A little over a year later I passed through Coral Gables to do a reading in support of my second book. At that time Books & Books was crammed into a few hundred square feet of pink stucco down the street from its present location. Lack of space was not an issue in my case, but it meant there was not a lot of room for folding chairs. If you drew more than a minyan of elderly Jews, combat for a place to sit down could be savage. The people who did show up for my readings in those days were often not entirely strangers to me, and among the combatants at Books & Books that night were a few who knew me as my grandparents’ grandson: The dentist who had repaired my grandmother’s teeth after her arrival in Baltimore. The neighbor lady at Fontana Village who had made such a strong play for my grandfather’s attention—at least in my view—with her version of Horn & Hardart’s macaroni and cheese. An old buddy of my grandfather’s from Shunk Street days. The former sales director of MRX.
When I was in college, before a poetry reading at the old Gustine’s bar on Forbes Avenue, some prankster had advised me to look up from the page now and then, to make “eye contact.” It turned out there was no surer way to make you lose your place in the text, persuade the audience that you were some kind of freak, or crush your soul. If the turnout was light, your soul got crushed by the sight of empty chairs. If by chance or misprint there was a decent showing, then it was crushed by its own unerring instinct to contact only the eyes in a face that was busy frowning, yawning, or looking vaguely ill. As the interval ballooned since the last botched attempt, I would grow increasingly tense, and finally look up at an arbitrary moment, giving peculiar weight to a random therefore or, inevitably, a word like snatch, nuts, or blown. By the time I hit Coral Gables, I had learned to mark four or five appropriate words at different points in whatever text I was reading. I would look up on cue and pray that my gaze alighted on somebody who was having an okay time or was kind enough to fake it.
That night at Books & Books, when I looked up in observance of mark number two, I saw a beautiful woman standing by the door where Salzedo Street met Aragon Avenue. She was looking back at me in a friendly but appraising way. She had the eyes of a noticer, cool but not chilly, unsentimental but not hard. The eyes of a painter, I thought. Silver hair streaked with dark gray and swept up into an untidy bun, born with a suntan, and some bold architecture in her nose and cheeks. My grandfather had said Katharine Hepburn because of the cheekbones, but I would have gone with Anjelica Huston. At mark number three, when I looked up again, she was gone. My soul and I alike experienced a certain degree of crushedness.
She didn’t reappear during the reading or afterward, when I was signing a few books. I heard about the horror of my grandmother’s dentition. I heard about how annoying my grandfather’s attention to modeling detail was when all you were trying to make was basically a Roman candle that would go really high and not explode. I accepted a few belated condolences. Then I said goodbye to Mitch Kaplan and took off. I was staying at a hotel on Ponce de Leon Boulevard—more of a glorified motor lodge—and I figured I might as well walk. I hadn’t gone even a block when I felt a touch on my arm, heard a woman calling me Mike.
“I thought that might have been you,” I said.
We shook hands, but then she said, “No,” so we hugged each other, standing out there on the sidewalk along the Miracle Mile. She had the hourglass shape that my grandfather always favored, but she felt much lighter than she looked. The bones of her shoulders flexed like clothespins under her blouse. I got a noseful of oranges and cloves. I remembered my grandfather saying that Sally had a heavy hand with the Opium spritz.
“I almost didn’t have the nerve,” she told me after she had let go of me. She took a Kleenex from a red knapsack-style leather purse and used it dry her eyes. I said maybe I would help myself to a Kleenex, too. “I would have just hated myself.”
“Actually, I thought you left.”
“I did. After I heard a little of what you were reading, I went and had a cup of coffee.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You were fine. I’m just visual. I can’t take things in through the ear.”
“Ah.”
“Frankly, I might be getting a little bit deaf. Are you hungry? Could you eat?”
We found her car, a stately Mercedes 280 the color of a camel-hair coat. A Hewlett-Packard parking decal faded in a corner of the rear window. The interior was drenched in Opium, and under that a smell of sun-damaged leather, and under that an acrid whiff of vitamins. Sally drove us to a Cuban restaurant she said she liked, but when we got there she only picked at her fried fish. When I ordered the lechón, she had said what the hell, she would have the pork, too. But the waiter had not reached the kitchen before she called him back and said she would have the fish after all.
“I was raised kosher, but after I left home I ate pork for the next fifty years. Suddenly, I can’t do it anymore. Even bacon! So what’s that about?”
I said I didn’t really have a theory to offer, but that was a lie. Something similar had happened to my grandfather at the end of his life, and I figured it had something to do with mortality. That didn’t seem like the polite thing to say to an old lady I had only just met. In the end she went and said it herself.
“No atheists in foxholes, right?” She looked around at the fake brick walls, the red Formica, the wrought-iron chandeliers. “I must be in a foxhole.”
“At least it’s a foxhole where you can get lechón.”
“Do you think God gives a shit what people eat?”
“I would hope He has better things to do with His time.”
“Ha. You know who you sound like?”
She had cut up her fish into neat little squares. She loaded some black beans and rice onto her fork and added one of the squares of fish. Then, when she had it all ready to go, she put down the fork with a chink. The bite she had prepared sat uneaten for the rest of the meal.
“I wasn’t in love with him,” she said. “For the record.”
“No?”
“Maybe I was getting there. We were going pretty hot and heavy for a couple of old people, I guess. But we only had six months.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s not very long.”
“When you’re seventy-two? It’s like six weeks when you’re fifteen. Then he went and got cancer.”
“You were making him too happy. He was having none of that.”
“That would be funny if it weren’t true. Do you smoke?”
“Trying to quit.”
“Me, too.”
She flagged the waiter, handed him a five, and asked him in serviceable Spanish to go next door to the liquor store and buy her a pack of Trues. In the end she settled for bumming one of his Winstons.
“Muchas gracias, corazón.”
“A la orden, se?ora.”
He patted his pockets for a light. I came out with Aughenbaugh’s lighter, which my mother had passed on to me. Sally noticed it. She angled her face away from me and blew out a long turbulence of smoke.
“Also, I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but he was not an easy man to love. I don’t mean that he wasn’t lovable.”
“No?”
“He was very lovable. Intelligent. Nice-looking, had those big shoulders. Pretty fit for his age but not, you know, one of these geezers running around in the ninety-degree heat, with the headband and the heavy-hands. Also, the man could fix anything. I mean anything. I have this, you know, CD thingy. A ‘boom box.’ It kept skipping. He fixed that. Those things have lasers inside.”
No one held my grandfather’s technical knowledge and dexterity in higher esteem than I did, but I doubted they extended to the repair of lasers. I just nodded.
“He even had a sense of humor in there somewhere.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“A dark one.”
“Very dark.”