The Beach Girls

by John D. MacDonald

  At about eleven the maid, who came every morning at nine, hammered on my door. I went with her to take a look at Maria. Maria was flushed, her hair damp with sweat, her forehead like a furnace. She looked at us with stary eyes and gobbled things that made no sense. I called the doctor. He gave her some shots and moved her to the hospital.

  She lasted until about four the following morning. I was questioned. I told them she’d gotten a little stinko and had decided to take a midnight swim. The pool was full. They asked about a swim suit and I said that wasn’t the way she went swimming They asked me why I didn’t stop her. I said I was just a house guest. They didn’t approve of me. The lawyer didn’t think much of me either, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Nobody was close enough to her to want to contest the will. So I got the money.

  I knew that I’d probably spend it if I kept it around, like the Baron’s money. I was smart enough to put it in a trust fund, and that’s how I’ve been getting this income all these years. It won’t buy what it used to buy, but it is very comforting.

  I went to New York and found work as a male model. Ran around with a weird group. Tumbled a hundred girls. Resolved never to get myself tied up with anybody again. And got homesick for sailing. And found an absolutely safe way to stay out of the service.

  I like to look at them when they cry. I like to hear them beg and plead and threaten to kill themselves. And I love to get them skunk drunk, so that they don’t have any idea of what’s happening, and you can despise them. Women are greedy, stupid animals, every one. During the war years, New York was too lush a hunting ground to leave. Too many of them wanted to be comforted. I perfected the techniques to such an extent that I kept four pals busy with my discards, improving their batting average by telling them what approach to use.

  By 1946 I’d had enough. I came down here and bought that cranky sloop and learned the waters in her. And traded for that dog of a schooner which nearly drowned me. Then cleaned out that woman up in Fort Pierce and went over and had my Angel built on Abaco, just the way I wanted her.

  So it has been a long time, Rex boy, and you’ve come a hell of a long way from Hunky-Town, so be of good cheer. Some rest is all you need. You’re not ready for hormones yet.

  Suddenly I remembered that in my eagerness to see how good a job Looby had done, I’d neglected to check my lines forward. I grunted with exasperation, pulled on my shorts and went topside with the light and checked. Everything looked fine. I took a look at the newcomer moored beside me, a Higgins by the look of the lines. I flicked the light along it, then went back below.

  I was wondering how anybody could get much pleasure out of the water by churning along in a stinkpot cruiser. I even hate to use the auxiliary. I’ll sail her in and out whenever I can. I don’t know how a man can …

  SEVEN

  Leo Rice

  … run a thing that size with sails and stay in the channel. It gives the man who can do it a disturbing flavor of competence. Disturbing to me.

  I sat up in the bunk and watched him when he first started moving around on his boat with that light. I didn’t know he was back. Nobody knew when he was coming back, and I couldn’t make a point of asking directly. At a house party, they said, over on the other coast. In Naples. Rigsby is quite a man for house parties, they told me.

  I should have known from the picture the agency got for me that he would look the way he does. The light reflected on him off the whiteness of the deck, and I saw the hard blunt bones in his face, the taut bulge of his shoulders, the muscular thickness of a forearm. I told myself the picture had been taken a long time ago, and that now he would be softer, older, more vulnerable—not so hard and fit.

  Were I objective enough, I would know perhaps how childish I am being. Shoveling those tons and tons of sand to bring the muscles back and slim away the executive belly. Buying a boat and learning how to handle it. Playing his game instead of my own, and knowing I will never be able to play it half as well as he. What in God’s name am I trying to prove? That I am a man?

  Now he has gone back below for the second time, and the light has gone out, and I can lay back. He is in a bunk not unlike this one. He is perhaps thirty feet from me. We lay in darkness with our separate thoughts. The difference is that he is totally unaware of me. And I am so completely aware of him that it seems impossible that he cannot sense it.

  To him I am just another husband. A trivial obstacle. He’s a careless animal, befouler, betrayer. Something to be killed. Retribution for something he did last year, in October and a part of November, and probably has not thought of it again.

  Last year. Her last year. I don’t know when it started to happen to Lucille. I thought everything was all right between us, just as it had always been. We’d been in the new house for five years. I was complacent, thinking our love was safe. It didn’t have the magic and wonder of the first years. But does that ever last with anyone? And I had been working too hard for too long, I guess.

  Over a year battling the details of the merger, fighting the tax case, and plugging for restyling of the entire line. I’d come home spent and irritable.

  But I loved her. I didn’t show it enough. I loved her. She was more beautiful at thirty-eight than when I married her, and almost as slim. Night-black hair and those sooty eyes and that slow mocking smile when she knew I wanted her. She’d made the effort to stay lovely for me. But I’d let myself go. That’s one of the things you think about afterward. Thirty pounds overweight, with flabby gut, jumpy nerves, puffing on the stairs, slopping around unshaven in old clothes on holidays.

  I was never unfaithful to her. Damn it, I never had the time, much less the inclination. When you move from store-room clerk to executive vice-president in eighteen years, in a company with two thousand employees, you haven’t got time for games. Or enough time for your wife or kids. You bring work home and you sit with it until you can’t keep your eyes open.

