The Beach Girls

by John D. MacDonald

  “I was married, Miss Christy. I married young. My wife is dead. I’ve got two kids in boarding school, two boys, fifteen and sixteen. They’re in summer camp now.”

  “Pry, pry, pry,” I said.

  “Why were you so positive about me being married? It’s happened before. I’ve always wondered.”

  I tried to figure out why I’d been so certain. “I suppose it’s a certain … aura of unavailability, Leo. Maybe a sort of naturalness in the company of a woman. As if you don’t have to prove anything. A woman senses the absence of the wolf call. Fix us some fresh things?”

  He looked at his empty glass and then held it out. “Shank of the evening, but please make mine look less like iced coffee without cream this time.”

  When I came back from the little galley with the two drinks he looked at me with evident curiosity. “While you were gone, Christy, I realized what’s been bothering me about you, on practically a subconscious level.”

  “Hey, now!”

  “Diction. When you talk casually you get that cracker slur and twang that I’ll swear is legitimate. But when you say something thoughtful, like telling me why I look married, you speak with a certain amount of precision.”

  “That calls for the story of my life, stranger. Lay back. My pappy and all us Yales were born right here. Of course, looking at the town now, it’s like saying you were born on a merry-go-round at a carnival. But it wasn’t like this when I was a little kid. It was quiet and nice. No neon and floodlights and swimming pools and horrible glass jalousies.

  “Born here twenty-nine years ago, to be desperately accurate, stranger. Me and my four brothers. They’re all older, all very conservative, all married. They’re scattered up and down the coast, disapproving violently of their little sister living on a houseboat in a junky marina. Disgraceful bohemianism. Mother was a doll, and Daddy sure wanted a Southern-type belle in the family. It confused him when I began to look like Mickey Rooney, from the neck up. But I did have a lovely voice. He decided if I couldn’t have looks, I could have brains, so I was the only Yale he sent North to school.

  “First year in boarding school I was playing a lady-like game of field hockey and a girl who looked like Tony Galento whaled me across the throat with her stick. I whispered for three months and when my voice came back, it came back like this. Like a boy with laryngitis at the time his voice is changing. Daddy wanted to sue. I spent six years in the North. Boarding school and Smith College. I came back and rattled around a while, then found my niche in the Elihu Beach Chamber of Commerce. I live aboard the Shifless with Helen Hass. The name of the boat is symbolic.”

  “Is it a bohemian life?” he asked.

  “That isn’t the word. I’d say casual. You’ve had a taste of how casual it can get tonight. You get a chance here to … say what you please and do what you please. There’re very nice people here, Leo. You’ll find that out if you stay. But I guess it’s sort of a revolt against the way most people live. It can get … violent around here. And funny. And crazy. It’s never monotonous.”

  “That I can believe. I haven’t been hit in the face or hit anybody else for twenty years. It was very unreal. Like finding yourself in a B movie.”

  “It didn’t work like the B movies. The hero got clobbered.”

  “I don’t feel like the hero type. I could have done just as much damage flailing him with a paper towel.”

  “Leo, what’s the object of crewing for Lew?” I asked him.

  “Object? It’s a chance to learn what they didn’t have time to teach me in Jacksonville.”

  “But it’s learning the hard way. Lew Burgoyne is rough.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice. Christy, I’m full of platitudes. Basically I’m a very dull man. I believe if you want to pick up something fast, you put yourself in a spot where you have to learn.”

  “Throw the baby off the dock and yell ‘Swim to Mommy, dear’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “One word in there bothers me. Why do you have to learn fast?”

  Once again I detected uneasiness and wariness in him. His smile was too casual. “Impatience, I guess.”

  Conversation had run out. I had the feeling that he and I could talk to each other for years, and enjoy every minute, but for the moment we had run out and I knew sleep would be good for him. Time for me to leave.

  There was a little pause after I finished my drink. Not a particularly awkward pause, but I filled it with one of my faces, the one with owl eyes and a goldfish mouth. It got the familiar grunt of laughter from him. I stood up and said, “Slave girl leave king on bed of pain now.”

