by A Tan
"No. I happen to know how to pronounce it. One has to start somewhere."
"Let's swim."
After about ten minutes Meyer intercepted me fifty yards from the beach, to ask, "How come you could find that out and Harry can't?"
"I found the only person who might really know for sure, aside from the travel agent. A neighbor lady, who shows her good taste by disliking the hell out of Harry Broll. She thought for a while Harry sent me. I softened her up. She makes terrible coffee."
"Did Harry try to pry it out of her, too?"
"Yes. Nearly two weeks ago. With tears. Without the gun. But rough. She said she thought he was going to try to shake it out of her."
Meyer nodded and went gliding away, head up, in that powerful, slow, and tireless breaststroke that somehow makes me think of a seal when I see his head moving by.
When I came out of the water, he was sitting on his towel again, looking petulant, a rare mood for Meyer.
"Something bothering you?"
"Illogical actions and illogical emotions bother hell out of me, Travis. His wife had been gone over three months. How about checking accounts, credit cards?"
I explained about the trust account and her taking cash so that she couldn't be easily traced by her husband. He said he knew one friendly face in the trust department of Southern National, but of course it would be Monday before he could learn anything there.
"Why bother?" I asked him. "I'm satisfied. We know where she is. I don't give a damn how jittery Harry Broll gets."
We walked back across the bridge together, squinting toward the western sun setting into its usual broad band of whisky soup. "I guess it doesn't matter in any case," Meyer said.
"What doesn't matter?"
"What happens to anybody. Look at the cars, McGee. Look at the people in the cars, on the boats, on the beach, in the water. Everybody is heading toward their own obituary notice at precisely the same speed. Fat babies, and old women like lizards, and the beautiful young with long golden hair. And me and thee, McGee. At tick-tock speed moving straight, toward the grave, until all now living are as dead as if they had died in Ancient Rome. The only unknown, and that is a minor one, is how long will each individual travel at this unchanging, unchangeable pace?"
"Good God, Meyer! I was going to buy you dinner."
"Not today. This is not one of my good days. I think I'll open a can of something, go walking alone, fold up early. No need to poison somebody else's evening."
Away he trudged, not looking back. It happens sometimes. Not often. A curious gaiety, followed by bleak, black depression. It was a Meyer I seldom see and do not know at all.
Friday night. I took my time building a drink, showering, dressing, building a refill. Dark night by then, and a wind building up, so that the Flush moved uneasily, creaking and sighing against her lines, nudging at her fenders. I felt restless. I was wondering where to go, who to call, when Jillian came aboard.
She clung tightly and said she had been utterly miserable. She looked up at me with two perfect and effective tears caught in her lower lashes, her mouth quivering. The Townsend party had been desperately dull, really. She shouldn't have tried to force me to go. She shouldn't try to force me to do anything. She realized that now. She would not do it again, ever. Forgive me, Travis darling, please. I've been so lonely and so ashamed of myself etc., etc., etc.
Once forgiven, all the lights came on behind her eyes, and the tears were flicked away. Mood of holiday. She had been confident of reconciliation, she had brought hairbrush and toothbrush. And all the urgencies a girl could muster.
In the morning a rare April rain was coming down hard, thrashing at the ports beside the half acre of the captain's wrinkled and rumpled bed, bathing us in gray ten o'clock light.
"Is your friend in trouble?" she asked.
"Who?"
"That respectable married lady friend, of course."
"Oh. No, she's fine. It turns out she's hiding from her husband. She went down to Grenada."
She lifted her head. "Really? Henry and I went down there on the first really long cruise we took in the Jilly III. The Grenadines are one of the great sailing areas of the world. And the yacht basin at St. George's is really marvelous. You see people from everywhere, really. Yacht Services is very helpful."
"She's staying at the Spice Island Inn."
"Quite expensive. Is she alone down there?"
"Apparently."
"She can get into all kinds of delicious mischief if she wants. If she's even half attractive, she won't be lonely. The air is full of spice and perfume down there, dear. It's a fabulously erotic island. Always so warm and lazy, with the hot hot sun and the hills and jungles and the beaches. Quite near the equator, you know."
"I didn't know."
"Well, it is. Don't you think we should go there one day?"
"I guess so."
"You don't seem exactly overwhelmed with enthusiasm."
"Sorry."
"Are you going back to sleep, you wretch?"
"Not with you doing what you're doing."
"This? Oh, it's just a sort of reflex thing, I guess. Darling, if you're no longer worried about your friend, could we be ready to aim the Jilly toward home on Tuesday? I can get her provisioned on Monday."
"What? Oh, Tuesday. I guess so."
"You don't seem to keep track of what I'm saying.
"I guess I'm easily distracted."
"You're easily something else, too."
"What did you expect?"
"I expect, my dear, if we put our minds to it, we might make the Guinness Book of Records. Cozy? A nice rain always makes me very randy." After a moment she giggled.
"What's funny?"
"Oh, I was thinking I might decide we should go to Grenada during the rainy season, dear."
"Ho ho ho."
