Please Stay until Summer

There is a winter in Miami Beach. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The travel brochures do not advertise it; you will not see it depicted on postcards or in magazine ads. It is as bleak as any weather the Northland can unleash upon humanity. The clouds scud along lower and lower until you think they are about to grate on the treetops. You sweat and shiver and you want to get drunk. When Francisco first moved there, a friend warned him about such weather, calling it "drizzmal." His friend was too kind.

Francisco sat in his little oceanfront condominium, supper finished, dishes in the sink, Scotch whiskey in a glass in his hand. He intended to drink himself to sleep by ten o'clock. It was Friday night. The weekend promised only clouds and rain and wind. When the weather turns dark in Miami Beach, the beauty vanishes and the blemishes glower. Trash blows down the streets. Door hinges become caked with rust. The architecture changes from exotic to vulgar. Colors are a futile rebellion against the gloom. People draw blinds and curtains and pretend the outdoors does not exist. In drizzmal weather, Francisco wished for a regular grind. Nine-to-five workers could party with their cronies and divorce their minds from their work. But Francisco was a creative person, a scribbler! He conducted his affairs apart from the rest of humanity. There was no such thing as starting time or quitting time at his job. He was always at work, but people thought he was never at work. He was subject to the whims of ghosts. When Nature got moody, so did Francisco. He was his own boss, people said with envy, but they did not know Francisco's employer. His hatred for this monster was the only thing that kept him alive.

Francisco drank to relieve the pain that made him think about lying down to sleep and never waking up, about swimming out into the ocean and not turning back. He drank so he could write without caring what he wrote. He drank because God seemed tipsy, and because Scotch whiskey was made for nautical darkness. He drank to make words flow. He drank to get drunk.

He sat down at his computer and began to compose.

There were three raps on the door. At first they sounded like the effects of the rising wind, but they came again, and again, and again.

"Buzz off! I don't want any!"

Tap! Tap! Tap!

"I said go away!"

"It's me!" came a thin, wet female voice. Thunder cracked, the echoless report of a storm on a lowland coast.

"You? You who?"

Francisco rose, drink in hand, went to the door and looked through the peephole. He saw blue-gray-green wetness.

Tap! Tap! Tap! "Francisco!" She knew his name.

He opened the door. The wind caught it, whipped it around, and smashed it against the outer wall. But when he saw the countenance before him, Francisco didn't care if the door might splinter away from its hinges and sail into the sea. Rain blew through her hair and raindrops scampered through the breezeway. She seemed to be crying, although in the rain it was hard to be sure.

"Maria?" he asked. She nodded. Maria. His ex-wife. "Come in, then." She entered, dripping, streaming. He pulled the door around and secured it. Lightning flashed. Thunder banged. Maria flinched.

"Come to the bathroom. Take your clothes off. I'll give you my robe," Franscisco said.

She did not move.

"Look, woman, we were married once. Get yourself dried off and warmed up. I won't stare at your naked body."

Maria went to the bathroom and closed the door. Francisco got his robe from the closet and knocked on the bathroom door. Maria opened it a crack. He stuffed the robe through.

Francisco switched off the computer and unplugged it to protect it from the lightning that now seemed bent upon shattering the building. A westerly gale began to rattle the windows and hiss through invisible chinks in the frames. Rain whipped the glass; it sounded like children throwing fistfuls of sand. The complex shuddered under the impact of the gusts. He refilled his drink without adding ice, sat on the couch, and waited for Maria to make her appearance.

Francisco watched the tempest through the east-facing living-room picture window. Ocean waves broke in toward the shore, and the storm drove sheets of rain out to sea. How could waves come in while the wind blew out? The sea contradicts itself, thought Francisco, like all creatures whose ancestors slithered from water to land. He swallowed the liquor and refilled the glass. "Well," he said aloud, "she ought to feel like it's old times with the drunken scribbler."

Maria came out, leaving her purse and wet clothes in the bathroom. She had brushed her hair and it hung down in thick caramel strands that curled outward at the ends, just long enough to tease the shoulders of the bathrobe, unblinking eyes taking in all the details of the two rooms that Francisco managed, somehow, to keep in order.

"May I prepare you a drink?" he asked.

"I don't drink," she said.

