by Ann Beattie
She found the room depressing. It was dark, though, so they’d be back any minute. She got up and picked up the remote control. She did not click on Power, though; she sat back on the bed. What if Hetherly had secretly carried a torch for her all these years? What if he was waiting? And if he led her husband astray, if the marriage collapsed, if James fucked one more person one more time . . . but that would be Machiavellian. Horrible. And why would he think she’d run into his arms, anyway? It made no sense. She was thinking of her friend, her friend, as he was so often called with a trace of annoyance, as monstrous. He wouldn’t do a thing like that, would he? Might someone who’d been to war—might someone who saw life in terms of actions fought, battles won or lost—might Aunt Rose have been picking up his preoccupations, rather than reciting her own? Thinking of the world as a war zone would be peculiar, for a little old lady. Is that why she was preoccupied with war? Because Hetherly was? Vietnam was the one thing you knew never to bring up with Hetherly—but maybe he was like a fat person who only ate in private. Maybe, alone, he wallowed in the war, relived it, had flashbacks, so that the last thing he’d allow his friends to do would be to intrude on his private hell, his hermetically sealed nightmare. He appeared one way, but in private, he was another. How unusual was that? Any more unusual than not telling your best friend, not telling your mother, that your husband had had an affair? It was easy to radiate STAY AWAY. You just had to forcefully communicate your desperation to people, making sure you masked it as certainty. You had to let them know that you’d take no prisoners.
She sat a while longer. She tried to imagine the boat docking. If it wasn’t, what was it doing? Out of fuel? Sprung a leak? Her precious husband, endangered? Right. Like he’d been endangered those times he was ostensibly staying late at work. The woman’s name was Ellen. How pathetic to pretend that she didn’t know her name. She’d even met her, briefly. Met her husband, too. The four of them, being introduced on the sidewalk outside the building. Ellen. Ellen. Ellen.
She went down to the lobby—almost ran from the room, as if the room, itself, was poisoning her thoughts. A fat man and a thin woman were checking in. In the corner, a Christmas tree decorated with pink and white lights glowed. Tinsel was draped from the branches. At periodic intervals, the white lights blinked. On one of the rattan chairs, an older man, wearing a bright red tie and a straw cap, sat reading a magazine. “A very happy Christmas to you,” he said brightly, as she passed. “Thank you. You, too,” she said.
There was no one behind the concierge’s desk. Outside, a taxi was discharging an Asian couple. The woman was short and had on stiletto heels. The man wore a navy blue suit. The cab driver held open the door of the hotel for them, in the absence of a busboy, the lights of his cab blinking in the driveway.
“Excuse me,” she said to the man behind the desk. “The charter boats—do they leave from some particular place?”
“Which one you thinking of?” the cabdriver interrupted, putting down a Vuitton bag at the Asian man’s feet. In her hand, the woman held a hatbox.
“Which boat? The Treasure Trove.” She remembered, because there was a jewelry store she liked by that name near the museum. She had once bought a watch strap there.
“Garrison Bight,” the cabdriver said. “The Treasure Trove’s a local boat. The private ones that come in this time of year, I don’t know the first thing about them,” he added.
“How far is that?” she said. “That’s where the boats come in? Garrison whatever?”
“Bight,” he said. “Bite, like a dog.” He bared his teeth. “Eight minutes.”
“Great,” she said. She followed him to his cab.
“Garrison Bight, comin’ up,” he said. The cab needed a brake job. The brakes squealed when he stopped suddenly as a bare-chested man in a Santa beard cut him off.
“My fuckin’ brother,” the cabdriver said. “He sat me down before I was old enough to toddle away and gave me the low-down on Santa.”
“He told you he didn’t exist?”
“That’s what he told me. You got any information to the contrary?”
“No,” she said. “Can’t help you there.”
“Well, that bastard went to jail for embezzlement,” the cab-driver said. “He wasn’t really my brother, anyway. He was some kid that lived with us for a while when my mother took a shine to the owner of the gas station.”
She said nothing. The houses were decorated with tiny lights that looked like icicles. Across the rails of the top porch of a Victorian was the outlined shape of a jumping shark. A block or so later, she noticed red lights outlining a huge cactus in someone’s front yard.
“I never ask my passengers where they’re from,” the cab-driver said. “My girlfriend says that’s strange. But they tell you, and it’s probably a place you’ve never been, right? Somebody tells me, ‘Reno, Nevada,’ what should that mean to me?”