"Well... it amused me. When I feel this delicious, I laugh at practically anything. Sometimes at nothing at all."
The unusual cold front which had brought the rain ahead of it moved through late on Saturday afternoon. She went back to the Jilly III. She said she had a thousand things to do before we sailed on Tuesday. She said to come over on Sunday, sometime in the afternoon. She said I could bring along some of my clothes and toys then, if I wanted.
She left and I locked up again, hot showered, and fell into a deep sleep. I woke at ten on Saturday night, drank a gallon of water, ate half a pound of rat cheese, and dropped right back down into the pit.
I woke with a hell of a start at four on Sunday morning, and thought there was somebody coming aboard. Realized it had been something happening in a dream. Made a grab for what was left of the dream, but it was all gone too quickly. Almost a nightmare. It had pumped me so full of adrenaline there was no hope of going back to sleep. Heart bumped and banged. Legs felt shaky. I scrubbed a bad taste off my teeth, put on jeans and boat shoes and an old gray sweatshirt, and went out onto the deck.
A very silent night. No breeze. A fog so thick the nearer dock lights were haloed and the farther ones were a faint and milky pallor, beyond tangible gray. I could hear slow waves curl and thud against the sand. The craft on either side of the Flush were shrouded in the fog, half visible.
Meyer's gloomy message had been delivered none too soon. Everybody else had been tick-tocked to the grave, leaving one more trip to complete-mine. Then, far away, I heard a long screeeeee of tormented rubber and a deep and ugly thud with a small accompanying orchestration of jangles and tinkles. The thud had been mortal, tick-tocking some racing jackass into his satin-lined box, possibly along with the girl beside him or the surprised folk in the other car.
A few minutes later I heard the sirens, heard them stop at what seemed a plausible distance. So stop thinking about this and that, McGee, and think about what you don't want to think about, namely the lush future with the rich widow.
I climbed to the sun deck and went forward and slouched behind the wheel and propped my heels atop the instrument panel, ankles cros
sed.
That old honorary Cuban had simplified the question all to hell when he'd said that a moral act is something you feel good after. Conversely, you feel bad after an immoral act. But what about the act that is neither moral nor immoral, Papa? How are you supposed to feel then?
Look, we are very suited to each other. There is a lot of control either way on both sides, so timing is no problem at all. She pleases me. She knows how to intensify it. I like the textures and juices, spices and rhythms of her, all her tastes and tastings. We truly climb one hell of a hill, Papa, and when we fall off the far side together, it is truly one hell of a long fall, Papa, and we land truly and well and as zonked out as lovers can get. We laugh a lot. We like to hold each other afterward. We make bawdy jokes. She has a lot of body greed and finds me a satisfying stud. In her gratitude she takes a lot of extra effort to keep things varied and interesting. So?
There's this little problem. I go into the head, Papa, and look at this battered and skewed beachbum countenance of mine, reflected in the mirror, and my eyes look- dull, and my mouth looks slack, and I am wearing the remnants of a doggy little smirk. I know she is in there, a-sprawl on the bed, drifting in and out of her little love doze, and I look truly and well at myself in the mirror, and I do not feel good about anything or bad about anything. I just feel as if I had made one of those little diagonal lines you use to keep track. You know-four little vertical lines side by side and then the diagonal that crosses them out and ends the group.
In the mirror my nose looks too big, and my skin looks grainy. I wear the doggy little grin. The smells of her cling to my body. There is the feeling of marking something off on a long score sheet. Something well and truly done that will have to be well and truly done for whatever years we both have left, because that is the bargain. Chop that cotton, tote that bale, plow that little acre of God.
What about it when you don't feel good and you don't feel bad? When you just feel that it's done for this time and done reasonably well, and later on the slack dangle of flesh will turn tumescent, and it will and can be done again, just as well as the last time? With proficiency, determination, patience, understanding, power and skill. Isn't lovemaking as good a way as any to pass the time for the rest of your life? It tones the body, and it's acceptable exercise, and it makes two people feel good.
If I don't grasp the opportunity, somebody will find some quick and dirty way to let the sea air through my skull.
I'm overdue. That's what Meyer says, and that's what my gut says in a slow cold coil of tingling viscera. Overdue, and scared, and not ready for the end of it yet. The old bullfighters who have known the famous rings and famous breeds despise the little country corridas, because they know that if they do not quit, that is where they will die-and the bull that hooks their steaming guts out onto the sand will be a poor animal without class or distinction or style.
An animal as ordinary as Harry Broll.
I shifted position, dug the keys out of the pocket, and found the keyholes in the instrument panel. It is one of the tics of the boatman, turning on the juice without starting up, just to check fuel levels, battery charge. By leaning close, I could read the gauges in the pallid light.
Maybe it isn't just the woman. This woman. Or a passing of time. It is the awareness, perhaps, of the grasshopper years, of always pushing all the pleasure buttons. The justification was a spavined sense of mission, galumphing out to face the dragon's fiery breath. It had been a focus upon the torment of individuals to my own profit. Along with a disinterest in doing anything at all about all those greater inequities which affect most of us. Oh, I could note them and bitch about them and say somebody ought to do something. I could say it on my way to the beach or to the bed.
