Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [17]
“What the hell was that all about?” he asked in that gruff voice of his.
“What? You heard her,” I said. “I’m going to train her father.”
“It’s not what I heard, shithead; it’s what I saw.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My ass you don’t. You two really hit it off. I about expected her panties to fly off when she stood up.”
“You’re crazy,” I told him.
“I’ve been crazy, and I’m going to stay crazy, too, but there was something pretty jazzy going on between you two.” He looked more worried than pleased when he said it. “You know what they say about business and pleasure.”
“You’re telling me I should stay away from her? You don’t have to tell me that, Cal. And you’re forgetting one thing: I am a certified personal trainer. That has to mean something in this crazy world.”
“It means shit. Look, wise guy, I didn’t say you had to stay away from her, not necessarily, but you’ve got to play it right. And sometimes that means not playing it at all. Can you grasp the subtle fucking mystery of what I’m telling you? Sometimes you just got to grin and bear it. You got to stand like Cary Grant with his hands in his pockets. You’re smart. You know what I’m saying. Don’t give me that certified bullshit.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve got to stand like Cary Grant.”
“Is that right? Say that when she’s sitting by the swimming pool, wise-ass; when it’s hot and you’re thinking, What the hell? When she’s asking you to put the suntan lotion on her back. What are you going to say then, Charlie Chan? What? ‘Cal, I fucked up. Her father’s on his way over here with a flamethrower. Save me, Cal.’”
I laughed. “What the hell movie did you get that from?”
“No movie, real life. I been in this business for fifty years. Right after the war. I was real cute then, muscles and everything. Not out of a bottle like Raul. He’s on the juice again, by the way. You know how many women have tried to kill me? Go ahead, guess.”
“All right,” I said. “Ten.”
“Actually, it was nine. Then I got old and retired from being stupid. You’re still on active duty in that department. I’m thinking of making a comeback, though. I can still get a boner you can hang a mink coat on. Hah! I bet you never heard that one before!”
I had an apartment that year near the beach up in Surfside, not far from the old movie theater that some friends of mine had leased and converted into a gym. I trained a few of my clients there. I had moved up there after the northerly migration created by the hurricane back in ’98 had driven up the rent prices down on South Beach to the point where I had to either buy a condo or spend the rest of my days resigned to the task of helping send my landlord’s kids to Harvard. In the end I moved north.
The boom hadn’t reached as far as Surfside, and the rents there were still reasonable. The place I lived in was a twin-level apartment building on Byron Avenue, called the Lancaster Arms. The neon sign out front didn’t work, and the blue-and-white building looked faded against the relentlessness of the sun. An octogenarian named Sternfeld owned and managed the place, and he was nearly as surly as Cal. He liked to stand on the stoop of his building behind his walker like an old admiral at the prow of his ship, and he had the crazy, wispy, white hair of a conductor in search of a symphony.
The day I came by to see the apartment, Sternfeld looked me over with the expression of a man attempting to calculate just how much trouble you were going to be to him. He was delighted when I told him I had a job, as though I’d accomplished something remarkable. He was even happier when I told him I was single, without even so much as a goldfish for company. In the end he promised to chop a hundred dollars off the rent if I would walk with him three evenings a week.
So for four hundred a month, I got a one-bedroom apartment with two entrances, and if you left both doors open on a hot day, a nice breeze would blow through. You had to be careful when you did that, however. The neighborhood was not all that safe