She showered, pulled the perm rods from her hair, then meticulously fixed the loose curls into a Betty Grable poodle. Discreet lipstick and eye makeup were applied and then she donned a coral cotton dress with white gardenias worked into the elasticized bodice. She picked at the puffed sleeves of the dress as she gazed out the window and marveled at the splendor of the morning.
She adjusted the straps on her heavy-heeled sandals, and was about to descend the stairs when she decided instead to rouse Valentine to have coffee with her. Her ulterior motive in this was to show him that at least once she could rise before him. His door was cracked and she gently pushed it open.
She was consternated to find that he was not alone. Valentine lay with his back to her, his face buried in the pillow, one arm thrown across someone’s broad chest. Clarisse stretched up on her toes to identify the other man, and sighed loudly when she saw it was Axel Braun. He turned in his sleep and drew his arms tightly around Valentine’s back. Valentine moaned contentedly, and nestled his head in the hollow of Axel’s shoulder; he had evidently found the man to make him forget Terry O’Sullivan. She meditated a few moments on the mutability of human emotions. The reconciliation of Axel Braun and Scott DeVoto she had witnessed the night before had evidently not taken. She sighed again, and Axel stirred at that noise. Clarisse withdrew quickly.
In the kitchen she fixed fresh coffee, squeezed oranges for juice, and spread a generous amount of butter across a heated scone. She set the dishes on a round wicker tray, and with her prescription sunglasses plunked just behind the poodle, went out into the courtyard.
The sun was blindingly bright against the upper walls of the compound, but the courtyard itself was shaded by the coffee tree. She pulled up a chair and seated herself, after setting the tray on the table beside her. In putting down the tray she inadvertently smashed one of the glass candleholders on the flagstones, but no accident so minor could destroy her mood this morning. As she shook out her napkin in her lap two gulls shrieked overhead; she put on her glasses so that she might see them better. The salt air was refreshing and happy. She watched the gulls circle the house, and wondered what made them swoop so low.
She smiled, rubbed her chin, and glanced up at Valentine’s window wondering why she had not heard his usual thrashing about the night before, looked at the flowers in their beds, sniffed their damp fragrance, and was just about to take the first bite of her scone when she chanced to look into the pool.
Bobbing face-up in the water beneath the diving board was Ann, her hair tangled about her forehead, her arm caught in the drain trough and her sightless eyes staring blankly up into the cerulean sky.
PART III
Rhythms and Blues
Chapter Eighteen
THE OFFICIAL PROVINCETOWN season runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Though the three months before gradually build up to that terrific crush, and the three months after are needed to wind down from it, that short season provides more than three-quarters of the municipality’s annual income. Perhaps only January and February find Provincetown really quiet. As might be expected, the full-time residents say that is the sweetest time of all.
During the summer, the town, whose permanent population is only a little over four thousand, will play host to nearly twenty-five thousand each weekend. A holiday weekend will bring twice that many. A substantial portion of this crowd is homosexual. A peculiar and strict rhythm marks every day of the season. The weekend has the same schedule as the weekday, only the crowds are more intense and the hilarity louder. The Provincetown day begins before dawn when the Portuguese fishermen, most of whom live in the West End, rise and take to their boats. The keepers of tiny necessity shops, unpretentious restaurants, and small groceries open their shops between seven-thirty and nine. Day-tourists begin arriving soon after. Vacationers who have taken rooms in Provincetown’s innumerable guesthouses, inns, and motels rise about ten and shuffle off to the beach, usually one of the wide, white, spectacular Atlantic beaches—five miles or so distant—rather than the narrow crowded fringe of gray sand that borders Provincetown Bay. The specialty shops and second-class restaurants open about eleven, and these are principally staffed by gay people who live in Provincetown throughout the season. Also about this time the gay people who have come for only a weekend—or a week or two or three—make a dour-faced, blinking appearance on guesthouse verandas and decks, tell one another how much they drank the night before, and describe to their friends how hot the number was they got, or almost got, or had stolen from them at last call. After a light meal—overpriced and served with practiced condescension—they go over to the Boatslip, where they sit in the shade or lie in the sun or move from one to the other with the display of indecision usually reserved for Saturday night’s outfitting. Still not fully awake, they stare vacantly about for a few hours, talk with their friends about what it was like last night as opposed to the night before, this week as opposed to last week, this season as opposed to last, and look over the crop of new arrivals. There is little cruising. In the town, during daylight hours, one suns and drinks and recovers from the night before—there is no sex, no hint of sex, not even the possibility of sex. If you want sex during the day, then you have to look for it in the dunes. In Provincetown proper, sex, like heavy drugs and the stars, is reserved for the night. At five or six there is dancing—but only at the Boatslip, and invariably somebody is thrown into the pool with all his clothing on. At seven everyone disappears again to change for dinner; by the time they emerge from their guesthouses the ranks of the straight tourists have begun to thin, and the first-class restaurants have opened. In the twilight you sit with your ex-lover and his new lover and your new friend whom you met last night and his old friend he did not know was in Provincetown and the two women who have the room next to yours in the guesthouse, and a boy they’ve known for years who is very dear to them. You tell them where you live in the real world and what you do for a living and what famous people you have touched. You boast how long you’ve been coming to Provincetown and compare it to Key West and Fire Island. Then you carry your drinks to a table and get served by the man you tried to pick up the night before at Back Street, and you hope he’s sorry that he didn’t say yes now that he sees how many friends you’ve got and hears how witty they are. After dinner you go back to your room, smoke a joint, and wonder whether you shouldn’t save your last Black Beauty for Saturday night. You walk around in your new cowboy boots to see if they pinch, and constantly peek out the door to see if the bathroom is free. Along about eleven you go out to the bars. For two hours the dancing and cruising is frantic, then everything shuts down and several thousand men and women whose adrenaline levels are just about at their eyebrows are swept into the streets of a New England fishing village with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Several hundred eventually end up at Dodie’s pizza parlor, and hundreds more at a similar place on the other side of the courthouse. But there is still the parade up and down Commercial Street, almost entirely gay now, chatting and laughing and dealing drugs and making offhanded sexual propositions. The benches in front of the courthouse are a spectrum of leather and fey, loose sweaters and careful denim. In the next several hours, men wander the beaches or walk the streets hoping to be invited to one of the parties they can see through the lighted windows of guesthouses and private homes. And finally this downbeat close of the night coincides with the morning of the Portuguese fishermen, rising to their nets.
