Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

“And then, later on, I was really pissed at him. When I quit law school and moved here I thought, wow, I’m set for life.” Jacko looked down, contemplating the little dark hole in the top of his beer can.

  “Y’know, there’s advantages in loving an older man,” he continued. “I can’t say I didn’t see them. You skip all those years of dead-end start-up jobs, living in cheap apartments, opening cans of cheap chili. But there’s disadvantages too. His friends are all older; they think of you as a bimbo, and either they ignore you or make passes.”

  “Mm,” Lee said.

  “And then Alvin had so much money, much more than I realized at first. There was a lot of competition for my job, from younger and younger guys. So one day I was just, what do they call it, deaccessioned? Desized?”

  “Downsized,” Lee said.

  “What got to me was the way he acted when he came here afterward. If he was alone it was okay, but mostly he brought along some new boyfriend, and then it was like I was just the hired caretaker. You know. ‘We’re going out to dinner at Antonia’s now, could you clean up the bathroom and bedroom, please.’ I wouldn’t say anything, but I’d sulk, and curse them behind their backs.” Jacko sighed and shook his head. “And now all this property. I was thinking, maybe I shouldn’t take it.”

  “For God’s sake,” Lee exclaimed. “Are you out of your mind? You made Alvin feel loved, that’s what counts. Anyhow, he wanted you to have the place. You’ve got to go along with that.”

  “I guess so.” Jacko slid onto a kitchen stool. “But you know, by his lights, Alvin was decent to me. I always liked plants and gardening, so he hired me to keep the property up, do the landscaping and maintenance and repairs. He introduced me to friends who needed a gardener or a caretaker, and pretty soon I had plenty of customers. And he never asked for the cottage back; I’ve been living here for years rent free.”

  “In exchange for the work you do on the place, you mean.”

  “Well, yeah. You know Alvin, he liked to get everything cheap.”

  “He was a tightwad,” Lee said.

  “Yeah. But I owe him a lot. You can’t imagine how ignorant I was when we met. I’d never seen an opera, and I thought espresso was some kind of air freight. I’d been in two plays by Shakespeare in high school, and never knew he was bisexual. I was a dumb Oklahoma hick.”

  “Really?” Lee said a little skeptically, setting two tomatoes on the window ledge to ripen.

  “Really.” Jacko grinned. “Shit, you know, I can’t take it in yet. I figured what I’d probably get from Alvin’s lawyer was a letter telling me to vacate the cottage by the end of the month.” He laughed.

  It was what Lee had expected too, knowing Alvin, but she did not say so. Instead she unpacked three dozen assorted croissants and brioche for her guests’ breakfasts and began wrapping them in plastic to keep fresh. “So what will you do with the property?” she asked. “You think you’ll sell the place, or part of it?”

  Jacko shook his head. “No, what for? Anyhow, it could take up to a year to settle the estate, that’s what the lawyer said. After that—I don’t know. Just play it as it lays, I guess.” He drank again, set the can down. “The first thing I’m going to do is get rid of that hideous night-blooming cactus in the front yard.”

  “Yeah?” An awkward, thorny, barren-looking gray-green vegetable monster, nearly eight feet tall, appeared in Lee’s mind. “You didn’t plant that yourself?”

  “No way. I don’t see the point of something that’s ugly three hundred and sixty-four days a year. It came with the house. Alvin wouldn’t let me take it out, he had some kind of weird attachment to it.” He laughed. “And then I’m going to invite my mom down to visit, so I won’t have to go to Tulsa this spring.”

  “Good idea,” Lee said. Jacko visited his mother twice a year, attempting (not always with success) to get into and out of town without seeing his other relatives, most of whom violently disapproved of him and his way of life. “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Sure, we’ll fix it up. I just have to clear out one of the dressing rooms in the pool house and put in a bed.”

  “Can’t she stay in the apartment over Alvin’s garage?”

  “Not now. It’s rented to this famous poet from California. Gerald Grass, his name is.”

  “Never heard of him,” said Lee, who, though she read sporadically but with enthusiasm in women’s literature, made no attempt to hear of any male poet.

  “So you’re a property owner,” she added presently, putting a bag of jumbo shrimps and ice into the refrigerator.

