When does life end?
Shirley and Debbie Ann arrived at eight. They were both in shorts and sandals and sleeveless blouses—Shirley in dark green Bermudas with a white-and-green-striped blouse and golden sandals—Debbie Ann in off-white shorts and a black blouse and red sandals. They had been to a large and informal cocktail party down the beach. They stood just inside a cone of light, both of a height, a dark one and a fair one, shapely, slightly flushed, close to laughter, twenty-five and twenty-three, the frosted cone of light picking up the highlights of perfect teeth and the fluids of their eyes and the fresh moistness of underlips, the slant of the light accenting the breasts hammocked in dacron, the both of them standing slightly hipshot with forward pelvic thrust and tilt.
I have been here before, Mike thought. This is an advertisement in full color. The plates cost a fortune. They have just stepped out of their convertible Spumoni in front of this Jamaican villa. Real clean women. Sixty-bucks-an-hour model fee.
But there was something a little out of key in the advertisement. These two lacked the scrubbed, vacuous sterility of ad models. They had come half-laughing out of the night, out of the hot night, slightly feral, with a moist and sensual pungency about them, their tanned roundnesses bespeaking their elemental service to the race. Toast lightly and serve with gin. He stared blandly and approvingly at the projections of breasts and narrowness of waists, at curved ripe mouths and lilting eyes, and thought, Which twin had the baby? No stranger could have told.
They both talked at once, the wee little voice of Debbie Ann alternating with Shirley’s gamin croak. “A hell of a big dull party … but with gaudy goodies, a long table full.… And what is he celebrating?… Is this a party like …? Invite us, sir.… I love smaller groups.… Same poison, Shirl?… Let’s put on some music.… The lights are lovely.… Poor Troy’s got the wobblies.”
And so it became, in a somewhat limited sense, festive—with music and dancing girls. And a little later, with Shirley in a suit borrowed from Debbie Ann, swimming girls, accompanied in the small pool by Troy, while Mike located suitable ingredients and constructed a monster sandwich. The swim sobered Troy somewhat, and the girls, though they continued the martini route, seemed to maintain control—at least as much control as they had arrived with. The girls changed back to their shorts and blouses. Quieter music was stacked on the changer, and the volume turned down.
When Mike looked at his watch he was surprised to find it was a little after eleven. He had been sitting for some time in a double chaise longue affair with Shirley. They had circumspectly switched to beer. They were in a far corner of the patio, shadowed from the lights by the broad leaves of a clump of dwarf banana. He had enjoyed talking with Shirley. They had gotten off into obscure and esoteric areas of philosophy, such as why do the fattest women wear the shortest shorts, and how big can tail fins get, and could you market a cigarette that was eighty percent filter, with enough tobacco for three drags. Nothing personal, nothing weighty, nothing pretentious. No drunk talk. No flirtatious innuendos. Just a couple of people talking in the tropic night, finding it easy to make each other laugh.
So why should I feel guilty? Mike asked himself. So we are lounging here on this double deal, and those brown legs have a very sweet shape stretched out right there, ankles crossed. So she is somewhat slumped, and props her beer can on the delicate convexity of her little tummy. So with those black bangs and that pointed chin and all that mouth, she somehow keeps reminding me of a cat. (Her eyes tilt a little, no?) So she smells good and the jasmine smells loud around here. So she is thoroughly girl, and I am, as an unkind traffic cop would put it, slightly under the influence. Am I making passes? No. Am I thinking of making a pass? It is a subject for idle speculation. But there is no intent, judge. And who wouldn’t? What red-blooded American newspaper bum wouldn’t be thinking somewhat along those lines? Don’t feel guilty, Rodenska. Some days you tire me. Some days you are an old lady, indeed. Rodenska, dwell on this. The same year you found out what girls are for, she was missing her mouth with the pablum.
