Last Resort (13 page)

But really, Jenny had explained, Lee was doing her a favor. If she weren’t here she’d be at home brooding. The day after the party Wilkie had frozen up again. He remained shut in his room every day, and when he came out it was as if he were there still. He was keeping the last chapter of his book back for more revisions, so there was nothing for her to check or comment on or type. When she’d asked again if she couldn’t help somehow, he said that there would be plenty for her to do soon enough. His thin, distant tone made Jenny wonder, not for the first time, if he were angry with her about something. But when she diffidently suggested this her husband denied it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he had said, in a way that seemed to contradict the denial.

There was something wrong, Jenny told Lee; something serious. Wilkie had never brooded over a book like this before, never shut himself away from her like this. His new editor had inquired about the progress of the manuscript again only yesterday, addressing his note to Jenny rather than her husband—of whom, she suspected, he was a bit afraid, as many people were.

Jenny, who knew now what it was like to be slightly afraid of Wilkie Walker, had tactfully delayed passing on this query until after supper, when he was usually in a more relaxed mood. But her tact had not been successful. A deep crease had appeared between his eyebrows, and he had used the phrase “damned interference.” The interference referred to, nominally, was that of the editor; but as Wilkie growled the words out, the dark thought came to Jenny that they were meant for her. Somehow, her presence had become unpleasant to him, her speech unwelcome. Maybe it was because she’d suggested that they come to Key West, she told Lee. Maybe he hated it here, and blamed her.

Or perhaps it was something else she’d done, something she couldn’t even remember. Or something that she was, that she couldn’t help. And now the little fear that had haunted Jenny years ago returned: the fear that she was not worthy of a man like Wilkie Walker. Like his first wife, she was not really an intelligent person: she had never been more than a B+ student in college. Dishonestly, knowing it was wrong, giving herself the false excuse that it didn’t matter, because Wilkie Walker would soon disappear from her life as magically as he had come into it, Jenny had concealed the weakness of her mind and her grades from him. And then he had asked her to marry him, and it was too late.

During their engagement, and for a while after the wedding, Jenny had dreaded that somehow Wilkie would realize how ordinary she really was. Now, in this ugly expensive house in Florida, this ugly fear had returned. In her anxiety, two days ago, Jenny had confided it to Lee. Suppose Wilkie had somehow discovered belatedly how ordinary and unworthy of him she was, she said. Because they had been together so long, he would probably say nothing about it. He would just slowly withdraw from her, as he had in fact done over the past few months. Perhaps also, in his deep disappointment, he might withdraw from their children, and even, eventually, from other people.

Lee had listened to all this attentively, seriously, as she always did. But when Jenny finished, instead of making some mild or reassuring comment, as usual, she had exploded.

“You’re out of your mind,” she said. “What the hell do you mean, you’re not worthy of Wilkie Walker? If you want to know what I think, I think he’s damned lucky to have you, and if he doesn’t realize that, he’s a—” Lee paused, swallowing something stronger, and finished, “a complete booby. And you’re not ordinary. You’re one of the least ordinary people I’ve ever known.”

Remembering Lee’s warm, indignant expression as she had said this, Jenny smiled in spite of her confused unhappiness.

It was wonderful to know someone like Lee, even if she might not be right. That was what a real friend was, she thought: somebody who thought better of you than you did of yourself. Somebody you really liked; no, loved. Who loved you too, when the people who should love you didn’t. “I feel as if I can tell you anything,” she’d said to Lee two days ago, “and you’ll never say Bad Girl.”

“Same here,” Lee had replied, grinning—though it was already clear to Jenny that if anyone said Bad Girl to Lee, she wouldn’t give a damn.

Outside it was raining again, for the fifth day in a row, and the air was saturated with damp. It had been too cold and wet for a week to swim; and Jenny had left the house this morning in a heavy misty drizzle that blurred the palms along the street. Her hair, which she had washed before breakfast, still wasn’t dry. She pulled the white elastic band off her ponytail and fanned it out over her white T-shirt, where it lay loose and pale and slightly wavy from the humidity.

Three hours times three mornings times twelve: a hundred and eight dollars a week, the first money Jenny had earned since she was twenty-two. She didn’t need it: the Walkers had a joint account, and Wilkie never questioned her spending. But the idea of those hundred and eight dollars pleased her. And it was so easy—just sitting here and answering the phone, taking reservations, dealing with any minor problems the guests might have, and handing out maps and information on tours and shops and restaurants.

