Last Resort (7 page)

“Yes, I remember. Howard drove over with a care package for you that first night.”

“He was so great about it. God, I miss him.”

“Yes,” Molly said a little tightly. She liked Gerry very much, but didn’t want to break down in front of him.

“You know, I haven’t run into you in New York lately,” Gerry remarked. “Do you ever go there now?”

“No, I haven’t been in years,” said Molly, who had once loved the city but now hated it. For her it was a city of death. Not only had Howard died there, but most of the people she had known in New York were also gone. Other editors and art directors were running the magazines that had published her drawings; if she went into the offices where she had once gossiped and laughed and drunk too much coffee and opened her portfolio, strangers would be sitting at the desks. Strangers would be living in all her friends’ apartments, and if she knocked on their doors they would not welcome her. The last time Molly went to the city she felt as if she had got into a parallel universe in which she did not exist and perhaps had never existed.

“I don’t like it much now,” Gerry said. “The place has become totally commercial. I’m glad we came here instead. And it was great to see the Walkers again. He’s a wonderful man, you know? And she’s a remarkable woman.” He helped himself to another chocolate meringue. “A real wife. I thought they didn’t make them anymore. Classically beautiful, well educated, intelligent, fantastic gourmet cook. And besides that, she keeps their accounts, drives the car, answers Wilkie’s letters, and does all his research. And whatever he believes, she just naturally goes along. For instance, I just found out she’s never had a fur coat, to protest animal rights.”

“Really?” Molly, who still owned two—an ancient but beautiful Brazilian otter and a rather frivolous but amusing ocelot, both now in storage—thought back. It was true, she had never seen Jenny in fur.

“And I would bet she’s totally faithful.” He paused, looking at Molly.

“Yes, I should suppose so,” she agreed.

“God, if I had a wife like her I could do anything.”

“Unfortunately, she’s taken,” Molly said, adding ice to her glass and voice. She remembered something that Howard once said about Gerry, that the only reason he’d never made it into the first rank of American poets was that he was a copycat. If someone he admired began writing sestinas or waterskiing or keeping a travel journal of a trip to Scandinavia, Gerry wanted to do it too.

“You know, I need someone like that,” Gerry confided. “The way it is now, my life is clogged up with errands. Sending out manuscripts, scheduling readings, phoning for plane reservations, packing and unpacking, balancing the checkbook, paying the mortgage, getting the computer fixed and the grass cut, going to the supermarket and the drugstore and the cleaners. It weighs you down.”

“Couldn’t your girlfriend do some of those things?” Molly inquired.

“Tiffany?” Gerry grinned. “Tiffany is worse than useless. Yesterday I was working on a new long poem, it was really going well, so I asked her to drive over to Fausto’s for milk and tea. She came back with condensed milk and powdered iced tea mix.” He laughed. “And then she said I should have gone myself if I was so goddamned fussy.”

“I thought she was rather nice,” Molly said. “Very cute, too.”

“Cute.” Gerry laughed again, less happily. “I’ve just about had it with cute.”

In the sunny, cluttered kitchen of Artemis Lodge, with its long scrubbed-pine table, comfortably sagging wicker sofa, bright feminist wall posters, and hotel-size blender, Lee Weiss was unpacking groceries from the Waterfront Market. She wore a brilliant fuchsia mumu appliquèed with large purple flowers, and was humming a country-western song: “Please Help Me, I’m Falling.”

There were five double rooms and a single in Artemis Lodge, four with private bath. From mid-December to mid-April they rented for from $100 to $150 a night, or $500 to $700 a week, continental breakfast included. During these months the guest house was almost always full. Even with taxes, insurance, laundry, cleaning, gardener, repairs, and a part-time desk clerk, Lee would have done well financially with only two-thirds occupancy. The only problem was that she kept reducing or even waiving the rent for friends or acquaintances, and sometimes for women she’d never met whom friends and acquaintances claimed were ill or in crisis and needed to be in a warm, relaxed place like Key West.

As she stripped the cellophane from three bunches of red and orange carnations, Lee heard the slam of the screen door and then rapid footsteps. It wasn’t the tentative approach of a customer, or the guest she expected for lunch in half an hour, but someone familiar with the house, and in a hurry, almost bounding down the hall toward her: Perry Jackson.

“Well, hi there,” she said—surprised, since it wasn’t his regular gardening day.