  But it was all for her and the kids, wasn’t it? Or was it? Was most of it because I wanted the joy of winning. It’s the biggest poker game in the world.

  I took her love for granted. I was proud of her and my home and the boys. But of course the entertaining we did had to be slanted businesswise. As well as most of the invitations we accepted. That’s the way of the world. Accept it.

  I thought she had accepted it.

  Until that night almost a year ago. A sweltering night in Syracuse, but cooler out at our place overlooking the Tully Valley. The boys were at camp. Some people from Washington had been on my neck all day and I was emotionally exhausted from the strain of keeping my guard up. I showered and had two drinks to relax me, but not enough to spoil my concentration after dinner when I intended to go over the tabulations prepared by our comptroller. But I never got around to the tabulations that night.

  After dinner she said she wanted to talk to me. She seemed very solemn, as though something had gone wrong. I wondered if she’d heard from her sister again. She wanted to talk out on the terrace. I felt impatient. I couldn’t afford too long an interruption.

  “I think this is important, Leo.”

  “What is it, dear?”

  It was one of the long dusks of summer, just dark enough to make the sudden flare of her lighter quite vivid.

  “I’ve been thinking about this a long time, Leo. I’d like to send the boys to boarding school in the fall.”

  I’d been prepared for something trivial, but this was not trivial at all. “Why!” I asked explosively. “They’re doing so well. You keep telling me the school is pretty good.”

  “I know that this may sound peculiar and maybe selfish to you, Leo, but it isn’t the boys, it’s me.”

  “You?”

  She sucked on the cigarette with such intensity it hollowed her cheeks. “Somewhere along the line I’ve lost part of myself. I don’t know how. We’ve lost it, maybe. I know that in a couple of years the boys will be going away anyway. And maybe then it will be too late.”

  “To
o late for what, for God’s sake?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand. I feel—unused, darling. I’m sort of decaying in the middle like a tree or something. I look ahead at the years that are coming and I just feel bored. I shouldn’t feel bored. It isn’t right. So I want to go away for a while, and find out who I am and who I can become.”

  “You know I can’t possibly—”

  “I know that so well, Leo. So well. I didn’t mean with you.”

  “Alone?”

  “Not exactly. With Martha. By late September that will thing will all be settled and she can get away.”

  Martha and Charlie Dade had been close friends. During the previous April Charlie had a coronary, neither mild nor severe. After three weeks in the hospital he had another one despite the anti-coagulants they were giving him, and it had killed him in minutes. Martha is a rangy, noisy, raw-boned blonde.

  “You’ve talked this over with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where would you want to go?”

  “Nassau.”

  “For how long?”

  “We don’t have any idea. A couple of months, I think. You can’t tell how long therapy will take.”

  I tried to talk her out of it. I made alternate suggestions. I couldn’t move her an inch. I’d never seen her so stubborn. I finally said, trying to hurt her, “If this is a trial separation, the least we can do is be honest and call it what it is.”

  “You can call it anything you want, Leo. You can be just as inaccurate as you please. I tried to explain it to you. If you don’t want to try to understand, I’m sorry. But I am going away for a while. If you don’t want to pay the expenses, I can use the bonds Daddy left. I’ve never touched them, you know.”

  She won, of course. The boys were confused and upset. We got them into a good school. It seemed easier to close the house and live at the club down in town. I put her car in storage. I saw them off at the airport. I kissed her. Her lips were cool and firm, her eyes quick and nervous. I’d fixed her up with a thick stack of traveler’s checks and a letter of credit at a correspondent bank in Nassau.

  Thus began a period of unreality for me. I think my decisions were as sound as usual, my concentration as good. But I felt oddly remote. Sometimes it was hard to believe she was not home where she damn well belonged. I fought against nasty little images in my mind, created by jealousy. She was damned attractive. She wrote me dutifully once a week, stilted, almost formal letters. Like letters she might write to an uncle she did not know very well. And I wondered how well I knew her. I could have arranged to get away for a few days to fly down and see her and ask her to come home. But I was stymied by my own pride.

  On October 16th I received the following airmail letter from her.

  “By the time you get this, Leo, Martha and I will be off on an adventure. We have chartered a precious little sailboat called a ketch. It is named Angel and it’s owned and captained by an American named Rigsby. He’s going to sail us around to the other islands and teach us what ropes to pull on and so forth. We’re very excited about it, as you can imagine. Martha is all packed and I’m not, so I must cut this short. Love, Lucille. PS. We were terribly lucky to find him free. He told us somebody else canceled out. I asked around, and they say he is a very good sailor and knows the Bahamas well.”

  The last I ever heard from her was a post card from Hatchet Bay, telling me that she loved sailing, and that the colors of the water were unimaginably beautiful.

  On the fourteenth day of November I accepted a collect call at my office from a police official in Nassau who, after he had made certain of my identity, informed me that my wife was dead. He said she had apparently taken her own life, but he would not give me any further details. I remember very little about making flight arrangements or about the trip down. I went to the office of the man who had phoned me. The night before last she had locked herself in her room and taken an overdose of sleeping capsules. She had been in the hotel, alone, only two days. It had been obvious to the management that she had been drinking heavily. I stared at him. “She never drank heavily.”

