How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  I knew what was coming next.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Me, too.

  * * *

  I got into the car a bit shakily. It must take a while to get used to stealing, lying about who you are, and preying on and pestering the newly bereaved. I was really tired, and the recent tension had upped my back pain a few notches.

  I thought longingly of my house, my bathtub, my bed, and my cat, but I didn’t feel brave enough to visit the last of these love objects, Macavity.

  Leaving home without Macavity is more dangerous than without an American Express card because of the unique attention he receives at Old Mrs. Russell’s Cat Camp.

  Nancy Russell, a lovely dealer in tribal jewelry, is my friend and neighbor who lives, when not shopping in obscure slivers of the world, with her mother, who is deaf, dictatorial, and convinced that most people and all “strange” animals are verminous disease carriers. Except for Macavity, who’s been granted special exemption from disgustingness. When I leave town, he goes to Old Mrs. Russell’s Cat Camp, where he does not exactly pine for me.

  Old Mrs. Russell poaches him fresh salmon and bluefish fillets. She lights a fire on even the muggiest days and has a special Macavity pillow that she places in front of the flames. She tells him stories of delectable mice and exotic alleys, and makes sure that a dozen new catnip-laden play toys are on hand per visit. She provides a constant on-demand lap and petting hand and a special litter pan that’s got a little house built around it.

  And then, to my and her daughter’s amazement, one day Old Mrs. Russell produced—proudly—her secret weapon, a vibrator with which she massages old Macavity’s stomach. “A nonsexual massage, you understand,” she said in her prim and haughty voice as I stood gape-mouthed. “But quite satisfying, as you can see.”

  Neither I nor her daughter dared cross the haughtiness barrier to ask where and how the elderly woman had procured her instrument of delight.

  But the bottom line is that a cat’s loyalty—make that my cat’s loyalty—is not the stuff of heroic ballads. Cats are pragmatists, not romantics. They know a good thing when they find it, and are not big on altruism. Macavity doesn’t speculate about whether he can go home again—he just knows he doesn’t want to.

  So if I did visit, he’d ignore me, hoping I’d go away, and I wasn’t sure I could handle the additional stress right now.

  I mentally wished my kitty a gloriously hedonistic holiday, looked up at the sky, which had turned thick, ominous, and lifeless, and reluctantly put the convertible top up, pointed the car east, and heard the first smack of rain as I pulled away. A summer storm without a summer. Or perhaps the half day of blue skies this morning had been it. I hoped I had enjoyed it sufficiently.

  Nine

  SOON OBVIOUSLY DIDN’T MEAN quite this soon, even though nearly three hours had passed since I first read Mackenzie’s message. Well, it was commuter time now, so I gave him further slack on getting back from wherever he’d gone in his search for Dunstan.

  I wanted to believe he was taking his time because in the interim he’d found, arrested, and booked Dunstan Farmer.

  I pushed Jesse Reese’s tape into the VCR and looked for the play button. And then I laughed out loud. All alone, laughing at nothing like a crazy person, but all the same it struck me as nearly hysterical that here I was, on the world’s most pathetic vacation, doing exactly what I had left home to avoid: sitting alone, watching a tape, and waiting for Mackenzie.

  The musical introduction to Jesse Reese’s seminar sounded prefab, as if someone had pushed the soothingly-nondescript-background-tune button on a computer.

  But the man himself was definitely not nondescript. Properly lit and photographed, he was better-looking than his portrait in the paper had suggested. His voice was deep, soothing, and convincing. A man to be trusted with your life’s earnings.

  After a short introduction the screen was filled with a shifting montage of senior citizens enjoying what he called, in his voice-over, the dividend years. There were golfers and sailors and mall-walkers and grandchildren-cuddlers and travelers and gardeners and ballroom dancers and hammock swingers. The images almost made me want to fast-forward the next thirty or forty years of my life and get to this plane of pure pleasure.

