(VERO BEACH, FLORIDA, 8/20/05)

…I found Heather, the young and vibrant administrator who had helped me book [my Vero Beach] concert.  She had blonde hair with red streaks that matched her rosy cheeks.  Her fiancé, Mark, was walking around the sunlit lobby strumming a soon-to-be-raffled guitar.  He had an adorable face too, like a Cabbage Patch Kid.   

——-

…off we drove in Mark’s shiny silver Ford F150 truck, with Heather sitting in the tiny backseat sipping from a plastic cup of red wine.  I had one too.  “Vero’s a weird place,” she said, stretching her arm out the open window and pointing at a gated community.  “Like, this neighborhood here wouldn’t let Michael Jordan live there because he’s black.  Michael Jordan!” 

“What?”

“I’m serious!  And town officials didn’t want Gloria Estefan playing a benefit here after our last hurricane because they didn’t want her to bring ‘that element’ to Vero Beach.  That element!  Can you imagine?”

Shocking, yes, but as we seemed to leave the gated communities behind, I was more taken with the trailer parks, the beat-up gas stations with no customers, and all the other rusty remnants of a time long passed when beach life might have been not so much about social status as it was about the simple desire to escape, to live by the sea and nothing else.  It might be nice to live in a trailer park here, I thought.  Very nice, actually.

We passed what looked like a defunct orange grove, all of the trees unkempt and mostly dead.  Heather noticed me staring.  “This will be another housing development like the ones we just passed,” she explained.  The truck soared onto a bridge over the Indian River.  Red and orange petals of clouds layered the sky as a sunset splashed pink light across the water below, and jutting into the middle of it I spotted a small peninsula with a few mansions peaking through the trees.  Before I said a word, Heather added, “That’ll be a development, too.”  

“Really?”  I said, sitting up a little.  “But it looks so small.”

“It is, but they plan to put like a hundred, hundred-and-fifty homes on that thing.”

——-

…. [after dinner,] Heather pulled out some Broadway music books and asked if I’d accompany her on a couple show tunes.  I immediately panicked, of course, because I didn’t want to fail the assignment, to disappoint her, to reveal myself — the concert pianist — as someone incapable of such an ordinary request, but I reminded myself that I was, for all intents, a good sight-reader and that I could handle this.  We began, and she sang with passion and humor as I followed along and Mark watched proudly with his ever-present smirk.  Maybe it was the piña coladas, or the fact that it was one in the morning, but my living room stage fright had disappeared.  I didn’t tense up.  I was smiling.  And after each number I laughed and clapped for Heather’s performance right along with Mark.  We had our own little salon, the three of us, there in the middle of the night in Vero Beach.