Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  Jenny pulled off the stiff, sopping-wet London Fog raincoat that she should never have brought to Key West. It was not only too formal, it didn’t keep out the tropical rain, which seemed to come from all directions at once, including the horizontal. She shook out her damp hair, then, hesitantly, approached the circulation desk.

  Back in Convers, the staff of the college library always fell all over each other to help Jenny—once even literally, when Mrs. Ormondroyd and one of her assistants collided coming out of the stacks behind the charge desk, both carrying books for Wilkie. Here it was very different. The collection was much smaller, and most of what Wilkie wanted had to be ordered on interlibrary loan. The staff was polite, but it had soon become clear that obtaining items for a temporary resident on a permanent resident’s card wasn’t their top priority. Jenny was not too surprised now to hear that nothing she’d requested had arrived.

  Wilkie wouldn’t like that, she knew. In the past he had always been tolerant when a book or a fact was temporarily unavailable. But lately he had developed a nervous impatience, a demand that what he wanted should appear immediately. “You tell them Professor Walker has to have it now, this week,” he had said this morning about some book on tides, ocean currents, and navigation in the Keys—a topic unrelated in any way Jenny could think of to The Copper Beech.

  It wasn’t fair, Jenny thought. She was doing everything she could, everything Wilkie asked her to do, just as always. But now she was doing it without joy, and without the rewards. In the past Wilkie had always been lavish with praise and compliments for everything from her creamy scrambled eggs to her discovery of a lost footnote. “Darling, you are a wonder,” he used to say, sometimes more than once a day. But now he was withdrawn and unappreciative. And ungrateful: on Wednesday when she came home with a magazine he wanted he had snatched it without even thanking her.

  In Key West, even when she had specifically asked that a book be held for Wilkie, it was sometimes reshelved. Hoping that this had happened now, Jenny made her way through the stacks to the shadowy corner where the Florida Collection was kept. But the gap on the top shelf was still there, which meant that when she got home Wilkie would be angry. He would have the face she had seen more and more often lately: the one she had seen this morning over breakfast, in the heavy wet light from the patio: the face of a detached, disapproving man, who didn’t even answer when she asked him to please pass the key lime marmalade. “I think he’s tired of me,” she had told Lee on Wednesday, and for the first time Lee had not been reassuring. “I suppose it’s possible,” she’d said. “Men are like that.”

  The fluorescent tube above the stacks, which was on a timer, went out, leaving Jenny in semigloom. She rested her forehead against a row of books and began to weep silently, sheltered by the curtains of pale, damp, silky hair that fell forward on either side of her face.

  “Hey, Jenny? Is that you?” The fluorescent light buzzed on, and Jenny wearily raised her head. She saw a man perhaps ten years her senior in a waterproof green poncho. He was tall and loosely put together, with curly gray-blond hair, warm brown eyes, and large reddish ears. Focusing, she recognized him as Gerry Grass.

  “Oh, hello,” she managed weakly, pushing her hair back.

  “Hey—Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She swallowed a throatful of tears and then a dim smile, realizing that her face must be wet, her eyes red. “Well, actually I’ve got rather a bad headache,” she improvised. “Sinus. This weather, I guess.”

  “Hey, that’s rough. I know; I used to have what I told myself was sinus every winter when I lived in Ottawa. But I think now it was the boredom as much as the climate.”

  “Yes?” Jenny said vaguely. Go away, why don’t you, she thought, and smiled in a perfunctory, discouraging way.

  “It’s weird, you know, the effect bad weather has here.” Gerry continued, undiscouraged. “It rains for a couple of days, and everybody’s depressed or angry or both.”

  Jenny looked at Gerry, wondering if this applied to him.

  “I guess you heard Tiffany’s left,” he added, answering her question.

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Day before yesterday. I figured Wilkie would have told you.”

  “He didn’t mention it,” Jenny said, frowning, thinking, He doesn’t mention anything to me anymore, he hardly speaks to me. “Left Key West, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh. And left me. It’s, like, over between us.” For a moment, the young hippie poet that Gerald Grass had once been spoke through his middle-aged mouth, with a half-aggressive, half-pathetic roughness.

