The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  “Probably. Okay with you?”

  “Perfect with me. Travis. This eye thing. What I wanted to show you … well, you know. It works for us. For you and me. I’m a personal person. What I was trying to say about Howie, you could look into his eyes eight hours a day, eight days a week, and they’re pretty brown glass. You bounce off. They look back at me the way my dollies used to.”

  She was wiggling loose. Inquisition requires a kind of domination, a control of tempo and intensity. I pulled away from all the invisible strands she had looped around me so quickly.

  “And you know why the voices were laughing at you, right?”

  It jolted her back off balance. “I don’t want to talk.…”

  “Talk about anything that might be your fault, think about anything that might be your fault. You want to be perfect.”

  “W-why do you get so—so damned mean? What made you say that about being no good in bed?”

  “Because it was a funny wedding, honey. No musk, no steam, no itch. A wedding of good buddies. A wedding of brother and sister. Remember the kiss after the pronouncement? The kind of quick peck the long-married get at airports.”

  So she got down to the clinical details. She said at first it was all her fault, not being able to respond. And as she explained her incapacity to respond, the picture of the sensuality of Howie Brindle emerged. Beef and sweat, quickly stimulated, quickly satisfied. Some days early in the voyage, an almost insatiable gluttony, a dozen episodes a day, in a dozen places on the boat. Apparently very little tenderness, emotion, romance.

  “Like those damned chocolate bars,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “He keeps a locker practically full. He says he’s a chocoholic. Right in the middle of plotting a course, or working out a position from the tables, or fixing the trolling lines, he’ll pop up and go peel a chocolate bar and chonk, chonk, chonk, it’s gone. Wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, lick his fingers, wipe his hand on his pants, smack his lips, and back to whatever he was doing. When it was happening often enough, and I was trying hard, I could stay far enough up sometimes, in between times, to make it, but when you have to be worried about not making it, it isn’t all that good when you do. And when you don’t and you have to ask somebody to help you afterward, it’s another kind of turnoff.”

  And by the time they had reached the Virgins, the edge was off his appetite to the point where he would take her at those times when he was awakening her to take the watch, or she went below to shake him awake. But it was not ritual. It was now and again.

  “My father was gone and Scott turned out to be a terrible mistake, and when I finally could lift my head and look around, there was Howie, taking care of things, taking charge. And it seemed as if that might be a good way for life to be. Sort of safe and steady.”

  “You began to have very bad dreams?”

  She cocked her head. “How’d you know that? Very foul and very vivid. They’d cling in my mind for days. Something wrong with me, usually. Like in one I looked down and there were two smooth holes in my chest. Somehow I’d gotten my breasts on backwards and the nipples were way inside there someplace. I was frantic to keep people from knowing it. It was so shameful. I kept hunting for round things I could hold there with my bra, but they’d fall out.”

  “Numb places on your hands?”

  “You know, you’re a weird person, Travis? Right along here, on the edges of my hands and around the base of my thumb. And I would get numb around my mouth sometimes too.”

  “And diarrhea?”

  “Where’d you graduate from, Doctor? Constantly!”

  “Now think back. Was there ever a time in your life when you felt as if you were utterly without any value at all, completely worthless and contemptible?”

  “Yes. After my mom died. It didn’t make any sense, but I had the feeling it was my fault somehow, that if I hadn’t been such a total nothing of a person, she wouldn’t have gotten sick and died and left me. I sort of went down and down and down. I slept all the time, practically. Food tasted vile. I didn’t want to leave the house. Daddy took me to a clinic, some kind of diagnostic thing, and they gave me every test known to man. Then they recommended some kind of special school. But my father got a prescription from them for something that made me feel edgy and jumpy. We had some terrible scenes. He yelled at me that I was letting him down, and I, by God, was going to learn navigation, small boat handling, marine engines, map reading, scuba diving. When he wasn’t yelling at me, he was telling me what a wonderful person I was, how special I was. How smart and pretty and outgoing and all. And … I began to work hard, and I came out of it, and by the time we got to Florida, I was pretty much okay again.”

  “I’ve got one last question, Lou Ellen.”

  “Oh, it better be the last. My head is trying to fall asleep and my stomach is trying to throw up.”

  “Do you like yourself?”

  “What the hell kind of a question is that?”

  “Do you, Linda Lewellen Brindle, like Linda Lewellen Brindle as a person.”

  “How can people like themselves anyway?”

  “Do you like yourself?”

  She shuddered. “You mean really?”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, God. No. I just don’t think about myself if I can help it. I’m such a wormy kind of sneak. I’m a nothing, pretending to be something. Can’t you see me? Fat thighs and dumb lumpy breasts and nothing-colored hair and weird-looking teeth. People are always talking about things I don’t understand. I like real square dumb things. I got through school, almost. I just can’t … respond to life because I don’t know what is really going on most of the time. Why are you doing this to me? I’m practically dead!”

  “I’m no doctor. I can’t shoot you with Sodium Pentothal. I shot you with booze. This is a small group for group therapy. I’ve been pushing you. Lou Ellen, dear, you are, I think, an anxiety type. Sometimes I detect a whiff of it in myself. What is that bit about the neurotic? The psychotic says two and two are five and the neurotic knows two and two are four, and hates it.”

  “But I—”

  “Listen for just a minute. Some of the classic symptoms of anxiety neurosis. The numbness, vivid and ugly dreams of something being wrong with your body, diarrhea, depression, self-contempt. There are others. Double vision, incontinence, and being always too hot or too cold, night sweats.…”

  “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, runn
ing unsteadily, whamming the doorframe with a hip as she went into the connecting hallway to bedroom and bath. A door slammed. In the silence of 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-his-name used to live aboard a houseboat named … dammit, 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 stall 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 busted, 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 same time, maki
ng 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.

  I 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.”