Last Resort (8 page)

“Yeah?”

“It’s always that way. It’s the rich guests that lift things. They figure, cute towels, it won’t matter to her, what’s a few dollars?”

“You could send them a bill.”

“Yeah, I might do that. Sometimes people pay up, if they think they might want to come again. Or they could decide to stay somewhere else next time. Maybe I’ll just write it off as a tax loss.” She smiled.

“You’re looking good today, you know,” Jacko said.

“So are you,” Lee replied, though with less emphasis; Jacko always looked good. “Well, the thing is,” she added, trying and failing to suppress a wide, embarrassed smile, “I’ve got some news too. I think I’m in love.”

Jacko raised his eyebrows. “Hey, really? Anyone I know?”

“No.”

“One of your breakfast and bed-me types.” Jacko grinned. It was not unknown for Lee’s guests to propose an erotic fling, often with the same slightly embarrassed sensual hopefulness with which they asked for extra pillows, or an egg with breakfast. Now and then she obliged them.

“No.”

Jacko registered Lee’s expression and the shift in her grip on a bottle of tonic, as if it were about to become a weapon. “Sorry,” he said. “So do you want to tell me about it?”

“Yeah, sure. I—” She sat down at the kitchen table, took a breath, paused.

“Okay; how did you meet, for instance?”

“Well, hell, it was kind of ridiculous. And kind of romantic. Day before yesterday, I rode my bike down to the city beach for a swim, but the jellyfish sign was up, so I just walked out along the pier. Nobody was in the water except this one woman, and then she started to scream. So I went in and helped her out onto the beach, and shook some tenderizer on her leg, where she’d got stung. She’s got beautiful legs, so long and white and smooth, and this goddamn amazing long silky hair, not blonde but the palest pale brown. She was terrified, shivering all over. She didn’t know about jellyfish; she thought she’d been attacked by a shark or something.”

“So you rescued her, and she fell into your arms.”

Lee gave Jacko a fast, furious look. “Of course not. She thanked me, and I rode back home. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again in this world, but yesterday morning she turned up here to thank me, with a beautiful white moth orchid. You can see it right out that window.” She pointed.

“Oh, yeah. Lovely,” Jacko agreed. “It’s a sign, don’t you think, the flowers people give you? This car dealer I once dated, he sent me one of those orchids that look like a bunch of big brown spiders, very rare and expensive, according to him. I should have figured out then I was the fly, but—”

“You know, it kind of reminds me of her, that long spray of creamy white flowers,” Lee interrupted, gazing out the window.

“So then what happened?” Jacko sighed.

“Nothing. Well, everything, maybe. I don’t know. She’s coming to lunch today. We haven’t even kissed yet, but there’s time. She’s down here for two months, renting a house near Higgs Beach. I don’t know if she’s ever had a serious relationship with a woman, but I’m hoping she’s open to it.” Lee, still contemplating the spray of orchids, fell into a daze.

“Mm,” Jacko prompted.

“She’s a lot like me in some ways; she admires the same films and books, she knits and weaves—she got really excited when she saw my loom. I think Key West is going to be great for her; she’s spent every winter freezing up in New England somewhere. The only problem is, she’s married. But it sounds like that relationship is more or less dead. He’s much older than she is, a retired professor.”

“Ah?”

“Another thing that’s kind of romantic, I don’t even know her last name yet. Just Jenny.”

For the first time, Jacko did not smile sympathetically; instead he frowned. “You said her husband’s a retired professor, a lot older?”

“Oh yeah. Like twenty or thirty years, maybe. She can’t be much over forty.”

“And they’re down here for the first time, in a house on Hibiscus Street?”

“Yes—How do you know that? Have you met them somewhere?”

Jacko looked at the floor, out the window, toward the front hall, and finally at Lee. “I guess I better tell you,” he said.

“Tell me what?”

“I know your girlfriend’s last name.” Jacko looked away again, cleared his throat. “It’s Walker. Jenny Walker.”

“Walker?” Lee frowned.

“They’re living in Alvin’s house.”

“How do you mean? You mean, she’s—Oh, shit.”

“You said you always wanted to know bad news,” Jacko bleated, moving back as if anticipating violence.

“That’s okay.” Lee set her jaw. “Hell, I should thank you. You’ve probably saved me a lot of grief.”

“I hope so. Hey, I’m really sorry.”

