Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  “Jesus.” Lee slammed her glass of iced tea onto the wicker coffee table. “All right, let him be in a warmer climate. He’s got the whole state of Florida to choose from, not to mention the rest of the Caribbean. Why should he have to come to Key West?”

  “I suppose someone recommended it. It’s where a lot of writers go, after all.”

  Lee made a hostile noise. “So when does he hit town?”

  “January second, I think.”

  “Ugh. Less than a month away.” Her angry grin showed square white teeth. “God, it’s going to be disgusting. I can see it now. You’ll have a dinner party for him, and then people like Roz Foster will take him up because he’s famous, and he’ll be everywhere. Sneering at gays and holding forth on our threatened environment and giving little inspirational talks to the Friends of the Library on Bubba Beaver or whoever his latest animal character is. And that backlash bitch his wife too.”

  “Oh, Lee.” Molly sighed again. “Jenny’s not a bitch. She’s a perfect lady.”

  “Yeah, well, it comes to the same thing sometimes. I’ve read about her too; she’s always mentioned in those interviews. The happy fulfilled wife and mother, the devoted secretary and research assistant. And some smarmy quote. ‘I see my role in life as making it possible for Wilkie Walker to be truly productive.’” Lee raised her voice to a shrill, whispery caricature. “Sorry. But when I think of that type of female I get riled up.”

  Molly shook her head slightly. Did I ever take such inconsequential things so hard? she wondered, as Lee began a review of the unliberated beliefs, statements, and actions of these females, much of which her friend had heard before. Perhaps when I was in my teens, she decided; but I was rather ashamed of it even then. I had been brought up to believe that except at the worst moments of life you didn’t curse or carry on. Because if you did, nothing would be left for those moments. It was like that old rhyme of Dr. Johnson’s:

  If a man who turnips cries

  Cries not when his father dies,

  Is it not a proof he’d rather

  Have a turnip than his father?

  Molly had cried for her father, and miserably, wrenchingly, month after month, for her husband. But for two years now she had not cried, except in private when her arthritis was at its worst. She couldn’t imagine getting seriously upset because someone she didn’t want to see was coming to Key West. The world was full of people Molly didn’t especially want to see, but she recognized that they had as much right to spend the winter here as she did.

  “So what’s been happening with you lately?” Lee asked at last.

  “Oh, nothing really.” Molly smiled briefly. She recognized Lee’s question as not so much an expression of interest as a friendly willingness to listen rather than talk for a while. But Molly had always found it boring to speak of her own life. After over eighty years she still did not understand why people enjoyed talking about themselves so much—even insisted on it—and were so eager to repeat facts they already knew. Sometimes she wondered if they were not wholly convinced that they existed and had to keep proving this.

  “Look, I’m sorry I flew off the handle about Wilkie Walker,” Lee said, apparently taking Molly’s silence for rebuke. “I know you weren’t deliberately planning to make things unpleasant for me.”

  “No. I wanted to make them easier for Jacko, that’s all,” Molly said. “He’s been trying to rent Alvin’s house ever since those people from New York canceled, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lee admitted, her tone shifting to one of concern. For years her friend Perry Jackson, who was also a year-round resident of Key West, had made his living partly as a landscape gardener and partly as the caretaker of the estate of a former lover, a rich, fussy, tiresome old man called Alvin. He had the rent-free use of a one-room cottage on Alvin’s property, and was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about plants. Last month, Jacko had tested HIV-positive.

  “How’s he doing?” Lee asked. “I haven’t seen him since Sunday, but he’s due here this afternoon.”

  “Oh, he looks fine. It could be ten years, you know. Or more.”

  “He told me he’s thinking of flying to Europe in July or August.”

  “I’d go now, if I were him,” Molly said slowly.

  “Jacko wouldn’t do that,” Lee protested. “He wouldn’t let us all down that way in tourist season. And besides, it’s winter now over there.”

  “All the same, I’d go fairly soon,” Molly said. “While I was well.”

  “You think he’s getting sick? Oh hell—Has he—Did he say?—” Her voice faltered.

