“Doesn’t the money mean a damn thing?”
“That’s a nice piece of money,” Birdy said.
“Don’t you want it?”
“Sure, we want it.”
“Then what the hell kind of an agreement do you want?”
“I talked it over with her,” Birdy said. “I didn’t think you’d come up with it. I said if you did, okay. You can give it to us. Like a present. Then after you give it to us, no strings, then we decide if we’ll leave. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but that way we’re not being pushed around none.”
“Do I look like a sap?”
“Buddy, I don’t know what you look like. You figure she’s poison for your pal. You want her out. Did you ever think of asking real nice, no money or anything, please take off?”
“Frankly, no. But if that’s what you …”
“It’s too late for that now, buddy. That’s what you do first. And if it don’t work the money comes next. You bitched yourself, buddy, thinking you could buy us. So you only got one choice left. Leave the grand and we’ll think it over.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Jerranna said. “Troy was getting kinda boring, but not yesterday, man. Yesterday he was real crazy. Yesterday was full of kicks. I saw in the paper he didn’t make it home.”
“So now you’ll stay even if I turn over the money.”
“Did anybody say that?” Birdy demanded.
“That crazy Troy wanted to trade punches with Birdy. He smacked Birdy one good one, and Birdy hit him—pow—and I swear to God he slid eight feet on his back and got up laughing so hard he was crying. He was having a ball yesterday.”
“I’m not getting into any kind of crazy arrangement about the money, the way you people want me to do it.”
“Suit yourself, buddy,” Birdy said.
Mike got up and said, “There’s no reason why you can’t take it away from me, I suppose.”
“Then it would be the same thing,” Birdy said.
“What do you mean?”
“We’d have to leave. We’re people, like anybody else. I took it away from you, it would be the same deal again. If we were going anyway, we would. I would. You’re heavy and you look solid, but I could snap your back across my knee.”
“Good for you.”
“He can pick up the front end of a new Caddy,” Jerranna said.
“If I don’t give you the money, will you stay longer?” Mike asked, feeling confused and desperate.
“The way I feel right now, buddy, when both of us get ready to leave at the same time, we’ll take off, and I don’t know when. You don’t get with things very good. You don’t come on very fast.”
“I feel like I’m dreaming this damn conversation,” Mike said. He stood up and pried the bills out of his pocket and looked at them stupidly. He sighed and opened the packet and slowly counted out five hundred and put the rest in his pocket, placed the five hundred on the table.
“What’s that for?” Birdy demanded.
“It’s a present,” Mike said thinly. “For two lovely people. I like your eyes. I like your hairdos.”
“And we go or stay. It’s up to us,” Birdy said.
“Yes. This is—a gesture of undying friendship.”
Birdy grinned. “Man, now you’re coming on better. You could even get with it, you keep straining.”
“Stick a gold star on my forehead,” he said and walked wearily out. When he was ten feet from the porch door Jerranna said something he couldn’t quite catch. And then they both began laughing. Mike flushed. When he got to the station wagon, he could still hear the laughter, very faint and far away. He drowned it with an angry roar of the engine.
Conned, he thought. Conned out of five hundred bucks. I’m not with it. I just can’t come on. I can’t dig the tribal customs. What the hell kind of a code of honor is that? And how much did Troy leave with them yesterday—as a touching gesture? It’s like you try to give a shark a cheese sandwich to stop gnawing your leg, and the shark says that as a moral, upstanding shark, he can take the sandwich only as a gesture of friendship. Give it to me, boy, and I’ll decide later on.
He went back to the house. Debbie Ann was still out. Troy was napping. So he went out and swam and fell asleep on the beach and awakened in time to see the last bloody segment of the sun slide into the Gulf.
I can pick up the front end of a new kiddy car, he said. I could snap Shirley’s wrist across my knee, after a course in calisthenics. And I can sure as hell give money away.
Some days the world seemed a lot less real. This was one of those days.
Eight
ON FRIDAY MORNING he left the house at nine before Troy was up, and while Debbie Ann was having breakfast, and drove up to see Mary. Though the peak of the tourist season had passed, the Tamiami Trail was thick with cars from Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan. The cars were dusty from travel, the rear window ledges cluttered with Kleenex boxes, fruit, seashells, coconut masks, children’s toys, yellow boxes of camera film.