  “Will be, anyhow.” Jacko’s smile brightened, dimmed. “The only thing is ...

  “Mm?”

  “I wish I hadn’t been tested, that’s all. I’d be on cloud nine now.”

  “Mm,” Lee repeated noncommittally. In her view, ignorance was never bliss. She visualized Jacko’s cloud, not as they are usually portrayed in art, but as she had seen them in the White Mountains: a thick pale-gray mist, blocking visibility. If it were me, I’d have taken the test soon as I could, she thought.

  “Some of my pals think I should have had it done years ago,” Jacko said, demonstrating, as he sometimes did, an apparent ability to read minds. He looked away at the dry pods of the women’s tongue tree shaking in the breeze outside the window.

  “Well, yeah. I can see that.”

  “I can’t. I had a professor at the U of O who was always going on about how knowledge is power. But the way I figure it, with good news you ruin the surprise. And if it’s bad, why find out before you have to?”

  “I’d like to know if there was bad news,” Lee said. “Nobody wants to live in a fog.”

  Jacko shrugged, smiled slightly. It was not his habit to contradict anyone. “Could be,” he said vaguely. “Anyhow, it could be worse. I could be twenty.”

  “I guess that’s so,” Lee said, frowning, thinking of kids she knew around town who were twenty, or not much more, and already ill or, in one case, dead.

  “The way it is now, by the time I go, I’d be finished anyhow. Once you hit forty, forty-five, it’s over, even for me.”

  “Over, that’s crazy,” Lee protested. “Hell, I’m fifty-two; my life isn’t over, not by a long shot.”

  “Yeah, but I want to be remembered as young and beautiful.” Jacko grinned casually, as if he were kidding. “I don’t want to watch myself turn into an old queen, going to bars and cruising the young guys. People saying, You won’t believe it, but he used to be really hot. I don’t want to turn into a sick, ugly old man like Alvin. And mean. I’d be mean.”

  “Aw, come on, Jacko,” Lee said, laughing. “You could never be mean; it’s not in you.”

  “Listen,” he told her. “If I was old and sick and ugly, I’d be mean, you’d better believe it.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not going to hang around till I’m like poor Tommy Lewis, shoved along the street in a wheelchair, hooked up to a breathing machine. Soon as I know it’s over for me, I’m out of here.” He smiled easily. “So how’s business?”

  “Good. Full up. I lost two more flamingo beach towels yesterday, that’s all. It was those women from Southampton in the big balcony room.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s always that way. It’s the rich guests that lift things. They figure, cute towels, it won’t matter to her, what’s a few dollars?”

  “You could send them a bill.”

  “Yeah, I might do that. Sometimes people pay up, if they think they might want to come again. Or they could decide to stay somewhere else next time. Maybe I’ll just write it off as a tax loss.” She smiled.

  “You’re looking good today, you know,” Jacko said.

  “So are you,” Lee replied, though with less emphasis; Jacko always looked good. “Well, the thing is,” she added, trying and failing to suppress a wide, embarrassed smile, “I’ve got some news too. I think I’m in love.”

  Jacko raised his eyebrows. “Hey, really? Anyone I know?”

  “N
o.”

  “One of your breakfast and bed-me types.” Jacko grinned. It was not unknown for Lee’s guests to propose an erotic fling, often with the same slightly embarrassed sensual hopefulness with which they asked for extra pillows, or an egg with breakfast. Now and then she obliged them.

  “No.”

  Jacko registered Lee’s expression and the shift in her grip on a bottle of tonic, as if it were about to become a weapon. “Sorry,” he said. “So do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Yeah, sure. I—” She sat down at the kitchen table, took a breath, paused.

  “Okay; how did you meet, for instance?”

  “Well, hell, it was kind of ridiculous. And kind of romantic. Day before yesterday, I rode my bike down to the city beach for a swim, but the jellyfish sign was up, so I just walked out along the pier. Nobody was in the water except this one woman, and then she started to scream. So I went in and helped her out onto the beach, and shook some tenderizer on her leg, where she’d got stung. She’s got beautiful legs, so long and white and smooth, and this goddamn amazing long silky hair, not blonde but the palest pale brown. She was terrified, shivering all over. She didn’t know about jellyfish; she thought she’d been attacked by a shark or something.”

