Miami 2024

A scene and characters from my imagination

Show them a picture of you naked

Emma shaded her eyes and looked beyond their table, beyond the raised restaurant platform, to the pool. A young woman stood tall at the pool’s edge. She was nearly naked in her bikini, her bottom a thin strip in the crevice between her butt cheeks, her top a pretense of covering her breasts. Acres of olive skin. A thin gold chain just above her belly button.

At their table, Emma’s husband Jeffrey had been looking past her, like people do at a party when they hope to find someone more interesting to speak to. Now she knew why.

She was still in her New York outfit of loose black clothes. They had arrived in Miami an hour ago. Their “house manager”––a term used by Jeffrey, not by her––had greeted them in the lobby wearing jeans and a dirty polo shirt with an “Hola” to take their luggage up to unpack.  The catering for their plane had failed to show so they were hungry.

The little restaurant at the Continuum was only for residents so was seldom crowded. It overlooked the pool area for the South tower, the last building on Miami Beach before the channel and Fisher Island. Below from the sunken tennis courts they could hear shouts, murmurs, and gentle thwacks.

Jeffrey said, “Do you realize how much money we’d save?”

Saving money was nice, but would he ever feel rich enough to make an effort to dress decently? She’d dragged him to Todd Snyder for a new casual wardrobe, but he claimed the pants bit into his waist.

So here he was in public wearing gray gym shorts and a black Grateful Dead tee-shirt. He didn’t seem to care that when he leaned back, his shirt bunched around his paunch exposing his hairless belly. Ghostly white like the face of a drowned man. Subcutaneous fat.

The rare times he wore a suit, his naked flab was hidden and his bulk was expressed in broad shoulders and a chest that looked muscular. Although the excess flesh was creeping up his neck toward his face. Jowls and a first wattle. For now, though, he retained the face that thirty years ago had made her call him her “Jewish James Bond.”

And the most annoying thing. He was vain, gleefully reporting whenever a woman called him handsome. Right. Show them a picture of you naked and see what they say then.

Not for the first time, she imagined herself as a much admired, valiant widow. 

Capable of deceit

Jeffrey answered his own question. “Last year if we’d been Florida residents, we’d have saved three million dollars. That’s three million after tax.”

Emma knew her script. “If we earn so much money to be able to save so much in tax, why shouldn’t we live wherever we want?”

“I’ve told you. I’m not thinking just of me. I’ll move the fund down here. My employees would save on taxes too. Not just taxes but cost of living.”

He spread his arms wide and his shirt shifted well above his belly button. “And the weather. It’s fifty fucking degrees warmer here. Being here makes me feel two decades younger.”

The girl on the pool edge raised two upright fingers to her full lips. Shall I go in? Theater. Her world was a stage.

If Miami made Jeffrey two decades younger, he’d be thirty-seven. She was fifty-one, six years younger than New York Jeffrey before his Floridian rejuvenation. Miami might make him lose his gut, start lifting, and be able to look as good in a bathing suit as he did in a suit. He still had a window of time to make himself look legitimately hot.

She knew he was capable of deceit.

When they’d first dated, Jeffrey Weiss had claimed sexual experience, but later he’d admitted that she’d been his first. His indignity that first time. Then her amazement he’d been a twenty-seven year old virgin. From the start she’d been in charge of their sex life.

They hadn’t had sex since the end of last summer. Six months. The feel of his body on top of her made her angry. Perimenopause was a convenient cover story.

Shaming was sometimes necessary

She’d worked hard to keep her body well-toned, waging a winning war against the gravity of aging. A workout every day, usually two. Cardio on the elliptical at home and Pilates at Chaise. She’d never carried less fat, had more muscle.

Their twin daughters, twenty-seven, saw her body as a rebuke. A political statement in favor of the patriarchy. The two of them had created a small media empire as influencers for the “love your body even if it’s fat” movement. They had a Substack, a podcast, and a recent book deal, all powered by a claimed childhood trauma that plugged perfectly into the 2024 zeitgeist.

