“Mr. Rodenska, you don’t …”
“You go find Debbie Ann, and when you get a chance, you play poker. Play every night. Better stick to small stakes at first. They ought to teach it in every law school. You had a deuce down and an ace up, and you were convincing me you had aces back to back. Go find your girl.”
Raines hesitated, and then left quickly. He looked back once. His leaving had the flavor of flight. Mike spat the tip of a cigar over the railing and lit it. He wondered how many cigars he had gone through during this long day. He felt vaguely guilty, and out of that guilt came the great seventh wave again, rolling his heart among the stones. There was no one to chide him about the cigars. No one to give a damn how many he smoked. Nobody to keep count and lecture him.
When Mary appeared below him and looked up at the porch and said, “Is that you, Mike?” he had to wait two long seconds before he could trust his voice and answer her.
She came up the steps and said, her voice too casual, “I just found out Troy was on Tim Gosnell’s boat for a long time. Tim says he was a little more sober when he left, so maybe he got home somehow. We might as well leave, if you’re ready. There’s always the chance he’s taking a nap in a dark corner somewhere, but I’m through looking. If so, he’ll wake up at daylight and walk home up the beach. It’s nearly five miles, but it won’t hurt him any.”
“I’m ready. How about your daughter?”
“She just left with Rob. There’s some sort of party down in Gulfway.”
They walked to the parking lot. She gave him the keys, a spare set she carried. He drove the Chrysler north, through the area near the public beach where the cars sat dark in starlight outside the silent motels, and where a few neoned beer joints were close to their midnight closing, and north past a place where on the beach he saw the silhouettes of people around the red coals of a driftwood fire, and north past the big dark beach houses.
When he drove into the triple carport, parking between Mary’s station wagon and Debbie Ann’s little white Porsche Speedster, Mary said, “Will you come in for a nightcap?”
“I guess I better just …”
“Please, Mike. Just for a minute or two.”
Her voice was still casual, but the appeal was clear. He went into the kitchen with her. She made the drinks and they carried them out onto the patio. Stars were reflected, motionless in the black surface of the small swimming pool. He sat in one of the big redwood chairs and she sat ten feet away on a hassock.
“Did you like the Club, Mike?”
“It’s a gay place.”
“Bernard and I used to belong. But living up on Ravenna Key, we didn’t get down very often. It’s much handier, living here. We get a lot of use out of it.”
“The food is fine.”
“How about the people, Mike? How about the people?” She laughed. “You told me you are a qualified people-watcher.”
“I can’t say much without sounding pretentious. I got this out of it. They seem anxious. I don’t know why. It’s as if they had the correct scoop that tomorrow a hurricane washes the Club out to sea. Or Prohibition is coming back. Or sex is going to be outlawed. I don’t know. They seem to try too hard. They press. And it isn’t that a lot of them are retired, maybe a little too young. Most of them work. It’s the same all over the country, I guess. But it seems concentrated here, somehow. Like they have to do everything there is to do right now. It gave me the jumps. It’s contagious. I emptied two drinks faster than I like to drink, and I had to say whoa boy.”
“I feel that too, Mike. It’s … undignified.”
“That’s a word I was hunting for.”
“But there were lots of nice ones there.”
“Nice ones everywhere. I met one nice one. Shirley McGuire. She flattered me, laid it on with a trowel, butter from head to foot. I respond fine to flattery.”
“Oh, she’s Martha Tennyson’s niece. A new friend of Debbie Ann’s. I’ve met her, but I don’t really know her. She’s getting a divorce, you know.”
“She told me.”
“She’s an … interesting-looking girl.”
“She talked to me, and that Rob Raines talked to me.”
“What did Rob talk about?”
Mike crossed his fingers in the darkness. “Sailboats.”
“He’s very high on sailing. Debbie Ann crewed for him in Yacht Club races when she was practically a child. She has a silver cup they won. He seems very interested now, but I can’t feel he’s right for Debbie Ann. There’s a sort of … heaviness about him. He doesn’t seem to have the light touch.”
There was a silence. He heard the ice rattle in the bottom of her glass as she finished the weak drink she had made herself.
“Mike?”
“Yes, Mary.”
“About what you said this morning. I wanted you to come in because I thought I wanted to talk. But I don’t. Not yet.”
“Anytime.”
“I have to do some more thinking. And even then, I don’t want to … drop my troubles in your lap. When I do talk, I won’t be asking you to do anything. It will be just … to get my own emotions straightened out. And even that isn’t fair to you. To have you come down here and then—”
“Knock it off, Mary. I’m your friend. I’m Troy’s friend. I’ll listen because I want to. Okay?”
“Okay, Mike.”
He said good night to her and went out the kitchen door toward the private guest-wing entrance. The night was very still. The richness of jasmine hung in the air, almost too strong. He felt no desire for sleep, so he changed to swim trunks and slippers, took a towel and went over to the beach. After he was in he realized it made him uneasy to swim at night. The water seemed to have an oily texture. He could imagine monsters sleekly stalking this blundering thrashing chunk of live bait. When he stood up to walk out with courageous dignity, something brushed against his leg, and almost instantaneously he was fifteen feet from the water’s edge, breathing hard.
