The Beach Girls

by John D. MacDonald

  “Sit down and let me tell you something that happened a long time ago to Marty. Sim and Marty were both wild crazy kids.” Leo sat beside me. “Marty was eighteen. He got interested in Mary Lee. She was, and is, a beauty. A rough, mean character—he’s now up in Raiford for armed robbery—was interested in Mary Lee, but she wanted no part of him. The rough type and three of his buddies cornered Marty one night and took him out behind a drive-in and gave him a horrible beating. He marked every one of them, but there were too many. When he was helpless, they picked him up and backed him up against the building. Two of them held him there. The one that’s now in Raiford, pulled his fist back, saying he was going to give Marty a face Mary Lee would get sick to her stomach if she looked at. ‘You better kill me,’ Marty mumbled. With his fist still back, the other boy said, ‘What you mean?’ Marty lifted his chin off his chest and he stared at that boy with his one good eye. ‘A beating is okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take that. But I won’t take this.’ ‘How can you stop it?’ ‘I can’t. But when I get well, I’m coming after you. And I’m going to kill every one of you. No matter where you go. No matter what you do. You do this to me and I live, you’re dead. So you better kill me right now.’

  “One of the boys who helped do it told me about it. He said it changed his whole life right there, with that one blue eye blazing at him. In a little while the leader dropped his fist. They let go of Marty and he fell down. And they walked away fast and left him there and they didn’t mess with him again.”

  Leo was silent for a long time. Then he said softly, “The pride and the dignity of the individual. It’s the kind of pride that refuses to accept humiliation. It’s that tired but, damn it, powerful old credo. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. It was that same thing in Marty that caused the Hungarian rebellion, and will make it happen again one day.”

  “I agree.”

  He shifted on the bench. “But suppose you’ve run out of pride, Christy? Suppose you had it once, and thought you still had it, but when you looked you found it had disappeared?”

  “I think it’s time you talked to me, Leo.”

  “I—I don’t think so.”

  “If it wasn’t time, you wouldn’t have said what you just said.”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to see how empty I am.”

  “I’m glad you’re that concerned about what I think.”

  “I’m suddenly surprised to find out how much I care.” His tone became lighter. “Must be something insidious about you.”

  “I’m insidious, and I’m ravenous. Old Bessie is gassed and ready, and I know a place where they don’t care how you’re dressed while you eat their big juicy charcoal-broiled steaks.”

  He drove old Bessie, my shambling Chevrolet. In a weak moment, a year ago, I had her painted shocking pink. She wears this brave hue with the somewhat shamefaced manner of an alley cat wearing a satin bow. When I park her, I half expect her to sidle over to a lamp post and try to rub it off.

  I directed him to a steak house nine miles down A-1-A. No music, no tablecloths, no lighting effects, and chipped china a good half inch thick. Sawdust on the floor, and big bandanas for napkins. But the service is fast, the steak tender, the knives sharp, the drinks generous. We had a brace of Martinis while they were broiling our sirloins, an utter lack of conversation after they arrived, sizzling, and then a period of recuperation over a pair of stingers. As though we had made some mutual agreement, the conversation stayed feather-light. We made up signs to put in Bessie’s rear window. Our favorite was Help Stamp Out Togetherness, which was Leo’s contribution.

  Once, just after we knocked ourselves out laughing at something or other, he said, “Christy, you’re so damn comfortable to be with.”

  “A good old shoe,” I said, unconsciously making one of my faces.

  “Stop mugging!” he snapped. “It makes me feel like an audience. When you do that it’s like slamming a door in my face.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just forgot.”

  “Not an old shoe. That isn’t what I mean. I mean the absence of Thurber’s war between the sexes.”

  “I’m neuter?”

  “Hardly. And stop twisting my profundities, Miss Yale. I don’t have to think before I speak. I find that refreshing. I have the feeling you actually listen when I talk. That too, is refreshing. And when you talk, that zany outlook of yours casts a special illumination on very ordinary things.”

