Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  “Maybe,” he whispered. “Maybe we will.”

  They would never have thought of this rejuvenation program back in Iowa. Hell, everybody knew them and knew just how old they were, and the kidding would have been without mercy.

  Maybe the reason here was because they were living in the middle of a gigantic throng of old old old old people. Once you started noticing, you couldn’t stop. A billion living tons of wrinkles and tremors and totterings. Of gray locks and swollen knuckles and shuffling footsteps. Of broken veins and naked skulls and grave marks. Of dentures and staleness and trifocals.

  What it did was make you damned conscious of the same attrition going on in yourself.

  But we are nowhere near as old as most of these retired people. I’m seven years away from Social Security, and Elda is nine away. No reason to hurry to catch up. The thing to do is go as far as you can in the opposite direction. Toward youthfulness.

  When he came out in his white tennis shorts, his Mexican sandals and his white T-shirt, still puffing slightly from his exertions with that tangle of plastic rope and pulleys which was melting his stomach down, Elda, in her terry robe, was fixing breakfast.

  He gave her a good-morning kiss on the temple and a good-morning pat on the rear and said, “Looks like a hot one.”

  “Paper says it’ll be ninety again. Who are you playing with?”

  “Lynn and me against Stan and Honey.”

  “Lynn again?”

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “I didn’t say it like anything. I just said, Lynn again?”

  “If you would learn to play …”

  “I have no intention of chasing a fuzzy ball around in this heat. I’ll be in the pool, thank you. And don’t get too exhausted. The Kelseys are coming here for bridge, remember?”

  “How did we get trapped into that?”

  “You asked them. That’s how.”

  “You are really in some great mood today, aren’t you?”

  She looked at him in genteel astonishment. “Me? I am in a perfectly good mood, in spite of not getting very much sleep.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular.”

  “You couldn’t sleep on account of nothing?”

  “You were thrashing and muttering and moaning most of the night.”

  “I seem to be dreaming a lot lately.”

  “Of Lynn Simmins?”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “What’s the matter? Too close to the mark?”

  “Lynn is the thirty-year-old daughter of two of the reasonably pleasant friends we’ve made down here, Mark and Edie Simmins. Colonel Simmins picked up bursitis in his right shoulder a couple of weeks ago. When he gets over it, he will partner his daughter. Until he gets over it, I will. She is pleasant to play tennis with.”

  “Anyone can see that. Anyone can see you really enjoy it.”

  “You got any butter for this?”

  “It’s off our list. There isn’t a drop of butter in the house.”

  “Okay. Well, I better get going.”

  “Don’t keep her waiting, for heaven’s sake. It’s okay if I sit here alone and eat. But don’t keep her waiting one single second.”

  He turned on the kitchen television. Barbara was asking a bald impatient guest one of her strangely lengthy questions. He fixed the color tones for Elda, got his sunglasses and his tennis hat and went down to claim the court.

  Loretta phoned Greg McKay at ten on Monday morning.

  “Are you in your office?” he asked. “Okay, let me call back.”

  She waited, fidgeting, fixing her mouth, clicking her lighter, chewing an end of her gleaming hair, scratching her thigh. When the phone rang and she was certain it was Greg, she said, “Where are you calling from?”

  “The private line in Mo Sinder’s office. He’s in Atlanta.”

  “Greg, it has been one hell of a long time.”

  “At one o’clock it will be fourteen days.”

  “I know.”

  “You made it pretty clear, Loretta. You made an ultimatum.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “I’ve been through hell.”

  “I can guess. All is forgiven?”

  “No. No way. Never. There was a pretty wild scene. It went on practically without a break for three days and nights. It went on right to the point of total physical and emotional exhaustion. She’s not very strong, you know. She has all kinds of allergies, et cetera. We just fought and fought and fought, until there was no fight left. We came right down to the bitter end of it when she sat in our living room and I sat beside her and she looked fifty years old. She looked at me and she said she was sorry but there was no way she could ever understand or forget or forgive what she saw. She said she had no love left for me. She said I was a stranger and would always be a stranger, so I better move out, or she would. So I moved out.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “In our apartment? Hey!”

