Condominium (8 page)

But the little anger he had drummed up had dwindled. He felt tired and misplaced. Quarreling was an evening affair, or a weekend
affair. Not here in the sunlight, like this. He couldn’t storm out saying he was going to the office, or to the club. What he wanted to do, actually, was try the new reel.

The pain and drama ebbed from her small face and she looked at him with growing concern when he did not respond.

“What’s the matter, dear?” she asked earnestly.

“I don’t know. I feel confused, sort of.”

“What about?”

“I stopped being angry. I don’t think I could get sore no matter what you say.”

“Is that some new kind of way of saying you don’t …”

“No. No, Elda. We’re here. How we got here is past history. You do what you do, and I do what I do. Maybe we’ll live longer. Maybe, hell, it will seem longer.”

“Why do you say a thing like that?”

“You’re still wanting to fight. I’m trying to say I’d
like
to fight. Okay? It’s something I’m used to. But I got to be angry or it’s just saying lines I know by heart.”

“George!”

“Look, I want to try out casting with the new reel, okay? I’m going down to the bay side. Want to come along?”

“The bugs are fierce. Well … sure. Give me five minutes.”

As she changed she kept worrying about George, and she kept telling herself it was probably a good thing if they could stop having these nasty fights every so often, saying terrible things. She told herself she had always wished they could stop fighting. Maybe they had, now. She wondered why she should feel frightened. No, not frightened. Threatened.

WHEN HIS SECRETARY
told him Loretta Rosen was on the line, Greg McKay’s heart gave a happy bound. Maybe, at long last, she had managed to rent one of those goddam apartments at Golden Sands to some off-season pigeon. To have at least one of the three rented would partially staunch a flowing wound.

“Hey, Loretta. What’s the good word?”

“The good word, darling, is one you won’t hear me saying over the phone. In fact, I don’t want to say any of this over the phone.”

“What’s the matter? Didn’t they like it?”

“They both thought the apartment was absolutely darling. They are a nice quiet couple, thinking in terms of a lease for one year before deciding whether or not to buy on the beach. I should have closed it right then and there, six hundred a month. But I always close in the office. How could I know? How could I guess?”

“Know what? Guess what?”

“A veritable plague of urchins, dearie. Little brown foulmouthed
ones. They came charging around a corner by the elevators and knocked Mrs. Granlund right onto her patrician ass.”

“But … the rules say no children!”

“I know. I know. That’s what I’d already told the Granlunds. The kids didn’t even stop to find out if they’d killed her. She claimed she wasn’t hurt at all. But it gave her a nasty little limp. And it turned them both off Golden Sands but good. I tried to retrieve the situation by marching them down to the manager’s office. Lorrie Higbee was very evasive at first. Finally she confessed that Julian rented an apartment on the sixth to two couples on vacation with small children, apparently for a nice fat figure.”

“It’s illegal!”

“Not really. The Declaration says no children under sixteen. But that’s for the owners who live in their apartments. Not renting to anybody with little kids is more like an unwritten rule, you know? Greg, dear, I tried. I really tried, but it was no way.”

“Did you rent them anything?”

“Elsewhere? As a matter of fact, I did. But, believe me, I am trying to fill yours first, God only knows why. You didn’t buy them through me, darling.”

“I bought them predevelopment, from Marty Liss.”

“I know. I know. Two years ago. But if you’d had your wits about you, you would have come to Loretta first and said, Loretta dearest darling, if I buy those three, will you keep them full or sell them at a profit, and I would have said, Greg, honey, my crystal ball says that the days of investing in condominium apartments have just about ended, and it will be a good way to get bruised.”

“Bruised? I’m getting lacerations you wouldn’t believe.”

“I can believe. There’s something else I want to tell you. When can you get away from those torts and writs and things? It’s important to you.”

“You’ve had lunch? So’ve I. What say I stop by your office in … oh … forty minutes?”

McKay’s secretary was watching her automatic typewriter clatter through line after line of boilerplate in a trust agreement, waiting for it to stop so that she could type in the specifics McKay had dictated.

“I’ve got two stops to make,” he said. “I’ll be back by three or a little after. Okay?”

“What about the admiral?”

“When is he set for?”