  “So you rescued her, and she fell into your arms.”

  Lee gave Jacko a fast, furious look. “Of course not. She thanked me, and I rode back home. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again in this world, but yesterday morning she turned up here to thank me, with a beautiful white moth orchid. You can see it right out that window.” She pointed.

  “Oh, yeah. Lovely,” Jacko agreed. “It’s a sign, don’t you think, the flowers people give you? This car dealer I once dated, he sent me one of those orchids that look like a bunch of big brown spiders, very rare and expensive, according to him. I should have figured out then I was the fly, but—”

  “You know, it kind of reminds me of her, that long spray of creamy white flowers,” Lee interrupted, gazing out the window.

  “So then what happened?” Jacko sighed.

  “Nothing. Well, everything, maybe. I don’t know. She’s coming to lunch today. We haven’t even kissed yet, but there’s time. She’s down here for two months, renting a house near Higgs Beach. I don’t know if she’s ever had a serious relationship with a woman, but I’m hoping she’s open to it.” Lee, still contemplating the spray of orchids, fell into a daze.

  “Mm,” Jacko prompted.

  “She’s a lot like me in some ways; she admires the same films and books, she knits and weaves—she got really excited when she saw my loom. I think Key West is going to be great for her; she’s spent every winter freezing up in New England somewhere. The only problem is, she’s married. But it sounds like that relationship is more or less dead. He’s much older than she is, a retired professor.”

  “Ah?”

  “Another thing that’s kind of romantic, I don’t even know her last name yet. Just Jenny.”

  For the first time, Jacko did not smile sympathetically; instead he frowned. “You said her husband’s a retired professor, a lot older?”

  “Oh yeah. Like twenty or thirty years, maybe. She can’t be much over forty.”

  “And they’re down here for the first time, in a house on Hibiscus Street?”

  “Yes—How do you know that? Have you met them somewhere?”

  Jacko looked at the floor, out the window, toward the front hall, and finally at Lee. “I guess I better tell you,” he said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I know your girlfriend’s last name.” Jacko looked away again, cleared his throat. “It’s Walker. Jenny Walker.”

  “Walker?” Lee frowned.

  “They’re living in Alvin’s house.”

  “How do you mean? You mean, she’s—Oh, shit.”

  “You said you always wanted to know bad news,” Jacko bleated, moving back as if anticipating violence.

  “That’s okay.” Lee set her jaw. “Hell, I should thank you. You’ve probably saved me a lot of grief.”

  “I hope so. Hey, I’m really sorry.”

  “No sweat,” Lee said as casually as she could manage. “There’s other fish in the sea.”

  “That’s right,” said Jacko, for whom the oceans had always teemed. He smiled, relieved.

  With some difficulty, Lee suppressed her true reaction to Jacko’s news for the remainder of his visit. But once she was alone, her face darkened. Jenny Walker, she said to herself. The first woman I’ve seen in four years that I could really love. So beautiful, so gentle, and she’s read all of Willa Cather. Except she’s married to Wilkie Walker, so probably she thinks like him about everything. Probably she votes Republican and thinks all homosexuals are sick.

  I might as well phone now and tell her not to come to lunch, Lee told herself. A whole pound of jumbo shrimp that I went all the way to Stock Island for, wasted. Goddamn it to bloody hell. She turned to the cupboard, took a chipped breakfast plate out of the stack, and flung it at the cellar door, where it smashed with an explosive crunch.

  It’s like some awful kind of retribution, Lee thought. I said that if I met Wilkie Walker’s wife I was going to spit on her. And by God, I did spit on her too, when we were at the beach. I was sprinkling the tenderizer on her leg, and I wanted it to work faster, so I spat on my fingers and rubbed it in. A vivid image of Jenny’s upper leg and half-exposed haunch: white, smooth, cold from the sea and flushed with streaks of red, appeared in her mind. Yes, she thought.

  No. You can’t, don’t love her, Lee told herself, opening a cupboard door to get the broom and dustpan. It’s just cognitive dissonance. The theory that you naturally overvalue someone you’ve helped, because the more wonderful they are, the more wonderful and important it was to help them. Nobody wants to think they’ve rescued some uptight homophobic Republican from panic and jellyfish.

