“No,” he said. “He was even nice about that. He said, ‘I’m there for you.’ I really think he was. Somehow.”
“You’re adorable,” she said, and she seemed to mean it. “But you’re right.” She pulled the blanket over her lap. “He was a good guy. If anybody besides him had broken into your apartment and tried to steal all your shit, for sure he would have been there for you. He … he would have had your back.”
Her eyes flooded with tears. She tried to hold them back by blinking, but it was too much. They rolled down her cheeks, her chin, her neck. Her face glistened in the murky light.
“We weren’t together,” she said. “Together together. I was his friend. His best friend. The others didn’t care about him.” She kicked another can off the table. “But don’t say we were only friends. Real friends are never only. Friends are who’s around when the rest have all gone away, who are here even after you’re dead. Who never even think about leaving. That’s who I was. That’s why I’m here. I guess that’s why you’re here, too.”
He nodded. He guessed it was.
“I have to say good-bye and I had to be in the place without him, knowing he’ll never be back and getting that through my fucking head, and then I can move on, I can move on to … whatever’s next. Don’t know what it is just yet. But I got to get away from here, that’s for sure.”
Coco stared at Bronfman with her lonely dark eyes, and wouldn’t stop looking at him, even when he looked away. He felt her stare.
“Take me with you,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“To the beach,” she said. “Destin. You’re going down there, right? Take me with you. My car is dead. Just take me down there and then … drop me off. Or not. Maybe we can hang together for a while. I don’t know. But let’s leave this shit behind. I won’t be Coco anymore. I’ll go back to being Yoshiko. I’ll pretend I’m really Japanese. Forget I can speak English. Start from scratch. Reinvent. What do you say? We could have fun.” She gave him an open-faced, playful, moderately sultry expression.
“Maybe,” he said. “Sure. I mean, why not? That might work.”
It might. He could take her; she would fulfill the requirements of the offer. But it wasn’t just about procuring a companion anymore; it was about procuring the right companion, a much more difficult requirement to fulfill. He liked Coco, but she wasn’t really who he had in mind. He wondered if Roy, his father, had felt something like that with Muriel. If he found himself alone with her in 2D and realized that he liked her but that, in the end, she didn’t fulfill his requirements.
Bronfman stuttered. He blushed. “It’s something to think about it.”
She cracked up.
“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” she said. “You know why I like you so much? I like you because you’re just so … who you are, if that makes any sense. You’re the perfect you. Sweet, thoughtful, very careful, but not really happy, because you think that would be asking too much of your life, so you’re happy not being happy. Are you even going to go, Bronfman? To Destin? I just wonder if you have it in you.”
“I have it in me,” he said.
“I hope so. But if you don’t, that’s okay, too. Not everyone needs to go to Florida.”
“I don’t need to go,” he said. “I want to go.”
“Then go! I’d like to go, too, but I get it—why would you take the drug whore? The drug whore always gets the short end of the stick. But I wasn’t one. I promise. I swear. I never did it, not once.”
“I never said you did.”
“You didn’t have to.”
She covered her face with her hands and rubbed her eyes. She brushed a few strands of hair out of the corner her mouth. He had never seen a sadder woman in all his life.
“I get it, Bronfman. You’re good at being you. Tommy was good at being who he was, too. When he had to borrow money to buy a pack of cigarettes, when he drank beer for breakfast, when he’d go out looking for a job and do everything he could not to find it—he was good at all that. He had a kid somewhere, a daughter, but he’d lost track of her a long time ago. He was a total loser, but somebody has to lose, right? Otherwise where would the winners come from? No shame in it. And he was kind. He could have been the best loser there ever was, the King of the Losers, but then he got all ambitious and brought drugs into the mix and that was never him, he wasn’t tough like that, or evil. Big mistake. Now he’s dead.” She lifted her hand, thumb upright, index finger extended, closed one eye for aim, and took a shot at Bronfman. “Bang-bang. Dead. That’s what happens when you try to be something you’re not. So maybe you shouldn’t go to Florida. It could end badly.”
