Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  She leaned her ear against the utility door and covered her other ear. One of the residents, a Mrs. Dawdy, had just gotten out of her car. She stared at Lorrie and came over, brows raised in query, and said, “Is something wrong, dear?”

  “Get the hell away from here!”

  The woman backed off. “Well, parm me, I’m sure. You don’t have to be shitty to me, you little slut.”

  Apologize later, Lorrie told herself. She could hear voices in the service room, Julian’s loud and angry and blustering, Vic’s much fainter. Then there were other sounds. Faint gasps and grunts of effort. Thudding thumping sounds. She squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to stop listening, and could not. There was a sour taste in the back of her throat. In an eerie way, it was much like listening that time to Julian and Mrs. Fish, the big nurse. There was the same sense of both fascination and personal loss. It had been evil to keep on listening and then say nothing to him, nothing to stop him doing it with her. Nurse Fish was freeing her from Julian. Now Vic was doing the same thing, somehow. It frightened her. She could hear no further sounds. She hammered on the locked door, hurting both fists.

  The door opened a few inches and Vic filled the opening, looking out at her with disapproval. “What are you banging on the door for? What are you yelling about? This is dumb, Lorrie sugar.”

  “Let me in. Let me see him or I’ll call the police.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Let me in!”

  “Go ahead. Call the cops. Then neither one of you has a job and everything you own gets thrown out in the street. I thought you were the one with sense. Go turn his bed down. I’ll walk him in through that back door in about five minutes.”

  He shut the door in her face and she turned and did as he had told her. She left their back door open.

  It was closer to ten minutes before they arrived, Julian with gray slack face, leaning heavily on Vic, scuffing, dragging the heels of his sandals. There were tear tracks on Julian’s face.

  Vic grinned merrily at Lorrie and swung Julian around and sat him on the side of the bed. Julian sighed heavily several times as Lorrie helped him undress. He rolled to face the wall, knees pulled up. She covered him over and left him, quietly closing the bedroom door.

  Vic was waiting in the tiny kitchen. “What I wanted to say was he took it good, like I figured he would. You noticed I didn’t mark him none. I didn’t think you’d like that. There is some cartilage sprung between his ribs that will hurt him for breathing for a couple weeks probably. And if he should piss some blood, not to worry. He is going to be too sore all over to get out of bed tomorrow. Better he should rest up. He understands if it ever happens again, it’s a hospital case, like a week maybe.” He held out his lumpy broken fists, with the dimpled knuckles where the bone had been compressed in combat long ago. He winked at her. “Better me with these than he sends some punk kid with a pipe wrapped in a towel to scramble his head. Always hire a pro. Look after him, Lorrie. See you around, huh?”

  9

  LEGRANDE MESSENGER eased himself to a more comfortable position in his big black leather lounge chair in Apartment 7-A and told himself the pain would soon go away. And he wished that this Mr. Stanley Wasniak would go away.

  “We believe,” Wasniak was saying, “that everybody here in Golden Sands is entitled to a personal explanation from one of us that got elected to be officers of the Association. You could say that everybody turns out to be a patsy, some kind of pigeon for the group that set this whole thing up. Everybody thought an average eighty-one fifty would cover it, but it has got to be more than twice …”

  “Mr. Wasniak.”

  “… more than twice what we counted on. What I want to assure you, we’ve been over the contracts and charges and all with a fine-tooth comb and—”

  “Mr. Wasniak! Please!”

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “I am trying to tell you that I am not particularly interested in what the monthly charges might be. Whether they are eighty dollars or eight hundred dollars is a matter of indifference to me.”

  Wasniak stared at him, mouth hanging open for several seconds. “Well, excuse me all to hell, Mr. Messenger. I din’t know I was talking to some kind of millionaire-type person.”

  “I am sorry if I was rude. I’m in pain.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No. It comes and goes. When I hurt I am likely to be irritable, as Mrs. Messenger will doubtless confirm.”

