Condominium (19 page)

Colonel Simmins was playing tennis with his daughter, the mysterious thirtyish slender blonde who was reputed to have been in an Arizona jail and released in her father’s custody. Father and daughter were spry tanned people in proper tennis whites, with agile feet, gasps and grunts of explosive energy, shiny metal rackets, head bands, wrist bands, orange tennis balls.

Harlin Barker stood and watched the long rally. They both hit the ball with great force, skimming it low over the net. The daughter had lovely legs. The colonel angled a shot across court and the daughter came scrambling and reaching to hit it back. She could not quite make it, but she swung at it. The rim hit the ball and the ball flew over and hit Harlin Barker before he could either dodge
or catch it. It stung him high on the chest and glanced upward and hit him under the chin before falling to the grass at his feet.

He smiled broadly to show her it hadn’t hurt him. He bent down and picked it up, and having bent over too quickly, he came up slightly dizzy. He wanted to seem forceful and athletic, so he threw the ball toward the woman. He was dizzy and it slipped from his fingers and went over her head, at least fifteen feet over her head, and across the next court and out into the grass beyond.

The woman put her fist on her hip and said, with a pale-eyed glare, “That’s very funny. That’s really very very funny.”

To the total helpless astonishment of Harlin Barker, he began to weep. Tears burst into his eyes and bleared the world and ran down his face while his throat made a gravelly crowing sound.

The woman came running to him and dropped her racket on the grass. He tried to turn and flee, but she caught him by the wrists. “Hey,” she said. “
Hey
now. It’s
okay
!”

“Get away from him, Lynn!” the colonel ordered.

“Oh, shut up, Simmy. Hey, mister. Don’t! Please.”

“Are you going to play tennis or aren’t you?”

The woman ignored her father. She gently steered Harlin Barker to a cement bench twenty feet away and sat beside him and gave him some tissue from the pocket of her brief white skirt. Barker wiped his eyes and blew his nose and, with a great effort, managed to still the rough sound of sobbing. “I … just don’t know what … got into …” He was aware of her narrow tanned face, her light-gray questing eyes, her mouth pursed with concern.

“When you get close to the edge,” she said, “any little thing can set it off. I thought it was a dumb joke, throwing the ball like that. That’s all.”

“I’ve been doing everything that has to be done. I thought I was okay.”

“Nobody is ever really okay. Anything I can do to help?”

“No. No. Thanks for being … I’m ashamed of myself.”

“You’re a person. Like anybody. You just held in too long. It had to come out.” She touched his cheek with her fingertips. “Look. You take care of yourself. Okay? You
do
that.”

He nodded and she went back to her game, jaw clenched. She seemed to be hitting the ball harder than before. Both the colonel and his daughter looked over at Barker from time to time. When he felt quite calm he got up and waved at the woman shyly, and went off to find Mrs. Twigg.

THELMA MENSENKOTT
had begun to spend most of her afternoons in the jungle. That was what she called the acres of tangled natural growth which began at the rear boundary of Golden Sands and stretched to the shore of Palm Bay.

She and Jack had moved into 6-F last August. They were among the early settlers. She was a tall big-boned woman of thirty-two. She moved slowly and shyly, shoulders hunched and head slowly bowed. Jack Mensenkott was sixty-one. He had retired last June. He had been an executive in network television, concerned primarily with the operation of network-owned facilities. His first wife, Janice, had died with shocking abruptness of a brain tumor in his, and her, fiftieth year. One morning at breakfast she had been talking about a man in the neighborhood and called him “she.” A day later she confused “you” and “me,” “mine” and “yours,” “his” and “hers,” laughing, but with an expression of alarm in her eyes, at her own confusions. Three days later she had the first myelogram;
ten days later she had no speech left at all; five weeks later she was dead.

A year later Jack married Thelma Borgren, then twenty-two, a researcher on the network news staff, a large, gentle, understated girl who listened well, talked little, and surprised and flattered him with her responsive sexuality. He had four children, one her age, the other three older, all married. They alarmed her. They and their wives and husbands had so much grinning, vibrating vitality. They gave their blessing. Better for old Dad to be married. She wanted a family. Jack wanted a second family. Through five years, four doctors and three clinics, they tried to reproduce. When she became pregnant it was a tube pregnancy, and she was a little too good at standing pain. It went on so long that when the surgeons went in there, they left her with no chance of another try. By then Jack was fifty-seven, and seemed relieved that he had to give up hopes of a second family, but saddened for her sake.

