Nine Island Read Online Free Page B

only depths and depths of dizzying blue up there, but mostly there are heaped white dunes of clouds, sheets and wedding cakes and tire treads of clouds, fata morganas in the sky.
    Was brave this morning and left the building not one of my favored back ways, via dock or garage, but boldly through the lobby, past the doormen who love to know who’s doing what, past the valets who sneer at my Mini and at the groceries borne home in my bare arms if I’ve dared venture carless into the tropics to shop. Walked through the revolving doors, past the burbling chlorinated fountain, down the swooping entry ramp, past the row of green fronds and scaly trunks and more girl-trees diving into the ground. Five of them, with silver-pink bark, slim torsos rising from the soil and splitting into long satin legs with tender dark clefts between. They look like naked preteen synchronized swimmers, plunging into the mulch.
    Not sure they got away from whatever chased them, with their poontangs eye height and bare, though.
    Girls! Close your legs right now, you fools!
    To get to Publix, you follow Island Avenue around the oval park, from my building (Nine), past Costa Brava, Sixteen, Belle Plaza, the Venetian, then walk over the last causeway bridge to Miami Beach. In the water are always needle-nose fish—and, gliding below them today, a ray. A spotted eagle ray, I think, having memorized one once and hurried home to consult my Audubon Field Guide . Undulating leopard wings, blue light wavering upon them.
    What a place, where you see something like this on your way to buy milk.
    Enough to make you forget your chronic life concerns.
    Almost.
    Just then a Jet Ski boy with a girl stuck to his back swerved by. Engine scream, arc of spray, the fish shot off, the ray glided down into silty dark.
    Landed a curse on the pair with my eyes.
    Walked over the bridge, past the marina, along a shady block of restaurants and bars, to Publix, which looks like a silver space-shell and is full of porn stars and fabricated beauties strolling the aisles in shoes not made for human feet. Their silhouettes seen from the coffee aisle, down near the illuminated fruits, are extreme. Their natural predators prowl the aisles, spying around boxes of soup.
    During the last hurricane, when electricity was out all over the Beach so there was no AC, they say that in the fancy buildings lining the bay the porn stars all went nude.
    The sort of statement you can believe.
    Like:
    You could be a courtesan, as Sir Gold said to me.
    He looked like he was actually thinking , those hazel-green eyes concerned, proposing what I might try next, now that he was done with me.
    Not that I knew this yet, lying naked in his sunny bed, with no desire to leave.
    Anyway.
    Yogurt, cookies, kale, cat food. Diapers. But no one makes diapers for old cats, only puppies, which I don’t understand, so after a while I wandered over to the aisle of baby things. Happy yellow, blue, pink, dimpled bottoms, sweet plum mouths. I found diapers for babies from two down to zero, almost small enough for a skinny old cat. The newborn diapers were a better deal than the ones for dogs, and I was reaching for a packet and feeling golden light sift upon me, feeling a transformation—when I realized the problem of the tail. Returned to the puppy diapers: not cheap.
    Shedding money galore for diapers plus litter plus cat food plus pills for both seizures and thyroid. If I drowned Buster today I’d have three hundred dollars a month for my mother.
    I have taken care of him for eighteen years.
    Time to go!
    It’s been grand!
    So long now!
    No no no. I’d never drown my baby baby baby cat.
    Had just checked out and was shouldering my green Publix bags when—oh, no. Par-T-Boy.
    Haven’t mentioned that there are deadbeats not only north but south: the distant, historic, alluring ones far up I-95, and new ones I’ve met down where 95 ends.
    Par-T-Boy was standing at the cash register