Condominium (35 page)

“Jesus, Gus!”

“That is one hell of a lot of woman, in all ways, and I think that if you distracted her from the job she has set herself, she would never forgive you.”

“I don’t
want
anything like that, chief. I have no time or energy left in this lifetime for anything at all real, ever again. Especially do I not want to mess with the pretty young wife of anybody like L. D. Messenger.”

“So you’ll find some other girl to do the typing?”

“No. It would look weird if I did that.”

“Sam, for God’s sake.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Leave me alone, Gus.”

MONDAY MIDDAY
near the end of July. Ninety-three degrees. Humidity, one hundred percent. Thunder rumbled and grumbled, promising afternoon thundershowers as forecast. The people of Palm County scurried from their air-conditioned houses and apartments to their air-conditioned cars, and drove to their air-conditioned shops and offices. The few people on the beaches spent most of their sun time in the water. There was no waiting for tennis courts. Golf carts with bright canvas canopies wandered the rain-green fairways. Stunned birds sat silent in the leaf shade. All over the big shopping plazas the air conditioning roared, sending out waves of heat which raised the ambient temperature of the areas, creating more work for the air conditioning.

Gregory McKay, of Benton, Barkley, Gorvis, Sinder and McKay, was spending a portion of his lunch hour on his back on a beach towel spread upon one of the beds in Apartment 2-F of the Golden Sands Condominium. Loretta Rosen straddled him,
kneeling, her torso erect, brown-gold hair spread on her shoulders, sharp breasts and belly gleaming with the mist of perspiration from her prolonged effort.

His hands were clasped loosely around her waist. Her pelvis moved in a strong, slow ellipsis, and she stared past him at the empty wall above the head of the bed, underlip caught behind the white capped teeth. He could hear the huff of the air conditioning, a very faint creaking of the bed, a muted boom of jet or thunder, and an infrequent damp lisping sound of copulation.

“Pretty soon,” she said in a small strained voice. “Pretty soon now, huh?”

Her eyes closed. Her mouth twisted into a grimace. She steepened and hastened her effort. A red flush darkened her heavy tan. She snorted, bucked, cried out and collapsed against his broad chest as the spasms slowed and softened.

“Gawd, I didn’t think I could again, not so soon anyway. You’re beautiful, lover,” she said. “You are really beautiful. It’s never been like this with anybody before.”

“Um,” he said.

“I really love you,” she said.

“Uh huh.”

“Do you love me?”

“Sure.”

“Can’t you say it?”

“Love you, honey.”

“Wow. That’s really a lot of enthusiasm there, fellow.”

“Sorry.”

“Did the poor man get all worn out by Loretta?”

“Uh huh.”

She moved away from him and groped and found the hand towel and used it on herself and then on him. She noticed how
startlingly dark her thighs were, and thought that it was just like that year with Cole, getting lots of sun so I can look good naked. A good tan forgives a lot of things. It covers the little sags and creases and crepey skin, the busted veins and blemishes. Fish-belly white makes you old. Tan is the color of the young, the color of beaches and vitality and slenderness.

Wasting too much time, she thought glumly. Working on my tan. Working on my face and my hair. Too much time spent screwing, while sales go down the drain and the prospect list looks sicker and sicker. But, oh, Jesus, this feels so good and I love it so much, and I was such an idiot trying to tell myself that I was through with this part of life. It isn’t as fantastic as it was with Cole. It was like he could turn me inside out. But this is a nice boy. Sweet. He’s nervous about some of the things I want. But he is learning to like it.

Greg stretched and yawned, scratched his chest, sighed loudly and said, “I’ve
got
to unload these apartments. It keeps getting to me.”

“But can’t you hang on okay now? The monthly fee for this floor is down to sixty-eight dollars each, isn’t it?”

“How long do you think that will last? Those are legal contracts.”

“But if everybody sticks together?”

“It may come down some. Not enough to matter. I wish I could just walk away. But Nance and I are on the notes, and we’d lose our house along with the apartments.”

“And there’s the little problem with Mrs. Neale.”

“That wasn’t too bright, that letter you didn’t answer.”

“Don’t tell me what’s bright, friend. You tend the law and I’ll sell your rotten apartments.”

“Don’t get sore. Okay? I didn’t mean anything. Just that maybe she has an outside chance of voiding the contract.”

“On account of her fool letter. Right?”

