Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

The first few inches, warmed by the sun, were pleasant; but below that the water was icy from over a week of bad weather. Jenny shivered with the shock, but fought the impulse to climb out. Maybe it would do her good: after all, cold water was traditionally believed to be a cure for unwanted sexual desire. Setting her jaw, she splashed out in a fast crawl.

  As she came up for air at the deep end of the pool, with dead leaves in her hair, and turned to start back, Jenny realized that there was someone else in the pool enclosure: a man in white pants and a red shirt. She blinked, resubmerged, and started swimming back more carefully.

  “Hello there,” he said, looking down from almost on top of her as she stood waist-deep in ice water, shivering and pushing sopping-wet hair and plant debris away from her face. It was Gerry Grass, holding some sort of large package.

  “Oh, hi.” Jenny’s tone was flat. Wet, shivering, comparatively unclothed, and with her dripping hair on a level with Gerry’s dry sandals, she felt at an unfair disadvantage. She waded toward the steps and climbed them. Now at least she was on his level; but though she was wearing a modestly cut green bathing suit from Lands’ End, she felt naked. It’s the way he’s looking at me, she thought, that overfriendly smile. Deliberately, she walked past him, wrapped the beach towel around herself, and sat down.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” Gerry said, following. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” He held out a large red heart-shaped box.

  “Oh, really?” Jenny exclaimed. “I didn’t realize it was—” She laughed artificially “Thank you.” The box was heavily padded, and decorated with red satin ribbon. “I didn’t expect—It’s years since—” Over ten years anyhow, she thought, since Billy was young enough to give his mother a hand-made Valentine cut from red construction paper and trimmed with sparkles. She had five or six of them still in his folder, back home. Wilkie had never given her anything on February 14; it was not one of the holidays he recognized.

  “It’s because you were so good to me at lunch,” Gerry said. “Listening to all my troubles.”

  “Thanks, but it wasn’t—You didn’t have to—” Jenny mumbled. In her view, Gerry’s troubles were not of the first magnitude. His laptop was acting up, his publisher had let one of his books go out of print—the usual annoyances of the literary life, which even Wilkie sometimes suffered. It was also true that Gerry’s girlfriend had left him, but clearly that had been coming on for a long time.

  Gerry, now looking quite untroubled, pulled another chair toward hers. “You can open it now, if you like,” he suggested, looking at the heart-shaped box.

  “All right.” She eased off the satin ribbon and lifted the padded cover on a display of fancy chocolates in fluted dark-brown wax-paper cups. “Oh, how nice,” she said rather flatly. “Please, have one.”

  Gerry reached, then retracted his hand. “Oh no; you first.”

  Jenny selected a small almond-shaped chocolate and put the box on the footrest of her chair.

  “Ah. Caramel,” he said with satisfaction, smiling and chewing.

  “Have another. Have as many as you like.”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” she said, surprised at this wavering between greed and good manners in someone who after all was well over fifty and one of America’s best-known poets.

  “But it’s your present,” Gerry protested.

  “One’s supposed to share presents. That’s what my mother always said.”

  “But it was hard, wasn’t it?” Gerry grinned and shook back his thick, graying curls. “Especially when you didn’t like all the other kids.”

  “Well, a little,” Jenny admitted, smiling for the first time. It was restful lying here in the sun, having this totally childish conversation.

  “That’s the kind of sick society we were brought up in,” Gerry announced. “Now what I believe is that you should share everything, but only with people you love and admire.” He reached toward the chocolates again, giving her a sideways grin. Politely, she pushed them nearer.

  “I hope that means you love and admire me,” he said, plucking a cube wrapped in gold foil.

  With difficulty Jenny restrained herself from moving the box away. “I never said I believed in your rule,” she replied coolly. But Gerry only laughed, showing a gold filling that matched the foil.

  Why, he’s flirting, she thought; and he thinks I’m flirting back. Well, why shouldn’t he think that? He knows he’s an attractive man, with his broad-shouldered height and regular features. If I were to flirt with him, most people would think it natural, especially if they knew how strange Wilkie has been for months.

  “You know what a friend of mine says,” Gerry mused. “He says that even bad experiences, like what happened between me and Tiffany, can be productive for a writer. Because it’s all fodder for poetry in the end.”

