“Give him a time-out,” Gabriel said. “He’s screwing with you.” Neva removed the bucket of fish and walked off the pool top with Gabriel. When she returned five minutes later, she found Friday waiting contritely, his chin on the poolside, mouth open.
She signaled him with a raised finger: attention! Then she asked him for a speed-swim.
He leaped from the water in three flawless breaches.
AT THE END of January, Libertine approached Gabriel on the pool top, where he was watching Friday and Neva play grab-ass with the help of the yellow water-scooter. She said, “I want to thank you again for finding work here for me, and treating me like one of you. I know it wasn’t your idea, and I understand why. But it’s been a long time since I was part of something bigger than just me.” She thought about this, then smiled ruefully. “Something human, anyway. I’m going to miss it.”
Surprised, Gabriel asked, “Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m just about out of money. We volunteers have to eat and make house payments like everyone else.”
“Have you talked to Truman about this?”
“No—I haven’t even told Ivy yet. I’m trying to gather my resolve. They’ve both been very good to me.” To her mortification, Libertine teared up.
He looked at her. “You okay?”
“I don’t want to go,” Libertine blurted out. “I love it here.”
Gabriel gazed out across the pool, waited a beat, and then said, “Funny you should bring this up now, because I talked to Truman about you yesterday.”
“Uh-oh.”
He broke into a grin. “He agreed to let me hire you. Full time.”
Libertine put her hands to her mouth. “Oh!”
“So should I tell him you want to think it over?”
She wiped her eyes and smacked him on the arm. “You,” she said.
“Then how about you go buy a wet suit so you can play with the boy.” Seeing her look he said, “No, on the zoo’s dime. I’d also like you to take scuba lessons. If you’re going to be part of the paid staff you’re going to have to help keep the pool clean, which means diving. I have some ideas about training Friday on the bottom of the pool, too, but it’s going to take the three of us. Anyway, the Y is giving a class in a month, so I’ve already signed you up. Call me crazy, but I suspected you wouldn’t turn the job down.”
She clasped her hands in front of her, brimful of gratitude and excitement. She’d never once considered that she might be valued in her role at the pool; she’d been grateful to be allowed there at all. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Isn’t there something you should be doing? Go!” He shooed her away. “Go!”
LIBERTINE SHARED HER news with Ivy that evening, at the Oat Maiden. “I feel like, I don’t know—like I’ve been let out of the dungeon and allowed to play with the other children after being all by myself for years,” she said.
“That’s because people who hear what you do assume you’re a wing nut,” Ivy said placidly, feeding Julio Iglesias a stretchy thread of mozzarella. “Actually, you are a wing nut. Very nice, but still, a wing nut.”
Libertine nodded matter-of-factly and reached across the table to take another slice of pizza. Julio Iglesias, who was sitting up in Ivy’s tote bag on her lap, growled.
“Oh, you,” Libertine said happily, rapping him smartly between the ears. Julio Iglesias lifted his lip.
“Boy, if looks could kill,” said Ivy.
“Short of stabbing me in the heart,” said Libertine to both of them, “nothing you can do is going to bring me down tonight, so don’t bother even trying.”
Ivy looked at her doubtfully. “Truman did tell you what the job pays, right?”
“Compared with zero? Yes. So you knew about this all along?”
Ivy waved this away. “It includes housing—he told you that, right?”
“It does?”
“He didn’t tell you.”
“I didn’t actually talk to him—Gabriel was the one who told me.”
“Well, the zoo will keep on paying your rent until June. After that you’re on your own.”
Libertine pressed her hands together in rapture. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“You really must be poor,” Ivy said.
“I have forty-four dollars and thirty-seven cents.” She gestured for Ivy to pass her Julio Iglesias across the table. In transit he sneezed over the pizza. “Talk about a class act,” Libertine chided him, settling him in her lap and kissing him on the top of the head.
