Twenty-two
Desperate Hair
1.
All in all, it had not been a good day.
Desmond collapsed back onto the orange bedspread in his room at the Gulf City Hotel. He’d complained about the broken air conditioner at the front desk this morning, and the clerk had told him, cheerfully, as if offering a solution to the problem, that the air conditioners were broken in almost all the rooms. Infuriating as the response was, it did make him feel marginally better to know he hadn’t been singled out for frostbite. It was late afternoon and the air outside was steam-bath wet and hot, but it couldn’t be above fifty in this chamber of horrors. He kicked off his shoes and folded himself, mummylike, into the bedspread.
Things had gone wrong from the moment he woke up and turned on the television. Almost every local channel had reports of a tropical storm—a rogue storm, an anomaly for this time of year—zigzagging its way through the Gulf. The chances of it hitting Gulf City full force were slim—thirty percent, if he averaged out the conflicting predictions—but it was being discussed by newscasters as a near apocalyptic event. Between stock footage of rain-lashed palm trees, they were broadcasting shots of people pushing around shopping carts full to overflowing with bottled water and toilet paper. One religious channel was presenting it as yet another manifestation of divine retribution for the opening of a gay strip club, the address of which they unfortunately had not revealed.
As they were driving out to Lorna’s house, everyone was strangely quiet, Jane staring out the passenger window, Tim and Chloe pressed against the doors on either side of the back seat. Worried about the storm, Desmond had thought initially, but then he’d asked what he assumed was a perfectly innocuous question about breakfast and there had been a mumbled chorus of disapproving voices: “Don’t ask.” “What breakfast?” “Who knows!” There had been a fight over breakfast, he conjectured, the specifics of which he would undoubtedly rather not know. So why, if they were all at each other’s throats, did he feel like the one being shut out?
Lorna had greeted them at her door with a disingenuous look of surprise, as if he hadn’t confirmed their arrival yesterday afternoon. “I thought you might have turned around and gone north again, once you heard about all this tropical rain they’re predicting.”
“It’s silly, isn’t it?” Jane had said, doing her best to sound knowing and conspiratorial. “We have a similar problem in New England—dire warnings about snowstorms that never materialize. You get exhausted from all the hype.”
Lorna was in her mid-fifties and had been teaching fourth grade for more than twenty years. She had a way of looking at you with disapproving condescension, as if she were about to slap you with a detention or take away your hall pass. “You get a lot more exhausted from cleaning up after the storms that do materialize. I certainly do, anyway.”
Jane obviously felt she was being judged harshly and had backed into a defensive stance, and any hope of rapport between the two women was dashed. Lorna discerned that Chloe and Tim were there for the technical side of things and demoted them to the bottom rung of the hierarchy. “Please don’t put that tripod there,” she said, as if she were talking to two disrespectful ten-year-olds. “Can’t you see what the legs are doing to my carpet? Would you like me to come into your home and do that to your carpets? No, I didn’t think so.”
Lorna looked like some of the earlier pictures of her mother—broad-shouldered and thick-waisted with an impressively large head. But while Pauline had gone for the bouffant hairstyles of the 1960s, usually colored with flat brown, do-it-yourself dyes, Lorna had her graying hair cut into a mannish bob, parted on one side and close-cropped in the back. She had big square eyeglasses she was in the habit of yanking off her face and staring at, as if to say, “How did those get there?”
The house had been redecorated since Desmond’s last visit. Lorna’s youngest daughter had started up an interior decorating business in Pensacola and had used Lorna’s house as a testing ground and showroom. The living room was a mad, overgrown garden of floral chintz slipcovers, floral curtains, floral swags over the window frames and doors, and big, ceramic vases stuffed with silk peonies and roses and lilacs and magnolias and irises. There were so many clashing patterns and colors, the overall effect was similar to one of those op art pieces so popular during the LSD craze of the 1960s.
“I love what she did in here,” Desmond said, trying to focus his eyes.
“Yes,” Lorna barked. “It’s very feminine.”
“I see you’ve moved your collection of memorabilia,” he said.
“It clashed with the new decor, so we stuck it out here.” She led them out to a glassed-in sunporch on the side of the house. There was a ceiling fan spinning at the far end, but with the windows cranked shut and the sun beating on the roof, the room must have been over a hundred degrees. Two long tables were set up under the windows along one wall, and on them, Lorna had stacked up, in no discernible order, album covers, newspaper clippings, photo albums, and plastic bags of Pauline Anderton’s stage outfits. Desmond stood in the intense heat, gazing down at the collection. Much of it had been bleached or rotted by the sun, some of the dresses appeared to have mildew stains on them, and everything was covered with dust. Even if there was something marginally appropriate about it, it was still heartbreaking.
Lorna must have been able to read the disapproval on Desmond’s face. “My mother wasn’t the least bit sentimental about her career or anything else,” she said, enunciating every word with her careful, schoolteacher diction. “‘Hit the high C and get the hell out of there.’ That was one of her mottos. She wouldn’t approve of me keeping any of this stuff in the first place, so I’m not worried she wouldn’t approve if some of it is getting a little worn. It isn’t a museum, you know.”
