Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [20]
“Here,” I said. “Try again.”
She reached for the can, but I grabbed it first and threw it over her head. Like the first, it hit the wall just beneath the clock and fell and rolled and spilled itself across the brown tile.
“Get out,” I said. “We’re all out of drinks here.”
She stood up. She wore a yellow sundress that clung to her hips and fell into the curve of her thigh and stayed there long enough for me to realize she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Even through the coldness, I knew I was going to miss looking at her, so I took as long a look as I could, and I let her see me doing it. It was my last drink before the lifelong desert of not seeing her anymore, and I wanted to fill up my cup for the endless time ahead.
I held the door for her. She seemed shocked. “You’re just going to let me go. I know you won’t sink the boat. You have…what, morals? Okay, but what about me? You don’t have anything left for me at all?”
“I have plenty left for you, but it isn’t anything that’s going to help you with Matson.”
“Oh,” she said. “So it was just the sex?”
“You’re shallow; you’re not very bright, and you’re a liar of the first magnitude. What else could it have been?”
That rocked her, and I had the morbid pleasure of seeing the hurt spread across her face until all her exquisite features seemed to be pulling away from each other. What was I doing but killing myself by saying things that I didn’t believe? It was only when I’d said them that I realized how long I’d been imagining just this moment, just this time. It was my big scene, and I’d played it the way I had dreamed of playing it. I’d gotten the knife in and twisted it big time, but what I couldn’t understand was why it felt like I was the one who had been stabbed.
Vivian turned, and I held the door and watched her walk past Sternfeld and out to her car. The birds were singing back and forth across the street to one another from out of the palm trees. She walked away slowly, holding her head a little to one side as though listening to something, and I remembered that was the way she held her head when she was upset. There was something in my chest that wanted to come out, but I couldn’t interpret it into any known language, and so it stayed there waiting like a blood clot until the Porsche let out a single, distinctive roar and drove away.
I had two clients scheduled for that afternoon, the Sheik and a singer from Germany named Tamara who lived down in South Miami. I didn’t feel much like training either of them, but it was too late to cancel. I picked up the Sheik around noon at his house on Pine Tree and drove him over to the beach, where we ran along the boardwalk in the very hottest part of the day. The heat was, for him at least, part of the challenge. Where the boardwalk ended, we pounded down the wooden stairs and out onto the hard-packed sand and ran south toward Government Cut, where the big pleasure ships entered the ocean.
After the run we went back to his house and spent another hour or so practicing kendo, in which he was an expert and I was not. It wasn’t the first time that I’d found myself playing the student rather than the teacher with a client. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether I hadn’t learned as much from my clients as they had learned from me.
His name was Anwar, and he was by right of birth a prince in a country I won’t name, but he had spent almost all his life in American schools, including Johns Hopkins, where he had received his degree in restorative plastic surgery. When I met him, he was thirty-five and had already practiced medicine in Somalia and Cambodia under the auspices of Doctors Without Borders. As far as I could see, he had responded to the challenge of nearly incalculable wealth as well as anyone I’d ever met.
It was our ritual after we put away our staffs and padding to sit in the Sheik’s Jacuzzi and drink a patient glass of his thousand-year-old scotch. His wife, Rhonda, was not there that afternoon, and so my pensive mood was less easy to camouflage once the sweat had dried and I was boiling my feet