Troy and Debbie Ann were at the other end of the patio, beyond the pool, and they had been talking quietly and inaudibly together for a long time, and with a flavor of intensity that made Mike uneasy, though he could not guess why.
“One enchanting little deal at that big dull party, Mike,” Shirley said aimlessly, and with a slight trace of bitterness. “A very brown man of about sixty, known hereabouts, they tell me, as a tireless tennis player. He had found out what we will delicately refer to as my status. But I didn’t know his, which seems to be professional widower. Anyhow, he kept calling me ‘my dear.’ Very uncle about the whole thing, you know. He said divorce is an emotional shock. His name is Van Cly or Van Clay. Something like that. He said the dangerous time is when the knot is finally cut, and he offered a suggestion of what to do with myself. And like a damn fool, because I really thought he was being quite nice, I had to ask him what he had in mind. So he said he had a nice little motor sailer, a jewel, not too much boat for one man to handle, and he knows the Bahamas like the back of his hand, and it would give me the perfect chance to relax. We could go around the Keys or through the canal and the lake, and spend a lazy month cruising the islands. He would show me places few people ever saw. ‘It would be so good for you, my dear.’ By that time, finally, I had the picture, so I got all hopped up about the idea and said it would be wonderful, and my mother and my little boy would enjoy it just as much as I’m sure I would. And all of a sudden he got very vague about the whole thing.”
“You are a cruel girl. You spoiled all his fun. Just think, you could have been a rich man’s plaything, and when he tired of you, he’d sell you to a native chief.”
“And I’d end my years in a crib in Port Said, a pitiful, broken thing, chanting my dreary invitations to sailors of all nations. Golly, I really missed a good thing, didn’t I? I wish I could remember that old clown’s name. Troy will know. Troy? Troy.”
She swung her legs off the chaise and stood up. “Hey! They’re gone!”
Mike stood up too. “We better check the cars. That’s the one thing neither of them are capable of doing right now.”
But the wagon and the Porsche were both there. Mike took the keys out of the Porsche and pocketed them.
“Maybe they’re just walking on the beach,” Shirley said.
They went back to the patio. They looked at each other and looked away, uneasy. “Mike, we shouldn’t have left them …”
“Are they teenagers?” he demanded irritably. “Are we chaperones?”
“But …”
“I know. I know. I know. Stay right here a minute.”
He left her there and, with a little crawling of apprehension he checked the master bedroom, the other bedroom in the main house, and finally the guest wing. No locked doors. No melodramatic confrontations. He went back to Shirley, where she sat cross-legged on a poolside mattress.
“We seem to be alone at last,” he said.
“Can we be sued for libel for what we were thinking? I guess they’re just walking on the beach.”
He sat in a nearby chair. “You know her. I can only guess. What … how much would she be capable of? She’s his stepdaughter.”
“I was worried. Is that an answer?”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe it’s what he’s capable of.”
“Right now he’s trying to nasty up his life as completely as possible.”
“Oh.”
“Look. Do you like her?”
“I don’t know, Mike. I don’t trust her. She’s amusing. And we have so much in common. Like her? You know, that’s getting to be an old-timey sort of question, isn’t it? Do people go around liking each other any more? Or just enduring. I like you, Mike. But with most people—I just keep my guard up, and lower it as much as I dare. I don’t understand the things people do any more. I used to think I did. I don’t any more. I can’t put myself in their place, I guess. It’s a world full o
f strangers. The world’s a big cruise ship, and you don’t want to get committed too far because the cruise ends. Why should you ask me if I like her?”
“I liked Troy a long time ago. I loved him. That’s an old-timey word too, for a friendship between men. So once you love, in any way, you make a commitment. Give away a chunk of yourself. So he’s calling the debt now. I don’t like Debbie Ann. I think maybe she’s a monster. I like Mary. And you.”
“Thank you, Mike.”
