Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  This was too much. He could imagine kissing her neck from behind, her bare shoulders.

  “Editors aren’t legends. Three in all of history are legends—and I haven’t worked on any manuscripts in fifteen years except when friends ask for an opinion. I don’t softball them, either. I tell them what I think, old friends, established authors. They in turn are indulging me.”

  “I would bet my last dime, sir, that they respect every comment.”

  “I used to keep track. One or maybe two suggestions in the end, they’d take. They were being good eggs, trying to keep me from feeling too obsolete. Even that they’ve stopped doing. First Marion gone, then the bottom fell out. Writers stick together. Editors are … expendable.”

  “But I’d also bet Marion did all of her best work with you at her side. At least nearby.”

  “You shouldn’t sentimentalize me,” said Leo. “What we’re talking about is just a curtain of social manners. Boil us all down, we have the same concerns and doubts. We’re cliquish, too, hopelessly tribal. Sociologists used to define us largely in terms of our reference groups.”

  Andi did a double take. “Editors?”

  “Leo, dude, give me hope!” Josh said returning with the glasses. “Throw me a bone.”

  Josh had pubic-looking whiskers. Was that considered rakish, comely, sloppily fetching?

  Leo said, “Editors more than any other. Do sociologists still talk about reference groups?”

  Josh took his first hissing sip of bourbon and said hoarsely, “You’re asking me?”

  “For instance. You’re an educated guy, obviously.”

  “You’re talking about Merton,” said Andi, “who was at Columbia. All those latent versus manifest functions, right? Good stuff. Yeah, I think he’s still considered foundational.”

  With a withering burble Leo said, “That does sound rather like my period, my epoch.”

  Leo thought of cigars and liquor and the gone, past ways of doing things, martini lunches and gentlemen’s agreements. He used to bow down before authors, considering them oracles if the writers were any good at all. He’d wanted to write at one early point, do his James Jones—if truth be known, his Hemingway. Only to Marion had he belatedly confessed the goal, as gone as bebop, and she had said that she was glad he hadn’t gotten his hands dirty. Only she was the star.

  He thought of girls in the summer on Park Avenue in their light dresses, the chivalry of an old, war-tired world, before the spectacle of a homosexual riding off with his wife. He’d stopped understanding anything, including himself, on that day. He thought of the army. A corporal in his unit in Yongsan had heard his mother was dead and that night come to Leo in his bunk and asked if he could lie next to Leo and have his arm around him. The boy was in pieces. They were away from all the action at their garrison, but you didn’t know where Truman was going to take things next in the “conflict,” the “police action.” Suddenly it was the Chinese, those Chinese. A warrant officer, Leo was two or three years older than most of the enlisted men, who went around calling each other sweetheart and wolf-whistling at each other’s backs, but it was all show—that talk of skirt men and legs and, oh boy, what they wouldn’t do to get Marilyn down off that pinup.

  You had to be tender with a kid like that. You treated him like your little brother.

  “Don’t worry,” said Andi, taking bird-sips, “we’re not being sociological with Marion.”

  “What’s this book about?” he said. “What’s your angle? Don’t be too slavish over her.”

  “I want to be true to her,” said Andi. “I never met Marion. I almost got the chance, but it didn’t happen, a reading when I think she was already sick. I wouldn’t have wanted to see her in that state. Tell me who she is, not just who she was. What do you think is still her essence?”

  More corniness but he recognized the kindness and felicity of it, the gesture of it.

  The bourbon went to work. There was nothing better than the first three or four tastes.

  He said, “Well, you want to know about my wife? Part of me still considers her my wife. She never remarried, so that might tell you something. Marriages wear out; they get old. We all get old. But they don’t die. I left another woman for her. She didn’t want me to but she couldn’t stay away. That sounds egotistical, and I don’t mean it to. But you talking to the other guy?”

  “Actually, we already have. Dan’s here in town now. You knew that, right?”