Face of a hero, he said to himself. Race of a hero. They need you in the Olympics, Rodenska. New event. Fifty-yard dash in three feet of water. Symbolic, anyway. You get scared of the things you can’t see. Comedy routine. Minnow nibbles fat man. Fat man roars out of water and then, with enormous nonchalance, peers up and down deserted beach to see if anybody was looking. Like Troy in Melbourne that time, when a lorry tire let go and made that prolonged and significant whistling, and when he came so damn close to dropping flat on the sidewalk, and then pretended he had stumbled.
Mike walked back and showered and went to bed, but his brain was a gaudy tin top, spinning and whining, his eyes glued wide open, his hearing acute. He guessed it was an hour later when he heard the car drift in with due consideration for those asleep. He walked over to the window, the terrazzo pleasantly cool against his bare feet. They sat there in the MGA, the parking lights on, talking in low tones. They got out of the car, met on her side of the car and kissed. Her back was toward him. He saw Rob’s hands slide slowly down from the small of her back to cup her haunches and pull her tightly against him. She acquiesced for a few seconds, then wriggled free, made a mock gesture of slapping him, giggled in a high tinkling way, and spun toward the door.
“Tomorrow?” he called.
“Phone and find out,” she said.
Mike went back to bed. He heard her stirring about in her room, with a quick tick-tack of heels which ended when she took her shoes off. He heard nothing for a long time, and then the soft closing of the other door to the bath they shared. A little while later the whispery roaring of the shower began.
He lay in darkness, moving closer to sleep, hearing her hum tunelessly above the shower sound, building pink and soapy and explicit visions of her, remembering what the McGuire girl had told him, and pretending in that drifting area of half sleep that when she had showered she would come sweetly, moistly, silently into his room and …
Sleep was suddenly rolled back by his sudden contemptuous realization that he had imagined
himself right into a state of acute physiological readiness for her—the shallow breathing and the sweatiness and the ponderous gallop of his heart and the knotted loins.
He rolled and thumped his pillow and said to himself, Maybe you should go back into high school. Maybe start a nice collection of dirty pictures. An adolescent old man. It’s a fleshy trap. The mind is entirely satisfied with continence. But it’s the old ape body which strains with unreasoned desire. It knows how much time has passed. So it rests here, hairy, heavy, with all the scars and marks and saggings of forty years, all the blemishes and erosions of its ape maturity, waiting with a massive arrogance for the glands to force the mind into some sort of pretty rationalization which will clear the way so that it can again exercise its plunging primordial function, its mute declaration concerning the continuance of the race. It’s an ape thing, squatting on its hairy haunches behind a screen of brush, slack-jawed, picking lice off its belly, watching the young females of the tribe, and making plaintive rumblings in its chest.
You know all the rationalizations it’s trying to force on you. Health. Quiet the nerves. Natural function. And that most devious rationalization of all, entitled: What Harm Would It Do? No objective harm, of course. She’s no hesitant virgin. She’d be incapable of attaching any emotional significance to it.
It’s the subjective harm, Michael. To be desperately old-fashioned, the loss of honor. It would be just a switch on the salesman and the farmer’s daughter. You were asked down to relax and mend. The services of the daughter of the household were not included in the facilities available. And, because you have years to live, and nobody cares deeply how you live them, and sons to raise, let’s beware of the sophistry that nobody gives a damn what you do. Because you do give a damn. When there’s nothing left but your own image of yourself, it somehow becomes a more grievous sin to smear it.
Okay. You’re noble. Go to sleep.
The shower stopped. He heard, at the limit of audibility, the tiny rusty sound of prolonged toothbrushing. The other door to the bath closed quietly. And in the great emptiness of the tropic night he found sleep.
Five
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK Mike had been on the beach over an hour. One week ago, at about the same time, he had been looking down from the high aircraft at the tiny chalk-scrawls of surf along the Atlantic beaches. And this Monday was another blandly superb day. A transistor radio, six inches from his head, canceled out any possibility of consecutive thought. He had a Havana station. It pleased him not to be able to understand the words of the singing commercials.
The sun glared red through his eyelids. Sweat ran down his ribs and the sides of his throat. When he became too uncomfortable, he could go into the water again. And when he became famished, he would go back to the house and eat. The present moments were reduced to the ultimate of simplicity.
But, a few minutes after eleven, Troy joined him on the beach. He brought a small ice chest containing cans of beer. He wore faded blue swim trunks and dark glasses. He settled himself beside Mike and said, “Got to replace the fluid you’re losing, chief.”
Mike sat up and said, “I’ll recommend this hotel to all my friends.”
Troy opened two cans, handed one to Mike. The beer was icy cold. Mike watched Troy. The glasses obscured his eyes. His hands trembled. He was tanned, but it wasn’t a healthy color. There seemed to be a tinge of yellow-green in it. Though there was still a hint of heavy-boned power about his body, the muscles were ropy and slack, the belly soft.
“I thought you’d be over in your sales office,” Mike said.
