I’m not saying I entirely blame the heat for what I did, but I think if I had to go to court, I’d use a temporary heat insanity defense. After all, my first three months in Florida were the wrong ones – June, July, and August. Lucky me, my husband’s company transferred him from Phoenix to Orlando, so I got to move from one of the hottest places in the Union to another.
I missed Arizona, though. You could get out of Phoenix and go north to Prescott, Flagstaff, or any number of mountain towns that were beautiful in summer. But there was no escaping southern Florida. We rented a house in the suburbs inland from Ft. Lauderdale amongst the lakes, bogs, and mosquitos. Within a two-hour drive you could be in more lakes, bogs, and mosquitos. Within a two-hour drive from Phoenix, you could be up in Oak Creek Canyon, sipping wine on the deck of your cabin amongst the aspens and junipers. My parents took us up there every summer when we were kids. I missed the snap of the fire in the living room or the burble of the creek outside my bedroom window. Those nostalgic sounds were ones I would never, ever hear in Florida.
In the dead of summer, Florida just made people crazy. Within a month of our move, a woman was arrested for firing a pee-filled squirt gun at her ex-lover’s new girlfriend in a Kissimmee Burger King. In Port St. Lucie, a man wearing only a thong smeared himself with honey and shoplifted in a 7-Eleven by sticking half a dozen ice cream bars to his body. In Lakeland, a man held up a Winn-Dixie at gunpoint, demanding eighteen bags of ice—and nothing more. In the Everglades, a man fed an alligator an entire black forest ham his wife had cooked, nearly lost an arm doing it, and said it was still worth it not to have to eat it.
I was bored out of my mind my first months there. At least I wasn’t having a psychotic break in the Everglades, but I had no job, no friends, and no life. My husband, Garrett, was gone all the time, trying to make his mark at the bank. He would come home late, after I’d already eaten dinner, and he would try to be husbandly.
“How was your day?” he’d say.
“The same,” I’d say.
We’d watch ghost hunters or house flippers or something that mattered to neither of us on television, then we’d retreat to our bedroom where I would watch him go through his elaborate bedtime routine. He’d brush his teeth with a sonic toothbrush that sounded like a terrifying dentist’s drill. Then there was gargling and flossing. Then he’d wash his face and put on moisturizer cream like he was a GQ model with a middle-aged paunch. Then we’d get into bed, he’d kiss me on the cheek and hoist his CPAP mask over his face. He sounded like Darth Vader. It gave me nightmares and I spent half my nights on the couch watching Food Network reruns. I learned how to make a chocolate souffle at least four times.
Garrett was a studious husband. He made sure the bills were always paid on time, we got one dinner out once a week, and I had a plethora of cable channels to keep myself occupied. I went for walks at night, but during the day it was too hot to go out. I just sat lethargically in the air-conditioning in front of the TV.
I met one of the neighborhood housewives—Sally Eagleton—at the Publix. She was nice enough. She said her teenage son, Tommy, was trying to lose fifty pounds, so she was buying nothing but vegetables and lean proteins. Her son went out and sweated on a treadmill in the garage every night, she told me.
More power to him, I thought. I couldn’t imagine actually running. Florida was slow and lethargic. Sometimes it was creepy. The low moans of frogs I never saw and the invisible grey catbirds meowing in the trees made for a nightmarish symphony every time I went for my nightly walk. It was like the whole neighborhood was teeming with animal life. I had bizarre dreams. A female praying mantis sexually assaulted me, and I liked it and turned into a lesbian. Palmetto bugs tried to suffocate me in my own bed. An alligator came to my front door and spoke to me with telepathy. “What are you looking for?” he said. “Are you looking to rhumba?” I spent days trying to analyze that one. Was I looking to rhumba? And did he literally mean rhumba or was it a euphemism for doing something to escape the boredom of my daily life? Do you rhumba? Nod, wink. Why yes, I rhumba. Sly inviting smile. It was like I was living in a swingers’ palace in my mind while Garrett and I had sex just once since we moved to Florida.
Out on my walks, I longed for any sound not derived from the animal kingdom—a plane, a car passing by, the Cuban couple on 12th Street screaming at each other at the top of their lungs in Spanish, and then, down Costa Avenue before I made the turn back to our house, the whir of Tommy Eagleton’s treadmill and the pounding of his heavy feet as he tried to lose those fifty pounds.
