Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  Thinking of money made the bottom fall out of his stomach, and made him feel sick and dizzy. There was a good chance no check would come on the fifteenth. And that increased the chance of Lorrie’s finding out sooner, instead of later, that the joint savings account was about three thousand smaller than she thought.

  He wished he could die, or disappear. Rub the magic lamp and disappear. Maybe the thing to do was clean out the account and go. Twenty-five hundred left. Go out to Oregon. Pick a new name. Make a new life. If Lorrie didn’t stop going dead every time he touched her, it would serve the bitch right. What did she expect a man to do? Go without? Forever?

  Maybe by now she was feeling sorry for the way she had acted when he had tried to show some affection. He went over to the phone and dialed the office number. No answer. The office phone extension rang in their apartment, so she wasn’t in either place. He sighed. She had probably made another trip up to Nurse Roberta’s place to tell her all her terrible problems and have another little session of tears and hugging.

  He drifted off to sleep and wakened with a start an hour later, with a bad taste in his mouth. He creaked big shoulders as he stretched, and then he tried the office number again.

  With equal measure of apprehension and indignation, he hurried down to the office. As he got there, he saw Lorrie unlocking the office door. Roberta Fish stood close behind her. They were laughing. When Lorrie turned as she pushed the door open, he saw that merry, rosy, dancing look on her face, a look he had not seen in several years. He knew exactly what it meant, and in his moment of realization, he knew that he had really known about it for some time, somewhere in the back of his head, hidden, inadmissible.

  That look was gone in an instant, and Lorrie said something in a quiet tone to Bobbie. They both looked at him in that way they had. Bobbie kissed Lorrie lightly on the cheek and patted her shoulder and then turned and swept by Julian on her way to the elevators. Julian came to within a fractional part of an impulse to club the nape of her neck with his big clenched fist, with all the strength he could muster. He knew the blow would have killed her. It shook him to have come so close. He leaned against the corridor wall, weak and sweaty, hands trembling, and in a little while he felt well enough to face Lorrie. He could hear her typewriter.

  He went into the office. She looked at him blandly enough and he said, “I know what’s been going on.”

  “So?”

  “Aren’t you going to even deny it, Lor?”

  “I happen to be sort of happy. In spite of you. I’m even kind of grateful to you. In a weird sort of way.”

  “What’s going to happen to us? What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Julian, for God’s sake, go fix a faucet washer. Go clean the pool. Go haul trash. There is absolutely nothing you can do about us, ever.”

  Ella was a life force of immeasurable strength. Her vitality was fueled by the heat of the summer sea beneath her. She sucked up the warm moist air from near the surface, whirled it high into towering clouds. Rain squalls radiated in all directions, billions of tons of rain, falling with a smashing awesome weight. From the clouds she spewed forth, tornadoes dipped down, spinning, ripping, smashing. She moved, advanced, threatened. She was a personage, reaching her deadly maturity, destined to die many many days in the future, much farther west, much farther above the equator.

  By Monday evening at six o’clock Ella’s approximated center was at 15 degrees north, 55 degrees west, approximately three hundred miles due east of Martinique. But so vast was the basic cloud-shape in its distinctive oval pattern, the leading edge of the main body of cloud was already blotting out Antigua and Guadeloupe. The aircraft had flown in and out of it. The instruments had been read, the data fed into the National Hurricane Center computers. Ella was a major hurricane, well-organized, of large size, with sustained winds of almost one hundred miles an hour, with an increase possible. One gust of a hundred and fifteen had already been measured at Saint Johns, Antigua, coming right after ten inches of rain had fallen in five hours.

  After the NOAA researchers aboard a 41-C four-engine turboprop had measured, within the eye and adjacent to it, water droplets, ice crystals, pressure gradients, wind speed and direction at various altitudes, with the stationary camera taking pictures of the changing values on the instrument panel, the track of the hurricane was plotted on the on-board computer and the results radioed to Miami for use in preparing the next advisory.

