Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling

This wasn’t standard operating procedure, but Karma was fascinated by his honesty. Honesty was all too rare in this business, she’d learned. “Go ahead,” she said, realizing that she was holding her breath. She let it out slowly, wondering if it was too much to hope that he’d describe a five-foot-eleven natural blonde with large feet, green eyes and breasts slightly on the small side.

“She’ll have light hair. Yellow, like sunbeams. Kind of like yours, only straighter.” He studied her. Appraised her. She didn’t know exactly what that look meant, but she took it that he didn’t exactly disapprove of what he saw. Until he went on talking, that is.

“She’ll be tiny. A little bird of a woman. And her voice will be sweet. Maybe she’ll like singing in the church choir.”

Karma couldn’t sing a note. And tiny she wasn’t. As her hopes faded, she said stoically, “Go on.”

“She’ll be comfortable on the ranch, know how it works. Or be willing to learn. I don’t expect her to rope and brand cattle, but she should understand that this is part of what I do. And she’ll be crazy about me. From the very beginning if possible. I aim to have me a wife by this summer.”

“What’s happening this summer?”

He looked at her as if she was crazy for asking. “Why, our honeymoon. I’ve already signed us up for an Alaskan cruise.”

“Oh.” Karma was nonplussed.

He zeroed in on her astonishment. “What do you mean, ‘oh’?” Is there something wrong with that?”

“Occasionally a wife likes to help choose the honeymoon spot,” Karma said, holding back the sarcasm with great effort.

She judged from the perplexed expression in his eyes that this had never occurred to him.

“I figured that if the woman loves me, then anyplace is all right with her. For the honeymoon, I mean.”

She took pity on him. “In some cases, that’s true,” she relented, and his smile warmed her heart.

Her heart had no place in this. She willed it to stop leaping around in her chest and pretended to make a notation on the form. But as she concentrated on her task, one side of her was having an argument with the other side. Sounding very much like her aunt Sophie, the yenta side counseled, “You’ve got yourself a client. You’ve got a paying customer on the hoof. Don’t scare him away.” The Karma side hissed, “Stupid! This is a really great guy. Why give him away to someone else? Why not keep him for yourself?”

A disturbing thought. She’d given up on men two or three relationships ago.

She cleared her throat. She cleared her mind. Or attempted to, anyway.

“Mr. Braddock. This is certainly enough information for me to match you up with some charming clients.”

He beamed. “Now that’s good news.” He produced a money clip and peeled off several bills. “Here’s the registration fee.”

Karma’s eyes bugged out at the wad of cool cash. Most people paid with a credit card. Most people didn’t carry that much money around.

He put the money back in his pocket. “I can’t tell you how downright scared I was coming in here today. I’d rather face a nest of full-grown rattlers than do this, I can tell you.”

She turned the full wattage of her best smile on him. “Oh, everyone feels that way at first, I’m sure. The next step is, of course, our videotape session. Normally I’d be able to do that today, but my video camera is out for repairs. So I hope it will be convenient for you to come back tomorrow?” She’d play soft sitar music on the boom box, wear something flowing. She’d make carob-and-pine-nut brownies and serve them with flair. She’d—but of course she wouldn’t. She wasn’t in the market for a guy, even one as appealing as this one.

Slade Braddock unfolded himself from the floor cushion, rising with spectacular grace. He looked down at her, a half smile playing across his well-sculpted lips.

“No problem, but why don’t you stop by the marina this afternoon? There’s a video camera on the houseboat. No point in wasting time. Got to get me a bride by June, you know?” His smile so unnerved her that she levered herself upward, stumbling over the corner of the cushion and catching herself on the doorknob, barely averting an unladylike sprawl across her desk.

“You okay?” he asked, frowning slightly.

“Y-yes. And where will I find you at the marina?”

“I’m staying on what they call Houseboat Row in a floating palace called Toy Boat. Silly name, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Karma said, unsure how to answer this. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Guys sometimes got very attached to their boats.

“I didn’t name it. That honor belongs to my second cousin’s wife. Renee thought it was cute.” He grinned, and Karma was totally charmed. Never mind that he had already told her the type of woman who appealed to him, and never mind that she wasn’t it. All her misgivings about men evaporated in that moment.

