by Alison Lurie
She knew that in the 1990s many people found her attitude strange. “Jenny’s a walking anachronism,” a loudmouthed, temporarily tipsy acquaintance had said last year when introducing her at a college reception. “She devotes herself full time to her husband, like a Victorian wife.” And years ago her daughter, Ellen, in junior high school and in the first rush of intoxication with feminism, had asked her, “Mom, don’t you ever want to have a real job, and earn some money of your own?”
“No, darling,” Jenny had said. “Because no job I could possibly have could be as important as the work I do with your father.”
But now Jenny found herself wishing that she did have some kind of outside job. Since they’d arrived in Key West, Wilkie hadn’t asked her to do any research, and she still hadn’t been given the final chapter of The Copper Beech to edit and type into the computer. She also couldn’t persuade him to answer even the most pressing business letters or return phone calls. “Let it wait awhile. We’re on vacation, for Christ’s sake,” he kept saying.
Yes, Jenny thought, as she lay in the speckled shade by the lukewarm pool; but in the past she and Wilkie had worked just as hard on vacations. Often her computer could hardly keep up with their output of letters, essays, lectures, reviews, and books. Every morning after breakfast they would plan the day’s work, and Wilkie would often erupt from his study several times a day to add to the list. But over the last few months these discussions had slowed, slowed now to a complete stop. Most days there was nothing at all for Jenny to do. Wilkie still retired after breakfast to the guest bedroom she had set up as his study, sometimes requesting delivery of a sandwich and coffee or iced tea at noon; sometimes descending for a brief, almost silent lunch, then reascending with the Times under his arm. At five he reemerged and walked to the beach for his daily swim.
When they met people, Wilkie was almost his old self; often he talked freely and at length, volunteering information and opinions. But if they didn’t go out in the evenings a dark weight of silence settled over the luxurious tropical house. Wilkie, once so warmly communicative and confidential, spoke to her less and less, and sometimes hardly responded to her questions or comments. And when Ellen or Billy phoned he seemed to have almost nothing to say to them.
Something was wrong, dreadfully wrong—but what? When Jenny, trying to shield her growing anxiety under a light tone, asked Wilkie how he was, how he was feeling, or how he liked Key West, he always smiled perfunctorily, hardly glancing at her, and said “Fine, thanks.” The last time, though, when perhaps she hadn’t kept her tone light enough, Wilkie almost grated out these words, adding, “Why do you keep asking that? If I weren’t fine, wouldn’t you be the first to know?”
“Yes, I guess so,” Jenny had stammered.
What made everything worse was that in the past few days Jenny had realized that she herself was not fine. For one thing, she almost couldn’t bear this rented house, with its luxurious but exaggerated and rather vulgar contemporary decor. Most of the furniture seemed to have come from two stores on Duval Street that specialized in expensive camp. There was far too much chrome and leather everywhere, too many mirrors, and too many large-scale glaringly colored representations of tropical flora and fauna, especially flamingoes. Jenny had put some of the smaller monstrosities, like the phallic dark-red wax anthuriums, away in a closet. But there were others she couldn’t do anything about, such as the giant coffee table in the sitting room: a thick ice-green sheet of glass supported on the heads of two grinning plaster monkeys, which must weigh half a ton.
When the furniture wasn’t vulgar it was unfriendly, and encouraged unfriendliness. The free-form orange leather sofa was overstuffed and hard, like sofas in motel lobbies; the folding screens painted with exotic flowers and birds blocked the view of what other people in the house were doing, and the indirect lighting and heavy silk-shaded lamps made their expressions obscure. On the king-sized “floating platform” bed Wilkie and Jenny slept far apart, like strangers, and the bed didn’t sag or creak when he got up at night, so she wasn’t always aware of his absence.
Even the soundproofing, which was supposed to be such an unusual advantage in a Key West house, was unfriendly. Back home in Convers, even if Wilkie’s study door was shut Jenny could hear him moving around inside, sometimes playing tapes of waves or bird song as he worked. Here, when he went into the study after breakfast, it was as if he had totally disappeared.