  He shrugged. He was very polite, very helpful, very remote. He gave me the impression that he had seen so many American women do so many astonishing and unspeakable things that he had lost the capacity for surprise. There was no empathy left in him.

  He checked all the likely hotels to see if a Martha Dade was registered. She was apparently not in Nassau.

  He got Lucille’s suitcases out of storage. The police had packed her belongings. There had been no note. Her money was in an envelope, carefully sealed. A little over twenty dollars. No traveler’s checks. A hotel bill had not been paid. He said if I would give him the money, he would take care of it for me. He gave me a receipt. There were intricate forms to be filled out and signed. He took me to where she was. I looked down at dulled black hair and the slack face of a dead stranger. She was heavily tanned, but it had a greenish, yellowish cast. Her face was far too thin, with pouches under her closed, sunken eyes.

  She was flown back in a cargo plane for the horrid ceremony of funeral and burial. The boys could not be consoled. Their safe warm life had been fragmented.

  After they were back in school I traced Martha to Bimini. I flew down. She was a guest aboard a huge yacht out of Miami. She was half-drunk and slightly sullen and strangely indifferent. Yes, she had heard of Lucille’s death. Too bad, she said, but she didn’t seem particularly moved.

  “Why did you split up?” I demanded.

  She shrugged so violently some of her drink spilled into the concrete quay. She was squinting in the hot sunshine. Her shoulders were peeling. “I got myself dropped off at Rock Sound. On the twenty-second of October. End of cruise for little Martha.”

  “Why? Was there a quarrel?”

  “Do you have to have it all spelled out for you, Leo? Should I draw pictures? It got too cozy aboard the Angel. Three’s a crowd. Yes, there was a quarrel. A dirty one. She was having all the fun and games, and I was the maiden aunt and I didn’t like it.”

  “But Lucille wouldn’t—”

  She looked at me flatly, with animosity. “She did, old buddy. Eagerly and frequently. With bells on, after Rex got her conscience quieted down. The first time was not exactly rape, but she cried and carried on about it. After that it all got too damn cozy. The wide blue sea is a romantic place, Leo. And don’t blame her too much. You have to understand that, like two goofs, we’d put ourselves in the hands of a greedy, adept, merciless son of a bitch.”

  I flew from there to Nassau looking for Rigsby. The Angel was gone. I found out it had been docked at Yacht Haven. I hung around until, by luck, I found a man who had seen the next to the last chapter of the story, and remembered it well, probably because it had bothered him.

  Rigsby had been aboard the Angel at dusk, with a young couple. A dark-haired woman had come out onto the dock, visibly wobbly with drink. She had stood beside the Angel, begging and pleading with Rigsby. My informant hadn’t been able to hear her very well. It had been something about love and something about money. Rigsby answered her curtly. The man had heard him telling her to go away, she was boring him. She continued the scene. People on other boats were watching. Finally Rigsby had bounded up onto the dock and slapped her so hard he knocked her down. She got up slowly, without a sound, and walked away. That was the night she had killed herself.

  It is difficult for me to explain what this information did to me. Lucille had always been a woman of style and poise and dignity. He had dirtied all that. In that, and in other ways, he had made it impossible for her to live with herself, much less come back to me.

  I went back home with that sour knowledge heavy on my heart. I told myself it was over. I told myself it was no more her fault than if she had been run over by a truck. It was my inattention that had made her nervous and vulnerable. Aboard the Angel they had been a pair of rabbits in the cave of the panther.

  I tried to throw myself into my work with such inte
nsity I could blank out that part of my mind which concerned itself with her. Hard work had become tasteless. Finally, telling myself that if I knew more about Rigsby, I would get over it more quickly, I put a top firm of investigators on him and paid them a great deal of money to do a thorough job. They couldn’t trace him back to his origins. It was an ordinary-sounding account.

  He had no police record. It was only by reading between the lines that you could detect the stink of him. Three times he had been named corespondent in divorce suits. He was a brawler, and twice had put men in the hospital, but no charges had been filed. He used Elihu Beach as his home port and kept the Angel at the Stebbins’ Marina.

  The summary was very cautiously worded. They said that even though there was no police record, it was considered possible that Rigsby was unscrupulous in money matters, particularly where women were involved. It was believed that it was his habit to borrow sums of money from women with whom he became emotionally involved, and make no effort to return such sums when the affairs were terminated. In addition to Lucille, there had been three other suicides among his intimates, two female and one male.

  I read the report so many times that I inadvertently committed long passages to memory.

  And I began to make mistakes in my work. Not crucial ones, but it was a warning that sooner or later I would make one so large it might negate the progress of years.

  I knew then that I had to go after Rigsby. It had become obsessive. It took over three months to so organize my work, splitting up duties and responsibilities, that I could ask a leave of absence from the Board, reasonably certain that my executive assistant could carry on throughout the summer. I talked to Sam Brayman who handles my personal legal matters. I had decided he would be the only one who would know how to contact me. Sam was horrified.