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I am handling a worn-down deck of cards illustrated by the logo of an airline that no longer exists. The two of clubs is missing a corner, disqualifying the deck from regulation play. Outside, in the swimming pool, past the stone columns of the veranda, a body floats. The body is alive, I think, unless something has gone wrong. The body is suspended above the water by a plaid, inflatable flotation device, with a cupholder. In the cupholder is a martini. With those little onions in it. I hate this specific body, or, if you like, I hate the person associated with the body. Religious and mystical types would argue that I hate the soul that the body is a vessel for, but that's a lousy bill of goods. Smash a brain, smash a personality, smash a soul. We are walking meat. Or, in my case, reclining meat, fondling an old deck of cards, letting the beaten paper rectangles fall from one hand into another. I eye the floating body with distaste. It is curvy, and female, and I have at one point or another held it close to me, and whispered words at it, and had it whisper words back to me. Now, she regards me with a dead eye, if at all. Right back at you. We have one more day of vacation together. We are both determined to stick it out, in spite of one another. We still sleep together, naked, facing away from one another, our exhalations and inhalations totally audible. --- My father invented a very good sort of hot-dog cart. He got a patent for it, and went into business with a guy who may or may not have been a full member of one of Pennsylvania's most respected and generally notorious organized crime organizations. Miraculously, he escaped with his life, his fortune, and his reputation enhanced, selling his share in the booming venture to his "partner." He sold for less than he should have, which was still more than being shot in the back of the head and then buried under a cement slab at some poorly regulated construction site in New Jersey. He then drank himself insensible, while publishing books of passionately religious poetry and strident calls for the promulgation of nuclear power. The books, put out by a vanity press based out of the corniest depths of Indiana, lay dead together, packed into solid masses, warehoused in cardboard boxes. The containers became both furniture and fixture in my father's small, elegant, whiskey-bottle decorated apartment near Harvard Square in Boston. When he died, my mother, who couldn't make it back from Hong Kong for the funeral, sent me her love via e-mail, and I inherited a lot of money. The vanity publishing had barely made a dent. Turns out, he never printed runs of over 1,000 books. He was a practical guy. --- I am an impractical guy. I made a sport out of failing out of college, playing tennis and tending bar at one of the all-time most respected and most thoroughly thought-through party houses in American collegiate history. My father (drunk) and mother (far away) barely noticed -- when I informed them that I'd left college, a year after the fact, it barely rippled the calm pool of our familial relations. I invented a drink. It was called a "Sea Change." My description of the Sea Change went a little like this: "The phrase 'Sea Change' gets thrown around a lot these days. It has slipped into the gutter of business talk, where a lot of reasonably good English expressions go to cough up their guts, pass out in the muddy water, and die. Originally, a sea change was a complete tranformation. It wasn't just a 'change' or a 'big change.' It was a total overhaul. A skeleton, for example, would fall to the bottom the sea, and coral, over time, would remove every original molecule of the remains and tranform the bones into limestone. When you drink my drink, it is like that, except with blue curacao. The blue curacao sort of smoothes out the rum. And it makes the drink blue. Like the ocean." Sometimes there'd be a pause at this point. "For which the drink is named." I got through this spiel exactly once, greatly impressing a girl named Annabelle, who was a freshman from Toronto, Canada, and not a very good lover. She was very nice, however. Being with nice is like cutting into the fleshy part of a hand with a knife. --- Annabelle, who lies next to me in bed, nude and for all practical intents and purposes dead to me, is a different Annabelle than the one I knew in college. Same body, different contents. She'd been through four boyfriends, the death of her mother, an abortion, an accident with a semi-truck that left her shoulder a mess of scar tissue, and a PhD program in English that had turned her from sweet to sweetly cunning, which is to say politically deadly. She still remembered the "Sea Change," and would bring it up sometimes to cut me down to size, reminding me of who I used to be, and what that used to mean. --- I'd bought the cards from a stewardess on the airline we'd once flown to Toronto, for her mother's funeral. The trip turned into something accidentally magical. We met her old friends, who were smart and sweet. We ate the best Chinese food of my life, packing our cheeks with dim sum and drinking hot, weak tea. We threw snow at one another, and curled up side-by-side, and gave one another massages, and talked about trying to make things work for the long term -- the sacrifices that would be made, the things that would be done together, the worthwhileness of it all. --- "A lot can change in seven days," she'd said, pitching the trip to Greece, grabbing double handfuls of my blue silk shirt almost menacingly, closing in on my personal space, locking her eyes with mine. We'd picked out the villa on the Internet. It was the veranda that sold us on it. |