  “Joe says I have a special awareness for the ridiculous.”

  “Joe is right. And it does me good, more good than I can tell you, to be out with a young girl and laugh with a young girl.”

  I looked at him demurely. “Golly, it’s so wonderful to bring a little sunshine into the life of such a dear old gramps. Gee whiz, imagine being out with a man old enough to be my father, I mean if you were pretty precocious when you were ten years old. I think it’s just so wonderful I didn’t have to push your wheelchair in here. And you hardly tremble a bit. I’m glad you made me leave my dolly and my bubblegum out in the car, Gramps.”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” he said. “I take it back.”

  “Let’s roll it, Father Time.”

  We drove slowly back. Somehow it had gotten to be eleven, and we marveled at that. Half a moon was doing a dandy silver job on the beach. Even the late neon, in all its candy colors, was pretty. I do not know precisely when his mood changed, when the lightness was gone out of him. But I suddenly realized I was making my jokes to an audience of one. Me. So I subsided.

  D Dock had been folded up and put away for the night. There were only the dock lights, and the lights on Sid Stark’s boat, and a light on Orbie’s Mine. If Sid was having a party, it was an intimate one. We paused by the Shifless and, conscious of the people sleeping around us, made in soft voices the little awkward sounds of parting. Like saying, “Well … well … well now.”

  He said, “I could offer a niggardly amount of bad brandy, what’s left in the bottom of the bottle. Or a tepid beer, on account of Billy forgot to bring my ice.”

  “Myself, I’m a drinking woman,” I said, knowing full well that it was just one of those automatic invitations that you make, expecting them to be refused. But I didn’t want an end to the evening.

  So we walked out toward the end of the dock and went aboard the Ruthless. “Odd name for a boat,” I said.

  “They told me the previous owner bought it to celebrate his divorce.”

  “Corny name for a boat.”

  “Then he remarried her.”

  “And had to sell, of course.”

  We sat on either side of the small hinged table opposite the galley and sipped the brandy, which was almost as bad as he said it was, out of coffee cups. Things were pretty forced. We’d lost the flavor of the evening. I planned to take off as soon as I could swallow what he’d poured me.

  “Another thing, Christy,” he said suddenly, and the quality of his voice changed it all back again, back to intimacy.

  “What?”

  “You don’t push. You don’t keep digging for the answer to the question you were asking before we left here.”

  “It doesn’t mean I gave up.”

  “Will you listen? Now?”

  “Yes, Leo. Yes.”

  Suddenly his ugly-nice face twisted into a mask of such special, personal, private agony, that I felt myself the intruder I was.

  “The name is not Leo Rice,” he said. “It’s Leo Harrison.”

  I wasn’t very quick. I guess I stared at him blankly. He had stopped talking and was watching me, so it was supposed to mean something. And suddenly it did. Rigsby and the woman and the suicide. The poor driven bastard. My throat closed up, and tears suddenly ran out of these jack-o-lantern eyes and down this urchin face.

  “Oh, my darling!” I whispered.

  He stopped looking at me then. He looked down into his empty cup, his arms heavy on the table, and he told me about all of it. The words were narrative—factual and objective as any case
history. With the logical quality of his mind, he made it consecutive, not finding it necessary to go back and fill in things he missed. All the emotion was in the timbre of his voice, in the way the words would tumble, and then come one by one, with difficulty. When he had finished—and I had sat so utterly still I felt numbed—there didn’t seem to be anything to say.

  He looked at me then, and tried to smile. “I was a damn fool. You’re wise enough to see that. If I could have been one of those nine to five boys, none of it would have happened. Seven to eleven, six and seven days a week. The big rationalization I was doing it for her. But I wasn’t. I was doing it for myself, to prove I could climb up above the timberline, up into stock-option country, fat bonus country. My picture in trade journals. I advised Congressional committees. I’ve been mentioned in Time and Newsweek. Isn’t that overwhelming? While I was pumping up my ego, I gradually lost my wife without realizing it was happening. I had made a fallacious evaluation of which part of my life was more important.”