  “I might have heard something. And presently I will try to forget it once again …”

  Poor Corporal Maynard. Funny thing, he got killed in a silly accident. Some requisitions being craned off a transport dropped on him and crushed him, but the last memory of him was of the kid digging into Leo’s armpit and bawling, soaking his undershirt. Had a screw loose, maybe was queer. Or the mother messed him up, smothering him. Unresolved conflicts. Shitty shame.

  More and more, people misunderstood the word tragedy.

  “Do you think you’ll ever speak to Dan again?” said Andi, leaning forward, her notepad hanging out from the clutch of her pretty white hand, the wrist sweetly limp. She fretted, waiting.

  “Not a chance. I don’t have anything to say to the guy. What’s the common ground?”

  “Well—for one—Marion …”

  (That sly smile of hers could turn on you, go from complicity to subtle condescension.)

  “When she decided to leave,” he said, “I made sure I was sitting out back by the pool.”

  The boy cocked his chin and blinked toward the back of the house, spotting the pool. Leo thought of Marion, ready to go, bags ready for the driver to take out, spotting him out there, too.

  “I had a cup of coffee and the paper, the Sunday Times, to make my way through.”

  Andi felt sorry for him. She’d known men like this, starting with her father. Men without apparent feelings, but get them a little tippled and they might let loose. She’d watched her father fall apart during his toast at her sister Cara’s wedding. You were supposed to congratulate males for expressing themselves, but the one she admired was Cara— for not expressing herself. Cara avoided making a hell of a scene. She could have accused him in front of everyone important to the family: “You abused me for years, and that’s what you’re blubbering about.” But she hadn’t. Cara and her nice, poor husband got married a month out of college and moved to Seattle. Their parents never heard from them; their mother pretended not to notice. Andi only blamed Cara for taking the money and letting them pay for the wedding—didn’t that just feed into the cycle? You couldn’t trust family. Had Marion hesitated at the front door? Had Leo not tried to stop her? She had left this man for a much younger, gay man, an intelligent fan who became her helpmeet and final nurse. The hangovers, the manuscripts (she didn’t use a computer), her ultimate cancer.

  “Did you think of her leaving as completely personal?”

  “Did I think of it as what?”

  “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

  “Yes, it surely must have.”

  They were at an impasse. He wasn’t going to softball these kids. He’d rather be alone.

  Carefully, Andi said, “When I read Marion, I think, what a strong, strong woman.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “And I think, here’s somebody who knows what she’s about, what she wants …”

  “There’s truth in that.”

  “But at the same time, would you say Marion was emotionally needy? But we all are.”

  “She was a human being, was she not?”

  Josh fretted into his half-drunk drink. “That came out as maybe sexist, Piglet.”

  “Honey,” said Andi, “Pooh Bear.”

  “But Piglet, you’re just hooking into worn-out, male-centered stereotypes of women.”

  He was too pretty for her, too passive and fey. That was their problem.

  No. Leo thought he could see it now. The pricey liberal arts college Josh attended on his rich folks’ dime, the jargony mind-bend
ing they were no doubt still putting kids through there.

  Andi smushed her mouth around and moaned to Josh, “Remember what Lily said.”

  Leo said, “Ah!” The click felt good and festive. “What did Lily say?”

  “Hmm, I’ll just go ahead and tell you. Lily said she’d always considered Marion as being rather, quote, ‘fractious.’ ‘Frangible.’ She had all these funky, I thought, harsh, words about her.”

  He felt resentment and the contradictory impulse to protect Lily, all in a headachy tangle.

  “Lily’s my friend, but she’s quite old, remember, and she’s always held singular opinions about people, curious and eccentric ways of looking at the world. This is the same woman who wrote a children’s novel that doesn’t just kill Santa and the Easter bunny, but takes away a child’s idea of heaven. The mom dies and Lily parachutes in with a dose of grim, stern reality. Now I’m as nonbelieving as anyone. But aren’t some youthful illusions, y’know, fine for kids to hang on to? Shouldn’t we just let them entertain certain ideas for the better duration of childhood? Jesus.”

