A Certain Age (6 page)

The man pointed beyond the breaking waves. "What's that?" he said. Florence saw Claudia's pink-spotted hat.

"Oh no!" Florence said. "That's her! She must have gotten washed out!"

"I was wondering what that was," the man said. As they watched, the pink spots went under and did not emerge. The man handed her the dog's leash and ran into the water. The dalmatian jumped up and down, barking excitedly. After a few minutes he swam back, pulling Claudia under one arm. Her hat was plastered to her head but still tied under her chin. Her eyes were closed. He put her on the sand, and she threw up all over herself just as a

wave crested around her knees and slithered back out in a gurgle of white sudsy foam.

"Are you all right?" Florence bent over her. More vomit, ruby-colored, trickled down the corner of her mouth.

"She's throwing up blood!" the man said.

"No, no, she just ate a lot of cherry jam," Florence said. "How long was she under? Was she under long? How did you find her underwater?"

"She was sinking—but in the same place," the man said. He looked up and down the beach. "I think you better get her to a doctor."

"Oh, God," Florence said. "I can't believe this is happening. Are you all right, Claudia?" Claudia lay on the sand, her puffy face chalky, the wet hat a limp petal. She seemed so little, and her bumble-bee-striped swimming suit made her look like a pathetic, drowned insect. She didn't respond. "What am I going to do?"

"Do you have a car?" She shook her head. "You hang on to the dog. I'll carry her."

The man slung Claudia over his shoulder and they set off to the parking area a half mile down the beach. There were six or seven cars in the lot, and two bicycles, but the only people were sitting some distance farther away. He placed Claudia near the railroad tie that stopped cars from driving onto the beach. "Are you all right?" He shook Claudia gently by the shoulders, but her eyes stayed closed, as if covered with wax. Two men in their twenties, gleaming and expensive behind glittering sunglasses, pulled up in an open-topped Range Rover. Florence ran over to the driver as he was getting out. "Excuse me—what's your name?"

"Eric."

"Eric, this little girl—she almost just drowned—I don't have a car—could you please take us to the hospital?"

The man who had rescued Claudia began to carry her toward the car. The two men in the Range Rover looked at each other. "Oh, Christ," the driver said. "Look, Mark, you might as well grab

our stuff and set up, and I'll take them to the hospital and come back afterward."

The one called Mark grabbed a couple of leather shopping bags from the back and headed onto the beach. Florence jumped into his seat and the man put Claudia on her lap.

The traffic was unbelievable. Bumper-to-bumper in both directions along the two-lane road. The cars, all luxury models— Mercedes, Jaguars, Corvettes, Cadillacs, Ferraris—were as nervous and restless as race horses at the starting gate. But snout-to-tail, snorting, glossy, primed with high octane, they could only creep along at twenty miles an hour. She thought she was going to scream with rage and fear. Surely there were some rules for what she could do in this situation, but her mind was blank. When she pulled up Claudia's eyelids, only the whites were visible. All she could do was repeat, over and over to Eric, what had occurred, as if by reciting it the episode would move into the past. But it was apparent that Eric—having heard the story once—was no longer listening, only shaping it in his own head for dinner-party conversation later on.

At last they reached the entrance to Southfork Hospital's emergency room. Before the vehicle had stopped she had opened the door and—barefooted—was hopping out, with Claudia half-dragging in her arms. "Hey! Hey!" she began to call. "I need help!"

The doors were shut. An ominous yellow band of fluorescent tape sealed the emergency room, and when she began to try to get into the hospital from the main entrance, Eric appeared and grabbed her arm. "I just remembered, they closed the hospital last week to do some kind of major cleaning or something," he said. "Come on, we'll just have to go to River Beach—there's a hospital there."

A sharp rock gouged into her foot, right in the spot where she had already gotten the puncture wound. "Ow, ow, ow. Eric, can you grab her legs, I think I'm dragging her feet on the ground. I don't know what to do. Do you have a car phone? We can call the

police for an escort." They were almost back at the Range Rover. She supposed she should be grateful that Eric hadn't just driven away after dropping her off; then she'd really be stuck.