“I’ll be glad to stop by the marina,” she said. “Would five o’clock suit you?” She’d bring hors d’oeuvres, wear something revealing. She’d—yeah. She’d make a fool of herself. Again.

“Five o’clock. Right. Thanks, Ms.—O’Connor, is it?”

She scooped one of her cards out of the jumble on her desk. “Karma O’Connor. Like on the sign out front.”

He looked at the card, looked at her. “Nice name, Karma. What does it mean?”

“Destiny,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, and despite her reservations, in that moment she was certain that she had found hers.

AFTER SLADE HAD LEFT HER OFFICE, Karma immediately dashed across the street to the Blue Moon, where she rented a tiny three-room pad.

The Blue Moon was exactly the kind of place Karma would have chosen to live even if it hadn’t been right across the street from Rent-a-Yenta. The building had seen its heyday in the late 1940s. It was painted pale pink, the doors and windows were outlined in aqua, and a lavender-blue stripe circled the top of the building. A blue bas-relief half moon hung over the door. Karma had heard the place variously described as “an iced pastry,” and “a Wurlitzer jukebox done in pastels.” After the heavy dark brick of her apartment block in Connecticut, she loved it.

Goldy, manager, desk clerk, custodian and security officer all rolled into one, sat inside the doorway behind a counter. She glanced up from her knitting with rapid-blinking brown eyes. Her short spiky hair gleamed in the sunlight from the nearby window; it was an energetic shade of copper this week. In the background a radio blared some sixties girl group singing, “Today I Met the Man I’m Going to Marry.”

Was the song an omen? Maybe. Karma believed in omens.

“Hi, Goldy, anything new?”

“I read the tarot cards for you today. Something big’s coming up. Something major.” Her voice was tiny, like a little girl’s.

“Like being able to pay my office rent?” Slade Braddock’s registration fee made that a sure thing.

“Hmm. Could be bigger than that.” Goldy set aside her knitting and adjusted the voluminous folds of one of the huge flower-print muumuus she liked to wear.

“Nothing’s bigger than paying the rent.”

“I thought since you gave up the five-room office suite, you’d be okay.”

“Only if I bring in more business. Things fell apart fast when Aunt Sophie was sick. She may have left me her business, but I’ve got to revive it. After quitting a market research job, being laid off from Psychtronics Magazine and getting fired from The Bickerstiff Corporation, it’s a welcome opportunity.”

“Maybe you should have your chakras read, get some direction. I have time late this afternoon.” Goldy’s shtick was anything New Age, and she never let anyone forget it.

“Can’t. I’m busy.”

“Well, there you go. Business must be picking up,” Goldy said with an air of idle speculation, which was how Karma knew that Goldy, from her vantage point by the window, had seen Slade Braddock.

“I have a new client,” Karma said reluctantly.

“Is he anyone that Jennifer might be interested in?” Jennifer was Goldy’s niece, and she’d signed up with Rent-a-Yenta the first week after Karma had taken over. Jennifer was hard to place because she had no real interests other than herself. Her favorite pastime seemed to be playing “Boxers or Briefs” while guy-watching with her best friend Mandi on Collins Avenue, and Karma privately thought that her brain was so empty that she ought to wear a Rooms for Rent sign on her forehead.

Karma managed a casual shrug. She couldn’t see Slade Braddock with Jennifer. Or maybe she didn’t want to.

“Well, how about Mandi?” Goldy asked.

Karma had experienced some success in placing Mandi, who also lived in this apartment house, but most guys backed off after they realized that artfully streaked hair, acrylic fingernails, and weekly massages did not come without a steep price.

“Could be,” said Karma noncommittally. She turned to go.

“Oh, by the way, Geofredo’s probably in your apartment right now. He’s respraying the whole third floor.”

Karma stopped and frowned. “I told you I didn’t want that exterminator guy coming into my place. You know I don’t believe in killing anything.”

Goldy spared her a meaningful look. “You told me you had a family of roaches living under your refrigerator.”

The roaches were palmetto bugs, enormous and all too prevalent in the state of Florida. These were big brown insects the size of hummingbirds, and they also flew. For palmetto bugs and spiders, which creeped her out bigtime, Karma was able to relax her standards slightly as long as she didn’t have to do the killing.

