Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  He was turned toward her. The windows were behind him. He marveled at the clarity and delicacy and beauty of her features, and ran his fingertips down her cheek.

  “You ever think of some other kind of work?”

  “Oh, sure. A few times. I learned hair, but there’s got to be more to life than standing on your sore feet while some woman yaps about her flower garden and her cocktail parties and her husband’s new Cadillac. I tried to be a model, but they want you to show up so early! I don’t know, Freddy. I like clothes and I like to watch the TV and I like to keep my tan going and I like to swim and I like presents and I like being cuddled. I like guys looking at me like you’re looking at me right now.”

  “What about later on?”

  “Being old? I’ve got that figured out. I’ve decided not to get old. I made up my mind.”

  “I’m going Saturday, but I’m coming back.”

  “More legal stuff?”

  “Not really. I want to come back and see you.”

  “For another whole week?”

  “Why not?”

  “Tell you what. I’ll make you a special annual rate, okay? Twenty big ones. Twenty thou.”

  “Darleen?”

  “Now, don’t look at me that way, okay? Don’t get that way with me, Freddy. You’re no fun when you get like that.”

  She flounced back away from his touch and lay on her back, flat, small chin up-pointed, eyes closed. He looked upon her, at the full delicate breasts slightly flattened by the weight of gravity, and banded by the narrow stripe of a paler tan. He studied with care the way the edges of the rib cage on either side of the diaphragm upthrust against the smooth deeper tan. An arm upflung revealed a scattering of dark stubble in the grainy pallor of her armpit. Her belly lifted and fell in the slowed tempo of her breathing. The gingery bush of pubic hair near the juncture of the two round firm thighs was just sparse enough to reveal the plump pale shape of her sex.

  Suddenly he saw, juxtaposed upon her fresh young image, the image of his mother in Intensive Care, in almost the same position, but with pipes and tubes and breathing equipment fastened to her in mysterious medical ways. She was shockingly old, her face like those ancient photographs of John D. Rockefeller, all of her slack face and in-sucked lips suspended from the high, hard, narrow bridge of the wasted nose.

  And I will be dead too, he thought. The image changed back to the resting warmth of the girl, and all of his response to her and to the thought of his own death was focused in the lengthening, thickening, hardening weight of his erection. He looked down at himself and saw how the rigidity moved slightly to each great thump of his heart. In a despair mixed strangely with a kind of dirty glee, he said to himself, I am lost. I am really and truly lost.

  Harlin Barker looked at his wife through the glass that separated him from Connie Mae’s cubicle in the cardiac intensive care section. He could see the screen beyond the head of her bed with the little green moving line on it, making a little sharp peak and valley every time her heart beat. He couldn’t hear the bleeping sound he knew it was making. Her color, he thought, was terrible. Green-gray, and her hair looked clotted and sweaty.

  Just when you think you’re getting things worked out, he thought. With Mrs. Twigg coming in to help me look after her. Think she’s coming along okay, and then this. Another little coronary and they took her out of Intensive Care after two days, back to the room, and I’m getting ready to take her home again, and now another one. In spite of all their darn medication, she has to go and have another one.

  He realized he was feeling angry toward Connie Mae, and he knew that was unjust and unloving. The poor darling couldn’t help it.

  After he saw her he went to find the woman who had phoned him at Golden Sands. She was in the hospital Accounts Office. Her name was Mrs. Partch. He sat in a small waiting room for twenty minutes leafing through tattered magazines about travel trailers and vans and motor homes, before she came to the door and called his name in a voice loud enough for a banquet hall. She was a tall big woman in a white blouse and a dark skirt, with her hair pulled back into a bun. There was a plastic badge pinned to her blouse: Mrs. A. A. Partch. She took him to a small cubicle and went behind her desk and opened the folder and leafed slowly through the accounts and forms contained therein. She had graceful elegant hands and long red fingernails. They danced on the keys of a minicomputer, and she wrote a figure in pencil on the margin of a buff-colored form.

  “I have word from the cardiac section your wife will be able to go back to regular service tomorrow.”

  “That’s great. I was trying to find out up there, but nobody seemed to know anything. That’s great.”

  “We have computed the time she has spent in the hospital for this illness, and I must advise you that six days from now the benefits will run out.”

  He stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know how I can say it more clearly, Mr. Barker. You will have to arrange for a transfer to a nursing home, or arrange nursing care for her at your home.”

  “She is a very sick woman!”

  “Mr. Barker, we must make decisions about very sick people every day of the year.”

  “Her doctor won’t want her to leave so quickly.”

  “If he wants to make a special presentation to the Care Committee in regards to lengthening her stay here, and if it is then approved, you can, of course, let her remain here, but all costs will be charged to you rather than to Medicare.”

  “Why?”

  “Mr. Barker, I told you why. Your benefits have run out.”

  “How can they run out? It is supposed to be … for medical catastrophes!”

  “Agreed. However, in the matter of specific illnesses, we must proceed according to the guidelines which are set up for us. We have no say in the matter. Suppose you came in here with a broken leg, without complications. After three days your benefits would run out.”