  “Christy, I’m very grateful.”

  “ ’Night, now.”

  “Just a moment.” He was looking at me with such a discomfiting intensity that I thought maybe there was a streak of the wolf there. “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Make that face for no reason.”

  “Oh, that! It’s just one of my faces. I’m Christy, the clown girl. A laugh a minute. Here’s one of my greatest.” I put the glass down and did my ape walk, knuckles almost on the floor, and made my ape face.

  He laughed and then said, “I laughed, but it made me feel uncomfortable to laugh.”

  I stared at him. “Why?”

  “Because it’s like a nervous tic. I sense something compulsive about it.”

  “Stranger, are you an exec or an undercover psychologist?”

  “I guess I’ve always had to know what makes people do things, say things, form opinions.”

  I felt very odd. Though we’d talked quite a lot, there had been an impersonal flavor about it. And suddenly it had become very personal, very immediate. To keep people out of your secret places, you make jokes.

  “Question, then, is why Christy is a compulsive clown? Because people tell me I have a nifty sense of humor and I have to live up to it.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, to be a clown, you have to have the face to go with it. Then you practice. And pretty soon people are laughing like crazy. And you become a very popular girl.” I’d tried to keep it light, but something worse than usual happened to my voice. And my darn eyes started to sting. “What difference does it make?” I asked belligerently.

  “The last thing I want to do is make you feel bad, believe me. I was just wondering about you. I’m sorry.”

  “No harm done, stranger. Take care.”

  “Christy?”

  I turned back again, warily. He had a horrible knack of making me feel exposed and uncomfortable. But I saw that he was the one looking uncomfortable. “What you said earlier, Christy, about the letter, joking about a secret mission. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to the other people about it.”

  “Then I was right!”

  “In a sense. Yes.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “I’ll make this promise to you. If I can tell you, I will.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re a great deal prettier than you think you are, Christy.”

  “Don’t!” I wailed, and fled like a thief. I stumbled getting up onto the dock because he had turned the sting to tears and I wasn’t seeing too well.

  Some of the gang were still down there by the Lullaby, but I didn’t want to join them. I went aboard the Shifless. I was glad Helen wasn’t home. It was just nine o’clock. On Thursdays she went to Spanish class and got back after ten.

  You go along, minding your own business, and you get the illusion of invulnerability until somebody comes along and shows you how easy it is to peel off all your armor. Leo had brought Jerry back to me, brought him back to life. Big solemn gentle Jerry. Before Jerry there had been boys who made the automatic social gesture of trying to kiss the clown girl. I disguised terror with a buffoonery that collapsed them. Until Jerry. At first he responded to my clowning with a tolerance that was almost solicitude, as though I had a rash or a stammer. I could not divert him. And pretty soon I loved him
with all my heart.

  He wouldn’t let me go into any of my acts or imitations, or make any of my faces when I was with him. He said I was very funny and later on I could amuse the hell out of our children, but right now he felt more comfortable being in love with a girl instead of a joke book, and for him I could, by God, be a girl-type girl. And I was. For him. Thoroughly girl.

  He told me I was beautiful, and it made me feel beautiful and when I felt beautiful, I didn’t have to be hilarious.

  Then, with marriage inevitable, there was a little hitch in the timing. We decided to be very sensible and delay it until after his participation in a certain police action. Not a war, of course. God damn all sensibleness, all logical decisions, all reasonableness. They killed him over there, on a hill with a number instead of a name, and when they’re dead you can’t tell whether it was a police action or a war. So I went through all the motions of life for a year, while my heart rotted in my chest. No kids to amuse. No new name.

  After a year I woke up and counted my losses, brushed up on all my acts, rejoined, in a limited fashion, the human race. At least my spinsterhood was not virginal. Twice on the beach, twice in his boat. That was all. So damn little, and so damn wonderful. Bright little memories for the empty nights.