  “Mh,” Jenny said, unconvinced and even a little repelled. The image of a large, fat workhorse appeared in her mind; he was standing in his stall, chomping greedily on the oats and hay of human unhappiness. She resolved even more strongly than before not to confide in Gerry, who might decide to feed her unhappiness, as well as his own, to that fat horse, whose name, according to him, was probably Pegasus.

  “... It’s been good for me, being in Key West,” Gerry was saying when she began to listen again. “Now that Tiff’s gone I’m working really well. I was getting kind of stale back in California. Cynical, even. I hate that.” He frowned, lowering his untidy gray eyebrows; then smiled at her, leaning nearer; she could see the thick growth of gray-blond hair sprouting from his fire-red shirt.

  “Yes?” she said, smiling very slightly back.

  “It was a bad atmosphere for me, L.A. Tiff and her friends were always talking about money. Sometimes they pretended to be concerned about art, or politics, or the environment, but what really interested them was the bottom line, you know?”

  “Mm,” Jenny uttered. One of the good things about Gerry was that he cared seriously about the environment. A few years ago he had published a book on nature and the contemporary men’s movement called Men of Oak, which contained several quotations from Wilkie’s works. Wilkie, in an exchange of civilities, had quoted from one of Gerry’s poems in an article in the Atlantic.

  “Fucking creeps, most of them, excuse me,” Gerry muttered almost to himself, sitting back.

  “That’s all right,” Jenny said pleasantly; but what she felt was annoyance and disappointment. Gerry had stopped flirting, if he ever had been flirting. But that was what she had intended, so why should it annoy her?

  “Not all, though,” he continued. “I met this really remarkable guy from Oregon last month. He’s designing a wind-power system that’s going to save God knows how much gas and coal. He was impressive. I get discouraged sometimes about the way the world is going, you know? Then I talk to someone like him, and I think we’ve got a chance. But Tiff and her friends—All they wanted to find out was, would his windmills make a profit, and if so how could they get in on the financial action, you know?”

  “Yes; I’ve met people like that,” Jenny said.

  “It’s good being out of that atmosphere. Being with someone like Wilkie. I’ve always admired him, even before we met. I was so damned pleased when he wanted to quote those lines from “Voices of the Lost Woods” in his article. You know, people still come up to me, people who never read poetry, and say ...

  He wasn’t flirting, Jenny told herself. He was just being agreeable to me because I’m married to Wilkie, the way everyone is. Everyone except Lee.

  “What he has is, he has integrity. He’s never compromised, never done anything he could be ashamed of, or anybody could kid him about.”

  No, I suppose not, Jenny thought, tuning out again as Gerry’s praise of Wilkie segued into regrets about the way the world was going, and his own guilty involvement in this deterioration.

  “... this ad for laptop computers; probably you saw it, it was in a lot of magazines last summer,” Gerry was saying wh
en she tuned back. “Some woman Tiff knew fixed it up for me. I didn’t like the idea much, but I needed to pay Gaia’s college tuition—that’s my youngest daughter, she’s at Stanford—and I agreed. So they put me in an ad with this football player. He was pushing seven feet and must have weighed well over two-fifty. The way we were photographed, he looked like a big healthy, happy jock, and I looked like some kind of loony aesthete. I got a check for five thousand and a new laptop, but I lost a lot of credibility. Tiff couldn’t see it. She just kept saying, ‘All publicity is good publicity.’”

  “Mm.” Jenny had often heard this dubious phrase; it was one of Wilkie’s new agent’s favorites.

  “You ask me, that’s like saying, all chocolates are good chocolates. The truth is, some might poison you.” He gave a short unhappy laugh and helped himself to another, presumably nontoxic, piece of candy. “I bet Wilkie never did anything like that ad.”

  “Well, he—No, not like that,” Jenny agreed, deciding not to mention the charity appeal in which a foolish unposed photograph of Wilkie had appeared. In this photograph Wilkie’s mouth was open, showing his partial plate, and he was being presented, evidently much against his will, with a giant stuffed toy panda representing World Wildlife.