  “No, not at all. It’s just that one never knows. It could be ten years, or it could be ten months.” In Molly’s mind, death appeared as a sort of invisible flying red dinosaur, like the one on a red rubber stamp marked AIR MAIL that she sometimes used. Or rather, considering everything, there was probably a whole company or battalion or army of flying red dinosaurs. These stupid, greedy reptiles cruised forever over the Earth, occasionally and randomly swooping down to snatch someone in their long carnivorous jaws. Sometimes, since they were not only stupid but clumsy, they dropped their victims again in a more or less damaged condition (heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, fractured hips). But, drawn by the scent of blood, they would be back.

  Molly herself was one of those whom the flying dinosaurs had snatched up and dropped. As a result she now had bad eyesight, a wonky heart, and crippling arthritis. Not too long from now, presumably, the dinosaurs would return for her. When her arthritis was worst, she hoped it would be soon.

  One raw icy day last spring, when she was just back in Convers and winter was supposed to be over, she had stood on her porch staring at the foul frozen heap of dirty snow the town plow had dumped across her driveway again, and felt in her aching wrists and knees the exhausting, probably impossible labor of shoveling it away so she could reach the supermarket. Then she had raised her eyes to the heavy ashen sky that promised still more snow. “All right!” she had called aloud. “Come and get me now, why don’t you?”

  But usually Molly wanted the flying dinosaurs to stay away a little longer, because the world was full of things she didn’t want to miss: an upcoming party, a new detective story by Tony Hillerman or Susan Conant, a Thai restaurant that had just opened, a visit from a granddaughter back from an archaeological dig in Ireland. Also, always, there was her curiosity as to what would happen next. For her, both Convers and Key West were full of interesting characters and ongoing soap operas, and her children’s and grandchildren’s lives were like long-running, richly populated comic strips. Would Captain Tony run for mayor again? Who were the man and woman seen making love in the empty lot behind the glass shop on Simonton Street at noon? Would her son be transferred to his west coast office, and if so would his wife refuse to leave her job, as she had threatened? Would her niece Clarissa marry the self-proclaimed Druid she had recently met? It would be a shame, really, to miss the next installment.

  “Hey, here’s Jacko now,” Lee said.

  A white pickup truck had just pulled into the driveway of the Artemis Lodge. Stylized green flames flowed backward across its hood, and the inscription on its door read GREENFIRE GARDENERS. From it, a beautiful young man emerged. He had curly dark hair, aquamarine eyes, an athletic physique, and a deep golden tan. It was impossible to tell from his appearance either that he was ill or that he was gay.

  Molly looked at him with concern. Like everyone who knew Jacko, she was always watching him now for signs of illness. So far there had been none, but the anxiety of this surveillance had begun to show in the watchers, producing the look of eyestrain and narrowed, focused vision that Molly remembered in plane spotters on Cape Cod during World War II. Meanwhile Jacko, perhaps consciously, seemed determined to prove their watch unnecessary. A month ago he might have taken the porch steps casually; now he bounded up them two at a time.

  “Hi, how’s it going?” he asked. “Hi, Molly!”

  “Oh, fine,” Le
e replied flatly. “Except I hear you’ve just rented Alvin’s house to a world-class homophobe.”

  “A homophobe?” Jacko took this in slowly. “You mean Wilkie Walker?”

  “That’s right.” Lee nodded sourly. “He thinks we’re disgusting and unnatural. He wrote a whole book about it.”

  “That was years ago,” Molly protested. “Twenty years at least.”

  “You said he was a famous scientist,” Jacko protested, glancing at her uneasily; he liked celebrities, and would sometimes announce their presence in Key West to his friends.

  “Yeah, so what?” Lee growled.

  Jacko did not reply, but Molly could almost see the words LOOK, I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT, I JUST NEEDED A TENANT passing through his mind as if on the illuminated bulletin board in Times Square, and being denied utterance. Avoidance of the unpleasant was one of his basic instincts.

  “Hey, is it okay if I let Marlene out?” he asked, gesturing at his truck, where a plump white cat with green eyes stood with its paws on the sill.

  “Oh, sure. Those two women from Montreal with the allergies went home Sunday, thank God.”

  Released, the cat followed Jacko back up the porch steps and leapt onto the low back of a wicker rocker, where it sat upright, waving its tail as the chair swayed.