“I don’t think you can generalize like that,” he said. “I’m not selling drugs. I’m just trying to get in shape and find someone I can take to the beach with me. I don’t think anyone’s going to shoot me for that. I’m going to Destin. I’m not who you think I am.”
“Then prove it,” she said. Her eyes darkened. She adjusted herself on the sofa, moved closer to the far side, and patted the extra space with her hand. She didn’t take her eyes off him. “Prove it,” she said again. She laughed. She threw a wet cigarette butt at him, and it hit him in the chest. And she opened her arms, the way his mother did sometimes welcoming him home from school—big, open arms that invited a hug. “Come here, Bronfman,” she said.
Come here, Roy.
He felt like another man then: the Un-Bronfman, the parallel-universe Bronfman, the hardscrabble-twin-he-never-knew-he-had-until-today Bronfman. He was himself and he was not. Otherwise, how could he explain what happened next?
He stood. The coffee table had created a barrier between them, a space he could safely be on the other side of, and as he stepped around it he felt the same sense of adventure he might experience were he floating around a bend in the Amazon, or crossing the border to another country, a foreign place with customs he didn’t understand, a language strange and subtle and beautiful. He stood over her, shaking a little, and she took his hand and pulled him into her arms. She placed a hand behind his neck and pulled him down and held him against her. Her face was pressed into his chest, and she was crying. He could feel the warm wet tears seep through his shirt and onto his chest. He let his hands rest between her scapula, and she pulled him closer (she was stronger than she looked) until all of him was against all of her. She was crying, and he was comforting her. That’s what was happening here, that’s all. He closed his eyes. She wrapped a leg around his waist, an arm curled around his shoulder. Her breathing became deeper, more rhythmic. She held him—clutched him—like a baby monkey, and as she slowly lifted her head from his chest and her nose grazed his neck and chin she kissed him, and kissed him again. Her lips moved upward until they were right next to his, and in a smart and stealthy maneuver (he couldn’t help thinking, dissecting every moment of this as it happened) her lips moved left (his left, her right) and then pressed against his.
She looked at him, and saw whatever it was that was in his eyes now. Fear? Yes, that’s what it probably was. That’s definitely what it was. “Don’t worry,” she said. And, pushing him away from her just slightly, she pulled off her T-shirt and dropped it on the floor. Her breasts were so small and lovely, her nipples just a shade darker brown. He stared at them, mesmerized. Coco pulled at his own shirt, untucking it at least partially, working with the buttons until she gave up. She fiddled with his belt, but it was so tight. She sighed, then closed her eyes and laced her fingers around the back of his neck and pulled his face into hers. So he opened his mouth. Her tongue slipped into it and swam around in it. Seconds passed—maybe two of them—before his own tongue did the same in hers. Her hands were on the back of his neck as she pulled his face in closer still, until their faces were pressed together so hard that in any other possible circumstance it would have been considered an accident, and he almost said “I’m sorry” out of habit, because one or both of them were going to come away from this bruised, lips raw, throbbing. Ro
y, she said. Oh, Roy! He felt his mind shutting down, going into deep storage, everything inside his head muddled, until he had no idea what was really happening—when, through the strength of a will he didn’t know he had or even wanted to have, he snapped out of it, and stopped. He pulled back, and the spell was broken. She waited for him to come back, her lips slightly parted, but he only moved farther away, sitting up straight, smiling a watered-down smile. All in all, about sixty seconds had passed.
“I can feel you against my leg,” she said. “You want this.”
“Yes but—” He strained to find some more articulate response, but he wasn’t able to provide one. “But no. Yes, but no. I do want to fuck up—my mother basically begged me to—but not like this. Not here, in Thomas Edison’s apartment.”
Coco ran her fingers through his hair, and even brushed the bangs to one side, perfect with the part. She left the palm of her hand on his wet, red cheek.