“No sweat,” Lee said as casually as she could manage. “There’s other fish in the sea.”

“That’s right,” said Jacko, for whom the oceans had always teemed. He smiled, relieved.

With some difficulty, Lee suppressed her true reaction to Jacko’s news for the remainder of his visit. But once she was alone, her face darkened. Jenny Walker, she said to herself. The first woman I’ve seen in four years that I could really love. So beautiful, so gentle, and she’s read all of Willa Cather. Except she’s married to Wilkie Walker, so probably she thinks like him about everything. Probably she votes Republican and thinks all homosexuals are sick.

I might as well phone now and tell her not to come to lunch, Lee told herself. A whole pound of jumbo shrimp that I went all the way to Stock Island for, wasted. Goddamn it to bloody hell. She turned to the cupboard, took a chipped breakfast plate out of the stack, and flung it at the cellar door, where it smashed with an explosive crunch.

It’s like some awful kind of retribution, Lee thought. I said that if I met Wilkie Walker’s wife I was going to spit on her. And by God, I did spit on her too, when we were at the beach. I was sprinkling the tenderizer on her leg, and I wanted it to work faster, so I spat on my fingers and rubbed it in. A vivid image of Jenny’s upper leg and half-exposed haunch: white, smooth, cold from the sea and flushed with streaks of red, appeared in her mind. Yes, she thought.

No. You can’t, don’t love her, Lee told herself, opening a cupboard door to get the broom and dustpan. It’s just cognitive dissonance. The theory that you naturally overvalue someone you’ve helped, because the more wonderful they are, the more wonderful and important it was to help them. Nobody wants to think they’ve rescued some uptight homophobic Republican from panic and jellyfish.

But hard as she tried, Lee could not superimpose upon Jenny the role of uptight homophobic Republican. Okay, she was that self-satisfied old bastard Wilkie Walker’s wife. She was also beautiful, intelligent, and desirable. That, years ago, she had married Wilkie Walker did not prove the contrary; other intelligent women had made similar mistakes.

As she gathered the fragments of crockery into the dustpan, memories gathered in Lee’s mind. She recalled how under the influence of her freshman English teacher and Wilkie Walker’s stupid book, she herself had married before graduating from college, in order to get over her “neurotic attraction” to women. To make everything worse, she had chosen a conservative Presbyterian from rural Ohio who shared Walker’s view of homosexuality as an unfortunate disease, as if she wanted to reinforce her guilt and her determination to become “normal.”

With a sigh, Lee recalled some of the things her husband had said about what he called “deviants,” even before their marriage, and his discomfort when two obviously gay men were shown to the table next to theirs in a restaurant on their honeymoon. She remembered his political views, and the expression on his face as he politely suggested that her Brooklyn relatives would not enjoy a vacation in the country—assuming, that is, that as urban Jews they would have no appreciation of rural WASP America.

She recalled how awkward his family had made her feel when she visited Ohio: the embarrassed twitch of their features when she did not know the name of some common flower or tree. No doubt if she were to become better acquainted with Jenny she would soon see these expressions again, on Jenny’s face.

But on the other hand, possibly she wouldn’t see them. Possibly Jenny wasn’t in complete agreement with Wilkie Walker. After all, she hadn’t said anything positive about him: only that she couldn’t have supper with Lee because she had to make dinner for her husband, and that she could come to lunch anytime because he worked in his study all day and usually had a sandwich at his desk. Also, that day at the beach, Jenny had said that her husband would think her a “total idiot” for having misread the sign about men-of-war.

Perhaps Jenny wasn’t totally an idiot about her husband, at least. Perhaps, even, she was in the state of growing discomfort and disillusion Lee remembered so well from her own marriage. Maybe what she needed was help in resisting the clinging, stinging jellyfish personality of Wilkie Walker. Maybe Lee could rescue her again, from him.

Opening the fridge, Lee removed the jumbo shrimp and put them in a saucepan with half a glass of white wine and a handful of fresh herbs. She’d have to go very slowly. Jenny might agree with everything Wilkie Walker thought and said. She might be completely happy with him. But if she wasn’t ...

Years ago, broke and battered and bruised by marriage—at the end, literally as well, though she had to admit she’d got in a couple of good licks herself at the time of the final breakup—Lee had despaired of vengeance on the homophobic WASP world. Back then, a twenty-six-year-old lesbian graduate student and single mother from Brooklyn had no power in that world. But now—Well, now we would see.