“Shirley, I got left behind somewhere. I’m put together of old-timey parts. I don’t react modern. I’m still on this good-and-evil kick. Okay, it hit both of us, soon as we found they were gone, they went off to crawl in the sack. Right? So I say, on one level, worse things happen all the time, don’t they? It’s incestuous only on a legal basis, no? It’s a forty-year-old man, a twenty-three-year-old woman, unrelated. So I ask myself, why the sweat? Isn’t copulation getting about as casual as shaking hands in certain circles? Who is going to tell on them anyhow? But all that fast talk I give myself doesn’t work so good. Maybe they’re walking on the beach. Maybe not. If they’re doing what we thought they were doing, then I’m just full up to here with outraged indignation, righteous horror. A real bluenose. Because it is evil. Capital E. Rodenska is old-timey. That’s my message to you.”
“Evil,” she said thoughtfully, “not because of the act itself, but who it can hurt. Mary, mostly. That’s what evil is, hurting people.”
“Would that be your only rule? That’s pagan, isn’t it? Shouldn’t there be rules of behavior? If Mary never knows, Mary isn’t hurt. That’s the way practically anything could be justified. You have to have a rule book and a scorecard.”
“They keep changing the rules and nobody keeps track of the score any more.”
“I’m inner-directed. That’s the new-timey word for old-timey. You’re a child of your times, Shirley. So you’re outer-directed more than I am. You go most by what people think of you, and I have to go almost all the way by what I think of me. So, contemplating a deal like what we thought, I get horror, and, honestly, what do you get?”
“Not horror. It would just be … offensive to me. It would make me feel crawly, because it’s an offense against good taste. Like watching your bridge partner peek into somebody’s hand. Maybe a little more than that because it’s in an emotional area. Maybe more like being in a supermarket and watching some woman bashing her four-year-old around and shrieking at him in public. You wonder what it’s doing to her and doing to the child, basically.”
“I don’t like to think what it could do to Troy. A man who despises himself can do a lot of filthy things, Shirley. Symbols, maybe. But what if he goes too far? What if he does something that really sickens him beyond his capacity to endure it? Then what does he do?”
She yawned. “The questions are getting too hard, Gramps. You are so old and wise. And the party is over. And I am pooped. So walk me home, huh?”
“I guess I can hobble along beside you, youngster. Wheezing.”
They went out into the night. They saw the running lights of something big, far out in the Gulf. The slow and meager swell curled lazily, thumped the beach, hissed and sighed.
As they walked toward the road she said, “Tomorrow I am being taken out fishing. By uncle. We’ll be after king-fish. I hate fishing. Have you been out on Troy’s boat?”
“Not yet. I looked it over. It looks nice.”
“I haven’t been out on it either. Debbie Ann says it’s dreamy. And very, very fast. I haven’t even had a close look at it.”
He remembered later how casually he said, “Let’s go peer at it by moonlight. We can stand on the flying bridge and pretend we’re cruising the Bahamas. I’ll be showing you places nobody ever saw before.”
“And how’s your tennis?”
They cut diagonally across the raked sand of the wide yard toward the boat basin where the Skimmer III sat pallid and quiet, moored to the pilings of the dock, serene in starlight. They made little noise as they walked across the sand. As they neared the boat he heard a curious creaking, an oddly familiar yet momentarily unidentifiable sound, audible over the surf sound when they were six feet from the boat, as rhythmic as the sea sound, but considerably faster. He did not yet understand when Shirley grabbed his arm with surprising force, pulling him to a stop. She made a hissing sound. He looked down into her eyes, dark and wide in the moonlight, and then suddenly realized that the quickening sound came from the cabin aboard the Skimmer III, the surging and creaking of the nautical bunk, the strenuous, cyclic pulsations of a mating, that only rhythm in the world which is almost as old as the cadence of the seas.
As they turned away, quickly, like thieves who had been challenged in the night, and before they had reached that point a few feet away where the metronome of the flesh would be buried by the night sounds of the Gulf, full confirmation came in the thin, raw cry of a woman, so like the daytime sounds of the terns, full of pain and triumph and self-mocking.
