Condominium (45 page)

“We don’t need one like that over here, Harry.”

“Bet your ass you don’t. Not with all those condos sitting on those sandspits. You are a disaster waiting to happen over there.”

“Everybody says the same thing, but they still issue building permits.”

“Not any more, they don’t.”

“That’s economics, not weather forecasting.”

“It hits, you run for high ground, Mick.”

“Great! Twenty miles inland we got some high ground, I think. Thirty or forty feet above sea level.”

“How are things with you anyway? You getting any?”

“A little here, a little there. How’s Myra?”

“Due to pop.”

“Again?”

“Fourth and last, fella. Fourth and last. We took an oath.”

After he hung up, Mick went across the city room to the big wall map of the Gulf and the Caribbean. Somebody had moved the little hurricane symbol to its most recent position. The little doughnut looked tiny in the vastness of the sea.

WHEN THE BIG DREDGE
had been grinding and grunting away in the bay behind Golden Sands, George and Elda Gobbin had taken to closing the bedroom windows and sleeping in the cool hush of the air conditioning. When the dredge stopped they tried to go back to the previous system, but it seemed too sticky and uncomfortable. They told each other that they did seem to sleep better under a light blanket, with the thermostat set at seventy. She said she hated to have her hair get sweaty.

It was full bright daylight when George awoke on Monday morning, August twelfth. He had slept so soundly, he did not know where he was. His first thought was that he was late, that he had overslept, that he would have to call the office. Next he realized that he was not at home, that he was in a strange hotel somewhere. He looked over at the neighbor bed and saw a strange blond head and a brown shoulder, and he erupted with panic and guilt. Suddenly it all fell back into place.

He was retired and living at Golden Sands and he could get up when he felt like it. Elda had finally found something which enabled her to tan rather than turn dark red. And her hairdresser was doing something to her hair lately.

As his panicked heart slowed, he yawned and wondered why he was feeling so disoriented lately. And why he was having so many horrible dreams. One in the night about Vicky Antonelli had awakened him, all cold and sweaty. He dreamed they were back in that cabin they used to go to, twenty years ago, on the land her father leased, and she was standing and holding her arms out to him and crying silently. Her breasts were shaped like big firm white drops of melting wax, greatly magnified. They ran down her and down the fronts of her thighs and shins and onto the old grass rug, and she would step away from them as others slowly grew and grew, breaking loose when they were the right size. She wanted him to do something to help her. She could not tell him what. She could only cry and hold her arms out. There had been other dreams too, but he could not remember any of them. He had the sense that they were horrible too.

He got up without awakening Elda and went into his bathroom and quietly closed the door before snapping the light on. After he urinated, he leaned on the sink and studied his face in the mirror, and took his brush and adjusted his dark hair to the new way he had discovered. If he brushed it forward and then across, and sprayed it into place, it did make him look younger. Elda agreed that it did, much to his surprise. He thought she would tell him it looked silly.

George got out the tape and measured his belly bulge. Forty-one inches. Down from forty-three already. And it was going to go down a lot farther. It was going to go down to thirty-six, he had decided, even if it did mean taking in a lot of his clothing and giving away a lot more.

Funny how, down here, they had become so much more conscious of appearance. Elda was serious about finding out how much a face lift would cost. With her tan, and her new-found figure, and her always youthful clear green eyes, she could create a magical change by merely putting her thumbs by her temples and pushing the loose skin upward. She had done it several times for him, and it made him feel odd to see an Elda from many years ago. Staring into his mirror, he pushed up on his own face in exactly the same way and saw young George peer out at him, the folds and tucks around the mouth disappearing.

“Maybe,” he whispered. “Maybe we will.”

They would never have thought of this rejuvenation program back in Iowa. Hell, everybody knew them and knew just how old they were, and the kidding would have been without mercy.

Maybe the reason here was because they were living in the middle of a gigantic throng of old old old old people. Once you started noticing, you couldn’t stop. A billion living tons of wrinkles and tremors and totterings. Of gray locks and swollen knuckles and shuffling footsteps. Of broken veins and naked skulls and grave marks. Of dentures and staleness and trifocals.