What was Wilkie doing all day shut in that upstairs room with its camp cherry-vanilla color scheme and distant view of the sea? From material evidence, she knew that he filled in the Times crosswords and the Sunday acrostic; presumably he read the rest of the paper and some of the magazines whose change of address she had conscientiously arranged.
Perhaps Wilkie was napping in there, since he was still sleeping poorly at night. Or perhaps he was writing and rewriting The Copper Beech. But if so, why was he so silent now, so withdrawn? Once they had talked easily, continually, and when Wilkie was working on a book or an article or a lecture, which was practically all the time, he had shared his ideas with her and often incorporated her suggestions. “You’re my ideal reader,” he had told her more than once. “You appreciate everything that’s really good. And when you don’t understand something, it means I’m not making myself clear.” Now there were days when they hardly spoke.
Maybe Wilkie was having writer’s block, Jenny thought. He’d never had it before, but according to an article she’d read it could infect anyone anytime, and mostly you just had to wait it out. But meanwhile, what was she supposed to do all day? What was she actually doing?
Essentially, nothing. Wandering around the huge unfamiliar supermarkets, or lying in this antimosquito cage reading some magazine or novel, occasionally sploshing back and forth in that box of overwarmed water. No doubt Wilkie had noticed her idleness. Hadn’t he said just yesterday (after denying again that there was anything wrong or anything she could do for him) that she ought to get out and see the sights, meet some people?
Used as she was to following Wilkie’s directions, Jenny hadn’t yet really followed this one. Though she’d loved going to strange parts of the world with him, she hated being a solitary tourist in her own country. She’d tried it one day here: walking through the Hemingway House alone, and then sitting alone among families and couples on a glass-bottomed boat while the tour guide described the sea life swirling vaguely and promiscuously below their feet. She knew long before the day was over that she deeply disliked the public aspect of Key West: the homogenized “tourist attractions,” the raucous bars whose loud music and loud customers spilled out onto the pavement, the shops crowded with neon-pink seashells and T-shirts with extraordinarily vulgar slogans printed on them. The half-dressed tourists who thronged Duval Street, drinking and eating and smooching, not only offended her aesthetic sense but reminded her that Wilkie had hardly touched her since they’d arrived.
Even here, lying by the pool, Jenny wasn’t comfortable. The humid air was cloying; the giant potted hibiscuses—six or seven feet tall, some of them—with their huge red and shrimp-pink blooms, made her feel small, as if she were one of those miniature people in that children’s book, The Borrowers, that her son, Billy, had liked so much. And after all she was a kind of Borrower here, living in someone else’s house, among someone else’s outsized furniture, lying inertly by their outsized pool—A pool potato, that was what she was turning into.
Jenny sat up abruptly, dislodging the magazine, which fell to the ground in a flurry of white pages. At least she could get some exercise, she decided. She would walk down to the beach and go for a long vigorous saltwater swim, just as Wilkie did every day.
Hot and impatient by the time she reached the ocean, Jenny plunged across the warm, coarse sand past the various cautionary signs that were posted there. She’d seen them before, including the amusing one that forbid “intoxicating beverages and dogs.” So she barely glanced at and dismissed a new hand-lettered placard that announce
d in red capitals:
DANGER: MEN-OF-WAR.
Taking a breath of warm, salty air, she strode into the cool salt waves. Yes, that was more like it! As soon as the water lapped over her knees she began to swim vigorously away from shore, her ponytail of pale hair streaming out behind her. The exertion, the cool caress of the heaving aqua-green sea, felt wonderful. Why hadn’t she come here before, instead of plowing back and forth in the overgrown concrete bathtub behind their house?
She turned onto her back and lifted her wet head. Pale sky above, wide aquamarine sea below, punctuated with white gulls and distant white handkerchief sails. And though the temperature of the water was perfect, there were no other bathers in sight; only sluggish tourists lounging or prone back on the sand. How indolent they look, Jenny thought, taking another strong stroke through what felt like a floating mass of seaweed.
