The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  “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 coconspirator 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.

  I closed my eyes at takeoff and opened them in the night sky over Los Angeles. I had about thirteen minutes to catch my flight to Miami. If I’d checked luggage through, it never would have made it. I hoped to go right back to sleep aboard the National DC-10, but the stirring around the Los Angeles airplane station, and a National stewardess who wanted to give me more service than I needed, left me bulge-eyed awake. The jets were yanking me back into my habitual time pattern, and it was as if scrambled brains were coming unscrambled. I thought back to the terribly cute words of the parting lovers in Hawaii. Keep me or marry me. All in a dizzy, guilty, quiverous condition, all in a lust that had not been quenched despite all the trying. A kid! The teenager who’d stowed away and been taken back to Daddy.

  The farther the airplane took me away from her, the more incredible it seemed. I knew that I was going to leave that whole affair out of the record when I talked to Meyer. She had come looking, but that didn’t mean she had to get what she sought.

  I yawned until my jaw creaked. I fixed the pillow again. Five miles below me, sensible people were sleeping in beds. Take that young wife, McGee, and file her under TTF. Try to forget.

  Six

  I tumbled back into the strange pre-Christmas world of Fort Lauderdale and surrounding area. It is the same every year. The unaffiliated, unfamilied, uninvolved make the obligatory comments about Christmas being the Great Retailers’ Conspiracy. Buy now. You don’t owe a dime until February. The Postal Service gets their big chance to screw up the delivery of three billion cards. Urchins turn the stores into disaster areas. Counter clerks radiate an exhausted patience leavened with icy flashes of total hate. The energy crisis is accelerated by five billion little colored light bulbs, winking on and off in celebration. Amateur thieves join the swollen ranks of the professionals in ripping off parked cars loaded with presents, in picking pockets, prying sliding doors open, shoplifting, and mugging the ever-present drunks. Bored Santas jingle their begging bells and the old hymns blur loudly through the low-fidelity speakers of department-store paging systems.

  Unreality was compounded this year by a long stretch of unseasonably torrid weather, comingling sweat and jingle bells. And all the merchants and hotel managers and saloonkeepers immediately violated all the rules of business management by turning on all the giant compressors and pulling the interior temperatures down into the
65- to 68-degree range, never realizing they are the unknowing victims of a long-term conspiracy.

  When a new structure is built, the air-conditioning experts are encouraged by the architect and the builder to overspecify the project. If they specify an $80,000 system instead of a $40,000 system, the architect and the contractor each, in most cases, pocket an extra $4000. Trade periodicals harp on how customer traffic flow is increased by keeping the thermostat low. In the densely urban areas, the heat output of all the overspecified systems so raises the ambient temperature that the big compressors have to kick in more often to keep the store at 67 degrees.

  The knowledgeable general practitioner and the specialist in respiratory diseases will both tell you that it is a total idiocy to subject the human animal to abrupt temperature variations of more than 15 degrees. He gets sick. He has more virus infections. He takes more time off from work. He feels rotten.

  Were there a Florida law stating that all thermostats would have to be blocked so as to prevent a lower interior temperature than 75 degrees in all public places, all stores, all homes, all hotels and motels, Florida Power and Light would be able to give up their huge smoking plans for new power plants. We would all be healthier. We would be able to dress more sensibly.

  So it was a reversal of the Christmas temperatures of the remembered childhood in northern places. Lauderdale was steamy hot on the outside, achingly frigid on the inside. This invited to town the new flu mutation, which began dropping the folk right and left.

  It was a curious and restless time. It seemed to me that I spent a lot of time getting in and out of automobiles, a lot of time traveling from places I did not care to be to places I didn’t want to go, accompanied by batches of noisy people I did not know very well and did not care to know better. I heard, too often, the sound of my own voice going on and on, talking without saying anything and talking loudly to be heard over all the din, for reasons I could not remember. And there was a lot of getting in and out of boats, in and out of pools, and, in a daze of booze and indifference, getting in and out of beds, even though I had long since discovered that it is a habit which degrades the receptivity to sensation, coarsens selectivity, implies obligation, and turns off most useful introspection.

  In that silly random season I found myself thinking of Lou Ellen, not in an orderly, consecutive, narrative way, but in very quick and vivid takes which were swept away as quickly as they appeared. She was just beneath the surface of my mind and was revealed in those moments when the light was just right.

  Some very curious attrition was going on. Ruthie Meehan, one of the long-time waitresses, began to act strange and remote, drowned in the sea while swimming at night, was brought in through the Inlet by the tide, and was found floating in the bay shallows by an early fisherman. Some said she’d gone on sopors. There were rumors she’d left a note. People said we ought to do something, but there wasn’t anything to do except go to the funeral, and nobody went because her sister in New Hampshire sent for the body.

  Brud Silverman borrowed Lacey Davis’s Charger and drove it out Route 84, destination unknown, and hit a big pine on the canal bank about a mile and a half west of Fern Crest. Estimated speed, a hundred and twenty. No sign of skid marks. A perfect hit, absolutely square. The car bounced back about seven feet from the tree, compacted to half its showroom length, and fried Silverman down to a child-size cinder.

  And Meyer keeled over.

