We didn’t know we’d been banned from Diggs for fighting until we tried to get back in. Frankie suggested that we dye our hair in order to disguise ourselves. He turned me into a redhead, and from the same bottle he’d used to create that patch that had made people call him Simon, he went entirely blue, right down to his eyebrows. And he looked fantastic.

A Door in St. Augustine

2002

“This place is so … faisandé,” the boy says, and then nods in agreement with himself. The end of his chin is whiskered—a wiry, meager attempt at a goatee—but the face above it is smooth and clean, his cheeks and nose slightly sunburned, his light-brown hair gelled into a mop. He lifts an eyebrow as he glances around the room: at the Moorish arches cut through the far wall, at the columns flecked with remnants of gold leaf, at the shallow midnight-blue dome set into the ceiling, its plaster striated with cracks that emanate from a chain supporting a teardrop chandelier. “That’s French for when they hang a pheasant up by its feet and, like, let it rot until they can scoop the meat off with a spoon,” he says. “Perfect, right?” He bends forward and, without using his hands, brings his lips to the beer in front of him. An instrumental from Camelot trickles from a pair of hidden speakers. Overlapping this, a faint, rhythmic scratching issues from the Discman headphones around his neck.

He’s taken the last chair at the bar, closest to Karen, who sits at a round marble table near the window. Other than the two of them, the bartender, and a small silver-haired man in a powder-blue suit seated on a sofa next to a grand piano, the cavernous room is empty. The boy’s tennis shoes knock lightly against a backpack nearly half his size propped against the brass foot rail. With a beer-foam mustache outlining his upper lip, he looks at Karen and, as if the two of them have been exchanging remarks, says, “I mean that in a good way. Most of the old grand hotels in the South have been chewed up by fat-cat millionaires looking for a tax write-off. Those guys always want to gut the place and ‘redo’ it, you know, all that faux marble, those faux murals they paint in the morning and then, like, rub with sandpaper in the afternoon to make them look old. When, really, something’s nice when it’s just naturally old, you know? Like this place. It’s kind of crumbly, kind of falling apart, but it’s natural. It’s like an old face.”