Eating Peaches

Awoman at the Jungle Club who can do sit-ups on a yellow polyethylene ball told me that widows never dream about their husbands. She announced this while scuttling across the gym like an upside-down crab with the purse-lipped surety of someone who tells you that a pinch of cream of tartar will make egg whites peak or that the veering Gulf Stream will keep hurricanes away from Vero Beach. I believed her, which was why I was unprepared for either Frances, Jeanne or Harry.

Hurricane Frances came first, tearing my pool cage in half. Three weeks later, Jeanne finished the job, sending the ripped screening flying into the next block, dumping two of my neighbor’s lawn chairs and a dead armadillo into my swimming pool and covering my floors in a sandy, brackish wash that smelled like dead fish. Harry appeared six weeks after the power had been restored and the remains of the pool screen had been carted off along with the armadillo, my neighbor’s twisted lawn chairs and a pile of soggy wallboard to the dump.

I dreamt about my husband after an unplanned sleepover. I was wearing a celadon green, charmeuse nightgown with a matching peignoir that the night before I had draped over a chaise with one sleeve trailing gracefully on the buckling bedroom floor. I had just opened my eyes to two empty martini glasses on the marble nightstand. Orange twists lay soaking in the dregs of Cointreau and orange flower water.

It wasn’t exactly a dream where I am trying to talk my way out of a ticket from a surgeon in a white coat. The dream happened when I was awake, listening to the new early morning sounds of chain saws and hammers, the clanking of new metal siding, realizing that Rafael had stayed overnight, noticing that charmeuse doesn’t wrinkle no matter what you do to it, and understanding that it is possible for a wooden floor, even when it is dry, to curl back on itself like a wave.

I didn’t try to run my hand through Harry’s ectoplasm or anything like that. Neither did I feel a sudden cold spot or a ripple across the back of my neck. I just knew it was Harry. You can’t watch someone peel off their socks for two-thirds of your life and not feel their presence when they enter a room.

 Iwasn’t frightened when I saw pieces of Harry assemble like a swarm of bees–just thankful that he hadn’t appeared earlier, when Rafael rolled onto his back and announced that I had been conned, that the pecky cypress ceiling was not really 100 years old but had been aged with sand blasting and acid.

Shimmering in pixels in the early morning light, Harry stood at the foot of my bed in a Bobby Jones golf shirt with a cigar clenched between his teeth, a hand-rolled Monte Cristo No. 2 Torpedo that our dry cleaner Luis gets from his brother in Tampa. Harry glanced in the direction of the bathroom where tan and buff 38-year-old Rafael was trimming his nose hairs, then just looked at me and smiled with an expression in his water-colored blue eyes that clearly said, “Are you kidding me or what?”

“It’s been 22 months,” I whispered. “I’m the one who had to deal with two hurricanes. If anyone is upset, it should be me.”

Read the entire article in the February 2007 issue