Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “Kyle said she couldn’t be happier for him.” Marse pulled at the top of her dress, smoothing it out. “I’m too old to be a bridesmaid. I’m too old to have other people pick out my clothes.” She wore a garnet-colored, strapless organza dress with a sheer, cream-colored slip that showed at the hem, and a ribbon of the same color around the waist. I thought the outfit was pretty, but it didn’t agree with Marse, who was more comfortable in a fitted suit or a short tailored dress.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Done.”

  “It might even fit me now,” I said.

  “You look good. I’ve been meaning to mention it.”

  I was wearing a dress I’d bought more than a year earlier but had never worn, because it had never fit right. It was a black-and-white plaid taffeta sheath with a low neckline. It hit just below my knees. Truth be told, I didn’t think it was dressy enough for a wedding, but I’d wanted to wear it—it finally looked good on me, after all—so I’d added patent leather pumps and jangly crystal earrings and swept my hair up. “It’s the tennis,” I said.

  I knew it was hard on Marse, going to wedding after wedding, year after year. At some point the weddings had tapered off—when we were about thirty, I suppose—but a decade later the divorces had started, and then the second marriages. In the meantime, Marse had dated a dozen handsome, emotionally unavailable men. I didn’t think she wanted to get married per se, but she wanted something. “What’s happening with that guy?” I said, thinking of Ted, the boat salesman.

  “Nothing. Over.”

  “Do you want to get some air?”

  “Lord, yes.”

  I scanned the room for Dennis and saw that he was talking to Julia. I caught his eye and waved as we went out. At some point since the brief wedding service, it had started to rain. We stood under an awning in front of the hotel among guests who had come outside to have the valet get their cars. “Don’t we all look handsome,” mumbled Marse. She turned to me. “You’ve been absent lately. Is it possible you’re playing that much tennis?”

  “I know. I don’t know what it is.” In the past week, I’d baked two loaves of bread and taken a nap every day. I’d been to the grocery store three times and painted two bookshelves that had been in the guest room since we’d moved into the house. They had been white, and now they were yellow. It was a modest change, but it made me happy—if not because they now matched the wallpaper, then because painting them had been on my list for so long and now was done. I hadn’t been to practice since the day at the beach with Jack, but I’d planned to return the following Wednesday and pretend nothing had ever happened.

  “I thought with Margo gone you’d be a pain in my neck. How is she?”

  “Fine. Apparently starting a new semester involves a lot of parties,” I said. “She’s enrolled in a class called Harbingers of Evil in Postmodern Literature. I keep meaning to ask for a copy of the syllabus. I could be one of those mothers who reads along with her child’s class.” A woman left the hotel and stepped into a black Lincoln, turning to wave as she did. I waved back. “Is that Eleanor Everest?” I said to Marse.

  “Oh, God, I know—they botched her face-lift.” One of Eleanor’s cheeks drooped considerably, and the eyelid on the same side drooped as well, as if she’d been stuck with something and deflated. “She’s going to that guy in Naples to fix it, but they can’t get her in for six months. You’d think this would qualify as an emergency.”

  “How did you hear all this?”

  She waved a hand. “Around.” Marse’s social life had always been a bit of a mystery to me. When she was with me, when she picked me up in her Wrangler and we ran out to Dadeland mall or she came over with a movie (usually a movie she’d seen and wanted me to see), or we took her boat to Stiltsville to watch the sunset, then came back to my house to make dinner—during these times, she referred to the activities that comprised her week, often mentioning people I knew casually or men she’d dated and broken up with before I’d even heard about it. Mostly, though, she remained close with people I considered acquaintances, women from our days in the Junior League, people whose families her family had known for decades. In so many ways, Miami was a small town.

  Did I think Marse had made a mistake, staying single? Did she?