"Sit down, why don't you," he said, not getting up, motioning towards the big easy chair by the window. Maria sat, her hands folded in her lap.

"You've been crying," said Francisco.

"Yes."

"Why are you here?"

"I'm leaving Tony."

"Who is Tony?"

"My husband."

"I thought Andrew was your husband."

"We got a divorce."

"You had two sons by Andrew, didn't you?

"A daughter, too."

"I see," Francisco said. "What can I do for you?"

"Save me! Save me from myself," said Maria.

Francisco enunciated carefully and spoke slowly, because he was growing numb and he was afraid his speech would be slurred. "That's a tall order," he said.

"I didn't come here to have you make fun of me."

"Of course not."

The storm spoke for both of them. Maria had loved Francisco and left him. Maria had loved and left Andrew. Now Maria was trying to get over Tony, her third husband. Francisco was not shocked. He would not be surprised to discover, were he to live another hundred years, that Maria was ready to ditch her twenty-fifth husband. Maria changed the outlooks of men, but her own outlook was a constant.

"That hair, those eyes, that smile, that body of yours," Francisco said, "have always added up to trouble for men."

Maria looked down and smiled. He feared she would hurl one of her dagger-smirks at him, and all the alcohol in the world would not deaden the sting.

"But," Francisco continued, "trouble for your man equals trouble for you. It is a law of the universe." He stood up and walked stiffly around and stuck his thumbs in his pockets.

She looked out the window and took a breath that made her whole body move.

"Someone," he said, "maybe your papa, told you when you were a little girl that you could get whatever you wanted because you were pretty. People kept raving about you. Didn't some rock-and-roll band write a song about you? I seem to remember the words, 'Maria! Maria, you are the cutest girl ...' That was the biggest disfavor anybody ever did you. You thought you could have everything because of your eyes and body and legs and smile. You got me, you lucky thing. How many other men you've had, I'll never know, and I don't want to know. It's clear that you have not yet learned that the world was not conceived and created for the purpose of being exploited by you."

"You're as cruel as ever," said Maria. "The booze, the ambition, whatever, has eaten your heart away."

"If I were cruel I'd fall all over you," Francisco said, sitting back down on the couch, across the room from the easy chair. "If I were cruel I would plead with you to stay with me now, because ... because ... all right. Go ahead. Tell me your story. From the beginning. All the way from when you divorced me. Pour it out. Don't hold anything back. But I plan to get wasted tonight, and I do not intend to have you prevent it."

Maria had married Andrew, an officer in the Marine Corps, hoping the income would be steady and the medical care guaranteed for life. She had two sons and a daughter by him, one right after the other. She had always wanted to have children, and she had them. She did not seek wealth as an end in itself, so she said, but she wanted economic security, and got it, so she thought. And of course Andrew was a fantastic lover, and was the best-looking man on the base. Each of Maria's lovers had to be Numero Uno at something. Andrew was charming, he was practical, he was strong, and he was sober. Then Andrew was called to serve in one of those latter-day foreign adventures from which so many men return disfigured, insane, or addicted to drugs.

"Aha! The catch. A war," Francisco said. "Soldiering is great until there's a war."

"I couldn't handle the day-to-day fear. They kept talking about how the Marines were going to get cut to pieces," Maria said, droplets dripping from her face, eyes pleading for sympathy while her body radiated prowess that shone through the robe. But as much as Francisco longed to kiss away her tears, he believed that the spirit behind that face had been sold to a demonic power that would never relinquish it at any price.

"I divorced him when he got back. I couldn't bear the thought of him staying in the military, but he plans to stay till he's fifty or sixty or a hundred or whatever," said Maria.

"And the kids?"

"He got custody!"

"How?" Francisco asked. "It would seem you should have gotten custody."

"He said he'd have me committed to a government mental hospital if I didn't give him custody," sobbed Maria.

"I see."

"I must be sick in the head," said Maria.

"What would you have me do?" asked Francisco.

"Let me live with you!" she said.

How many times Francisco had dreamed, by day and by night, about this scene, when the only woman he ever loved would come back and ask him to have her! Now it was happening and he felt nothing. Was this his reward for putting all his being onto the printed page and into cyberspace? To have no life remaining in his own heart?