  “I read that when I was a kid,” Josh noted. “Really did a number on me. Well, actually, I wasn’t such a kid anymore. I was, like, sixteen. But I remember being depressed for, like, ever.”

  “Sometimes we’re a kid at heart for a while longer than others are,” Leo said. “I applaud this in some people. The point is, Lily can be crisp and a touch self-righteous. Didn’t ring true.”

  “Real buzz-killer,” said Josh.

  “Won the Caldecott and the Newbery, too,” Leo added.

  “I don’t think Lily meant her words treacherously,” said Andi. “She admired Marion.”

  “I sure as hell hope so,” said Leo. “Marion admired her back.”

  Josh said, “Just to say, meeting Lily didn’t depress me in the same way her book did.”

  Leo said, “Josh brings up a good point, about the author as distinct from her characters.”

  “Do you think I’d be disappointed if I met Marion and she were sitting here now?” Andi said, having thought of Marion for so long as almost a lover. “Lily said she was charismatic.”

  “Piglet, didn’t Lily say Marion was shy?” said Josh, stoned already, was Leo’s thought.

  “We can’t have both,” Leo said, laughing. “You won’t find a single page that came out of her real life. Tell your readers autobiography was one of the temptations I warned her against.”

  This was right about when—in the past—Leo would have reached for another cigarette.

  And if they ever offer it to you, he also thought to tell them, don’t take the chemo. No one should have to live through that. They didn’t apparently smoke but perhaps he should warn them.

  (His third or fourth, it would have been already, because time was so dull and heavy.)

  Andi put down her hardly touched drink and panned the room saying, “I just love the idea of the two of you working together in this place. She wrote a lot of her fiction here, right?”

  “In this room above us. You’d know what kind of mood she was in depending on whether you heard her typewriter going. You didn’t even have to see her face to know. A lot of fast racket and it was thumbs-up. It was like miniature workmen up there with all the clacking and racket.”

  “Thrived on productivity,” suggested Andi.

  “But when it wasn’t all systems go, then look out.”

  “Moody.”

  “Moody as hell,” he said.

  “What did you do when it was like that, when Marion wasn’t so productive?”

  “Got out of the way. I did a lot of getting out of the way, come to think of it. Somewhere down the line it occurred to me that some people are not outfitted for a lot of maintenance in the form of affection. They don’t need it or want it—offer it at the wrong time, and they’ll thank you to mind your own business.” He coughed. “Puritanical desire to be punished for not working.”

  “And yet she was plagued with crippling anxiety every time she sat down to work.”

  Now he couldn’t stop coughing. But when he stopped, he hesitated, looking at the girl.

  “Did Lily tell you that?” he said, through strangled sounds.

  “Yes, Lily—and Dan, too.”

  “The first because Marion confided and the second because they were shacked-up. I had better get my two cents in here. I don’t know what he went through with Marion. I don’t care.”

  “He”—Andi began—“he confided in me that a day didn’t go by that he didn’t feel guilty about the part he’d played in her leaving you. He still carries that. He said there were days when he felt like a eunuch, almost—no, exactly like a eunuch—before and after she got sick.”

  “The man said that?” said Leo, though it hurt his throat to say the damn “gay” word.

  Josh said, “That must have been with me out of the room.”

  “Dan wasn’t proud of it,” Andi said. “I think he wanted to confide in just me about that.”

  Leo waited. It hurt to keep talking, but the ice numbed his throat some as he chewed.

  “And do you suppose he was there for her all through the end? Do you have witnesses?”

  He felt bad for saying that, but he was curious. Only the one answer would do for his ego.

  She sighed. “Everyone says so. That’s the story. That he barely left her side on the Cape.”

  Josh laid his head against the sofa back giggling, the edges of his white teeth flashing.

  The Cape, how pretty. Scenic. Literary. Snug. Treacherous. He’d been there with her, too.

  Andi nodded saying, “We’ll be talking to some of the New York people real soon.”

