Condominium (13 page)

“Well, it was going faster than I figured, so I was early.”

She wore an open robe over her blue and white swimsuit, and carried an orange beach bag by its nylon cord. Her raw tawny brown-blond hair was as casual as noonday lions. She was a honey-tanned, long-limbed creature, handsome and graceful and totally assured. There was a very tangible force about her, almost a flavor of violence under control. Without conscious effort she received special attention from everyone and accepted it without surprise.

“And?” she said expectantly.

“What? Oh, I was just leaving. Good-bye, sir. Good-bye, Mrs. Messenger.”

She looked thoughtfully at her husband after Wasniak had gone. “He looked sort of concerned and shaken, darling.”

“I think I got impatient with the fellow.”

She went to him quickly and sat on the footstool and took his hand. “A bad one?”

“No. It’s fading now. Grade Three plus.”

She knew his grading system. Three was a dull red color like fireplace coals. The pain was like an expanding pocket of gas
trapped in a coil of bowel, shortening the breath. Grade Two was a flickering, pulsating, evil yellow. Grade One was glaring white, and hissed and made sweat and sometimes made him yell.

“Want a shot?”

“There were a few minutes there when I would have said yes. But I’m really all right now, thanks.”

“Where’s Mrs. Schmidt?”

“She asked if she could leave early. She got a call from her daughter. Some kind of trouble. I gather it isn’t very serious. How was your walk?”

“Four miles long. And hot. I went two miles south down the beach and turned around. Starting a mile south I began to come upon dead fish washed up, and fewer people. Very long-dead fish. Down where the motels are, the stench would knock a goat down. People say it’s a new outbreak of red tide.”

“And the seas shall rot, the animals die, the birds vanish, and all the people flee.”

“What’s that from?”

“The instant inventions of LeGrande Messenger.”

“When I think it’s you, it turns out to be a quotation.”

“Child, you came along after they stopped educating people.”

“I know, I know, I know,” she said, getting up. “I was born on your fortieth birthday, and the world has been going to hell in a handbasket for a long time. I better go change.”

After she left the room, Messenger leaned forward, braced the heels of his hands against the leather arms of his chair and with a brisk effort levered himself to his feet. He swayed, caught his balance and walked slowly over to the window wall and looked out across their roof patio to the bright afternoon dance of the Gulf, seen between the pale stiff shoulders of the Azure Breeze and the Surf Club.

Be grateful it was Grade Three and didn’t last, he thought. And be grateful that age slows the growth of the inoperable invader cells. You old bastard, you want to get so old the growth will stop. You want a remission. Mother had an aunt who lived to a hundred and six and kept her wits until the end. Lost her teeth, hearing, eyesight and mobility. But kept her wits. Heredity? Or is it all the vitamins Barbara keeps shoving into your ancient carcass? The wretched part is in looking so damned old. Part of that is the disease, of course. Eats you out. What the young never realize, can never comprehend, is that inside this husk there is a baffled man aged thirty. Barbara’s age. A man who feels hope and fear, love and lust, anger and greed, pride and despair. The young man wonders how this creeping, dismaying, destroying thing called age ever happened to him. He wonders how the years were all so short.

Given a choice, he thought, of being old and sick and poor, and old and sick and rich, rich is better. A lifelong exercise of wits, weighing with great care the risk-reward ratios in all things. Dim little men try to conserve, and so they have to be right fifty-one percent of the time to hope to stay even with the board. Deepen and broaden the risk areas, and eventually you can reach a point where being right ten percent of the time will pile money atop money. Big money expands the choices, multiplies the options.

He stretched with care, clicking an elbow, creaking a shoulder, checked for the last morsel of pain and found it entirely gone. He went over to his desk in the corner of the room, eased himself into the chair and played back the tape of the morning phone call from Zurich, listening to it for the third time, listening with care for each nuance in Muller’s heavy voice, his eyes closed. When he felt Barbara’s hand on his shoulder he said, “I don’t think we gave him enough to show to his people upstairs. Tomorrow I’ll dictate a new clause and put in a three- or four-year reversion.”

