Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  Martin Liss stood naked, looking north through the sliding glass doors of Penthouse A of Tropic Towers, across the low one- and two-story buildings of Beach Village, toward the curving pattern of the high rises marching into the misty heat of the August Sunday afternoon. He stood with bare feet in deep orange shag, a hairy man of small stature, the black mat of thickly curled hair covering his chest, growing more sparsely on shoulders and back and protruding belly, thickening again into the forest of the groin, where the flaccid tube of sex lay dead against the heavy asymmetric dangle of balls. He stood with his arms crossed under his plump hairy breasts, elbows in his palms. He looked out at the penthouse deck where Drusilla had nursed the dying plants back to luxuriant life.

  “It wasn’t out off that wall Jerry jumped?” he asked.

  “Stop thinking about it, love.”

  “Probably around from the back. Sure. From where he hit.”

  “Yes, it was around from the back,” she said. “Darlin’, stop worrying your head.”

  She was supine upon a low deep couch fashioned of a three-quarter mattress on a low frame, covered with the dynel skins of imaginary animals, with a rainbow of pastel pillows in large sizes and strange shapes. Nearly all the draperies were drawn, leaving the big room in shadow.

  She lay propped on pillows, ankles crossed, one arm across her stomach, the other behind her head. Her hair was tousled. He walked back across the shag and plucked his brief mesh shorts from a chair and pulled them on, hopping for balance. Buttercup mesh. Swedish. Imported. Fourteen bucks a pair. He had a dozen pair in assorted colors.

  He looked at her and said, “Hey, when I was a kid I had a postage stamp looked just like you there, same position, everything.”

  “A postage stamp!”

  “Spanish. Let me see if I can remember. Sure. Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba. The word was that he was getting a little on the side, so he made two paintings of her, one with clothes and one without. Among my group it was a very hot number. You’re not as heavy as she was.”

  “Thank you so much!”

  “Think nothing of it. You look better, even. And you are better. The way it’s all coming down, I would have bet forty to one nobody could have got me in the mood.”

  “I should have wagered. Darlin’, you have to have some relaxation, you know.”

  “Who can relax? The way my head is, I think I’m falling out of my tree. It’s very weird. I don’t know. I am going along like always, and then I get a sudden feeling as if something slipped inside my head. A gear comes loose and the motor races. I go right back into last week or last month or last year, with memories so strong and bright they are as if they were happening all over again. Like in a dream, but I’m not asleep. Things happen to me and I know how they come out, but I want them to be different the second time around, and I am standing over at the side, sort of gnawing my hands and saying, Don’t happen! But it does, just like before.”

  She said, “But he told you what it was. Simple anxiety. Just take your Valium, Martin.”

  He sat at the foot of the couch. She braced a slender bare foot against his thigh. He scowled into space. “I don’t know exactly how they are coming after me, or how much blood they are going to want. But I’m not going to be able to sidestep it.”

  “You haven’t done anything so terrible!”

  “I know. I know. Look, the times are wrong. I guessed exactly right a lot of times, and this time I figured it all wrong. People are hurting. They are taking big lumps. So it has to be somebody’s fault. I’m all of a sudden a leper. My connections close me out, even. They buy me out for discount rates, and there’s nothing I can do. I should have packed up and left back in April or May. I thought about it. I could have written off everything I put into the Harbour Pointe project and walked away rich. I think of how close I came to doing just that, and I ache all over. No, I couldn’t walk away. Not Martin Liss, the high roller. Know something? Benjie is going to fink out. I know it. How can I blame the little guy? Ten kids. Never hire anybody with ten kids. If he finks, so will Lew. They’ll load it all onto Marty. Immunity. You’ll see.”

  “Aw, they wouldn’t be doing that to you now!”

  “I don’t want to think about it, even, but I can’t think of anything else. The thing is, Irish, I gave the folks a fair shake. Mostly, what they paid for, they got. You know? You got to watch Cole because he cuts those corners. And so I always watched him, and so he never got away with too much. You want to know something I know that chills my blood?”