As he neared Sarasota the tempo of the traffic slowed for the long, tawdry, dangerous strip of commercial slum—juice stands, beer joints, drive-ins, grubby motels, shabby sundries stores, tackle shops, shell factories, gas stations, trailer parks, basket shops—all announcing the precariousness of their existence with big cheap bright signs imploring the passerby: STOP—BUY—EAT—SHOP—CUT RATES—SALE—BARGAIN—SPECIAL. Here and there were trim, tidy, attractive operations, lost in the welter of potentially bankrupt anxiety, in the dusty flavor of a dying cut-rate carnival. Tires yelped and horns brayed indignation as people cut in and out of the lines of thirty-mile-an-hour traffic.
The road widened as he entered Sarasota. He found a marked turn through an exceedingly complicated interchange, swooped around a bay-front drive and on out over bright new bridges to St. Armands Key where the leggy brown girls walked in their short shorts, and there were a great many convertibles. He found his way to Longboat Key and drove past some vast and florid hotel ventures along the Gulf front and, just when he was wondering if he had passed Lazy Harbor, he saw the high blue and white sign ahead, with a plywood seagull balanced on one wing tip on top of it. He parked by a long low pink building, asked for Mrs. Jamison, and was told she was out by the pool. He found her in a deck chair in a white sheath swim suit that accented her tan, her long legs burnished with oil, big black sunglasses with coral frames, cigarettes close at hand, an O’Hara novel propped on her stomach.
“Pardon me, miss, but haven’t I seen you someplace before?”
“Oh, Mike!”
“I generally don’t try to pick up young girls,” he said, and moved a chair closer to hers and sat down.
“It must be this suit. I bought it Wednesday, and yesterday when I was walking over on the beach, I was whistled at, by a boy Debbie Ann’s age. It made me feel horribly smug. This suit must do something special.”
“You do something nifty to it, maybe.”
“Stop it right now, or I’ll become unbearable. What’s happening, Mike? How is Troy? Don’t you think I ought to come home?”
He told her about Troy, how he was reacting. It took a long time. She had a lot of questions. Then he told her about Jerranna and Birdy and how that had worked out.
“They sound like members of a different race,” she said wonderingly.
“Martians, maybe. I don’t know. It’s a kind of evil, Mary. Psychopathic. I saw one like him once, a younger version. Killed his parents. They wouldn’t let him have the car keys. He was indignant. Why the big fuss, he wanted to know. They wouldn’t let me have the keys. I got sore. They didn’t have any right not to gimme the keys, see? I had a date.”
“And have you ever seen anything like her?”
“Never. A lot of them almost like her, but without that something added, whatever the hell it is.”
Mary kept at him to describe Jerranna more completely. But words merely made her sound totally unattractive, and made Mary feel baffled by the whole thing.
“I’ve had a chance to think about Troy,” she said, “and about the things you told me about him. I’ve been wondering something. I want to know what you think.”
“Go ahead.”
“Could a man … a man like Troy … have such a fear of failure, which could come from a feeling of guilt, have such a great fear of failure that through some sort of reverse, compulsive thing, he forces himself to fail? In two businesses and two marriages, probably the four most important things in his life?”
“It’s a thought. It could be right. The neurotic ambitious pitcher who can’t help serving up that fat pitch, that home-run pitch.”
“Oh, Mike,” she said in a lost voice, “I don’t know what to think.”
“Maybe it was just drunk talk. Just that.” He felt a sudden unreasoning contempt for himself and for his involvement in this thing. It was unreal to be here, sweating in the sun, talking to a brown handsome woman beside a tourist pool. “We all take the big swing with amateur psychiatry. What does it mean? What do we know? So Troy is another alcoholic, and we make a big thing out of it.”
“It’s a big thing to me, Mike.”
“I shouldn’t have said it that way. Hell. It’s the alcoholic cycle, isn’t it? Build everything up so far and then tear it all to hell down and start again. But how many starts does a guy get in one lifetime?”
“I better come home, Mike. Now.”