  Don’t tell me about it, Jenny thought. Leave me alone, can’t you see I have my own troubles? But automatically, social rules kicked in. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she exclaimed, wondering why this was the usual, almost the only possible polite response to news of any separation. Sometimes, as now, the natural reaction might be, Hey, congratulations.

  “Yeah, well.”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, though in fact she wasn’t sorry Tiffany had left, or even surprised. The only thing that surprised her slightly was Gerry’s evident grief. If I was living with Tiffany, Jenny thought, I would want her to leave.

  “I guess it had to happen. The relationship was, as she put it, all fucked up.”

  “Please, could you be a little quiet?” It was one of the librarians, hissing at them from the end of the stack of books. “Other people are trying to read.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny apologized again, lowering her voice, and realizing that this time she meant the phrase.

  “Anyhow, she cut out day before yesterday,” Gerry said, hardly lowering his.

  “But you’re staying on in Key West,” Jenny murmured, moving sideways in an attempt to bring the conversation to an end.

  “Yeah. For a while anyhow.”

  “Please.” It was the librarian again.

  “Aw, hell. Look, would you like to have lunch somewhere?” Gerry whispered. “I have to hang around this end of town until the copy place finishes the manuscript I just gave them.”

  “Well—” Jenny began, forming a polite refusal in her mind as she contemplated Gerry’s curly wet hair, his sad, wet expression. But at this moment an old saying of her mother’s came into her mind: Whenever you feel dreadful, dear, the best cure is to do something for someone else. “All right. Why not?”

  “Thassa white heron,” the guide in the lead kayak droned in his flat central-Florida twang.

  The dumpy little widow sitting behind him, weakly paddling, said nothing. But her niece Barbie, a big, soft-looking young woman in a pink sweatshirt with a picture of a raccoon on it, cried, “Ooh, really?”

  Wilkie Walker, paddling the following kayak with Barbie’s eager but awkward assistance, scowled. He was no ornithologist, but he knew quite well that the bird standing in the shallows to their left was not a white heron, but an egret. At any earlier period of his life he would have corrected the error, would have taken satisfaction in correcting it. Now he didn’t give a hoot in hell. All he gave a hoot about was getting through the days and nights until the weather changed and he could take his final swim in the ocean. It wouldn’t happen today, though, he thought. The rain had paused for the moment, but heavy cold whale-colored clouds still sagged low over the Keys.

  Wilkie had never been especially attracted to aquatic mammals or plants: according to an amateur astrologer he had once had the misfortune to know, this was explained by the fact that he had no water in his chart. He had come on this trip not out of interest, but to kill time in hell. As cold wet day succeeded cold wet day, his nerves were wearing down, and so was his nerve. Sometimes he thought that if he had to sit in his study for another hour he would end his life in some weak messy way, involving gas or blood.

  Yesterday afternoon, unable to stay in the study, he walked into the living room and found Jenny sitting on the sofa, knitting a lump of grayish yarn that, she explained, would one day become a sweater for hi
m—a sweater, of course, that he would never wear. In a few days, after his tragic death, she would set it aside. But probably not forever. Jenny was a practical housewife: she disliked waste, and had never failed to complete any task she had set herself. It was not unlikely, it was even probable, that some day, perhaps months or even years later, she would take up that lump of yarn and complete the project. Someone else, probably their son, Billy, would wear the gray sweater.

  But could he be sure it would be Billy? Jenny was still a relatively young woman. After his death she would still be beautiful, graceful, and charming, an admirable cook and housekeeper, a gifted researcher and editor. And she would be well provided for: he had taken care of that. Certainly she would have suitors. It was not unlikely that she would marry again, Wilkie realized—not out of passion, that wasn’t her style—but out of affection, loneliness, and a need for companionship and protection. Jenny was, in many ways, an old-fashioned woman. It was one of the things he loved in her, and one that he had—he admitted—indulged and cultivated. But once he was gone, it would make her vulnerable.