  Classified as a five on the Saffir-Simpson scale, Ella was confirmed as a major hurricane, one of the same size and intensity which in 1944 took a toll of seven hundred and ninety men, one hundred and forty-six aircraft and three ships of the U.S. Third Fleet in the Pacific. Ella was as dangerous as the one in 1789 in India which left twenty survivors out of a coastal population of twenty thousand where she came ashore, as impressive as the 1881 hurricane which killed three hundred thousand people in China and the one that drowned three hundred thousand more in Bangladesh in 1970. Ella was sister to Beulah, Celia, Carla, Hilda, Camille and Betsy, who had all come slamming into the upper Gulf Coast in the 1960s.

  The hurricane’s anatomy was powerful and complex. Heavy rain clouds rushed inward to be caught at the perimeter of the eye and there whirled upward in spiral pattern. As the clouds rose they became cooler, and as the water condensed as rain, it created and released heat. This heat made the air mass rise more rapidly, just as in a fire storm. This rapid elevation reduced the pressure and thus increased the size and scope and velocity of the input of the moisture-heavy cloud masses.

  Ella’s energy was the reverse of the energy of the sun. The sun had heated the tropic seas along the Intertropical Convergence Zone. It had expended great energy in the form of heat to turn the water of the sea into vapor. One part of volatile fuel such as gasoline will turn twenty parts of water into vapor by boiling it. Ella was now condensing twenty billion tons of water a day out of the cloud pattern. And so the energy released each day was equal to a billion tons of fuel. Air descending inside the eye—which was thirty-five miles wide and forty thousand feet deep—was cooler and dry. At the top of the cloud wall the air, after having shed all its contained moisture, was pumped away in anticyclonic pattern. Ella fed on an apparently endless supply of warm moist air from the vastness of the Atlantic, sending belts of heavy rain ever farther out in front of her, and to either side of her path.

  34

  SAM HARRISON WAS at a shady metal table by the pool at the Islander at nine on Tuesday morning. He had finished the tall chilled glass of fresh orange juice, and the scrambled eggs, sausage and grits, and Kitty had brought him his second pot of coffee. The table was in the shade of a giant sea grape, and his chair was positioned so that the Gulf breeze kept the small biting insects away. He wore brief turquoise swim pants and large, very dark sunglasses. He had taken a lot of sun in the past few days, putting such a deep burn atop his permanent tan that he was a heavy brown-red, with the body hair on his arms and legs bleached to a dynel white against the startling hue.

  As he turned back in the Athens Times Record to read once more the detailed report on Hurricane Ella, Kitty arrived with the plug-in phone. “At your service,” she said. “I wouldn’t want any guest to have to stand up and walk twenty feet, would I?”

  She plugged it into the receptacle in a post behind the table, lifted the receiver and handed it to him with an ironic little curtsy.

  “Sam Harrison,” he said.

  “Hi. Good morning!”

  “Morning, Barbara.”

  “They had to hunt you down, so I guess I didn’t get you up.”

  “I’m still about four time zones away from here. I can’t seem to get back on the track.”

  “I went down to Insta-Print yesterday at about four and checked to see if we’d get those reports today as they promised. They had a little trouble reducing the graphics to the right size, but they’ll be out this afternoon. I saw the covers. It should look very … authentic.”

  “And it now looks
as if people might have a little more interest in reading that stuff.”

  “I know. I know. Did you hear any news this morning?”

  “The Today Show at seven. It sounds as if Ella is really chewing up the islands down there.”

  “Sam, if she comes here, comes ashore here, I’ll feel as if we sort of caused it. Isn’t that silly?”

  “She wants to prove my point, you mean?”

  “Something like that. I don’t like to impose, but I try not to go out when Mrs. Schmidt isn’t here. Could you drive down and pick those fifty copies up at four o’clock today and bring them back here?”

  “No trouble at all.”

