and more urgent. To a kid brother, a bastard no less, this was not news.
'Siddown,' said Zack, motioning Joey into a slatted wooden chair next to his desk. Zack himself plopped down into his rolling, swiveling seat, rocked once so that the tilting back gave a homey squeak, then came forward and put his chin on his interlaced fingers. 'Joey,' he began, 'some jobs, ya know, you do with your brain, right? Other jobs you do with your hands, or your back, or just by getting yourself into a certain land of mood. Those jobs call for parts of you. You see what I'm saying, Joey?
Joey crossed his knees and hugged the top one. He didn't know exactly how to answer. Getting fired, he imagined, had its protocols and customs just like other parts of having a job, and Joey had never been fired before.
'What I'm saying,' Zack resumed, 'is that this is a job you do with your whole person, every part of yourself. Sizing people up, that's brainwork, right? But standing out there on the hot sidewalk for eight hours a day, that's hard physical labor, no shit. As to how you actually approach people, that has a lot to do with the mood you're in, right? Whether you use humor, push the freebies, go for sympathy, whatever. And how the people respond to you, well, that's beyond mood, that's a mystery, like religious almost. Are you in the zone? In a state of grace? At one? Ya know, there's all different ways of describing that frame of mind where everything just falls right and people can't resist you. You know what I'm saying?'
Joey thought he did, but he found himself increasingly impatient with Zack's analyses of effectiveness in sales and life. When Joey still had his job, he'd thirsted after Zack's advice, thought about it long and hard. But now it no longer seemed worth the effort. 'You're saying I've been all fucked up lately, and you're right.'
Zack waved the comment away. It was far too negative for him. 'No, Joey, no. That's not what I'm saying.' He flipped open a manila folder and removed a piece of paper. On it was a week-by-week graph of Joey's performance on the job. The graph went up, up, up, hit a plateau, then came down, down, down, tracing out a pattern not unlike the pyramidal slope of Mount Trashmore.
'Joey, look at this. The first week you were here, you made a hundred twenty dollars. That's not much money for forty hours of busting your butt and having people turn you down all day, but hey, you hung in, you stayed with it. Second week, you doubled. Third week, you jumped to four eighty. Fourth week, four eighty again. Now that's pretty damn good, Joey. For a guy still learning the ropes, that's excellent. But what happens after that? Three twenty. Two eighty. Two hundred even. Joey, these aren't just numbers. These are like a map of what's going on with you. You wanna talk to me, Joey?'
Joey looked out the window, glanced at the Parrot Beach model under its perfect sky of Plexiglas. The graph depressed him. He was no stranger to lack of success, but this was different, this was active failure, failure clearly drawn and pushed in his face, and Joey didn't like it at all. Nor did he enjoy the bitterness that came with losing something he was just barely ready to admit he cared about losing. 'Zack, if you're gonna fire me, can't we just please get it over with.'
Zack Davidson sat back and ran a hand through his sandy hair; it fell back exactly where it had been. 'Who said anything about firing you?'
Joey tried to say something but all that came out was a kind of blubbing sound, a sound from underwater.
The other man spread his arms out wide and hugged the edges of his desk. 'Joey, this isn't about firing you. This is about getting you back on the street so you can make some fucking money. Listen to me, Joey. There's some things you oughta know, and apparently you don't. You're very well thought of here. People like you. They like how hard you try, that you don't make excuses. They like that you don't bitch and moan, that you're not a prima donna. They like it that the people you send, they're almost always in a good mood. They don't feel like they've been jerked around. They feel like they've been dealing with a human being. You've got this warmth, Joey, this… I don't know what to call it. Life, call it life. People deal with you, they feel like they're dealing with someone with some blood in his veins and some thoughts in his head, some curiosity. That works for you. So let it work.'
To someone unaccustomed to receiving compliments, Zack's words were as intoxicating and unsettling as empty-stomach cocktails. Joey squirmed, as he generally did when wrestling with the question of thankfulness. He knew he should be grateful to Zack for saying what he'd said, but gratitude was a risky matter. As soon as you acknowledged that someone had done something for you, you opened up the chance that you'd look to them again and they could let you down. If they weren't family, if they weren't neighborhood, what assurance did you have? 'Zack,' he admitted, 'I don't know what to say.'
