Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  When he finally finished, he abruptly shifted gears, as if he were coming out of a seizure. He leered at the two of us.

  “Just kiss her, Gunther,” he said.

  The ordeal was over. The bride and groom, sweating in the heavy cotton of their Mexican costumes, and the drunken, disheveled guests stumbled outside once more into the scorching haze. Someone took pictures with a Polaroid. The kids began shrieking again until they were hauled off in cars.

  It was over. Gunther and I spent the first night mainlining speed, something we rarely did, with our new set of honeymoon works in a motel on a traffic island in the middle of the New York State Thruway. Sheets of rain were drowning out the sounds of all but the biggest trucks. Where were we? I thought I had been taken hostage. I was spooked. When my new husband reached for me, I flinched.

  “We can still make love, even if we are married,” Gunther said.

  But he had hit on it. I felt there was something obscene about having sex with a relative. For all of the next year that we stayed together, that feeling never left.

  Casa Pacifica

  “Janet, Janet, that was the second bell for lunch. I know you heard Katherine ring it. She came right out by the pool. I will not tolerate lateness. Gunther, you can stop work now and wash your hands. Luncheon is served,” my grandmother said, standing in the doorway of the breakfast room.

  I dreaded moving out of the sun to go inside and eat a heavy meal. But Grandmother lorded over us with the will of a white man in the jungle gone psychotic. From the day we arrived, Gunther had been reduced to little more than her zombie. I was the zombie’s consort. Well, I had tried to tell him, but he didn’t get it. He thought that family is family.

  Now he was swooning in the late-summer semitropical sun, trying to finish the wall-to-wall bookshelves so that he could go on to the next big task, retiling the kitchen floor. He was working in the shade of the patio adjacent to the pool. I lay nearby, occasionally breaking to swim among the gardenias floating on the calm turquoise surface. Even if Gunther had had the leisure time to dive in with me, he was a weak swimmer, pounding the water with flailing fists. So he spent the mornings hammering and sawing inside the patio, his hair wrapped up in a red bandanna, the sweat pouring off his face and down his T-shirt.

  Palm Beach, and Casa Pacifica in particular, never failed to bring home to me that the ultimate luxury is misery. To feel nothing but despair in these lush surroundings appointed with such marvelous lapidary touches of exquisite beauty—from the hidden statues in the tropical orchard, to the giant koi lazing at the bottom of the man-made waterfall, to the hand-painted mosaic tiles on the wide front stairs—was the limit of self-indulgence. All the more because there was no one in the world to pity me. If I cried out in anguish, no one would emerge from behind the beach plum trees surrounding the pool to comfort me. Rich people, or even poor people surrounded by riches, are not entitled to feel pain. But in spite of the sensual intensity, in spite of the elaborate melodies of exotic songbirds and the host of fragrances and colors competing for my attention, I had plunged into a torpor of self-loathing.

  The three of us sat at one end of the long glass table in the breakfast room, while Katherine scurried back and forth with the obligatory courses: cold lemon vegetable soup, cheese soufflé, salad, finger bowls, and melon balls for dessert.

  “Don’t you think Janet would look better with her hair off her forehead? Even girls who are not great beauties should at least show their intelligence, if they have any,” Grandmother was saying by way of conversation. “And while we’re on the subject, I think it’s high time you got a haircut, Gunther. Only factory workers wear their hair long like that; company presidents do not. Don’t you want to be someone?”

  “Yes, madame,” Gunther said. He had begun to address Grandmother as “madame” the way the servants did.

  “I’m so glad you agree with me. I’ll call Roberta at Elizabeth Arden and get her over here this afternoon. I wish Janet responded to suggestions as amenably as you do, but unfortunately, Janet is just like her mother, difficult. Well, you’ll see. I hope you won’t always give in to her,” my grandmother said.

  I was sitting right by her side, but she often referred to me as if I weren’t there.

  The sunlight bounced around the glass-enclosed room, flirting with the yellow roses in the wide vase in front of us and shining directly in Gunther’s eyes. He shielded them and looked at me apologetically. He could not defend me. Gunther was overwhelmed, had been so since the moment we arrived.