  “But you know, people will forget that ad,” she said. “I mean, if they ever saw it in the first place. I didn’t, for instance.” Automatically, she assumed the soothing, almost crooning tone she had perfected over the years for responding to any public insult or embarrassment to Wilkie. “Most people never remember ads.”

  “I hope so.” Gerry stared down into the pool, then lifted his head. “You know that lost-looking white heron I was telling you about Friday, that I saw on the street?” he said. “I put him into a poem. I’d like you to look at it.”

  “That would be nice,” Jenny said, aware that to refuse to look at a writer’s work is always a deadly insult.

  “Great.” Gerry leaned toward her, put his warm hand on her cooler arm, and looked warmly into her eyes. “It’s up in my study, if you don’t mind climbing stairs—It’s getting kind of hot here.”

  Yes, Jenny realized, it was hot—especially under Gerry’s hand. Maybe she had been right after all.

  “I’ll give you a drink,” he added, removing his hand but not his gaze.

  “Oh—Thanks, but I don’t need—” He’s flirting again, she told herself; maybe more than flirting. Well, at least I’m not going up there half-naked. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll get some dry clothes on and be with you in ten minutes.”

  “Great,” Gerry repeated. “Hey, don’t forget your chocolates. They’ll melt out here.”

  Carrying the oversized red heart-shaped box of candy, Jenny crossed the sitting room, glancing out the front window as she passed to see if Wilkie was on his way back from the beach.

  There was someone by the gate, but it was only Jacko’s cousin Barbie, a large, silly, blonde young woman, who had turned out to be one of Wilkie’s fans, and “totally thrilled” to find herself staying in the same compound. Twice already she had informed Jenny that it must be wonderful to be married to a man like that. Yes, it used to be, Jenny had thought. Today Barbie, who was presumably waiting for her cousin Jacko, was wearing an especially silly getup: a pink ruffled off-the-shoulder blouse and short white shorts, like a female country-western singer.

  Barbie’s aunt, however, was a quiet, pleasant woman, Jenny thought as she climbed the stairs. She’d had an interesting conversation with her yesterday about plants. According to Dorrie Jackson, the luxuriant elephant-eared climbing vine by the gate was a common philodendron. In this tropical climate, when it found a suitable tree, it totally metamorphosed. Registering Jenny’s polite but unconvinced expression, Mrs. Jackson had proved her point by showing her, on the ground by the tree, a shoot of the same plant in its smaller, northern form.

  On the other hand, Jenny thought as she peeled off her bathing suit, Barbie’s mother, Myra Mumpson, was a very annoying person. Yesterday, for instance, she had more or less forced her way into the house, saying that she wanted to “look it over” for Jacko, the future owner of the compound. “I’m a Realtor, you know,” she had explained, pushing past Jenny into the hall. She then made a rapid tour of the place, letting fall at intervals phrases that might have come from a real estate brochure, phrases like “contemporary island kitchen” and “en suite luxury master bath.”

  Jenny had tried to keep Mrs. Mumpson out of Wilkie’s study, but without success. “I just want a tiny peek, it won’t take a minute,” she had cried, opening the door. Wilkie, who was sitting in the rocker gazing out of the window, looked up, his expression of surprise quickly turning to rancor. “Who the hell was that awful woman?” he had asked Jenny angrily later, as she had known instantly that he would.

  Opening the door of what Mrs. Mumpson had referred to as an “elegant built-in wardrobe,” Jenny selected the clothes that seemed appropriate for a drink with Gerry Grass in his present state of mind: canvas shoes, tailored slacks, and a man’s shirt in a dense weave that would neither suggest erotic advances, in case that was what he had in mind, nor make them easy.

  Dressed, she descended the stairs, glancing out the window again. Wilkie was not on his way back from the beach now, she saw. He was here already, standing by the gate in his swim trunks, talking to Barbie Mumpson, who stood close to him, looking up with the worshipful expression common to Wilkie’s fans.

  But as Jenny began to turn away from this familiar sight, something unfamiliar happened. Barbie stood on tiptoe, flung her arms around Wilkie, and kissed him full on the mouth. Occasionally in the past Jenny had seen overeager women try to do this, and her husband’s reaction had always been a speedy though polite flinch of withdrawal. But now Wilkie did not withdraw; he might even have joined in, though it was hard to be sure. He just went on standing there.

