John Brandon
Naples. Not Italy.
It rained that whole weekend, a month of rain in three or four days. Our friend was down, a woman our age but single, and shy in an ugly way. After a few hours with us, she softened. She needs us in order to be herself. In the old days, in the desert and in a lot of other places, we had shown her who she was, that she didn’t have to like everything she saw, that she didn’t have to smile so much. We’d forced her to make lots of dinners. We cooked her into a person and then overcooked her and then left her.
The TV stays on, muted, day after day. None of us have what it takes to turn it off or sit and listen to a program. The TV is as big as a booth, an old-fashioned big-screen, the projector type, from before they started flattening TV’s out and hanging them on walls. You could collect tolls from inside this TV, or serve espresso, or dispense pills. The TV is our connection to the fresh disasters of the world. We watch earthquakes soundlessly topple buildings in Asia. We see Alabama leveled by tornadoes. No hurricane will ever hit Naples. These people have good insurance and strong houses and if someone dies, well, they were getting ready to die anyway. God is mean, but not inefficient.
The TV shows us which priests and starlets are doing the wrong things. We make a point not to root against them, not to judge.
The TV shows us the world of the young. It’s crap compared to our young world. The new young world is easy to make fun of, but this fact does not comfort us in the least. We are around thirty, so there are times when there is no comfort for us.
Lara, our visitor, owns an empty, lovely condo in another part of the state. All the land around Lara’s condo was clear-cut, and then the whole project was halted. Her building is the only one. Florida is too flat, the very bottom of something vast. The clouds look sloppily clumped. At night, at Lara’s condo, it’s like the moon. The way Lara chooses to live is, for her, a kind of dying. In the mornings, she runs until she hurts her feet.
On TV is a painting show. It’s the show that guy Ross used to be on. The new guy is more Ross-like than Ross, dreamier. What he’s painting looks like a flower pot until it looks like an oaken bucket. We don’t know what type of wood the bucket is meant to be made from, but we’ve all heard of an oaken bucket. None of us have heard of a pine bucket or an elm bucket or, for sure, a palm bucket. Palm trees are meant only to make people wistful. Wistfulness is taking us over. When it moves in, there’s no room for anything else.
We can’t remember if we truly loved Ross or if we loved the idea of him. And this new guy, he could drop dead for all we care.
The game, out on the front porch, is called 20-Point Turn. All you do is sit with your drink, hidden among fake trees, and watch the old folks try to park. The rules of 20-Point Turn can be changed on the spot. Points can be given, to no one in particular, every time a wife gets out of the car and directs her husband—a couple points if she does it decently, more if she squawks.
I’ve done something to my back, something involving a disc. When I go to the mailboxes, the old men think I'm mocking them.
We talk about giving each other nicknames. That’s the type of thing we try to talk about, so Lara won’t cry. You can always talk about nicknames. Other types of inside jokes get depressing, but not nicknames. If any of us ever has a child, the first thing we’ll do is give it nicknames. My wife wants Lara’s nickname to be Thomas. There’s no reason why.
What kind of pill is best for a backache is a topic. Whether to keep doing our own taxes is a topic. Yoga, which Lara does and my wife and I don’t, is a topic. Computer brands. You can see what I’m getting at.
The palms are here to sway. The alligators are here to eat small dogs and collect indigestible collars in their guts. The white birds are here to stab the ground. The old folks are here to die in pleasant weather. We’re still figuring out what we’re here for. We’re figuring out what’s needed.
The note on my car says: HOW ABOUT GIVING US A BREAK, WE CANNOT GET IN AND OUT WITH OUR BIKES AND BUNDLES. It’s not signed. Whoever left the note wants me to believe I’m blocking his front walk by parking where I’ve parked, in the closest space, but he and I both know why he doesn’t want me there. That space is bigger than the others. It’s wider. I park my Honda there on purpose for the good of our game. My wife suggests we put a new note on my car window, one that will read: IF YOU WANT A BREAK, GO BREAK YOUR FUCKING HIP. We don’t do it, though. At our age, we care about being good people. Teenagers and old folks do whatever they please. Maybe it’s right there’s no one else in this town, just teenagers by the dozens and old folks by the thousands.
Each evening, we go to a restaurant in the ritzy downtown, our only outing of the day, jogging in the rain from the car to the awnings. I limp when I jog, but still, I can jog. The restaurants are too expensive for us, but we can’t let the old folks have anything on us. If they’re going to have pistachio-crusted yellowtail snapper in an apple and rum sauce, so are we. And we know the wines. We enjoy food more than they do. We hope, each of us silently, that when the old folks see us sighing and cooing and letting our jaws roll luxuriantly, they’ll think about the sex we must have.
The condo we rent is full of the old lady’s figurines. The day we moved in, we piled them all in the spare room. There is enough ceramic in that room to fill a grave.
The condo complex is immense. You could say it’s a square mile and nobody could argue. It may be a lot more than a square mile. The pool, which we’ve yet to walk to, is the largest in Southwest Florida.
The last night of her visit, Lara wins 20-Point Turn. An old man hits her car. She’s got a Nissan she’s taken great care of, that she takes religiously for waxes and transmission flushes and new tires even when it doesn’t need them, like a sickly child to his check-ups. Now her Nissan has a dent in the quarter panel. Lara decides not to care. She decides that her incessant car care is getting pathetic. The dent is a blessing. Lara has no human being to care for and she has begun caring for her car instead. She knows it’s worth a dent to win the game, because she could really use a win. When the guy finally gets into the space and gets himself up out of his Grand Marquis, the three of us cheer. We have bought bottles of electric blue, pre-mixed cocktail called Hypnotiq, and are drinking it out of plastic cups. This is something only people our age will do: make fun of things by consuming them.
Angels, as we imagine them, sing magnificently, if grudgingly.
Angels, as we imagine them, limp under the weight of a vacant feeling that must be satisfaction. It’s an arrogant limp, the limp of a young man who knows he’ll heal by morning.
If angels are male, it isn’t because men behave better on Earth, but because God understands men better and likes to give them a break. Men are the same as they were thousands of years ago, while the souls of women have grown unrecognizable. God knows what the old men of the condo complexes will do when He halts the rain for ten minutes. Each will scurry out, each with his own mind and his own towel, and dry off his huge automobile for fear of water spots.
Angels are lonely. They don’t know where to look for the other angels, don’t know if other angels would be happy to see them. They feel the presence of the other angels most strongly when they all do the same thing at the same time, like when the death of a child calls them to 
[Read an interview with John Brandon.]
Prose: Underwater Christ Statue off Key Largo, Mark Theiss/Ultimate Chase/Corbis, 2007 Poetry: Above a Small Swamp (detail), Maud Gatewood, 1992