Goldy said, “You tell Geofredo to check the supply room on your floor for spiders.”

“Will do.”

Karma started up the stairs to the third floor; there was no elevator in the building. She figured the stairs were good exercise, which she needed now that she was going to be sitting behind a desk every day. Not that she had done much sitting so far, since the chair was usually piled high with papers. Most of the hours she had put in at the Rent-a-Yenta office had been spent painting and cleaning, with an occasional client thrown in for good measure.

Speaking of clients, Goldy’s niece Jennifer was skipping toward her down the stairs, probably on her way home from visiting Mandi. Jennifer’s hair was long, straight, and bouncy. She wore a tight cutoff Planet Hollywood shirt with low-slung white capri pants that showed off her silver navel tassel.

“Hi, Karma,” she said, stopping before they passed. “Hey, are those real?”

“Are what—?” Karma began before she realized that Jennifer was unabashedly staring at her breasts.

Karma shook her head as if to clear it. Was she supposed to answer such a question?

“I don’t mean the boobs, silly. If they were fake, you’d have chosen bigger ones. No, I mean the nipples.”

“What?” Back in Connecticut, where Karma came from, people didn’t ask such personal questions.

“Oh, well, I guess they must be. Forget I asked—I was only wondering if your nipples were fake because I’m going to buy some if I can figure out where to get them, and I thought you could tell me.”

“Sheesh, Jennifer, what are you talking about?” Karma had thought, erroneously it appeared, that she had outgrown being freaked by the wacko characters in Miami Beach.

Jennifer tossed her head so that her hair gave off the overpowering scent of mango-coconut shampoo. “Nipples, silly, you can buy fake ones to stick on. My own are kind of puny, and the idea of all these guys I’m going to meet through Rent-a-Yenta has been making me think. Do I want a steady boyfriend? Yes! Do I want to use every means at my disposal to attract one? Yes! Guys love huge nipples, Karma, believe me. It’s a major drawing point. Point, that’s funny!” She laughed uproariously.

Karma made herself keep a straight face. “I can’t help you, sorry. But if I were you, I’d try that place advertised on the big billboard near the airport—The Booby Trap ‘n Boutique.” The billboard featured an overendowed winking woman wearing nothing but a large pink feather.

“Oooh! Good idea! Thanks, Karma.” With that, Jennifer resumed her skipping down the stairs, and Karma readjusted her blouse so that it didn’t cling.

The exterminator, Geofredo, was backing into her apartment with his bug-spray equipment as she arrived. Karma considered if maybe this was the man she was going to marry, like in the song. She also considered readjusting her blouse so that it did cling, but she quickly gave up the idea until she knew more about him.

As he went around her apartment spraying and smiling shyly between squirts, Karma decided that if this guy had any intention of marrying her, he wasn’t letting on.

He gave her one last bashful smile at the door. “Hasta la vista? Baby?” he said, looking more tentative than forceful.

“Don’t forget about the spiders in the supply room,” she said, doing a finger-play demo of the kindergarten song about the itsy-bitsy spider. “In el rooma de supply.” This was the best shot she could give Spanish; she’d taken French in high school.

Geofredo shoved the bug bomb he was carrying into his pocket and grinned widely, exposing a row of teeth as white and as straight as a row of Chiclets. “Spi-der,” he said, mimicking her actions. “Araña.” That’s when Karma spotted the wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand and realized that he wasn’t the man for her.

“Hasta la vista to you, too,” she told him, and then she shut the door behind him fast.

Besides, she really dug cowboys. Or at least she had ever since she’d set eyes on Slade Braddock.

2

SLADE SETTLED BACK in a deck chair, popped the top off a Guinness, and resigned himself to listening to intermittent jabber and Cuban music wafting over from D Dock. He was trying his best to impersonate a yachtsman, but even after two days in residence on Toy Boat, he felt like an interloper. The habitues of the Sunchaser Marina were a tight-knit group. They didn’t so much ignore him as act as if he didn’t exist.

Well, his clothes might have had something to do with it, but whenever he shucked the jeans and boots for one of Mack’s designer swimsuit outfits, he felt like a complete idiot. Silver reflecting sunglasses and a cabana shirt thrown open at the throat weren’t his style.

