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"Is a cute little thing," she finishes, but looks angry saying it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and abandoned.
"She'll be down soon," he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness. This is the kind of woman he's ended up with, after Mary A
"She should wait," Mrs. Zabritski says.
"I'll tell her you said so," he says loudly, fighting the magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors apart in this corridor like a long peach-colored chute glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty-two. Not so bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.
He tries to watch TV but it makes him restless. The last of the summer reruns are mixed in with previews of new shows that don't look that much different: families, laugh tracks, zany dropins, those three-sided living-room sets with the stairs coming down in the background like in Cosby, and front doors on the right through which the comical good-natured grandparents appear, bearing presents and presenting problems. The door is on the right in Cosby and on the left in Rosea
At first he thinks Janice has tried so hard to reach him those four days before the phone got co
The local air down here this time of year is full of violence, as if the natives are on good behavior during the winter season. Hurricane alarms (Gabrielle packs punch), head-on car crashes, masked holdups at Publix. The day after Labor Day, lightning kills a young football player leaving the field after practice; the story says Florida has more deaths by lightning than any other state. In Cape Coral, a Hispanic police officer is charged with beating his cocker spaniel to death with a crowbar. Sea turtles are dying by the thousands in shrimp nets. A killer called Petit whose own mother says he looks like Charles Manson is pronounced mentally fit to stand trial. That Deion Sanders is still making the front page of the Fort Myers News-Press: one day he knocks in four runs and a homer playing baseball for the Yankees, the next he signs for millions to play football for the Atlanta Falcons, and the very next he's being sued by the auxiliary cop he hit last Christmas at that shopping mall, and on Sunday he bobbles a punt return for the Falcons but runs it back for a touchdown anyway, the only man in human history to hit a home run and score a touchdown in pro ball the same week.
Deion has right stuff
Enjoy it while he can. He calls himself Prime Time and is always on the TV news wearing sunglasses and gold chains. Rabbit watches that big kid Becker beat Lendl in the U.S. Te
He talks to nobody, except for Mrs. Zabritski when she catches him in the hall, and the teenage Florida-cracker salesclerks when he buys his food and razor blades and toilet paper, and the people who feel obliged to make chitchat, the other retirees, in the Valhalla dining room; they always ask about Janice so it gets to be embarrassing and he more and more just heats up something frozen and stays in the condo, ransacking the cable cha