by Alison Lurie
Wilkie, embarrassed by this scene, turned away. For a moment he continued to tread water, watching the fading red light on the outer sea, resenting the delay, resenting the presence of the dying man. The sun was gone, the rose-colored clouds were fading; why the hell didn’t they leave? Wilkie frowned: though no one would ever know, it displeased him to realize that the last strong emotions of his life had been irritation and distaste. Shaking his head, he struck out for the darkening horizon.
Almost at once there was a loud, heavy, explosive splash in the water behind him. Wilkie stopped swimming and looked round. The pier was empty except for the three tourists near shore. The sick man in the wheelchair had disappeared as if wiped off the sunset with a sponge.
The tourists had heard the splash too: they were scrambling to their feet, shouting, running out along the pier, then huddling together and staring into the water on the far side. One of them waved and screamed something unintelligible at Wilkie.
His first reaction was pure black rage. Goddamn it, why did that have to happen now? Then, automatically, he started swimming hard toward the pier.
That wasn’t an accident, he thought suddenly as he clung to the soggy railing and began to haul himself up. That was a suicide, deliberately and courageously planned. It was high tide, and a heavy wheelchair with a man strapped into it would go—had gone—straight to the rocky bottom in ten or twelve feet of sea water. Four minutes, that was the longest anyone could live without air, and this fellow wasn’t anyone, he was fatally ill.
Down by the beach the invalid’s Asian attendant—no, lover, Wilkie realized—began to run toward them, shouting. I saw them say good-bye, he thought. I saw their last kiss. He clung to the slimy steps, above which the tourists stood now, jabbering and pointing. Witnesses, he thought, on hand to prove that the other fellow—the lover—wasn’t physically involved in this death. And I also am a witness.
We won’t be able to get him up, and it’s not what he wanted; but we have to seem to try, Wilkie told himself as the teenager and the Asian descended the wet stairs. And it’ll be a nasty, hopeless business. Meanwhile, the two middle-aged tourists pounded back along the wooden walkway, probably to call the police.
The next fifteen minutes, as Wilkie had foreseen, were highly disagreeable. With great difficulty, he and the other two men splashed and forced their way through the rusted, barnacle-encrusted supports of the pier. The wet, rubbery, floating seaweed, and the high surf, made it hard for them to reach the heavy wheelchair; the fading light prevented them from seeing it clearly. The third time Wilkie dove, he half grasped something bony and limp that must have been an arm, then lost it. Soon he had a pain in his hip and a long bleeding scrape on his shoulder.
Now the police and an ambulance had arrived; followed by a tow truck with a winch attached. Already a little crowd of those human ghouls who are attracted as if by magnetism to disaster had begun to gather. Men with heavy equipment ran out along the pier, shaking the boards.
Obeying their shouted instructions, Wilkie and the other amateur rescuers swam and squeezed their way back under the pier. He dragged himself out of the water into a cold wind, realizing that he was exhausted and shivering. His arm was bleeding, but there was nothing to staunch the blood with: his towel, his shirt, and one of his sandals were gone, no doubt knocked into the water by some fool in the confusion.
Wearily, he tramped back up the pier. One of the policemen stopped him, asking stupid repetitive questions and clumsily recording his name, address, and phone number.
“Okay, Dad, you better get on home now, warm up,” the cop told him officiously. “We’ll be in touch with you later to take a statement.”
Exhausted, furious, Wilkie limped across the beach in his remaining sandal, and started along Reynolds Street in the windy dusk. It was beyond reason, beyond justice, that he should be balked this way, over and over again. It was as if there were some invisible but vicious force that wanted to thwart him; that had already thwarted him again and again. Something that wanted him to die slowly, humiliatingly, in agony.
Halfway up the first block he stopped. What the hell am I doing? he thought. I could go back now and finish the job. He turned. The tow truck and ambulance were still there, their red and white lights flashing off-sync. He’d have to wait till they left, and he was now shivering almost continually, but what did that matter? He’d be dead before he could come down with anything.