  “Should I want to know?”

  “There is one condominium on Fiddler Key that was put up maybe five years ago. I could take you to the courthouse and we could find the plans and drawings in the file. All approved. We could find the inspection reports and the approval reports for every phase of construction. It called for pilings, so many, so deep, with lab tests and so on and so on. Safety factors, et cetera et cetera. And you know something? There isn’t one goddam piling under that sucker. Not … one … single … piling! It sits on the fucking ground like a big fucking box, like some package that fell off a truck!”

  “You are joking!”

  “I am absolutely dead serious. Think of how many people had to be paid off! Compared to the bastards who put that one up, I’m a charitable foundation.”

  “Martin, maybe nothing at all will happen. Maybe it will blow over.”

  “There’s too many agencies involved by now. Too many people got hurt in this Grome thing. All of the REITs have come tumbling down like stones. People invested for income. Hell, Dru, I was just out there playing in the traffic when the truck came along. These agencies, they try to out-tough each other. It gets political. Nobody can afford to ease off.”

  “Shouldn’t you be doing something? Shouldn’t you be making some contact with a very good attorney?”

  “I know what I should be doing. But what I am doing is spending Sunday here with you. You know, everything looks different.” He took hold of her ankle. “Like feet.”

  “Feet!”

  “I don’t know how to say this. I am looking at your foot as if I never saw a foot before. These toes are like funny little fingers. Once upon a time they could grab ahold of branches. Now these little fingers that don’t work so great anymore are shoved into little leather boxes and we walk on them, on pavement.”

  “My darlin’, you are quite mad, aren’t you?”

  “I keep thinking I should go home. She was sleeping when I left, and she doesn’t know where I am.”

  “Maybe she’s having a special tennis lesson?”

  “I guess I shouldn’t have showed you those pictures.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss them. She looks so terribly intense, you know?”

  “What have I got, really? Adding up my life is one of the things I’ve been doing.” She reached and tugged at him and he slid up to lie beside her against the pillows. “Take my two kids, for instance. They say Sue’s got a hostility problem. What it means is she won’t look at me or speak to me or have a goddam thing to do with me except spend the money I send her. She lives on that California beach, pops pills, screws musicians and cracks up automobiles. Marty Junior lives in the goddam desert with that fat Indian wife of his that had the three kids when he married her, and they make that junk jewelry and sell it and he paints pictures of cactuses and gets bombed on peyote most of the time and can’t carry on a logical conversation. I tried. Jesus, how I tried. And one day I said to myself, why are you trying so hard? Give up! So I gave up, and you don’t know how really relaxing and wonderful it was to say, after all those years, I just don’t like those kids. I not only don’t love them, I don’t even like them! Shall I continue? I take three good shots at marriage, and on the third try I get Francie. Hell, I can’t hate her. She watches the soaps. If her life isn’t fucked up emotionally, she doesn’t feel as if she is living. That’s the secret to her and that tennis guy. She doesn’t really enjoy getting laid like that. She feels she owes
it to herself as a person. If I throw her out now, who sends me gift packages in the slam? It will really turn her on if I go to jail. The plot thickens. Will Frances Liss divorce her jailbird husband to marry her tennis pro, or will terminal hangnail end her dramatic life first?”

  “Martin, Martin, Martin.”

  “No, I’m mostly laughing. Don’t be concerned. Now we come to my friends and associates, Benjamin Wannover and Lewis Traff. The way it works, once they make their deal with the Feds, they will have to hate me. It’s the way they rationalize it. It’s how people tick. They can dump me because I lost my leverage. Which brings us to you, Irish.”

  She turned and hooked a long leg across his thighs. “The loyal and diligent Miss Bryne?”

  He looked into her shadowed eyes, six inches from his. “What I think, kid, is that maybe it’s time for you to get out of the line of fire. You could get felled by a random shot.”