  A wave of cold, unfocused jealousy washed over Wilkie, causing him to flub his next stroke with the paddle and send a corresponding, though smaller, wave of cold saltwater back into the kayak and onto Barbie Mumpson. “Sorry,” he muttered, glancing round briefly.

  “Aw, that’s okay.”

  Wilkie scowled. He realized that he was angry at everything and everybody—even his wife—because they were going to live and he was going to die. Right now, for instance, he was angry at Barbie Mumpson, and at her aunt, and at the tour guide. But most of all he was angry at Perry Jackson. It was Jackson, the caretaker of their rented house, who had inveigled Wilkie into today’s excursion. Jackson’s mother and his cousin Barbie were visiting him, he had explained, and he’d set up a trip for them to the dolphin sanctuary on Sugarloaf Key and then a kayak tour of the mangrove swamps; wouldn’t Wilkie like to go too?

  It wasn’t goodwill that had prompted this invitation, Wilkie thought now. What Jackson had wanted was somebody with a car who would drive his boring relatives up the Keys so he wouldn’t have to go himself. And he, Wilkie, had agreed in order to get out of the study for a few hours.

  Jackson’s mother, Dorrie, appeared to be a harmless, quiet little woman. But Cousin Barbie had almost immediately revealed herself as a fan of the most gushing sort. “Wilkie Walker!” she had screeched with embarrassed excitement when they met. “You’re Wilkie Walker, I mean you’re really him, I can’t get over it! You’ve been my hero ever since I was a little girl. I’ve read everything you’ve ever written—And now I’m actually going on a nature trip with you, I can’t get over it!”

  To break the flow of gush, Wilkie had announced that he didn’t like to talk while he was driving—the last long drive he would probably ever make, he thought. He had also managed to avoid Barbie at the dolphin sanctuary, where they were shown round by one of the staff members whom Perry Jackson knew.

  Barbie, of course, had insisted on revealing Wilkie’s identity to their guide, a tall, attractive, athletic-looking woman named Glory Green in jeans and a cotton sweater, with a gray ponytail and no makeup—a familiar type to Wilkie. To Barbie’s evident disappointment, Ms. Green seemed unexcited by this news. Possibly, Wilkie thought, she had never heard of him; or she didn’t approve of what she knew. More and more often, after all, this was the case. Or perhaps it was just her cool, deadpan manner, even when describing the work of the sanctuary.

  Barbie Mumpson, however, made up for this. She cooed sentimentally and oohed indignantly over the injured dolphins. She was horrified to learn their individual histories; how they had been disentangled from fishing nets, or rescued from commercial aquariums where they had been starved into performing tricks for the public.

  Wilkie, standing a little apart, wearily observed Barbie’s performance—as automatic in its way, he thought, as that of a performing dolphin. He had always had mixed feelings about places like this. Naturally he favored the preservation of species, and most of the organizations that worked to breed and reintroduce individuals into the wild had his full endorsement. But he had also seen some that were merely glorified zoos or theme parks—or worse, showcases for dubious fund-raising.

  There was always a potential conflict of interest in any charity, since its director and employees depended for their livelihood on a continued supply of the unfortunate individuals it was supposed to help. Social agencies need clients; drug counselors need drug addicts, and it was the same with animal-rescue enterprises. If dolphins were banned from commercial aquariums and all nets were biodegradable, the sanctuary they had visited this morning might have to close. Meanwhile, when the supply of damaged individuals fell off, there would be a natural tendency to keep them in care as long as possible, to sentimentalize them and treat them as pets.

  Wilkie had been slightly surprised to discover that Glory Green, unlike many nature guides, was apparently aware of these issues.

  “Yeah,” she had said in reply to Barbie’s horrified enquiries. “It keeps happening. If it didn’t, we’d have to shut down ... Nah, essentially we can’t do anything about it. We have to wait until they’re hurt bad enough that the fish shows don’t want them anymore.” Her tone was dark but restrained, as if she had seen so much cruelty to mammals that it had worn her out, the way it had worn Wilkie out.