But if he died tonight, his death would be arbitrarily but inexorably linked with that of the man in the wheelchair. Wilkie could imagine the headline in the Key West Citizen: TWO DROWN AT HIGGS BEACH. Worse, the Times would probably mention it in his obit. Forever and ever after, his life of respectability and achievement would be associated with that other pathetic death.
Yes, and some might even wonder if there was an actual link between them. The human mind is confused by coincidence into suspecting connection; it formulates false explanations. Synchronicity, it had been called by Jung (a thinker for whom Wilkie had little use). Was Professor Walker’s death at the same time also a suicide? That was the kind of question that would occur to the sort of critics and biographers who are always sniffing out scandal where it doesn’t exist.
He’d seen it happen to others, friends who were gone now. Bill Lumkin, for instance, killed in a fire trying to rescue his neighbor’s old tomcat. Afterward people started wondering why the cat was in the Lumkin’s barn anyhow, what did that mean? When the answer of course was, it was there to catch mice.
Maybe Wilkie Walker knew the man in the wheelchair, the scandal-hounds would speculate. Maybe they had once been intimate.
No. That must not be. He must postpone his accident until there was clearly no connection between it and the one he had just witnessed. He must wait a day—probably, to be safe, two. Two days of pretending to eat. Sleep. Talk. Of more promises to lecture and write that would never be kept, but would prove he planned a future and was a good and generous person. Wilkie felt the weight of those days crushing him like stones falling from the darkening sky. Chilled to the bone, almost dizzy with despair and exhaustion, and becoming increasingly conscious of a full bladder, he turned and limped on through the cold evening.
He would have to tell Jenny what he’d just seen, to prepare her for the arrival of the police. But not just yet. First he needed a hot shower and a shot of bourbon. The windows of their house were unlit: maybe nobody was home.
No such luck. There was a female figure by the gate, half illuminated by the outdoor lights that went on routinely at dusk. Not Jenny, but the friend of the manatee, Barbie Mumpson.
“Oh! Professor Walker!” she cried in a rush, grabbing his sore arm. “I’ve been waiting for you, I’ve got so much to tell you! I met this really nice man on the beach this afternoon, and he says there’s a lot of wonderful people in the Keys that are working to save the manatee. And I told him you might be interested, and they were absolutely thrilled. They’re having a big meeting here next week, and I said I’d ask you to speak. So please, please, say you will, because I promised I’d try as hard as I could—”
The girl stood close to Wilkie, clutching his injured arm, looking up at him with her round, stupid baby face, panting at him, blocking his way into the house. Get rid of her, he thought.
“Yes, all right,” he growled, because in two weeks he would no longer exist. Exhausted, he tried to put her aside, but Barbie wouldn’t let go.
“Oh thank you, thank you!” she whined; and then suddenly she bounced up and planted a long wet, sloppy, warm kiss on his mouth. “Oh, that’s so wonderful. They’ll be thrilled, I know they will. I just hope I’m still here to hear you, that would be so great!”
“Yes, well, excuse me,” Wilkie said, detaching himself finally, rather roughly. “I need to—”
“Oh, gee, of course, I’m sorry—” Finally, she got the hell out of the way. “I didn’t realize, I was just thinking—” But the rest of her gush of words was lost, amputated by the slam of th
e front door.
11
ON TUESDAY MORNING, AS Lee Weiss sat on her veranda fringing some handwoven napkins, Jacko’s pickup truck swung into the driveway. He leapt out, carrying a great armload of white hothouse flowers, followed by his fluffy white cat, Marlene.
“Hey,” Lee called. “What’ve you got there?”
“They’re from Dennis,” he said, mounting the steps. “People keep sending them, and he wanted them out of the house.”
“Out of the house?” She contemplated the mass of foliage: lacy ferns, sprays of daisies, waxy trumpet lilies, ruffled carnations, tall gladioli, and roses in every shade of white from snowflake to heavy cream. “But the funeral’s tomorrow. They’ll keep until then.”
“He doesn’t like the white ones. For Chinese people, white is the color of death.”
“Yeah, I read that somewhere, but—Well, hell, after all, Tommy is dead.”