  “I couldn’t possibly—”

  “Let’s have some honesty, okay? I have listened to enough bullshit lately.”

  “Well … I have thought of it, love.”

  “That guy still waiting?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ve got the money to take back by now?”

  “Well … rather more than in the … game plan. Quite a bit more, in fact. Thanks to little suggestions you gave me. Little speculations. And I am quite close about money, you know.”

  He stroked her in an absentminded manner. “You let him know you’ve got more than you planned on?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Peter would tell me to come home and be married.”

  “What would be wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I guess. The garage is doing well. We’d live in the cottage where his grandfather was born. It’s of stone, very snug. We’d be but fifteen miles from the sea, and have a small sailboat. I should go back. I’m getting a bit long in the tooth to be starting a family, you know. But I think of it, and there is no flutter. No rush of warmth. I just think of it and it seems a nice thing to do. But it should be more than that, Martin.”

  “Am I what got in the way?”

  “Oh, no. Not really. This was a decision I made at a time when I really did not like you. It seemed … a safe solution. It’s certainly nothing Peter need ever know, but he certainly has every right to suspect. It would make little or no difference between us. We’re adults, you know. Then, in time, I came to like you, Martin. You can be very nasty and overbearing and egotistical. But I like you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are a very good lover, Martin.”

  “Two ex-wives would give you an argument there. Anyway, I am not any kind of lover at the moment.”

  She got up and clambered over him and stood smiling down at him. “I’ll scramble some eggs with roe?”

  “Fine.”

  “Make us a drink if you’d like one. About my going back, I don’t know if I will, ever. I just don’t know. And I will take my chances on that stray shot you mentioned.” She started away and picked up her short robe and turned back as she shouldered into it. “Oh, by the way, I have this apartment sold, I think.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Don’t sound so impressed!”

  “Look. You’ve done a nice job. You are doing a nice job. Every dime over expenses goes right onto the loans. I can’t even give you a bonus for selling this one. You’ve made it look great. Where’ll you go from here?”

  “One floor down. Empties are getting scarce. And that will be the last furnished empty one. The furniture is hideous, even worse than this one was.”

  “Who’s buying this one?”

  “A jeweler from Memphis.”

  She went to the kitchen. Before she started the eggs she came back to ask Martin if he was going to fix a drink. He had fallen asleep. She sighed and covered him with a bright yellow afghan, bent and put an imperceptible kiss upon the bald front half of his tanned tired head. She sat at the kitchen bar and had bread and tea, and thought about Martin and about Peter. The next place, she thought, might be Dallas. Joyce’s last letter said there would be no trouble finding a lovely position, in spite of the way everyone was talking about hard times coming, about the new great depression. Joyce said that handsome Irish girls were in short supply and high demand. Joyce now worked for the senior partner in a large advertising agency. She decided that if Martin was still asleep by six o’clock, she would have to wake him.

  At six o’clock EDST on Sunday, August eleventh, analysis of the satellite photographs established Ella at roughly 14 degrees north, 48 degrees west. This placed the center at about one thousand statute miles due north of Belém, Brazil, and seven hundred and twenty miles due east of Barbados.

  Mick Rhoades phoned an old friend on the Miami Herald, who said he had been over at the National Hurricane Center earlier in the day.

  “I tell you, that is one bi-i-i-g mother out there, so big those experts are laughing and punching each other on the arm and generally carrying on, like somebody lands a record marlin.”

  “Any predictions on it, Harry?”

  “Except for predicting that it will turn into a hurricane in the next twenty-four hours, which is something you already got over the wire, they won’t say much. The thing which seems to turn them on is the way it moves right on course and at the same speed. Conditions are ideal for it to grow bigger and nastier. They’ll probably be flying into it tomorrow. We had those funny-looking clouds radiating out of the southeast all afternoon today. They’ve got big surf in the islands, and very heavy rains starting there. If she continues coming a little north of west, she could move up far enough to put this town right in the way of the worst quadrant of the winds four days from now. Anyway, if she doesn’t slow, she’ll bang into the Lesser Antilles tomorrow, with the eye getting there like about midnight tomorrow to three in the morning. Then we’ll know how rough that mother is.”

