It is possible to stretch a generalized lust, or an aesthetic turn of mind, to encompass a hundred lassies—say five and a half tons of vibrant and youthful and sun-toned flesh clad in about enough fabric to half fill a bushel basket. The erotic imagination or the artistic temperament can assimilate these five and a half tons of flanks and thighs, nates and breasts, laughing mouths and bouncing hair and shining eyes, but neither lust nor art can deal with a few thousand of them. Perceptions go into stasis. You cannot compare one with another. They become a single silken and knowledgeable creature, unknowable, a thousand-legged contemptuous joy, armored by the total ignorance of the very young and by the total wisdom of body and instinct of the female kind. A single cell of the huge creature, a single entity, one girl, can be trapped and baffled, hurt and emptied, broken and abandoned. Or to flip the coin, she can be isolated and cherished, wanted and needed, taken with contracts and ceremonies. In either case the great creature does not miss the single identity subtracted from the whole any more than the hive misses the single bee. It goes on in its glistening, giggling, leggy immortality, forever replenished from the question of children plus time, existing every spring, unchangingly and challengingly invulnerable—an exquisite reservoir called Girl, aware of being admired and saying “Drink me!,” knowing that no matter how deep the draughts, the level of sweetness in the reservoir remains the same forever.
There are miles of beach, and there were miles of bunnies along the tan Atlantic sand. When the public beach ended I came to the great white wall of high-rise condominiums which conceal the sea and partition the sky. They are compartmented boxes stacked high in sterile sameness. The balconied ghetto. Soundproof, by the sea. So many conveniences and security measures and safety factors that life at last is reduced to an ultimate boredom, to the great decisions of the day—which channel to watch and whether to swim in the sea or the pool.
I found 8553. It was called Casa de Playa and was spray-creted as wedding cake white as the rest of them. Twelve stories, in the shape of a shallow C, placed to give a maximum view of the sea to each apartment even though the lot was quite narrow. I had heard that raw land along there was going at four thousand a foot. It makes an architectural challenge to take a two-hundred-foot lot which costs eight hundred thousand dollars and cram 360 apartments onto it, each with a view, and retain some elusive flavor of spaciousness and elegance.
Economics lesson. Pay eight hundred thou for the land. Put up two hundred thousand more for site preparation, improvement, landscaping, covered parking areas, swimming pool or pools. Put up a twelve-story building with 30 apartments on each of the floors from the second through the eleventh and 15 penthouse apartments on top. You have 315 apartments. The building and the apartment equipment cost nine million. So you price them and move them on the basis that the higher in the air they are and the bigger they are, the more they cost. All you have to do is come out with about a thirty-three hundred net on each apartment on the average after all construction expenses, overhead expenses, and sales commissions, and you make one million dollars, and you are a sudden millionaire before taxes.
But if the apartments are retailing at an average forty thousand each and you sell off everything in the building except ten percent of the apartments, then instead of being a million bucks ahead, you are two hundred thousand in the red.
It is deceptively simple and monstrously tricky. Meyer says that they should make a survey and find out how many condominium heart attacks have been admitted to Florida hospitals. A new syndrome. The first symptom is a secret urge to go up to an unsold penthouse and jump off your own building, counting vacancies all the way down.
As I did not care to be remembered because of Miss Agnes, I drove to a small shopping center on the left side of the highway, stashed her in the parking lot, and walked back to the Casa de Playa.
On foot I had time to read all of the sign in front.
Now showing. Model apartments. Casa de Playa. A new adventure in living. From $38,950 to $98,950. Private ocean beach. Pool. Hotel services. Fireproof and soundproof construction. Security guard on premises. No pets. No children under fifteen. Automatic fire and burglar alarm. Community lounge and game area. Another adventure in living by Broll Enterprises, Inc.
The big glass door swung shut behind me and closed out the perpetual sounds of the river of traffic, leaving me in a chilled hush on springy carpeting in a faint smell of fresh paint and antiseptic.
