Last Resort

by Alison Lurie

  “Oh, wow.” Barbie breathed ecstatically.

  Yes, it was definitely a manatee: a rather large one—in fact the first Wilkie had ever encountered outside of an aquarium. He could see its broad mottled gray-gold hide under the slow flow of tea-colored water, and the gentle movement of its tail fin as it burrowed among the grassy reeds.

  As they drifted closer to the shore, almost silently now, something—perhaps the shadow of the kayak on the sand startled the animal. With a sudden unlikely burst of speed, it shot away, trailing bubbles and turbulence, rocking the boats heavily.

  “Yeah, that was a genuine Florida manatee,” the guide said with some awe. “You don’t see too many of those fellers around here, these days. When I was a kid, they usta be all over the place.”

  “Really?” Barbie said. “How come they left?”

  “Wal. I guess they didn’t exactly leave. They mostly kinda died out. They’re sorta dumb, see. They kept getting snagged in nets, and cut up by boat propellers. That old feller there, you could see the scars on him.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad,” Barbie wailed.

  “And then, they don’t breed the way they used to. Or when they do a lotta times the pups get sick and die. Wal, anyhow, you saw one today.” A note of stupid self-satisfaction had entered the guide’s voice, as if he had planned the whole thing. “You can tell your friends back home—Hey, ma’am. You okay?” He addressed Jacko’s mother, who had slumped forward in the bow of his kayak, letting her paddle trail helplessly in the salty swell.

  “Yes, thanks—I—” Dorrie’s voice said in a series of squeaky gasps; Wilkie could not see her face. “I’ll be all right in a moment—a little sick—”

  “Bit rough now. Wind’s getting up,” the guide agreed. “Wal, you hold on, okay? We’ll be back at the landing in five minutes.” He quickened his stroke, driving the kayak forward across the open, now choppy waters of the Gulf.

  Dorrie said nothing; instead, she seemed to slump further. In the other kayak Barbie also stopped paddling and sat staring ahead.

  “Are you seasick too?” Wilkie asked, trying and failing to sound concerned rather than irritated.

  “Nah, I’m okay,” she said. “And I don’t think Aunt Dorrie’s seasick either. It was what that guy said about the manatee babies dying, because she’s so upset about Perry. Well, I am too, but it’s not so bad for me, because I’m not his mother.”

  Don’t tell me about it, Wilkie thought; but Barbie did not hear this silent request.

  “She’s been like that ever since Perry told us about his being so sick, last night. I mean, he’s not really sick yet, but he will be, because that’s what always happens if you’re HIV-positive.” Barbie lifted her paddle again and took an awkward stroke.

  “Excuse me.” Now it was Wilkie who had stopped paddling. “Are you trying to say that Perry Jackson, our gardener, has AIDS?”

  “Well, uh-huh, yeah. Didn’t you know? I mean, Perry said everybody down here knows already.”

  “No, not everybody,” Wilkie barked. His immediate reaction to the news was fear—not for himself, but for Jenny. The man had been in and out of their house, cleaning, every week. It was quite possible that he had left some smear of blood, some secretion—But he mustn’t be paranoid: the virus, he had read many times, couldn’t survive more than a few seconds outside its host. Jenny was safe. It was Jackson who, like him, was under sentence of death.

  “I feel so strange and confused,” Barbie said suddenly, missing her stroke again. “I mean, I keep thinking about Perry, and I feel awful. But then I think how I saw a manatee, and I’m really happy. And I got to meet you, and that’s so wonderful too. I know I’ll remember this day the rest of my life.”

  Wearily, Wilkie glanced at his latest, and no doubt his last fan: her untidy blonde curls, her rumpled pink sweatshirt. An odd impulse, compounded of irony and goodwill, came over him. “Yes,” he said. “So will I.”

  8

  ON THE OVERCAST, INTERMITTENTLY drizzly morning of the next day, Lee sat at her dining room table doing the accounts and trying not to think about Jenny Walker. There were plenty of other things to think about, she told herself. For instance, why was the laundry bill so low this week, and the phone bill so high? Or, why was she so low today, when yesterday she had been so high?