  And maybe nothing unfamiliar has happened, Jenny thought as Barbie finally let go of her husband: nothing that hasn’t happened before. Maybe that’s why Wilkie’s been so strange lately, so distant. Maybe when he said last year that they were getting older, it was her age he was speaking of, not his own. He meant that Jenny no longer interested him romantically, that he wanted someone younger. Well, I’m not interested in you either, Jenny thought. I hate you.

  Meanwhile Wilkie was still standing close to Barbie Mumpson, gazing dumbly at her. But soon probably he would come into the house and pass Jenny with the same quick, chilly, distant glance he had thrown in her direction when he left for his swim.

  She couldn’t bear that, not now. Turning away, Jenny ran across the room, out through the sliding glass doors, toward Gerry’s apartment.

  An hour earlier, fleeing his wife and his house, Wilkie Walker had hastened along the cracked sidewalk toward the ocean. He breathed heavily, and his heart thudded as if he had narrowly escaped some disaster. No, two disasters. When Jenny’d looked at him and laid her soft hand on his arm and said, so lightly but so longingly, that she’d like to come swimming with him, Wilkie had been shaken by two almost uncontrollable, irreconcilable impulses: first, to embrace her and cry “Save me!” and then to shove her away, shouting “Leave me alone, get your hands off me!” Just barely, he had resisted and escaped.

  He kept twisting round, looking back every few moments to see if by some dark chance Jenny had scrambled into her bathing suit and was following him. That would be fatal—no, anti-fatal—because even if he was in the water first he wouldn’t be able to carry out his plan. He couldn’t disappear with his wife gazing after him, swimming after him, calling him to come back, crying aloud that he was out too far—But that’s just what Jenny would do if he refused to hear and plunged on. It would probably end with his having to save her, because though graceful in the water, she was not a strong swimmer.

  Again Wilkie glanced over his shoulder. The street, blood-spattered with the wet crimson petals of bougainvillea, was still empty. Perhaps Jenny wasn’t coming. Perhaps this time he would m
ake it. He hurried on.

  Now the ocean opened up ahead. The sun was low in the sky, a flat, pale orange; it wouldn’t be long to sunset. Conditions were ideal: a strong wind blew from the south, the tide was high, and the sea was streaked with irregular, rocking clumps of creamy camouflaging foam.

  Wilkie passed—for the last time, he hoped—the list of Higgs Beach Regulations. Deliberately he strode across the rough sand to the pier, ignoring the people gathered there. At the far end he dropped his sandals, shirt, and towel onto the boards. He descended the wet stairs, holding tightly to the salt-slimed wooden railing as the waves sloshed against him. He must not slip now and merely injure himself.

  The sea, after a week of rain, was cool, almost cold. Wilkie stroked strongly away from the pier, then paused, treading water and watching the sun slide into its slot between sky and sea, waiting for the sunset-gawkers to disperse, for the air to flush from gold to gray for the last time. The horizon, almost to the zenith, was piled with thunderclouds, possibly signaling imminent rain. That was good; a sudden storm would make his drowning more plausible.

  Soon only five people remained on the pier: a teenager down near the beach, plugged into a Walkman; a late-middle-aged couple near him; and at the far end a man in an electric-powered wheelchair and his slight, black-haired Chinese (or possibly Japanese) attendant. Wilkie had seen this pair before: almost every day, before the weather changed, they had been here at sunset. The invalid was young, painfully thin, and breathed through a tube. According to Molly Hopkins, he was probably one of the many AIDS victims who came to die in Key West. At the end of their lives they returned to the place where they had once been happiest—and where, quite possibly, they had been infected and infected others.

  As Wilkie waited, fending off the small, choppy waves, the Asian attendant came round in front of the chair and leaned over the invalid. They gazed steadily at each other and appeared to speak. Then the attendant bent down, moved the breathing tube aside, put his hands on the other’s shoulders, and kissed him passionately. At last he replaced the tube, stood up, and started back down the pier toward the van in which they always traveled, stumbling once or twice as if blinded.