“You don’t travel much?” she said.
“I belong to the greatest frequent flyer program of all,” he said. “Astral projection.” The cab went through a yellow light. “Yeah, that’s the way to travel.”
In another minute or so she saw a boatyard on both sides of the road. “That slip right there, by that Dusty Dancer? That’s where the Treasure Trove docks. Out late tonight. I presume you want to disembark?”
“Yes,” she said. She paid him and got out. A strong breeze was blowing. There was a wooden sign on a post sunk into the cement marked Treasure Trove. In the space next to it, another boat bobbed in the water. It didn’t seem that anyone was on any of the boats, though she didn’t know what she’d say if she did see someone. Hey: Can you tell me the truth about my husband and a friend of mine? Do you tell fortunes, or are you just standing around on a boat? The light changed and a motorcycle zoomed onto the road, voices screaming into the wind. She turned to see the two riders disappear. She walked forward and sat on the grass behind the sidewalk, feet stretched in front of her. Five minutes or ten minutes passed, and then, eventually, in the distance, she saw lights, and not long after that, what she assumed might be the Treasure Trove. As it grew larger, she felt sure that it was.
Unexpectedly, it emitted a low bleep—fast and rude, like a fart. Voices floated over the water. Laughter. Wild, merry laughter. It was a good-size boat.
She sat there all the time it took for the boat to slowly pull in. She watched men moving around on deck. In some ways, the scene in front of her didn’t seem to really be happening, though it was vivid, like a movie. What boat materialized almost instantly, as if her wish was its command? It was a variation of her wondering, as she sometimes did, such as when she’d caught sight of herself earlier, in the hotel mirror: who is this person? She could hear everything everyone said. She could see the squealing, squirming dancers: bright-haired women dressed as mermaids. The costumes were made of green sequins that flashed like neon against the black backdrop of the sky. One woman was not dressed as a mermaid: she wore only a Santa hat, pasties on her nipples, and a G-string. Someone was laughing loudly, grabbing her around the hips. “No more room at the manger! Let’s relocate this party elsewhere, my friends,” a man’s voice called. Music was turned on and quickly turned off. People began to disembark. People paid no attention to her. It was as if she’d become invisible. “You need a ride? Hey, you need wheels?” one man called. “Meet you at Teasers! Hey! Meet you at Teasers!” came another voice. James and Hetherly were not among those who were screaming. Between them, they half dragged, half held up a drunken mermaid. If the mermaid had been Hetherly’s war buddy, he would have been accomplishing a noble, noble deed. Though James helped him—as much as he was able; he was stumbling almost as badly as the mermaid—Hetherly bore the brunt of the load. Out of the battle, into new territory. Across the field she’d later realize had been filled with fire ants—in the moments before she realized she’d been swarmed, that they’d attacked so quickly, there was nothing she could have done—in those moments, she’d been so focused on asking the t
wo drunken fools in front of her whether they ever intended to take her with them to London that she’d tuned out her own pain.
What did they expect from her, standing there, bobbing like they were still aboard a wave-tossed ship, the mermaid so drunk that in spite of their support she’d gone down on her knees? Here was the treasure of the Treasure Trove. Here they were, taken aback for a second in the midst of their midlife crises.
Hetherly’s eyes were wide with horror. He was sure that he had met the enemy. And James looked . . . leering. He leered so peculiarly that she was transfixed by his slack-jawed expression, though when his eyes went out of focus his expression changed entirely. She watched as Hetherly grabbed the mermaid more tightly, tipping her body toward his. The mermaid flopped lifelessly. And she might have bought it—she might have believed that it was Hetherly’s mermaid, except that, with an unexpected surge of strength, the woman wrenched herself the other way, reaching out to James. Worse even than that was that he let her go. Let her slip to the ground. Was going to leave Hetherly to deal with it, while he began his lying explanation to her, trying to explain away what she’d seen. Hetherly, at least, had the decency to pull the mermaid up. He stayed to see that the mermaid was settled in another passenger’s arms.
The hazard lights blinking at the side of the road belonged to the same cabdriver. He got out and gestured, waving his arm for them to come into the cab. “Whew,” he said, as they approached, and told them to keep the windows down in the back. What he thought of her predicament—why he’d come back, what he thought of any of it—she could not imagine. As she sat squeezed between James and Hetherly, increasingly conscious that something was very wrong with her—that she hadn’t just gotten a few bug bites, that there was something terribly, painfully wrong: a fire that had begun to consume her from the legs up—she found herself concentrating on what the cabdriver had said earlier. He was right, and she believed him totally. It didn’t matter if this was happening in Key West, Florida, or in Reno, Nevada.