Who will know you were ever around, McGee? Or care?
Wait a minute! What am I supposed to be doing? Making up the slogan I shall paint on my placard and tote in the big parade? A parade is a group, and I'm not a group animal. I think a mob, no matter what it happens to be doing, is the lowest form of living thing, always steaming with potential murder. Several things I could write on my placard and then carry it all by myself down empty streets.
UP WITH LIFE.
STAMP OUT ALL SMALL AND LARGE INDIGNITIES.
LEAVE EVERYONE ALONE TO MAKE IT WITHOUT PRESSURE.
DOWN WITH HURTING.
LOWER THE STANDARD OF LIVING.
DO WITHOUT PLASTICS.
SMASH THE SERVOMECHANISMS.
STOP GRABBING.
SNUFF THE BREEZE AND HUG THE KIDS.
LOVE ALL LOVE.
HATE ALL HATE.
Carry my placard and whistle between my teeth and wink and smirk at the girls on the sidewalk watching the nut with his sign.
Am I supposed to go out with my brush and yellow soap and scrub clean the wide grimy world? If you can't change everything, why try to change any part of it, McGee?
The answer lit up in the foggy predawn morning, right over my head. A great big light bulb with glowing filaments, just like those old timey ones over in Boca Grande in the Edison place.
Because, you dumbass, when you stop scrubbing away at that tiny area you can reach, when you give up the illusion you are doing any good at all, then you start feeling like this. Jillian Brent-Archer is another name for giving up your fatuous, self-serving morality, and when you give it up, you feel grainy, studlike, secure, and that doggy little smirk becomes ineradicable.
You are never going to like yourself a hell of a lot, T. McGee, so what little liking you have must be conserved. To become Jilly's amiable useful houseguest and bedguest would turn you into something which you are not, yet have an uncomfortable tendency to become.
You retain the fragile self-respect by giving Them the increasingly good chance of ventilating your skull or scragging you through the heart. There have been some rotten little scenes with Ally but the next one will be the most memorable of all.
So Mary Broll is okay. And there is a good lump of cash money stashed behind the fake hull in the forward bilge of the Flush. But it would be a good time, a very good time, to go steaming out and find the plucked pigeon and clean up its little corner of the world by getting its feathers back-half of them, anyway. Get out there on the range and go down to the pits and stand up for a moment and see if they can pot you between the eyes. If they miss, maybe you'll get your nerve back, you tinhorn Gawain.
Eight
SUNDAY I did not feel up to facing the predictable fury of Lady Jillian. She wanted me aboard for drinks Monday evening. Time enough, I told myself.
Meyer came over to the Flush on Monday morning at about ten thirty. I was punishing myself for recent sensual excess by polishing some neglected brighiwork on the instrument panel, using some new miracle goop that was no more miraculous than the old miracle goop.
Without preamble he said, "I phoned the trust department of the Southern National Bank and Trust Company and told the girl to put me through to somebody who could give me a trust account number. When another girl answered, I said that my name was Forrester, and I was with Merrill Lynch. I said we had received a dividend which apparently should have been sent to Mrs. Harry Broll's trust account. I wanted to advise New York and mail the check along, and to prevent further confusion, I wanted the trust account number and the name of the trust officer handling that account. Mary Dillon Broll or Mrs. Harry Broll, 21 Blue Heron Lane, and so forth. She told me to hold, and in a minute or two she came back and said the number was TA 5391, and the trust officer was Mr Woodrow Willow."
"Interesting, but-"
"I asked her to put me through to Mr. Willow. When he came on the line I introduced myself correctly and told him that I was a personal friend of Mrs. Broll, and she had told me before going away on a trip that he handled her account TA 5391. He said that was correct. He sounded guarded. Properly so. I told him that Mrs. Broll had asked me to give her some advice regarding rephasing her accounts to provide a maximum income, as she anticipated some possible change in her pers
onal status."
"You are getting very crafty lately, Meyer."
"Please stop rubbing those damned dials and look at me. Thank you. He sounded huffy then and said they were perfectly competent to give all necessary investment advice. I told him I knew that and that was why I had called him. I certainly didn't want to usurp their authority and responsibility. I said I seldom make portfolio recommendations any more, only for old friends and at no fee, of course. I said that women often become confused about the way a trust account is set up. I said I understood she had discretion over it, that she could determine what she wanted bought and sold and so direct them. He said that was indeed the case. He sounded wistful, as if he wished it weren't true. I said that I had been trying to get in touch with her in order to clear my ideas with her before coming in to discuss them with him. I said her husband had been unable to help me. I said her house was closed, and her neighbors did not know where she had gone. I asked if he could help me. He said she had phoned him early in January and had come in and drawn out all the accumulated interest and dividends, a sizable amount, and told him she was going away for a month or six weeks. She did not know where. He said he wished he could help me."