  That was easy: for a moment yesterday Lee had been almost sure that what she felt for Jenny was reciprocated. She had come in from shopping to find that Jenny had located a doctor for a guest who had contracted pinkeye and soothed the feelings of several others who blamed Artemis Lodge for the bad weather. Gratefully, impulsively, she had leaned over the desk at which Jenny sat and kissed her, just missing her mouth. Her lips had touched Jenny’s cool, smooth skin; her dark springy hair had mixed with Jenny’s pale silvery mane, which yesterday was not caught back into a ponytail. Anything might have happened then, if the phone hadn’t begun to ring.

  I must speak out, she had decided as she fielded an inquiry about room rates. If Jenny’s going to scream and run, it’s best that she should do so now, before I care so much I’ll never get over her. When we’re having lunch, I’ll say—

  But Jenny, with her slow, lovely smile, had declined to stay for lunch, saying that she “had to get back.” She hadn’t finished the sentence, but maybe that was because, with her natural tact, she had intuited that Lee didn’t want to hear her husband’s name again.

  The time before that, when Jenny was at the guest house on Wednesday, she had talked about him far too much to suit Lee. Over lunch she had begun dithering again about the mental and physical condition of this piggy, self-satisfied, egotistical man. Worse, Jenny had started blaming herself for Wilkie Walker’s cold, sullen, and hostile behavior, and calling herself bad names, until finally Lee had been unable to contain herself and almost referred to him as an asshole.

  Yesterday Lee hadn’t had to hear the name Wilkie Walker even once. But she had already heard it several times today, because Jacko’s cousin Barbie Mumpson seemed unable to stop mentioning it.

  Barbie’s aunt Dorrie, it had turned out, presented no social problem. Now that she’d recovered from the trip she accompanied Jacko to his jobs every day. Oh, no, she didn’t mind the rain, Dorrie said: she was a gardener herself. Besides, she’d been, as she put it—with the bashful smile of someone using the slang of a younger generation—“blown away” by the possibilities of a frost-free climate. “I can’t get over it!” she’d exclaimed. “It’s like gardening on Mars, all these strange, lovely things. And all my houseplants are growing outdoors here, as big as houses!”

  Barbie might have gone with them, but Jacko wouldn’t let her. Since she couldn’t go to the beach in this weather, and had exhausted the indoor tourist attractions, she had taken to hanging around Artemis Lodge in a disaffected and helpless condition.

  “Listen, if she gets to be a drag, throw her out,” Jacko had told Lee. “Tell her to go sit in a coffee shop, or something.”

  Instead, Lee had put Barbie to work. She was strong, willing, and in spite of her protestations of helplessness, good with her hands. Already she’d repaired Molly’s temperamental toaster, and this morning she had restrung the blind in the blue room at Artemis Lodge. “I get it from Dad,” she had explained. “He could fix just about anything. Like he used to say, if you really take the time to look at something, you can probably figure out how it works.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lee laughed. “Maybe you can figure out my dishwasher. Half the time it won’t drain.”

  “Okay,” Barbie said seriously. “Anyhow, I can try. Have you got the manual?”

  “I’m not sure, I’ll look around for it,” Lee had lied, wondering if she should take the risk.

  “I mean, probably I can’t, but you never know. I took this vocational test in high school, and it came back saying I should go into small appliance repair. Mom was livid.” Barbie giggled. She was already looking better than when she’d arrived, Lee thought. Actually, in spite of her chunky build and
unflattering clothes (ill-cut white shorts and a baggy lavender T-shirt), she was rather pretty.

  Right now the room was silent, because Barbie was out of conversational range, on a stepladder in the dining room washing a tall Victorian Gothic window; but she was steadily edging her way toward Lee.

  The laundry bill down by nearly half, and the phone bill up: two hundred and seventy-nine message units, and seven calls to Directory Assistance, plus taxes—Well, it could be that because of the cold and rain none of Lee’s guests had gone swimming and brought back sandy tar-stained towels; instead they had stayed in the Lodge and got Jenny or Polly to call their travel agents, trying to change their tickets.

  “You want me to do the windows in here, too?” Barbie asked.