  “Mrs. Barker has had three coronaries.”

  “The heart condition is considered as a single illness, Mr. Barker. Your benefits will run out on the fourteenth of this month. We try to be cooperative. That is why we let you know in advance. So you can make arrangements.”

  “But what am I supposed to do with her?”

  “I cannot help you solve that problem. The hospital has adopted the same schedules as apply to the benefits you receive, with, of course, the doctor’s right to appeal to the Care Committee.”

  “I think he will.”

  “And I hope he will be successful, for your sake. I should advise you that when a patient’s status is changed from Medicare to Self-Pay, a new admissions procedure has to be gone through, and it is hospital policy to require a deposit of three hundred dollars at the time of admitting.”

  “Who sets up these guidelines?”

  “I understand it is mostly done by computer. They have data from all over the country regarding the recommended duration of hospitalization. You realize, of course, you can apply for and receive benefits applicable to a stay in a nursing home after she leaves here.”

  “But my wife has had three separate coronary occlusions. I can’t understand why you people—”

  “I have a busy schedule, Mr. Barker, and there are two people out there waiting to see me right now. I wish I could give you more time, but I have the feeling I would merely be repeating what I have already told you. By the way, here is the most recent billing for items not covered by Medicare: $158.50. Would it be convenient for you to pay at the window now? Do you have your checkbook with you?”

  “No.”

  “It is always wise to bring it with you when you come to this office, Mr. Barker. I hope everything works out for you and Mrs. Barker.”

  “According to the guidelines?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind.”

  He went down the corridor and around a corner and leaned against the wall. A woman came along, yanking a small child savagely, squalling at it, beati
ng it across the back of the head with her purse. The child was howling. Harlin Barker envied the kid. It could howl its heart out and stay in character. Old men were not supposed to.

  The next step was to locate Dr. Keebler, the heart man, and find out what was going on.

  Sam Harrison did forty slow laps in the warm water of the pool at the Islander, climbed out and toweled his head and face and shoulders, then pulled on, over his head, his blue and white Greek shirt to go into the cocktail lounge.

  The lounge was completely enclosed with glass, set at unexpected angles. Indoor and outdoor planting areas kept people from walking into it. There was a wide overhang. Reflections were in turn reflected from one big tinted expanse to the next, making all the hot bright world outside quite unreal, with high rises lifting out of the sea, and waves breaking white into the flowers, and people walking across the pool.

  Skip, the bartender, made the sour planters’ punch with exaggerated, ironic care, but dumping in the rum with that free hand one uses for the heavy tipper.

  “To your taste, sir? Your discriminating taste?”

  “Today it’s merely exquisite.”

  Skip leaned closer. “The three little ladies out there at the pool? They had their little knock at the bar while you were doing your forty laps. They are three executive secretaries from Birmingham, and I gather they would not be averse to your buying them a drink and going on from there, especially the tall one in the white. A nice laugh and a very nice build, as you can plainly see.”

  “Skip, you do take good care of me.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. This is a very straight place, you know. No hookers. With all the amateurs we get here, a hooker would starve. Like I am about to starve if the bar doesn’t pick up.”

  “Maybe some other time on that tall one.”

  “Beach-walking again today, sir?”

  “The way you keep track of me is making me nervous.”

  “I will say this. Whoever it is you do that beach-walking with, she does indeed make the tall one in white look like a vulture’s lunch. And that might be she in the misty distance right now. Spill your drink, sir? Let me mop that little bit right up.”

  Sam looked north up the beach. The reflections disoriented him. Then he saw the figure which might be Barbara Messenger. It looked like her good, swinging stride. White shorts and yellow halter top. A man’s ragged old straw hat from the Nassau market.

  He left money on the bar and went to meet her. Her smile was vivid with welcome under the shade of her straw brim.

  “Hi, Sam! You get all your laps in?”

  “Slowly, slowly. That’s the way I’m getting back into shape. Very very slowly.”

  “You look pretty solid.”

  “Pure deception.” He fell into stride with her. They walked barefoot on the damp hard sand. Sandpipers skittered ahead of them, took off, circled wide across the water to land behind them and continue their endless hungry hunting. Her yellow canvas beach bag was slung over a brown shoulder by its drawstring of heavy cotton rope strung through brass grommets. They walked south, past other motels, and into an area of newly killed fish washed up on shore, an area where the faint acridity of red tide tickled their throats. The beach was almost empty of people.

  She stopped and bent over to look more closely at a very large mullet, recently arrived, shiny and wet, and very dead. “Not a mark on him,” she said.

  “Paralysis. The dead bodies of the red tide organism give off a substance that paralyzes the gills.”

  “It seems like such a waste.”

  “It could be some kind of a cycle we don’t yet understand. A few million tons of fish die along the coast and float in on the tide into the estuaries and get tossed up into the mangrove roots. They lodge there and nourish the mangroves. The mangrove is the basis of the whole marine food chain. Red tide kills the predators in the bays and estuaries so that billions of minnows and baitfish live to grow up. A few years after a big red tide, fishing is great. And it would be a hell of a lot better if man didn’t bulldoze the mangroves out and put in seawalls for the storms to undermine and knock down.”