At sixty-one Jack Mensenkott looked a little under or a little over fifty, depending on the light and the time of day. He had, out of vanity, always taken splendid care of himself. At Princeton he had wrestled at five nine, a hundred and fifty pounds. At sixty-one he was five eight and a half (the discs all become thinner and harder) and weighed a hundred and forty-five. He was a very physical man. He had played hard fast games all his life. He owned three five-hundred-dollar hairpieces. He wore soft contact lenses and boiled them every night. He’d had one face lift and was thinking about another (they last but seven to nine years, depending). He had been tan all his life. He was never ill. Each morning he did fifty pushups in fast cadence, ran in place for three hundred steps and turned his shower to cold before he got out of it. And most mornings of every month he made love to Thelma, as deliberately as he
embarked upon other exercises, because he believed that it kept him young.

The relationship troubled her in ways she could not define. It had been a love affair, intimate and intense, and they had revealed to each other all the secret dreams and fears, held each other close in the fearful night. They had become lovers and friends and then, somehow, lovers and acquaintances. There were no more revelations. She was stroked and patted with a casual affection, and when they talked it was a surface thing, involving things they had read in the newspaper, people who had moved into Golden Sands, changes in the weather and in the TV schedules.

Jack kept a twenty-foot Cobia at the in-and-out marina near the north bridge and had quickly become a dedicated and deadly hunter of fish. She sunburned quickly and painfully and, as Jack had observed, could become seasick on a wet lawn, and so she was glad when Jack ceased asking her to go out with him.

Were it not for the sexual part of their marriage they could, she thought, have been amiable and courteous strangers who lived together, sharing the chores of housework and shopping, enjoying similar books, magazines and television programs. For a time, after they had settled into the routines of Golden Sands, she had begun to feel a reluctance about lovemaking. She had felt a need to diminish her own participation in this obligatory rite, to avoid climax. But he was a patient and observant man. Afterward she would tell herself that she had been given pleasure, but she could not escape the feeling she had been used. It was one with the affable pats he might give a valued dog or horse. He had spurred her into performance, lifting her over the jumps, depositing her in a drowsy exhaustion at the end of the circuit. Somehow he was demeaning her, and there was no way for her to tell how. Or why.
The books told her she was an extraordinarily lucky woman. But she felt like a refugee from her own life, living in the comfortable exile of the well-to-do, waiting for word to go home, knowing it would never come.

She had been at her peak of puzzled discontent when she had discovered the jungle. She had been a city child, used to the gritty air, the asphalt playgrounds, the truck stink and motor roar. Over three years the vital noisy grinning father who would lift her and gently bump her head against the ceiling and sing his loud songs to her had dwindled and shrunk and faded and died. From cane to crutches to wheelchair to bed and to the grave. She had become then, at ten, the solemn and shy and studious person she would be all her life. Her full scholarship to the university had been awarded when she was seventeen. She had lived at home, with her mother and her aunt and her grandmother, in the apartment where her father had died, and she got her degree in three years and went to work at the network, where a professor had given her a strong recommendation. She liked the work and she was good at it. Her mind was quick, retentive, imaginative. Within a year they were bucking the special problems to her. Give this one to Borgren. The Mouth wants some retrospective on Murmansk during convoy days. A twenty-second fill, but meaty. Give it to Borgren. And then she was on loan to Jack Mensenkott to help with a speech concerned with government interference with freedom of expression on television news and news specials. She and a writer named Hatch worked on the project. The network brass thought it important.

She knew Mensenkott’s wife had died just three months before she was assigned. She had expected sighs and silences. The man was so full of vitality, energy, anticipations and good cheer that she wondered if he had loved her, even though everybody said they were close.

