The Man Who Ivented Florida (31 page)

Yesterday, though, Tuesday, she had made a comment that, Ford suspected, foreshadowed an inevitable conflict. He had entered his lab to find her photography equipment, cameras and lenses and filters, spread out on all the tables while she cleaned them. It wasn't unexpected. He had offered her the use of the room, any time. But looking up at him, she had smiled softly and said, "I'm in your way."

"Nope. There're other things I can do."

"We don't have a lot of room here, do we?"

"It's like living on a boat." He had almost added, "That's why I like it," but he didn't.

Last night she had disappeared, and he had walked out to find her sitting on the deck, looking at the water. He had touched his

hand to her shoulder, and she had taken it, without looking at him, and held it to her lips. "A lot has happened very fast, huh?"

"Yeah, it has. Are you getting homesick?" Ford hoped he hadn't sounded as wistful as he felt.

"No. Well, I miss my cat. But being with you, that's what I want now."

"It's . . . been fun."

"But you know. I was sitting here thinking"—she had turned to him, still holding his hand—"I was wondering. Those things you read . . . about the way people act after a divorce?"

"I've never read them."

"Oh."

"You think we're going too fast?"

"Maybe. I don't know." She had made a fluttering sound with her lips. Frustration. "I don't know what to think. I know I've felt good, being here."

On the rebound? That's what she was thinking about—Ford could almost feel her cerebral electrodes zapping the possibility back and forth. She had loved her husband. She had already told him that. So the conflict was understandable, though Ford could have never brought himself to push the subject. That was Sally's life, her private realm, and small caches of private experience were becoming rare these days.

But there was something he could talk about, something else, he suspected, that had motivated her brief withdrawal.

"Staying here, having to use a rainwater shower and an outhouse. I've been thinking that that must be hard on you. You probably got enough of this when you were a girl?"

Ford had been surprised at her surprise, at the wide-eyed look she'd given him. "How do you do that?"

"What?"

"Break in on my thoughts like that? That is exactly what I was thinking, the instant you said it. And you did it yesterday, too. About the camera mount. How? How do you do that?"

Yesterday, he had seen her looking at his telescope. Then she'd gone over to check the calendar, and he had said, "If you need a camera adapter to get shots of the full moon, there's a photo supply on the island."

But standing alone with her on the deck, Ford had said, "Just a guess."

"I was hoping it was something more. The Spanish have a word for it.
Simpatico."

Ford had said, "I'm familiar with the word," but offered nothing more.

A while later, breaking the silence, Sally said, "You love this house, don't you?"

"It's a good place to work."

She had stood then and kissed him. "Then it's where you should be."

That
brief uneasiness was gone Wednesday morning, and Sally had dressed to go grocery shopping while Ford worked on the two big glass tanks he was building to do the procedure with his filtering sea mobiles.

Then she had returned with the new issue of the
National Enquirer,
still reading it now as Ford moved around putting groceries away. He heard her say, "Uh-oh, you're not going to like this."

He stopped. Now what? He leaned against her to read over her shoulder. She was pointing to a bottom section of paragraphs, which Ford skimmed. The state was trying to take Tucker Ga-trell's property to make a park. But how could the state set a price on something as valuable as the artesian well Gatrell had found? Were they willing to pay him what it was worth? Not that he wanted to get rich off it, no; Mr. Gatrell was a simple man. Just a regular working guy. He wanted to share the water with anyone willing to come to Mango to get it. Naturally, he would have to charge a small price—bottles, handling, that sort of thing. He had to make a living, after all. But he was going to sell the water cheap. Help people, that's what Mr. Gatrell wanted to do, the story said. Help people feel young again.

Then the story quoted Tuck: "A number of scientists are already studying the composition of the water. A Florida biologist, Dr. Marion Ford, has already assured me that the water contains unusual properties."

That wasn't Tuck talking; it was the reporter. But Tuck had used Ford's name. How else would the reporter have gotten it?