“I’ve never seen you this happy,” Ivy said. “It’s unnerving. Julio thinks so, too.” The dog was stiff-arming Libertine, who was trying to hug him. “Here, you better give him back before he bites you in the face.”
“I haven’t had very many friends in my life,” Libertine said matter-of-factly.
“You have me.”
“I do have you. I had my husband, too.”
“You were married?” Ivy said, surprised.
“I know,” Libertine said ruefully. “It always surprises people. Do I look like that much of a spinster?”
Ivy thought about that for a minute. “No, you look like that much of a loner. A sad sack and a loner.”
“I wasn’t always.” She told Ivy about Larry Adagio. “He got me. I still miss him.”
“So do you, you know, hear from him or anything? From the Beyond?”
“I’m an animal communicator, not a medium.”
“Did he know that?” Ivy asked.
“He knew I could talk to our cat and an old dachshund his mom had, but I didn’t start working with wild animals until he died.” Libertine said. “I think he’d be proud of me, though. He always said he had more faith in me than I had in myself.”
“So some things don’t change,” said Ivy.
“I guess. What about you—no husbands, no fiancés?”
“Nope. Oh, I went out with a fair number of men in my day. I used to spend my winters in Egypt until recently.”
“Hence the dresses.”
“Hence the dresses,” Ivy confirmed. “There’s no getting around the fact that Arabs know how to dress for comfort. Anyway, I saw a few of the men in the Egyptian ex-pat community, but nothing serious—most of them were married. I was reading a biography the other day about Wallis Simpson, and did you know she didn’t really even want Edward? But after he abdicated the throne, what was she supposed to do, throw him over and call him a mistake? Not likely. They were apparently a phenomenally dreary couple, by the way—sponges and parasites and boring. After what they went through, you’d think they’d be fascinating but I guess they weren’t. Bigots and fascists, yes, but fascinating, no. How on earth did I get onto that subject?”
“Beaus,” Libertine prompted.
“Ah. Nothing else to say about that. It would be nice to have someone fall madly in love with me, a little less nice to fall madly in love with someone else, especially if it wasn’t reciprocal, but I don’t spend time thinking about it anymore. I’m sixty-two, set in my ways, and I love sleeping alone.”
When dinner was over, Ivy reached for the check first, as always. Libertine tried to stop her. “No, let me. After all, I’m employed now!”
“Honey, if you paid you’d only have twenty-five dollars and thirty-seven cents, and I can’t imagine any emergency that could come that cheap. You hang on to what you’ve got—you can take me out another time.”
Libertine gave in.
IVY HADN’T BEEN completely honest. There had been just one man in Egypt—a married man. They had met in a club frequented by U.S. State Department diplomats and functionaries; ever since, the shush of overhead fan blades turning in the heat had aroused in her a vestigial feeling of regret and longing. Ivy had been forty-nine, he’d been forty-two, and his wife had been thirty-seven—too old to be a trophy wife and not old enough for Ivy to feel sorry for. The feet touching beneath the table, the calves intertwined, the furtive hand-holding they’d succum
bed to, had been agony. He had had the most beautiful forearms and hands she’d ever seen, before and since, though Gabriel’s were close contenders. They had met away from the club only once during their seven-month relationship, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo. But instead of the tryst they’d both been anticipating for so long, he had broken down and wept.
“What should I do?” he’d begged her. “Just tell me what I should do and I’ll do it!” But the mere fact that he tried to appropriate her strength killed the passion. She would not shoulder his adultery; nor was she capable of loving someone with unclear priorities. Dutifully she’d held him, even wept with him, but she flew home the next day and never saw him again.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY Ivy invited Gabriel to her house on San Juan Island. “You need to get away,” she’d told him in making her pitch. “When’s the last day you had completely off?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“When’s the last time you were away from Bladenham?”
“Longer.”
“I’ll pick you up at the pool at two-thirty on Friday. Plan on staying overnight.”
“You don’t have to do that—I can find my way back.”