They walked quickly to the beach and walked three hundred yards without a word to each other. Then Shirley paused and walked more slowly up the slope of the beach and sat down at a place where a storm had cut into the beach sand, leaving an abrupt two-foot miniature cliff, as comfortable as a hassock for sitting. He sat beside her. She dug cigarettes and lighter out of her straw purse, lit his cigarette and her own. She snapped the lighter, a sound like a pistol being cocked in the darkness.
“Pretty,” she said, and her tone was not pretty.
“We don’t know for sure that it was Debbie Ann and—”
“For God’s sake, Mike! Why don’t you go make a formal identification? Take their fingerprints.”
“All right. We both knew it when they took off. Suspicion confirmed. Charming girl, isn’t she?”
“And he’s a doll.”
“I have a bad feeling, Shirley. I think bad things are going to happen.”
“Have happened, don’t you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean. All I know is Mary deserves a hell of a lot better from a husband and a daughter.”
“Juicy gossip for Riley Key.”
“Are you going to spread it?”
“How would you like a smack in the mouth, Rodenska?”
“I wasn’t accusing you. Settle down. I was just wondering how it would get around.”
“It isn’t any great trick to tell about a man and a woman when you see them together in public. It always shows. People always guess. They’re either too utterly casual with each other, or too tensed-up. Mary will sense it right away. It stinks, Mike.”
“It stinks.”
She shoved the burning end of the cigarette into the sand and stood up. “Now you have a longer walk.”
“How so?”
“I was sleepy enough to go right back. But that—tender little episode has made me restless. We’re going to walk right on by the Tennysons’. Okay?”
“All the way to the Club, if you want.”
“I’m not that restless.”
“Is conversation in order?”
“I’ll let you know when it is. Mike, I am being awfully irritable. I’m sorry. Give me a little while and I’ll be all right again. Right now I feel a little sewery, as if the girl on the boat was me. Could be me. I think I’ll stop being chummy with Debbie Ann. Not all of a sudden. I’ll taper off.”
“Sound idea.”
And so they walked in silence, not as quickly as before, walking where the sand was hard-packed, past the Tennyson house and on down the long wide empty beach. The night was utterly still. Palm fronds were cut out of black metal, striped with silver along the edges from half a high-riding moon. The beach was gypsum, left over from an alpine movie of long ago, held in place by a wrought-iron Gulf that infrequently, casually, lifted and thudded against the sand.
Mike had begun to recover his composure as premonitions of disaster faded. She walked neatly and placidly beside him, their moon shadows black against white sand.
“Hey!” he said softly and stopped.
She faced him, lifted her head reluctantly, and he saw the tear tracks on her face, rivulets of mercury.
“Hey, girl,” he said gently. Such gentleness was a mistake. It crumpled her face. It brought out of her a hollow yowl of grief and plunged her against his chest, clutching at him, sobbing and sniffling against his ear, shuddering within the circle of his heavy arms, so automatically and protectively placed around her. He heard the strangled gulpings, rasping breath, little cries of loneliness. The top of her shining black head came to the level of his eyebrows. The straw purse thudded onto the damp sand.
He made the automatic and traditional sounds of comfort. There, there. And, Now, now. And, It’s all right. There, there. Take it easy, honey, patting her slim shoulders and back with a big earnest clumsy hand, supporting, against him, most of the weight of her.
A woman is soft and fragrant. A weeping, trusting woman is compellingly appealing.
The ape thing had been crouched back there in the brush, somnolent, half-dozing, scratching its hairy chest and belly, and peering from time to time at the females of the tribe. Suddenly he selected a female, stood up on knotted bandy legs, thumped a stone fist against a bass chest, grunted and came waddling out of the brush into the clearing where the female stood, curious, half-poised for fight.…
Slam the Big Door Page 17