What it did was make you damned conscious of the same attrition going on in yourself.

But we are nowhere near as old as most of these retired people. I’m seven years away from Social Security, and Elda is nine away. No reason to hurry to catch up. The thing to do is go as far as you can in the opposite direction. Toward youthfulness.

When he came out in his white tennis shorts, his Mexican sandals and his white T-shirt, still puffing slightly from his exertions with that tangle of plastic rope and pulleys which was melting his stomach down, Elda, in her terry robe, was fixing breakfast.

He gave her a good-morning kiss on the temple and a good-morning pat on the rear and said, “Looks like a hot one.”

“Paper says it’ll be ninety again. Who are you playing with?”

“Lynn and me against Stan and Honey.”

“Lynn again?”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“I didn’t say it like anything. I just said, Lynn again?”

“If you would learn to play …”

“I have no intention of chasing a fuzzy ball around in this heat. I’ll be in the pool, thank you. And don’t get too exhausted. The Kelseys are coming here for bridge, remember?”

“How did we get trapped into that?”

“
You
asked them. That’s how.”

“You are really in some great mood today, aren’t you?”

She looked at him in genteel astonishment. “Me? I am in a
perfectly
good mood, in spite of not getting very much sleep.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, nothing in particular.”

“You couldn’t sleep on account of nothing?”

“You were thrashing and muttering and moaning most of the night.”

“I seem to be dreaming a lot lately.”

“Of Lynn Simmins?”

“Jesus Christ!”

“What’s the matter? Too close to the mark?”

“Lynn is the thirty-year-old daughter of two of the reasonably pleasant friends we’ve made down here, Mark and Edie Simmins. Colonel Simmins picked up bursitis in his right shoulder a couple of weeks ago. When he gets over it, he will partner his daughter. Until he gets over it, I will. She is pleasant to play tennis with.”

“Anyone can see that. Anyone can see you really enjoy it.”

“You got any butter for this?”

“It’s off our list. There isn’t a drop of butter in the house.”

“Okay. Well, I better get going.”

“Don’t keep her waiting, for heaven’s sake. It’s okay if I sit here alone and eat. But don’t keep her waiting one single second.”

He turned on the kitchen television. Barbara was asking a bald impatient guest one of her strangely lengthy questions. He fixed the color tones for Elda, got his sunglasses and his tennis hat and went down to claim the court.

Loretta phoned Greg McKay at ten on Monday morning.

“Are you in your office?” he asked. “Okay, let me call back.”

She waited, fidgeting, fixing her mouth, clicking her lighter, chewing an end of her gleaming hair, scratching her thigh. When the phone rang and she was certain it was Greg, she said, “Where are you calling from?”

“The private line in Mo Sinder’s office. He’s in Atlanta.”

“Greg, it has been one hell of a long time.”

“At one o’clock it will be fourteen days.”

“I know.”

“You made it pretty clear, Loretta. You made an ultimatum.”

“I guess I did.”

“I’ve been through hell.”

“I can guess. All is forgiven?”

“No. No way. Never. There was a pretty wild scene. It went on practically without a break for three days and nights. It went on right to the point of total physical and emotional exhaustion. She’s not very strong, you know. She has all kinds of allergies, et cetera. We just fought and fought and fought, until there was no fight left. We came right down to the bitter end of it when she sat in our living room and I sat beside her and she looked fifty years old. She
looked at me and she said she was sorry but there was no way she could ever understand or forget or forgive what she saw. She said she had no love left for me. She said I was a stranger and would always be a stranger, so I better move out, or she would. So I moved out.”

“Where are you living?”

“Where do you think?”

“In our apartment? Hey!”

“I’m not in any mood to be cheery or funny or anything like that. I’m really down, Loretta. I really loved her. And she said that if I didn’t stop trying to put my arms around her, she was going to vomit.”

“She’s a dreary little prude, honey.”

“She’s a lovely sensitive woman.”