“Lee, darling, I had to come over, I’ve got the craziest news.” Jacko leaned against the kitchen door frame in faded cutoff jeans and a dark-green T-shirt, assuming a pose that might have been photographed for a fashion page. He was also fashionably thin: thinner than a month ago, before he had what he described as “a dumb nothing cold”—a cold that had caused much anxiety among his friends. “You won’t believe it.”

“Okay, I won’t.” She grinned and slammed the freezer on a quart of coconut ice cream. “Tell me anyhow.”

“Alvin’s left me his house.”

“Shit, really?”

“Really. I just had a call from his lawyer in Chicago.”

“Hey, that’s fantastic!” Lee laughed with pleasure. “You want something to drink? A beer?”

“Beer would be great.”

“You mean the whole place?” She popped open a can, which foamed up excitedly as if in sympathy. “Or just your cottage?”

“Everything. It was in his will, the lawyer read me part of it. ‘To Perry Jackson, the only man who ever really loved me for myself, I leave my property at 909 Hibiscus Street, Key West, Florida, and all the buildings and contents thereon.’”

“Wow.” Lee opened a beer for herself. “You know though, that’s kind of sad. What he said.”

“Yeah. I figure that’s how it is a lot of the time for rich people. They can’t believe anybody really likes them, specially if they’ve got nothing much else going for them.” Jacko ran one hand through his perfect dark curls.

“I guess so,” Lee agreed, thinking that in Alvin’s case this view might have been correct. “Anyhow, it’s great.” She put a carton of milk and two of half and half into the fridge.

“Yeah, but the truth is,” Jacko said after a moment, looking down and rotating his beer can.

“What?”

“The truth is, it makes me feel kind of crappy. I never loved Alvin, not the way he meant. I was impressed by him at first: I knew I was a lightweight, and he was so heavy in the world. So sure of himself, so much in control. If he wanted to go to Bermuda or somewhere, and there wasn’t a convenient flight, he’d charter a plane. I was blown over by how cool he was about things like that. And about being gay. And of course by all the sophisticated people he knew, the places he’d been. But even when we were first together he was hard to get on with sometimes, y’know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know,” she agreed, suppressing the impulse to say more, to use words like “self-centered,” and “crabby.”

“And then, later on, I was really pissed at him. When I quit law school and moved here I thought, wow, I’m set for life.” Jacko looked down, contemplating the little dark hole in the top of his beer can.

“Y’know, there’s advantages in loving an older man,” he continued. “I can’t say I didn’t see them. You skip all those years of dead-end start-up jobs, living in cheap apartments, opening cans of cheap chili. But there’s disadvantages too. His friends are all older; they think of you as a bimbo, and either they ignore you or make passes.”

“Mm,” Lee said.

“And then Alvin had so much money, much more than I realized at first. There was a lot of competition for my job, from younger and younger guys. So one day I was just, what do they call it, deaccessioned? Desized?”

“Downsized,” Lee said.

“What got to me was the way he acted when he came here afterward. If he was alone it was okay, but mostly he brought along some new boyfriend, and then it was like I was just the hired caretaker. You know. ‘We’re going out to dinner at Antonia’s now, could you clean up the bathroom and bedroom, please.’ I wouldn’t say anything, but I’d sulk, and curse them behind their backs.” Jacko sighed and shook his head. “And now all this property. I was thinking, maybe I shouldn’t take it.”

“For God’s sake,” Lee exclaimed. “Are you out of your mind? You made Alvin feel loved, that’s what counts. Anyhow, he wanted you to have the place. You’ve got to go along with that.”

“I guess so.” Jacko slid onto a kitchen stool. “But you know, by his lights, Alvin was decent to me. I always liked plants and gardening, so he hired me to keep the property up, do the landscaping and maintenance and repairs. He introduced me to friends who needed a gardener or a caretaker, and pretty soon I had plenty of customers. And he never asked for the cottage back; I’ve been living here for years rent free.”

“In exchange for the work you do on the place, you mean.”

“Well, yeah. You know Alvin, he liked to get everything cheap.”

“He was a tightwad,” Lee said.

“Yeah. But I owe him a lot. You can’t imagine how ignorant I was when we met. I’d never seen an opera, and I thought espresso was some kind of air freight. I’d been in two plays by Shakespeare in high school, and never knew he was bisexual. I was a dumb Oklahoma hick.”

“Really?” Lee said a little skeptically, setting two tomatoes on the window ledge to ripen.