“Please, let’s not fuss about it. It isn’t only the apartments. We had a meeting of the partners, and there’s going to be less to cut up this year. A lot less. I can’t seem to get it across to you that I’m really in bad shape. I’m really worried, Loretta honey.”

“Then Loretta is going to take your mind off your problems.”

“What are you doing?”

“What is it beginning to look like?”

“I’ve got to be getting back to …”

“Hush, dear. Please hush.”

It took longer than she expected to get a response from him, and when the response was adequate, she daintily knee-walked sideways, until with her last step she lifted one knee across his head and then settled delicately. In about ten minutes Loretta knew that Greg could come again and she could not, and as she began hastening him, she heard a small sound near the open doorway. She glanced sidelong and saw a young woman in a yellow sun dress standing in the doorway. She had a plump, pretty, childlike face and dark hair. She wore a strange expression.

She said in an apologetic voice, “I just came to get … to get …”

Gregory roughly and abruptly pushed forward and down on Loretta’s hips, collapsing her against his chest. He raised his head until, over the round hillock of a buttock, he could see his wife standing in the doorway.

“Please!” he roared, tumbling Loretta off him. “Please!”

It seemed to him then, and later, a strange entreaty. Please what? Understand? Forgive? Forget?

But Nancy was gone. The corridor door slammed. Gregory bounded up and ran to the door and almost opened it before he realized very little would be achieved through naked pursuit.

When he returned to the bedroom, Loretta was kneeling on the
bed, sitting back on her heels, combing her hair back with spread fingers. She wore an expression of sweet concern. “Aw, sweetie, that’s too bad. That really is.”

He smacked his bare thigh with his fist, so hard that he winced and rubbed the spot. “Oh, Jesus,” he moaned.

“Well, she shouldn’t have been sneaking around.”

“She wasn’t! She probably came over here to get something she bought when we furnished the apartments. Probably something we need.”

“Whatever she was doing, she shouldn’t have been here.”

“You didn’t fasten the chain on the door!”

“Greg, dear. I got here first. Remember? Whoever gets here last is supposed to fasten it.”

“That lousy chain. Two seconds it would have taken. Jesus, all my luck has turned bad.”

“
That’s
not exactly flattering, dear.”

“Well. You know what I mean. What am I going to do?”

“Have you considered the Foreign Legion?”

“This is no time for cheap jokes, damn you!”

She came swarming off the bed and slapped him hard before he could evade the blow. “Watch your mouth, you silly little prick!”

“I just think … making jokes isn’t going to help.”

“Face it. There isn’t anything that’s going to help. If she ever did take you back, which isn’t likely, she would make you crawl on your belly all the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”

“I just want to explain to her that …”

“Explain! What is there to explain, and how would you explain it? We were quite obviously doing exactly what we were doing. About the only constructive thing you can do is come back here and stretch out again.”

“You must be out of your mind, Loretta.”

“Trust Loretta. Come on, sweetie. Come to Loretta.”

“No. I can’t, not now.”

“Listen very carefully. You come here right now, or there isn’t going to be any next time, ever. Either come here, or put your clothes on and get the hell out. That is what is known as an ultimatum.”

He stared at her with a look of thoughtful stupidity. All the hours at a desk had begun to give him a pouchy look, and there was a small roll around his middle. He was not as heavily hung as Cole Kimber, she thought. But he was nice.

He sighed audibly and went to the chest at the foot of the bed and took his jockey shorts and stepped into them. He lost his balance and hopped on his left leg a couple of times before regaining it.

“Did you hear what I told you?” she said.

He snapped the elastic waistband. “I heard you.”

“I mean it, you know.”

“I guess you probably mean it.”

He sat on the chest and pulled his socks on. He stepped into his pants, tied his shoes, put on the white guayabera—approved for the summer months at the office.

She watched him, lips tightly compressed. He went into the bathroom and she heard the water running. He came out, still combing his hair with his fingertips.

He stared at her morosely. “Well … you take it easy, Loretta. It’s been … I guess it’s been a lot of fun. I don’t know. It’s been a lot of something.”

“Get out of here!”

“Sure,” he said, and left.

She sprawled on her face on the beach towel and wept. She drifted from infrequent sobs into sleep, and when she woke up she
was astonished to discover it was after four. She tied her hair out of the way and showered. She brushed her teeth with kitchen salt and a corner of a towel. After she was dressed and had brushed her hair to smoothness, she smiled at herself in the mirror, showing her teeth. She let the smile fade and she studied herself carefully, thinking that it was better without the glasses than with them. Myopia blurred all the tiny wrinkles. They became visible when she moved close to the mirror. She pressed her thumbs against the sides of her face close to the ears and pushed upward. The little puffy places at the corners of her mouth disappeared. The skin under her eyes tightened. The pouch under her chin was gone. Her eyes had an interesting tilt.