  “I didn’t mean to bug you when you’re …”

  “Sit down, sit down again, please, Mr. Wasniak. You may have to run through it again, as my attention was … less than perfect the first time. Let me ask some questions to clarify my own thinking on this. Would you say that it was or should have been obvious to the developers that the monthly maintenance would not cover the costs?”

  “Oh, hell yes. What Liss says, he says the original figures were worked out for a lot more units, but then the project got cut back by a regulation on density, and they never changed the figures. Look at me. I’m supposed to be retired. I’m supposed to be fishing, playing golf and all that. What am I doing? I am running around like a damn fool asking people to understand it isn’t my fault they pay double from now on. How I got sucked into this I’ll never know. I wanted to be Mr. Popularity maybe. Some popularity!” He checked his list. “You go from a hundred and five to two oh two. One of the things I’m supposed to tell you, you can inspect the books. Hadley Forrester has all the books and records in his apartment, in Seven-D, right here on the top floor. It averages out—”

  “I’m sure that the accounts are in good order, and I am sure that there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it.”

  “I’m telling you, that’s a lot better attitude than I’ve been running into most places, Mr. Messenger.”

  “I appreciate your stopping by. And you’ll forgive me for not seeing you to the door, Mr. Wasniak?”

  “No, don’t you trouble yourself. A real pleasure talking to you, sir. The new billing will be along first of the month.”

  Just as Wasniak opened the door, Barbara Messenger was reaching to put her key in the lock. She gave him a brilliant smile as he stood aside to let her in. “Hi, Mr. Wasniak. I thought I’d be back here before you arrived.”

  “Well, it was going faster than I figured, so I was early.”

  She wore an open robe over her blue and white swimsuit, and carried an orange beach bag by its nylon cord. Her raw tawny brown-blond hair was as casual as noonday lions. She was a honey-tanned, long-limbed creature, handsome and graceful and totally assured. There was a very tangible force about her, almost a flavor of violence under control. Without conscious effort she received special attention from everyone and accepted it without surprise.

  “And?” she said expectantly.

  “What? Oh, I was just leaving. Good-bye, sir. Good-bye, Mrs. Messenger.”

  She looked thoughtfully at her husband after Wasniak had gone. “He looked sort of concerned and shaken, darling.”

  “I think I got impatient with the fellow.”

  She went to him quickly and sat on the footstool and took his hand. “A bad one?”

  “No. It’s fading now. Grade Three plus.”

  She knew his grading system. Three was a dull red color like fireplace coals. The pain was like an expanding pocket of gas trapped in a coil of bowel, shortening the breath. Grade Two was a flickering, pulsating, evil yellow. Grade One was glaring white, and hissed and made sweat and sometimes made him yell.

  “Want a shot?”

  “There were a few minutes there when I would have said yes. But I’m really all right now, thanks.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Schmidt?”

  “She asked if she could leave early. She got a call from her daughter. Some kind of trouble. I gather it isn’t very serious. How was your walk?”

  “Four miles long. And hot. I went two miles south down the beach and turned around. Starting a mile south I began to come
upon dead fish washed up, and fewer people. Very long-dead fish. Down where the motels are, the stench would knock a goat down. People say it’s a new outbreak of red tide.”

  “And the seas shall rot, the animals die, the birds vanish, and all the people flee.”

  “What’s that from?”

  “The instant inventions of LeGrande Messenger.”

  “When I think it’s you, it turns out to be a quotation.”

  “Child, you came along after they stopped educating people.”

  “I know, I know, I know,” she said, getting up. “I was born on your fortieth birthday, and the world has been going to hell in a handbasket for a long time. I better go change.”

  After she left the room, Messenger leaned forward, braced the heels of his hands against the leather arms of his chair and with a brisk effort levered himself to his feet. He swayed, caught his balance and walked slowly over to the window wall and looked out across their roof patio to the bright afternoon dance of the Gulf, seen between the pale stiff shoulders of the Azure Breeze and the Surf Club.