  So you make all the adjustments, lock all the cup-boards, sweep out the floor of your heart and wait with indifference for the years when you will be a very funny old woman. Then, without warning, an odd and gentle man comes into your life and responds to you in a way so reminiscent of Jerry that all the tidying up is undone. Debris all over the place. It isn’t fair.

  I sat in the dark for a while and then I turned on a light and looked at myself in the mirror, trying to see prettiness. I really looked. Not that half-conscious morning inspection.

  This hair—a coarse cropped thatch in four beach-bleached shades of sand and brown. This too-round face, devoid of any suggestion of a romantic gauntness. An after-thought of a nose, so inconsequential as to look embryonic. Mouth enough for a girl and a half. Eyes of a funny shade of green under furry black brows set into a face so asymmetrical that the left one is noticeably higher than the right. The figure, I freely admit, is a little jim-dandy. Things seem to be in the right places in the right quantities. It is a good and faithful gadget that can water ski all day without complaint, digest scrap iron, and slay any virus foolhardy enough to come within range. Only Jerry knew how well and quickly it learned its primary function. But unused now. Aching at times from disuse. Sad faithful gadget, whose basic remaining function is to hold this silly head five feet four inches off the ground.

  Be pretty, girl, like the man says. So I moistened my lips and blinked my eyes at myself and attempted a provocative smile. I looked like an urchin stifling a gastric disturbance. I knew what was coming then. First time in years. It took me thirty seconds to strip, slip into my bed—teeth unbrushed—and huddle into a sour little ball of misery, with the pillow in a strategic position. I made it just in time.

  Within seconds it was upon me, and I was snorting, whooping and yawfling into the pillow, the sobs knotting and bursting. When Christy cries, she goes all the way, spasming in damp agony. When it’s over, and it usually takes a long time, my face looks as if my head had been boiled in beet juice.

  It ended, as it always does, and I lay spent and, in some measure, content. With a ghost of a sob once in a while, like a remote hiccup. Heard the night sounds. Whispery hum of traffic. Lap of water. High whee of a jet. Music somewhere nearby. A man laughing.

  You can’t hardly get good armor any more. The kind you can get, it dents easy. And rusts in damp weather. And the joints squeak. And if you try to chunk your lance into a windmill, the seams split on you.

  I wonder if Anne’s armor is better than mine.

  And what brand is Leo Rice wearing?

  I have the feeling that something is ending around here. An era. The end of a piece of my life. It’s a restless feeling of change, and with a smell of violence about it. As if the fight tonight was just a sample. I don’t like fights …

  FIVE

  Alice Stebbins

  … but somehow I have to watch them, even though they make me sick to my stomach. How many have I seen here since I married Jess ten years ago? More than a dozen scary ones, like tonight. I don’t count the tourist fights, when they get to scrapping about their women. They get drunk, take a few wild punches, then grab each other and roll around until they run out of wind.

  I mean the man-fights, like tonight. Mike used to love a fight. He said it was a good hobby for a construction man. He’d come home all banged up and happy as a clam, win or lose. Twenty-two good years with Mike, from when I was seventeen to when I was thirty-nine. Had the one boy and lost him when he was eleven, and from then on the years weren’t quite as good. But good enough. Until a cable snapped and whipped and cut him into two pieces. Even if I think of that a thousand more times, it will make my stomach turn over every time. But you could never tell it, looking at him in the coffin.

  That first outfit he was with, they built a new highway across the farm. The day the job ended, when they all tossed their hats into the last slab poured, I ran off with him, so crazy in love I didn’t care if he married me or not. But he did.

  It’s a crazy world, how a farm girl from west of Columbus can end up owning a boat yard. Always wanted to see Florida. After Mike was gone, nobody was more alone. In construction you never settle long enough in one place to put down roots.

  I got permission to fish off the end of B Dock. Ten years ago you could catch fish in the basin. Not any more. Restful to sit and fish. Jess got into the habit of wandering out every day for a little chat. It took me a while before I could understand everything he said. He would stay a little longer every day. I told him about the farm and Mike and the boy and the accident, and all the places we’d lived. He told me about working on the trawlers when he was a boy, and how his three brothers drowned in a hurricane, and how he came to buy fifteen acres of land for a boat yard. He told me about his two wives and what they died of and when, and how his son got killed in a plane crash in the early part of the war and how his daughter died of leukemia.