Back to the olden days, she thought. P.M. Pre-menopause. Take twenty-five hundred out of capital and get it done. When? Well, right now. Soon as it can be scheduled. Slack time. Summer time. Recession time.

But Greg is going to come crawling back. From the look on her face, the marriage is absolutely stone dead. Hell, he projects a very masculine image, but on the inside he is a weak, scared little man. With no one to hold him and comfort him but me, he’ll come back. I won’t let him come back too quickly and easily. The little nips and tucks and stitches can wait until I’ve let him come back, and gotten him finally all trained and housebroken, and then I can get the repairs done, knowing he won’t wander while I’m out of circulation. It really comes down to this … he has nowhere else he can go.

Jud and Fred Brasser were both prematurely balding men in their early thirties, both too heavy, both florid and authoritative. Jud was a Santa Monica banker, and Fred was a Fort Worth broker.

Dr. Vidal was a sallow young man with metal-rimmed glasses and an oversized black mustache. He wore a white smock. The Brasser brothers had cornered him in a small waiting room at the end of a third-floor corridor of the Athens Memorial Hospital. Dr. Vidal sat on the shiny plastic cushions of the couch. The brothers had hitched their chairs forward, blocking escape.

“You wouldn’t believe that apartment,” Jud said. “We had two maids in there cleaning yesterday. They cleaned that place for seven hours. I took down eight of those big plastic bags full of trash. I don’t know how come my mother was living like that. My wife, Marie, came here last year in August to look after Mom when she was getting out of the hospital after that jaundice, and the apartment was okay then—”

“As I was saying,” Vidal interrupted, “we know very little as yet about the mental effects of severe cirrhosis of the liver.”

“She’s a carefree person,” the broker said, “but not what you’d call sloppy. Not
that
–sloppy.”

“The needle biopsy we took last year showed typical advanced cirrhosis. Now let me try in layman’s terms to give you some indication of what we expect from liver damage. The body’s use of protein is impaired so that there is a wasting away of muscle tissue, so that one gets the pipestem arms and legs typical of the advanced case. Also one can expect edema, an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the face, giving the typical lumpy look of the alcoholic—”

“Now wait just a …”

Vidal held up a hand. “Please. Ask your questions when I am finished. As the liver becomes hardened by the accumulation of connective tissue, one sees a kind of back pressure exerted on the venous system, causing varicosities in the places normally expected, but also on the inner wall of the esophagus. At the same time, the liver’s function in producing one of the blood-clotting
agents ceases, and the blood becomes so thin it can leak through the walls of the varicosed veins in the esophagus, and from there into the stomach. That is why we check alcohol-abuse patients for black stool which would indicate internal bleeding.

“I attempted to tell your mother the seriousness of her situation when she was hospitalized last August. But I could not believe I was reaching her. Let me explain why. The liver is a very complex organ. It does a great many things. In addition to what I have told you, it also regulates the balance of certain key compounds in the bloodstream. It controls the sodium and magnesium and potassium balance. Though the research still has a long way to go, we do know that these substances in proper balance are necessary for adequate brain function. For example, were one to completely upset the sodium balance, the patient would become almost instantaneously unconscious. In fact, that is precisely how one of the spectrum of anesthetics works. It is fair to assume, I think, that when the balance of these substances is altered, brain function is also altered. One could say that the person is semi-anesthetized, and I do not mean that this is the effect of alcohol directly, when there is a semiparalysis of the cerebral cortex. I am saying that after severe liver damage, even were a person to cease all alcohol intake for several weeks, the fuzziness of the brain function would persist. Yet, after several months of abstinence, if as much as one tenth of the liver were left undamaged, one could expect a very gradual recovery of function. Though the damaged areas cannot regenerate, the undamaged areas can take on a larger share of the total functions than one might expect. At any rate, she could not comprehend or accept the seriousness of my warning. Quite obviously she kept on drinking and, as was her habit, did not eat while or after drinking, so that the liver damage was accelerated. The … squalid condition of the apartment was due to the semi-anesthetic
effect I have described to you. The electrical impulses in the brain deteriorate. Conversation becomes endlessly repetitive, anecdotal, simplified. They think you are making jokes of some sort.