“I know, I just assumed we’d both be drunk enough not to want to deal with ferry schedules and unlit roads.”
“You do have a way of laying things out, don’t you? Does anyone ever tell you no?”
“Damned few, as a matter of fact—but it’s usually because I’m filthy rich. You don’t seem to care about that.”
“Why should I? You’re the one who’s rich, not me.”
“You have a point.”
“Almost always.”
Ivy put together a grocery list and faxed it to the market in Friday Harbor, asking them to put everything in a box, charge it to her account, and have it ready for her to pick up on the way home from the ferry. Included: Dungeness crab, butter clams, fresh mussels, asparagus, romaine lettuce, various bell peppers, mushrooms, radishes and any other available vegetables that would work up nicely in a salad, freshly baked artisan bread, and a whole bakery cheesecake. They stopped at the liquor store to pick up several bottles of a superb Chilean Pinot Grigio kept chilled and in stock especially for her, and arrived home with enough time for Ivy to assemble and serve an excellent dinner, which she followed up with a very nice port.
By the end of dessert they were blotto, sprawled in the deep, comfortable club chairs in Ivy’s living room. “I wish I were younger,” Ivy said earnestly, picking through Julio Iglesias’s fur for nonexistent fleas. When the dog bared his teeth she smacked him lightly on the nose and went back to rummaging through his coat.
“Doesn’t everyone?” asked Gabriel.
“No—I mean I wish I were younger but you were your age.”
“Ah.”
“Is it tragic or just maudlin when old women lust after younger men?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t think I’m the kind of man women lust after.”
“Au contraire.”
To his credit, Gabriel let the remark go; to hers, in an act of uncharacteristic restraint, Ivy didn’t pursue it. She sipped her drink and licked the rim of the glass ruminatively. “You know, it’s a terrible thing to be alone.”
“What do you mean?” said Gabriel.
“What do you mean, what do I mean? Just what I said.” Ivy pushed Julio Iglesias off her lap and sat up straighter. “I bet you think I’m spunky. Just a spunky ol’ gal.”
“Well, aren’t you? Not the old part, but the other.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point.”
“So what is the point?”
“No one chooses to be alone. Maybe that’s why I relate to Friday.”
“Now you’re being maudlin.”
“I’m not. I just love him and I hate that he’s all by himself.”
Gabriel stared at her. “Are you kidding? One of us is with him eighteen hours a day, most days.”
“You know what I mean,” Ivy said, slumping back into her chair.
“If I do, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Ivy subsided. “Would you say you have to love the animals you work with?” she mused. “Because why else would you spend all day and most evenings waiting on them hand and foot? Hoof—hand and hoof? No, wait, wait—flipper and fluke.”
Gabriel frowned over this. “Love? Not necessarily. Respect—you have to have a high degree of respect for them. And they have to have a high degree of respect for you. Otherwise there’s a good chance they’ll kill you.” He closed his eyes.
“Well, that’s no good.” Ivy raised herself on one arm, squinted at him, then collapsed again. “How can you be so damned smart about animals and so clueless about people?”
He cracked one eye open in protest. “What do you mean?—I am not.”
Ivy nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, you are. Take little Libertine. She’s head over heels in love with you—love, not lust—and you probably don’t even know.”
“Now I do,” Gabriel pointed out.
Ivy snickered. “That’s true. Now you do.”
“You know, you’re a mean drunk,” Gabriel said, pointing at her with his wineglass, sloshing a little port on his shirt.
“Me?”
“You. She’s your friend and you just outed her.”
“I did not,” Ivy protested lamely.
“Yeah, you did,” Gabriel was saying. “Now we just have to hope I get drunk enough not to remember, because then you’ll have outed-her-not.”
“He loves me, he loves me not,” sang Ivy. “Are you drunk enough?”
“No.”
“Then we better fix that.” Ivy rose with some difficulty. “You know, I have a very, very good scotch. Want some? Accepting would be the gentlemanly thing.”