  “I’m not in any mood to be cheery or funny or anything like that. I’m really down, Loretta. I really loved her. And she said that if I didn’t stop trying to put my arms around her, she was going to vomit.”

  “She’s a dreary little prude, honey.”

  “She’s a lovely sensitive woman.”

  The tone of his voice made the little warning sign flash in the back of Loretta’s brain: Mistake—Mistake—Mistake.

  “I really didn’t mean what I said, Greg. I … I guess I struck out at her and called her a prude because I feel, you know, kind of self-conscious about what she walked in on. That’s because I guess with us it has always been pretty much my idea, not yours. Any expression of love is totally okay in my book, no matter what it is, as long as it gives pleasure instead of pain, right?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I certainly will accept your analysis of Nancy as being a lovely, sensitive woman. And not at all aggressive. Okay?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Darling, regardless of how sensitive she is, you just can’t afford to let her hang-ups cheapen our relationship. You can’t start seeing us through her eyes, or she will have spoiled what we have together.”

  “What we have?”

  “I didn’t mean to make it sound like an ultimatum. I was frightened. I was confused. When I get like that, I come on too rough and say things I don’t mean.”

  “I parked by your office the other day trying to get up the nerve to come in. Then you came out, laughing away, talking with a couple of people, smiling. You looked pretty happy.”

  “That’s my act. I sell things. I’ve been desolate.”

  “Me too.”

  “I want to see you, Greg, because I need your advice. Two men came to see me about buying out my business. I named a very fat price and they went away and thought it over and came back with some earnest money. They want the name and the goodwill, and they want me to agree not to go into the same line of work anywhere in Palm County. I need your advice, and if we agree I should sell, then I’ll need your help drawing up a contract of sale.”

  “I’d be glad to …”

  “Where can I bring the papers and things?”

  He said ruefully, “It’s pretty easy nowadays, with me living at Golden Sands, Two-F. F for frolic, as you always say. It’s been pretty grim. I’ve been there … ten days. Don’t come by until maybe eight o’clock, Loretta. The place is a mess.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m so happy, darling.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “See you,” she said and hung up and leaned back and smiled up at her office ceiling. She looked at her watch. If she could get to the apartment by four o’clock, she should have it very very tidy by the time he came home from the office. Drinks all made, dinner ready for the oven, wine on ice. She had a mental image of herself bounding on all fours into the living room, carpet slippers in her teeth, and she laughed aloud.

  • • •
>
  Carlotta Churchbridge was in the pool by eleven in the morning, and when Henry went down to see how she was coming along, she was still churning slowly from end to end, doing what she had called in the early days of her English lessons, “the dog puddle.”

  When she saw him she came over to the ladder. She took his hand and he helped her out. She came out nimbly, and he was pleased with her small tidy brown body, her mid-sixties agilities.

  “They are too damn bloody far away!” she said, toweling herself.

  “What? Oh. Sure. Anchorage and Melbourne and Guadalajara. A scattering of grandbabies.”

  “I want to be hugging them. Ready to walk now?”

  “Okay,” he said. It seemed pleasant to be able to cross Beach Drive without that long delay for season traffic. There was not as much glare as usual. There were very high clouds hazing the sunlight. He tied the laces of his sneakers together and hung them over his shoulder so he could walk with her in the wash of the small waves.

  “Strange day,” she said. “The weather smells funny.”

  “Hurricane Ella.”

  “Now it’s a hurricane?”

  “According to the radio news at eleven. Sustained winds of eighty miles an hour, gusts to a hundred and ten.”

  She looked up at her tall husband sidelong, mockery in her dark eyes and in the expression on her weathered brown face. “Something worth being afraid of, eh?”

  “The real menace versus the imaginary menace.”

