John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament

by The Turquoise Lament(lit)

  "There's another of mine."

  I took her hands and pulled her onto the couch beside me and kept hold of her hands. "Listen, dear. Why shouldn't it happen to you? An only child. A lot of pressure on you to be the best child ever. Impossible goal, of course. Sense of failure at not making it. So your mother died when you were at peak vulnerability, and then your father died, and you never had a chance to prove to them you could hack it in this world."

  "This is funny. I'm not really crying. It's just water running out of my eyes like this."

  "So, out of a sense of being terribly alone, you marry a very large and sort of limited guy. Part of it was rebound from Scott. And revenge on Scott. And it was the pursuit of perfection. You have all the images and symbols working for you. Hold still! A great motor sailer, youth, money, time, honeymoon, tropic seas. But on board the Trepid we have two people who maybe can't make a marriage, can't make a honeymoon, can't make a future. Other people have all the excuses. Rotten jobs, cost of living, depressing neighborhood, meddling in-laws, babies too soon. What's the excuse when you can't hack it in paradise? So you lay it all on yourself, Pidge. Very heavy. And somewhere you start to make that funny little sidestep into another world, where it changes neurotic to psychotic, changes suspicion to paranoia."

  She shook the mists out of her head, held my hands in a grip that dug her nails into me. Her eyes went wide and looked through me, looked back down the avenue of the months and months of cruising. I think she stopped breathing.

  Suddenly she wrenched her hands free and left, running unsteadily, whamming the doorframe with a hip as she went into the connecting hallway to bedroom and bath. A door slammed. In the silence oi' predawn I heard her in there yawking and hawking and wheezing, and knew she was the sort who would rather break blood vessels than have her head held.

  I leaned back, rubbed granular eyelids, then pushed the stud on the Pulsar. The red numerals glared up at me from the ruby screen on my wrist. 4:11. I held the stud down and the seconds appeared... 56... 57... 58... 59... 00. The 5 was constant, and the second figure changed to each subsequent figure in that odd, parts-saving method of digital design. I released it and pressed the.stud again for an instant, and 4:12 glared at me for the second and a quarter, the specified recognition interval. I had checked it with the shortwave time signal from Greenwich a week after a rich lady had given it to me. Gift of a toy in return for making the right contact for her which enabled her to buy back the stolen, uninsured black opal ring her deceased husband had given her on his last Christmas on earth. An easy salvage, too easy to warrant charging half the value. A good rule is to levy the standard charge or nothing at all. So it was nothing at all, and the watch was a gratitude gift. And running two seconds fast.

  Little red numbers to fit you back into time and place. Going on quarter after four on Friday morning, December 7th, in Hawaii-where they have had some remarkable December 7ths.

  Meyer made one of his Meyerlike observations about the Pulsar. He said it was ironic that this space-age, world-of-the future, computerized gadget was, in reality, a return to the easier and more relaxing and contemplative times of yesteryear. The wristwatch with dial and hands keeps needling you every time you happen, by design or by accident, to look at your wrist. Get on with it, brother! Life is running out the bottom of the tube! In gentler eras, if a man wished to know the time, he took out his gold pocket watch and snapped it open and looked at the hands. If he did not want to know the time, it never intruded. Time served man. The Hamilton Pulsar does not intrude either, until you decide you want to know the time, and you push the stud, and it tells you, then keeps its peace until next time.

  It is, the booklet said, guaranteed to withstand a force of 2500 G's. But can McGee, who wears it, endure having his body weight upped to two hundred and seventy-five tons? I would cover the area of a tennis court to a depth of a sixteenth of an inch, and there in the middle of me would be the sticky lump of the Pulsar, ready to glare red-numbered accuracy at the next fellow to push the little stud.

  I snapped out of a smoky doze as she came floating out, in a different and floor-length caftan, looking fifteen pounds lighter, three inches shorter and five years younger. She sat shyly on the edge of the couch.

  "I just imagined those things," she said. "I know that now. You're right. Oh, I got so god-awful close. to the edge. There's a funny thing about the edge. When you get close, somehow you... want to get closer. You want to look down. You might even want to fall over the edge."

  "Has this past month been better?"

  "Off the boat? I guess so. Yes. It has been better, but then, when I kept phoning and phoning you and finally got the call through and then I couldn't say anything I'd planned to say, that was a low point. Believe me, that was a very low point. A feeling of... complete, total failure in everything."

  "Who's watching? Who's keeping score on you? Who's grading your paper, honey?"

  She looked puzzled. "They are. Whoever They might be. The ones who watch you."

  "And who live inside your head?"

  "They live somewhere."

  "You can walk down ten thousand crowded streets in ten thousand cities of the world, and nobody will give damn one about whether you cope or can't cope, whether you live or die. The ones who notice you wonder if there's any safe way to use you, or they give you a part in the little fantasy theater inside their skulls. There is an estimated price on your clothes, shoes and purse, but the rest of you is just so much live meat. Pretty meat. No bonus for how well you perform the feat of living."