Still, he might have gotten along with his companions better last night if he’d been dressed in Miami Beach mode. The two guys he’d met at the beach had taken one look at his boots and hat and mistaken him for a rube. They’d invited him along on a little bar-hopping jaunt, set him up with a sumptuous redhead at a party, and tried to steal his money in a back alley. Bad mistake. The guys were nursing aching heads today, no doubt, and not as a result of hangovers. As for the redhead, she’d split, yelling at the top of her lungs. Good riddance.

He was by nature soft-spoken and quiet, and he was well aware that it gave him an advantage to be seen as naive. He’d never thought it necessary to advertise the fact that he’d graduated from the University of Florida and been a star on the rodeo circuit for a couple of years afterward.

Slade Braddock had seen enough of the world to appreciate who he was and where he’d come from, which was why he knew he wanted to live in Okeechobee City for the rest of his life. Here in Miami Beach, he felt misplaced. Like a fish out of water, so to speak. He didn’t belong here, he didn’t really want to be here. He’d made progress today, though. He was on the way to finding himself a wife.

The marina was bustling with activity as boats came back from fishing trips, people returned to their houseboats from their day’s activities, and fishermen weighed in their catch. The breeze felt good after this typically stifling September day; it wafted with it the scent of the ocean. Across Biscayne Bay, an orange sun cast the skyline of Miami into golden relief, and Slade was momentarily homesick. To his way of thinking, sunset in the Glades was a much more inspiring sight.

He allowed himself to daydream as he thought about the wife he had come here to find, heard her soft voice whispering in his ear. It would be good to have a wife at last, good to have a sweet little cutie to laugh with in bed at night, to cuddle happily for a few quiet moments in the morning before he rode out to check the fences and the herd.

He pictured the Diamond B Ranch in his mind—brilliant blue sky, acres and acres of green grass punctuated by palmetto hummocks, and in the distance, Everglades saw grass shimmering green and yellow in the bright sunshine. It was a special place, that ranch, carved out of the Glades by Slade’s grandfather, built to its present greatness by his father, and he wanted a special woman to share it with him.

Slade spotted Karma O’Connor as she rounded the curve from the parking lot on her bike. Now speaking of women, there was an interesting one, he thought. But quirky. Karma didn’t at all resemble the wife he intended to find—she was too tall by far, and not fragile. Definitely not fragile. The word he would choose to describe her would be robust. He did have to admit that her hair was much the same color as what he had in mind. It wasn’t straight though, and he had a thing for fragile-looking women with long straight blond hair—Southern-belle type, if possible. On the other hand, on Karma that bouncy mop of curls looked good.

He stood up to get a better look at her, and to his surprise, she didn’t stop pedaling when she reached the grassy strip dividing the parking lot from the dock, nor did she stop on the narrow band of asphalt that passed for a sidewalk. She rode her fool bike right onto C Dock.

He treated himself to another swig of beer as she bent her head down in determination and kept pedaling past the line-up of houseboats, a big Amazon of a woman. The boards of the dock creaked under her bike wheels. That fluttering purple thing she wore scared a lazy pelican off one of the weathered pilings, and the bike’s back wheel clipped a bait box, but still she pedaled on.

Slade couldn’t figure for the life of him what kind of garment Karma was wearing. You could see through part of it, but not any part that mattered—the sleeves and at least the bottom part of the legs were transparent like a nightie. He remembered her legs. He’d gotten a pretty good gander at them when she was walking up the stairs to her office this morning. And her hips, ditto. They’d looked like a couple of melons in a croker sack. Very firm melons.

Then: disaster. Slade saw what was going to happen before Karma did. An elderly guy named Phifer in C-22 was making repairs to his boat, puttering around on deck as he had all afternoon. Phifer must not have seen Karma because he tossed a line toward the dock. The line seemed to hover for a moment before it descended, a kind of slow motion free-fall, and as the rope looped toward her through the air, Slade yelled, “Look out!”

Karma looked up. The trouble was that she looked up at Slade all the way down in Slip 41, not at the line, which fell neatly over her foot, snagging both it and the bike pedal in a kind of a bungee hang-up. Karma went flying. So did the bike—both of them right into the drink with a huge splash.