According to Lee, Key West was in the midst of what she called “our regular ten-day winter.” “Hell, I don’t mind,” she had told Jenny this morning. “It might chase some of the tourists away, but it gives me time to catch my breath before the first wave of college students hits town for spring break.”

Only two of Lee’s guests had been driven off by the weather, but those who remained were cross and disappointed. Pretending to be joking, they blamed Jenny for the rain. (“Will you look at it outside! How could you do this to us?”)

All morning she had done her best to suggest alternate activities: a tour of the perfume factory or the aquarium; or, if it stopped raining, a visit to the dolphin sanctuary, or a kayak excursion among the mangrove swamps like the one Jacko’s mother and cousin were going on today. But nothing seemed to interest Lee’s guests. This disturbed Jenny, and when Lee returned at noon she said so.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Lee reassured her, smiling and tossing a sparkle of rain from her dense, dark hair. She was wearing a tangerine-orange nylon poncho that would have been garish on anyone else. “Who was grousing today? Was it Bitsy and her Oriental friend in Room Four?” She opened the screen door, pulled off her poncho, and shook it out onto the porch. How wonderful she looks, Jenny thought, how she lights up the room!

“Yes, them. And those two nice schoolteachers from Connecticut. They didn’t want to do any of the things I suggested.”

“That figures. Aw, don’t look like that, it’s not your fault, really. You have to understand that what some people come to Key West for is to do nothing. They could goof off back home, of course, but their superegos won’t let them. Especially the New England types.”

“Oh, Lee.” Jenny looked up, almost blushed. “That’s not why I came, honestly.”

Lee gave her wonderful, deep laugh. “I know that. I’m not talking about snowbirds like you. There it’s mostly fear of winter, I suppose.”

“I did rather fear the winter,” Jenny said, and paused, recalling that what she had feared most was the effect the darkening days and falling temperatures might have on Wilkie’s state of mind. But she had resolved not to mention her husband today: she didn’t want to become a one-note whine.

“Well, you’re safe from winter in Key West,” Lee said in an odd, thick voice. “Luckily for me.” She leaned forward and for a moment rested her warm hand on Jenny’s bare shoulder and brushed Jenny’s face with her warm mouth.

“It’s lucky for me, too,” Jenny replied as the phone began to ring. The places on her shoulder and cheek that Lee had touched seemed to glow as if a match had been held to them.

Actually I don’t always feel safe in Key West, she thought as Lee spoke into the phone; but I do here. That’s odd, because the guest house is full of strangers. But they’re all women; that makes it safe. (“It was one of the best damn ideas I ever had in my life, only renting to women,” Lee had confided last week. “No serious violence, no piss stains on the bathroom floors, no high decibel beer parties, and if women do get drunk they usually don’t smash up the furniture.”)

“Okay, you keep track of the weather forecast and let me know.” Lee hung up and cleared her throat. “Another customer who wants me to guarantee sunshine,” she said, and laughed. “See, the problem is most people can’t admit that they want to do nothing on vacation. That’s because according to the moral system most Americans buy into, it’s sin: the sin of laziness and sloth. But at a resort the rules are changed. As long as it’s hot and sunny, especially if you’re near water, you can take off most of your clothes and lie around doing nothing for hours at a time, and it doesn’t count. Sloth is redefined as ‘sunbathing,’ even if you put a towel over your face and slather yourself with total sunblock. So naturally if it’s cloudy, they complain.”

“I guess that’s true.” Jenny laughed.

“Sure it is. Take a look next time you go to the beach, or pass a motel pool. Most people aren’t in the water, they’re flat out around it. They could save the airfare and room fees if they would stay home, turn off the phone and TV, and lie down in the bedroom, or out in the yard if it was warm enough. And in the evening they could go to expensive restaurants, just like they do here.”

“If you did that where I come from people would think you were sick,” Jenny said. “I mean, you know, mentally.”

“Oh, absolutely. And I’m all for it. If everyone realized how dumb and unnecessary sunbathing was, not to mention what it does to your skin, I’d probably go broke.” She laughed. “Hey, let’s have some lunch. There’s some pretty good fish stew left from last night, and I can make a salad.”