  But hard as she tried, Lee could not superimpose upon Jenny the role of uptight homophobic Republican. Okay, she was that self-satisfied old bastard Wilkie Walker’s wife. She was also beautiful, intelligent, and desirable. That, years ago, she had married Wilkie Walker did not prove the contrary; other intelligent women had made similar mistakes.

  As she gathered the fragments of crockery into the dustpan, memories gathered in Lee’s mind. She recalled how under the influence of her freshman English teacher and Wilkie Walker’s stupid book, she herself had married before graduating from college, in order to get over her “neurotic attraction” to women. To make everything worse, she had chosen a conservative Presbyterian from rural Ohio who shared Walker’s view of homosexuality as an unfortunate disease, as if she wanted to reinforce her guilt and her determination to become “normal.”

  With a sigh, Lee recalled some of the things her husband had said about what he called “deviants,” even before their marriage, and his discomfort when two obviously gay men were shown to the table next to theirs in a restaurant on their honeymoon. She remembered his political views, and the expression on his face as he politely suggested that her Brooklyn relatives would not enjoy a vacation in the country—assuming, that is, that as urban Jews they would have no appreciation of rural WASP America.

  She recalled how awkward his family had made her feel when she visited Ohio: the embarrassed twitch of their features when she did not know the name of some common flower or tree. No doubt if she were to become better acquainted with Jenny she would soon see these expressions again, on Jenny’s face.

  But on the other hand, possibly she wouldn’t see them. Possibly Jenny wasn’t in complete agreement with Wilkie Walker. After all, she hadn’t said anything positive about him: only that she couldn’t have supper with Lee because she had to make dinner for her husband, and that she could come to lunch anytime because he worked in his study all day and usually had a sandwich at his desk. Also, that day at the beach, Jenny had said that her husband would think her a “total idiot” for having misread the sign about men-of-war.

  Perhaps Jenny wasn
’t totally an idiot about her husband, at least. Perhaps, even, she was in the state of growing discomfort and disillusion Lee remembered so well from her own marriage. Maybe what she needed was help in resisting the clinging, stinging jellyfish personality of Wilkie Walker. Maybe Lee could rescue her again, from him.

  Opening the fridge, Lee removed the jumbo shrimp and put them in a saucepan with half a glass of white wine and a handful of fresh herbs. She’d have to go very slowly. Jenny might agree with everything Wilkie Walker thought and said. She might be completely happy with him. But if she wasn’t ...

  Years ago, broke and battered and bruised by marriage—at the end, literally as well, though she had to admit she’d got in a couple of good licks herself at the time of the final breakup—Lee had despaired of vengeance on the homophobic WASP world. Back then, a twenty-six-year-old lesbian graduate student and single mother from Brooklyn had no power in that world. But now—Well, now we would see.

  She turned off the stove and removed the lid from the pan, exposing the shrimp, now no longer gray and hard-shelled and icy-cold, but a delicious pale, steaming pink.

  5

  ON A WARM DAY in February, in Alvin’s postmodern chrome-yellow and chrome kitchen, Jenny Walker confronted the remains of last night’s dinner party, her first in Key West. Every horizontal surface was covered with the plates and cups and glasses and flatware and cooking pots for eight people, all coated in the dried remains of homemade cheese dip, seafood bisque, lemon chicken, tropical fruit salad, cheesecake, three kinds of wine, and mixed drinks.

  It hadn’t been Jenny’s idea and wasn’t her usual practice to leave the dishes. But after their guests had gone Wilkie had insisted on her coming to bed, hardly giving her time to put away the leftovers—something he’d not done for years.

  That was wonderful of course; but it was also one more example of the erratic behavior of her husband over the last few months. He was sleeping irregularly again: almost every night, if Jenny woke he would be gone. Once when she mentioned this the next morning, and asked again if there were something on his mind, he had almost exploded. “I really wish you wouldn’t keep asking that,” he’d snapped in a tone that made Jenny recoil and recall the birthday crackers that used to frighten her as a child. “You worry too much, you know,” he had added, less explosively and with an indulgent but impatient smile, as if he were speaking to a fearful child. It was the manner he had toward her often now, as if he knew something she didn’t know, perhaps something awful.