“I phoned Marvin early and went back to sleep. He can handle it. Things are slow right now. If he has to take anybody around, he can lock up and leave a sign on the door. I’ve been going slowly nuts in that place lately. Hell with it. I guess I was the belle of the ball last night.”
“I didn’t see you wearing a lamp shade for a hat. You just quietly folded your tent.”
“Gosnell makes a wicked martini. My seams came un-glued. Mary is full of pregnant silences this morning.”
“How’d you get home?”
“It’s a dreary story, old buddy. I crawled aboard Bart Speeler’s Chris and went to sleep in the cockpit and the morning sun woke me up. I started wobbling up the beach and one of the Tomley kids picked me up in his beach buggy. Did you stay long?”
“We left a little before midnight.”
“Enjoy the party?”
“I think so.”
“Ah, we’re a gay mad lot here on the Key.” Troy finished his beer, scooped a hole in the sand and buried the empty can. He patted the sand down over it, smoothly, carefully, making a small and tidy grave. “Mike.”
“Right here, sir.”
“Yesterday, I was damn rude. I apologize.”
“I needled you.”
“Because I needed it.”
Mike knew that in those few moments the old relationship had been reestablished. No more withdrawal. No more defenses. It made Mike feel glad, and in another way it made him feel weary, because the regained closeness implied an obligation he was reluctant to accept.
“I needed it a long time ago too, Mike.”
“You were in bad shape then. Not like now.”
“Maybe I’m headed for the same place again.”
“That sounds jolly.”
“Honest to God, Mike. I don’t know. I can’t even be honest with myself.” He kept smoothing the beer-can grave. “Asking you down here. I said it was … for you. Good old Mike. My turn to help. Christ! But all the time I was thinking—somebody to steady me. And I didn’t want to think I needed that. That’s why I was so damn nasty yesterday.”
“So it was a call for help?”
“I don’t like to think so. How goddamn weak can I get?”
“How bad off is your project?”
Troy drew a fingernail cross on the beer-can grave. “It’s like this. We rented twenty boards. Fifty dollars a month apiece. Three-year contract. The sign company got the locations and put them up. A thousand-a-month advertising expense. They’re good boards. They show a picture of the place the way it should eventually look. Hell, I pointed one out to you. So we’re behind in the rent. In the contract, when you get behind, the whole amount becomes due and payable. So Signs of Ravenna has turned it over to their attorney. They want twenty-six thousand bucks I haven’t got. If I don’t come up with it soon, they’ll lease the boards to somebody else and I’ll still owe the money—the corporation will. We’ve had to stop the newspaper ads. We can’t give clear titles unless the customer pays cash so we can turn it over for release of mortgage, so I can’t cut pre-development prices down far enough to move the lots to replace working capital.”
“Bank loan?”
“They won’t loan on land, only on our signatures. And only with personal balance sheets. And we’ve put everything into the kitty.”
“Everything?”
“But the house, the boat, the cars and a little cash.”
“How did you get into such a jam?”
“Too optimistic. Thought I could have all the engineering done at the same time. It’s cheaper that way.”
“Couldn’t you develop one small part of it at a time?”
“With what, Mike? With what?”
“How much would it take to get into the clear?”
“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand. That would handle the costs of finishing the Westport Road section, three hundred lots, and the merchandising. The take from that, after mortgage payments, would cover the next section.”
Watching him carefully, Mike said, “Rob Raines told me last night you were going to lose your shirt, and if anybody went in with you they’d lose their shirt too. He said if you asked me for money, he’d set up a date with Corey somebody and they’d educate me.”
Troy’s head had snapped up, his hand motionless over the beer-can grave. “So Raines is in it, too!”
“In what?”
“Haas would like to steal the
whole setup. I’m not asking you to put your money in, Mike. I’m not asking you for a thing.” His face changed, mouth going slack. “I don’t think I give a damn. I don’t think I give a hoot in hell what happens.”
“Like New York?”
“Just like New York. I can always make three fast laps, but I fold on the clubhouse turn.”
“Self-pity.”
“Self-analysis, Mike.” He turned his head away. He dug his fingers into the sand, then squeezed until his knuckles went white. In a dull voice he said, “It’s like New York in another sense, Mike.”
“How?”
“Jerranna Rowley is in town.”
Mike felt as if he had been belted under the heart. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. I don’t know where she was. Out west someplace. There was an article about me in a building contractors’ magazine. Just a column. Small builder with new ideas. One of those things.” His voice was listless. “Just one of those things. She didn’t even see it until the article was a year old. She saw it about four months back, in a damn dentist’s office. So she got here in February. She’s in a place on Ravenna Key. Shelder’s Cottages. She phoned me at the office. I … I went to see her.”
“You damn fool! Have you been seeing her often?”
“I guess you could call it that. There’s a man with her. She calls him Birdy. Says he’s her cousin. Who can tell? I guess the shakedown is more his idea than hers.”
“Shakedown?”
“Nothing expensive. She’s into me for—I don’t know—six or seven hundred bucks.” He took the dark glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, Mike. It’s about that time things started to go sour. When she got here. I was supposed to see her last night. That’s why I got drunk and didn’t. Defensive maneuver. It’s easier to get high than think about it.”
Slam the Big Door Page 9