Ford said, "Damn him. He's gone too far."

"He's trying to get you involved, Doc."

"Of course. But to have my name associated with something like this!"

"I know. He's wrong, he is. But I think he's desperate."

"All the years he's owned that land and done nothing but make a junk heap out of it. Suddenly he's desperate to keep it?"

"I don't think that's the reason he's desperate. I think it has something to do with you." Sally leaned back so that her head pressed against Ford's stomach, a warm physical prompt, asking whether he wanted to talk about it.

Ford kissed her on top of the head. "I'll put the last of these groceries away."

"He's not a bad man. And you certainly aren't."

"Yes, but only one of us is crazy. No, make that two. It must be catching, because now Tomlinson's got it. I have to hunt through some more papers on his sailboat and Federal Express them this afternoon."

Tomlinson had been in Boston since Friday. "Might as well, man," he had told Ford privately. "I can't even stop over at your place for a beer anymore, the musk is so thick. I'm afraid it'll peel my tan off."

Right. What he really wanted was an excuse to go and see his daughter, Nichola, and use a research facility he knew about near Cambridge. "They've got the new Genesis machine for DNA testing, and the head honcho owes me a favor. An automated sequencer that pops everything up on the computer screen, no fuss, no muss. Du Pont makes it. Same folks who gave us napalm. This world, it just keeps getting wackier and wackier."

Even so, Tomlinson had called Ford nearly every day he had been gone. Sounded oddly troubled, too. Sort of deflated, as if running on low batteries. Not at all like Tomlinson, but Ford wasn't the type to press for explanations. Tomlinson told him what books and papers he wanted, and Ford said okay. He was getting to be pretty good friends with the Fedex lady.

Now Ford folded the last of the grocery bags, saying, "I have to find the papers and get them off by three, or they won't make Boston's morning delivery. The way Tomlinson keeps his boat, they could be anywhere."

"Hey . . . hey." Sally had him by the hand, turning him toward her. "You're upset."

"Nope. I'm not."

"You're tense. I can feel it in your shoulders." She was kneading his neck with her strong fingers, looking up at him, the two of them standing so close, and Ford recognized the gradual transformation of her mood, her body: knees bent, breathing more shal-lowly, the sleepy sag of her eyelids.

"Seriously. I told Tomlinson I'd do it. I don't know why, but I told him, so—"

She pressed her lips to his, sliding them back and forth, back and forth, her tongue moving to lubricate his lips as her right hand slowly moved to her own chest for a time before she began to unbutton the jade blouse, pulling it open to show him the translucent cotton bra full to bursting, stretched taut, holding her. "I can't let you go off like this," she said.

Ford hesitated—he really had promised Tomlinson—but then his hand found the little coupling at the front of the bra. It was automatic now; didn't even have to stop to think about how the tricky thing worked. Then, as he stooped to kiss her, he felt her hands on his belt, sliding down to grip him, and he didn't think about Tomlinson or Tuck or anything else for quite a while.

TWELVE

The
reason the package didn't make the Thursday Fedex delivery, Tomlinson decided, was because Doc had probably gotten caught up in his work, forgot all about the time. Tomlinson could picture the man hunched over his microscope or peering through his thick glasses at some vial, doing—what was it now?—yeah, research on nutrient pollution in water. The projects changed, but Doc's intensity didn't. Ford was compulsive about work. Probably sat there in his lab and forgot all about the clock. Tomlinson could just see him, down there on Florida's Gulf Coast in the autumn heat and tropical squalls, oblivious to the world. All the man's sentient energies being poured into linear problem solving, which wasn't healthy. Really murked up the aura. Made it opaque as used dishwater, like this Boston weather. . . .