  Then Reese’s voice faded and we heard from the seniors themselves. “My whole life I dreamed of getting a college degree, and at age seventy-six, I…” “I always loved dollhouses, and now, with the time to collect and design them, I…”

  I, of course, was Jesse Reese’s nightmare. A pension plan that wouldn’t kick in for years, and then only feebly. No savings. No safety net. Where would I be when I was their ages? On a soup line along with Frankie the bartender and other merry souls who thought financial planning was a boring topic? In a rocker at the Indigent Old Teachers’ Home? Or—worst of all, the nightmare—under the boardwalk along with Georgette?

  Jesse Reese infomercialized me into slavish attention. How could I save myself before it was too late?

  He sat, elegantly tailored, in a living room that had an edge of forced fakery, like a homey talk-show set. Two women and a man faced him, smiling nervously. One of the women looked like Norma Evans might if she invested in makeup and time.

  Everybody’s awkwardness was endearing. They were marvelous actors who imitated nervous amateurs brilliantly.

  “I’ve been a homemaker all my life,” a blond marshmallow puff said. “When my husband died, I realized I didn’t know the first thing about how to take care of myself financially.”

  “My investment goals are pretty simple,” the man said. “I want to be able to stay independent. Don’t want to rely on the kids or anybody else, ever. Don’t want anybody’s handouts, but I don’t have enough money to interest one of those professional money managers, so what do I do?”

  “I’ve worked all my life,” the second woman said. I squinted at her. She was handsome, in a large-boned, strong way. Clearly defined, and not all muzzy, the way Norma Evans had been. Her eyes were lined and lashes mascaraed, her lips were a bright crimson, her cheeks rosy. I was certain, almost, that she was, indeed, Jesse Reese’s secretary, testifying for her boss, being the serious ant contrast to the chubby blond homemaker’s grasshopper. “I couldn’t save much until recently.” She sounded like somebody who hadn’t quite fully memorized her script. “For a long time, I had a lot of family expenses because of illness and things like that. So now I’m really concerned about protecting myself.”

  And to each, Jesse Reese extended sympathetic sounds, a pat on the hand, a smile, and then advice. He stood and made lists on an easel that happened to be part of his living room decor. He explained, he charted, he offered suggestions. And through it all, like a subliminal message, was the clear idea that if you wanted more guidance than a thirty-minute tape could provide, and no matter how large or small your net worth, Jesse Reese, a man who cared, a man with years of experience, would be more than happy to become your personal financial advisor.

  “You convinced me, Jess,” I said. Talking to one’s TV is one of the ten warning signs of Needing to Get a Life. There was a message in all this, and it wasn’t about investments.

  The rooms here had doorbells. Mine made an unpleasant noise between a honk and a howl. I wonder what designer having a bad day decided that all the irritants of home should be built into the hotel’s wiring. The bell sounded again, like an agitated goose.

  And here we were, together again at day’s end, Ma working over a hot TV and Pa bringing news of the larger world.

  “Find him?” I asked when he’d settled into the second upholstered chair.

  “Him?” He pointed at the television.

  “No,” I said. “That’s Jesse Reese. We know where he is.”

  Mackenzie looked at the screen. “What’s that you’re watching, the news?”

  “A tape,” I said. “An infomercial that was going to run, probably on a local cable channel. Seminar number one for senior citizens on wh
at to do to protect their futures. I don’t think it’s soon to be a major motion picture.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  I stopped the tape. “I’ll tell if you don’t lecture me on ethics. In fact, I’ll tell you everything about today if I can be spared the voice of the law.”

  “Stole it, didn’t you?” He sighed, then smiled. “That wasn’t a lecture, so tell me about your day.”

  I did, as much as I could remember in one gulp. He already knew whatever Sasha had said this morning, so I began with the business with the chambermaid, awaited applause, which I found rather stingily meted out, then grudgingly continued with Frankie’s additions and the details of my expedition to Cherry Hill.

  “I just wish I could have found out why he was in Atlantic City, if not to gamble,” I said. “The fact that Norma Evans wouldn’t say means it must be important. She’s shielding him.”

  “Maybe she didn’t say simply because she didn’t know.”

  “You’re kidding. The woman made it very clear—was very proud of the fact—that she organized every detail of his life and had done so for seventeen years.”

  “Maybe this one time he had no intention of lettin’ her know, and she couldn’t admit it. The woman’s embarrassed.”