  Be grateful it was Grade Three and didn’t last, he thought. And be grateful that age slows the growth of the inoperable invader cells. You old bastard, you want to get so old the growth will stop. You want a remission. Mother had an aunt who lived to a hundred and six and kept her wits until the end. Lost her teeth, hearing, eyesight and mobility. But kept her wits. Heredity? Or is it all the vitamins Barbara keeps shoving into your ancient carcass? The wretched part is in looking so damned old. Part of that is the disease, of course. Eats you out. What the young never realize, can never comprehend, is that inside this husk there is a baffled man aged thirty. Barbara’s age. A man who feels hope and fear, love and lust, anger and greed, pride and despair. The young man wonders how this creeping, dismaying, destroying thing called age ever happened to him. He wonders how the years were all so short.

  Given a choice, he thought, of being old and sick and poor, and old and sick and rich, rich is better. A lifelong exercise of wits, weighing with great care the risk-reward ratios in all things. Dim little men try to conserve, and so they have to be right fifty-one percent of the time to hope to stay even with the board. Deepen and broaden the risk areas, and eventually you can reach a point where being right ten percent of the time will pile money atop money. Big money expands the choices, multiplies the options.

  He stretched with care, clicking an elbow, creaking a shoulder, checked for the last morsel of pain and found it entirely gone. He went over to his desk in the corner of the room, eased himself into the chair and played back the tape of the morning phone call from Zurich, listening to it for the third time, listening with care for each nuance in Muller’s heavy voice, his eyes closed. When he felt Barbara’s hand on his shoulder he said, “I don’t think we gave him enough to show to his people upstairs. Tomorrow I’ll dictate a new clause and put in a three- or four-year reversion.”

  “But that won’t really mean anything, will it?”

  “It will to Muller, I think. He has to bring the stick back, wagging his tail.”

  “Okay, I know you are a very clever man, and I’ll retype the damned thing and mail it, but you should be saying, My, what a pretty dress and how nice you look, darling.”

  He opened his eyes and smiled ruefully. “My, what a pretty dress and how nice you look, darling.”

  “How sweet of you to notice, Lee!”

  She sat in the chair beside the desk. He rewound the tape and ejected the cassette and put it aside for her to file. “While you walked did you think about what I asked you?”

  She nodded, head atilt, her smile small and solemn. “Of course. I think it is really a good place for us to live. Like you say, this is a very gaudy and vulgar building. But the climate is good, and this penthouse apartment is pleasant and roomy enough for us, dear. There’s good medical attention handy. I know we could live anywhere in the world. With a staff of dozens. And no privacy. These people don’t know who you really are. They’ve never heard of you. We don’t have to have any social or political or business involvements here. I know, I know. Don’t say it, please. You worry too much about me, about what I might want. My God, Lee, I love the sun and the water. I’m no little kid aching to go to parties. This place is fine, really. And if I ever start to get sick of it, I will let you know immediately.”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tomorrow maybe we could go over those inventory lists and see what we’d like to have with us. The bank can arrange it all. I don’t want to clutter the place with too much stuff. Some of the small bronzes, maybe.”

  “One of the Chinese horses maybe?”

  “If you’d like.”

  “And the Miro with the balloons?”

  “On that wall?”

  “Oh, yes. Why are you frowning, Lee?”

  “Wondering if it is enough of a life for you, Barbara.”

  “I had all that other stuff.”

  “And I’ve made you a rich lady.”

  “Which really bugs those three prune-mouthed sons of yours, dear.”

  “They take after their sainted, long-departed mother. There’ll be enough to go around. You just got yours earlier.”

  “When I think of it, I want to laugh.”

  “It’s funny?”

  “Lee, when I worked in your office for four hundred dollars a week, I formed my lifelong opinions about money. I can be terribly solemn about fifty thousand. I can be awestruck by one million. But the amount you stuck in trust for me is so grotesque, it makes me laugh. It’s like a little kid at the Macy’s parade seeing a duck twice the size of an elephant float by. It is beyond belief. It is a delight. And it is absurd. I look at it from the outside. You know? Office girl fleeces tycoon. Premarital contract sets record.”