“I don’t know. I felt sure I was being smart. He’s trying to smash everything he cares about. So if you’re out of the way, I thought … now I don’t know what I think. I feel as if I’d been meddling. Maybe an occupational disease. Come home—stay here—how important is it to you?”
She looked away from him. A little muscle moved at the corner of her jaw, and her throat looked taut. She pitched her voice so low he found himself leaning forward to hear her. “I want to say … it’s terribly important. But that’s a pose, isn’t it? Noble Mary, forgiving and understanding. My own retouched photograph of myself. It … isn’t as important as it was. It never will be, Mike. Never again. That foul woman. He went from me, to roll in filth. So I wasn’t enough. Something inadequate.” She looked directly at him, her eyes brilliant, and said abruptly, “A lot of this warm protective desire to understand the poor sick man is crap, Mike.” She banged her fist on her naked thigh. “He hurt me! He made me ashamed! He hurt me! He hurt me!”
She bent forward from the waist, face in her hands, in a quiet agony. On the other side of the pool a sheep-faced woman stared, nudged her husband, spoke secretively to him, still staring, the explosions of rapid sibilants audible across the pool. He opened his eyes solemnly and the two of them stared at Mary. There had been a slight flavor of childishness in her outbursts, a little of petulance, but it was mostly a mature woman in that special area of pain reserved, in irony, for those who know how to give.
He wanted to reach out and touch her, but did not want to make the little scene more interesting to the couple opposite them. He sat in discomfort, thinking how easy it was to hurt the good ones, how impossible to hurt the bad ones. Vulnerability, he said to himself, seeking for that epigrammatic quality, is the curse of the thinking classes.
She lifted her face, fighting for, then achieving an illusion of composure, and said in a small weary voice, “I’m so damn tired of being so stinking decent about everything. It was easier to get away from him than you know, Mike. I … snapped at the chance, with a pretty show of reluctance. The least I can do right now is be honest with myself and with you.”
“Mary, this honesty thing is tough. The pretending is so easy. There is maybe about four of me, and only one is real, so once in a while, like for character or something, I have to go down into a hole with those three other guys and lay around me with a club so I’m the only one left. But they win sometimes. How do you tell the player without a scorecard? I’ll give you this. I admire you. I’ll do it up in needlepoint. You can frame it. Like home sweet home.”
“Don’t you make me cry, darn you.”
“Okay, let’s try a change of pace. Now I’ll tell you how I’m becoming a big land merchant. They call me Mike the Dealer. I’ve got the secret of this land-development kick. You’ve got to hate trees. A tree has to offend your sense of ugliness, so you bulldoze it the hell out of there, and asphalt the whole area. Then you put up eighty-six lousy little forty-thousand-dollar houses and you’re in.”
He told her about his adventures. He made her laugh. Laughter took the agony out of her eyes, made her visibly younger. It took so long to tell that he stopped while she went and changed to a yellow sunback dress, and then he drove her to a garden restaurant where, under a pink umbrella and with the pleasant distractions of a fashion show of beach wear and a small and tender filet, he finished it. She felt sorry for Corey Haas. She told Mike he was brilliant. He told her he had known that all along, but it was difficult to get anybody to perceive it. She told him that if he was actually, seriously considering risking his money, he needed his head examined. And that had a double meaning which put shadows back behind her eyes. He said he would risk it out of greed, maybe, having always wanted to see how a millionaire felt on the inside—smug or nervous.
So, after some silence, not particularly awkward, they got back to Topic A.
“I don’t want to go back right now,” she said with a certain defiance, “even if I felt he does need me, which I don’t quite believe somehow. I need myself. I’m getting re-acquainted with Mary.”
“Then the thing to do is stay.”
“But if I stay here, it leaves it all in your hands.”
“So I’ll try to cope. No obligation. Should I sit on the beach in mourning? There is a thing you should know about. Buttons called it the Curse of Rodenska. I’ve got used to it. I can explain it this way, Mary. Suppose I was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The day before they’re going to finish me off, the warden comes to the cell. He sits down and looks at me sadly. I’m all braced for words of compassion. So he says, ‘Look, Mike, I’ve got this problem I need your advice on.’ ”
Mary laughed. “Oh, Mike, honestly—”
“Everybody does it. Should you be different? If all I had to do was lie on your beach it would make me highly nervous.”