“Quarter of.”

“Well, I’ll try to hurry and you try to keep him from having a heart attack.”

Ten minutes later, as he turned onto Fiddler Key and drove south toward Beach Village, he was wondering if he should have tried to get some other realtor to handle the renting of apartments 2-D, 2-E and 2-F. Having a realtor at all was an additional expense. According to the management contract, ten percent had to go to the manager no matter what. And another ten to Loretta took a good bite out of any rental. On the other hand, she had found that January through March rental for 2-F, three thousand gross, twenty-four hundred by the time they finished cutting it up.

He had been involved in several closings for clients where Loretta Rosen had been involved as a realtor. He had found her to be energetic, shrewd, handsome and funny. He guessed she might be even as much as ten years older than his thirty-four, but his guess was based on conversation clues, not on her looks. If she was that age, she worked very successfully to conceal it. She was a medium-tall slender lady with a long gleaming weight of dark blond hair. Her tanned face was very mobile and expressive, her pale gray eyes striking. She had a gravelly voice and salty turn of
phrase, and a hundred small nervous mannerisms, forever folding and unfolding her sunglasses, lighting one cigarette from another, fingering her hair back, tapping her teeth with a pencil eraser. She knew everybody. Her advertising logo said, S
EE
L
ORETTA!
She seemed to work twenty-six hours a day.

He parked beside her little building on the outskirts of the Village. The front-office girls knew him. Loretta was waiting in her small office in the back. She sprang up from behind her desk and shook his hand, and waved him into the big comfortable armchair across from her. She went to the door and said, “Hey, Bonny, no calls, okay?” She closed the door and went behind her desk, leaned back in her chair, shook a match out and grinned at him. “Big mystery, huh?”

“So far.”

“Hmmm. The guard is up. Sweetie, relax. I’m going to try to do you some good, even though I shouldn’t, I guess. It could be a question of ethics. But it is also a question of friendship. We’re friends?”

He smiled. “So far.”

“The thing is, maybe I’d be doing you too small a favor for it to matter too much to you. I mean you talked about being lacerated, but you could have been sort of kidding. You
are
a partner. Are you really hurting, or were you kidding?”

He asked for scratch paper. She slid a yellow pad over to him. “These are guesstimates, but close,” he said. He worked it out. “Cash down on the three, eighteen thousand. Cash for furnishing the three apartments, about twenty-two thousand. Call it forty invested. Total outstanding mortgages at this time, about a hundred and twenty thousand. Annual interest charges, about ten thousand five hundred. Annual assessment about three thousand. Repairs and maintenance, call it fifteen hundred. So that means
total carrying costs of about fifteen thousand, plus reduction of the principal amount of the mortgages.”

He showed her the figures and said, “The legal fees I earn go into the kitty, and the partners split it all up each year according to a formula which favors the guys who’ve been aboard the longest. So it isn’t exactly all that great. I’ll admit it. The apartments are a real drain. I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why I got into such a thing. It’s going to make me old before my time. And some of the money was my wife’s: ten thousand of the twenty-two we put into decorating. Nancy had fun doing the decorating and buying the furniture. But with no rentals, it isn’t fun anymore. We’ve been jabbing at each other about it. Tales out of school. Sorry.”

“You’ve told me just what I have to know. Really. All kidding aside, it wasn’t a good investment, Greg.”

“I bought one at Shoreline four years ago, paid forty and sold it for fifty-eight. I guess it made me overconfident or something.”

“Look, I was never very high on Golden Sands. It seemed to me there aren’t enough apartments to support the facilities. I had a client seven months ago. Stan Wasniak. I tried to find the right place for him and his wife. He knew I was a little bit dubious about Golden Sands, but his wife flipped so badly over it, I had to close or lose it. Wasniak read me pretty good. I ran into him yesterday. He says that as of the first of June, it is
really
going to hit the fan. He’s an officer of the Association. He told me they’ve been over all the financial records and there is just no way they can operate that thing without more than doubling the monthly assessment,
plus
a double assessment in June to take up the slack.”

His mouth sagged. “Double? From three thousand to six thousand a year for those three of mine? God, that really kicks it in the head. I can’t make out at all.”