  “But she was there. She didn’t say so, but Sasha mentioned somebody with a blue and purple leather pocketbook, and there was one like it under Norma Evans’s desk.”

  “Don’t women change purses?” Mackenzie asked with real curiosity.

  “She isn’t exactly a fashion plate. The bag, to tell the truth, was a lot spiffier than the rest of her. I bet it was a gift from Reese. For Secretary’s Day or something.”

  “But don’t hundreds of women own the same bag?”

  Of course they did.

  “Did you ask her where she was that night? Her whereabouts?”

  I shook my head. “I was supposed to be writing about investments for seniors. Interrogation didn’t exactly fit the role. Sorry.”

  “Well…good job, anyway,” Mackenzie said. Rather grudging, just because it would have been illogical to ask the question he had in mind. I wondered if Mackenzie’s competitive streak was as erratic and ineradicable as mine, and whether it bothered him that I’d detected something on my own.

  I moved the topic slightly off the mined ground. “What happens when an investment advisor dies?” I asked, somewhat rhetorically, because there wasn’t a business-oriented brain between us. “Who takes care of the money that’s invested?”

  Mackenzie slowly unwrapped one of several peppermint candies in a small glass bowl. “Probably just give it back and the folks have to choose somebody new.” He didn’t seem particularly worried about Jesse Reese’s clients.

  “Do you think one of his investors could have had it in for him?”

  His voice was muffled around the candy, which bulged in his cheek and compounded his accent. Slowly, I deciphered each word. “Anything’s possible,” he said, “though I thought his clients tended toward senior citizenship. Could they overpower him? Bash him with that heavy lamp?”

  There was that. “A surrogate?” I asked halfheartedly.

  “I did find out some about Dunstan,” he said when the candy was down to talking size. “At least where he lives. Lived. His place was locked up and his next-door neighbor told me he’d gone away for an indefinite period. Left early this mornin’. So I didn’t find out much. He lived out a piece in one of those standard-issue condos. Fake Tudor half-timbering on a three-year-old cinder-block building, for whatever that says ’bout his character, taste, or means.” He slouched in his chair, long legs straight out into the room.

  I couldn’t believe it, but I had forgotten to tell Mackenzie about my phone call to Wisconsin. “Well, I found out more than that. I found out that Dunstan Farmer died in some big city in the South when he was in high school.” I thoroughly enjoyed the blue flash of interest that ignited Mackenzie’s pale eyes. Gotcha. I know that my competitive attitude is unworthy of me and unhealthy for any relationship I might have, but it feels good not to squelch it all the time. Besides, if that’s what terminates C.K. and me, if we can ever whittle our problems down to one such issue, I’ll be happy to work on it. And very surprised.

  “The dead Dunstan wasn’t foreign-born, was he?” Mackenzie asked.

  I shook my head. “Dunstan Farmer’s family goes way back in Wisconsin, where he, too, was born, although they moved to the South when he was in high school.”

  Mackenzie sat up straighter and rewarded me with a companionable grin. “Good goin’,” he said, not at all grudgingly.

  Brilliant going, I told myself.

  “That’s what I figured myself,” he said, even more slowly than was normal.

  “How?” I said. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? Had lots of time to think today. Couldn’t find his place—he’s moved three times recently. That ride was incredibly boring. How come they call this the Garden State?”

  Only God—or the advertising agency that had invented the slogan—knew. And the garden’s culmination, America’s number one vacation destination, was no more picturesque than the roads that led here. Driving back from Cherry Hill, I’d again been struck by the depressing decay behind the boardwalk. Atlantic City was a one-dimensional backlot facade, the only place I know where the expression “The buck stops here” is literal and visual. The place where the bucks stop is one block back from the boardwalk and as clearly marked as a high-tide line.

  But that was beside the point. Dunstan was the point. Mackenzie’s ability to have known my great revelation in advance was the point. The itchy flare of that competitive annoyance was yet another point.

  “You know,” he said, “I should have mentioned somethin’ this mornin’. Maybe could have saved us both time.”