“Really.” Jacko grinned. “Shit, you know, I can’t take it in yet. I figured what I’d probably get from Alvin’s lawyer was a letter telling me to vacate the cottage by the end of the month.” He laughed.

It was what Lee had expected too, knowing Alvin, but she did not say so. Instead she unpacked three dozen assorted croissants and brioche for her guests’ breakfasts and began wrapping them in plastic to keep fresh. “So what will you do with the property?” she asked. “You think you’ll sell the place, or part of it?”

Jacko shook his head. “No, what for? Anyhow, it could take up to a year to settle the estate, that’s what the lawyer said. After that—I don’t know. Just play it as it lays, I guess.” He drank again, set the can down. “The first thing I’m going to do is get rid of that hideous night-blooming cactus in the front yard.”

“Yeah?” An awkward, thorny, barren-looking gray-green vegetable monster, nearly eight feet tall, appeared in Lee’s mind. “You didn’t plant that yourself?”

“No way. I don’t see the point of something that’s ugly three hundred and sixty-four days a year. It came with the house. Alvin wouldn’t let me take it out, he had some kind of weird attachment to it.” He laughed. “And then I’m going to invite my mom down to visit, so I won’t have to go to Tulsa this spring.”

“Good idea,” Lee said. Jacko visited his mother twice a year, attempting (not always with success) to get into and out of town without seeing his other relatives, most of whom violently disapproved of him and his way of life. “I’d like to meet her.”

“Sure, we’ll fix it up. I just have to clear out one of the dressing rooms in the pool house and put in a bed.”

“Can’t she stay in the apartment over Alvin’s garage?”

“Not now. It’s rented to this famous poet from California. Gerald Grass, his name is.”

“Never heard of him,” said Lee, who, though she read sporadically but with enthusiasm in women’s literature, made no attempt to hear of any male poet.

“So you’re a property owner,” she added presently, putting a bag of jumbo shrimps and ice into the refrigerator.

“Will be, anyhow.” Jacko’s smile brightened, dimmed. “The only thing is ...

“Mm?”

“I wish I hadn’t been tested, that’s all. I’d be on cloud nine now.”

“Mm,” Lee repeated noncommittally. In her view, ignorance was never bliss. She visualized Jacko’s cloud, not as they are usually portrayed in art, but as she had seen them in the White Mountains: a thick pale-gray mist, blocking visibility. If it were me, I’d have taken the test soon as I could, she thought.

“Some of my pals think I should have had it done years ago,” Jacko said, demonstrating, as he sometimes did, an apparent ability to read minds. He looked away at the dry pods of the women’s tongue tree shaking in the breeze outside the window.

“Well, yeah. I can see that.”

“I can’t. I had a professor at the U of O who was always going on about how knowledge is power. But the way I figure it, with good news you ruin the surprise. And if it’s bad, why find out before you have to?”

“I’d like to know if there was bad news,” Lee said. “Nobody wants to live in a fog.”

Jacko shrugged, smiled slightly. It was not his habit to contradict anyone. “Could be,” he said vaguely. “Anyhow, it could be worse. I could be twenty.”

“I guess that’s so,” Lee said, frowning, thinking of kids she knew around town who were twenty, or not much more, and already ill or, in one case, dead.

“The way it is now, by the time I go, I’d be finished anyhow. Once you hit forty, forty-five, it’s over, even for me.”

“Over, that’s crazy,” Lee protested. “Hell, I’m fifty-two; my life isn’t over, not by a long shot.”

“Yeah, but I want to be remembered as young and beautiful.” Jacko grinned casually, as if he were kidding. “I don’t want to watch myself turn into an old queen, going to bars and cruising the young guys. People saying, You won’t believe it, but he used to be really hot. I don’t want to turn into a sick, ugly old man like Alvin. And mean. I’d be mean.”

“Aw, come on, Jacko,” Lee said, laughing. “You could never be mean; it’s not in you.”

“Listen,” he told her. “If I was old and sick and ugly, I’d be mean, you’d better believe it.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not going to hang around till I’m like poor Tommy Lewis, shoved along the street in a wheelchair, hooked up to a breathing machine. Soon as I know it’s over for me, I’m out of here.” He smiled easily. “So how’s business?”

“Good. Full up. I lost two more flamingo beach towels yesterday, that’s all. It was those women from Southampton in the big balcony room.”