I walked by the elevators and saw a small desk in an alcove. The sign on the desk said: Jeannie Dolan, Sales Executive on Duty. A lean young lady sat behind the desk, hunched over, biting down on her underlip, scowling down at the heel of her left hand and picking at the flesh with a pin or needle.
“Sliver?” I said.
She jumped about four inches off the desk chair. “Hey! Don’t sneak up, huh?”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“I know you weren’t. I’m sorry. Yes, it’s a sliver.”
“Want some help?”
She looked up at me. Speculative and noncommittal. She couldn’t decide whether I’d come to deliver something, repair something, serve legal papers, or buy all the unsold apartments in a package deal.
“Well … every time I take hold of something, it hurts.”
I took her over to the daylight, to an upholstered bench near a big window which looked out at a wall made of pierced concrete blocks. I held her thin wrist and looked at her hand. There was red inflammation around the sliver and a drop of blood where she had been picking at it. I could see the dark narrow shape of the splinter under the pink and transparent skin. She had been working with a needle and a pair of tweezers. I sterilized the needle in her lighter flame, pinched up the skin so that I could pick a little edge of the splinter free. She sucked air through clenched teeth. I took the tweezers and got hold of the tiny end and pulled it out.
“Long,” I said, holding it up. “Trophy size. You should get it mounted.”
“Thank you very very much. It was driving me flippy,” she said, standing up.
“Got anything to put on it?”
“Iodine in the first aid kit.”
I followed her back to the desk. She hissed again when the iodine touched the raw tissue. She asked my advice as to whether to put a little round Band-Aid patch on it, and I said I thought a splinter that big deserved a bandage and a sling, too.
She was lean, steamed-up, a quick-moving, fast-talking woman in her late twenties with a mobile face and a flexible, expressive voice. In repose she could have been quite ordinary. There was a vivacity, an air of enjoying life about her that made her attractive. Her hair was red-brown, her eyes a quick, gray-green, her teeth too large, and her upper lip too short for her to comfortably pull her mouth shut, so it remained parted, making her look vital and breathless instead of vacuous. She used more eye makeup than I care for.
“Before I ask question one, Miss Dolan—”
“Mrs. Dolan. But Jeannie, please. And you are …?”
“John Q. Public until I find out something.”
“John Q. Spy?”
“No. I want to know who you represent, Jeannie.”
“Represent? I’m selling these condominium apartments as any fool can plainly—”
“For whom?”
“For Broll Enterprises.”
“I happen to know Harry. Do the skies clear now?”
She tilted, frowned, then grinned. “Sure. If a realtor was handling this and you talked to me, then there’d have to be a commission paid, and you couldn’t get a better price from Mr. Broll. There used to be a realtor handling it, but they didn’t do so well, and I guess Mr. Broll decided this would be a better way. Can I sell you one of our penthouses today, sir? Mr. Public, sir?”
“McGee. Travis McGee. I don’t know whether I’m a live one or not. I’m doing some scouting for a friend. I’d like to look at one with two bedrooms and two baths just to get an idea.”
She took a sign out of her desk and propped i
t against the phone. “Back in ten minutes. Please be seated.” She locked her desk and we went up to the eighth floor. She chattered all the way up and all the way down the eighth floor corridor, telling me what a truly great place it was to live and how well constructed it was and how happy all the new residents were.
She unlocked the door and swung it open with a flourish. She kept on chattering, following a couple of steps behind me as I went from room to room. After quite a while she ran out of chatter. “Well.… Don’t you want to ask anything?”
“The floor plan is efficient. The equipment looks pretty adequate. But the furniture and the carpeting and the decorating make me feel sort of sick, Jeannie.”
“A very expensive decorator did all our display apartments.”
“Yeck.”
“A lot of people are really turned on by it.”
“Yeck.”
“We’ve even sold some with all the decor intact, just as you see it. The buyers insisted.”
“Still yeck.”