  Lee hesitated. “Sure,” she said finally, “that’d be great,” adding, to discourage conversation, “Seven times fifty-five is three eighty-five, and—”

  “You know, I still can’t get over it,” Barbie announced, undiscouraged, as she hauled the stepladder toward the nearest window. “There I am, staying practically next door to Wilkie Walker. I was with him for hours yesterday, and he was talking to me just like he was an ordinary person. I’m so lucky. Mrs. Hopkins is even luckier, she’s known Professor Walker for years, isn’t that right?”

  “I believe so,” Lee said.

  “She must have some great stories.” Barbie gazed into the middle distance through a pane of glass smeared with chalky cleanser.

  “Could be,” Lee agreed, frowning at the phone bill. “All I ever remember Molly saying is that in college Walker was known as World War II.”

  Barbie stopped spraying. “World War II?” she said in the tone of someone mentioning a distant historical epoch—which no doubt it was for her. “I don’t get it.”

  “Because of his initials. Wilkie Walker, WW. He was supposed to be hell on wheels.”

  “Professor Walker’s not like that at all,” Barbie protested. “And I bet he never was, either. That was probably just some dumb old joke. I wish you could meet him; then you’d see.”

  Lee did not echo this wish.

  “Anyhow, he’s not like that, no way He’s a very spiritual person. I’m kind of stupid sometimes, you know, and when I was paddling I kept heading us into the reeds, but he didn’t yell at me or anything.”

  “Mm,” Lee murmured, adding a column of figures.

  “And he knew so much about the dolphins, and this rare sea mammal we saw. It’s called a manatee.”

  “You saw a manatee?” Lee asked, attempting to divert Barbie from her praise of WW II. “What did it look like?”

  “Well, it was kinda—kinda like a seal, I guess, only much bigger. Sorta tubby and pale brownish grayish, with a round face and bristly whiskers. And this sorta serious, wise expression—It looked a little like Professor Walker, actually.”

  “Really.” Lee mentally compared the images of manatees she had seen in the Greenpeace store with recent photos of Wilkie Walker. “Yeah, I see what you mean.” She laughed.

  “He knew all about it too. It’s not his specialty, but you know he’s always loved animals and studied them. Even when he was a little kid. I was the same way myself, though of course I wasn’t brilliant like him. I was always bringing home lost cats, and birds that had fallen out of their nest, and lizards and bugs. Mom used to get really disgusted with me.” Barbie’s tone slid down the scale from enthusiasm to something near depression.

  “Mom’s thinking of maybe coming to Key West, you know,” she added.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Or maybe she won’t.” Her expression brightened.

  “It sounds like you hope she doesn’t,” Lee said.

  “Well, uh. I mean, I know Mom wouldn’t like it here.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Uh, well, you know. There’s all these, you know, kind of weird people around. Anyhow, except for Oklahoma and Washington, Mom doesn’t like most places. She thought Europe was sorta disgusting. And it would be real hard for her to get away now, she’s so involved back in Tulsa.”

  “So probably she won’t come,” Lee suggested.

  “I d’know. When she heard what the situation was here, she said she might consider it.”

  “Oh? What’s the situation here?”

  “Well, you know.” Barbie swiped at a pane of glass. “I mean, Perry says everybody does in Key West, but we didn’t have any idea back home.”

  “Any idea about what?” Lee asked with exasperation.

  “I mean, about him being so sick.”

  Lee frowned and put down her pencil and calculator. “You’re telling me Jacko’s mother didn’t know he’s HIV-positive? I thought that was why she came.”

  “Uh-uh.” Barbie rested the roll of paper towels on the top step of the ladder. “He just told her night before last. We were having ice cream in that Flamingo Crossing place you recommended. Aunt Dorrie just kinda fell apart. She dropped her cone and went all white and trembly, like she was the one who was sick or maybe even dying. Perry kept telling her it wasn’t so bad. I mean, he feels fine now, and he still has lots of good cells in his blood. But it was like Aunt Dorrie couldn’t hear him. She kept crying and there was mango ice cream all down her dress. It was awful.”

  “Yeah, I see.” Lee imagined what it would be like to learn that her daughter, who was now becoming a city planner in Boston, had AIDS.

