#90 The Queen Of Puerto Rico- Joe Frank
Nick travels with his family to St. Thomas for the summer.
He’s seventeen, “too old for the other children and too young to feel
comfortable with the adults.” Spending most of his time at the hotel bar and
the beach, he spies a woman in pink. He falls in lust and follows her around
the island never getting his nerve to speak with her.
He meets a man on his last night that tell him that the
woman in pink is a washed up prostitute and takes him for a ride in his motor
boat. He is taken advantage of by this man and becomes the target of his
unwanted affection. While back home, he gets phone calls, letters and free plane
tickets back to St. Thomas from this creepy man.
This is a story about longing, and like most longing its
skin deep and self-centered. There is no noir here, no dark mystery deep within
the characters, there is just superficiality. The woman sent to him from a
mutual friend, the legless woman with too much makeup, probably the pink woman
or a surrogate sent by the old man, is a lesson in superficiality.
These Joe Frank stories in this collection have some
entertainment value, and I enjoy reading them, just like I would enjoy sitting
on the beach with a pina colada staring at the woman in pink, but like Nick’s
story, nothing substantial will come of it.
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