One night, after I had walked through an array of spiderwebs and was trying to pull them out of my hair, I heard Sally calling to me. She and her husband, Shane, stood in their driveway. Shane was watering their gardenias out front with a hose. It was the first time I’d seen him, and I had to admit, he was a rather dashing man. He was tall, slim, and muscular. I could see his calves bulging as he picked debris from the flowers. He almost looked like a different species compared to my Garrett, who was a loving, caring man, but was balding and had grown a belly that got in the way whenever we did have pre-Florida sex.
“Hello!” Shane said. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”
“Thank you,” I said. I had been wearing a tight tank top and I saw his eyes fix on my boobs, then look back to the plants he was watering.
“Are you settling in, okay?” Sally said. “I know it can be so hot in summer. But you’re from Arizona. I’m sure that’s much more difficult.”
“Well, the humidity here…”
“Are you looking for a house yet?” Shane said. He had a mischievous twinkle in his eye that was hard to look away from when you made eye contact with him.
“Oh stop,” Sally said. “He’s a Realtor. He’s ready to sell you anything.”
“Oh really,” I said. “Well, we do need to start looking. Lord knows, we don’t want to be renting at this time next year.” This was a lie. I wanted to get out of Florida as fast as we had gotten there.
“No, of course not,” said Shane. “The market’s good. You should buy.”
And that was all it took. Two days later, I was sitting beside him in the front seat of his BMW, cruising through neighborhoods.
“I just want to give you the lay of the land first,” he said. “Then I’ll take you to some individual houses so you can get a sense of what you can get for your money.”
“Fantastic,” I said, looking at his tan, sinewy forearms. He wore a flamingo-colored shirt, which was so Florida. Garrett wouldn’t be caught dead in something like that. Yet somehow, Shane pulled it off. He looked like Don Johnson with his razor stubble. I bet he still had a white sport coat with rolled-up sleeves in his closet.
“The thing about Florida is,” he said, “it’s almost never a bad time to buy. There’s always someone from the Northeast or Chicago who wants to trade winter for perpetual summer.”
“Perpetual summer,” I said. “I never thought of it that way.”
“It’s never-ending, Florence,” he said.
He took me to a couple of ranches to start off, and they were fine. Modest, middle-class accommodations with small backyards, but suitable enough. Then he took me to a Mediterranean split level, and I could tell he personally was a far bigger fan of that one. His energy completely changed as we walked past the fountain out front and paused inside the foyer.
“Now, this is a house!” he said. “And the killer thing is, the sellers? They only lived here four or five months a year and never rented it out. It’s pristine. You barely have to do any upgrading. It’s Mediterranean chic.”
“It’s nice,” I said.
“The owners—they’re never here in summer. They haven’t been here in months.”
There was a decent-sized pool out back with a hot tub and a large barbecue station.
“Perfect for entertaining,” Shane said. Then he looked me over and said, “And you would look perfect, lounging poolside with a margarita in your hand.” He smiled and winked. I had chosen another low-cut top that showed off my cleavage. I loved how he looked at me unabashedly. Garret was so focused on his work, I could have streaked naked across our kitchen and I don’t think he would have noticed.
We went upstairs where there was a large master suite—big enough for a king-size bed, two nightstands, a makeup counter, and a large chaise with a reading lamp that sat in the corner of the room.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “But you must see the bathroom.” Then he took me by the hand—he literally grabbed my hand—and whisked me into the bathroom. There was travertine flooring, a separate shower, and a gorgeous soaking tub beneath a skylight. There was a large vanity with dual sinks and a mirror that spanned the entire wall from the waist up. I stood there looking in the mirror at the two of us. I imagined Shane brushing his teeth in the morning, gargling with minty-fresh mouthwash, and saying, “Good morning, love.” It would have been a nice change from the grinding of Garrett’s sonic toothbrush and the spittle leaking down his chin.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“It is,” he said, looking down at my chest again. And then he stepped forward and kissed me right there in the bathroom. Before I knew it, he led me back into the bedroom where he bent me over the bed, pressed his weight against me, and kissed the back of my neck while he playfully pulled my hair. I’d never been with a man who was so aggressive. He twisted and turned me the way he wanted. He ripped the comforter off the bed, threw me down into the sheets, and came at me like a wild animal.
When it was over, we lay there, sweating in someone else’s bed, staring up at the ceiling fan as it spun round and round, making me dizzy. I wondered about the ethics of what we had just done. I imagined the people who owned the house coming home to their spoiled sheets.