  “Payment is all arranged. They’ll be expecting you. You can sign them here and Gus can sign his cover memo, and we should be able to start distributing them.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you about four thirty, then.”

  As Kitty came to take the telephone away, the tall executive secretary from Birmingham moved in and sat at the table. Kitty glanced at her with thin-lipped disapproval. The executive secretary had rotated back to the white swimsuit. “Aren’t we important, though?” the girl said. “People darting about, bringing you telephones. Good morning, Sam darling.”

  “Good morning, Liz.”

  “About last night, I decided to forgive you. Isn’t that nice of me?”

  “What did I do to warrant the dispensation?”

  “Listen to him! I thought we were getting along beautifully last night. I thought we were both absolutely enchanting. And suddenly I looked around and you were gone. Men’s room, I thought. And waited and waited and waited. Maybe he got tight and went walking on the beach, I said to myself. I waited some more. I went looking for you. I called your place on the house phone. Nothing. You walked out on me, pal.”

  “Did I? I thought I said good night. Sorry.”

  She studied him. “You know, when I was seventeen and I became Miss Fork Lift, I didn’t think I’d ever have this kind of trouble.”

  “Trouble? I’m sorry. I felt restless. I went for a long walk down the beach. By the time I got back the bar was closed and all the people had gone to bed.”

  “All seven or nine of us. I forget the size of the group. I would have walked on the beach if that’s what you wanted.”

  “If I was rude, I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  She sighed. “Okay, fella. I win a lot, so I have to lose one here and there. Something went wrong with the chemistry.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, Liz.”

  She got up, smiling. “Nothing a good cry won’t cure. See you around, engineer.”

  She was good to look at as she walked away from him, and she was graceful as she ran three steps and took a flat racing dive into the pool. Sorry, lady, he thought, but I seem to have picked up a little something you might call emotional impotence. It seems that if it ain’t Mrs. Messenger, I don’t want it at all. She is even interfering with my normal healthy appetite, and she keeps waking me up now and then in the middle of the night. I don’t have a thing that your average pimpled wistful schoolboy isn’t familiar with. I am that round-headed kid, Charlie Brown, dreaming about the little redheaded girl. The trees keep eating my kites. I can’t pitch a strike to save my soul. If Barbara told me to go jump off a building, I would ask her which one.

  Snap out of it, Harrison, he told himself. You are heading into your middle years. You tried marriage once and it didn’t work out. Hell, you can’t even keep track of friends, much less a wife. And she is already married, and she is very rich. And lovely.

  Dr. Dewey Dromb made his morning rounds at his usual late hour at Athens Memorial. He had only three patients in the psychiatric wing as of that Tuesday morning. He had Mo Sinder’s teenage daughter, Kathy, who had gobbled down so many strange compounds and combinations she had scrambled her head and was just beginning to be able to separate hallucination from reality. He had the father of Fred Hildebert, the president of the Athens Bank and Trust Company, and he was beginning to be quite certain that the old man’s trouble was an irreversible senile dementia requiring permanent custodial care. The old man had been quite weak and feeble when his brain was functioning reasonably well, but now that he was (Freud forgive me) crazy as a bedbug, he had become very spry, agile and disconcertingly strong. After he had tried to assassinate the United Parcel Service delivery man, failing only because he had pulled both triggers simultaneously on his son’s shotgun, with the effect of blowing a hole in the porch roof and knocking himself down the steps into the shrubbery, he had trotted for six blocks before they could catch him. He told Dromb he’d overheard the nurses plotting to slip a cobra into his bed some night, and he wanted to be issued a snake bite kit, and he wanted a night lock for the inside of the door.

  Dewey Dromb saved Thelma Mensenkott for last, knowing she would be more rewarding this morning than his other two.

  Thelma was wearing a simple blue dress and sitting in a straight gray chair which was bolted through the rug to the steel floor, near the window. She had an open book in her lap, and when he came in she got up and closed the book and put it on the windowsill.

