closed, the Windsor-blue door shut tight. I squint my eyes, turn the outside scene into a color montage of squares and rectangles. This odd combination of pigments and shapes and even the signs themselves might be the makings of a good abstract. But who would buy it?

I turn back to Belle’s familiar white-gray walls, which are hung with prints and originals—three of them mine. Whatnots and well-crafted statuary rest on tables and pedestals, and two curved gray-leather love seats face each other on a black and red Bokhara carpet, a slate coffee table in between. The Paint Box is done in what decorators, I’m sure, would call good taste: gray walls, taupe furnishings, and points of dark color, reds and blacks in the carpet and pillows, to offset the monotones. The paintings on the walls are seascapes, sand dunes, oceans, sunsets. In its own way the trappings of this store irritate me as much as the blue-greens back at the condo. Everything is so calculated, so expensive, exactly what one would expect from a high-class art shop in a beach-side city.

Before I can further analyze why I’m so critical of the decor, Belle returns, balancing an artsy tray of mugs, cream pitcher, and sugar bowl, which she sets down on the counter between us. She pushes a stoneware cup toward me with a napkin under it.

“What’s got you so interested in my marital status, sweety? So all of a sudden?” she asks, and lifts her drawn-on ginger eyebrows, creating two new lines, wrinkles, above them.

“You know I’m married,” I say, and immediately feel asinine, for the thick platinum band, set with one round ruby and two diamond baguettes on either side, is prominent on my left hand.

“Sure,” Belle says. “Never met anybody in Tampa who wasn’t married, tied down, or so old and unhealthy that no one will touch them. Of course, you’re married, angel. Good-looking, tall guy like you.”

I feel an unpleasant constriction in my brain, a grainy annoyance that comes from some internal repugnance. What she says is so predictable, just like this room. She’s flirting; what she thinks I expect. I mix cream in my coffee, try to keep my expression unreadable—my CIA face. Is this what she thinks I want: compliments, a lead-in to my saying something equally pleasant in return? I take a swallow of the hot liquid and turn my kisser, composed again, I hope, in a disguise of interest.

“So you’re married?” I say, repeating her word.

Belle chuckles, “Well, not right now, no, but . . . .” She rounds her shoulders in a shrug, which tightens her blouse over her breasts. “I might take the plunge again if the right guy comes along.”

I hallucinate my hand inside her bra, cupping the large brown-pink nipple, the prickling of flesh under my fingers.

“You’re divorced?” I ask and silently answer, of course, what else? And then I regrettably project the inevitable conversations between us, an exchanges of notes on which spouse was to blame, who said what to whom.

Belle shakes her head, no, says, “No, widowed––twice.”

Surprise! Somehow I’d imagined this middle-aged dame to be a two or three-time loser like myself. Why else the big friendly to a married man unless she’s unhappy, disgruntled? Does she see me as a future husband? Hardly. Belle knows my whole set up, knew the Bower family, sold art stuff to Ed and Miz Mildred long before I came on the scene.

“Widowed? Twice?” I repeat, and can’t keep amazement out of my voice.

And here is where that odd bit of ESP I have comes into focus. Belle nods her head once and so slightly that I’m not sure if she’s responding “yes” or nothing. It’s instinct, but I know Belle doesn’t want to talk about her lost husbands. After all, they’re dead aren’t they? Yet, I want to ask, How? But across from me, I can tell Belle’s holding herself implacably still until some strong memory passes.

Her lack of emotion reminds me of my own mother’s weird way of lying, especially to my Grandfather, by giving a reply so soft it couldn’t be heard or by complete silence. “Is that a new dress, Lizabeth?” he’d ask. My mother would stand completely silent at the stove, stirring one of her arthritis concoctions, the stench of menthol and whatever weed some other old lady had recommended flooding the kitchen. Or she’d mumble a monosyllabic, unintelligible reply.

“Is it new, I’m asking?” Grandpa Emile would growl again. He’d be in his habitual place, a straight chair beside the plank table, the ladder back against the un-plastered wall. Another murmur from my mother, as faint as breath. He would ask his question again and again, rephrase it in different ways, and each time receive less of an answer. Eventually he would give up, cave in to her silence.

Belle drinks from her mug, some Indian design in the clay, her fingers obscuring most of it. Her eyes are downcast, concentrating on the tan surface of the coffee as though she can see past events, tragedies there. I wait for her to look up, to confirm that she was widowed twice in some ordinary way: two husbands whose fates were heart attacks or car accidents would be explanation enough. An old joke comes back to me. “You lost two husbands?” I want to say. “How careless of you.” But all I can see in her large face is the exterior, the mask of make-up. Dark eyeliner and mascaraed lashes—thick as the kohl Arab women wear—around her lowered eyes. The heavy blue shadow cakes the lids up to the drawn-on eyebrows; the pink-red rouge starts at the nostrils, darkens as it rolls up her cheeks and fans into her hairline. Her lip liner is an odd mauve color, not matching the rest of her lipstick shade, and it extends beyond the natural contours, in an effort I suppose, to make her lips appear larger. Who in the hell tells women to wear this ugly camouflage?

Still keeping her made-up eyes averted, Belle takes her coffee mug, slides off the stool, and stands apart from me to gaze up at her own walls as if she’s never seen them before. She indicates one of my pictures and lies, “I think I have that water and boat scene sold.” Her wide back turns. She points, arm extended, a person in a play. “ . . .to Mrs. Martin . . . that old lady who lives over in St. Pete, right near Island’s End.”

“Great,” I say, play-acting my part in the charade. “Give her an extra fifty bucks off if you think you can move it.”

“Well, it’s slow right now, but it’ll pick up in November.”

Belle is completely distracted, her mind so far away that she slurs her words.

Then, as improbable as it seems, a red mist swirls up, a barely perceptible, incredibly thin bloody vapor hangs in the air between us. It’s my artist’s imagination, I’m sure, but still an instinct tells me she’s done something wrong where her husbands are concerned, something associated with blood, and the image in her mind has taken a plasmic form between us. I hold my breath, not wanting to pull into my lungs the pinkish veil that hangs, a drapery between us, smelling faintly of copper.

The whole business jangles my nerves. Whatever she’s done, I don’t want to know. “Well, I really should head out,” I say to Belle’s profile. I stand to leave, to move away from this woman. But my words—like a chain on a dog who’s run out too far—bring her back with a jolt.

“No way!” She turns, waves her hand in protest; her many silver bracelets tinkle, and her smile returns. Back is the old crowd-pleaser, the agreeable, loveable Belle. “I made a whole pot of coffee for you, sir, and you have to drink another cup.”