“Oh, Bronfman,” she said, wistfully. “You have no idea what you’re missing.”
“You’re exactly right,” he said. “I have no idea.”
Through the paper-thin wall separating this apartment from his, he heard his landline ringing. It was certainly Sheila. No one called him anymore except her, now that his mother couldn’t remember his number. She was worried about him; Bronfman could almost hear the worry in the essence of the ring itself.
A siren wailed in the distance. His phone kept ringing. And then the phone stopped, and the siren was no longer quite as distant, closer to King’s Manor now, and closer still. There could be no doubt now that the police were on their way here. He guessed a neighbor had seen Bronfman and Coco inside, or their shadows, seen the torn crime-scene tape and called it in, which was something Bronfman himself might have done, once upon a time. Coco didn’t seem to care, really; she had been on the other end of sirens before, no doubt.
“Oh!” she said. Something had made her almost happy. “I forgot!”
With the blanket still covering her hips and legs, she leaned back and over the side of the couch and rummaged through some things, and in a flourish produced what looked like—what actually was—his cowboy hat, star and all. Poor old beaten thing. It had seen some hard times the past couple of months, not unlike Bronfman himself. It appeared to have been run over and flattened by a car and punched back out with a giant fist, so that it was no longer a hat, really, but something just hat-like, a former hat, three star points bent, two broken off entirely. With one hand she held the blanket around her waist, kneeling above him bare-breasted, and with the other she set the hat on her head, and cocked it just a bit to one side.
“You know that’s my hat, right?” he said.
“Yeah. But Tommy gave it to me—you know, after he stole it.”
“Of course he did,” Bronfman said.
She seemed to think about taking it off and handing it back to him, but that moment quickly passed. She struck a pose.
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About me in your hat. Can I keep it?” she said. “Please?”
“Keep? My hat?”
“Yeah. I mean, look—it fits me. It’s way too small for you now.”
And it did fit her, really well. It looked like a hat for nobody’s head but hers. But he missed his hat. He missed it the way he missed his mother, his old life, the old world where all he had to worry about was remaining just unobjectionable enough to be invisible. Now that he’d been seen, though—Sheila had seen him—there was no going back.
“That hat saved my life once,” he said, “a long time ago.”
“Really?” She took it off her head and held it in her hands, turning it back and forth, round and round, looking at it inside and out, studying it, trying to decipher its magic. Then she looked at Bronfman. “Do you think it could save mine?” she asked him. “Because that would be awesome.”
The police cars were there now. Two of them, blue and red lights flashing and circling, bouncing off the walls of Thomas Edison’s apartment as if it were a discotheque. The sirens brought the pound dogs to life, slowly, as if they’d been sleeping, and they started baying, one by one.
Serena was already getting out of her car when Bronfman walked out of Thomas Edison’s apartment. When she saw him, she froze, and seemed either relieved or disappointed; from where he was it was hard to tell. She looked back to the other car, where there was a stern-looking cop with his eyes locked on Bronfman, and waved at him—a signal that he could stay put, she had this under control. He nodded. But he still kept looking at Bronfman as if nothing would give him more pleasure than to lock him up, and, perhaps, throw away the key.
Serena ambled toward him, hands on her hips. “Bronfman, Bronfman, Bronfman,” she said. “What have you gotten yourself into now?” She directed his attention to the window where Coco was framed, in the cowboy hat, her bare shoulders and the blanket just covering her breasts.
“That’s not what it looks like,” he said.
“That’s exactly what it looks like,” she said. But she wasn’t upset at all. She actually seemed pleased. “I didn’t take you for that kind of guy, but it’s kind of sexy. I’m impressed.” She winked at him, smiled. “But, on the other hand, you’ve broken a couple of serious laws here. Criminal trespass is just one of them. You know that, I hope.”
He nodded, and with her eyes she gestured back to the car behind her. “I’d let it go because I like you, but there are other eyes on us.” She removed the handcuffs from her utility belt. “Hands, please.”