It is a scheme as formal and as rigid as the nine-to-five world so many of these men and women have come to Provincetown to escape.
It was a scheme which Valentine took in his stride, but which Clarisse was at pains to avoid. She never accompanied Valentine to the bars when he was out merely to cruise. She would not go alone to the straight bars in town because they all had the air, the smell, and the clientele of the confirmed drunkards’ saloon. So, Matteo Montalvo’s request for a date seemed like divine intervention in what might otherwise have been a summer devoted entirely t
o Valentine’s company and the White Prince’s well-stocked library of forties fiction.
What Clarisse had not counted on was spending the summer stumbling across the lifeless forms of recent acquaintances.
Chapter Nineteen
CLARISSE GAPED AT Ann’s corpse, thinking I never even learned her last name. The two gulls that had at first drawn her attention to the pool swooped down again, and now Clarisse, appalled, knew why. She flung her untasted scone at the birds and rose from the chair and flapped her arms. The gulls wheeled away.
She realized that she must do something. She looked at the doors of the three apartments of Noah’s compound, as if some prize awaited her behind one of them. Which should she try first?
She could not understand why Ann should be alone. Ann and Margaret had been inseparable; how could one have drowned without the other’s knowledge? In any case, Clarisse determined to enter the middle apartment first. Her frantic voice calling to any of the men—Valentine and Axel, Noah and the White Prince—would draw Margaret to one of the windows and from there, looking down into the pool, she would see her friend’s corpse. It was a sight Clarisse wanted to spare her, so she stepped quickly around the pool, not looking again at Ann’s staring face, and slipped silently inside.
She called Margaret’s name softly, then more loudly. She knocked on the frame of the door, then smacked the palm of her hand against the banister rail. She mounted the stairs, and continued to call Margaret’s name. Suddenly she was afraid.
But Margaret was not in the house, and when Clarisse realized this, she could not be certain exactly what her fear had been.
She moved to the wall that she knew was common with Valentine’s room on the other side, and kicked it several times. Then she ran downstairs, out the door, and into her and Valentine’s place. Above, she heard Valentine’s inarticulate growl. She called, asking him to come down. When he protested, she cried, “Daniel! Look out the window!” When she addressed him as “Daniel,” he always knew something of importance was afoot.
Without waiting for his reaction, she ran outside again and toward her uncle’s apartment. Her commotion had already roused Noah and the White Prince, and they appeared simultaneously in the windows of their bedrooms, Noah bare-chested and the Prince in an emerald-green silk robe agitatedly running his fingers through his hair.
“Clarisse,” called her uncle, “what on—”
She extended her arm toward the pool, as a ringmaster might introduce a new act. Hearing exclamations of surprise and dismay on all sides, she dropped into a chair and burst into tears.
Valentine had called the police and they arrived only a couple of minutes after Axel had departed—everyone agreeing that his presence might only further confuse an already complicated household situation. Along with the police came the curiosity-seekers: the staff of Poor Richard’s Buttery, inhabitants of neighboring houses, and those who thrill to the sound of a police siren. The White Prince and Clarisse stood guard at the gate, and there probably wasn’t one person in all of Provincetown who could withstand their withering looks and sarcasm.
The police were exasperated to learn that Margaret, who had evidently disappeared sometime during the night, had left behind neither her surname nor her address. Noah patiently explained that she had been only a guest of the dead woman, and that the house had been leased for the week to Ann Richardson. Margaret was from Toronto and lived with a woman named Joyce, but that was all anyone knew.
Clarisse had returned home at half past ten, and spoken briefly to the two women, who were swimming in the pool.