“And I think it is absolutely hideous, and it makes me feel queasy, too. It looks too sweet. Cotton candy and candy cane and ribbon candy. Yeck.”
“Got one just like this that hasn’t been messed with?”
“Down on five. Come along.”
We rode down three floors. The apartment was spotlessly clean and absolutely empty. She unlocked the sliding doors, and we went out onto the balcony and leaned against the railing.
“If the answers to the other questions make sense, Jeannie, my friend might be interested, provided you don’t show her that one up on eight.”
I asked the right questions. Was it long-term leasehold or actual ownership with undivided interest in the land? How much a year for taxes? How much for the maintenance contract? What were the escalation provisions in the maintenance contract? How much did utilities run? Would the apartment be managed, be rented if you wished when you were not using it?
“How many apartments are there all told?”
“Counting the penthouses—298.”
“How many unsold?”
“Oh, very few, really.”
“How many?”
“Well … Harry might cut my throat all the way around to the back if I told anybody. But after all, you are my surgeon, and I have the scar to prove it. We’ve got thirty-six to go. I’ve been here a month and a half, and I get free rent in one of the models and a fifty-buck-a-week draw against a thousand dollars a sale. Between the two of us, Betsy and me, we’ve sold two.”
“So Harry Broll is hurting?”
“Would your friend live here alone, Travis?”
“It would just be more of a convenience for her than anything. She lives in the British Virgins. St. Kitts. She comes over here often, and she’s thinking about getting an apartment. I imagine she’d use it four times a year probably, not over a week or two weeks at a time. She might loan it to friends. She doesn’t have to worry about money.”
Jeannie Dolan made a small rueful face. “How nice for her. Will you be bringing her around?”
“If I don’t find anything she might like better.”
“Remember, this floor plan is $55,950. Complete with color coded kitchen with—”
“I know, dear.”
“Wind me up and I give my little spiel.” She locked up, and we rode down in the elevator. She looked at her watch. “Hmmm. My long, exhausting day has been over for ten minutes. I read half a book, wrote four letters, and got operated on for a splinter.”
“There’s some medication I want to prescribe, Mrs. Dolan. If there’s an aid station nearby, I can take you there and buy the proper dosage and make sure you take it.”
She looked at me with the same expression as in the very beginning: speculative, noncommittal. “Well … there’s Monty’s Lounge up at the shopping center, behind the package store.”
Five
Monty’s was no shadowy cave. It was bright, sunny, and noisy. Terrazzo floor, orange tables, a din of laughter and talk, shouts of greeting, clink of ice. Hey, Jeannie. Hi, Jeannie, as we found our way to a table for two against the far wall. I could see that this was the place for a quick one after the business places in the shopping center closed. There was a savings and loan, insurance offices, a beauty parlor, specialty shops all nearby.
The waitress came over and said, “The usual, Jeannie? Okay. And what’s for you, friend?” Jeannie’s turned out to be vodka tonic, and friend ordered a beer.
In those noisy and familiar surroundings Jeannie relaxed and talked freely. She and her friend Betsy had come down to Florida from Columbus, Ohio, in mid-January to arrange a couple of divorces. Their marriages had both gone sour. She had worked for an advertising agency, doing copy and layout, but couldn’t find anything in her line in the Lauderdale area. Betsy Booker had been a dental hygienist in Columbus but hated it because no matter what kind of shoes she bought, her feet hurt all the time. Betsy’s husband was a city fireman, and Jeannie’s husband was an accountant.
She seemed miffed at her friend Betsy. There was tension there, and it had something to do with Harry Broll. I tried to pry, but she sidestepped me, asked me what I did. I told her I was in marine salvage, and she said she knew it had to be some kind of outdoor work.
Finally I took a calculated risk and said, “If my friend likes the apartment, then I’ll see what I can do with Harry Broll. Hope you don’t mind hearing somebody badmouth him. Harry is such a pompous, obnoxious, self-important jackass, it will be a pleasure to see how far down he’ll come on the price.”