“Then I accept.”
Ivy rummaged in a liquor cabinet until she found the bottle, then soda, then two glasses. Clumsily, before putting the drink in Gabriel’s hand, she slopped some of it on Julio Iglesias, who’d been dozing on Gabriel’s lap. The dog gave her a bitter look before jumping down and walking slowly, deliberately, to the other side of the room, where he glanced back at her to make sure she was watching before depositing a small, perfectly formed turd on the carpet.
“I don’t know what he holds against me,” Ivy said sadly, making no move to clean it up. “I’ve given him everything and he treats me like crap.” Her eyes filled with tears. “They say maiden ladies—does anyone use that expression anymore?—maiden ladies use dogs as surrogate children. Some child. A real child would treat me better, I’ll tell you that.”
Gabriel slapped his chest. “Come on, Julio. Come to Papa.”
The dog trotted back and hopped up. “Want a sip?” Gabriel held his scotch-and-soda where Julio Iglesias could lap up a healthy dose, then raised it overhead. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re the designated driver.”
Ivy thought that was a scream.
By midnight Gabriel had fallen asleep on the living room sofa with Julio Iglesias curled on top of his chest and snoring like a wino. Ivy was in a similar state of dishabille on a fainting couch across the room, her voluminous dress twisted around her, her Nikes and athletic socks kicked off to reveal a fresh and immaculate pedicure. One of her pet peeves was women who, in their senior years, neglected their nails—one of the few body parts which, when skillfully attended to, could still compete with those of women half their age.
She finally roused Gabriel long enough to lead him upstairs, putting him in the same guest room Libertine had used. “G’night, you luscious thing.” She gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Dream of beautiful virgins.”
The next morning they were halfway through a hangover breakfast of hash, eggs, and Bloody Marys when the phone rang. It was Neva.
“I think you’d better come back,” she said starkly. “There’s something wrong with Friday.”
Chapter 11
GABRIEL AND IVY made it back to Bladenham by late afternoon, which was a mira
cle, given the infrequent ferry runs at that time of year. They drove directly to the pool, where Neva and Libertine were waiting. Neva darted out before Gabriel had even stepped out of his truck. “Slow down,” he told her. “Take a deep breath.” Once they’d reached the office he said, “Okay. Now.”
“He does an underwater speed-swim for maybe two or three laps, until he’s really got some speed, and then he slams into the gallery windows.” Neva said. “It’s totally unnerving.”
“Headfirst?”
“God no—broadside.”
“And when she says ‘slams’ she really means slams,” Libertine said. “You can hear the reverberation from across the pool. And he’s doing it over and over and over.”
“Here—watch. He’s getting ready to do it again.” Neva pulled Gabriel over to the window. Just as she’d described, Friday wound himself up and bodychecked the nearest acrylic pane the way a hockey player slams into the boards. “It’s awful,” she said.
“Is he vocalizing?”
“I don’t know.” She and Libertine looked at each other for consensus. “No, not that we’ve heard.”
“And how many times has he done it?”
“Maybe forty times,” Neva said. “When we’ve been here.”
“Has the sun been out?”
“I wish.”
“What’s his body posture like?”
“I don’t know—normal,” Neva said. She looked to Libertine, who concurred. “Nothing different.”
“No convulsing, no arching, no cramping?”
Both women shook their heads.
“And no vocalizing?” he asked again.
“No.”
“Have you been in the water to listen?”
“I cleaned yesterday afternoon,” Neva said, “when he first started doing it. I didn’t hear anything.”
“No bleeding, no broken teeth?”
“No.”
“And he’s eating?”
“Yes.”
“No discharge when he blows—no flying snot?”
“No.”
Suspecting that whatever was going on was behavioral rather than medical, Gabriel calmly folded his arms across his chest and said, “Okay. Let me watch him.”
Friday's Harbor: A Novel Page 19