She turned off the stove and removed the lid from the pan, exposing the shrimp, now no longer gray and hard-shelled and icy-cold, but a delicious pale, steaming pink.

O
N A WARM DAY
in February, in Alvin’s postmodern chrome-yellow and chrome kitchen, Jenny Walker confronted the remains of last night’s dinner party, her first in Key West. Every horizontal surface was covered with the plates and cups and glasses and flatware and cooking pots for eight people, all coated in the dried remains of homemade cheese dip, seafood bisque, lemon chicken, tropical fruit salad, cheesecake, three kinds of wine, and mixed drinks.

It hadn’t been Jenny’s idea and wasn’t her usual practice to leave the dishes. But after their guests had gone Wilkie had insisted on her coming to bed, hardly giving her time to put away the leftovers—something he’d not done for years.

That was wonderful of course; but it was also one more example of the erratic behavior of her husband over the last few months. He was sleeping irregularly again: almost every night, if Jenny woke he would be gone. Once when she mentioned this the next morning, and asked again if there were something on his mind, he had almost exploded. “I really wish you wouldn’t keep asking that,” he’d snapped in a tone that made Jenny recoil and recall the birthday crackers that used to frighten her as a child. “You worry too much, you know,” he had added, less explosively and with an indulgent but impatient smile, as if he were speaking to a fearful child. It was the manner he had toward her often now, as if he knew something she didn’t know, perhaps something awful.

But though Wilkie was so strange with her, so disconnected, he seemed to be getting back in touch with the rest of the world. He had started reading his correspondence and accepting invitations to write articles, to lecture and attend conferences and serve on panels—and now without any of the concern about fees and travel expenses he had irritably voiced last fall. “It doesn’t signify, darling. I can afford it, after all,” he said when Jenny pointed out that the letter about the symposium in Washington didn’t mention airfare.

Wilkie had also agreed to last night’s dinner party; and during most of it he had been affable and animated. He was full of ideas and opinions—some almost extravagantly upbeat, as with his extended praise of Molly’s deceased husband; others sardonically downbeat, as when describing the future of the northeastern woodlands. But soon after ten, when they were sitting over brandy and decaf, he lapsed into a preoccupied silence that caused their guests to rise and say that they must be getting home.

Wilkie continued to spend most of the day in his study, but now Jenny knew he was working, since on Monday morning he’d sent her to the library for books. It was a bizarre selection, however, even a disturbing one. The volumes on the diseases of plants, animals, and humans, and those on death and dying, presumably meant that
The Copper Beech
would be a tragedy, a warning to the world; that its last chapter would expand to mention many other losses and extinctions. But what explained the books on the Gulf Stream and ocean currents, or those on wills and copyright law?

She would find out soon, because yesterday, just before their guests arrived, Wilkie had revealed that
The Copper Beech
was almost finished. There were a couple of changes he still had to make, he said, but in a few days the manuscript should be ready for her. “Oh, that’s wonderful news!” Jenny had cried out, and kissed him impulsively, almost laughing with joy and relief. He had not kissed her back.

It’s not that he’s angry with me, she tried to tell herself as she scraped dried seafood bisque off Alvin’s expensive and hideous green and orange art-deco crockery. It’s just that he’s been working so hard, even harder than usual. After all, he’s been finishing a great book—perhaps his greatest book. Probably that was why he’d been so strange and distant. That was why, for weeks, his silence and absence had weighed on her like stone, and why whenever she moved nearer in bed he had shifted away.

But now, perhaps, all this was over. Last night Wilkie had embraced her eagerly and almost rushed her into the bedroom. Breathing hard with pleasure and anticipation, Jenny had helped him peel off her chiffon party dress printed with pale-brown leaves and ferns; she had tousled his hair as he bent to kiss her breasts, rubbed against him, done all the private, affectionate things she had been longing to do for weeks.

In the end, as had sometimes happened in the last few years, her pleasure had been more complete than his. No doubt the gin and wine and brandy Wilkie had drunk, the lateness of the hour, and the labor of finishing his book were responsible. And this morning, when he’d looked so cross and hardly spoken to her, he was probably just hungover. But none of that was important, Jenny told herself. The important thing was that they had made love again, and that
The Copper Beech
was almost finished.