“The way rentals are going, no. You can’t. Even without that extra, I don’t think you can make out.”

“Have you got some kind of answer?”

“Yes, but you aren’t going to like it. It could be called biting the bullet. You are a young man with a good profession. I’ve been around a long time. I was divorced when I was twenty-two, and I’ve made out because I’ve got money sense. I manage a lot of property for a lot of people. I have seen too many guys go through too much agony trying to save things, only to lose them in the end. Sweetie, my old battle wounds tell me that Golden Sands is going sour. I’ve seen some of them go that way, and it isn’t pretty. As your friend, and your volunteer financial manager, I think you ought to dump those three just as fast as you can. I think you ought to cut the price down to where I can take you out of them fast.”

“How far down is that?”

“The present state of the market, I’d say that in order to get people to stand still for a hundred and sixty something a month assessment, you’ve got to get down under thirty-five thousand. Furnished.”

He swallowed hard and fingered his throat. “God; Loretta. It will add up to better than a sixty-thousand-dollar bath, counting everything in.”

“You made a sixty-thousand-dollar mistake. You are entitled to one of those at your age. If you’d bought only one, you’d have made a twenty-thousand-dollar mistake. If you’d bought six, you’d have—”

“Please. I thought of buying six. And didn’t.”

“Praise the Lord for small blessings. Do you want me to go ahead and try to move them?”

“Probably yes. You are probably right. It would be such a wonderful sense of relief. But I’ve got to talk it over with Nancy first.”

“Of course. But I think you should move pretty fast. I’ve got some pigeons I can work. Usually I let people … find their way out of their own swamps. But … I don’t know. We’ve worked together and I like you, I guess.”

“I really value your advice. It’s hard to take, but it’s good, I know.”

They both got up and moved toward the door, smiling. He shook his head. “It’s going to give Nance a migraine.”

They both reached at the same instant for the doorknob. Their hands touched, and he took hold of her thin wrist, and then reached and captured the other wrist. Her pale gray glance was apprehensive, swift-moving, somehow ironic. With a quick lift of her head she threw her heavy hair back.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not much for this kind of thing.”

“Or me.”

“I didn’t think so. Greg, honey, it really isn’t an area where I have any confidence at all. Okay? Unhand me, sir?”

He let go of her. They gave each other clumsy smiles. He said, “I don’t know what the hell I had in mind. That was dumb. I’m not … one of those.”

“I know. I know. It happens. I give a lot of people the wrong impression. I’m kind of a fake.”

Their eyes met again. She looked away, uneasily, and then met his direct gaze again. He looked into pale gray, into the shiny black pupils. It was a specific physical impact, an electrical tingle of awareness. She said, hardly moving her lips, “I’m … really not any good at anything like this.”

“I think because of the way you said you like me …”

“You are so damned unbelievably young, Greg. You were born way too late for me. I mean even if I wasn’t so jumpy about … getting involved.”

“I wasn’t asking for anything to happen. I don’t
really
want …”

“I know. Look. Turn around and go out the door. Okay, dear Greg? Just do that.”

He took a deep breath and let it out, and turned and went. As he went blindly through her office and out to his car, he could not remember what she looked like. He could not remember what Loretta Rosen, Realtor, looked like though he had known her for several years. He could remember only what the new Loretta looked like. Before his eyes, she had changed into loveliness. Defects had now become the hallmarks of her authenticity.

He sat in his car and tried to yank his mind back out of fantasy, back to the realities of the waiting admiral, and the reality of taking a frightful bath on the three apartments. But nothing seemed as real or as important as her gray uneasy eyes.

On the way back to the office he had to drive past Golden Sands again. It looked, from Beach Drive, bigger than it was. It glowed orange and gold in the hot afternoon sunlight. In the occupied apartments the draperies were pulled across the tinted glass doors and tinted picture windows. From desperate habit he picked out the windows and balconies of apartments 2-D, 2-E and 2-F. Once again he heard himself telling Nancy what a great deal it would be. He slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel and groaned. Nancy would have to be told. He began to rehearse how best to tell her. But Loretta Rosen sat in the back of his mind, listening to the rehearsal, smiling and nodding when he devised a particularly apt phrase.