  “She was ambitious for you?”

  “Yes. More so in the beginning. And indifferent at the end.”

  “So wasn’t it her decision too, Leo?”

  “In a sense, but I don’t want to rationalize that.”

  “You’re very severe with yourself.”

  “Justifiably, Christy.”

  I looked at him. A human in misery. I shook my head slowly. “Why did you come down here?”

  “Now I don’t know. To look at him, talk to him, make him say something about her. And he did. Masochism, maybe. Making the hurt worse. I’m wondering if I can kill him.”

  “Can you?”

  “I don’t know. And anything less seems so—damn trivial. Expose myself and cry, I am the husband of the woman you betrayed, sirrah! Put up your hands. A schoolyard sequence at best. Even if I could whip him, which doesn’t seem very likely. I can’t imagine getting much satisfaction out of it.”

  “Which is a sign of your maturity.”

  “Death is less trivial.”

  “He ought to be put out of circulation, Leo. I’ll go along with that. It’s a problem any stock breeder would know how to handle.”

  It startled him. “That’s pretty direct.”

  “Oh, we females are primitive. If you’d ever been captured by Indians, you’d know all about us.”

  “I want you to understand that I don’t blame Lucille. It hurt. I admit that. Had she lived and had I found out about it, I would probably have become a tragic suffering figure. There is no stuffed shirt like the betrayed husband who has been entirely faithful.”

  “Entirely?”

  He smiled. “In deed, if not in thought. I’ve thought a lot about myself lately, trying to find out what sort of man I am. In all the years of marriage I didn’t slip once. And I felt smug about it. And righteous. It is a deviation from the cultural norm.”

  “Oh, yes indeed.”

  “Now I know what it was. I felt guilt about how little time I gave my marriage. So I could always say to myself, in excuse, Well I may work till midnight, but at least I haven’t done that to her.”

  “Leo, I would have thought that after this happened, you would have just worked harder than before.”

  “I tried that. But there was no pleasure in accomplishment. None. I finally engineered a ticklish merger, one I’d been struggling with a long time. And when we got S.E.C. approval and the final papers were signed, it didn’t mean a thing. All the juice had gone out of it. They think I’m coming back. I won’t go back, Christy, no matter what happens. I’ll have to go back to clean up personal matters, the house and all, but no more than that.”

  “Can you just—quit?”

  “It won’t be a popular decision. There’ll be pressure. Financially I can. I’ve exercised my stock options. It’s more growth than income. I could sell out, take my capital gains, and reinvest in income stuff. I’ve set up a trust for the boys. I can live carefully. But I can’t go back to that. Every day I’d be totally aware of what it had cost me. You see, she wasn’t a weak woman, Christy. But she wasn’t one of those women who can divert all her warmth toward her kids. A man’s woman. And I gutted her. I deprived her of the most valid reason for her existence. So she was restless and searching for something she couldn’t name. Vulnerable as hell. So Rigsby took away from her the only thing she had left—pride and dignity. He killed her. And I don’t think I can return the favor.”

  And he began to break. Part of it was the reaction to telling me. His face began to come apart. Sometimes there have to be arms around you. I slid quickly around and gave him the arms he needed. I pulled his head into the hollow of my throat, made comforting noises. The sob of an adult male can be grotesque comedy. Red Skelton uses it sometimes. But the sob of a strong man, with a reason to sob, is a thing that can shake you all the way down to the cellar of your heart.

  He had one arm around me as I held him. And his arm was strong. There were two lights on. I was able to reach up and click off the stronger one. I wanted all his unshed tears. I wanted to be a great deep pillow for his grief. I felt him fighting it, and wished he wouldn’t, but knew it was part of him to fight it. When he sat up again, I didn’t want him to go. His arm was still around me, and he put his mouth down upon mine, upon this clown mouth, this girl and a half mouth, in tenderness, in gratitude. But it lasted just long enough so that something else was added to it.

