“You know,” she says, “my dad used to talk about this place all the time,” and he says, “Yeah?” and she says, “Yeah,” and moves to the window. He thinks how, except for her mitten hands, she could be some silhouetted exotic woman in one of those posters to lure people to this hotel, this room with a wall of windows and white sand beyond that flows into blue and another blue that looks like a current but is, he thinks, where the sky flows into the gulf’s horizon. He wants her in that honeymoon way grooms want brides but his mom has lectured him about sensitivity and listening and all about “delayed gratification” and how good, better than good, stuff can be if he’ll just remember to use his head to think with every once in awhile instead of his “privates.” She’s a funny old thing, his mom, calling his dick his “privates” and all, but she’s a clever old thing, too, and he’s thinking that there might be something in the way his almost new wife moved to the window and the way she said “Yeah” that he should maybe be listening to.
”So when was that?” he says, and she says “Back in the sixties. Clean-up, you know.” “Right,” he says and he’s vaguely recalling the little war his old mom calls The Day War that wiped out, or nearly wiped out, erased, that was it, erased Cuba and Austin, Texas.
”And earlier, too,” she says, “in the fifties. He worked back and forth between here and The Keys in the fifties. He used to talk about those times mostly.” She moves outside and her voice goes dim because despite all the open windows and doors there are some walls between them, and he wraps a thick cotton towel around his waist and presses the hooky-do tabs together with his stubby hands and goes where she is. He is intent on listening. “The Keys,” he says, “I’ve read about them,” and he thinks about mentioning how they were erased, but she has read the same histories he’s read and probably knows more than he does because of her dad and all. He wants “good” to be even better, even if he can’t imagine anything better than the good he already gets. So he says, “Must’ve been way different then, eh?”
When she turns to look at him, he sees the least little bit of surprise in her eyes, like maybe she’s realizing that he’s maybe more than a husband, sort of like a friend she can talk to, too. “I guess,” she says. “It was way different everywhere then, you know?”
”I guess. Yeah.” He’s not the kind of guy who thinks much about stuff, so thinking about stuff that’s like double his age back in history isn’t something he’s real familiar with, and besides that he’s looking at her and thinking about how she looks, in profile, with the white flower tucked behind her ear, and about how this shot would make a great poster, too. And it sort of hits him from out of the blue about the posters they still put up in airports and places that have mysterious exotic beautiful photos with women and sometimes guys with arms, well, when he thought about it, like maybe almost half again as long as his, and all those long fingers, too, almost like they came from a different planet, the models in those posters. He says, “Yeah. It must’ve been way different then, like everywhere,” and she says “Yeah,” and what happens after, he thinks, is maybe not better, but man, it’s still just as good.
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