  "That is so goddamn cold!" she said loudly.

  "Scare you?"

  "I guess."

  "That's the way it is. Nobody grades your performance except you and your own ghosts. And you've gotten so anxious about the scoring, you hallucinated."

  She sighed and softened, and in moments was nodding and yawning once more. Where the light touched her hair, it wove fine patterns of gold in spun threads, and her posture pulled the caftan tight to the round of left hip and flank.

  So I got up and, with a small pat of affection, a quick kiss on the temple, I said good night and got out of there, all the scruples of my self-awarded medical degree intact. Guilt in one area, Meyer says, can lead to unexpected virtue in everything else. Also, it is unseemly for a sportsman to feed the tame deer a carrot and then shoot it dead.

  In the borrowed bed on the ninth floor I was able to spend at least fifty seconds in somber thought before sleep took me. When people invite you to come into their lives and meddle, that is what you do, if you are concerned about them. Right? Right? Right....

  Five

  I WOKE up at eleven in the gloom of the draperied room, having just dreamed of being dead. I was dead on the stones of the patio of the Club de Pescadores, my skull mashed by the blow of the fish billy swung by Bunny Mills, the blue-tail flies already humming around the raw broken meat.

  In my dream I had been mourning me. Dead is dead. Dead lasts long. The word is strange, like a tap on a slack drumhead. Like striking the key of a piano when the hammer mechanism is broken. I had been dream-mourning the rangy, knuckly, chopped-up, pale-eyed, wry-minded beach bum. Meyer was quite broody about losing me. The regulars at Bahia Mar would gather a few times and laugh at crazy memories, hoist the sentimental glass and get mournfully drunk. It would move them, I suppose. In each relationship there had been something of meaning, some communication beyond that inaccurate code-and-cipher convention of speech. Male or female, it would fit that Rilke quotation:

  Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

  ... That slip over there, that's where what's-hisname used to live aboard a houseboat named... damn it, how can I forget names so easy?

  So suddenly, sitting on the edge of the bed, I began to laugh. Big hard laughter, clenching the belly and roughening the throat. The vision of the lugubrious McGee, whining as he fondled his incomparable skull, was too much.

  In the shower sta
ll I thought about death in a definitely jolly way. Pidge had talked about Them. I have my own set. They gave me a little bit of space at the edge of the gaming table, and They gave me a few hints about the rules. I made the choice, as does everyone, about how much I want to bet and how often. I decide what I am willing to win and willing to lose.

  The house takes a cut of every wager. So you can play a close tight game, work out little conservative systems, calculate the odds to several decimal places, and no matter what you do, sooner or later They will bust you, because the house busts everybody. The house percentage does it, sooner or later.

  Or, if you want, you can bet the long shots, go for the hunches. You will give Them a chance to bust you sooner, but you will maybe live a little bigger and better while you still have a place at the table. Only children of all ages think they will play forever. The man who knows in advance that They are going to bust him should not start whining about it in advance. They will bust you with Big C, or a truck driver on uppers, or pilot error, or an Irish bomb, or a coronary occlusion, or gas in the bilge. Other creatures play on smaller tables, and they all get lmsted, from mayfly to possum to quick red fox. By the time I began shaving, the shadows were not as heavy across the back of my mind. Dreams can change a day. I guessed that being aboard the Trepid had brought Bunny Mills back. Most probably he had never tried to kill anyone else, before or since. The time and place had been just right. A whole set of his internal cycles had peaked at the righe time, making a killing possible, or even necessary. In the presence of professionals, my instincts would probably keep me alive. God deliver me from amateurs. Bunny had nearly gotten me, and maybe the mark it left was deeper than I had realized.

  l had finished shaving when the door chime bonged once and then again. I knotted the big yellow bath towel around me and went to the door.

  Pidge came plunging into the room, all manic intensity, with a smile that came and went so quickly it was like a grimace. She wore a little white dress. Her voice was fast and was pitched a half octave high. She gave the impression of trotting back and forth in the small studio room, like some kind of nervous goalie. She shook her hair back a lot. She made mouths of many different shapes. Yes, she had been up since eight; woke up abruptly, knew she couldn't sleep any more, knew I was right. Yes. it had all come clear to her.

  "'The big question, you see, is did I ever really love him. It is one thing to accept the idea you can really and terrifyingly hallucinate and think you are actually going crazy, and another thing to sort it all out and say, Do I go back to him and start again. Well, suppose all the hallucinating and so on hadn't happened. What would I be like now? I suppose I would be on the boat and maybe we'd be a thousand miles south of Hawaii, and everything would still be blah. It would be a big sack of absolutely nothing, because what threw me off the tracks was the way I was trying so hard to tell myself that it was all loverly. And it wasn't. Oh, Trav, it just wasn't! And c-c-couldn't ever b-bb-b..."