In retrospect, it seemed as if all the disappointments of the day were preparing him for the biggest let-down of all—his interview with Lorna. Sitting in an overstuffed armchair with a sunflower slipcover, arms folded over her chest, yanking her glasses off and on, Lorna had alternated between crisp, vague, and evasive answers.
Had her mother been discouraged by her husband, Michael’s, dismissal of her talent?
“She never listened to what he said.”
Had she been hurt by his criticism of her singing?
“She wasn’t easily hurt.”
Why had her mother given up singing after her husband died?
“She wanted to.”
Why had she turned down so many offers?
“She felt like it.”
As for the information supplied to them by the Walshes, about Pauline’s last rowdy days, her fights with her sister, her tendency to throw furniture around—Lorna tossed that off as meaningless.
“I didn’t know those two were still alive. You couldn’t trust anything they said even before they lost their minds.”
She broke off the interview after two hours, claiming she had to go out and stock up on supplies for the storm. Desmond had managed to secure a promise from her that she’d let them come back tomorrow. “Come if you want,” she said, and then qualified the invitation with: “Assuming we haven’t all blown out to sea.” They could rearrange some of the memorabilia if they wanted to, lay it out so it would be easier to photograph. Tim had packed up the video equipment and stacked it all in neat piles in a shady corner of the sunporch. Chloe didn’t want to part with it overnight, but leaving it there was like a security deposit. Lorna couldn’t change her mind about letting them in, and Desmond had discovered over the years that you never knew what you were going to find once you got your foot in the door.
Although really, he thought, lying on the thin, uneven mattress, wrapping the orange bedspread around his body more tightly, listening to the relentless clatter of the broken air conditioner, he didn’t hold out too many hopes for this one. Lorna would offer nothing tomorrow she hadn’t offered today. The collected junk would look just as badly deteriorated. He wasn’t going to find a mis
sing key to Pauline’s story. Jane had said little on the ride home, obviously as discouraged as he was about this project. When he finally asked her what she’d thought, she said, “That Lorna’s not exactly great TV material.”
As he was showering this morning, he’d had a fantasy that he’d walk into Lorna’s house and feel an inner vibration, the kind of thing some people report feeling when they hallucinate a ghostly presence. He’d sit down with Lorna and, armed with the insight he’d gained while on sabbatical from his relationship with Russell, he’d wrest from her the essential truth about the end of Pauline Anderton’s life. His understanding of Anderton would be complete, the disparate pieces of her life would connect neatly, he’d go back to Boston and wrap up the whole package. And no matter how unfortunate the effects of his Boston sabbatical had been on his relationship with Russell, he would at least know that he’d been right about taking it; it was something he’d had to do to reclaim his identity and clear his mind.
2.
Desmond and Jane decided to have dinner together and set out from the hotel on foot. The wind was up tonight, and as they walked along the promenade, the powdery white sand blew up from the beach and across the road like a dusting of fine, dry snow. The water and the sky were a matching shade of golf-course green. Weather reports were as inconclusive this evening as they’d been all day. The traffic had disappeared, and many of the bars and restaurants were closed—for the season or the storm, Desmond wasn’t sure which. For all the threats of violent rain and wind, there was something relaxing about the thought of a large, loud weather system coming to knock down a few trees and set right the disordered pattern of the jet stream.
Jane stopped to read the menu posted outside a white stucco steak house. “We did a show on mad cow disease a few months ago,” she said. “They think it can incubate in the body for up to twenty-five years.”
“Frightening thought.” And yet, what was life but one big incubation period for all the miseries and indignities that would eventually kill you? “Beef might not be the best choice in this area anyway.”
“I suppose we should look for something fishy.”
“That’s probably the sensible way to go. Something alcoholic might be another sensible way to go.”
It was still hot, despite the wind, and the farther they got from the hotel, the more slowly they walked. They stopped at a place on the beach, a small brown clapboard building with a sign that flashed the word: “Co ktails” in blue neon. The Brown Room, the long-defunct lounge where Pauline Anderton had been discovered, was probably similar to this. It was nearly empty, and the air smelled of stale alcohol and cigarettes, but there was something about the giddy melancholy of the blue Christmas lights behind the bar and the purple fluorescent glow from a murky fish tank that appealed to Desmond’s current mood. To Jane’s, too, apparently, for she said, “Exactly what I had in mind.”
When their drinks arrived, they clinked glasses despondently. After a few sips, Desmond said: “I couldn’t think of anything to toast, could you?”
“Not really. I wouldn’t call it an auspicious day. It started out badly and kept moving in that direction. Maybe tomorrow will be better.”
“Tomorrow will be windier,” Desmond said. “Apart from that . . .”
Halfway through her second drink, Jane leaned forward in her chair and lit a cigarette from the candle in the middle of the table, exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke, and began confessing.