Their truth was that they’d been raised by a thin blonde “trad wife” mother who’d shamed them for their zaftig figures and kinky Ashkenazi hair. But they’d made their peace with Emma because grudges were out, forgiveness was in. “We love our mom. She was raised to be who she is, so we can’t blame her…”

But that version of her motherhood was false. She’d read a book on dysmorphia before it became a “thing” and couldn’t recall ever mentioning the twins’ weight or chastising them about food. Even when they’d gobble a dozen packages of 100 calorie Oreo snack packs, she’d said nothing. She simply stopped buying any snacks.

Maybe their version of her shaming consisted of looks and silences, codewords, and what she had failed to say.

In any case it was all ridiculous because neither Amanda nor Lizzy had ever been fat. The pictures of themselves they put online were taken at angles that emphasized the size of their curves. The camera could lie both ways.

On their various publications, the twins detailed with zest their sexual conquests of men. It was their viral post “How To Be Fat And Fuck Who You Want” that had won them their book deal.

With her daughters’ permanent record of all that indiscriminate fucking who would ever marry them?

Now she said to Jeffrey, “The girls need me in New York. If half the things they write are true…”

Jeffrey said, “Em, they’re adults. They’ve built a business, they’re making money, they’re having fun. They can take care of themselves. And so what if they have sex with lots of guys? You did before you met me.”

“So I had a lot of boyfriends. Nobody would have married me if I had written about orgies and threesomes. Not even you.”

He let that pass. “Who’s to say the twins even want marriage or children. It’s a different world.”

A different world without future grandchildren, the eventual measure of success for the women she’d grown up with. She hated hearing about her older friends’ grandchildren. Barely tolerated seeing their pictures.

But when they told tales of their kids’ fertility woes, she basked in schadenfreude. “They started too late.” “They didn’t freeze their eggs.” Tell me more.

The twins had refused to consider freezing their eggs. It was “off-brand” for them. Her offer to pay for it hadn’t made a difference. The twins had trust fund income from Emma’s dad, their scandalized Grandpa Nate. Plus they were making money on their own. To have a shot at influencing her daughters, she needed to be with them in New York.

She looked at Jeffrey’s belly. What if the twins really let themselves go and became legitimately obese? They’d already written a tirade against Ozempic. Shaming was sometimes necessary. She knew they still craved her approval just like she craved her father’s. She’d take the consequences. There was a price for everything.

A thing of exquisite beauty

Jeffrey used a finger to detach a crouton from the sparse remains of his Caesar salad and popped it into his mouth. No wind, so the cheesy smell hung in the air.

He ordered an espresso. “Ex-presso.”

She’d been trying to correct him forever, but he’d resisted by pointing out that his mother had always pronounced it that way. The dead mother card.

In her mind, however, she sang “You say expresso and I say espresso, let’s call the whole thing off.”

No sex for him this trip. So easy to tack on extra time in the penalty box. Her father was a hockey fan. So she was too.

She sighed. “How could you be so obtuse about the girls? Do you even read what they write? That last one was pure pornography.”

She wondered if he knew what obtuse meant. He might make all the money, she might be a useless trad wife, but she had a killer vocabulary and knew things that he didn’t. So she could make him feel stupid. Or maybe he didn’t even realize when she was insulting him.

Jeffrey removed his Mets hat and ran a hand over his forehead and then onto his hair. The sweat slicked it back. “They’re tough. They can take care of themselves Besides, don’t you always say, ‘Pornography is in the eye of the beholder’?”

She had let “expresso” go, but not this. “No. Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, ‘I know it when I see it’.”

She took a quick glance at the girl at the pool, her arms raised. stretching her long lithe body. The girl straddled the line between beauty and pornography.  If she said that aloud, Jeffrey would think, “I wish she’d straddle me!” That made her furious with him.

Jeffrey said, “You can be with the twins in New York any time. That’s why I have the plane. It’s like ordering a taxi. You’d be able to go on a whim. Stay for as long as you want. It’s only me that’ll have to keep track of the days.”

“It sounds like you’d be happy to be alone here without me as much as possible.”

Instant regret. She sounded peevish.

“Of course not. I’m just saying it’s you who’ll have all the flexibility. It’s me that Scoggins will keep down here to establish tax residency. Your residency’s not a factor. Your father’s trust doesn’t pay New York tax. Scoggins called your trust a thing of exquisite beauty.” He covered her hand on the table with his. “Like you.”

