Last Resort (22 page)

“So how’s Dennis doing?” Lee asked as she filled her deep sink with cool water and immersed the mass of flowers.

“Kind of strange.” Jacko sat on the creaky wicker sofa and took Marlene onto his lap. “I think he’s still in shock.”

“That figures.” Lee began to cut the stiff, woody stems of the carnations under water.

“He phoned me late last night, asked me to come over. He didn’t sound too bad, but by the time I got there he was really down. He started in again about how his life was over, and he’d never love anyone the way he loved Tommy. Then he said he might as well be dead too, and if he hadn’t promised Tommy to go on living he’d probably kill himself sooner or later.”

“Tommy made Dennis promise to go on living? That was smart of him.” Lee started to fill a glazed blue jug from White Street Pottery with white carnations.

“Oh, yeah. Tommy told him that because he was
HIV
-negative it would be his job from now on to enjoy all the things Tommy used to enjoy, twice as much. Drink Dubonnet and lime, and play their Callas records, and have artichokes with homemade hollandaise at least once a month. He said he’d be watching, and if he looked down and saw that Dennis wasn’t having a good time he’d be very cross.”

“Down from where?”

Jacko pointed toward the ceiling.

“So he was sure he was going to heaven.” Lee took a breath. Indoors, the scent of the hothouse flowers, especially the lilies, was almost oppressive.

“Yeah. You know Tommy. Always the optimist, right to the end.”

“So Dennis is supposed to enjoy food and drink and music,” Lee said. “But not sex.” She moved the carnations aside and started on some ivory roses with dark red, thorn-studded stems.

“Oh no. Sex too. Tommy told Dennis he had until Easter to get laid.”

Lee laughed. “He was a sweet guy, you know, Tommy, even if he had a lot of dumb political opinions. Most people might not want to think about how their partner was going to go on screwing after they were dead.”

“Yeah,” Jacko said after a pause. He wiped a curl of thick, dark hair out of his eyes.

“You think Dennis will meet the deadline?” Lee asked, setting aside a battered but elegant silver coffeepot full of white roses.

Jacko raised his shoulders, dropped them. “Who can say? He’s such a romantic. Always wants to be ‘in love.’” He crooked the fingers of both hands, placing imaginary quote marks around the phrase. “Wants to ‘really know someone deeply.’”

“That makes it harder,” Lee agreed, contemplating a rose so thick and perfect that it seemed to be shaped of white suede.

“I don’t get it, you know,” Jacko said. “The way people have to clutter up sex. When I see somebody I think is hot, it can ruin everything to know too much about him.”

“I know what you mean,” Lee said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost interest when I found out some really attractive woman was a right-wing Republican, or believed in previous lives.”

“Right. You want them to stay strangers. The best thing is if I don’t know where somebody comes from or even what his last name is. Just that he’s strong and beautiful and sexy, like those flowers.” He gestured at the tall copper vase of lilies with their almost pulsating golden stamens.

“But there has to be more to it than that,” Lee said, frowning.

“Not for me. What I really like is, I look at some guy, he looks back, that’s it. Fast and hard. The first time is always the best. Then if I don’t get away soon enough, he starts to tell me how he has migraine headaches or he was unhappy at work that day. I want to say, Look, would you please shut-up? You’re ruining everything. Only if I do, the guy will either get hurt feelings or try to kill me. So I hang around awhile to be polite, and he starts explaining how he grew up in New Jersey and didn’t get on with his father, or how he’s training to be a computer programmer, or he has a terrier named Oscar with a flea problem, whatever.”

“But hell, that’s part of the fun.” Smiling, Lee began to add lacy maidenhair ferns to the roses. “It is for me anyhow. Getting to know somebody, who she really is and where she comes from, feeling more and more comfortable with her, knowing she’ll be around awhile, that’s all part of it. Don’t you ever want that?”

“You’re like my mother, you want me to meet a nice man,” Jacko said, smiling. “My trouble is, I’ve met too many nice men. The better I know somebody, the less he excites me. Pretty soon he isn’t a great fuck anymore, he’s just some guy I know.”

“Yeah, but—”

“The last thing I want anyhow is a permanent live-in relationship; that’d be like prison. You don’t want it either, or you’d have one by now.”

“It’s not as easy as all that,” Lee said. “Not if you’re stuck with love.” A troubled expression appeared on her face.