The tone of his voice made the little warning sign flash in the back of Loretta’s brain: Mistake—Mistake—Mistake.

“I really didn’t mean what I said, Greg. I … I guess I struck out at her and called her a prude because I feel, you know, kind of self-conscious about what she walked in on. That’s because I guess with us it has always been pretty much my idea, not yours. Any expression of love is totally okay in my book, no matter what it is, as long as it gives pleasure instead of pain, right?”

“Well, I—”

“I
certainly
will accept your analysis of Nancy as being a lovely, sensitive woman. And not at all aggressive. Okay?”

“I guess so.”

“Darling, regardless of how sensitive she is, you just can’t afford to let her hang-ups cheapen our relationship. You can’t start seeing us through her eyes, or she will have spoiled what we have together.”

“What we
have
?”

“I didn’t mean to make it sound like an ultimatum. I was frightened. I was confused. When I get like that, I come on too rough and say things I don’t mean.”

“I parked by your office the other day trying to get up the nerve to come in. Then you came out, laughing away, talking with a couple of people, smiling. You looked pretty happy.”

“That’s my act. I sell things. I’ve been desolate.”

“Me too.”

“I want to see you, Greg, because I need your advice. Two men came to see me about buying out my business. I named a very fat price and they went away and thought it over and came back with some earnest money. They want the name and the goodwill, and they want me to agree not to go into the same line of work anywhere in Palm County. I need your advice, and if we agree I should sell, then I’ll need your help drawing up a contract of sale.”

“I’d be glad to …”

“Where can I bring the papers and things?”

He said ruefully, “It’s pretty easy nowadays, with me living at Golden Sands, Two-F. F for frolic, as you always say. It’s been pretty grim. I’ve been there … ten days. Don’t come by until maybe eight o’clock, Loretta. The place is a mess.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m so happy, darling.”

“That’s nice.”

“See you,” she said and hung up and leaned back and smiled up at her office ceiling. She looked at her watch. If she could get to the apartment by four o’clock, she should have it very very tidy by the time he came home from the office. Drinks all made, dinner ready for the oven, wine on ice. She had a mental image of herself bounding on all fours into the living room, carpet slippers in her teeth, and she laughed aloud.

•  •  •

Carlotta Churchbridge was in the pool by eleven in the morning, and when Henry went down to see how she was coming along, she was still churning slowly from end to end, doing what she had called in the early days of her English lessons, “the dog puddle.”

When she saw him she came over to the ladder. She took his hand and he helped her out. She came out nimbly, and he was pleased with her small tidy brown body, her mid-sixties agilities.

“They are too damn bloody far away!” she said, toweling herself.

“What? Oh. Sure. Anchorage and Melbourne and Guadalajara. A scattering of grandbabies.”

“I want to be hugging them. Ready to walk now?”

“Okay,” he said. It seemed pleasant to be able to cross Beach Drive without that long delay for season traffic. There was not as much glare as usual. There were very high clouds hazing the sunlight. He tied the laces of his sneakers together and hung them over his shoulder so he could walk with her in the wash of the small waves.

“Strange day,” she said. “The weather smells funny.”

“Hurricane Ella.”

“Now it’s a hurricane?”

“According to the radio news at eleven. Sustained winds of eighty miles an hour, gusts to a hundred and ten.”

She looked up at her tall husband sidelong, mockery in her dark eyes and in the expression on her weathered brown face. “Something worth being afraid of, eh?”

“The real menace versus the imaginary menace.”

“Where on earth does the man get those trousers?”

“Eh? Oh, you mean C. Noble Winney. They are the trousers that go with his suit, of course.”

He knew what she meant. Though broad and vast and flabby, Winney had gray trousers with a slight overall sheen which fit him so abundantly he wore the belt taut above the most prominent bulge of the belly, so that the belly made a rounded convexity of the fly area. They sagged in folds in the rear, and flapped about his legs as he walked. With the trousers went white shirts, dark ties, and suit coats always a little too small across the chest, but of the same silvery gray fabric.

“I was too sleepy to listen last night,” she said. “Your friendship has ended?”