Aow! A searing pain fastened itself on the back of her upper leg. Jenny screamed, tried to stand, and sank. She swallowed saltwater and came up choking and splashing, spitting ocean, gulping, thinking Sharks!, crying out against the burning biting sensation that grew worse every second. “Aaoo! Help!” she screamed.
“Here. Hang on to me.”
Somehow a long-haired woman had appeared close beside her. She had her strong arms round Jenny, was pulling her toward shore.
“Swim, damn it!”
“My leg,” Jenny choked. “I can’t—”
“This way ... Okay, you can touch bottom now.”
Jenny felt with her good leg and stood. Weeping, coughing, sputtering, leaning gratefully on her rescuer, she staggered through the last small waves and limped onto the sand.
“My leg,” she gasped. “I don’t know what—I’m sorry—” She bent sideways, trying to see the wound. “Was it a shark?”
“No, you just ran into a jellyfish,” the woman said. “Come on, I have what you need.” Supporting Jenny closely and warmly, she helped her up the beach.
“Wait here just a sec. Yep.” From the capacious basket of an old bicycle, she brought out a jar labeled Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. “Okay, let’s see. Where does it hurt? Yeah, it really got you.”
Jenny twisted round and looked over her shoulder. There was no bite, no blood; but the back of her left thigh and most of the quarter-moon of buttock exposed by her new high-cut pale-blue bathing suit was an inflamed scarlet.
“Right. Hold still.” The woman sprinkled Jenny’s rump liberally, as if she were planning to roast it. “You’ll feel better in a moment.”
This kind, strong person is crazy, Jenny thought through her tears and pain. I’ve got to get away from her, find a doctor. “That’s all right, I’m all right now,” she lied ... and then, surprised, realized that the fire was easing. “Hey, it is getting better, really. Thank you. What’s in that jar?”
“Meat tenderizer, like it says.” She held out the jar. “It’s papaya enzyme, actually. I always carry it just in case. They say you can use a ripe papaya too, if you have one handy.”
“I didn’t know—Thank you.” Swallowing the last of the saltwater, Jenny looked at her now evidently sane rescuer. The woman seemed to be about her own age, but half a foot taller and more squarely built, tanned and striking-looking in an almost Gypsy style. She had thick, streaming-wet, dark hair and was wearing a fire-red T-shirt and cutoff jeans, now drenched with saltwater and clinging to her generous figure. “How did you—”
“I was out on the pier, I heard you scream. What the hell were you doing in the water, didn’t you see the sign?”
“Sign?”
“Men-of-war.” She pointed.
“Men-of-war is jellyfish?”
“Yeah. Where the hell have you been all your life?”
“In New England, mostly.” Jenny answered the rhetorical question. “I only got here about two weeks ago, I didn’t know—men of war—I thought that meant battleships.”
“You thought they’d put up a sign warning swimmers of battleships?” Her laugh, like her body, was strong and warm.
“I didn’t know,” Jenny repeated, beginning to feel cross and embarrassed as well as grateful. Then, ashamed, she added, “I mean, I heard there was a navy base here, so I thought—I’m sorry. My husband will think I’m a total idiot.”
“Don’t worry about it. How do you feel now?”
“Much better, thanks.” Jenny’s thigh and hip still stung, but no more than a moderate sunburn.
“Can you manage by yourself, do you think? I have to get back to the guest house so my desk clerk can pick up her kid at day care.”
“Yes, sure. I’m fine, really.”
“Okay. Here, take this. Have a shower when you get home and then put some more tenderizer on.”
“No, I couldn’t—”
“Don’t be dumb, you’ll need it. I don’t know where you’re staying, but somebody there should have warned you. Next time you come to Key West—Have one of these.” She dug in her bicycle basket again and produced a printed brochure.
“Thank you. Thanks for everything, you really—” But the woman had mounted her bicycle and was riding off.