Jenny Walker loved her, she was almost sure of that. What she feared was that Jenny loved her only as a friend. When they met Jenny smiled with pleasure. Lee could hug her then, even kiss her quickly, and Jenny would reciprocate, but no more. Sometimes when they were together, sitting close, leaning over the loom or a book or a pot of lime marmalade, Lee couldn’t help touching Jenny as if by accident. Jenny never startled or drew back; usually she smiled, but also she never moved nearer.

A dozen times Lee had psyched herself up to make a serious move, and then chickened out. What if she shocked Jenny, drove her away? Then it would all be over, and she would have nothing. Jenny would never sit in this kitchen again, looking so slim and beautiful, never stand next to her at the stove, laughing as they made pumpkin soup and licked each other’s fingers.

“So how’s it going with Mrs. Walker?” Jacko asked, demonstrating again his intermittent ability to read minds.

“Okay,” Lee answered repressively.

“You mean you still haven’t leveled with her.”

Lee shrugged and said nothing. Jacko was silent too; he sat there slowly stroking Marlene, causing her to purr even louder and blink her pale-green eyes. But Lee knew what he was thinking: he was thinking, if love is so great, how come it’s making you miserable? I’m not miserable, she told herself. Whenever I see Jenny I’m wonderfully happy.

“I don’t get it,” Jacko said. “I mean, hell. The way she’s over here all the time. And the way she looks at you. I bet she’s just waiting for you to make a move.”

Again, Lee said nothing, but she could not prevent the expression that came over her face. To conceal it, she looked away from Jacko toward the mass of creamy roses, the darkest of them almost the same shade as the skin on Jenny’s neck when she lifted her hair.

“Well, I better get on home,” he said finally. “See how Mumsie’s holding up.”

“Isn’t she well?”

“She was fine when I left. But she’s been having lunch with Aunt Myra; that’s enough to get anyone down.” He laughed shortly. “You want to know something? Now that Myra knows I’m sick, she won’t touch me. Won’t even shake my hand, in case she should catch something.”

“That’s disgusting. Stupid, too.”

“I had this sudden idea yesterday to grab Myra’s hand like I was going to kiss it, except then I’d bite it, really give her a scare. Only I’d probably get blood poisoning, she’s so mean.”

Lee laughed.

“Y’know, it’s weird, having this disease. It’s like I’m carrying a concealed weapon. Been carrying it for years, probably, only I didn’t know it. Didn’t want to find out.”

“Uh-huh.” Lee frowned.

“The thing is, at first you tell yourself, it’s not true, it’s just something they have in Haiti. You think, it can’t happen to me, I’m so young, so beautiful, so healthy and strong—But all the time I was sort of walking around in my sleep, killing people without knowing it, like some zombie in an old horror flick.”

“But you don’t know that,” Lee insisted. “You don’t know that you gave it to anybody.”

“No. But the odds are pretty damn good I gave it to somebody, just like somebody gave it to me. Sometimes I get really down. I tell myself, for a few years you were a murderer. You’ll burn in hell.” He laughed uneasily.

“Not if you’re sincerely repentant,” Lee said. “Isn’t that the rule for Christians?”

“I don’t know,” Jacko said. “Even now, when I think of some of the fantastic times I’ve had, I can’t make myself wish they’d never happened. Sometimes I think it was worth it, those years. That I was lucky to have been born when I was. The younger guys now, they’re all scared shitless, or else they’re really crazy and self-destructive.” He shook his head. “Well.” He stood up. “You’ll be there tomorrow,” he added with a slight upward inflection.

“Oh, sure,” Lee said. “Tommy made me furious sometimes, he was so opinionated and bossy. But he was a smart guy, and a damn good real estate agent. He found me this place; he helped me get a loan and start the business. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know if I’d have had the nerve.”

“You always had the nerve,” Jacko said. “All you needed was a little push. Come on, Marlene. Time for some lovely kibbles.”

Her back stiff under the white pique sundress, her hands hot and wet on the wheel, Jenny Walker drove toward Artemis Lodge. It was Tuesday afternoon, and she wasn’t supposed to be there until Wednesday morning, but she couldn’t wait any longer: she had to talk to Lee. Anyhow, she had to talk to someone, and Lee—so warm, so lovely, so unjudging—was the only possible person.