  That would make a good picture, Molly thought in spite of herself, for she had given up art. Every few weeks lately she made up her mind not to draw anymore: it was too hard to see the paper, too awkward and painful to hold the pen. Besides, there was no point in it. The New Yorker, under its new management, wasn’t buying her vignettes; and her dealer was politely dim about sales possibilities, definitely discouraging about a show. But then something would catch Molly’s eye: a spider and her web in a shop doorway, a bearded monkeyish man with a live monkey on his shoulder, a sweet-lime tree swarming with ragged black and white children.

  “I just want you to know, I’m not coming to your house while those people are on Alvin’s property,” Lee warned Jacko.

  “Really? That’s too bad,” he said in a neutral tone.

  “And don’t you ask me to meet them, either,” she told Molly. “If I see them I’ll spit on them.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jacko said. “Mrs. Walker too?”

  “Yeah. Because in a way she’s worse than him. She’s a traitor to her sex. If she has any sex, which I doubt. And Walker’s a creep, take it from me. You’re going to wish you’d never rented Alvin’s house to them.” Lee laughed angrily, but Jacko did not respond; he merely smiled with the tolerant confidence common among physically beautiful people, who know that they make a contribution to the scene simply by being there.

  “I tell you what, though, Molly,” she added, laughing more easily. “Maybe you could get rid of them, the way you did with Seymour.”

  “Really, Lee,” Molly said. “Who says I got rid of Mr. Seymour?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Lee replied. “Everybody. They say you scared him out of town somehow.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all.” Molly giggled slightly. “I only gave him a little push.”

  “She told him the tap water was full of poisonous chemicals,” Jacko volunteered from the porch railing, where he had assumed a graceful, watchful pose which echoed that of his cat. “All sweet and concerned, she was. She explained that it didn’t bother her that chemical poisons were slowly building up in her body, because she wouldn’t be around for long, but she thought he ought to know.”

  “That wouldn’t work with Wilkie Walker,” Lee said. “Where the environment is concerned, he’s probably convinced he’s the expert. Nothing anybody else says would make a dent in his mind.” She scowled. “So how long are they staying?”

  “It’s not settled. Two, maybe three months.”

  “Ugh, really? Isn’t Alvin coming down this winter?”

  For a long moment, Jacko didn’t answer. He shifted his posture and rubbed his sea-green eyes. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, and then in a rush, “I don’t see why it has to be such a fucking big secret. Alvin is—He’s in the hospital with a stroke; he might be dying, that’s what his secretary said when she called this morning, and please don’t tell anybody.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Molly and Lee exclaimed simultaneously. Neither of them liked Alvin, but he was a Key West institution, and they were unsettled, as they would have been by the sudden demolition of an ugly but historic local landmark.

  “It just doesn’t seem right,” Molly added with a helpless gesture.

  “Yeah.” Jacko glanced from one to the other, registering their embarrassed inability to express real sorrow. “It’s rough. I’m going to miss him. Well, I guess I’ll start on those aralias.”

  As Jacko disappeared around the side of the guest house, carrying a pair of clippers and a trash can, Molly and Lee looked at each other.

  “Alvin isn’t all bad,” Lee declared finally. “He always writes a check for AIDS Help, even though it’s never for much, considering the kind of money he has.”

  “He gave a hundred to the Everglades Fund last year,” Molly said. “A lot of rich people who come here don’t even do that.”

  Having discharged the obligation to speak only good of the dying, they turned to more pressing matters.

  “Yeah,” Lee said. “But the real question is, suppose Alvin does die, what happens to his property?”

  “I think he has relatives,” Molly offered. “There’s a brother, or maybe it’s a sister. They’ve never been down here, though, as far as I know.”

  “If they sell the place, they could get a lot for it,” Lee suggested. “Or somebody could buy it for a condo development. There’s the big house, with that separate apartment over the garage, and Jacko’s cottage. And you could make over the pool house; it already has two dressing rooms and bathrooms and a wet bar.”

  “Maybe whoever buys the property will keep Jacko on as caretaker,” Molly suggested.