  He kissed me again, and it was mostly something else, his mouth hardening as mine softened, with breathing quickening and my arms growing strong as I tried to curve myself against him as close as I wanted to be, and could not manage in that cramped little space, where the edge of the table cut sharply into my waist. It became a little blindness for us, groping and gasping, bruising our lips.

  He released me abruptly and we moved apart like guilty children. “I didn’t plan anything like that,” he said, looking at me with a perturbing wonder.

  “Oh, I cooked it all up, dear,” I said. “When you told me you were rich, I couldn’t help myself.”

  His smile was slow. “And I know better than that, too.”

  “I can make some phrases. What could we have been thinking of? It shall never happen again, sir. We were carried away by proximity. We must control ourselves. It was the animal in us, Gramps. And I better go home.”

  “The last phrase is the good one,” he said. “Get me aroused and no telling how bestial I might become.”

  I stood up in the narrow aisle. He got up behind me. I started to put one foot on the two steps that would take me topside. And suddenly there was a bold explosion in my heart. I turned and looked at him. I felt as if my hands were the size of bait pails and I didn’t know what to do with them. The dim light helped.

  “Leo …” I said, my voice more of a croak than usual.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m all hoyden all of a sudden. A bawd. A loose wench. Leo, no claims, no recriminations. I swear. Cross my heart. I mean if you could want to, I want to.” I was prattling and I couldn’t stop. “I’m terribly out of practice, and my underwear is mended, but it’s span clean. We can make out like it never happened, if we try, but I want a chance to make out like it never happened. And before I can do that, it has to happen, doesn’t it.”

  “If I could want to!” he said. “Good God! It isn’t that, but I don’t—”

  So I rushed him. I ran thump into his chest and found his mouth with mine at the first plunge. I nearly dropped him onto his back. Christy, the demure type. I found I could fit against him much more pleasantly than in the booth but by then, of course, that much closeness wasn’t enough either. After we got into the forward cabin I started prattling again, my voice squeaking with nervousness, saying how it was a tiresome thing for a girl who wanted to be slipping sleekly out of silks and laces to have to struggle with a dang pair of bluejean shorts and an old yellow T shirt which I adored even though I know yellow is the wrong color for me, because it makes me look sort of green in the face, and …
>
  He put a firm and gentle hand over my mouth and when he took it away, I could keep from talking. He helped me off with what my shaking hands hadn’t been able to manage. He got me into the bunk and I was shivering, and I got a twitch in the muscle of the calf of my right leg so that the whole leg kept leaping about like a mackerel in the bottom of a skiff. Christy, the great courtesan. He held me gently and patiently until the shivering stopped and the little motor in my leg ran down. Then he kissed me.

  I don’t know how it was. I’ve got the weirdest sort of memory. I know the lyrics of a hundred songs, and a lot of them are not terribly nice, but what else goes with my laryngical croak? I can remember the pictures in my first reader, clear as clear. But when the big things happen, my mind seems to be turned off.

  I do know that for a while it was two living things. And it became one entity, with no more thee and me, or thine and mine. And it had the feeling of being meant to be that way, as if there was something forlorn and drab about being just one separate thing by yourself all alone. And I felt that all of me had been combined. All the layers of self, so separate, were stirred into one broth, and so I was able to be present at that time and place in a way I had never been present before. A supra-awareness, and good because all the selves were for giving, not taking.

  I can’t avoid using some of those silly, overworked, sappy words. So I have to say some of it was tender and some of it was savage, some of it was sweet and some of it was fierce as growling.

  I am supposed to have a good imagination. And I’ve read the analogies they write where they compare the end of it to the sea, or music or fireworks or the earth shaking and so on. But it wasn’t like that. I felt proud that it was so good, and then it became better and then it became incredibly better, and when I knew there was no enduring it, it suddenly swooped up so high that I was beyond any place where I could sort out comparisons about the sea and aerial bombs and so on. It was just a gigantic, indescribable, prolonged something that was happening to me, so important that I didn’t even know my own name, or what I was, or where I was.