Slade was up and off Toy Boat in a flash. But by the time he reached the space where Karma had gone in, all that was to be seen of either her or the bike was a circle of purple chiffon floating on the top of the water.

She surfaced right away, sputtering and flinging a tangle of hair out of her eyes.

“I’ll throw you a life ring,” Slade hollered, grabbing one from a hook on one of the pilings and tossing it at her.

She yelled back, “I can swim,” but when the life ring landed beside her, she latched on to it anyway and began kicking in the direction of the dock. By this time, bystanders had gathered. “What happened?” asked the old guy who’d thrown the line.

“She was riding a bike. Lost control of it,” Slade said, not wanting to get into a conversation with Phifer. At present he was much more interested in Karma, who was now treading water directly below him. “Swim over to the piling, I’ll lean down and give you a hand up.”

She looked wary. “I can’t do that. I don’t have on anything but my underwear. That’s my sari,” and she pointed at the purple chiffon, which was being borne away by the outgoing tide.

“What’d she say?” asked Phifer.

“I believe she said she’s sorry,” Slade told him.

“I should think she’s sorry,” huffed Phifer. “Riding a bike on the dock.”

The other onlookers agreed with him, and one by one they wandered off to their barbecuing or their beer on ice or whatever it was that they’d planned to do. “Me, I’ve got fish to clean,” Phifer said grumpily before slapping off down the dock in his worn old boat shoes.

No one else came over to see what was going on, which told Slade something about how these Miami Beach people lived. Sure, Miami Beach folks lived a laid-back lifestyle, but in his opinion, they should have more concern for their neighbors. In Okeechobee City, this situation would have drawn a bunch of spectators, all of whom would feel inclined to give advice and, probably, help. But then, Okeechobee City was a small town. Miami Beach was not.

He turned his attention back to the woman in the water. She was floating amid the flotsam, including but not restricted to a tangle of dirty fishing line, and assorted fish parts. “Um, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Did you really say that you don’t have on anything but your underwear?” he asked.

“Do we have to keep talking about it?” she said.

He was sure that this was a rhetorical question, so he decided to change his tack. “You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Wait and see,” Karma said, and he thought she looked kind of comical in her determination. The key parts of her anatomy that he could see under the surface of the water looked nicely shaped and tan. Why they were tan, he could only speculate. Maybe she did a lot of topless sunbathing, like some of the models he and his companions of the night before had seen on South Beach yesterday. He tried not to think about Karma with no top on, but the image stuck in his mind.

As if she could read his thoughts, Karma hugged the life ring to her chest, covering up what was interesting him. “I’ll come out when it gets dark. I’ll slink away into the night. Look, why don’t you forget you ever met me? I’m sure you can find another matchmaker in this town.”

Slade had no interest in shambling through the whole dating service sign-up process again. It was embarrassing enough to have to enlist help to find a wife in the first place. Besides, at the moment he was fascinated by Karma O’Connor, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. Mascara was running down her cheeks in rivulets, and she’d lost an earring. But with her hair plastered to her head like that so that he wasn’t distracted by her wealth of curls, he could better assess her beauty. And Karma was beautiful. Her complexion was pink-and-white and flawlessly textured; her nose was aristocratically narrow. She also had very white and very straight teeth. As a connoisseur of horseflesh, he knew you could tell a lot about an animal by its teeth.

This, however, was a woman. A woman in distress. He said as comfortingly as he could, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to get a robe and throw it down to you.”

Karma opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly just prior to being sloshed by the backwash from the propeller of a passing outboard. Before she took it into her head to object, Slade took off at a trot back toward Toy Boat, passing Phifer on the way.

“Fool woman. Had no business riding a bike on the dock,” grumbled Phifer, who by this time was tossing fish heads to a circling flock of gulls.

When Slade returned with one of Mack’s monogrammed white terry cloth robes, Karma had moved to the piling and had commenced clinging to a metal ring affixed to the post.

Slade bundled the robe into a neat ball. “I’m going to throw this down, and you can put it on. Then you can come out of the water,” Slade said.

Karma said something like “Hmmpf,” and he tossed the robe down. He tactfully turned his back as she put it on, but he heard her splashing around and it seemed to take her an overly long time to get into the robe. “Everything all right?” he called over his shoulder.