“You said you were friends, McGee!”
“I said I knew him. Do I look like a man who needs friends like that?”
“Do I look like a girl who’d work for a man like that?”
We shook hands across the table, agreeing we both had better taste. Then she told me that Betsy Booker’s taste was more questionable. Betsy had been having an affair with Harry Broll for two months.
“Betsy and I were in a two bedroom on the fourth on the highway side, but she has gradually been moving her stuff up onto six into his one bedroom, apartment 61. I guess it hurt her sore feet, all that undressing and dressing and undressing and walking practically the length of the building.”
“Bitter about it?”
“I guess I sound bitter. It’s more like hating to see her be so damned dumb. She’s a real pretty blonde with a cute figure, and she just isn’t used to being without a guy, I guess. It isn’t a big sex thing going on. Betsy just has to have somebody beside her in the night, somebody she can hear breathing. She makes up these weird stories about how it’s all going to work out. She says he’s going to make a great big wad of money on some kind of land promotion stock and because Mrs. Broll deserted her husband, he’s going to be able to get a divorce and marry Betsy.”
“Couldn’t it happen like that?”
“With him? Never!” she said and explained how she hadn’t liked Harry’s looks and had checked him out. Her best source had been the housekeeper at the apartment building. Last November when the place had been finished, Harry Broll had taken over apartment 61. He had an unlisted phone installed. He did not get any mail there.
“It’s obvious what he was setting up,” Jeannie said. “The world is full of Harry Broll–type husbands. The housekeeper said some Canadian broad moved into the apartment a week later. Harry would take long lunch hours. But he must have slipped up somehow, because Mrs. Broll arrived one day about Christmas time and went busting in when Harry was leaving, and there was a lot of screaming going on. His wife left him, even though Harry had gotten rid of his girlfriend. Then Harry moved out of his house and into the apartment. Betsy saw his house once. He took her there and showed it to her. She said it’s big and beautiful. She won’t ever get to live there. He’ll dump her when he gets tired of her.”
She said two drinks would be plenty. I paid the check and took her out and introduced her to Miss Agnes. Jeannie was so delighted with my ancient Rolls that I had to drive her up
to Pompano Beach and back. I let her out across from the Casa de Playa. I wondered if I should caution her about mentioning my name to Betsy, who might in turn mention it to Harry Broll, and turn him more paranoid than ever. But it seemed to be too long a chance to worry about and too little damage from it even if it did happen.
She gave me an oblique, quick, half-shy look that said something about wondering if she would ever see me again. I discovered that I would like to see her again. We said cheerful and conspiratorial good-bys. She walked around the front of Miss Agnes, waited for a gap in traffic, and hastened across the highway. Her legs were not quite too thin, I decided. The brown-red hair had a lively bounce. From the far curb she turned and waved, her smile long-range but very visible.
It was dark when I parked Miss Agnes. I walked to F Dock and on out to Slip 18 and made a ritualistic check of the mooring lines and spring lines, then checked to see how the Muñequita was riding, tucked in against the flank of the Busted Flush, fenders in proper placement to prevent thumps and gouges.
“Don’t pretend you can’t hear my foot tapping, you rude, tardy son of a bitch,” Jilly said with acid sweetness. She was at the sundeck rail, outlined against the misty stars with a pallor of dock lights against her face.
I went aboard, climbed up, and reached for her but she ducked away. “What did I forget, woman?”
“The Townsends. I told you I accepted for both of us. Don’t you remember at all?”
“What did we accept?”
“Drinks aboard the Wastrel and dinner ashore. They’re over at Pier 66. Old friends, dear. She was the heavy little woman with the good diamonds.”
“Oh.”
“You’re drawing a blank, aren’t you?”
“I seem to be.”
“Hurry and change and we can join them at dinner. And, dear, not quite as informal as you were at my little party, please?”
“Is she the woman who kept talking about her servant problem? No matter what anybody else was talking about?”
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 5