  “What’s New York like now? Is it as conventionally bourgeois as everybody says it is?”

  He said this knowing he’d never been anything but bourgeois, in his way, and was fine with it.

  “Oh, man,” said Josh. “Parts of it, sure. Do you get back up there anymore, Leo?”

  “Because we’d love to have you over sometime,” added Andi. “We’re out in Bushwick.”

  Leo said, “The next time I leave here, it won’t be by car or plane.”

  “Harsh,” said Josh, “but good one, anyway. Hilarious, actually.”

  And then he was tired. Outside, the afternoon was full-on. He kept the blinds lowered and pulled three-quarters shut and yet the sun hammered at the house. The interior glowed with just that bit seeping in. Reliable subtropical sunshine was the one thing that kept him from being too depressed or self-involved here. He often wondered what life, their lives, might have been like if they hadn’t left New York. It was for her, he’d thought at the time. This would make her happy and she’d never leave him because of her “blue tendencies.” Leo remembered how his hand had trembled as he signed the mortgage, which he had only paid off two years before her departure. Along the way, they’d had some luck—an inheritance, a few windfalls—so they’d thrown down chunks of cash to clobber away at the debt. Time had a way of passing. Debt, you shall die, too!

  Over time Marion had become dimmer to him—a concept, a presence, Leo could less and less discern through the fog of these young strangers’ grasping, even misplaced, pleasantries.

  “I’m pooped,” he said, “and I’m afraid I have to wrap this up. I don’t sleep well at night. I start to fade about this time. Summa summarum, we were good for such a long time, but it was a surprise when she came home and told me. And then not much later she was sick. And you’re not supposed to find out things like that third-hand, from a landscaper who heard it from a friend.”

  “You found out Marion had cancer from a gardener? Dude!”

  “And in awfully broken English. I almost didn’t believe him. Does that make me racist?”

  “Wait,” Josh said, “I’m still just trying to get used to the first thing you said.”

  Then again, in Key West you usually found things out through your gardener. Gardeners pollinated the ecosystem, exploiting its prosperity and disease,
the little town of sublime ill ease.

  How to get rid of these two? Andi and Josh didn’t seem in a hurry to make a damn move.

  “But hey, listen,” he said, “you two. As long as she was happy, I was supremely content. When she got that way, and I could get that way, too, I told her, ‘You do what you have to do.’”

  “That is really touching,” said Josh, but Leo seemed to leave him stricken. Leo’s gift.

  “I was nuts about her. When you’re enough nuts about someone, you’ll say anything.”

  He directed this at Josh, an admonishment. The light changed and Josh was a silhouette.

  People thought Josh was dumb, a stoner, but no, Josh did know about loneliness.

  When they left and started walking back to the hostel, he said, “I feel sorry for the guy.”

  “But something doesn’t smell right,” said Andi, off on another one of her scent-trails.

  “Must be humiliating for him,” said Josh. “This time of the day here, it’s a little sinister.”

  “You know what I mean. What’s the first thing everybody says about her, about Marion?”

  “How much they loved her,” he said, taking out a cigarette to cope with the pretty tedium of it all. They walked along, past all the colorfully painted wood and bursting-out-bright flowers. Andi reached for the American Spirit to get the first puff. “Whole deal’s depressing,” he added.

  “But we have to go beyond and ask exactly why. If we got that New York State grant we could come back. There are still so many people to talk to, not just other writers.”

  “Like who, landscapers from El Salvador? Andi, Honey Bunch, what’s left to cover?”

  “Like the people running the nature conservancy where she volunteered, the bird refuge.”

  “You think the same people are still around running that stuff? Marion left a while ago.”

  “She did return. Everybody’s so old, maybe they forgot some things they could say later.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They were at the corner waiting to cross over to the gas station, then over to another one.

  A middle-aged Latin on a bike festooned with holiday garland crossed with the traffic. He pulled a little trailer with a plastic crate that held a boom box issuing a hectic, high-volume salsa.