On the Loose (15 page)

"What the fuck are you guys doing out here?"
He went by the name of Pete and had a mustache
and a beard. Then, in the light from the door, he
recognized Dibble and moderated his tone. "Why
didn't you say it was you? Make sure the door's
locked when you come in."

Dibble said, "How can I get in if the door's
locked?"

"Don't be a wise fucker."

They heard the door slam. Bobby smiled, but
the smile faded. "When you leave, Dibs, what will
happen to me?"

"I got a while yet."

"I know, but when you do."

"You're going to be tough," Dibble said. "You
do it right, you're going to be me."

The bulk of Harry Sawhill's estate went to his son
and the token remainder to his widow. Ben
Sawhill set up trust funds for Bobby, a special one
for what he hoped would be Bobby's education,
Harvard if possible. He considered selling Harry's
house but decided it should be there for Bobby if
he wanted it.

"So long as he never lives with us," Belle
Sawhill said.

"He won't," Ben said. "Just don't ask me to turn
my back on him."

Belle crossed her arms tight under her breasts.
"The thought of him coming home petrifies me."

"You come first, you know that. You and the
girls."

"I'll tell you who else is scared. 'Irish."

"She has nothing to worry about."

"Tell her that."

After learning that Harry was dead, the first person Trish Becker had called was Gloria Eisner. Standing rigid with one hand in her hair, she said,
"He's gone, Gloria. He's pushed off."

"I'm sorry, baby. So sorry for you."

"He might be happy where he is. Who's to say?"

"I'll come up."

"Hurry"

Gloria stayed with Trish through the funeral and
two weeks afterward. Then Gloria brought her
back with her to Connecticut, the visit considered
indefinite. Trish phoned Ben, who promised to
look after her house, and she called Belle several
times, the two of them closer now than they had
been before, with Bobby creeping in and out of the
conversations.

"What will you do, Belle?"

"Cross that bridge when I get to it."

Sitting with a wine cooler on the patio, the day
nodding off into twilight, Trish said to Gloria, "He
wasn't someone I loved heart and soul, not like I
did my first husband, but I cared for him. He tried
to be good to me, but he was so vulnerable."

"My husbands were all vulnerable to one thing
or another, usually other women."

"Harry wasn't that way. Poor Harry. I don't think
anyone could have replaced his first wife."

They took more walks through the sanctuary.
The air fluttered with pine needles. Colorful birch,
maple, and oak spilled leaves. They climbed the
hill where they could see the outstretched sky and
birds in flight. Trish felt a sharp breeze through
her shirt.

"Summer's gone," she said. "It was so swift, so
unfair, so much like life."

When the sumac began to lose its blaze and the
weather chilled, she said, "I want to go where it's
eternally warm. Where I can show my ass on a
beach. Where to, Gloria?"

Gloria, sitting sideways on a window seat in the
sunniest room, was clipping her toenails. "Anywhere," she said. "As long as it's not Hell."

In Key West, Gloria judged the sun bigger and
redder than in any other sky. Setting, performing
for a cheering crowd on Mallory Square, it was
luridly awesome, as if practicing to end the world.
Trish aimed her camera, a Pentax that had belonged to Harry, but decided a picture would capture nothing.

"Poetry might," Gloria said, "but we're not poets."

"What are we?"

"Vagabonds with pocketbooks."

Shopping on Duval Street, Trish bought Christmas gifts to mail to her children. Gloria, childless,
bought scenic postcards to write to friends. They
dined on yellowtail on the crowded veranda of a
restaurant, where Gloria reminisced about her
great-grandmother who, according to family legend, had required her personal maid to bathe her
after intimacy with her husband.

"She was still alive when I was a kid. I was allowed to kiss her on the cheek if I wiped my mouth first. My mother thought she might leave us something. She didn't."

"Harry left me practically nothing. I'm glad."

"Never turn your nose up at money. It's what
gives you options."

They returned to the Casa Marina, the fortress
of luxury where they had checked in a month ago,
and slept soundly through the warm night and
well into the morning. They spent the afternoon
on the beach, which was not sand but crushed
coral. The sun was blazing, the sky radiant, and
the ocean a mirror without an image. Gloria allowed a young man who'd been flirting with them
to rub her bare back with suntan oil but then sent
him on his way.

Trish grinned. "Not your type?"

"Darling, he's gay. But he thinks we're rich
bitches."

"Aren't we, sort of?"

"No. Rich is never having to worry."

In the evening they returned to Duval Street,
which swarmed with tourists and exhibitionists. A
man whose clothing consisted of a Panama hat and
a bikini bottom edged by them. A heavy woman in
the clothes of a child fluttered a fan in their faces.
Jostled, Trish said she felt like a tropical fish swimming in the smallest of bowls. They dined again at
the restaurant with the veranda, this time on snapper, the catch of the day. Afterward they went to a
bar, but the music was raucous and much of the
behavior bizarre.

"Not my scene," Trish said. "I feel uncomfortably overage."

"Speak for yourself," Gloria said, but they left.

They returned to the Casa Marina early enough
for Trish to take a call from Ben Sawhill, who was
handling her financial affairs in his usual fastidious
way. "You're spending too much," he said. "You're
dipping into capital."

"I'll slow down when I get back."

"Better slow down now. I mean it, Trish."

She let a couple of seconds pass. "I'm glad
you're looking after me, Ben."

"I'm simply warning you," he said. "It could become serious."

Putting down the phone, she looked at Gloria
and said, "You're right about money."

"Shit," said Gloria. "I'm short too."