“You like me?” he said as he let her have them. She slipped the cuffs on his wrists, and was locking them in place with a click when Sheila emerged from the shadows, materializing in the crazy manic rainbow of light. She must have pulled in right behind the police cars. He had no idea how much of this she had seen, but, based on her expression, she’d seen enough. She stopped a few feet from the stoop and took it all in: the police cars, Serena, Bronfman in cuffs, his shirttail pulled from his pants, his belt loose and drooping, and Coco, nearly naked, watching it all from the window, a devilish smile on her face. Serena turned and saw Sheila, forlorn and heartbroken, and turned back to Bronfman with an expression composed of a confused mélange of disappointment, amusement, and shock.
“Seriously?” she said. “Jesus, Bronfman. You are a dirty dog.”
Sheila appeared to have lost some important part of herself, and even Bronfman knew what it was. This is what a broken heart looks like, he thought, desperately sad, hopeless, and alone. And angry, hateful, and just a little bitter.
Her lips were moving soundlessly but he could easily read them. “Never trust an ungulate,” she said. She looked Bronfman dead in the eyes, and with them so clearly said the rest of it, good-bye, adios, see you later, I hardly knew you. He knew how it looked, the kind of man he had become in her eyes: he had become Crouton, the photographer. But he wasn’t him. That was the last thing he was. She was walking away now—you’re too late, Bronfman, too late—but just before she melted into the darkness he called out to her.
“Sheila!” he said. He was looking at her back, the way her hair rested on her collar in the beautiful whirling lights of the law. “I like to watch previews better than the movie. I’ve never bought a pair of underwear in my life, because that’s something my mother liked to do. Midgets scare me. I’ve never been on a motorcycle and never want to be. I’m not an orphan, but I act like one and I want to stop acting like that. I also have a prehensile tail.” He paused. Her head clocked a few degrees to the left. “I threw that in there just to see if you were listening.” And she was listening, he could tell. But she still didn’t turn, she just stood there, half a step away from disappearing into the night and out of his life, almost certainly forever. “Sheila,” he said again.
He turned to Serena. She had her hands on his, holding them beneath the cuffs. He looked over his shoulder at Coco, who was still there with the blanket around her, watching all of this as if it wer
e a movie. She waved at him. The dogs at the pound were going full chorus now, singing their symphonic hearts out. He had never known them to be so eager to be heard. Bronfman could pick out the cry of certain dogs. He had even named them. That’s Jawbone, he could say, or Mugwump, or little Jimmy Dean, or Pal. Every night it was like this. Every night was sad, every night was hopeful. Because anyone who really listened could tell what they were doing. They were calling out to someone on the other side of the tree line, someone they used to know or hoped to meet, howling into the dark the way scientists send radio waves into space, looking for unknown companions.
“Sheila,” he said, one last time. But softly, so he could be heard.
DAY
NINETY-FIVE
Three weeks after the offer had officially expired, near the end of July, Bronfman called the 800 number on the back of the Extraordinary Adventures brochure and asked to speak to someone in a managerial position. He was put on hold for almost four minutes before a woman who identified herself as Beverly Taylor picked up. He was all set to explain to her what had happened, how his goal had been to take advantage of the offer within the proscribed amount of time—but she stopped him before he had completed his first sentence.
“What do you mean?” she said. “‘Proscribed amount of time’?”
“Before the deadline,” he said. “You see, I knew the offer expired on June twenty-sixth, but there were some … complications, and—”
“There is no deadline,” she said, and then, with a weary cheeriness, “There is always time for a time-share. Many units are still available. Come down anytime you like.”
“Really?” he said.
“Some operators imply that there might be a deadline—act now, you know. That sort of thing. It gives the offer a sense of urgency. Makes it more tempting. But no. Please. Anytime. Let Destin be your destination.”
She was a pleasant woman, and didn’t seem to be in much of a rush, so he felt compelled to share with her the other prerequisite Carla D’Angelo, Operator 61217, had shared with him.