Paul Levine: Riptide

She showed him how to open the camera, her hands touching his and lingering. “Birthday present for you,” Violet Belfrey said. “Now, let’s take some pictures.”

Samuel Kazdoy shrugged his rounded shoulders. “What’s to take here?”

They were in his office on the mezzanine of the South Side Theater in Miami Beach. The ventilation was bad, and the theater smelled of age, a tired building in a dying part of town that somehow missed the renaissance going on all around it. Samuel Kazdoy puttered around every afternoon in the dimly lit office and checked in evenings at his twenty-four-hour delicatessen on Collins Avenue. If you’ve worked for seventy years, you can’t turn it off just because the sand is running out of the glass.

“Ah’ll show you two things to take,” Violet said, peeling off her orlon sweater and slipping out of a sheer red brassiere. She loosened her platinum hair, shaking it in streams over her shoulders, her breasts tumbling free. “How’s this for a Kodak moment?”

He squinted through the viewfinder. “Ay, you got some moxie, bubeleh.”

“Jes’ aim and push the button,” Violet said. He did, the flash bleaching the office in white light and casting tiny shadows in the furrows of her forehead. She squeezed out of her tight jeans and high-stepped out of her panties that matched the brassiere right down to the red frilly trim. She turned sideways and arched her back so that her buns jutted skyward like the ramp of a ski jump, and at the same time, squashed her breasts together with her arms. There was no seduction on her lips, no excitement in her eyes. She could have been composing grocery lists for all that her face revealed.

Kazdoy clicked another picture. Eyes smarting from the flash, Violet Belfrey saw a strip joint in Jacksonville a dozen years earlier. She had danced on a table there and even now could smell the stale beer on the wooden bar and feel the salesmen’s clammy hands tucking dollar bills into her garter, copping a quick feel as she stepped down. She hated it when the music stopped and she heard the scumbags laughing and the glasses tinkling, no longer able to pretend she was alone.

Violet Belfrey saw more than her share of motel ceilings in Jax, which she figured was the world’s largest jerkwater town, a place where the stench of the paper mills clung to your clothes like flypaper on a summer night. She had been stuck halfway between the Carolina mountains and the Florida Gold Coast, and the money was decent even if the men were not. She remembered a blur of flushed faces, of men who leaned close with spur breath and winked that maybe a double sawbuck was the key to her apartment door. Never again, she had vowed, would she sell herself. At least not so cheaply, she later amended.

“ Gottenyu! ” Kazdoy wore a child’s look of astonishment as the instant film developed before his eyes. The legs appeared, the bare round bottom, the breasts filling in, all creamy smoothness, the nipples flat, oblivious to his attention.

Kazdoy loosened his clip-on tie and removed the plaid sports coat. An old sensation tugged within him but he knew it was his memory stirring, not his loins.

He shuffled across the cluttered office filled with photos of company picnics, sketches of new factories, and industry awards. A short man with fringes of white hair, he wore a blue plaid polyester sports coat and a baggy pair of pants that fit better when Ike was president. Placing a hand on Violet’s shoulder, Kazdoy said, “Here, bubeleh, I got something for you.”

She stiffened a moment, an old reflex no matter how many times she’d been down that road. The feeling passed as it always did and she was ready for him, but Samuel Kazdoy walked past her, threw back a soiled blanket that covered a file cabinet, and twirled a combination lock. Violet squinted, but the seventy-five-watt bulb tossed shadows, and her eyes still saw blue lightning from the flash.

“How do you remember the combination?” she asked, hoping he would say it aloud. “My little ole head would never keep all the numbers straight.”

Kazdoy laughed, touching a finger to his forehead. “My hop still works, even if my schmeckel don’t.” He opened the cabinet and Violet saw bundles of papers, legal-looking with fancy script writing and colorful borders. “Coupons,” he continued, reaching in with both hands, a kid in a candy bowl. “Put ‘em in a safe place. And the first of every month, take ‘em to the bank.”

The only coupons Violet knew got you twenty-five cents off the kitchen cleanser, so she had no idea what he was giving her, but she figured if you take them to the bank, they can’t be half bad. Violet stuffed the documents into the bag from the camera store and quickly put on her clothes. She gave the old man a peck on the cheek.

“Thanks, Mr. K. You’re the only thing in pants what’s ever been nice to me without askin’ somethin’ in return.”

“You’re some tsatske,” he said with the smile of a young man. His dark eyes were bright and still sparkled with the gift of laughter. “Now run along before I start something I can’t finish. I got coupons to clip for the first of December, and so do you.”

“You’re a sweetie,” Violet said, wondering what the hell he had given her and what was left behind in the locked cabinet.

“Sweetie?” Samuel Kazdoy shook his head and smiled again. “Twenty years ago… no make it ten, I’d have given you something sweet. I’d have shtupped you from here to Shamokin.”

The sign bolted to the stucco wall said sea view terrace, though the drab, three-story building had neither. Violet had moved in shortly after answering the classified ad in the Miami Beach Sun: “ Shayna maidel or shiksa wanted as Gal Friday for owner of theater and delicatessen.” She figured the job couldn’t be worse than the midnight shift at the Sunny Isles Peep Show.

It was only a five-minute walk to the apartment building from Kazdoy’s office, and tonight there would be no detours. A few aging widows still lived there, having relocated from Brooklyn or Jersey, but now the tenants were mostly Hispanic. To Violet, they were mostly Cuban, for she made no distinction between the Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Colombians, and a melting pot of others from the Caribbean and Central and South America. All she knew, they jabbered in Spanish so loud you couldn’t hear the old Jews hacking up phlegm across the hall.

Violet could tell the difference between her Hispanic neighbors and the Haitians who moved in a block away at the Ocean Manor. The Haitians were blacker than midnight, poorer than Georgia crackers, and they scared the bejesus out of her when she walked by their building. No matter that the men looked down as she walked by, Violet feared them for their barechested blackness. This night, one of them painted bright pictures on a piece of driftwood, another carved a woman’s torso in a piece of dark mahogany. Violet eyeballed the knife as she passed. She clenched the camera store bag until her knuckles were white. Thirty paces from the front steps of her building, a blur flashed from behind.

“Cuidate mujer!” Manuel, a skinny twelve-year-old from the second floor, flew by on his skateboard and Violet stumbled off the curb.

“Stay off the sidewalk, you little greaseball!” Violet shrieked after him.

Tingling with anticipation, Violet climbed the stairs. The hallway smelled of fried bananas. Behind the thin walls, a child wailed. Once inside her apartment, Violet’s bony hands were a blur of motion. She made a small pot of black coffee. She tied her hair back into a ponytail and sat cross-legged in the tiny living room. She spread the papers onto the living room floor, the cheap shag carpeting matted under the glorious display of colors, blue and orange and purple borders. On top of each one, a finely etched eagle, a magnificent predator with wings unfolding and poised for flight. Violet Belfrey felt like singing the national anthem.