"Mark's got the phone. Why don't we put her in the backseat? At least she'll be lying down."

With Claudia in the backseat, Florence had a chance to look at her feet. They were absolutely sliced open and filthy, as if she had been dancing on broken plates and knives. Gingerly she tried to brush off the dirt until she realized Eric was looking at her with disgust out of the corner of his eye. Just then Claudia began to wake up. She made a strange, almost inhuman gargle.

"Oh, Claudia!" Florence leaned over the backseat and stroked Claudia's face. "Are you all right? Can you hear me? Just hang on and we'll be at the doctor's in a minute." Claudia's nose was bubbling. It was repellent, such thick, gooey stuff. Florence didn't have a tissue. It took all her strength to wipe Claudia's nose with her fingers.

Claudia moaned again and was sick on herself and the backseat. Eric was shaking his head. "There should be a towel, someplace."

She was about to lean back to try to find one, but they had pulled up at the River Beach Hospital's emergency room. She raced in, shouting for assistance. Two men appeared and took Claudia from the vehicle.

"I've got to run, Eric!" she said. "Thanks for all your help!"

He had opened up the back of the car and was searching for a towel. "Good luck! Hope everything works out."

"She seems okay, but I think we'll keep her overnight for observation," the doctor said. They had somehow managed to track down Natalie on her cellular phone. "We're going to give her some intravenous antibiotics, she's ingested some fluid, but basically she's a very lucky girl."

She stayed with Claudia at the hospital until late afternoon, when Natalie finally arrived, and waited outside so Natalie could be alone with her.

"What was she doing at the beach!" Natalie said as they drove back in Natalie's silver BMW. "I told her not to go to the beach. I swear, she does these things to get attention—she waits until the day I'm having all these people for dinner, just to drive me crazy! I get home, there's a note from her tutor saying she wasn't home, I had to pay him thirty dollars just for showing up—"

"It was my fault!" Florence said, beginning to cry.

"I'm in the middle of aerobics class, the telephone starts ringing in my backpack—I run over, trying to find it,
so
humiliating, having the hospital call. I said, 'You might as well keep her for a week if you're going to keep her overnight. I'll be back in the city all week anyway; at least I won't have to worry about her ending up in the hospital again if she's already
in
the hospital.'"

"I thought it was okay for me to take her to the beach, just that you didn't want her going there alone, and I fell asleep—I didn't think she'd go in without me!" Florence said.

They didn't speak for the rest of the trip.

She went upstairs to change. There were slivers of honey and amber in her hair, so subtle as to appear natural except to the rest of Manhattan's female population—a process that set her back five hours and three hundred dollars every month. Most of her income went for maintenance on herself. Her nails and toenails were manicured and polished in the palest silver-pink, her legs waxed, as were eyebrows and facial hair. This was another hundred and fifty a month; in addition, her membership at the gym (not a very nice one, to be sure, but not the worst either) was three hundred and fifty. Then there was the expense of clothes.

She tugged on a skin-tight pair of gray trousers, Capri-length, with slits up the calves. These had come from Henri Bendel and had been expensive—at least by her standards—nearly four hundred dollars. The cotton ribbed T-shirt was from the Gap, only

twenty-nine ninety-five, and probably she didn't need it, but she wanted to have something new to wear to Natalie's party. The pants, however, she had definitely needed. They were sexy yet modest: at least they didn't reveal too much skin; she didn't need or want to have hostile glances from the other women.

The shoes were flat navy-blue satin slippers. They had been
extremely
expensive, and she could see they weren't going to last much longer—the satin was beginning to fray—but she had loved them, so she had simply worn them out. Perhaps if she bought three or four pairs at once, the next time they would last longer; she could switch from one pair to the other. The outfit, including the undergarments (and regarding these items Florence could not bear to skimp; she could not feel good about herself unless her brassiere and underpants matched and were of good-quality silk and lace) in total cost about seven hundred dollars. And yet it was a modest ensemble. None of these were designer clothes, and the trousers had been reduced from five hundred dollars down to three ninety—a real saving, she had thought at the time, for pants she would be able to wear well into autumn, though now she wasn't quite so fond of them as she had been at first.