Jenny turned the brochure over and read, in rustic capital letters, the words ARTEMIS LODGE.
In the pleasant study his wife had arranged for him—the last of many such studies, he thought blackly, and the least functional—Wilkie Walker sat brooding, waiting. There was nothing else for him to do here: no reason to spend all day imprisoned in the hot half-dark with the blinds lowered to shield his desk from the burning, indifferent Florida sun. But nevertheless his presence here was necessary. It was essential that he appear to be normal, and working normally, so that no one, especially not Jenny, should ever suspect that the death he was planning was anything but a tragic accident.
Though there was nothing to do in the study, Wilkie felt no wish to leave it and explore Key West. In his present state of mind the idea of such an expedition was exhausting, irrelevant, even repellent. For him the whole world was smudged and darkened. The bright scenery outside registered on his consciousness only dimly and dully, as through a clouded, dirty strip of film like the one he had held up to his eyes as a small child during an eclipse of the sun. The less he had to see of it the better.
He had been right to come to Key West, though, Wilkie thought. It was best for bad events to take place in neutral surroundings, so that they would not contaminate a house and a town thickly silted with good memories. Besides, in Convers he was constantly threatened with interruption from ex-colleagues and ex-students, not to mention possible visits from his offspring.
Christmas with Ellen and Billy had been hard. Knowing that he wouldn’t see them again, Wilkie had forced himself to spend time with the children, to speak with them in ways that they would remember as calm and upbeat and concerned in a fatherly way with their rather uninteresting lives. He didn’t enjoy the process and—he suspected—neither did they. For one thing, though he had tried not to say much about it, they must have seen that he was depressed by their choice of professions. He had approved of Ellen’s wish to become a doctor; but why should she choose a specialty like neurology, instead of pediatrics or obstetrics, where her knowledge might some day be of use to her family and community? And now Billy had declared an interest in what he called “computer art”—in Wilkie’s opinion, an oxymoron.
Already, unless the ocean currents had brought in jellyfish, as they had today, Wilkie went swimming every afternoon to establish a routine and prepare for his tragic accident. All that remained now was to determine its optimum time and place. Late in the day would be best, he had decided, when visibility was poor and there were few other swimmers. Perhaps just after sunset when the light was dimming, the wind strong, the glass-green surf churned and choppy. It would be important to make sure that there were no boats or windsurfers near: he didn’t want to be rescued ignominiously.
As for the location, there was a choice of four places, two of which Wilkie had now ruled out. The long state beach was always thic
k with tourists and too shallow—he would have to wade at least a quarter of a mile before the water was over his head. The city beach was small, usually crowded, and overlooked by buildings. He was hesitating now between the two other options. At Fort Taylor there were often real waves, and occasionally a good strong undertow. But it closed at sunset, which meant he would have to swim out to sea sooner, increasing his chance of being seen and “saved.”
The county beach at the end of Reynolds Street had the advantage of being within walking distance, and there was a pier, so he could get into deep water fast. The only problem was that this pier was a favorite location for sunset watchers. Most of them left once the show was over, but a few sentimental couples sometimes lingered; he would have to wait till they’d gone, or were focused on each other.
Only two things delayed Wilkie’s departure now. Most important, he had to finish his last (perhaps his best) book, The Copper Beech. All that remained was deciding on the final chapter. The actual Copper Beech was still in its prime, and would probably outlive his children—and grandchildren, if any. But for dramatic and didactic purposes Wilkie Walker’s monumental biography, like all great biographies, must close with the death of its subject. There were three possible endings; they had already been roughed out and lay on his desk in three numbered folders.
In the first version of Wilkie’s final chapter the great tree suffered a lingering and pathetic death: dropping its foliage early, losing its limbs, becoming weaker and more susceptible to insects and disease. As it aged it was gradually deserted by the squirrels and chipmunks and birds that had long made it their home. Then one spring it failed to put out leaves, and stood as a mute gray skeleton among its green companions.