Within the week they rented a small house behind Duval Street. A delicate fretwork porch that
looked tentative fronted the house, and overhangs
hooded the windows. Living next door in a nearly
identical house were two middle-aged gay men,
who took, an immediate interest in them and invited them over for drinks. Barry, exceedingly
handsome, was an artist who painted the human
figure in fragments, the limbs adrift. Stirling, quietly distinguished-looking, was a tenured history
professor on sabbatical from a university he did
not mention. Both had gray hair, Barry more of it.

Barry served brandy in snifters. His paintings
were on the walls. Intriguing to Gloria was a ren dition of the Dead End Kids as disjointed cherubs.
More intriguing was one of Mickey Rooney and
Judy Garland as Adam and Eve, Adam's detached
penis turning into the snake, making him the seducer, not Eve.

"Interesting supposition," Gloria said. "I believe
it's true."

"Where did you two meet?" Trish asked.

"Here," Stirling said.

Barry took them into a bedroom to see what he
called his masterpiece. It was an abstract of the
sun imploding, time grinding into pieces, into a
confusion of fiery shards and shivers, the past
scrambled with the present, all of it stunning to
the eye.

"Eerie in a festive way," Gloria said. "I like it."

"Critics aren't so kind," he said. "Shall I tell
them what one said to my face?"

"Up to you," Stirling murmured.

"He said I paint dogshit and pretend it has
thoroughbred meaning. A wonderful line, I must
admit."

"And cruelly unfair," Stirling added.

Gloria liked them both, especially Barry. Trish
preferred Stirling, whose reserve and dignified
manner she found endearing rather than intimidating. Barry frequently invited them over for lunch
prepared by Stirling, who made his own salad
dressing, poppy seeds an ingredient. Desserts were
custards, bits of orange on top.

One afternoon the four of them sailed on a small
cruise boat to one of the islets, where Barry and Gloria snorkled in the reef. Stirling and Trish
stayed on deck and chatted about their childhoods.
His, Stirling said, had been idyllic and more so as
he grew older. Hers, Trish said, had had its ups and
downs, nothing really traumatic, though adolescence, full of female upheaval and change, not to
mention boys hitting on her, had been a bitch.

"Adolescence I could have done without," Stirling said.

Her smile responded to his. "Know something?
I wish you were straight."

"No, you don't," he said softly.

Gloria's head popped out of the ocean, and soon
she was climbing the ladder to the deck. Removing
her mask, she said, "We saw a school of barracudas. Fantastic!"

"I was scared to death," Barry said. "She
wasn't."

On the short ride back to the pier Barry and
Stirling stood alone together in their swim trunks
at the rail. Gloria whispered, "Christ, they've got
better bodies than we do."

A few days later Stirling, who spoke fluent
Spanish, took Trish grocery shopping in Cubantown while Brian sketched Gloria in the nude. She
lay on a draped ottoman as if asleep, a hand behind her head. Brian did several rapid sketches
from different angles and seemed pleased with the
results, which he showed to her when she was
back in her clothes.

"Some women have melons," he said, "you have
pears.-

"I was always jealous of Trish. She has melons."

"You and Trish are beautiful women."

"You and Stirling are beautiful men. You two
seem very happy."

Barry turned away and placed the sketches in a
drawer. "We put on a good front. Stirling is HIV
positive."

Gloria felt a stab, as if it came from the back.
"Oh, shit. I'm sorry, Barry."

"He won't talk about it, so don't you either."

"I promise," she said and stepped close to him.

"Hug me," he said. "I'm the one who's going to
be left."

"I want to get out of here," Trish said when Gloria
told her.

"Soon as we can." Then she began to cry, the
tears angry. She had been putting away groceries.
Peppers spilled from a bag. "I don't want to see
them again. I don't want to look at Stirling. He's
going to die."

"Not yet. Who knows when?"

"Don't you understand? I can't deal with it. I
came here for the sun, not the dark."

"Trish, you're being unreasonable."

"Can't help it."

"We're not supposed to know, so don't say anything."

"Then why did you tell me?"

Two days later Gloria made excuses when Barry
and Stirling invited them out for an evening at
Sloppy Joe's, and another time when Barry sug gested dinner at Fiorini's. The excuses hurt her. In
the week that they were to leave she spoke privately to Barry and blamed the early departure on
money.

"We all have those problems," he said as she
read his face.

"But you're not buying it."

"Yes, I am. It's whatever you say."

"It's not the money," she said starkly, "it's Trish.
I think she's in love with Stirling."

"Women usually are. I suppose you passed on
what I told you."

"Yes, and she can't handle it. No surprise. One
husband left her, and the other died on her."

"Then we won't say anything to Stirling. We'll
let it be the money." He smiled and extended his
arms. "Do I get another hug?"

"Only if I get one back."

When she returned to the house Trish was watching a sitcom, a bombardment of inanities. Her hair
was pulled back and held with a rubber band. She
was in pajamas, her toenails newly painted. "Don't
say anything," she said. "I know. I'm a coward."

At the end of the week a taxi took them to the
little airport. They arrived early and had a bit of a
wait, no coffee available. Trish chewed gum. "I
didn't say good-bye."

"I did," Gloria said.

Finally they boarded the airplane, squeezed into
small seats, and listened to the propellers start to
whirr. When the plane left the ground for the flight
to Miami, Trish said, "Let's never come back."

From Connecticut Trish entered a lengthy telephone
conversation with Ben Sawhill. "I feel I'm going
somewhere," she said, "but it's on the Titanic."

"Financially speaking, you could be absolutely
right," Ben said. He was preparing a budget for
her, guidelines he said she must follow if she
wanted to remain comfortably solvent.

"Why did Harry have to leave everything to the
kid?"

"It was his call."

"I'm not complaining, honest, merely feeling
sorry for myself. At least I came away with something from my first marriage."