  “Well, hell, they should,” Lee said. “He practically created that fantastic garden out of crabgrass and marl.” She lowered her voice. “But what happens if Jacko gets sick?”

  “When.”

  “What?”

  “Not if,” Molly said wearily. “When.”

  “I suppose so. What a bitch,” Lee muttered. “You know Jacko has no health insurance,” she added. “He was joking about it last fall; he said it brought on trouble, made you careless. He said that after his friends signed up they fell off ladders or got ringworm. Talk about stupid.”

  “Probably he couldn’t afford health insurance,” Molly suggested.

  “Yeah. Probably not.” Lee picked up her glass, in which the ice had now melted. “He never got himself tested for HIV, you know,” she said. “They did it without asking when he cut his arm replacing a window in Alvin’s greenhouse.”

  “I know.” Molly sighed.

  “I can’t relate to that,” Lee said. “I couldn’t take not knowing. Hell, it’d be on your mind the whole time, right?”

  “I suppose it would,” Molly said. The knowledge of approaching illness and death was often on her mind, though as seldom as she could manage. Think positive thoughts, she kept telling herself. Concentrate on the things you can like and enjoy.

  For a few moments they were silent. Molly observed the warm wind as it ruffled the trumpet vine; she heard birds trill and insects buzz in the tall poinciana tree that shaded the street in front of Artemis Lodge with its sprays of delicate leaves.

  “It’s so pleasant in Key West,” she sighed. “It doesn’t seem as if anything really awful could ever happen here.”

  “I know,” Lee replied. “That’s what I used to think too.”

  3

  IN MIDAFTERNOON THE OVERSIZED pool behind the oversized house shimmered turquoise in the January sun. Since it had been built in the 1940s, before Mosquito Control, the pool and its adjoining pool house were enclosed in a giant cage of wire netting. Many tropical flowering plants and white-painted metal chairs with
tropical-flowering cushions shared the enclosure, and mango and orange trees provided a lush, jeweled shade at one side.

  Jenny Walker lay in one of the double-width lounge chairs, laxly turning the pages of Harper’s, at loose ends. The phrase was her grandmother’s, and was associated in Jenny’s mind with a sense of guilt and with her grandmother’s cream paisley shawl, its fading, mystically patterned cashmere unraveling into long tangled fringe.

  At home Jenny was never at loose ends. Even when she wasn’t working with Wilkie, there was the house and three acres of lawn and garden and woods to look after. There was shopping, cooking, mending, errands, letters to write; people coming for lunch, tea, and dinner, and to interview Wilkie; the cleaning lady and the gardener; the bills and investments. And, whenever there was time, her sewing and knitting and weaving and tapestry projects.

  But here, after the initial flurry of unpacking, stocking the refrigerator and pantry, and getting the computer, printer, fax, and answering machine set up, suddenly there was almost nothing for her to do. The caretaker, a pleasant young man called Jacko who lived in a cottage on the property, cleaned the house and tended the exotic flowers and shrubbery. She had no loom or sewing machine here, and it was far too hot to work on the tapestry cushion she had brought, or the Kaffe-Fasset wool sweater. And often she didn’t even have to shop or cook because they were eating out.

  What was most disturbing was that for the first time Jenny was also free of her real task in life. For years, whenever anyone asked her what she “did,” she had replied patiently: “I help Wilkie with his work.” “Our work,” she might have said if she were less modest, for Wilkie’s books were full of sentences, and even paragraphs, that she had composed. In The Copper Beech, for example, much of the chapter on the uses of beechwood and beechnuts had been transcribed verbatim from her research notes.

  Wilkie recognized the importance of her contribution: every preface he had written from The Salt Marsh Mouse on ended with a warm tribute to “my wife, Jenny, without whom this book could never have been written.” Occasionally other people recognized the literal truth of this statement: the copy editor of Wolves of the West, for instance, had declared at one point that Jenny’s name ought to be on the title page with her husband’s, not just in the preface. If Jenny agreed, this rather angry young woman had said, she was going to tell Wilkie and his editor so. “Oh, please don’t do that,” Jenny had exclaimed. “I don’t want it, really. Besides, even if the research is mine, most of the ideas in the book are Wilkie’s.”