“But that won’t really mean anything, will it?”

“It will to Muller, I think. He has to bring the stick back, wagging his tail.”

“Okay, I know you are a very clever man, and I’ll retype the damned thing and mail it, but you should be saying, My, what a pretty dress and how nice you look, darling.”

He opened his eyes and smiled ruefully. “My, what a pretty dress and how nice you look, darling.”

“How sweet of you to notice, Lee!”

She sat in the chair beside the desk. He rewound the tape and ejected the cassette and put it aside for her to file. “While you walked did you think about what I asked you?”

She nodded, head atilt, her smile small and solemn. “Of course. I think it is really a good place for us to live. Like you say, this is a very gaudy and vulgar building. But the climate is good, and this penthouse apartment is pleasant and roomy enough for us, dear. There’s good medical attention handy. I
know
we could live anywhere in the world. With a staff of dozens. And no privacy. These people don’t know who you really are. They’ve never heard of you. We don’t have to have any social or political or business involvements here. I know, I know. Don’t say it, please. You worry too much about me, about what I might want. My God, Lee, I love the sun and the water. I’m no little kid aching to go to parties. This place is
fine
, really. And if I ever start to get sick of it, I will let you know immediately.”

“Promise?”

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow maybe we could go over those inventory lists and see what we’d like to have with us. The bank can arrange it all. I don’t want to clutter the place with too much stuff. Some of the small bronzes, maybe.”

“One of the Chinese horses maybe?”

“If you’d like.”

“And the Miro with the balloons?”

“On that wall?”

“Oh, yes. Why are you frowning, Lee?”

“Wondering if it is enough of a life for you, Barbara.”

“I had all that other stuff.”

“And I’ve made you a rich lady.”

“Which really bugs those three prune-mouthed sons of yours, dear.”

“They take after their sainted, long-departed mother. There’ll be enough to go around. You just got yours earlier.”

“When I think of it, I want to laugh.”

“It’s funny?”

“Lee, when I worked in your office for four hundred dollars a week, I formed my lifelong opinions about money. I can be terribly solemn about fifty thousand. I can be awestruck by one million. But the amount you stuck in trust for me is so grotesque, it makes me laugh. It’s like a little kid at the Macy’s parade seeing a duck twice the size of an elephant float by. It is beyond belief. It is a delight. And it is absurd. I look at it from the outside. You know? Office girl fleeces tycoon. Premarital contract sets record.”

“What if I
had
to buy you?”

“No way. The lady is not for sale.”

“I would cheerfully have paid that just to have you near me while, as they say in the song, the days grow short.”

“Shall I whistle for the violins?”

“I just have to reassure myself that you are here and want to be here. I have to hear it now and then.”

“Where else would I be but with you? I had all that other stuff, Lee. I had the house, the husband, the babies. I don’t ever want to
be that vulnerable again. The fates mess around with the people who have the most to lose. Ever notice that?”

“A couple of times a day.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“It was a joke, Barbara. Slightly sick, but a joke nonetheless.”

“It isn’t going to have me laughing helplessly.”

After the worst of the heat had gone from the sun, she went out onto the private terrace with him. She brought him his small carafe of red wine and put it and the glass he liked on the tiled table beside the arm of his chair. Eight pelicans in single file glided by, heading home after the day’s work out on the broad Gulf. She sat in the deck chair beside his, drifting back and forth across the edge of sleep, made drowsy by the walk along the beach.

He held her hand and talked to her. She could tell that the old man wanted her and was trying to hide it. He was as shy and strange about that as he was about almost everything. He seemed to feel that she should be sickened by the needs of a frail, dying man. He had come to despise his own body to the point where he could not comprehend how she could caress him or endure his caresses. Love made her take pleasure in giving him pleasure. After the first time he had told her he had not intended that to be part of their bargain. She had said she did not think in terms of bargains and agreements. Frailty made them gentle. Each time might be the last time. There was sweetness and there was gratitude.