Noah and the White Prince had come in at midnight, at which time the women were plainly visible in their own living room, still in bathing suits, smoking. Valentine, returning at half past one, had noted the living room lights still on, but had not seen anyone inside. Although all their bedrooms had windows that overlooked the courtyard, no one had heard a fight, or the noise of Margaret leaving the house with her bags, or the splash of Ann going into the water, or her drowning thrashes.
Ann was fished from the pool by two ambulance attendants and transported unceremoniously away in a gray canvas body bag, to the delighted horror of the twenty-nine persons gathered in Kiley Court. The police, leaving a few minutes later, took with them a towel found draped on a chair, which belonged to none of the survivors and was assumed to be the property of the dead woman; two clear-glass goblets, one empty and the other nearly filled with an unpleasant-looking purplish liquid which Clarisse conjectured to be an abominably sweet wine; and the minuscule roaches of three marijuana cigarettes found in an ashtray in the living room. Noah was asked not to rent out the apartment until the police had returned and made a thorough investigation.
“Well,” said the Prince, who was standing nearby, “she may be dead, but she’s still got the place till Saturday noon.”
Clarisse, at the gate, detained the last of the policemen. He was young and smug. “What do you think happened?” she asked.
“Accidental drowning. Too much wine and too much grass and not much judgment.”
“She was a good swimmer,” said Clarisse.
He shrugged. “All right then. It wasn’t accidental. It was suicide. Satisfied?”
“No!”
“Look, what do you want? She and her friend that ran off, they were lesbians, weren’t they?”
Clarisse nodded.
“Then what happened is: they got drunk, they got stoned, they got in a fight, one skipped out and the other slid under the water.”
“Well,” said Clarisse after a moment, “I’ve seen it on the late show.”
“Once every summer,” said the policeman with a smirk, “but usually not so early in the season. Usually August. Once they even waited until after Labor Day. When we find this other woman, we’ll know for sure. The dead girl was pretty small—she must have been the femme.”
“The what?”
“You know: the wife. The feminine one. What was the other girl like? Built like an eighteen-wheel diesel, I’ll bet. They all go in pairs like that, you know. One femme and one butch.”
“Have you ever tried writing for Midnight?” asked Clarisse. “I’m sure they would find your aperçus of gay lifestyles quite interesting.”
He shrugged again and glanced back at the pool. “It’s classic. I’ve seen it at least fifteen times. Listen, tell your landlord he better drain and clean that pool before anybody uses it again.”
“Aren’t you going to dust the surface of the water for prints?” asked Clarisse coldly, and latched the gate behind him. She went into Noah’s living room where she found Noah and Valentine drinking coffee and exchanging glances of distress. The two men, hastily aroused from their sleep and confronted with death, both looked the worse for wear. Their appearance did not fit at all well with the simple, even cold elegance of Noah’s living room.
Clarisse seated herself at the opposite end of the sofa from Valentine, and took the coffee that Noah poured for her.
She related the policeman’s theory.
“Ann Richardson didn’t strike me as a potential suicide,” remarked Noah. “She was more the victim sort I think.”
“Why do you say she was a victim?” asked Valentine.
“I don’t know. I suppose that I look on anybody who drinks that much liquor and smokes that much dope as a kind of victim. Something always seems to happen to people like that, probably because they’re never really on top of things. I saw Ann outside at the pool yesterday morning at nine o’clock—and she was smoking grass. At eleven, she was guzzling down screwdrivers.”
“Oh,” said Valentine, “then you mean accident victim, not crime victim.”
Noah nodded. “This wasn’t murder, was it?”
“Where’s Margaret?” demanded Clarisse.
Valentine sighed in exasperation. “It’s too early to play Clue, Lovelace. That cop may have had an unenlightened attitude, but he may just be right. Remember Ann and Margaret weren’t real lovers, they were only P
’town lovers—they both had women back home. Maybe Ann had too much grass and too much liquor and too much romance, and tried to force Margaret into making a commitment. Margaret said no, Ann said get out. Margaret got out, and Ann started to look for coins at the bottom of the pool.”
“What if it was murder?” asked Clarisse.
“A swimming pool surrounded on three sides by an inhabited house is hardly ideal as a scene for a crime,” said Valentine. “If it had been a deliberate drowning there would have been a commotion, but nobody heard any splashing or anything else last night. There would have been at least one scream, but we didn’t hear that either.”
“We don’t even know if she drowned!” cried Clarisse.
“You’re impossible in the morning,” said Valentine.
“I mean, don’t you two think it’s a bit odd that two people have died in this town since Saturday night, both of them gay, both of them found in the water, and both presented themselves first for my inspection?”
“And both of them had only one vowel in their first names,” said Valentine. “Make something of that.”
Though her inclination was to return to bed for the remainder of the day, meditating on the insecurity of human life, Clarisse was advised by both Valentine and Noah to go into work. She did so, and for the first time was actually pleased by the number of customers who, for short periods of time, kept her from conjuring up visions of Ann’s face in the water. When Valentine brought her lunch, she shut the door and turned the OPEN sign around to read CLOSED. They pushed aside some fishermen and clowns, and spread the plates and sandwiches and drinks.
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