  "Blub?"

  "Oh, God. And I put in so much time on my eyes. Look at me."

  "I am looking at you."

  "I don't mean look at me the way you're looking at me."

  "If it's bothering you, go back out the door, take five and come in again and we'll start over, Lou Ellen."

  "I'm in here now. It's a lot of trouble."

  "You shouldn't have done that eye-to-eye thing with me."

  "There's a whole list of things I never should have done."

  "I've got a longer list."

  "Oh, what the hell, Travis. What the hell, darling."

  I remember that my mind, adrift and afloat amid our busy-ness, went all the way back to Biscayne Bay, to the time when I was toting her back to Daddy, when she sat huddled and miserable on the bow deck of the Busted Flush and I had felt a wistful lust when I looked at the shape of the lass in her white shorts. That and other memories of her were strangely merged with the sweet and immediate realities of her, the here-and-nowness of her, so that I seemed to live in the past and present all at once.

  After a little while she cried out, and after that there was no room or time for memories. All the old nostalgia became the immediate and heated nimbleness, the present need. She was a temptation out of the past, served up on some kind of eternal lazy Susan so that it had come by once again, and this time we had taken it.

  We sighed and murmured slowly back from all that lifting effort, made ourselves comfortable on tumbled bedding, shifted weights and pressures. "Umm," she said. And, "Hey now." And, "Umm," again. She stretched and turned and kissed and sagged back again. Her eyes were very bright. "I was going to fake it anyway," she said.

  "Run that through again?"

  "I mean I decided that it would be only fair you should have the idea it really got to me."

  "What do you mean, fair?"

  "As long as I was using you."

  "Premeditation?"

  "Damn right. Except it took me practically three hours to work up enough nerve. You never had a chance, McGee."

  "I didn't?"

  "Of course not! I know how I am. Now that we both know something funny was happening in my head, you'd go back to Florida and I would probably think about getting divorced from Howie, and I would see him and probably move back aboard the boat, and we'd keep on cruising and I'd go all weird again. It's too scary. I can't go through all that again. Not ever. So there's just one thing that would keep me from going back to him. And we just finished that one thing, and it was really beautiful. I wanted to do it with you a thousand years ago and you wouldn't. You were pretty stuffy about it."

  "I tend to get stuffy about statutory rape. It's one of my character defects."

  I turned her, stroked the fine smooth curves of her, all warm damp with prior effort, and snuffed the natural perfume of her brown hair.

  "Do you mind if I sort of used you?" she asked.

  "I have a tendency to forgive you, lady."

  "I can't go back to Howie after doing such a rotten thing to him."

  "I suppose."

  "You see, dear, I had to make absolutely sure I wouldn't go back to him. Do you understand?"

  "I understand."

  "Hey. What are you doing?"

  "Proving I understand."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "I mean that in a little while now, I am going to make you doubly sure."

  "Good thinking," she said. "And you approve?"

  "If I didn't, would I be doing this?"

  There may be better ways of spending the middle part of a Friday in Hawaii or anywhere else. If so, I find it very hard to think of any. It made a fine Friday. And Saturday. And Sunday.

  On Monday I spent a half hour with Howie Brindle before Pidge drove me out to the airport.

  The Trepid was looking a little better. He was transparently eager to have me notice the change and remark upon it. If he had had a tail, he would have wagged it.

  I told him I had a long talk with Pidge, several long talks in fact, and we were now both convinced that she had been hallucinating due to emotional pressures.

  "I didn't give her any emotional strain," he said, frowning.

  "You did without meaning to."

  "I don't believe that. How?"

  "She was alone and she was lonely and you were there, and she married you. She doesn't love you."

  "She certainly does!"

  "No. That's her problem, Howie. Listen and believe. She has been trying to be in love with you, but she can't. She really can't. And that gives her a sense of failure. That makes her depressed, and she gets confused."

  "But I love her! I really love her, Trav!"

  "There's no law that says it has to run both ways. If you love her, you'll do what's best for her."

  "Which is?"

  "Let her go."

  "Maybe if she could understand that I understand the problem, then we could be together and it wouldn't--"

  "No. Won't work."

  "No?"

  "Absolutely never."


  He looked down. I thought it was a snort of sour laughter, and then realized it was half snuffle, half sob. I saw tears run down his round ruddy cheek. I felt like a co-conspirator in a very rotten plan. This was a very simple decent guy. So, like a coward, I tiptoed offstage.

  At the airport, there was time for kisses. But they had the slightly sour flavor of betrayal. She beamed at me and said that when she came back to Lauderdale she would decide whether to marry me or merely keep me. I said I would be on tenterhooks until she gave me the word. She had always wondered what was a tenterhook. I told her that a tenter was the frame on which they used to stretch cloth when they made it, so it would dry evenly, and the bent nails around the frame were tenterhooks. She said it sounded uncomfortable to be on tenterhooks, and I said that it probably would be, so hurry home, girl.