Филип Керр - A Five Year Plan

Al walked into the pool-house.

‘Morning Al,’ smiled Sindy.

‘Morning Sindy.’

Just about the first thing Al looked for after he had looked at Sindy’s pubic hair and then her tits was Sindy’s orange juice. Tony didn’t swim a prescribed number of lengths, or even a set period, but only for as long as it took Sindy to finish him off in her mouth. If Sindy was drinking orange juice it meant that she and Tony were done.

‘Party over?’

Sindy toasted Al silently with half a glass of juice and then sipped at it teasingly. Al’s eyes stayed on her lips and the juice.

‘Want some?’ she said, offering him the glass.

‘Ah no, thanks, ah, Sindy.’

There was no way Al was going to put his lips anywhere near that glass after what her mouth had been doing.

‘Sure? It’s um... freshly squeezed. Y’know what I’m sayin’?’

‘Sure. I ah... just had breakfast.’

‘Hmm. So did I.’ Sindy swallowed thoughtfully. ‘Rather a lot as it happens. Tony must be taking extra zinc or something.’ Giggling at Al’s very obvious discomfort, Sindy tapped him on the nose with one of her long, scarlet fingernails and called out to the weary looking man crawling slowly towards the poolside: ‘OK, hon, I’m outta here. You OK? Want me to help you out?’

‘I’m OK. And you helped me out enough already. Thanks, baby. I’ll call you.’

‘Later.’

Al watched Sindy’s bare ass all the way back to the changing rooms and shook his head in quiet desperation.

‘I should learn to fuckin’ swim,’ he said.

‘You said it, Mary Joe.’

‘Mary Joe’ was what Tony always called Al whenever the subject of Al not swimming came up, after Mary Joe Kopechne, the girl who drowned at Chappaquiddick when Ted Kennedy didn’t. ‘Mary Joe’, or sometimes ‘Pussy’.

Nudelli sank beneath the surface of the water and kicked his way toward the pool steps. Al had to admit, Tony looked good for a man of his age. His shoulders and chest were broad and he still had all his hair which was a Cary Grant shade of silver gray. Nudelli enjoyed the comparison.

‘Hand me that robe, will ya Al?’ Nudelli said, surfacing again and coming up the steps.

Hung too, thought Al. Like a horse. It looked like Sindy had her work cut out. For an older guy Tony sure had a whole lot going for him. Al collected a towel robe off the back of a white rattan chair and handed it over. Nudelli slipped it on. As he sat down he jerked his head toward the wet bar.

‘Fix yourself some breakfast if you want,’ said Nudelli, putting on his glasses and selecting a large Cohibas from the rosewood humidor on the etched glass table. ‘There’s fruit and coffee, all kinds of shit.’

‘Thanks, I already had some.’ Al started to laugh as he remembered the story he had prepared for Tony’s amusement.

‘No coffee?’

‘Yeah, coffee, thanks. Here let me get it.’ Al walked over to the wet bar, picked the Cona jug off the hot-plate and poured two mugfuls. ‘Well, I say breakfast,’ he said, bringing over the coffee. ‘Weirdest fucking breakfast I ever ate. And that includes the ones in Holland.’

Nudelli puffed the cigar into service and flicked the match onto the surface of the pool confident that the pool man would scoop it out later on.

‘How’s that?’

‘Ever since I was a kid I have to have a bowlful of Wheaties for breakfast.’

‘I remember,’ said Nudelli. ‘When we were in Vegas last year you were a real pain in the ass about it.’

‘The breakfast of champions.’

‘Don’t start on that bullshit. If there’s one thing I hate in the morning it’s an advertising slogan. It’s like finding a turd in an unflushed toilet bowl.’

‘So this morning I come down to the kitchen and Madonna’s in there with the kids and it’s like, y’know. Fuckin’ chaos is what it is, right? And all I want to do is have my bowl of Wheaties and then get the fuck out of there before I have a cerebral hemorrhage with all the fuckin’ noise there is. Anyway, I get the bowl of Wheaties and sit down at the table and look around for the cream and there isn’t any left in the jug. No problem. I can see that she’s got her hands full what with the new baby n’all. I’m not above fetching my own fuckin’ cream from the icebox. Trouble is that there isn’t any in the icebox either and so I start to cuss. What’s the problem? she says. The problem, I tell her, is that there is no fuckin’ cream to put on my Wheaties. I’m sorry honey, she says, I guess we must have run out. The kids drink it like they’d never heard of Coca-Cola, which is good because they need the calcium. I can see we’ve run out, I say, but what am I going to do? You know it screws up my whole day if I don’t leave the house with a bowlful of Wheaties inside of me. You know what she did?’

‘Surprise me.’

‘She’s walking around breast-feeding the baby, right?’

‘Jesus, ya can go to the zoo if you wanna see that shit.’

‘The next minute she plucks the tit from the kid’s gums, leans over my fuckin’ shoulder and squirts a couple of ounces of breast milk all over the Wheaties.’ Al quickly mimed the action he was describing.

Tony started to laugh.

‘What the fuck is this? I ask her and she says, What the fuck do you think it is, asshole? It’s milk. I can see it’s fuckin’ milk, I tell her. I just wonder what you think you’re doin’ with your fuckin’ tits in my breakfast. It’s good enough for your kids, but not you, is that what you’re saying? she says.

Tony was laughing hard now, and coughing too as his air got mixed with cigar smoke, so that he sounded like a small motorcycle engine ticking over. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘She says, How many of the other guys have wives who could do this? You should be glad. It’s fresh and it doesn’t cost you a fuckin’ cent. The money you give me to keep this house? You’re lucky you don’t get this every morning, ya cheap bum.’

Tony said, ‘Jesus Christ, that Madonna. I love her. She’s a piece of work. She looks like Tugboat Annie, but I love that fuckin’ wife of yours, Al.’ He wiped his streaming eyes on the collar of his bathrobe. ‘So what happened next?’

Al said, ‘What happened next? I ate the fuckin’ Wheaties. That’s what happened.’

Both men exploded with laughter, with Al coming down first.

‘I mean, it was that or no Wheaties, right?’

‘Oh Jesus,’ sighed Tony, finally replacing his glasses. ‘How could you do that?’

Al shrugged, uncharacteristically at a loss for something to say.

‘Well come on, Al. Whaddit fuckin’ taste like?’

Al’s face wrinkled with thought as he tried to recall.

He said, ‘Warm, of course. Kind of like the skimmed you get in those little creamer cartons when you’re in McDonald’s. I prefer the milk that comes out of a cow, but Al junior seems to like it. Can’t get enough of the stuff.’

‘That Madonna. She’s something.’ Just the thought of the big redhead made him squirm. God only knew what she looked like when she was around the house. She looked bad enough when she was dressed to come out to dinner. Al on the other hand, Al made an effort about the way he dressed. It wasn’t the effort Nudelli would have made, but still. Just now he was wearing an expensive-looking yellow Gianni Versace shirt that looked like a silk cushion cover, some black leather jeans that were made to be worn by someone a lot thinner than Al, a white snakeskin belt, and red cowboy boots — not to mention a lot of gold this n’that. Nudelli thought Al Cornaro looked like a nigger’s Christmas tree, although by Miami standards he could pass for well-dressed. People in Florida knew shit from Shinola when it came to clothes and Al was no exception. They went anywhere outside the Sunshine State and Tony usually made Al wear a Brooks Brothers suit with a proper shirt and tie. A suit was business. Nudelli was an Anglophile. English shoes. English suits. He always bought English.