“Dennis says they spook him. Anyhow, the service is supposed to be a celebration of Tommy’s life. So I thought maybe you could use them.”
“Well—Sure I can, I’m not Chinese. Thanks, that’s great.” She removed her bare brown feet from the battered wicker coffee table and stood. “Bring them into the kitchen; I’ll find some vases.
“So how’s Dennis doing?” Lee asked as she filled her deep sink with cool water and immersed the mass of flowers.
“Kind of strange.” Jacko sat on the creaky wicker sofa and took Marlene onto his lap. “I think he’s still in shock.”
“That figures.” Lee began to cut the stiff, woody stems of the carnations under water.
“He phoned me late last night, asked me to come over. He didn’t sound too bad, but by the time I got there he was really down. He started in again about how his life was over, and he’d never love anyone the way he loved Tommy. Then he said he might as well be dead too, and if he hadn’t promised Tommy to go on living he’d probably kill himself sooner or later.”
“Tommy made Dennis promise to go on living? That was smart of him.” Lee started to fill a glazed blue jug from White Street Pottery with white carnations.
“Oh, yeah. Tommy told him that because he was HIV-negative it would be his job from now on to enjoy all the things Tommy used to enjoy, twice as much. Drink Dubonnet and lime, and play their Callas records, and have artichokes with homemade hollandaise at least once a month. He said he’d be watching, and if he looked down and saw that Dennis wasn’t having a good time he’d be very cross.”
“Down from where?”
Jacko pointed toward the ceiling.
“So he was sure he was going to heaven.” Lee took a breath. Indoors, the scent of the hothouse flowers, especially the lilies, was almost oppressive.
“Yeah. You know Tommy. Always the optimist, right to the end.”
“So Dennis is supposed to enjoy food and drink and music,” Lee said. “But not sex.” She moved the carnations aside and started on some ivory roses with dark red, thorn-studded stems.
“Oh no. Sex too. Tommy told Dennis he had until Easter to get laid.”
Lee laughed. “He was a sweet guy, you know, Tommy, even if he had a lot of dumb political opinions. Most people might not want to think about how their partner was going to go on screwing after they were dead.”
“Yeah,” Jacko said after a pause. He wiped a curl of thick, dark hair out of his eyes.
“You think Dennis will meet the deadline?” Lee asked, setting aside a battered but elegant silver coffeepot full of white roses.
Jacko raised his shoulders, dropped them. “Who can say? He’s such a romantic. Always wants to be ‘in love.’” He crooked the fingers of both hands, placing imaginary quote marks around the phrase. “Wants to ‘really know someone deeply.’”
“That makes it harder,” Lee agreed, contemplating a rose so thick and perfect that it seemed to be shaped of white suede.
“I don’t get it, you know,” Jacko said. “The way people have to clutter up sex. When I see somebody I think is hot, it can ruin everything to know too much about him.”
“I know what you mean,” Lee said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost interest when I found out some really attractive woman was a right-wing Republican, or believed in previous lives.”
“Right. You want them to stay strangers. The best thing is if I don’t know where somebody comes from or even what his last name is. Just that he’s strong and beautiful and sexy, like those flowers.” He gestured at the tall copper vase of lilies with their almost pulsating golden stamens.
“But there has to be more to it than that,” Lee said, frowning.
“Not for me. What I really like is, I look at some guy, he looks back, that’s it. Fast and hard. The first time is always the best. Then if I don’t get away soon enough, he starts to tell me how he has migraine headaches or he was unhappy at work that day. I want to say, Look, would you please shut-up? You’re ruining everything. Only if I do, the guy will either get hurt feelings or try to kill me. So I hang around awhile to be polite, and he starts explaining how he grew up in New Jersey and didn’t get on with his father, or how he’s training to be a computer programmer, or he has a terrier named Oscar with a flea problem, whatever.”
“But hell, that’s part of the fun.” Smiling, Lee began to add lacy maidenhair ferns to the roses. “It is for me anyhow. Getting to know somebody, who she really is and where she comes from, feeling more and more comfortable with her, knowing she’ll be around awhile, that’s all part of it. Don’t you ever want that?”