Since Sunday afternoon, when she saw her husband kissing Barbie Mumpson, Jenny had been in a state of confused misery, gradually deepening to despair. She’d planned to tell Lee about it the next day, but that had been impossible. When she got there Monday morning the place was crowded with people mourning and exclaiming over the death of a local real estate agent called Tommy Lewis, which was featured on the front page of the
Key West Citizen.
Even Jenny had been drawn into the conversation when she realized that he was the man in the wheelchair whom Wilkie had seen drown at Higgs Beach the day before.

According to Lee’s friends, it hadn’t been an accident at all. Tommy, who was terminally ill with
AIDS
and in constant pain, had deliberately released the brake on his wheelchair and steered it off the pier into ten feet of water. He was strapped in, so he couldn’t rise to the surface, and by the time the police and the ambulance arrived he was dead. Tommy’s friend Dennis had known what was coming, and just before it happened he went back to the car, pretending to be getting Tommy a sweater, so that nobody would suspect him of murder afterward.

If Wilkie were still Jenny’s trusted and beloved husband, she would have tried to remember all the details in order to relate them when she got home. But he hadn’t really spoken to her in weeks; and since she’d seen him kissing Barbie Mumpson, she was afraid to have him speak to her; afraid of what he might say.

For over twenty-five years, whenever she had a serious problem, Jenny had taken it to Wilkie. He would listen patiently, console her, advise her. After a while, what had seemed “really heavy,” as their son Billy put it, would begin to weigh less. Under Wilkie’s steady gaze the problem would lose substance, like a block of ice gradually melting into water and mist. What helped tremendously was that Wilkie looked at everything in a long-term perspective. Compared to global warming or the destruction of animal species, even awful things like the fatal illness of Jenny’s favorite aunt, or Billy’s flunking chemistry at Cornell, began to diminish and dissolve. Such events, Wilkie’s response suggested, were a natural part of life. They would pass; or they would not pass, but would be survived.

Now, though, Jenny couldn’t go to Wilkie with her pain and her problem; he was the problem. What she’d seen on Sunday had proved to her something she’d dreaded for months, but hadn’t wanted to know: that her marriage was probably over.

And now an unpleasant, long-forgotten incident from the early years of her marriage surfaced in Jenny’s mind, like an ugly catfish rising to the surface of a clear forest pool. It had occurred in Manhattan, when she was making conversation at a literary party with a nervous, goggle-eyed woman who claimed to be a close friend of Wilkie’s first wife. “I’m sorry for you,” this woman had whispered, or rather hissed. “You look like a nice girl. But you’d better watch out. He won’t stay with you either.”

After all these years of happiness the prediction, or curse, of the catfish woman was about to come true, Jenny thought. It was clear that Wilkie didn’t love her any longer—maybe didn’t even like her. She wasn’t sure yet that he loved Barbie Mumpson instead, because he had started being strange and cold and distant long before he’d met Barbie. Besides, how could someone as brilliant and serious as Wilkie love a ninny like Barbie?

But a lot of men did love women like that, Jenny thought. Sometimes even brilliant, famous men. She knew several who had left their wives for girls half their age, often silly blondes like Barbie—who was, Jenny recalled now, thirty-six, about half Wilkie’s age.

Of course not all men were that way. Jenny’s father, as far as she knew, had never run after stupid blondes. And Gerry Grass had said outright yesterday that girls like Barbie bored him. He knew the type: “art groupies,” he called them. In the sixties and seventies, he said, when he started appearing at political demonstrations and writers’ festivals, there were a lot of girls like that around. Most of them were totally uninteresting; they couldn’t tell one poem or one poet from another, and they had no real depth. They weren’t “grounded.”

Jenny had been glad to hear this, even if it possibly wasn’t relevant to her situation. She had felt grateful and warm toward Gerry, but she didn’t even want to see him now, because shortly after that he had become part of her problem.

At first, talking to Gerry in his disorderly apartment over the garage—or rather, listening to him, which was what men always wanted and needed—had been a relief and a diversion. She hadn’t of course told him what she’d just seen. Instead she had listened while Gerry read his poem about the heron, in which he imagined himself becoming the bird and soaring over the “blood-pulsing” ocean. She continued to listen when he went on to deplore the current condition of poetry and its audience. Even ten years ago, he said, he had real hopes for the literacy of our civilization. But now, though he tried to keep up his courage, telling himself that there must be readers out there somewhere, often his energy flagged.