They hadn’t received the money from the station, she said. She’d lied about that. Why? To please him and to make herself feel good, important, productive. They weren’t going to receive money from the station. As far as the station was concerned, their project was not viable. These drinks, that hotel, this whole trip was being funded by a loan, money she’d borrowed from a friend. And that was just for starters. Did he want to hear more? Her show, Dinner Conversation, had been canceled. She’d stay on at the station, but she’d be shuffled into some humiliatingly minor position working on DC’s replacement, a show based on a concept proposed by pretty, perfect Chloe, whom, by the way, she couldn’t even be angry at anymore because this morning, over breakfast, in the coffee shop at their swell auberge, she’d witnessed, firsthand, the kind of racist insults that Chloe, pretty and perfect or not, occasionally had to put up with. And, just in case he was wondering, the “friend” she’d borrowed the money from—all very hush-hush and under-the-table—was her ex-husband. Dale. Maybe he’d heard her mention the name once or twice?
“It has a way of popping up in conversation,” Desmond said.
“He has a way of popping up in my life.”
The bartender was standing in the back of the cocktail lounge, discussing the Gulf-facing windows with a man in overalls. Probably making plans to board them up. It might be fun to ride out a storm in this seedy dive, windows shuttered and Christmas lights blinking, an unlimited supply of potable liquid within easy reach.
When they’d returned to the hotel from Lorna’s house earlier in the afternoon, Tim had pulled Desmond aside and handed him a postcard which, he said, Jane had left on the table at the coffee shop this morning. “I meant to give it to her, but I forgot.” Too intimidated was more to the point. The picture on the front was supposedly of the beach, but the photographer had obviously fallen in love with the road. The beach was relegated to the background where it appeared as a blur of white. On the back, she’d written a note to her shrink, a touching admission of guilt, but it wasn’t clear to him—probably it wasn’t clear to Jane, either—if she had intended to send it or not. He didn’t know what to do with it himself; tossing it out might be the simplest course.
“You remember when we were at the Ritz,” Desmond said, “the day you told me the station had almost certainly okayed the money? You also told me that day that your marriage was in the WASH cycle. Do you remember that? Warm Affection mixed with . . . something else I’m not sure of.”
“Oh, yes. That was my wishful thinking du jour.”
“I have the feeling it might be more a matter of Wondering About Second Husband. Choice of, to be more specific.”
“I had an affair with him, Desmond. With Dale. Which is like going back for seconds to the buffet table where you got food poisoning.” She let her head fall into her hands and gave a tug at her hair. “Ugh. I hate this perm. Despise it. Don’t you?”
“Yes, it’s horrible. It makes you look older and, to be even more blunt, it makes you look a little desperate.”
“I am desperate. Isn’t that obvious? I couldn’t be any more desperate. Who else but a desperate person would do such a thing?”
“Maybe you’re still in love with him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is, he understands me, and when I’m with him, I know he sees me for who I am.”
In the flickering light of the candle, it was clear to Desmond that Jane, in her desperate hair, was wearing a costume. There’s always something exhilarating and awful about seeing people clearly, and most often, especially if you like them, you have to look away. So he couldn’t tell her that it seemed obvious she had it backward, that it was Thomas who understood her and saw her for who she was, while Dale merely saw her for who she wanted to be.
“I suppose we should be moving on to dinner soon,” he said.
“We should,” she said.
They ordered another round of drinks. Dinner was not on the menu tonight.
Twenty-three
Margo?
1.
He opened his eyes, stared up at the ceiling over the bed for a moment, and then turned on his side. Where was he? He was freezing. Florida, that was it. He could hear sand, that fine white quartz sand for which the area was famous, blowing against the window. He tried to get up, but his head was spinning. It had been years since he’d had a genuine hangover. He got himself upright, sat on the edge of the bed facing the window until he found his balance, then stood and opened the drapes. It was after seven, but so cloudy, there wasn’t mu
ch more light out there than there had been at midnight when he and Jane had finished the last of their drinks and somehow—he wasn’t yet clear on the specifics—made it back to the Gulf City Hotel. The chairs and tables and umbrellas had been removed from the patio, and the sand was rising in swirling clouds that looked like ghosts, dancing above the beach.
In the bathroom, he decided having a hangover wasn’t so bad. There was something about the dazed, muffled way his mind was functioning that was restful. True, his life was rapidly becoming an empty shell, but in his current condition, he could appreciate how much more free time that would leave him.
As he was returning from the bathroom, he noticed that Jane was sleeping in the other double bed, wrapped up in blankets against the chill of the broken air conditioner. It came back to him then, the way they’d crawled back into the room and she’d collapsed on the bed, and asked if he minded if she slept there. “I don’t think I can move,” she’d said, and then immediately added, “In other words, I don’t want to be alone.”
He was beginning to fall back into unconsciousness when the phone rang. Jane groaned and draped an arm over her eyes. “Gerald?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”
It was Chloe, clipped and wide awake, clearly not hungover at all. “I tried calling Jane,” she said, “but she isn’t in her room.”
“I know,” Desmond told her. “She’s here. What’s up?”
“She’s there? Well, whatever.” Her mother had called her an hour ago to tell her that she’d been watching the Weather Channel and thought she should get on a plane before they closed down the airport. There was a chance of flooding. There were high wind warnings. She paused and waited for Desmond to respond, and when he didn’t, she said, “And I’m just not convinced this project is worth the risk, Desmond. I’d recommend you rethink your plans.”
True Enough Page 34