“You’re like my mother, you want me to meet a nice man,” Jacko said, smiling. “My trouble is, I’ve met too many nice men. The better I know somebody, the less he excites me. Pretty soon he isn’t a great fuck anymore, he’s just some guy I know.”
“Yeah, but—”
“The last thing I want anyhow is a permanent live-in relationship; that’d be like prison. You don’t want it either, or you’d have one by now.”
“It’s not as easy as all that,” Lee said. “Not if you’re stuck with love.” A troubled expression appeared on her face.
Jenny Walker loved her, she was almost sure of that. What she feared was that Jenny loved her only as a friend. When they met Jenny smiled with pleasure. Lee could hug her then, even kiss her quickly, and Jenny would reciprocate, but no more. Sometimes when they were together, sitting close, leaning over the loom or a book or a pot of lime marmalade, Lee couldn’t help touching Jenny as if by accident. Jenny never startled or drew back; usually she smiled, but also she never moved nearer.
A dozen times Lee had psyched herself up to make a serious move, and then chickened out. What if she shocked Jenny, drove her away? Then it would all be over, and she would have nothing. Jenny would never sit in this kitchen again, looking so slim and beautiful, never stand next to her at the stove, laughing as they made pumpkin soup and licked each other’s fingers.
“So how’s it going with Mrs. Walker?” Jacko asked, demonstrating again his intermittent ability to read minds.
“Okay,” Lee answered repressively.
“You mean you still haven’t leveled with her.”
Lee shrugged and said nothing. Jacko was silent too; he sat there slowly stroking Marlene, causing her to purr even louder and blink her pale-green eyes. But Lee knew what he was thinking: he was thinking, if love is so great, how come it’s making you miserable? I’m not miserable, she told herself. Whenever I see Jenny I’m wonderfully happy.
“I don’t get it,” Jacko said. “I mean, hell. The way she’s over here all the time. And the way she looks at you. I bet she’s just waiting for you to make a move.”
Again, Lee said nothing, but she could not prevent the expression that came over her face. To conceal it, she looked away from Jacko toward the mass of creamy roses, the darkest of them almost the same shade as the skin on Jenny’s neck when she lifted her hair.
“Well, I better get on home,” he said finally. “See how Mumsie’s holding up.”
�
�Isn’t she well?”
“She was fine when I left. But she’s been having lunch with Aunt Myra; that’s enough to get anyone down.” He laughed shortly. “You want to know something? Now that Myra knows I’m sick, she won’t touch me. Won’t even shake my hand, in case she should catch something.”
“That’s disgusting. Stupid, too.”
“I had this sudden idea yesterday to grab Myra’s hand like I was going to kiss it, except then I’d bite it, really give her a scare. Only I’d probably get blood poisoning, she’s so mean.”
Lee laughed.
“Y’know, it’s weird, having this disease. It’s like I’m carrying a concealed weapon. Been carrying it for years, probably, only I didn’t know it. Didn’t want to find out.”
“Uh-huh.” Lee frowned.
“The thing is, at first you tell yourself, it’s not true, it’s just something they have in Haiti. You think, it can’t happen to me, I’m so young, so beautiful, so healthy and strong—But all the time I was sort of walking around in my sleep, killing people without knowing it, like some zombie in an old horror flick.”
“But you don’t know that,” Lee insisted. “You don’t know that you gave it to anybody.”
“No. But the odds are pretty damn good I gave it to somebody, just like somebody gave it to me. Sometimes I get really down. I tell myself, for a few years you were a murderer. You’ll burn in hell.” He laughed uneasily.
“Not if you’re sincerely repentant,” Lee said. “Isn’t that the rule for Christians?”
“I don’t know,” Jacko said. “Even now, when I think of some of the fantastic times I’ve had, I can’t make myself wish they’d never happened. Sometimes I think it was worth it, those years. That I was lucky to have been born when I was. The younger guys now, they’re all scared shitless, or else they’re really crazy and self-destructive.” He shook his head. “Well.” He stood up. “You’ll be there tomorrow,” he added with a slight upward inflection.