Now it was Friday, and Tomlinson was walking along the north bank of the Charles River on the bike path from Watertown to west Cambridge, and he glanced up at the sky. There was no sun, just a pale smear without borders—a cold pale light in a gray meld of smog and haze. Simon and Garfunkel kind of day, that's the way he had once thought of it. Everything gray and black: oaks and maples, mossy wet, twisting in a November wind that swirled down the Charles. In the high trees, a few remaining leaves fluttered, their glow of first frost weeks gone, solitary as brown flags.

Cold, man. Should have stopped in at Musashi's to give Nichola a quick kiss and borrow a coat. Can't be more than thirty-five, forty degrees. Should have just walked right up and pressed the doorbell, let Musashi know I can be assertive, too. Musashi may be the girl's mother, but I'm the father, and fathers have rights, too.

Tomlinson walked along, thinking about what he should have done, carrying the Federal Express envelope under his arm. His hair was pulled back into a pony tail and he wore old frayed jeans and a black oiled wool sweater a friend had brought him long ago from Northern Ireland. Made a present of the sweater to him back in the days when there was so much energy in this town that an outsider could touch the grass on Harvard Commons or stick a toe into the Charles and he would feel a sort of electrical shock. Nothing negative, just a wild kenetic energy that flowed through the whole scene, Cambridge and Boston, even the MIT campus—a kind of kick-butt tribal power created by the coming together of thousands of young souls fired by Beatles music, first-rate intellects, social consciousness, the outrage of Vietnam, and some damn fine drugs. A truly inspiring venue for experimentation and social revolution that grew and fermented, getting stranger and more wonderful until about . . . what, 1970 or '71? . . . until the killings at Kent State seemed to stick a pin in their beautiful balloon and reversed the momentum. That was peak tide, and the ebb had been running ever since.

A few nights before, roaming the old section of Harvard's campus, distraught, depressed, nearly loony with Musashi's combative behavior, Tomlinson had fallen into the grips of nostalgic despair, and it seemed he could see the high-water mark of his generation's youth: a faded paisley stain at limb level on trees beneath which he had once made speeches and made love.

I'm the outsider now. Students, they seem all of a type. Snobby and full of themselves, but without grace or tolerance. All they care about is What Bo Knows. Pricey cross-training shoes, MTV, Walkmans, and paying lip service to causes—usually the Environment, capital E—to which they bring anger without understanding. They're all style, man. Style without substance.

He had said essentially the same thing to Musashi, and her cutting reply had hurt and confused him: "Were we any different, Tomlinson? Do you really believe that we were? That we had understanding without anger? That we were substantive and graceful and tolerant? Think back and tell me then if you really believe that."

He had said to her, "But at least we had an honest cause. Vietnam. Vietnam as an issue wasn't substantive?"

And her reply to that had been shocking. "I remember anger. That's what I remember. I remember being angry as hell, absolutely sure that we were right. But now, when I think about it— and I try not to think about it—but, when I do, I have a very difficult time reconciling our self-righteousness with the fact that four or five million Vietnamese and Cambodians were slaughtered when we finally got our way. When we finally made them bring the troops home. It's hard for me to feel righteous about that."

"My God, you're not saying we were wrong to protest—"

"No, of course not! I'm saying that now I see clearly enough to know that the world does not tolerate clarity. That, in those days, maybe we had a lot more anger in us than understanding. Simple answers require the simplicity of youth. We despised complexities—don't you remember? So we took all the hated unknowns and cloaked them with our certainty. We were children, Tomlinson. We were no different."

Replaying the conversation over and over in his head as he walked, Tomlinson caught himself. He was getting hung up in a flow of negative vibes. A whole negative, destructive trip that seemed to be sweeping him along, and Musashi was right at the heart of it. The woman who had asked him to father her child but who now seemed intent on squeezing him out of her life and, worse, their child's life. How could motherhood have changed her so much? Or perhaps she had changed gradually in the years prior to their joining to make the child, but he had been too enamored of their past to recognize her new reality. But one thing was certain: Each trip he made to Boston, Musashi seemed to get a little colder. A little more abrupt. And more obvious that he was not welcome.