“That was fantastic,” Shane said. “I knew you would like this house.”
It went on that way for weeks. He would pick me up and take me to different houses to screw me. Sometimes we would bring our bathing suits and use the pool or a hot tub. One time we even cooked dinner in a nice coastal contemporary home with a couple of beautiful magnolia trees in the back. “The owner hasn’t been here for weeks,” he said. “I told her I would run the appliances every so often to make sure everything stays in working order. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if we took one of the bottles from her wine collection either.”
The sex was good. I mean, I’d been with Garrett since high school, so what did I know? The sex was different. Shane made it fun. He wore a cowboy hat once like he was role playing. He gave me massages and dripped candle wax on my back. He sucked my toes. I didn’t really know what to do. I would just kind of mirror what he did. If he grunted, I’d grunt. If said, “I want to fuck you so hard you can’t walk tomorrow,” I’d say, “Yeah, I want to cripple you, too.”
He flipped me around in all sorts of positions. He had names for them and called them out while we did it. “The Corkscrew!” “The Pretzel!” “The Wheelbarrow!”
“Yeah, give me more ‘Magic Mountain,’” I’d say, but I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I’d leave every round of sex sweaty, with muscles I hadn’t used in a long time—like ever—shaking mercilessly.
I was extra special to Garrett on the days of my sexual indiscretions. I would cook him elaborate meals: filet mignon with roasted brussels sprouts, eggplant parmesan with cannoli for dessert, poached salmon with grilled asparagus. We ate well every time I slept with Shane. It seemed to pick up Garrett’s spirits. On one Tuesday I even slept with Shane and Garrett on the same day. That’s how I rationalized that what I was doing was okay. It was fulfilling some kind of need I had, and life was getting better for Garrett, too. I no longer bitched at him that he spent too much time working and that we never did anything together. I became a good housewife. I cleaned. I did the dishes. I made the bed. I even did his laundry, complete with folding and ironing—something I never did before we moved to Florida.
Sometimes Shane and I wouldn’t even go tour houses. We’d just take long drives somewhere. He introduced me to places that were unique to Florida. We went to Monkey Jungle where the people were caged and the monkeys ran free. We visited Parrot Jungle where they would stack parrots on your shoulders and charge you $20 for a picture. I’m not a fan of birds of any kind and shrieked until they got them off of me. In the picture, Shane stood robustly beside me with his hands on his hips, flashing that coy Miami Vice smile.
One time he took me to an alligator park and we ziplined over alligators. I almost lost my marbles. I imagined falling into one of their pens and Shane coming to my rescue, shouting, “I’ll save you, Flo!” Then, of course, he wrestled an alligator into submission, who then telepathically complained to me that he just wanted to rhumba.
Another time he wanted to take me to the zoo, but I said I couldn’t take any more animals and begged for something different. Instead, we went to the Coral Castle, where a five-foot, hundred-pound Latvian man named Edward Leedskalnin single-handedly carved 1,100 tons of coral rock into a home and a sprawling sculpture garden with statues of everything from a clock tower to a crescent moon to a sundial to ornate water fixtures that had been working since the ‘50s. There was a multi-ton door on a single hinge at the entrance that they said anyone could open with a finger back in the day.
“They say the man that built this place did it all by himself over decades for unrequited love,” Shane said.
“That’s romantic,” I said.
“Is it?” Shane said. “He repeatedly invited her to see his masterpiece and she never came.”
“I guess that’s sad,” I said.
“It’s a downright travesty,” Shane said.
On the way home, he pulled over into a secluded, wooded campground off the highway and asked me to have sex in the car. I was not comfortable. I thought there might be people around who would see.
“Let them,” he said. “What do I care?”
The woods reminded me a little of northern Arizona, which I still missed profoundly. For some reason, I still had it in my head that I’d move back there, stay clear of the heat in Phoenix, and get a little cabin outside Cottonwood or Sedona. I rolled down my window, hoping to hear the burble of a running brook or the wind through the junipers. Then I remembered I was in Florida and all I could hear were maniacal cicadas.
Shane reached to unbutton my blouse and I pushed his hand away.
“Not here,” I said.
The cicadas were deafening. Even if I wanted to have sex in a car, I think I would have been too distracted. Why did these bugs make so much noise? One of them dropped on the windshield and Shane flicked on the wiper blades, flattened it, and spread bug goo across the glass so that I couldn’t see the road on the way home. I just kept staring at the remnants of the dead cicada, thinking that I wanted someone to build me a coral castle, not screw me in the backseat of a Beamer.