  I remember the day I told him it was my fortieth birthday. There’s this about a birthday. Even when you know it doesn’t mean a thing, you feel as if you have to tell somebody. So I told him. When I was leaving late that afternoon, he called to me and asked me in, and that was when I first climbed those narrow stairs up to this apartment. He had a store-bought cake he’d gone out and gotten, with Alice written on it in green goo, and four little blue candles. Being so alone after never being alone your whole life, you get edgy. All of a sudden I couldn’t stop bawling. He was walking back and forth, wringing his hands, and practically bawling himself. He’d stop every little bit and pat me on the shoulder real timid.

  After I got over it the candles had burned down and out. I cooked up some fish and hash-brown potatoes and we ate, and he put new candles on the cake and I blew them out. We ate some of the cake and then talked until about midnight.

  Four days later he asked me up again. He was acting solemn and nervous. He had something on his mind, but he couldn’t seem to get it out. He kept telling me I was a young woman. That was a laugh. I felt as young as Grandma Moses. And then, after some fumbling, he showed me a piece of paper he’d written a list on. The old sweetie had listed his assets, the marina free and clear, government bonds and so on. He told me he was sixty-two. I found out later he was really sixty-four. I finally realized he was asking me to marry him. Thank God I neither laughed nor cried. I said I’d think it over. We were both so alone. That was the worst part. Being so alone. I wondered what Mike would think if he could see me thinking about marrying Jess Stebbins, a knotty little old guy with that big ruff of white hair and those washed-out blue eyes in a face sun-dark as a saddle. I’ve always been a big horse. I stood eye to eye with Jess and outweighed him fifteen pounds. Mike would roar that big laugh, but he’d understand. No o
ne should ever be completely alone.

  I decided to say yes the next day, and waited three more days before telling Jess. The mayor, one of his old buddies, married us in his office in City Hall. Jess and I moved my stuff into this apartment. We had to have half a truckload of junk carried away to make room.

  About the physical part of it, I didn’t know what to expect. After the ceremony he kissed me quick and timid. I knew I didn’t feel any more response to him than I would to your granddaddy, but if he figured that was part of the bargain, I wasn’t going to hold out on him. I needn’t have worried about him. By the end of the first week I had some pretty strong suspicions of what had killed off his first two wives. And my responses were all in order. I wasn’t complaining a bit. After twenty-two years with a man like Mike, you build up fires that never go out. Jess loved to have me joke him about his virility, expressing awe and alarm. He’d stick his chest out and swagger up and down. After our first couple of weeks he slowed down to the pace of a sailor on leave.

  It was a good three years, all but the last three months. Except in that one department, he was the laziest man alive. Anybody can see how this marina grew into a pretty fair business. It grew like a mushroom patch. Nothing matches. Everything needs paint. Everything is about to fall down.

  After he took sick, it took him three months to die, and he died hard. I don’t think the body weighed sixty pounds. I nursed him twenty hours a day, and slept for a week after the funeral. He left me everything, with cash for taxes.

  Maybe it’s the climate, or maybe it’s being on the water. I don’t know. I had big plans to do all the fixing up and enlarging Jess never got around to. I put it off and put it off. Now I’m as no-account as he ever was, I guess. But I have roots. And friends. And Gus Andorian.

  He’s a lot more like Mike than Jess was. And now that I’m fifty, Gus doesn’t seem as old as Jess did when I was forty. It started between us nearly three years ago, in a damn fool way. I woke up about two one morning and thought I smelled smoke. I’m scared to death of fire around this place. I put a robe on and went down to look around. I couldn’t find anything. It was a moon-lit night, but I didn’t see a six-inch chunk of two-by-four until I stepped on it. I twisted my ankle and fell on my face. I used some of the language I had learned from Mike as I was getting up. When I put my weight on the ankle I went down again and said some of the words I had overlooked the first time.