  When Marcus Beck had first left Kathleen, Marse and I had gone to Kathleen’s new condo for dinner, and Marse had asked her more or less the same question. “Do you miss him?” she’d said, and before I could stammer a protest—Marcus had left her, after twenty years together—Marse cut me off. “Let her answer,” she’d said, and Kathleen had nodded. “I wouldn’t say I miss him, because that would be pathetic,” she’d said. Truth be told, I hadn’t ever respected Kathleen much. She wore Laura Ashley dresses even though she was gaining on fifty, and her twin girls were sweet without seeming to mean it, and they’d been dorm roommates in college, an arrangement that I thought reflected poor parenting. But at this moment, sitting at Kathleen’s country French dining table, drinking the bold red wine Marse had brought, I’d been impressed. “I will say that I don’t like being alone,” Kathleen had said. “That’s all. I don’t like it.” She’d looked at Marse, who was shaking her head silently, and suddenly both of them looked older to me. They looked tired. “It sucks, doesn’t it?” said Marse to Kathleen. She looked at me, and then Kathleen looked at me. “We hate you,” said Marse, and Kathleen laughed lightly for a long time, and it had occurred to me that Marse had been faking it—maybe she wasn’t tired of being alone, and instead was trying to give an old friend someone to lean on. Marse wanted Kathleen to think they had much in common, but Kathleen was a housewife who was suddenly not a wife and not living in her house—she was a fish out of water, whereas Marse’s life made sense. Marse had a successful career, a busy social life, and a stream of romantic prospects. It wasn’t the same thing at all. Kathleen would be more lonely now precisely because she’d once had a husband and a home, not in spite of that.

  I said to Marse, “Margo is living in an apartment, did I tell you that?” The rain was coming harder now, spattering the tops of my feet and ankles. Marse and I huddled closer together.

  “Why would she want to do that?”

  “I think it might have something to do with a boy.”

  “A man,” said Marse. “She’s in college. They’re men, and she’s a woman. That’s what they want to be called, anyway.”

  “I don’t think quite yet,” I said.

  “You’re not ready.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Who does she live with?”

  At that moment, under the canopy outside the Biltmore’s stately main entrance, I could not recall her roommate’s name. “A girl from Tampa,” I said. “And I guess the girl’s boyfriend is pretty much a third roommate.”

  “Have you met them?”

  As a matter of fact, Margo and I had made plans that afternoon for me to come up for a weekend in October. “Not yet, but I will. Next month.”

  “Do you know anything about this man?” said Marse.

  “You’re interrogating me,” I said. “Margo is fine. She was paired with a roommate and she says they’re very compatible. Janelle—that’s the girl’s name. Margo gets along with the boyfriend. The apartment is right off campus—lots of kids do it, I guess. It’s common.” Even as I spoke, I felt uneasy—it had struck me as overly mature, this live-in boyfriend situation, but I’d told Dennis that I felt comforted knowing a boy would be around.

  The wind was picking up, blowing around the royal palms that rimmed the Biltmore’s circular drive. Marse said, “I still think of her as thirteen years old, that brace face. Let’s get a drink. We’ll toast her independence.”

  We’d had a couple of drinks each already. The bar inside the reception was serving wine, beer, and several flavors of daiquiris, which Marse had noted said a lot about the bride, and possibly about the promise of everlasting happiness. Marse didn’t want to go back to the party, so she headed to the hotel
bar while I stopped in at the reception to tell Dennis where I’d be. I found him in a corner with Julia, standing close and laughing. His daiquiri was peach, hers was strawberry. Before I left them alone again, I said, “I won’t be our ride home,” and Dennis raised his glass and said, “We can take a cab.”

  The hotel bar was walnut-paneled and dim, with burgundy chairs grouped around low glass tables. Marse ordered us whiskey sours, which was her drink of choice, and one I enjoyed when we were together but never once without her. “Julia is flirting with Dennis,” I said when I sat down.

  “Ha!” said Marse. “Good for her.”

  “Good for him,” I said. “She’s very pretty.”

  “Kyle told me he was disappointed when I RSVP’d for one. That’s the word he used—he was disappointed.”

  “Is he trying to prove that he can make a person bitter?”

  “Apparently.” She drank a piece of ice, then spat it back into the glass. “Hey,” she said, “let’s swap outfits.”