Cat People
MRS.EUGENIE Nestor and her husband, Old Nestor, live next door to us in Key West, behind a tall bam-boo fence with several shoebox-size rectangles cut in it so their cats can prowl in our yard. Key West has changed a lot during the twenty years my husband and I have been renting a winter house here. For one thing, these days you can throw away your alarm: if it’s not the crashing clatter of the recycling truck twice a week—this beast can come at three in the morning, by the way—it’s the daily whine of buzzsaws. No one needs an alarm anymore. The renovation has drowned out the roosters, machines screech more piercingly than any of the birds, and motorcycles let you know how frustrated the riders feel, having to zig and zag through so much traffic. The main street, Duval, is, during the height of the tourist season, entirely blocked off, being bulldozed and jackhammered. Everyone takes the next street over, Simonton, which means traffic pours by day and night. My husband refuses to drive the car and has even abandoned his bicycle because of the many ruts in the road, and because tourists have recently been reaching out their windows to try to topple the cyclists. It’s a new sport, malevolent, but a direct response, people think, to the number of cyclists who frighten them by riding at high speeds on the right and side-swiping them or cutting them off. Yesterday I saw a woman in a convertible using a shopping bag like a big flyswatter. You used to see amusing, interesting things in Key West: men riding along in bikini trunks with their dogs in baskets on the front of their bikes, or adults pulling other adults in wagons on the side walk. And the gay people were quite flamboyant; leftover masks from Fantasy Fest might appear pushed to the top of their heads like one of those old lady pancake hats, or they’d wear masks on the street, nothing particular going on except that they were escorting some friend in chains down Duval, and the one who wasn’t bound in chains would have on a miniskirt with a tee-shirt with something outrageous written on it, and over his eyes, a mask made of peacock feathers. AIDS took its toll in the ’80s, though, and now most of the birds are in the trees, or snatching expensive goldfish out of people’s little garden pools. Yesterday my husband saw a crane walking up the steps of a recently opened gift shop. Amazed tourists were giggling and gawking and photographing it. The storekeeper said, “Let it come in. Maybe it has a credit card.”
Inevitably, the Conch Republic has changed. Even the conch is now imported. The tourists still come in droves and hurtle around the island on a big caterpillar with an awning called the Conch Train. My husband and I hear the punch line of a recorded joke as it passes, about every half hour. One of the drivers moonlights for my husband, coming on Monday and Wednesday nights to stand in our pool with some other models, clothed and unclothed. He recites the canned jokes to make them groan, and they roll their eyes or splash water on him. My husband understands that modeling can be very boring, and he expects to be talked to, but pretty quickly the models understand they won’t be getting much feedback except for an occasional “Pardon me?” or “You think so?” Inevitably, the models who have been in analysis come to love my husband. If he could remember ten percent of what they tell him, I could spend my whole life amazed by people’s bizarre lives and problems. Lem Rupert is not only a Conch Train driver, but also a weekend waitperson, as well as part-time model. Lem grew up in Wales, in a little place called Hay-on-Wye, which he calls Ham-on-Rye. Apparently the place is famous for its bookstores; some shops are so large they spill out onto the street and only awnings keep the books from getting rained on. Lem’s mother was a maid in one of the inns and his father was away at sea for most of the years Lem was growing up. Lem has a sister, Daphne, who also models for my husband when she needs extra money. Like her mother, she works in a hotel, but it’s the Hyatt in Key West: quite large and new and grand. Daphne has auburn hair and a ruddy complexion that my husband has speculated may be protective coloration, a way of disappearing while working in a big hotel that is primarily pink.