  “She’s been kinda weepy ever since. Yesterday when we saw the manatee Aunt Dorrie didn’t hardly say anything, she was sorta out of it the whole time. And I guess she isn’t really sleeping much, because last night and the night before, I could hear her walking around outside.”

  “Do you think she’d feel better if your mother was here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I mean Mom is her big sister, and Aunt Dorrie usually kinda depends on her. And Mom’s always on top of things. She’s doesn’t get confused in a crisis the way most people do. Like she puts it, she can see the big picture. That’s why she’s so successful in business and everything.” Barbie sprayed another pane.

  “I see. A kind of generalist.”

  “Well, yeah. Mom is like a general, in a way. She sorta goes right into a problem and finds out all the details and gets it organized. For instance last night she was asking me all this stuff about Cousin Perry, did he have medical insurance, when had he last been to the doctors, and what exactly did they say. Only I couldn’t tell her anything really. Then she wanted to know about his place, where was it located, how many buildings there were, where Aunt Dorrie and I were staying, and how big was the pool. Like she wanted to visualize our situation in her mind, I guess.”

  “I see.” The thought came to Lee that Barbie’s mother, as a high-powered real estate agent, was anticipating the possible mortgage or sale of Jacko’s property to cover his medical bills.

  “Only I wasn’t much use with that either. I don’t organize things like Mom does. She got kinda impatient with me, like she does.” Barbie sighed and began rubbing the glass again.

  “She often gets impatient with you.” Lee frowned, irritated to hear herself falling into her therapist mode. She had promised herself not to do this with Barbie, who was obviously a dependent personality.

  “The thing is, I’m a disappointment to her. I feel bad about that, because so many people have disappointed her already.”

  “Is that so?” Lee said skeptically. According to Jacko, Barbie’s mother was a rich woman, a very successful real estate agent, and a powerful force in the local Republican party.

  “Well, yeah. For instance Gary, that’s my brother. Mom was keen for him to have a career in politics, but it didn’t work out, because people, you know, voters, sorta didn’t take to him.”

  “So what does he do instead?” Lee imagined Barbie’s brother as a masculine equivalent of her: blond, innocent, clumsy, and lost.

  “Oh, he’s a big success in Tulsa. Oil leases and banking. He has a head for deals, he’s like Mom that way.”

&nbs
p; “I see.” Lee revised her image.

  “And Dad disappointed her too. He was such a great guy, everybody loved him. But he didn’t have Mom’s business drive, and he wouldn’t go into politics like she wanted him to. Then about ten years ago he was in this awful car accident, where a guy got killed. And then he went to England on a tour with his sister who lives in Fort Worth and he never came back.” Barbie began to choke up.

  “You mean he deserted the family,” Lee said dryly, trying to head off Barbie’s tears.

  “Aw, no!” The maneuver worked: Barbie shifted from sorrow to indignation. “Dad would never have done that. See, he had this heart condition, and he just, he just went and passed away somewhere in England.” Barbie’s tone became weepy.

  “But your husband’s in politics, isn’t he?” Lee said, to avert a serious rainstorm. “I think Jacko said he was elected to Congress. That must please your mother.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, she was real happy at first. Only now she’s kinda disappointed in him too, because of this woman—”

  “I heard about it,” Lee said. “Molly says that’s why you came here, to think things over and decide whether to take your husband back.”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “So what have you decided?”

  “I—Well, I guess I haven’t yet.”

  Lee sighed, exasperated, as she had often been, by the indecisive weakness of straight women with obviously shitty husbands.

  “I mean, maybe it wouldn’t be such a good thing for him anyhow. It’s like Mom says, I was supposed to be an asset to his career, but I’ve become a liability. Mom says he still really loves me. But I don’t know if I should believe her.”

  “I suppose the question is, do you still love him?”

  “I guess—” Barbie’s voice wavered. “I mean, I used to, for sure. I couldn’t believe my luck, that somebody so wonderful would want to marry me. But after Mom backed his campaign and he got into state government, he sorta changed. Things started to happen that I didn’t like.”

  “Your husband began having affairs,” Lee put in, to hurry the narrative along.