"You might be sick, Maria, but I am sicker," said Francisco. "I knew it when we were married. I saw the wreck that I would become. I thought I was doomed to drink myself to death. But the gods and the devils, those little jokers who roam the skies and burrow in the earth, had other things in mind."

Thunder cracked again. The wind had died down, and the waves came rolling in, pounded ever more down by vertical torrents.

"Maria," Francisco said, "I have cancer."

She looked at him with an expression he had never seen.

"Maria," he said, "There are six medical verdicts. A jury of doctors. All from Mayo's, the best clinic in the world. They are unanimous. I have no life to offer you."

"How? Cancer of the what? Why?" asked Maria.

"I didn't ask them why, and they didn't tell me why. Except," Francisco said, realizing he was smiling at one corner of his mouth, "it has nothing to do with my drinking. I'd have gotten it if I had never put a bottle to my face."

"They can't help you?"

"They say I'll die before summer."

"Let me live with you till then."

"Maria, this is not the sort of process you want to watch. Anyway, what about your husband Tony?"

"He had an affair."

"Is that all?" asked Francisco.

"Isn't that enough?"

"Enough for what? For you to leave him? At one time I would have said so. But what about him otherwise?"

"He's a wonderful person otherwise."

"He never threatens you or shouts at you or beats you?"

"He's not capable of such things."

"Is he good in bed?"

"Good enough."

"Imaginative, creative, athletic, you know, the way you like it?"

"Maybe."

Francisco looked at the floor. "How long did the affair last?" he asked.

"It was a one-time thing," said Maria. "He was just ... it was ... well, he's promised me it will never happen again."

"I suppose you've never had an affair without him knowing?"

"What would it prove?"

"How did you find out about his fling?"

"He told me."

"Then forgive him," said Francisco.

"What? Just like that?" asked Maria.

"Yes. Just like that."

"I can't believe it! You don't want me!" Maria said. Her eyelashes were still wet, and they stuck together and made little star points. Her gaze came through Francisco's pain and drunkenness and self-pity, revealing a truth too terrible for him to know before that moment.

Maybe he didn't want her. Maybe he didn't want anybody.

"It's not that simple," said Francisco.

"Yes it is!" said Maria.

"Oh, Maria! Even if I were in perfect health, I wouldn't be the man for you. I was not right for you before, and I am not right for you now. We both know that."

"You have published how many books? Twenty? Your name is all over the Internet. I have seen your stuff in the stores."

"You mean," Francisco drawled, "you've been looking?"

"It would not be like before," she continued. "We wouldn't fight about money. I'd let you write. You need someone."

"Writing makes gambling seem like a stable business, Maria. Rich today, poor tomorrow. I write exactly what I feel, too. I get threats against my life. If someone blows me away, he'll be doing me a favor. But you do not want to be here when he comes."

Maria looked down so Francisco saw only her hair, and for a moment she appeared old -- eighty, ninety, a hundred years old. Then she looked up again.

"Are you in pain?" asked Maria.

"Not when I'm drunk," said Francisco.

"But otherwise?"

"There is no otherwise."

"Why aren't you in the hospital?"

"All those doctors are smart, but they can't compete against one smart lawyer. The world goes on whether I feel good or not. It will go on regardless of you, too, Maria."

"So I should go back to Tony," said Maria.

"Yes," Francisco said. "He is a good man, you say. Hang onto him. Good men are hard to find and hard to keep."

Maria got up from the chair. "May I have my clothes back?"

"They are wet. I'll put them in the dryer." Francisco went into the bathroom. Maria's clothes and purse were lying in the tub. He got the clothes out. He threw the purse on his bed. He took the clothes downstairs to the laundry room. Rain fell straight down on him.

When he returned, Maria had poured a tumbler full of Francisco's best Scotch.

"That's the tonic for drizzmal nights," he said.

"It tastes like medicine I had when I was two years old," she replied.

"You drink all that and you'll feel two years old."

"It will also keep me from driving."

Francisco came up behind Maria and held her.

"Why me?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said.

"You are a fool," he whispered into her hair.  "Beautiful woman, bad choices.  It's a law of the universe."

Maria faced Francisco and tried to smile. "Do you have time for foolishness?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "Everybody does."

Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 by Francisco Carrera.