  “My Gott, scheiss! It’s so beautiful. My Gott, Janet,” he said, walking around in a circle when we got there, staring up at the cathedral ceiling that soared high above the giant living room. I ran up the hand-painted tiled steps to the balcony, where I stood looking down at him.

  “Janet, Janet!” he yelled. “You are my princess, you know it? My princess!”

  Grandmother joined Gunther in the living room.

  “I’m glad you like it here at Casa Pacifica. We think it’s beautiful, too.” Then she called to me. “Janet, you’re not to go in your usual room. I don’t want you staying in the big house. Too much work for Katherine. Besides, I’m saving the guest rooms for guests. You and Gunther will share the apartment with Fritz over the garage.”

  I wouldn’t have minded sleeping over the garage next door to Fritz, the chauffeur, if grandmother had not treated Gunther and me the same way she treated her servants, which was lousy. I mean lousy.

  Right after we settled into our tiny room with the linoleum floor, the clumsy, protruding wardrobe, the noisy fan and the creaking double bed, the old woman presented Gunther with a page-long list of jobs he was to do. I protested, but Gunther was stoic.

  “Janet, that is no way to talk,” he said.

  “She is my flesh and blood, you know,” I reminded him when we were alone again.

  “Nevertheless, we have to make the best of it. Don’t create trouble. Kiss me now. We’re together.”

  He tucked my head underneath his chin, where it did fit rather nicely we had discovered, and held me there.

  “I love you so much,” he said then.

  Right after lunch, Grandmother arranged for Roberta to drop whatever she might have been doing and come over to cut Gunther’s hair. At least we wouldn’t have to go out “motoring” with the old woman in the powder-blue Lincoln Continental, the three of us squeezed in the back, Fritz driving up front, with all the windows shut and no air-conditioning because she detested drafts. Roberta could have put hot straws underneath Gunther’s fingernails for all I cared; at least I was escaping that.

  As it turned out, Roberta did a smashing job, layering Gunther’s honey-colored waves so that they framed his dreamy face. He could not have looked more handsome. When we walked down Worth Avenue later that same day, a rich young matron stopped him on the street. Would he mind helping her with her packages to her car? I was left standing there while he went off with the woman, into the store and back out again, in and out. I was in a rage, chiefly because Gunther was so oblivious to his own power to attract. He just thought he was being a gentleman, until the moment, of course, when, he later told me, she asked for his number while they were leaning, heads together, under the hood of the open trunk.

  Meanwhile, I was already mad at him for other reasons. Before we came down to Casa Pacifica he had made me give up my Sutton Place apartment and return every stick of Whitney’s mother’s furniture to Whitney, who had to fly east to retrieve it. Now we were stuck at Casa Pacifica with no place else to go. I didn’t like feeling as though a big chunk of my recent past had been confiscated and since disappeared without a ripple. I managed to hang on to my clothes, but Gunther claimed the furniture and the Sutton Place apartment would be constant reminders of the Life, which all of a sudden he wanted to obliterate. Gunther had assumed a different role now that we were married. I was his wife now: his wife.

  If it were not for the satisfaction it would’ve given my grandmother, I might h
ave left him the first month after we arrived in Palm Beach. My love for my husband was dying. Still, I felt bad for him, and I blamed myself. Meanwhile, obviously frustrated and confused, he withdrew from me—wouldn’t say peep a lot of the time. Or if he did, it was just to snipe at me. Once or twice, he got as capricious as a big bad cat and cuffed me on the back of the head. I said something like “fuck you” then; I still wasn’t out-and-out afraid. All I knew was we were no longer allies. The only experiences we openly shared were our drunken nights.

  We decided to use the time in Florida to clean up, with the exception of alcohol, of course. After all, liquor was legal. We wanted to kick the other stuff, the speed and the coke, the quaaludes, the reefer, and the hash. But because booze was still OK with us, on our first free afternoon, we took the Volkswagen over to West Palm Beach and, using the last of our wedding money, loaded up on a case of scotch, rum, and vodka. The problem was, since we shared the garage-apartment kitchen with the not entirely trustworthy Fritz, we had to find places to hide all the bottles in our small bedroom. Also, we decided, we were going to have to learn how to drink moderately and quietly. At first, we managed to do that, sipping a cocktail or two before dinner and maybe taking a quick snort before bed. In the beginning, Gunther was so exhausted he usually didn’t even want a drink at the end of the day. I did, though. I would sit by myself in the cast-off old armchair underneath the window, gazing at the blotchy stars, swigging scotch from the bottle.