The angry fire had burned up the grinning happy husband and the fat adorable babies and the white house with the Tory chimney. It had burned up all their letters and their music and their yearbooks, their photographs of one another, her diaries and his tennis cups. It had burned her heart to a black cinder. The strange
old man had waited long enough and then had sent people to bring her back to her desk, no excuses acceptable. She had been thinking then of sleeping pills and deep fast rivers, of high high places and razor blades, of gas ovens and kitchen knives. But that weird old Mr. Messenger had piled work upon her as if to crush her under the weight of it. She had dived down into work and had lived there for over a year. When she had raised her head and looked around she found she was as mended as she would ever be, could ever be. She raised her head to hear Lee telling her that he was phasing out the office, that he had cancer, that, as an arrangement, and in order to be fair to her, he would marry her. He needed someone around him who was attractive, who’d had some nurse training, who was a superb secretary and who had no one else close to her. He said he might live six months or a year and would expect her in attendance to the end. But it had been two and a half years now, and though he looked more wasted than ever, the pains were not as frequent or as harsh.

He had offered her places to live. Corfu, Madeira, Saint Thomas, Crete. Islands in the sun. Agents had brought pictures and floor plans of the houses they could have. But one could not run a big house and manage to make the end of a long life graceful and easy at the same time.

So it would end here. The day after tomorrow or the year after today. She yawned and sighed and pulled the grave-marked hand to her mouth and kissed it, then went in to fix the sparse evening meal. She thought of the money. She did not think of it often. It was up there in the Chase, growing and growing in a fetid mushroom darkness, feeding its own tax-free income back to itself in the form of more tax-free municipals. Lee selected them. All from the South and Southwest and the West. General obligations, whatever they might be. Oh, there was enough to go around without
that. She had seen all the trusts he had set up for the disapproving sons, with their long lists of holdings. She had seen how carefully he was liquidating, consolidating, minimizing the estate taxes. There was lots to go around. Without the trust fund he had settled on her, there had to be ten million left per son, at least. And it could be twice that. Beyond a certain point money ceased to have any meaning. One could ride in but one car at a time, eat one meal at a time, sleep in one bed at a time.

Beyond that certain point, yes, quantity ceased to have any meaning, but up to that certain point it represented a pattern of living so at odds with her background she did not believe she could ever accept it without a sense of wonder and unreality.

The leased car was down there in the parking space underneath the building. If it developed any odd noise, or ceased to run perfectly in any way, one phoned and they came and took it and brought another. And there was always the limousine service, of course. If you bought a suit which did not really please you after one or two wearings, you gave it to Goodwill and bought another. When Lee ordered your birthday ring by telephone, a courier brought it down from New York. Mrs. Schmidt, that competent Swiss, did all the buying, cleaning, and almost all the cooking. Lee’s bank received all their mail, paid all bills, accepted all income and forwarded the personal mail. They never had to stand in lines, wait in waiting rooms, bicker with bureaucrats, or suffer the attentions of fools and boors. Best of all was never having to think about money at all, about how much or how little for this or for that. It was there, and this life-style could not use it all as fast as it accumulated, so you never thought of what anything cost anymore.

COMMISSIONER JUSTIN DENNIVER
sauntered into Billy Scherbel’s office in the east wing of the Palm County Courthouse, closed the door behind him, beamed at Billy, who was on the phone, and settled into one of the chairs facing the desk.

Billy was saying, “…  there’s a set procedure everybody has to go through, Mrs. Johnson. I’m not saying it’s actually required, but I do think you’d be better off having an attorney check into this for you. No, there wouldn’t be any point in talking to the County Manager at this stage of the game. Right. Thanks for calling.”

Scherbel hung up and grimaced and said, “She wants a platted road vacated. Right now. Kids riding trail bikes up and down it, and she and her neighbors want to fence it off.”

“How’s Bets?”

“She’s coming along fine. They got her walking up and down the hall already.”

“That fast! Glad to hear it.”