Her annual income from Quayle's was twenty-six thousand dollars, before taxes. Nobody except Quayle's directors received anything resembling a decent salary. Her position was educational, a job intended for rich girls waiting to get married, or career women with enough money to sustain them or an ability to live cheaply until they obtained a curatorial or academic position outside the city. Between the three-thousand-dollar mortgage and maintenance and her other monthly expenditures—which generally came close to fifteen hundred dollars—she spent, after taxes, more than twice what she earned. Luckily, until now she had had the money left to her by her mother. Now that was almost entirely depleted. But what else could she have done? There didn't seem to be any way to spend less money.

She thought of changing into a pair of silver sandals with low heels, which she had also brought along, but then she remembered Charlie wasn't much taller than she. He seemed so old-fashioned

in his outlook that, at least for the time being, she wanted to give him the advantage of thinking he was the same height, if not taller.

She put on a little makeup; she didn't really need any, she liked to keep it simple, but this was a dinner party after all. She stroked some cocoa-colored powder on her eyelids (a Japanese brand, in a beautiful sleek black case with a tiny sponge applicator, thirty-seven dollars), applied a very pale lipstick with a faint hint of silver-pink (twenty-three dollars, from a fashionable little boutique in Greenwich Village, the only place where it was sold) and some powder (twenty-seven dollars, from an Upper East Side salon that did facial treatments and where she bought all of her skin-care products).

Finally she gave up and went down. John was standing at the bottom of the stairs, freshly showered, his hair wet and sleeked back, a martini glass in hand. "Oh, John!" she said. "Is there any more news? Is she all right?"

"Yeah, yeah. Nat finally got me at the golf course and I just stopped over at the hospital on my way home. She's fine. I don't know why they even want to keep her overnight—they say there's a chance she could get pneumonia if she got water in her lungs, but I think they're nervous we'll sue them later on if she gets sick."

"I feel so terrible. I fell asleep for a minute—I don't know what could have happened—she knew not to go in swimming without me. I think maybe she was just playing at the water's edge and a wave . . ."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Nothing happened; it could have been worse." He leered slightly. "You're looking good, Florence!"

"Oh, gee." She was slightly sheepish. "Thanks, John." She tried to keep her tone of voice businesslike, or sisterly. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"What I'd like to do is move some of that stuff in your room so you can be more comfortable. I still don't have a clue why Natalie put you there. Come up with me for a minute so I don't take your things out by mistake." He headed up the stairs.

"No, no," she said. "Really, it's fine. I pushed the things that were on the bed into the corner—I'm only here for one more night—honestly, it's—"

He continued up. On the landing she stopped, reluctant to follow him farther. She thought of turning and going back down, but he called from the third-floor hall. "Florence, this suitcase on the floor—is it yours?"

"Which one?" she said.

"I'd better show you. I'm going to put these things into the attic. I was meaning to do it for a while anyway."

She stood in the hall. "The brown leather-and-linen overnight bag is mine—"

He grabbed her wrist and gave her a quick yank into the room. In what appeared to be one motion, like some kind of karate move, still clutching her wrist with his left hand, he kicked the door shut behind her back, let go of her wrist, pulled up her shirt and tugged the cups of her brassiere down below her breasts, so that they stood out in the kind of frame between her shirt and the bottom of her bra. "Oh, God," she said. "No, no." In some way her protests seemed to incite him even more. Though his desire seemed to have no more significance than a sudden desire for French fries, she couldn't deny she was aroused too. It had taken her so long to get dressed for the party, she hated the way he was coming at her, determined to undo the work. How could she go downstairs afterward, flushed, with an aura of consummation, and expect to be desirable to a man offering real possibilities? She struggled to pull up her brassiere cups, but his mouth was firmly fixed on her left nipple like a lamprey; the more she tugged at her brassiere and tried to pull down her shirt, the more excited he seemed to become.