  “Sit down, Thelma. You look better today.”

  “I feel better, I think.”

  He sat on the foot of the bed and smiled at her. “Did you think about what I asked you to?”

  “Yes. I tried lots of different things. And … well … I’ve come up with an analogy that isn’t really exact, but I think it is as close as I’m going to be able to get.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Once when I was little I was running in the house when I wasn’t supposed to and I struck a table and a dish fell off and broke. It was a white dish with raised purple flowers on it. English pottery, in the family a long time. I wanted to hide the fact I’d broken it. I could hear them talking. They hadn’t heard the dish break. It landed on the rug and cracked in half. I took the two pieces to my room. I had some airplane glue and I thought I could mend it perfectly so that nobody would notice, at least not for a long time. But when I tried to stick it together I found that some little pieces were missing. It would not fit together well enough so that the joint would be inconspicuous. But I tried anyway, and that was stupid. It would have been better not to try at all, because they found the evidence of my trying to glue it, and that was deceit. So … that is the analogy.”

  “How does it relate to you?”

  “Can’t you see how it does?”

  “I think so. But I want to see how you feel about it.”

  “I … I am broken. I broke in half. I can mend myself, I think, but there will be little bits forever missing and people will see what a clumsy mending job it is.”

  “What if you were never broken at all? What if you were always in two pieces, and what happened was that you had your attention called to that fact?”

  “Oh?” She tilted her head slightly and frowned at the wall. He thought to himself that she was quite a handsome woman in repose. “I guess I’ve never felt whole … in the way that other people seem to be entities. Jack is such an integrated person. I’ve never been entirely sure of who I am, I guess.”

  “You do love your husband?”

  “Oh, yes! Very much. He is a very kind man.”

  “What would you most like to do with your life?”

  “Have children, but I can’t.”

  “Other than that.”

  “I think I would like to go back to school and study living things. Mammals. Botany. Marine creatures.”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  “Oh, I guess because Jack would probably think it a silly thing to do.”

  “Can you notice any physical changes since Friday that you think might be due to the medication?”

  “I get a kind of … excited anticipation, a joyous kind of breathlessness which comes and goes away very quickly. And there isn’t any reason at all for me to feel like that.”

  “Do you find it unpleasant?”

  “Not really. I feel f
lushed and my heart pounds, but not really.”

  “How did you sleep last night?”

  “Like death. I think I awoke in exactly the same position I went to sleep in. I don’t think I moved. Is there any reason why I can’t be home, taking these things?”

  “I want you to have time alone to think about yourself. I do not believe you have thought about yourself enough. You are dismayed by the thought you might be neurotic, self-involved. We are all self-involved, Thelma. Each of us is the only person we have any chance of ever getting to know, and if we avoid the self-knowledge, then we can become rather odd.”

  “Like me?”

  “I think you are complicated, but not odd. Not odd at all. I don’t want to send you home again just now because I think your husband takes up just a little bit too much of your time and attention when you are home.”

  Her face darkened suddenly, and her eyes narrowed. She hit her fist on the arm of the gray chair and said, “Sometimes I hate that arrogant little old shit! He makes me keep—” She stopped suddenly and put her fingertips across her mouth, eyes wide.

  “Say the rest of it, Thelma.”

  “Oh, no. My God. Where did that come from?”

  “From the other half of the broken dish?”

  “But I love him. I love him with all my heart.”

  “But you feel humiliated by him.”

  “Never!”

  “Thelma!”

  “I guess that … sometimes I sort of resent him.”

  “Because he wants both of you to live his life, as he has planned it?”

  “I hate that fucking building!”

  “Because …?”

  “It’s a place for dying! It’s a place to come to die!”

  “And you aren’t ready.”

  “Where did all that come from? My God, my mouth opens and I don’t know what is going to come out. You’re right, Doctor. I shouldn’t go home yet. I shouldn’t go home ever, maybe.”