  One night, Gunther and I, Katherine, and the cook, Marie, stood in the driveway waving to the Lincoln Continental as the taciturn Fritz drove Grandmother to a dinner party the toothpick heiress was throwing. Everybody would be there, and although Grandmother had little use for the vapid rich widows who ran this town, she loved to see what they were wearing, the bugle-beaded gowns and chinchilla wraps, the face-lifts and the waxed bony knees. Grandmother, a suffragette, didn’t even own a pair of high heels, short as she was. Her idea of dressing up was to put on her floor-length white silk schmatta that Katherine had made for her and a little pink lipstick. But she did adorn herself with her sapphires on these occasions. She was not that big of a prude.

  Dusk settled over the tropical orchard. Before he left, Fritz had turned on the spotlights, which focused on the web of roots at the base of the banyan tree, the fronds of the traveler’s palm, and the masses of orchards surrounding the silver water in the long pond at the bottom of the dormant waterfall. The spirits of the woods were being summoned to the footlights. Katherine and Marie retired to their rooms behind the kitchen in the main house to pray silently, privately, on their knees. Gunther and I went back to the garage, where we filled up a big soda bottle with rum, laced with a splash of Coca-Cola.

  The night was ours. We came back to the orchard, sat on the swinging bench by the water, and took turns with the rum. In the darkness, birdsong gave way to a wall of sound charging out from the crickets and the tree frogs. There was nothing crawling around or flying in the air. All the salamanders had disappeared with the sun, and there were practically no insects, too close to the ocean. In a moment like this, I could admit that the sheer comfort of this queerly stagy version of the outdoors, a little patch of manicured jungle, had always suited me. I thought Casa Pacifica, and especially the orchard, was supernaturally beautiful. From earliest childhood, I compared this place with the hill my WASP father’s family owned in New Hampshire, and while I was quick to acknowledge that the other rugged country was the real one, the authentic country, it did not otherwise appeal to me any more than this. In fact, even when I was blue, I had come to prefer this spot, this construct of heaven, to any other on earth. When I was still a child, feeling slightly guilty for choosing the dulcet-toned Palm Beach over the harsh, bright mountains, I reasoned that if I were a fairy, for instance, I would have automatically chosen to haunt this twinkling, enchanted wood, this ineffable mixture of electric light and moonlight.

  Gunther did not seem at all to fit here. He got up from the swinging bench and began to roam. Like some poor Caliban who had lumbered unbidden into the territory, he scrounged around looking for evidence of the world as he knew it. He found a scrap of paper, a broken gardening tool, a cigar butt. Each one he held up, saying, “Aha.”

  “Come here,” I said to him, patting the bench.

  “No, you come here,” he said to me, laughing.

  It was a reference to our first encounter, our little private joke now. But he did join me on the swinging bench. We began to nuzzle each other, then paw each other. Finally, giddy now, Gunther and I stripped naked. We ran around, skirting the spotlights. I pretended to chase him, laughing louder than the crickets. When Grandmother and Fritz came home promptly at ten thirty, they discovered us lying in the missionary position under the banyan tree, on the dark side, but the soles of Gunther’s feet were caught in a spotlight.

  The car door slammed and we scrambled apart, taking refuge against the wall at the back end of the orchard. We were still naked, having shed clothes all over the place, so we just stood there, covering ourselves as best we could with our hands, while we watched the old woman pick her way in and out of the lights. She stopped about ten feet in front of us, holding on to the trunk of a kumquat tree, shaking all over. Then she let go and began to thrust her fingers in wild, stabbing motions through her upswept hair.

  “I will not have it. I will not have it,” she said. “Janet, you are the embodiment of evil.”

  She turned and stomped out of the orchard. We had crouched down, where we now remained, giggling.