  “Mentioned something like what?” It didn’t matter what Mackenzie would specifically say. The thing was, he’d been ahead of me all the time. I was no more than a dogsbody. The dummy Watson bringing home tidbits to Holmes. “Something like what?” I repeated, trying not to snivel. I hate not knowing things.

  He stood up, making the room look even smaller, the ceiling even lower. He’s not gigantic, although he is tall, but wherever he is, in some secret alchemy I have yet to figure out, he dominates the space. He can stand unobtrusively, his colors pastel—blue eyes, salt and pepper hair, unflashy clothing—slouching mildly, and he will nonetheless still be the focal point of the room, its chief architectural adornment. Besides, this particular room didn’t have much space for pacing, but moving his long legs seems to crank his brain, so I let him pick his way in a half loop around the bed, then back. And again. “You told me this mornin’ and it makes sense, long as we assume Sasha’s tellin’ the truth,” he said. “An’ why shouldn’t we?”

  That was kind of him. There were actually lots of reasons why we possibly shouldn’t, given that she was charged with murder.

  “An’ anyway, I’d already been wonderin’ what would have kept Dunstan from simply admittin’ he was with her, except bein’ afraid of the law. An’ why would he be afraid, this photographer who’s unknown to the local police, unknown far as we could check to anybody much, certainly not wanted? Why would he refuse to just plain say he was with Sasha?”

  I twiddled with the cellophane wrapper of another peppermint. I could nearly hear him processing his thoughts, the squeak of ideas moving through neural pathways, each grabbing the next connector, whispering “Pass it on.”

  “I considered that maybe Dunstan was part of the witness protection program,” he said, “afraid of havin’ his picture in the papers. But hell, he’s a photographer. Out at public functions all the time, an’ the kind of functions where distant relatives and complete unknowns are likely to show. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, anniversary parties in the number one vacation destination of the entire country just doesn’t seem a way to hide. Besides, he’s obviously foreign-born, some English-speakin’ country, so if he needed protecti
on, why wouldn’t we send him back home, wherever that is, but out of the USA, and safe?”

  Mackenzie was remarkably calm about the idea of somebody’s being an imposter. Was the world, then, full of Dunstans, people trying to be invisible? The landscape suddenly became one of those hidden pictures of flowers and butterflies that turn out to be people upside down and in fetal positions. How many convicts and escapees can you find in this drawing? I didn’t like the idea one bit.

  “So I figured his fear prob’ly wasn’t based on what he’d done, but on what he hadn’t done.” Mackenzie stopped next to the night table and held up a hand, like a professor. “Or maybe,” he added, “it was based on both. What he had and hadn’t done.” Then, having dramatized his cryptic point, he started pacing again, but at a speedier, corner-cutting tempo that didn’t work. He bumped into the edge of the bed in his excitement, then bent to rub his shin. “So,” he said, his voice muffled, “it seemed a matter of finding out what country and what he was running from and why he didn’t become a citizen the normal way, with a green card, etcetera. Then you told me about that drunk who called Dunstan ‘Egbert.’”

  “Edgar.” At least he’d slipped up somewhere, even if it was on an irrelevancy.

  “So he ran away from Yorkshire and his wife, faked a drowning, and became Dunstan Farmer.” Mackenzie straightened up, probably so that I could see how innocent, how truly superior, how devoid of smugness he managed to be.

  “It’s hard to think of Dunstan as an illegal alien,” I muttered.

  “Not quite the stereotype, is he? He’s countin’ on that. So do a lot of other Brits. Right color skin, an’ even though he has an accent, it’s our accent of choice, the one we’ve decided shows breedin’ and class.”

  Mackenzie was a tad oversensitive on the subject of accents, but I shelved that issue for another time.

  “What he’s done is a good way of establishin’ a whole new identity,” Mackenzie said. “Take the name of a dead person who’d be near your age and whose birth record is in one part of the country and death certificate in another. The records aren’t consolidated anywhere, an’ anybody can get anybody’s birth certificate. Then you’re off and runnin’. You get a new Social Security number based on the certificate, ditto a driver’s license. Get a passport with that piece of photo ID, and so forth. Build a person from scratch, each new piece of ID leadin’ to more. Show the driver’s license and get a charge at a department store. Show that and get a credit card. And so forth.”