  As they walked on she gave him a mocking look. “An engineer talking ecology?”

  “I live in the world. I’m a pragmatist. Do this, and that happens. Do that, and this happens. Complex equations and interrelationships. If we were doing things right, the seas wouldn’t be turning rancid, and the air would never get to a hundred thousand particles per cubic centimeter.”

  They walked on until they came to the vacant land with the big fading signs advertising it for sale as an ideal place for a motel complex. There had been a stand of giant Australian pines on the seaward side of the lot, and a storm some years ago had taken a lot of them down. Water and sand and sun had bleached the wood almost white. They sat on a trunk in the shade of the remaining trees, where they had sat before, and she took the folder out of her bag and handed it to him.

  “That finishes it?” he asked.

  “The final eleven pages,” she said, handing him her pen.

  He used the folder as a writing surface braced against his thigh. He had learned to concentrate completely in a lot of the noisy places of the world, amid many distractions, but it took a special effort to block her out of his awareness and focus exclusively on the words he had written and which she had typed.

  “Didn’t I have hydrokinetical here?”

  “Let me see. Yes. You are using it as an adjective, and it sounds redundant, so I made it hydrokinetic. I can change it back.”

  “No. This is fine. I like it better.”

  He made extensive alterations on two of the pages and minor changes on one other page, all in the interest of clarity. She looked at the changes, then put the folder and the pen back into the beach bag.

  “I found a pretty good place,” she said. “It’s called Insta-Print. They can reduce the charts to eight and a half by eleven, no problem. And they can do the binding too. They showed me samples. Any hang-ups about color?”

  “Whatever you choose is fine.”

  “Do you want to sign every copy?”

  “I think it would be best to do it that way.”

  “Lee thinks so too. Well, if I can get it to Insta-Print before noon Friday, tomorrow, they’ll have it all ready by next Tuesday afternoon. That’s the …”

  “Thirteenth.”

  “And then we can drop it on the world, Sam.”

  “Just like dropping a piece of lint into a snowbank. Terrific impact.”

  She had the old hat off. She spun it around her finger and frowned at the marine horizon. She has such a look of lovely vitality in that bright shade, he thought. That strong throat, the good shoulders, the limber tan of midriff, the way that dark blond hair springs from the scalp like fine gold wire.

  “They won’t listen?”

  “Barbara, let’s say one person listens—aside from you and your husband and Gus—and that person gets out of Golden Sands in time, when a storm is coming, and gets to safe ground, only because Gus got nervous and got Mr. Messenger to finance a study, and Mr. Messenger decided to let the residents know.”

  “You mean is that enough return on the investment? Come on! You’re getting into kid games. If I push this button I get ten thousand dollars and ten thousand Bulgarians die. Do I push it or not? Okay, a life is valuable. Saving a life is a useful thing to do. But dropping lint into the snow doesn’t turn me on very much.”

  “You want a world view, historical perspective and so on?”

  “Try me.”

  “Suppose a hurricane does exactly what I say it can and probably will do. It is still a ripple. A little readjustment of the surface of the earth. Okay? Now try to comprehend what a major adjustment might be. Go to north Florida or to Louisiana, and dig a hole four miles straight down. Four miles! And at the bottom of the hole you might find hydrocarbons, and they would be the result of life forms of the past: forests, animals, marine creatures. Okay? Now try to comprehend the forces
involved, the fantastic upheavals plus the length of time involved to put living things four miles below what we recognize at this moment as the surface of the earth.”

  Her gray eyes were wide and she wore a dazed expression. “Good heavens, Sam!” she said faintly.

  “Drive down a dirt road squashing frogs, and it is a hell of a serious matter for the frogs. But if they wrote up a report and circulated it, saying that this was a dirt road and cars used it, and regardless of how delicious the mud puddles, they better hop the hell off it, how many would leave?”

  She laughed. “You are some variety of strange, sir.”

  “And you are some variation of lovely.”

  Her face went blank. “No,” she said. She stood up and put the hat on and slung the bag over her shoulder.

  He stood up and moved in front of her when she tried to turn away from him. He did not touch her. He said, “You said that the last time. No. Like that. One word. I take one hell of a lot of pleasure in your company. I think you like being with me. I like to watch you laugh. I like looking at you. I go past a certain line one tenth of an inch, and that’s what I get. No. Can you embellish that refusal just a little bit?”

  She stepped around him and started back. He caught up and walked in stride with her.

  “Embellish?” she said. She glanced at him with a brief smile. “My surface has been readjusted, Sam. If you dug down through my crust and went down four miles, you would find no evidence of any past life forms at all. I am a dead lady, floating in space. What there is left of me, Lee rescued. So what there is of me, he owns.”

  “I don’t want to dispute the ownership.”

  “So keep it impersonal.”

  “Even though we are both aware that it is personal, Barbara?”

  “Oh? Are we?”

  “Come on! Why are you so defensive?”