And so, promising to keep her up to date, he took her back to Lazy Harbor and drove back on down to Riley Key. It was nearly four when he arrived. He looked across the beach before he turned into the drive and saw Troy stretched out, alone, in the sun.
He changed to swim trunks and walked down onto the beach and sat on his heels beside Troy.
“You could even be human,” he said.
Troy rolled up onto one elbow. “It took until noon today. You’ve been to see Mary? Thought so. Spare me any play-by-play, old buddy.”
“I wasn’t going to present a report, old buddy.”
“The words would be familiar. I’m tearing her heart out. I don’t deserve such a fine woman. And so on.”
“For a nearly hundred-percent bastard, Troy, you run in luck. You not only get the friendship of a sterling type like me, but you marry real good women.”
“It’s a knack. I’m a great guy. I’m a war hero.”
“About Mary, set your mind at rest, war hero.”
“How so?”
“One time a guy on our street bought a dog. The dog didn’t adore him enough. So he got a stick and beat on it, but for some reason the situation got worse. He couldn’t understand it.”
“Pull up a cracker barrel and we’ll spit on the chunk stove to hear it sizzle.”
“I’m just homespun, Troy. True blue. She’ll be back, I suppose. But it won’t be the same deal you had.”
“Something precious has been forever lost?”
Mike studied him: “You’re a great guy, Troy. You’re a prince. You need that shrinker.”
“Anybody who doesn’t agree with you is sick?”
“Let’s say you’re scared, Troy.”
The word dented Troy’s mas
k of bland amusement, ironic arrogance. The word twisted his mouth. Mike watched him regain control.
“Scared of what, old buddy?”
“What’s happening to you. Because you don’t know why it’s happening. Or how it’s going to end. You know it’s going to end bad. You don’t know how bad. Nobody knows how bad. So everybody’s scared, Troy.”
“I’m scared. I’m sick. I’m a mess. So I need a drink. That’s indicated, isn’t it?” Troy got up and walked toward the house. Mike stood up and watched him. Troy strolled. He ambled along, scuffing sand. But his back muscles were rigid. Very casual, Mike thought. Like a thief walking past a cop. What gutted him like a fish? Mike wondered. What hollowed out the empty man?
Mike swam. He stood, winded, in the clear water. A fish the size of his thigh, wearing a black-and-white-striped suit, swam by with slow, purposeful dignity, heading north. You got lousy taste in clothes, Mike told him. A self-made fish. So you don’t know how to dress. You buy mail-order stuff from Playboy, and all your employees snicker behind your back. Find a good tailor, buster.
Mike waded out. He prodded his belly and told himself all this swimming was making him hard and lean and dangerous. Rodenska, soldier of fortune. They all wondered who the tanned stranger was, with that look of far places in his eyes.
Wait until Buttons sees …
He turned and squinted through the water in his eyes at the fat red dying sun. Go on down, he said. Don’t bother to come up again. Stay down. It isn’t worth the trouble.
So he went back to his room, and when he shut himself into the shower stall, he sang his shower song. Not exactly a song, without much of a tune. Up half the scale—boom, boom, boom, boom—and back down—bum, bum, bum, bum. It resonated well.
The alcohol was working on Troy. Mike nursed his drinks and listened. Good old maudlin garrulousness, he thought. Paddlin’ maudlin home. Every drunk has the conviction he is unique, and all drunks are alike. A few tears for Bunny. A few lies about the war. Tears for the daughter. Tears for Mary. Some jokes, badly told. Owlish laughter. The world is down on me. Nobody cares. The bad luck I’ve had. Jesus! Bathos instead of tragedy. Alcohol loosening the mouth, dulling the eyes, causing the expansive, uncertain gesture. Paralysis of the cerebral cortex. No judgment in choice of words or thoughts. The fumbling tongue. Mike watched him. This had been the lean and deft young officer, good at love, good at killing—full of a quickness. Now the chronological age was forty, the apparent age fifty. A pulpy drunk, bragging now of many conquests, some of them obviously imaginary.
Slam the Big Door Page 16