Last Wednesday night my husband had the two of them posing in the pool, Daphne on a raft, Lem holding a palm frond and pretending to be fishing out leaves, when Old Nestor had what my husband calls “an episode” with one of the cats. The cats seem to disappoint him in many ways. They do something that makes him bang a spoon on a pan—that is the very worst cat punishment for all of us—though other times the Nestors throw fruit or simply clap their hands and curse. But this night the orange cat did something that really set Old Nestor off. Even from inside the house, I could hear distinctly the metallic beat of the tom-tom, with Old Nestor’s wife shrieking in falsetto. A banana was the first thing to end up in our pool, followed by the orange cat’s darting through one of the shoebox holes in a state of wild agitation, making a mad dash so intense that it overshot the yard entirely and ended up in the water. An apple and several starfruit flew after it, and the apple smacked Daphne on the head, causing her to scream as she toppled off the raft into the pool. To make matters worse, the orange cat was terrified and attempted to scramble up Daphne, which was the first time anyone realized quite how afraid of cats Daphne was, though anyone might have been afraid of some wildly circling animal in fear for its life, with its eyes bugging and its claws extended. As I understand it, Lem was immediately possessed of enormous strength—such a surge of power that he dismantled part of the fence with his bare hands, and clomped into the Nestors’ yard cursing every bit as obscenely as Eugenie and Old Nestor. Meanwhile, Daphne was shrieking in the pool, and the cat was swimming in circles around her like a shark, so my husband peeled off his shirt, stepped out of his sandals, and rushed into the water, swatting the cat toward the shallow end with the palm frond, where it quickly found the steps and clambered out. Daphne was in tears, really going crazy. She started whacking at Andy, accusing him quite irrationally of “offering no protection” or something like that, her hand on top of her head where the apple had hit it, the string on her bikini top having broken, so that she clutched one little triangle of fabric over one breast, while trying to elbow the other triangle over
the other breast . . . well: it was pandemonium, and furthermore, the orange cat had run right through Andy’s pallet, and there were blue pawprints everywhere. The cat’s mad dash had triggered the other neighbors’ new security system, so suddenly, amid the three-way cursing at the Nestors’, a voice you knew did not originate from a human being, announced: “You have entered a secured area. You have five seconds to leave the premises.” If the neighbors had been home, they could have come out to investigate, but they weren’t home, so the alarm system went off, resulting in ear-splitting noise which only ended when the police arrived. They obviously knew the code and had no trouble deactivating the alarm, but in their haste, in the dark, they knocked over the birdcage, and the door opened and the Minichiellos’ parrot flew off into the night, which made one of the cops completely exasperated and furious, as his partner laughed and laughed, grabbing hold of our back gate to keep himself upright. Then his eyes drifted to Daphne, with the string and triangles dangling around her neck, standing and screaming after Andy, because by then he, too, had disappeared into the Nestors’ backyard. Though none of us knew it that moment, he had embarked on a plan to uproot every bush and tree he could find there that was without thorns.
“Fucking idle rich!” Daphne screamed, climbing out of the pool. “It’s exploitation! Seven dollars an hour doesn’t entitle you to slam-dunk me. I want that monster arrested. I want to press charges because he could have bloody well killed me, him with his rabid cat and his stinking bloody violence, I want whoever threw that rock arrested!”
“You miserable lowlife,” Eugenie Nestor screamed. Which one of them she meant, I had no idea, but when an enormous bird-of-paradise plant was heaved over the fence into our yard, Old Nestor followed after it, through the newly broken fence, and as he attempted to scoop it up, Lem kicked him from behind and he went sprawling, and that was when the police finally did intervene—with the parrot staring down from high up in the palm tree, calling out: “Margaritaville! Margaritaville!” Like the bird, the laughing cop only got out individual words, but the address did get through, and within a matter of seconds there were sirens in the distance, and two police cars converged in front of our house, where Daphne now stood, topless, screaming that someone had tried to murder her. The upshot of it was that Old Nestor and Lem had to be restrained, and it took Andy quite a long time to disabuse the cops of the notion that a porn movie was being shot in the backyard. “Why do you keep asking when you don’t see any camera?” Andy said repeatedly to the cop. “Look at this. Look here. This is what was happening, when our neighbors began throwing things after their cat. I was painting a painting. That’s what I do for a living. I’ve been coming to Key West for twenty years. I’m a painter. I’m a painter.” If he weren’t so tall, he could have been mistaken for Elmer Fudd, jumping up and down. I was a great help in giving a balanced view of the whole situation. By ten P.M. they were gone—with Lem in custody, and Daphne weeping in a chair on our front porch, dabbing her eyes with a tee-shirt, saying that it was their father Lem had gotten his ungovernable temper from, and hadn’t he been wonderful, going after the people who had tried to kill her? The Minichiellos’ parrot had flown away. When Daphne stopped sniffling and put on her in-line skates to follow after Lem to the police station, we put on the evening news and took comfort in hearing how cold it was elsewhere.