  “But then when the dolphins get well, they go back to the sea,” Barbie proposed eagerly.

  “Yeah, usually they do. All except Lady Edna.” Glory Green gestured at a large, slow-moving dolphin who was nosing the rim of the pool nearby, slowly sinking and surfacing again, as if performing some old Sea World routine. “She stayed around too long and got hooked on the free fish. Now it’s too late for her.”

  “Oh gee,” Barbie said. “You mean she can’t ever live in the wild again?”

  “Nah.” Glory shook her head. “She couldn’t make it there, not now.”

  “Aw, that’s so sad. Do you think she minds awfully?” Barbie’s voice trembled. “Do you think she misses the sea?”

  “I used to think that. But now I don’t think we ever know what animals really feel.” Glory glanced at Wilkie Walker with an expression that suggested familiarity with his early and more popular books, and possibly a critical opinion of them. “Sometimes I figure she probably doesn’t remember much what it was like out in the ocean. This is all she knows. When I lived in Southern California I saw a lot of over-the-hill actors like that. Old hams, going over their tricks one more damn time, scared shitless to leave L.A. or take a regular job. You have to feel sorry for them.” Again, casually, she glanced at Wilkie.

  She has my number, even if she doesn’t know it, Wilkie thought now as he paddled through the winding shallow streams of the mangrove swamp, trying as much as possible to tune out the drone of the guide’s spiel. I probably couldn’t make it on my own in the wild anymore either. I’m an old ham like that fat old dolphin Lady Edna. That’s what I feel when I get in front of an audience now, that I’m just going through my tricks. It’s time to go back to the ocean, and past time.

  “Oh, the sun’s come out!” Barbie Mumpson squealed as gold light broke through the heavy, sodden cover of cloud, flooding the shimmering aquamarine water and glossy, shining dark-green clumps of mangrove. “Isn’t it glorious!”

  Wilkie did not reply. To him, the scene looked false and glaring, like a child’s picture book colored with cheap, waxy crayons. He would have preferred that the day remain cloudy, to match his mood.

  Animals are lucky, he thought, not for the first time. Places like that dolphin sanctuary, at the most, maintain only a few individuals past their natural life span. But with humans, in the so-called civilized countries, the old, sick, injured, and incompetent are preserved. As a result the world is burdened with a population that in an earlier, more natural age would have ceased to exist years ago. Miserable, senile, ailing individuals are made to survive past their natural life span in som
e pathetic institution like the home for bony, sick old cows he had seen in India.

  We are the holy animals of this world, he had thought then, worshiped and cared for even when we should be dead—would far rather be dead. That was what would happen to him, if he didn’t get out in time. But he would get out in time. It could only be a matter of a few days at the most now.

  “Oh, look!” Barbie squealed from the bow of the canoe. “What’s that big thing over there by the tree, moving around just under the water?”

  “Lessee.” In the other kayak, the guide reversed his stroke. “I d’know—It could be a manatee.” For the first time he spoke in a nonguide voice, with human interest.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, uh, it’s a kind of big, you know, fish. Likes warm water.”

  “The manatee is not a fish, it’s a mammal,” Wilkie said impatiently, shaken out of his torpor. He eased the kayak gently toward shore. “It’s related to the dugong of the Indian Ocean.”

  “Oh, wow,” Barbie half whispered as they drew nearer. “Look, Aunt Dorrie, do you see it? That sort of big golden-gray thing shaped like a, a giant baking potato, under the mangrove trees.”

  “I do, dear. Is it alive?”

  “Oh, sure. I mean, I think so.”

  Wilkie groaned silently to himself. The last day of my life, quite possibly, he thought, and I have to spend it stuck in a Florida swamp with two stupid women.

  “It’s alive all right,” the guide said, lowering his voice as they approached.

  “It’s awfully big, isn’t it?” Aunt Dorrie whispered nervously.

  “They can get up to over three thousand pounds, some of them. But you don’t hafta worry, they’re vegetarians. Only eat seaweed and stuff.”