  “Where on earth does the man get those trousers?”

  “Eh? Oh, you mean C. Noble Winney. They are the trousers that go with his suit, of course.”

  He knew what she meant. Though broad and vast and flabby, Winney had gray trousers with a slight overall sheen which fit him so abundantly he wore the belt taut above the most prominent bulge of the belly, so that the belly made a rounded convexity of the fly area. They sagged in folds in the rear, and flapped about his legs as he walked. With the trousers went white shirts, dark ties, and suit coats always a little too small across the chest, but of the same silvery gray fabric.

  “I was too sleepy to listen last night,” she said. “Your friendship has ended?”

  “Our acquaintanceship. He wouldn’t let me back away without any explanation. He had to keep worrying at it. Why should a retired diplomat be afraid of the truth? Because one retires, that does not mean one should turn one’s brain off forever. I should be thinking of how much I could contribute to his study groups and work sessions, not how I could avoid them.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Yes indeed. Oh, boy. He wore such an earnest face. As you talk to him, his mouth makes little motions, trying to help you along. And he nods and nods as you talk. Somehow like an old nun. Like an old Mother Superior. Yes, that’s what it is. A kind of ecclesiastical fervor. The true believer. Nothing can shake his faith. I realized that just as I was about to hit him with logic. Logic would have been as effective as throwing marshmallows at a tank. So I said that I had studied his materials and I had given his discoveries and insights a great deal of thought. I said I had decided that when I had been in the Department, I had been asked to assume a certain amount of risk. I had to live up to my oath, and besides I was paid to do a job. But now, in my retirement, I did not feel that I wished to assume the risks he was asking me to assume.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “I said that as his influence spread, inevitably word of his activities would reach the ear of somebody who would feel it necessary to do something about him and his associates. I said it would be done cleverly and painlessly, of course. It would look like heart attacks and strokes and so on, so as not to create any publicity. Or any martyrs. I said that, from my experience, I thought it too great a risk to take, as I would prefer to live out my years in peace.”

  “You bastard, Enrique! You utter horrid bastard. You’ve terrified the poor hulk.”

  “Terrified him? My goodness, no! He couldn’t have been more delighted. I have reinforced his paranoia. I have verified his most foul suspicions. I have given him a credible object for his fears. I launched that idiot into euphoria. He held my hand in his large damp cold hands and shook it slowly for a long time as he kept telling me that he understood, that he would not press me further, that I had already given enough of my life to my country and on and on. He would respect my wishes and I would hear nothing more from him on these matters, ever.”

  She pounced upon a shell, examined it, found it flawed and threw it into the sea. She turned to look up at him. “It makes me wonder just how many times you have manipulated me?”

  “Physically? Let me make an estimate …”

  “No! You are an old sex fiend.”

  “Retired with honors,” he said. “I do not believe I have ever successfully conned you into anything since the day I conned you into marrying me.”

  “In frightful Spanish.”

  “The best of Berlitz.”

  “Now I am going to con you, Henry Iglesia-puente. Next month I will get the next payment from that estate of my dear dead sister’s father-in-law, and with it I wish to be taken to Guadalajara and to Melbourne and to Anchorage—in any order you choose.”

  “I swear upon the great gray stomach of C. Noble Winney that I shall arrange the trip and we shall go.”

  “And first you will finish your paper? Swear on the stomach.”

  “It doesn’t go all that well. It doesn’t march.”

  “What I’ve read marches dandy. Swear on the stomach.”

  “I do so swear.”

  “We’re past our marker, dear. More than a mile. We can turn around.”

  After David Dow, the treasurer of the Condominium Association, left the manager’s office at Golden Sands, Julian Higbee said angrily to Lorrie, “It doesn’t mean anything! An absolute minimum we can get along on? Work for the Association? Forget it, baby. I don’t want Gulfway Management sore at me for any reason.”

