“Hush now and listen. Tristan becomes a knight at the Round Table and has a passionate affair with Iseult, who now is married to the king.”
“Sounds like us. Are you making this up?”
“No, when I wasn’t banging heads on the practice field, I took Mythology 101 in college. One day Tristan is wounded by a poison spear. Iseult has great healing powers, so he sends for her. He desperately tries to hang on, and she sets sail to reach him. But he is falsely told that she is not aboard the ship, and, alas, he gives up hope and dies before she reaches him.”
“Alas?”
“On finding his body, she kisses him and dies of grief, falling beside her lover.”
“Is there a moral to this story, Jake?”
“Sure. Tristan was a true romantic. He yearned for this woman he could not have, except for stolen kisses in brief, secret moments. He lived a life of loneliness without her. No other woman ever measured up to his idealized view of his love goddess. Eventually, the notion that she would not come to his side killed him.”
“I get it,” Gina said. “You don’t want to be like Tristan, right?”
“Yeah, and I’d also like to avoid poison spears.”
“But you do live a lonely life, Jake. You reject other women because you’re waiting for me. You’re living like Tristan, but you don’t have to. You could have me, but you’re afraid to ask.”
It had gotten dark outside the windows. The neighborhood mockingbird began troo-loop, troo-looping. The fan still made its endless droning circles. “Okay, I’ve spent half my life waiting for you to come back and the other half afraid that you would.”
She smiled down at me. “How big are your closets, anyway?”
“Closets?”
“For my clothes, silly. You wouldn’t believe how much room I need. I’d get rid of most of the gowns, the opening-night outfits. I’d never get you to take me to the opera, anyway, though it might do you some good. I can keep the furs and ski stuff in storage. I’d have to, since it’s always so sticky in here. You’re going to have to get air-conditioning sooner or later. No more of that stuff about how coral-rock walls keep out the heat, and…”
Some long-forgotten lyrics about letting a woman in your life popped into my head, something about her redecorating your home from the cellar to the dome.
“…Jake, maybe it’s time to think about moving. There’s a new high rise on Waterway Drive where each apartment has its own elevator.”
Did she say high riser
“A condor You want me to go to meetings where they decide how many pounds your poodle can weigh and what time you have to turn off the stereo?”
“It’s time you became domesticated.”
“Like you?”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Does Joe Paterno know football?”
“Why do you get like this just when we’re getting close?”
“Because if I don’t, I’ll end up getting stung. Sooner or later, you’ll leave. And if you didn’t, I would. We’re like those little magnetic chips the kids use in science experiments. Once the chips get too close, they peel off in different directions.”
She rolled out of bed and stood up. “What is it you lawyers say in court? ‘Let the record reflect..
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Well, let the record reflect I offered to stay, to come to you, to be with you, now and forever. Let-”
“Forever? Gina, with you, forever lasts as long as this season’s hemlines.”
“See, Jake? You can’t take it. You always thought you wanted me, but I knew that once I was available, you’d run. I’m going to tell you anyway. Let the record reflect that I love you. I always have. And maybe you think it sounds like a soap opera, but that’s the way it is. It’s always been you, Jake.”
She dressed hurriedly, heading down the stairs carrying her sneakers. “So long, Jake,” she called back, over her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you later. And maybe I won’t.”
Chapter 18
During the night, the wind picked up. Swirling gusts from the northwest, humming and whistling and trilling a wintertime song. The trees moaned in protest. Twigs snapped and were pulled away from their mothers. Lids of garbage cans rolled down Kumquat Street. Green coconuts thumped to the ground and careened like bowling balls against picket fences. In my neighbor’s yard, a gate with a broken latch blew open and banged shut.
Our second cold front of the season. Arctic air moving down from Canada, a deep freeze in the Midwest. This was the mother of all cold fronts as far as Florida was concerned, dipping far south, freezing the citrus groves hard, bringing snow flurries to Orlando, and giving us a nighttime frost as far south as Key Largo.
By morning, the wind was due north and holding strong, not even suggesting that it would begin clocking toward the east and warmer air. The sky was a brittle blue and cloudless, and Miamians were agog with the novelty of it all. The graphics guys at the Miami Journal had icicles dripping from the masthead. The weather gal on the morning TV show gave frostbite advice, and a crop specialist fretted about the winter tomato and strawberry crop.
In my Coconut Grove neighborhood of small, older houses, a different smell was in the air. The fragrance of hibiscus was replaced by the smoke from fireplaces. Inside, my old coral-rock house was warm and comfy; only a layer of frost on the windows revealed just how cold it was. I dug out my wool suit, the conservative gray herringbone, and polished my black wing tips. I chose a white shirt and a gray tie with a rose-colored pattern.
I made a breakfast of shredded wheat with slices of yellow star fruit, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a cup of coffee, black. I skimmed the headlines in the Journal — more Rolex robbers mugging drivers at gas stations for their watches, the head of Planned Parenthood quitting because she became unexpectedly pregnant-then grabbed my bag and took off.
The upholstery in my antiquated chariot was cold and stiff, cracking when I sat down. The engine coughed and hacked and sputtered and said to hell with it a couple of times until I coaxed her into life. I let the old gal warm up, whispering sweet nothings about a new wax job while the defroster blew noxious air at the windshield. The clutch rebelled when I put her in gear and tried to bounce my left knee into my jaw.
With the frost melting and the engine backing off, I took my usual shortcut through the south Grove, from Poinciana up Douglas, passing Royal Palm, Palmetto, Avocado, and Loquat, hanging a right on Thomas by the old Negro Cemetery, then scooting over to Hibiscus, and north a block to Grand. Morning rush hour was building with rich white folks from Old Cutler Drive, Cocoplum, and Gables Estates cutting through the black Grove to get downtown, so I swung left on Matilda, and then right on Oak, which becomes Tigertail, and takes me right to the entrance of I-95 just north of Seventeenth Avenue. Of course, I could have headed north on U.S. I to get to the same place, but I never take the straight path when a serpentine route will get me there thirty seconds faster. Besides, I was running late, and Abe Socolow hates to be kept waiting.
There are three courthouses in Miami, to the utter confusion of citizens called to jury duty. Our town is the venue of choice for international drug dealers, as well as a convenient place to bring to trial various savings-and- loan scoundrels and notorious presidents of banana republics. This prompted the federal government to add a bunch of judges and build a new courthouse connected to the FDR-era post office that housed the old one. Sometimes, prospective jurors summoned to hear fender benders in state court inexplicably end up there. Baffled, they watch busloads of shackled Latino cocaine cowboys hustled into the building for their arraignments, the good citizens wondering if they’ve been transported to some Central American principality.
For big trials, the feds still use the old Central Courtroom, a spacious two-story affair with coffered ceilings, dark wainscoting, red velvet draperies, and a hand-carved witness box. On the wall, dating from the early forties, is a twenty-six-foot-long pastel mural depicting our state’s past. Indians, fishermen, farm laborers, beauty queens,