Because there was a possibility of last-minute changes, she and Hatch flew out to Chicago with Mensenkott in an executive aircraft. Approval of the final draft of the speech came through, so no changes were needed. He spoke to fifteen hundred people. He did beautifully. Applause was thunderous. He had told her to come up to his suite and listen to the eleven o’clock news. She had thought Hatch would be there. And other people. But Mensenkott was alone. He gave her wine. She sat and he paced as they watched the news. He was given good local coverage and fair coverage on the other networks. He kept darting to the set to change stations, hunting for the sound of his name.

Finally he turned the set off and laughed and went to her and plucked her up out of the chair and kissed her for quite a long time, stroking her back and flanks and rear. Then he told her to go on into the other room and go to bed. He had a long-distance call to make. She thought of all the things she should tell him: that she had never been this far away from the place of her birth before, that she had slept with a boy once but it had not been very successful, that her body felt bulky, clumsy and unlovable, that she had never thought of him in that way, that she was frightened.…

But he had seemed so totally confident that she would do just as he asked.… And she had come to the suite on his invitation, and he had not really said anybody else would be there, so he must think that she … She found herself, a-tremble with anxiety, taking off her clothing in the semidarkness and putting it on a chair, neatly folded. She slid nude between cool sheets, and worried about whether being so nervous would make her breath bad, and she tried not to think at all about the hardness that had pressed against her during the long kiss.

He came in humming, undressed swiftly, slipped into bed and gathered her into his arms. She was gasping and shaking, and he
soon realized it was terror. He comforted her. They were married less than a year later. By then she had seen him in the total collapse of grief, had seen him in pain and anger and in need. And she had become so passionately infatuated with him she thought only of him when they were apart. He moved her into the big house in Larchmont. It was alive with all the ghosts of Janice. She wanted to change the decor, but was not sure enough of her own taste in such matters. Two of his married children lived nearby. They threw her into the community. Club events, charity drives, teas, bridge, dinner parties. All in all, Jack Mensenkott found himself in a younger social group than when Janice was alive. It pleased him. He could keep up. Thelma tried to make herself look older, in hair style and clothing. It seemed to average out. There was a certain transient flavor to the community. In a few years she was welcoming newcomers, and they looked on her as a part of the community they had moved into. She tried hard to be the successful wife of a successful man, and she tried to have his children. She became accustomed to the life, and it shocked her when Jack retired at sixty. She was astonished at her reluctance to leave Larchmont. But he had made his plans long ago, had invested wisely, and grew irritated at her hesitations.

So there were a dozen farewell parties and, after the house was sold, an enormous garage sale. When they drove out of town, heading for the Jersey Turnpike and I-95, she felt old insecurities return. She could not express what she felt. She was being yanked away from the place where her protective coloration worked. And Jack always drove much too fast.

She had become interested in the jungle because of what she had learned on the beach. While walking one day she had come upon
two young women taking photographs and making notes, seemingly involved with a scrubby-looking vine crawling across the sand above the high-water line. She asked what they were doing and they said they were taking a census of the grasses which aided beach stabilization along this particular mile of Gulf frontage. They said they were with the University of South Florida. They were pleasant and outgoing and told her the names of many varieties of grass, vines and shrubs in that area. Thelma was astonished at the variety.

A few days later she went to the Athens Public Library and looked into their reference works on the botanical profusion of the southwest Florida coast. Next she purchased appropriate handbooks from Athens’ largest bookstore. Soon she could identify the finger grass, the spurge, the purslane, the salt grass and others, and with the typical determination and tenacity of the intellectual she memorized the scientific names:
Sesuvium, Distichlis, Chloris glauca, Chamaesyce
. She matched the leaves to the careful line drawings in her handbooks. It was satisfying to get back to intricate research and investigation. Yet at the same time she was amused at herself in a sardonic way. Man superimposed his compulsive patterns on nature, forever devising categories and sub-groupings, seeking relationship in shapes and life patterns. It was a dry arrogance to look at the finger grass, moving in the sea wind, making its delicate rounded calligraphy in the soft sand, and say to it, “Ah, you are
Chloris glauca
! Of course!” No living thing on the planet except man knows its own name. It cannot possibly matter to plant, bird, fish or tree what man, fancying himself superior, agrees to call it.