'Don't say anything. But Joey, listen, I don't wanna pry, but it's real obvious that some strange shit is going on. Guys like outta the movies climb out of a Lincoln and rough you up on the sidewalk. Your brother comes to town and your commissions take a nosedive. Now this woman I know, she works at Flagler House, tells me there's some weird guy who hasn't been out of his room all week, there's two Lincolns camped in front of the hotel, and for some strange reason the cops won't go near them. Joey, is it me, or does all of this look a little strange?'
Joey fiddled with a sneaker lace to stall for time. Why was everyone always asking him to spill his guts? Then again, what a giddy pleasure it might be if he could spill them. He'd laid it all out for Sandra, a woman. Why not tell it all to Zack, this curious outsider who for some odd reason seemed to want to be his friend? Why not tell everyone and have it the hell over with? Unloading his secrets-what a notion. It was dizzying. It was impossible. 'Yeah, Zack,' he said, 'it looks strange. In fact, it is strange. But it's got nothin' to do with the job.'
Joey volunteered nothing further, and Zack put up his hands in surrender. 'O.K., Joey, if ya can't talk about it, ya can't talk about it. But listen, if there's some way I can help, I'm here.'
Joey hesitated. He hesitated for so long that Zack began to fidget, putting paper clips on things, squaring the edges of stacked stationery. Hot shafts of sun streamed in the office window and glinted off the Plexiglas model. Joey was oblivious. He was wading through thoughts as through limestone muck, and while his preoccupations were the same as they had been for weeks, he was suddenly taking a very different course through the morass. He had two lives, Joey did, and until this moment he'd been trying his damnedest to keep them separate, to preserve the new from contamination by the old. Now he realized that the collision had already taken place-in fact, there had never been a time when the two lives weren't one. So he found a new idea: If the new life couldn't be quarantined from the old, maybe the old life could be solved, settled, and laid to rest by the resources of the new. When Joey finally spoke, his words seemed to Zack a bizarre departure from what they had been talking about. To Joey, however, the question was a perfectly logical and even inevitable conclusion to a rigorous line of reasoning.
'Hey Zack,' he said, 'you got a boat?'
— 28 -
Along about the first of April, the weather changes in Key West. The daytime temperature jumps one day from eighty-two to eighty-five, and there it stays for six weeks or so, until a similar increment signals the setting in of summer. The evenings suddenly no longer call for sweaters; the light cotton quilts are kicked down to the feet of beds, and even top sheets are likely to be bunched around waists but pulled no higher. The east wind, which had been rock-steady at twelve to fourteen knots all winter, becomes fitful, moves toward the south, loads up with salt, and blows moist enough to make cars wet. These changes, by the standards of the temperate zone, are so subtle as to seem insignificant. In the subtropics, however, people grow spoiled; the range of perfect comfort shrinks for them as it does, say, for the very rich, whose standards of acceptable luxury become so crazily refined that they can hardly ever be satisfied. So, while eighty-two degrees with a twelve-knot wind seems sublime, eighty-five with an eight-knot wind seems sultry, and people alter their routines accordingly.
At the compound, Peter and Claude put aside their silk sarongs and seldom wore anything more confining than the lightest of seersucker robes. Wendy and Marsha decided that the hot tub was too hot, and were more likely to stand chest-deep in the pool while discussing modern sculpture and rubbing the stress out of each other's shoulders. Luke and Lucy spent a lot of time in their outdoor shower and never quite looked dry. And Steve the naked landlord, to fend off dehydration, carried four beers rather than three to the pool with him at ten a.m.
'Whatcha reading, Steve?' Joey asked him as he went to hand over Sandra's check for the April rent.
Steve turned the damp paperback over and looked at the green flying saucer on the cover. 'Aliens,' he said. 'Germ warfare from space.' Then he smiled.
As for Sandra, she had finally broken down and done some shopping, finally put aside her fuzzy cardigans and
