“One more?” came a woman’s voice, and he looked up. The bartenders had changed. Dark eyes, long black hair, a pea-size mole high on her right cheek. Her gaze was impatient and closed, not even a suggestion of helpful or nice or sympathetic, nothing to generate a tip.
Joe nodded, and he watched her, watched her ass, as she made the drink. He felt that at-attention kick of interest—his own, certainly not hers. The drink landed on a napkin, her back turned again before he could even mumble thank you. Charming? Maybe once. That had been a long time ago, too.
* * *
Luna got to work late and shook out her hair. Rodrigo the restaurant manager was always telling her to wear it up, but she liked it long, liked to feel the swing against her back. Dima was out there already, pouring for a man who seemed gray and sad, hunched over on the stool, not looking at anything. Luna tied her apron, squinted into the small mirror she kept in her purse, and rubbed a mascara smudge away from her lash line.
Dima passed her on the way to the kitchen. “More limes,” he said.
The man drank fast, three swallows, maybe four. The ice rattled.
“One more?” Luna asked, and he raised his head. His face was puffy, pink around the edges, the eyes a clear blue. Their brightness took her by surprise. He didn’t strike her as a drunk, not a true drunk, but he looked tired and habitually sad, or perhaps ill. A depleting illness, Luna thought. Or a poisoned diet. She’d been reading recently about pesticides, BPA, the casual infiltration of chemicals into organs and muscle.
The man nodded, and Luna turned to make him the drink. He was eyeing her up and down, she could see him reflected in the mirror behind the bar. Luna knew men looked at her like that, they always had.
Luna deposited the drink and turned away to cut the limes that Dima had delivered. By midshift they were always running out of limes.
“Um, miss?” the man said. “You dropped something.”
She turned and faced him. “What? Where?”
“There. It looks like a flower.”
It was. It was a sprig of blooming thyme she’d cut from her herb box. She’d dropped it into her purse because she liked the smell and because it gave her comfort to carry something she had cared for and grown, though it had become mashed and bent in the jumble of her bag.
“Oh. Thank you,” she said, and she picked up the thyme and put it back into her purse.
“Was it a flower?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Luna admitted. She felt embarrassed, as though she’d been revealed to this man in some small but complete way. She faltered. She smiled.
* * *
On their first date, Joe took Luna to a restaurant on the top of a tall building made of pale green glass. Everything in the place shone and flickered. Over their artful, tiny meals, Luna asked Joe about his work.
“It’s nothing. Boring. Selling stuff. Gathering information. It’s a job.” Joe shrugged and ate a forkful of steak. He’d been lying about the Miami job to Noni, trying to make it sound better, make himself sound better, but why? He was sick of pretending to be someone important. In New York he’d been able to justify it—the money, his office of glass and chrome, conferences and trips and bottles of fifty-year-old scotch. All that had disappeared, most of the money, too: bad investments, bad habits, Sandrine. Now he was a salesman, pure and simple, hawking banner ad space on websites. Click here for whiter teeth, cheaper mortgage, better life.
“So tell me about Revel,” he asked.
Luna told him about the restaurant, the hookers and the wannabes, the manager—Rodrigo—whom they all hated, the other bartenders, the Cuban chef, the French busboy. “It’s a great place to work. The money’s great for now,” she said. “I’ve also started modeling. Just a few gigs, but my friend Amanda says things will take off soon.”
They were on their second bottle of wine and a shared crème brûlée. Joe cocked his head. “You don’t seem like a model. I mean . . .” He laughed. “You’re beautiful, but you seem . . .”
“Too short? Too old?” Luna asked.
Joe looked down, and now Luna laughed.
“I’m twenty-five. You know, I probably am too old to be a model. I was saving for college, but maybe I’m too old for that, too.”
“No. Twenty-five? I don’t think so.”
Luna reached across and grabbed Joe’s hand and the look on her face was not flirtatious but determined.
“I’m growing plants on my windowsill,” she said. “Small things. Herbs. Three tomatoes, and they are beauties.”
* * *
After he took Luna home, Joe sat on the balcony of his penthouse condo, one he had rented unseen from an online broker seventeen months before, and lit a Cohiba. Writing the rent check each month made him shiver, watching the money go, go, go. He didn’t need all this space, the fancy kitchen, the whirlpool tub, but the view he’d come to see as essential. The balcony faced east toward the beach, and he could faintly hear the sound of waves breaking sixteen stories below. Joe loved the way the blanket of city lights ended sharply at the shoreline and the black of the ocean stretched upward and back to the faint line of the horizon and the black of the sky, one black bleeding into another until the lights began again, pinpricks of stars leading up to the white glare of the moon. Tonight it seemed circular and right to him—a city, an ocean, a sky—and himself in the middle, observing it, existing within it.
In New York it was easy to forget you were surrounded by something as elemental as water. It was easy to lose yourself in all that concrete, surging crosswalks, taxi honks, steam and grit. But here in South Beach, the ocean reminded you every day of its authority. Whenever Joe thought about New York or Sandrine or Ace or Kyle, he experienced a small deadly drop in his stomach. Nausea and a sense of shame and shock about what had happened. Remembering was like riding a familiar roller coaster, feeling an agony of apprehension as you climbed the slope even though you knew what was coming. He’d heard from none of his old fraternity brothers, but Joe found himself unsurprised. All those years of friendship burned up and floated away, whoosh, like a pile of dry, dead leaves. He had never belonged among them, not truly. That’s what Joe thought now, and he felt a certain relief at not having to pretend anymore.
Maybe, Joe thought, he should call the guy Felix. Felix wore expensive suit jackets over T-shirts and jeans, half a head of ratty red hair hanging to his shoulders to compensate for the baldness on top. Felix sold mediocre pot but perfect cocaine in tiny glassine envelopes. Most nights Joe went to him—the guy charged more for house calls—but a few times Joe hadn’t planned ahead and he’d ended up on the phone in the darkest hours. Felix traveled with a large brown case that he’d set up on a table and open with a small silver key. Inside, boxes and packets, powders and pills. I’m your friendly traveling salesman, Felix would say, and count the cash and close the case back up again. He was part greasy adolescent, part circus ringmaster, part savvy businessman, and each time Joe decided that he never wanted to see him again.
But tonight the urge was there, that niggling want, want, want that flashed out from Joe’s stomach in ever-expanding circles of light, like sonar. Joe almost picked up the phone, but he reached for the cigar instead. It was more than two years since he’d made that promise to Renee on the sidewalk. I’ll stop, he’d said. I’ll stop the coke. Joe hadn’t meant it then, but he meant it now. He would take one thing at a time. One thing, and maybe the rest would follow. He knew this wasn’t the way you were supposed to do it—sober or not, clean or not, no in between—but this was all he could manage. One thing.