  “It’s not like we’re not married. What’s the big deal?” I said.

  But the next morning, when Grandmother emerged in public at about eleven, after her usual breakfast in bed and a bath, she marched over to the patio to tell us that we would have to go if she ever caught us in flagrante again.

  “You must think of the servants. It won’t do. I can’t harbor a pair of animals in this house,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, madame, I don’t know what came over us. It won’t happen again, I can promise you that,” Gunther said.

  And it didn’t, nothing like it. We were trapped, hemmed in by dinner bells and airless car rides, Fritz snoring next door, the interminable round of stifling days and nights with no release. We would have left on a dime if there were anyplace to go. The more oppressive it got, the harder it became to think of a way out. Gunther couldn’t take it. He began to drink more, to sneak it in the morning, too, sometimes. One Sunday, when everybody was off at church, except for Grandmother, who was resting on the balcony after her facial, Gunther started to slap me around our bedroom. I forget what we had been fighting about. We were always at each other by this time.

  “You are a little whore,” he said calmly as he whacked my face with the back of his hand.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed, and spit at him.

  “So, you want to play?” he said.

  Then he punched me. I fell clean off the bed onto the cold linoleum floor, where he began kicking me with the toe of his engineer boot around the kidneys, across the small of my back and on my behind. But I sensed by the way he paused each time to take aim with his foot that he was still in control of himself.

  ‘He won’t kill me,’ I kept thinking.

  In spite of the fact that I was getting kicked hard by someone who was a foot taller and outweighed me by seventy pounds, it didn’t hurt, because I was too afraid. My body went into, if not actual physical shock, then some equivalent state of numbness. And the crescendo of rage that was triggered inside of me with every jolt up my spine was a relief. I actually felt grateful.

  ‘Finally, I can leave you, you son of a bitch, you motherfucker. That’s it. I can get out now,’ I almost said out loud.

  After what seemed like a very long while, he said, “You’re disgusting,” and walked out of the apartment, slamming the rickety screen door behind him.

  I threw all my clothes in the big suitcase, pulled it down the stairs and out onto the street. I
dragged the thing a mile into town. My eye was starting to close, I could feel it. People stared at me from their cars, but no one on that Palm Beach boulevard stopped, needless to say. I kept trudging along through the heat that was coming off the sidewalk at me in waves. When I got to a phone booth, I called Rayfield and told him the whole story.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll wire you the money to come home. Do you have a place to stay in town?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, Mother’s I guess. Or no, this time I think I can bunk at a friend of mine’s. Anyway, I’ll be fine as long as I can get out of here. It’s hell, Dad,” I said.

  “I know, I know. I thought the whole idea of Palm Beach was a bad one from the start. I’ll call your grandmother and tell her what happened. You’ll be all right. Just take the first plane you can get, darling,” he said.

  It was the only time I could remember that my father had ever called me “darling.” His sudden tenderness took me by surprise. I started to cry.

  “I never hit a woman, you know.”

  Silence.

  “Go to Western Union now. It’s going to be all right, don’t worry. Well, good-bye, pet.”

  The marriage was over; I had my father’s blessing. No one could blame me. Oh, thank God. I wasn’t mad at Gunther anymore, not at all. Instead, I wanted, deep in my gut, with all of my aching body, to tell him I was sorry.

  The Mohican

  Rayfield sat across from me in the dark barroom dressed as always in a turtleneck, this one light beige cotton. He hadn’t had a tie on in decades. He was a stubborn misfit. But, as always, with his silver temples and his black arched eyebrows, he managed to look distinguished. We were down in the fish restaurant in the tunnel at Grand Central Station eating our supper at breakfast time, around ten, because we were both on what they call the lobster shift, he at his daily newspaper where he worked nights as an editor, and I as an employee at the Sultan’s Retreat, the best massage parlor New York City had to offer. My father, oblivious to the hot May day above him, ordered his usual, a wintry oyster pan roast, while I stuck to the raw ones. I let him pick them for me; he knew them all—the Chesapeake, the Golden Mantle, the Wellfleet, two of each. I piled horseradish and hot sauce on top and sucked them down, trying and failing not to eat them too fast.