  “Mr. Dow is only working up—what did he call it?—a bare-bones budget. He was asking what if we’d work for them, what would we have to make. That’s all. They haven’t asked us yet.”

  “You didn’t have to answer any of those questions about what we make.”

  “What do we make anyway? Thursday is the fifteenth. You think a check will come? Mr. Sullivan, the girl said, is no longer with Gulfway. Mr. Gellroy is in charge. Mr. Gellroy is busy. Three calls and he won’t call back. Mr. Frank West is no longer at Investment Equities. The man in charge is a Mr. Milremo. And he doesn’t call back either. I don’t even know if we’ve got jobs and I can’t find out, and you don’t want me to even answer questions.” She stared at him. “Jesus Christ, Julian, the thing about you is you are so thick-headed, stubborn, damned dumb, sometimes I …” She shrugged hopelessly and started toward the office door to unlock it and take off the CLOSED sign.

  Julian caught her by the shoulders and pulled her back and turned her around. “Honey, it’s a big organization and they pay us good money, and if things go bad here, they’ll put us someplace else, some other condo, maybe over on the East Coast. We don’t want to rock any boats, right?”

  “Oh, shut up. Maybe they’ve gone broke like everybody else.”

  “You need cheering up,” he said, and pulled her close and began caressing her. In a little while he realized she was standing slack and unresponsive. He held her away and looked at her. “What’s with you?”

  She shook her hair away from her face and said, “You want to rape somebody, go find somebody that’ll put up a fight.”

  “Who said anything about rape?”

  “Who said it was ever anything else with you?”

  He pushed her away, made a mindless, wordless, howling sound of rage and frustration and went storming out.

  Because he happened to have on him a key to 5-E, the unit owned by Pastorelli and ready for furnished rental, and empty now for four months, he went there and turned the color set to a game show and stretched out on the couch.

 
It took anger a long time to fade. The worst mistake he had ever made, he realized, was setting up Bobbie Fish. How was he to have known in advance that Bobbie would become Lorrie’s best friend? They’d gotten very close. Lorrie had always wished she’d finished her nurse training. She liked to talk to Bobbie about nursing. And Bobbie acted as if Lorrie had saved her life, getting her off the sauce.

  The trouble was that with Bobbie hanging around the office and hanging around their apartment all the time, it was a constant reminder to Lorrie of his infidelity. Actually she didn’t seem as sore about the cheating as she was about how he had taken advantage of Roberta. She bought that crap about his forcing Roberta into it, and she was willing to believe that all the times Bobbie phoned trying to locate him, it was because she had been drinking.

  They had wept together and hugged and had somehow become best friends—a big dark-haired woman and a little one. He had tried to explain to Lorrie that Bobbie hadn’t really been forced, that she had only tried to make herself believe she had been forced in order to save her own face, that she had been so ready she had come in about a minute and a half after he got in, but Lorrie didn’t want to hear one word of criticism of her new best friend.

  It made him feel strange the way they would both look at him when he walked in and interrupted one of their long conversations. They would stop talking and giggling and both stare at him. Identical looks, cold and full of hate. No, not hate. Contempt. As if he had messed on the rug. They closed him out. Each one of them was down on him for what she thought he had done to the other one. Disliking him was part of their friendship. There was no possible way now for him to get a piece of ass from either one of them, and it was beginning to make him very jumpy. He wouldn’t have gotten into that situation with Lynn Simmins if it hadn’t been for Lorrie and Bobbie freezing him out.

  What did they expect him to do, anyway? Go up to the Sand Dollar Bar and buy it from one of Tom Shawn’s hookers? But that Darleen Moseby would certainly be worth the price from the look of her. Very choice. The only one he knew of at Golden Sands who ever got any of that was the Reverend Doctor Harmon Starf. Once a month Mary Starf had to fly up to Chicago for a meeting of the family corporation which was supposed to own lots and lots of coal and pipe lines, and one of the two nights she was gone, the Moseby girl would make a house call.