  We took our drinks into the powder room, which had an anteroom with chaise lounges and a wall-sized mirror, and she unzipped me, then pulled her dress over her head, revealing her lean torso and sheer, nude-colored bra. I could see the outline of her dark nipples through the fabric. I stepped out of my dress. On Marse, the bridesmaid dress had been floaty and flowing, but no matter how much thinner I’d become, I was still a good deal larger than she was, and though it zipped without a problem, it was not floaty. Where on her it had been a sort of princess dress, like something you’d find on a young girl’s doll, precious and not sexy, on me it was—well, it was showy. We faced the mirror. The neckline of my dress—the one Marse now wore—was low, but there was plenty of room inside it, whereas Marse’s dress fit snugly around my chest, lifting and cupping my breasts and deepening my cleavage. Marse and I both stared into the mirror at my chest; the cleavage was lovely, a style I could see adopting in the future, should my figure remain more or less the same, but I was still wearing a bra and the black straps showed. Marse helped me unhook it, then stuffed it into my purse. “There,” she said, “you’re in the wedding party. You owe me two hundred bucks for the inflatable kayak I gave them.”

  When we returned to the bar, the bartender gave no sign of noticing that we’d swapped outfits, but he did glance briefly at my cleavage, I noticed, and seemed if not impressed then at least not appalled. Marse was ordering another round when I heard a deep voice from behind us. “Well, well.”

  Marse and I both turned. Jack stood there with a wiry, gray-haired man who was familiar to me from the tennis club—another pro. “Who’s this?” said Marse, not rudely but with an air of not caring about the answer to the question—an air I assumed was affected.

  “Marse, this is my tennis instructor, Jack. Jack, this is my dear friend Marse.” I gripped Jack’s outstretched hand. We shook hands in the way that you do with old friends, where you don’t pump so much as just hold tightly. Jack introduced his companion as Adam. They were both wearing navy button-down shirts with the hotel’s insignia on the pocket. “Are you working?” I said, motioning to the insignia.

  “More or less. There was a dinner for the board.” He gestured upstairs, where the dining room overlooked the lobby, and I wondered if he’d seen me and Marse cross the lobby, and if that was what had drawn him downstairs. He said, “We thought we’d stop for a beer before heading out.”

  “We were given drink tickets,” said Adam.

  “Drink tickets?” said Marse.

  “It’s a bribe,” said Jack. He sat on the stool next to mine. “They’re afraid we won’t come, or if we do, we won’t schmooze. Tennis is this club’s cash cow.”

  “What about golf?” I said.

  “Golfers,” said Adam, rolling his eyes. He sat on the far side of Marse.

  “What are you drinking?”said Jack.

  “Whiskey sour,” said Marse.

  “How is it?”

  “Delicious,” said Marse.

  I tipped back so Marse and Jack could see each other. “So Marse,” said Jack, “how’s that spelled?” Marse spelled it for him. “What do you do, Marse?” he said, and she told him, and for a moment they spoke about a man they both knew—a partner at her firm—and when Adam joined the conversation, Jack turned back to me. “I have a confession,” he said. “I knew you were in here. I saw you from upstairs. But I believe you were wearing that.” He pointed discreetly to Marse. “Very nice, either way.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and I realized from the way I said it—encouragingly—that I was fairly drunk. In the mirror behind the bar, I could see the entrance to the room and most of its occupants: if Dennis arrived, I would be prepared.

  “You shouldn’t stay away,” Jack said. “You don’t need to do that.” He spoke softly, but I was aware of Marse sitting beside me, her uncanny ability to read my mind, and I thought of the first day we met, at Stiltsville, when she’d known even before I had that I’d won Dennis and she’d lost him. I turned toward her, to try to pull her into the conversation, but she wasn’t there. She’d stepped a few feet away and was intent on the television behind the bar. Adam was standing, too, chatting with another man who had come in. The bartender was watching the television, and he had—I realized this without having registered it at the time—turned up the volume a moment earlier. I had the thought that maybe Marse was going to flirt with the bartender, and that Adam was occupied, and Dennis was with Julia, many steps away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there Wednesday, I promise.”

  “Let’s not trash your tennis career over one afternoon at the beach.”

  “No, of course. Of course not.”