“Oh, I can’t, not today,” Jenny said. “I have to get back. Maybe next time.”

“Sure,” Lee said. “Well, see you Monday.”

I could have stayed for lunch, Jenny thought as she descended the steps of the guest house. The truth was that she had been afraid to stay for lunch; afraid that she would start complaining again about Wilkie, and boring Lee, who was already bored by him even though they hadn’t met. And afraid of showing how important Lee was to her, because what if she didn’t feel the same way? After all, Lee had lots of friends in Key West; she couldn’t possibly love and need Jenny the way Jenny loved and needed her.

It had been raining off and on for days, and the effect on the landscape was depressing. Key West needs sunshine to look its best, Lee had said, and she was right: in bad weather the island seemed drab and shabby and makeshift. Now the quaint little white-painted gingerbread houses were exposed as peeling and gray; most of the bright flowers had been beaten down into the earth, and the luxuriant tropical trees hung over the badly paved streets like clumps of heavy wet spinach.

Because Key West is built on coral rock, Lee had explained, rain drains off very slowly. This morning when Jenny walked to work there was water collected dirty-gray around clogged gutters everywhere, splashing pedestrians like her whenever a car passed. In some places, for instance at the corner of United and Simonton, the streets were two to three feet deep in muddy runoff, and filled with soggy floating debris and with stalled rental cars whose engines had flooded.

Instead of going home Jenny headed for the Key West library, a large pink stucco building surrounded by dripping exotic foliage. Usually it was more or less empty, but today the rooms were crowded with people who would otherwise be strolling past the shops on Duval Street or at the beach. There was also an identifiable population of homeless persons: men and a few women who, in order to avoid the police, normally slept during the warmth of the day on a bench or under a bush in some park, and stayed awake at night when it was cool. Half a dozen of these people, driven indoors by the rain, were slumped on library chairs, pretending to read newspapers or magazines, or blatantly dozing.

Jenny pulled off the stiff, sopping-wet London Fog raincoat that she should never have brought to Key West. It was not only too formal, it didn’t keep out the tropical rain, which seemed to come from all directions at once, including the horizontal. She shook out her damp hair, then, hesitantly, approached the circulation desk.

Back in Convers, the staff of the college library always fell all over each other to help Jenny—once even literally, when Mrs. Ormondroyd and one of her assistants collided coming out of the stacks behind the charge desk, both carrying books for Wilkie. Here it was very different. The collection was much smaller, and most of what Wilkie wanted had to be ordered on interlibrary loan. The staff was polite, but it had soon become clear that obtaining items for a temporary resident on a permanent resident’s card wasn’t their top priority. Jenny was not too surprised now to hear that nothing she’d requested had arrived.

Wilkie wouldn’t like that, she knew. In the past he had always been tolerant when a book or a fact was temporarily unavailable. But lately he had developed a nervous impatience, a demand that what he wanted should appear immediately. “You tell them Professor Walker has to have it now, this week,” he had said this morning about some book on tides, ocean currents, and navigation in the Keys—a topic unrelated in any way Jenny could think of to
The Copper Beech.

It wasn’t fair, Jenny thought. She was doing everything she could, everything Wilkie asked her to do, just as always. But now she was doing it without joy, and without the rewards. In the past Wilkie had always been lavish with praise and compliments for everything from her creamy scrambled eggs to her discovery of a lost footnote. “Darling, you are a wonder,” he used to say, sometimes more than once a day. But now he was withdrawn and unappreciative. And ungrateful: on Wednesday when she came home with a magazine he wanted he had snatched it without even thanking her.

In Key West, even when she had specifically asked that a book be held for Wilkie, it was sometimes reshelved. Hoping that this had happened now, Jenny made her way through the stacks to the shadowy corner where the Florida Collection was kept. But the gap on the top shelf was still there, which meant that when she got home Wilkie would be angry. He would have the face she had seen more and more often lately: the one she had seen this morning over breakfast, in the heavy wet light from the patio: the face of a detached, disapproving man, who didn’t even answer when she asked him to please pass the key lime marmalade. “I think he’s tired of me,” she had told Lee on Wednesday, and for the first time Lee had not been reassuring. “I suppose it’s possible,” she’d said. “Men are like that.”