They both turned to look at the girl at the pool. She had snapped those two long fingers for a towel. It was brought, and she lowered herself to sit cross legged. No pubic hairs. Emma needed a wax job. The girl probably had a Brazilian because that’s what she probably was. She uncrossed her legs and dangled them into the pool.

Jeffrey’s hand still lay on top of hers. Flesh on flesh was sticky in the heat. She slid hers away. Pretended she needed to scratch the side of her nose.

A big fat loss

She was certain Jeffrey would jerk off to the girl tonight. “I don’t want to sell New York. We’ll take a huge loss. That is, if anyone will buy it at all.”

They owned the co-op together, tenants in common. They had used a loan from Emma’s trust to buy it. That had been a huge battle with her father. He’d called it a rape, made Jeffrey co-sign for the loan, and slapped a 10% interest rate on it. The trust, meaning her father as trustee, could call the loan due and payable at any time.

She loved their New York apartment. It was in one of the dozen “good” pre-war buildings, a Candela, said to be his best architectural work.

It was an unwritten rule that their co-op Board required buyers to have $100 million of net worth even though purchase prices were a fraction of that. They hadn’t qualified, but had passed the Board anyway because her father had known half the owners.

If they went to sell, the pool of buyers would be restricted to a very narrow slice of the wealthy––the few ultra rich who preferred the building’s hundred year-old charm to the conveniences of the new luxury condo buildings, shaped like middle fingers and marring the skyline south of Central Park.

And even if a wold-be buyer was fabulously wealthy, they had to be a certain type of wealthy. Most of the owners in their building were Jewish, but buyers who had been “too” Jewish, i.e., Orthodox, hadn’t even made it to a Board interview. And no one too flashy, or a celebrity, or who had crossed one of the owners in business.

Jeffrey said, “Keeping New York isn’t an option, but Scoggins says we can keep East Hampton. Anyway, we’ll need the proceeds to buy something permanent down here.”

At the word permanent she closed her eyes as if in mourning.

Selling the co-op felt like a defeat. A permanent defeat made worse by taking a big fat loss. Made worse still by the inevitable harangues from her father.

Table stakes

The sunlight had turned from glaring to hazy. But she felt the threat of tears so she put her sunglasses on. “People go to Florida to die. I’ll lose my New York friends. People who actually read books and go to theater and care about culture. ”

“Florida’s different now. You’ll make new friends. And nowadays people don’t go to Miami to die. That’s an old wives tale. It’s booming here. Do you know how many guys have made the move?”

A “guy” was a fellow hedge fund founder who’d moved to Miami post-pandemic taking his family, often after having dumped his old wife for a new one with a new set of kids. A guy would also bring down his staff of “employees” who wore the uniforms of the guy’s house as if it was a hotel.

She thought of staff as servants because that’s how she’d grown up.

Their sloppy house manager was their only Miami “employee,” and he was part time. Despite their private plane––and Jeffrey had told her that was table stakes––Jeffrey had told her that they were not nearly as rich as the “guys” he looked up to.

Call it a draw

“Remember,” said Jeffrey, “we have dinner tonight with my cuz Courtney and her new boyfriend. I know you like her, and she lives here.”

Emma did like Courtney. She was an art advisor. She could talk about things other than money and real estate and the headlines in the news. She came from Greenwich, part of a different branch of the Weiss family that had moved from Riverside Drive in the 1970s to escape the then bankrupt and dangerous city.

Courtney had grown up with horses and Christmas cards and with the name Courtney White, courtesy of her grandfather’s name change. She was just a few years younger than Emma.

In terms of attractiveness, Emma called it a draw. Courtney was taller and had great legs. But she had features that were sharp in subdued light, harsh otherwise. It would be good to take the measure of the man Courtney had attracted.

She said, “I’m going up to change.”

Jeffrey leaned back. “I’m gonna have another expresso. I’ll meet you up in a bit.”

The girl at the pool slid in standing, the water bisecting her at a point between her bikini bottom and her gold chain. The sign said three feet deep. She had to be at least five-ten.

As she walked back to the lobby, Emma wished she was wearing heels.

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