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “Frances?” said Marse. There was an edgy timbre in her voice, a shiver of hardness. I turned toward her, and she crooked her finger. “Come here,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” I said to Jack. Had our flirting been so obvious, so terrible, that I was being scolded? When I reached her, Marse said, “Watch this,” and put her hands on my shoulders to turn me toward the television. On the screen was a newswoman in a yellow blazer with large gold buttons, and behind her was a white front door in a low brick building cordoned off by yellow police tape. There were officers milling around, and in the corner of the screen, an ambulance with its back doors open.

  Did I recognize the building, in that instant? In the bottom third of the screen was the story ticker: GAINESVILLE STUDENTS SLAIN, it read, and then: TWO DEAD AT WILLIAMSBURG VILLAGE APARTMENTS.

  I had no trouble placing the building’s name. The newswoman was saying, “We’re reporting that the victims were both women in their late teens or early twenties, students at the university, where the fall semester is currently under way. The bodies were discovered this afternoon at four p.m., after one of the girls’ mothers reported that she had not heard from her daughter. The killer appears to have entered through the apartment’s sliding glass doorway.”

  “Dennis?” I said to Marse.

  “Your friend’s getting him,” she said.

  “When did I talk to her?” I said.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure she’s safe.”

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Dennis rushed into the bar with Jack as the newswoman closed her segment, saying, “For now, Gainesville students are being cautioned by police to stay alert, travel in pairs, and lock their doors.”

  “Give me the phone,” said Dennis to the bartender, and after some maneuvering, the bartender was unable to pull the phone away from its spot beside the cash register, so Dennis went around the bar. He started dialing, then stopped and looked at me. “Is it 5269 or 6952?” he said, then without waiting for an answer turned back and finished dialing. Marse and I watched him. After a long moment, he spoke into the phone. “Call your parents,” he said urgently, then put the phone down and reached across the bar for my hands. “Just the machine,” he said. “She’s not in, that’s all.” My che
st was tight. “We’re going home—we’ll be there in ten minutes—and she’ll have left a message. If I know Margo, she’s already on a bus.”

  I nodded. Home seemed a long way away.

  “I’ll walk out with you,” said Marse. She collected my purse and took my arm, and the three of us headed together toward the parking lot. Only later did I consider that I hadn’t said good-bye to Jack, and that I owed him a word of gratitude: not only did he retrieve my husband when I needed him, but he also must have paid for our drinks.

  Today, with cell phones and the Internet, the whole event would have unraveled differently. But then, the only people I knew who had cell phones were a secretary at Dennis’s firm whose husband was rumored to be a member of the Cuban mafia, and a doctor I knew from my office, who preferred it to a beeper in case of emergencies. We knew several people who had car phones, and indeed our next car would have one, but at the time we did not, and so we drove in silence, Dennis squeezing my knee. As I’d watched the newscast at the bar, my mind had been cloudy with panic, my vision had narrowed, and I’d had difficulty viewing the screen as a whole—instead I’d seen the ambulance in the corner, then the words on the screen, then the newswoman in her yellow jacket. But in the car, looking out at the clear bright night, I grew calm. Not this, I prayed. This is not going to happen to me. To someone else, this is happening, but it is not happening to me. One thing I felt, beyond the fear and frenzy, was love: for my daughter, for my husband. When we turned into our driveway, I said, “If there’s no message, we’ll call the Gainesville police, and if we can’t get through, we’ll get back in the car. We can be there in six hours.”

  Dennis paused. “We’ll check the machine,” he repeated. “Then we’ll call the police. Then we’ll drive.” We were people who needed a plan, and he seemed to consider this a good one. But when we rushed into the kitchen, I saw the red light on the answering machine blinking, and I cried out in relief. He hit the play button, and then there was a woman’s voice—but it wasn’t Margo, it was Gloria, and she said something about a picnic at the beach before Dennis hit the delete button, and the machine sounded a long beep. And then—finally, like wheels touching down after a turbulent flight—it was Margo, saying, “Are you there? You’re going to see the news. I’m all right.” She paused. “Those girls—they lived right next door to me.” There was the soft, wailing sound of my daughter crying, and I started to cry, too. Dennis replayed the message and we listened again. He dialed her number, frowned, and handed the phone to me. I got the tail end of a recorded message, and then it repeated: All circuits are busy, please try your call again.