  “What if I had to buy you?”

  “No way. The lady is not for sale.”

  “I would cheerfully have paid that just to have you near me while, as they say in the song, the days grow short.”

  “Shall I whistle for the violins?”

  “I just have to reassure myself that you are here and want to be here. I have to hear it now and then.”

  “Where else would I be but with you? I had all that other stuff, Lee. I had the house, the husband, the babies. I don’t ever want to be that vulnerable again. The fates mess around with the people who have the most to lose. Ever notice that?”

  “A couple of times a day.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.”

  “It was a joke, Barbara. Slightly sick, but a joke nonetheless.”

  “It isn’t going to have me laughing helplessly.”

  After the worst of the heat had gone from the sun, she went out onto the private terrace with him. She brought him his small carafe of red wine and put it and the glass he liked on the tiled table beside the arm of his chair. Eight pelicans in single file glided by, heading home after the day’s work out on the broad Gulf. She sat in the deck chair beside his, drifting back and forth across the edge of sleep, made drowsy by the walk along the beach.

  He held her hand and talked to her. She could tell that the old man wanted her and was trying to hide it. He was as shy and strange about that as he was about almost everything. He seemed to feel that she should be sickened by the needs of a frail, dying man. He had come to despise his own body to the point where he could not comprehend how she could caress him or endure his caresses. Love made her take pleasure in giving him pleasure. After the first time he had told her he had not intended that to be part of their bargain. She had said she did not think in terms of bargains and agreements. Frailty made them gentle. Each time might be the last time. There was sweetness and there was gratitude.

  The angry fire had burned up the grinning happy husband and the fat adorable babies and the white house with the Tory chimney. It had burned up all their letters and their music and their yearbooks, their photographs of one another, her diaries and his tennis cups. It had burned her heart to a black
cinder. The strange old man had waited long enough and then had sent people to bring her back to her desk, no excuses acceptable. She had been thinking then of sleeping pills and deep fast rivers, of high high places and razor blades, of gas ovens and kitchen knives. But that weird old Mr. Messenger had piled work upon her as if to crush her under the weight of it. She had dived down into work and had lived there for over a year. When she had raised her head and looked around she found she was as mended as she would ever be, could ever be. She raised her head to hear Lee telling her that he was phasing out the office, that he had cancer, that, as an arrangement, and in order to be fair to her, he would marry her. He needed someone around him who was attractive, who’d had some nurse training, who was a superb secretary and who had no one else close to her. He said he might live six months or a year and would expect her in attendance to the end. But it had been two and a half years now, and though he looked more wasted than ever, the pains were not as frequent or as harsh.

  He had offered her places to live. Corfu, Madeira, Saint Thomas, Crete. Islands in the sun. Agents had brought pictures and floor plans of the houses they could have. But one could not run a big house and manage to make the end of a long life graceful and easy at the same time.

  So it would end here. The day after tomorrow or the year after today. She yawned and sighed and pulled the grave-marked hand to her mouth and kissed it, then went in to fix the sparse evening meal. She thought of the money. She did not think of it often. It was up there in the Chase, growing and growing in a fetid mushroom darkness, feeding its own tax-free income back to itself in the form of more tax-free municipals. Lee selected them. All from the South and Southwest and the West. General obligations, whatever they might be. Oh, there was enough to go around without that. She had seen all the trusts he had set up for the disapproving sons, with their long lists of holdings. She had seen how carefully he was liquidating, consolidating, minimizing the estate taxes. There was lots to go around. Without the trust fund he had settled on her, there had to be ten million left per son, at least. And it could be twice that. Beyond a certain point money ceased to have any meaning. One could ride in but one car at a time, eat one meal at a time, sleep in one bed at a time.