  “We don’t need one like that over here, Harry.”

  “Bet your ass you don’t. Not with all those condos sitting on those sandspits. You are a disaster waiting to happen over there.”

  “Everybody says the same thing, but they still issue building permits.”

  “Not any more, they don’t.”

  “That’s economics, not weather forecasting.”

  “It hits, you run for high ground, Mick.”

  “Great! Twenty miles inland we got some high ground, I think. Thirty or forty feet above sea level.”

  “How are things with you anyway? You getting any?”

  “A little here, a little there. How’s Myra?”

  “Due to pop.”

  “Again?”

  “Fourth and last, fella. Fourth and last. We took an oath.”

  After he hung up, Mick went across the city room to the big wall map of the Gulf and the Caribbean. Somebody had moved the little hurricane symbol to its most recent position. The little doughnut looked tiny in the vastness of the sea.

  33

  WHEN THE BIG DREDGE had been grinding and grunting away in the bay behind Golden Sands, George and Elda Gobbin had taken to closing the bedroom windows and sleeping in the cool hush of the air conditioning. When the dredge stopped they tried to go back to the previous system, but it seemed too sticky and uncomfortable. They told each other that they did seem to sleep better under a light blanket, with the thermostat set at seventy. She said she hated to have her hair get sweaty.

  It was full bright daylight when George awoke on Monday morning, August twelfth. He had slept so soundly, he did not know where he was. His first thought was that he was late, that he had overslept, that he would have to call the office. Next he realized that he was not at home, that he was in a strange hotel somewhere. He looked over at the neighbor bed and saw a strange blond head and a brown shoulder, and he erupted with panic and guilt. Suddenly it all fell back into place.

  He was retired and living at Golden Sands and he could get up when he
felt like it. Elda had finally found something which enabled her to tan rather than turn dark red. And her hairdresser was doing something to her hair lately.

  As his panicked heart slowed, he yawned and wondered why he was feeling so disoriented lately. And why he was having so many horrible dreams. One in the night about Vicky Antonelli had awakened him, all cold and sweaty. He dreamed they were back in that cabin they used to go to, twenty years ago, on the land her father leased, and she was standing and holding her arms out to him and crying silently. Her breasts were shaped like big firm white drops of melting wax, greatly magnified. They ran down her and down the fronts of her thighs and shins and onto the old grass rug, and she would step away from them as others slowly grew and grew, breaking loose when they were the right size. She wanted him to do something to help her. She could not tell him what. She could only cry and hold her arms out. There had been other dreams too, but he could not remember any of them. He had the sense that they were horrible too.

  He got up without awakening Elda and went into his bathroom and quietly closed the door before snapping the light on. After he urinated, he leaned on the sink and studied his face in the mirror, and took his brush and adjusted his dark hair to the new way he had discovered. If he brushed it forward and then across, and sprayed it into place, it did make him look younger. Elda agreed that it did, much to his surprise. He thought she would tell him it looked silly.

  George got out the tape and measured his belly bulge. Forty-one inches. Down from forty-three already. And it was going to go down a lot farther. It was going to go down to thirty-six, he had decided, even if it did mean taking in a lot of his clothing and giving away a lot more.

  Funny how, down here, they had become so much more conscious of appearance. Elda was serious about finding out how much a face lift would cost. With her tan, and her new-found figure, and her always youthful clear green eyes, she could create a magical change by merely putting her thumbs by her temples and pushing the loose skin upward. She had done it several times for him, and it made him feel odd to see an Elda from many years ago. Staring into his mirror, he pushed up on his own face in exactly the same way and saw young George peer out at him, the folds and tucks around the mouth disappearing.