We did it one more time after that—back at the Mediterranean split level. We had a meal of broiled sea scallops with a zucchini and squash medley tossed in olive oil. Then Shane led me upstairs. Fall was upon us by now, and it was a cooler night. He opened the sliding glass door to the deck of the bedroom, then pulled me onto the bed with him. There was no foreplay or fun this time. He just slipped it in, like he’d had an itch to scratch since that day we’d gone to the Coral Castle and I rebuffed him in the woods. He pumped away and my head kept snapping against the headboard. I put a pillow behind me so I wouldn’t get concussed and thought of Edward Leedskalnin, working in the darkness so no one could know how he did it, using levers and wheels and the “secrets of the ancient Egyptians,” as he touted, to build his love letter to the woman of his dreams. So much brute force and labor, so much effort. I imagined him putting me up on his pedestal—literally placing me in the cradle of his handcrafted crescent moon, where I could look up at the stars and just be thankful to be alive. I imagined him waiting on me hand and foot, day after day, trying to prove his love to me. “I know!” I’d say to him. “Don’t worry, I know! You built all this for me. I would never leave you.”
Shane’s grunting and groaning broke up my reverie about me, Edward Leedskalnin, and our happy lives together. All of a sudden, I heard the screeching of feral cats outside. At first, they sounded like babies wailing for their mothers. Then it turned into a fight and got ugly. They must have been protecting their Florida turf. As he orgasmed, Shane let loose at a squeal nearly as high as the cats, yelling, “Yeah, baby, yeah!”
He rolled off me and I stared at the ceiling fan revolving overhead, and then, belatedly, remembered to mimic him. “Yes, oh yes,” I said. Then the tree frogs began their nightly symphony.
I’d like to say that as summer passed into fall and fall passed into winter, that I regained my composure and moved on with my unmerry little life, enduring useless TV shows with Garrett again and watching him sleep like a humanoid with his CPAP mask every night.
But cooler weather did not fix things. I never saw Shane again, but his wife somehow saw the pictures of us at Parrot Jungle and all hell broke loose. Yeah, poor Sally. Subtlety was not her strong suit. She came over to our house and shrieked in our living room for an hour one Sunday afternoon.
“Goddammit, Sally,” I said. “It’s not like I’m the only woman he’s sleeping with. Why are you making me pay?”
But she made me pay dearly. That night ol’ Garrett went catatonic on me, standing there in front of the bathroom mirror, grinding away at his teeth for thirty minutes with that sonic toothbrush. I finally had to grab a towel and wipe the drool running down his chin.
The next morning, he did not go to work for the first time since we had moved to Florida. He sat at the kitchen table eating burnt toast and said, “I want a divorce.”
I didn’t fight it. Neither of us moved out right away. We were stuck in a lease that the landlord wouldn’t let us out of. I slept on the couch for months. I kept doing my walks at night. By December I had to wear a sweatshirt. I enjoyed passing by all the Christmas lights and the Spanish-speaking Santa Claus out front of the angry Cuban couple’s house on 12th Street. By Valentine’s Day, he was still there, on the ground now, covered with soot, the bugs eating into his jolly red coat.
By the time summer came around, people started to do crazy stuff again in the heat. In Orlando, a woman was arrested after breaking into a home just to use the pool. In Leesburg, a twelve-year-old boy rode his bicycle off the roof of his parents’ house into the pool, knocked himself unconscious and nearly drowned. In a strange copycat incident in the Villages retirement community, a senior citizen rode his $4,000 “Gatsby” luxury party scooter into the pool and sank to the bottom until lifeguards pulled him to safety.
I never got near a pool, the ocean, or even a water hose. I just kept sweating, doing my walks. I got used to the toads and egrets and lizards as I huffed and puffed around my neighborhood. The sounds of the cicadas, frogs, and catbirds didn’t faze me anymore. I just heard the whirr of the treadmill in the Eagletons’s garage as I quietly skulked by their house every night, trying not to be seen or heard. As I finished each walk, I thought of northern Arizona, and what it would take to get me back there. I heard Payson was nice. It’s surrounded by evergreens in the Tonto National Forest, not far from the San Francisco Peaks. I’d rather be a mountain girl than a Florida girl any day. It was just a matter of time before I got there.