  He said he felt very strange. Far away. A nice fast walk on the beach, a swim, some exercises, a shower, a steak, and he’d be just fine, he said. But when we walked up the slope of the beach after swimming, he stopped and looked at me and said, “I think I …”

  I waited for the rest of it. He smiled, rolled his eyes up, and pitched onto his face in the soiled sand above high tide. He is as broad as a bear and as hairy as a bear. You think of heart. You think of something going bad inside that big chest. I eased him over. He had sand in nose, mouth and eyes. I laid my right ear on his wet, hairy chest and heard the engine going. Tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM, tuh-PUM. Too fast? But he’d been swimming hard. A fat, gentle woman filled a kid’s sand pail with fresh water and cleaned the sand off Meyer’s face while we waited for the ambulance. Ambulance service to the beach is very good. Four minutes this time. Resistance to my riding along, until I said I could tell the emergency room just how he had acted before he passed out and when he passed out.

  Fast ride. Deft handling. Too damned cold in the emergency area. They got a blanket over him, steered me to the admissions desk, wheeled him away somewhere. I was a conspicuous figure, walking around in there in swim trunks. A tiny blond nurse, almost a midget, found me an XL robe before I froze. I upset several people in my search for Meyer by appearing in places I was not supposed to be. The medical industry is never ready for inquiry. They never used to like to answer questions. Now they have the excuse they could be sued. They overwork the excuse.

  A saturnine, leathery doctor named Kwalty was supervising the workup on Meyer. I answered the questions I thought he ought to be asking and had to assume he heard what I said.

  He wrote something on a form and gave it to a gray-headed nurse. An orderly wheeled Meyer away, with the nurse keeping pace.

  “Where is he going now?” I asked.

  “What is your relationship to the patient?” Kwalty asked coldly.

  “I’m his sister.”

  Kwalty pursed his lips and stared up at me. “If you start trying to muscle the staff, fellow, you won’t find out one damn thing.”

  “Would you like to put a little money on that, Doctor?”

  He tilted his head. “Maybe not. Your friend has a temperature of almost one hundred and five degrees. And some fluid in the lungs already. It’s a virus infection. He goes to Intensive Care. When the lab puts a name on the bug, we’ll go the antibiotics with the best record against it. It can kill him, leave him in bad shape, or he can recover completely.”

  I took a cab home to the Busted Flush and got clothes and money and drove back in my blue Rolls pickup and parked her five blocks from the hospital. That was as close as I could get and legally leave it there for a long period.

  I did not mind hanging around. I had nothing pressing to do. I was sick of going to the places I had been going to. The hidden compartment in the hull of the Flush was stocked with enough cash to afford six or more months of very good living. So the hospital was fine. It was a project. Infiltrate. Ingratiate. Learn the kind of protective coloring that gets you past the places where they stop the civilians, and learn the kind of behavior which keeps the staff from using their authority to toss you the hell out.

  There is no reason why a person cannot buy and wear a white, long-sleeved shirt-jacket. It does not look at all like a medical smock. A person can keep things in the pocket, pencil flashlight, several pens. A person can carry an aluminum clipboard. The pace is important—steady and mildly purposeful. Smile and nod at every familiar face because that is the way you become a familiar face. Do little favors. Look up the nice folk who took such good care of you the last time you were in. And the time before.

  By the time they let Meyer out of Intensive Care, after four rough days and nights, I had goodies all lined up. I had a fine private room assigned to him, 455, on Four South, ten easy paces from the nurses’ station. And that was a most agreeable station indeed because, rarity of rarities, the nurses on all shifts were cheery, competent and funny, and half of them were pretty.

  I had become friendly with Kwalty after our bad beginning. He said that if I wanted to throw away my money, a private nurse just for the span from eleven at night to seven in the morning might be helpful, as Meyer was still a sick and a weak man. The day-shift gals on Four South put their heads together and came up with Ella Marie Morse, RN, thirty-something, tall, dark, graceful, husky and highly skilled, a lady who had married a wealthy patient who had died in a plane crash on a business trip to Chicago, leaving her financially comfortable and bored.

  They wheeled Meye
r to 455 and eased him from bed to bed at four in the afternoon of the day after Christmas, Wednesday. I had looked in at him in Intensive Care several times. He looked worse at closer range. The infection had eaten him down. He looked shrunken in every dimension. His hair was dull, and his face looked amber and waxy. After they took pressure and temperature, and got his four o’clock medication into him, they left us alone. Meyer gave me a slow, thoughtful, heavy-lidded look.

  “Christmas … is really gone?”

  “So rumor has it.”

  “The medication … fogs my brain. I can’t handle … word games.”

  “Yesterday was Christmas.”

  He kept his eyes closed for so long I thought he had gone to sleep. He opened his eyes. “How was it?”

  “Christmas? Well … you know … it was Christmas.”

  After he closed his eyes again, I gave him a chatty account of McGee’s Christmas, about decorating the tree in the nurses’ lounge on Christmas Eve, about bringing in a batch of presents for people on Christmas Day, about attending three different staff parties in the hospital Christmas afternoon and evening. When I was through I realized he was snoring softly, but I did not know when he had dropped off. I decided he had not missed anything of great moment.

  Nurse Ella Morse arrived early, a little after ten. She was taller than I had pictured her, not quite as pretty as described, and had an unexpected—and attractive—flavor of shyness in her manner. It made her seem less mature than she obviously was. After she had checked her sleeping patient out and had greeted the girls on duty, she and I took coffee into the small visitors’ lounge at the end of the corridor. She asked about Meyer. A semiretired economist living alone aboard his dumpy little cabin cruiser over at Bahia Mar. That doesn’t cover it. Meyer is something else. She would find out. Meyer is a transcendent warmth, the listening ear of a total understanding and forgiveness, a humble wisdom.

  I explained that Doctor Damon Kwalty had suggested that she be the judge of when Meyer could get along adequately without her help. With a trace of officiousness, she asked me how come I was able to remain in the hospital so long after visitors’ hours. I said they had given up asking me to leave, probably because I was handy to have around.