She dipped a finger in her remaining half inch of Moselle and drew a slow circle on my chest. "Hmmm," she said.
"Hmmm what?"
"I guess everybody has heard that ancient joke about how do porcupines make love."
"Very very carefully," I said.
She reached and set her empty glass aside. Her eyes danced. "So?"
I gathered her in. "Let me know if it gets to be not careful enough."
Seven
VVHEN I arrived back in Lauderdale the next morning at eleven o'clock I turned the little. car in at the airport and taxied back to Bahia Mar. After I dumped the laundry in the hamper aboard the Flush, showered, and changed to a fresh white knit shirt and khaki slacks, I checked the houseboat over to see if the phone was dead, or the batteries, or the freezer. I was hungry, and I decided I'd go over to the Beef 'n' It for their big sirloin-decided to walk over, as the miles in the little car had made me feel cramped. I fixed a Boodles on ice in one of the heavier old-fashioned glasses and carried it up to the sun deck to stand and survey what I could see of the yacht-basin world.
I looked over toward the ships'-supplies place and was surprised to see the familiar lines and colors of Aggie Sloane's big Trumpy. I locked up and walked down there, glass in hand. There was a mild fresh breeze off the Atlantic that fluttered the canopy over the little topside area where Meyer and Aggie were hunched over a backgammon board. I hailed them, and Aggie invited me aboard. I went up and took a chair and said, "Go ahead. I don't want to interrupt the game."
She said, "It might just be over. Meyer, take a look at this." She picked up the big doubling cube from her side of the board and plunked it down on his side. The number on top was 16.
Meyer studied the board for a long time. He wore a sour expression. He sighed. "Too slim," he said. "No, thanks. Travis, if I take the double, she just might close her board on this roll."
"Class tells," said Aggie, marking the score pad.
"Aggie," I said, "you look fantastic."
In her husky baritone she said, "Just because I had a few more tucks taken in this sagging flesh? Just because I got back down to one thirty? Just because I do one solid hour of disco every morning, starko, behind locked doors? Just because my hair is longer, and this is the best tint I've had in years, and my new contacts are this nice lavender color, and I'm off the booze, and after three years of shame I've been able to get back to bikinis? Thank you, darling McGee. I think I do look rather fantastic, comparatively speaking. I went through all this hell as a special present for good old Meyer."
"Good old Meyer appreciates it, dear lady," he said. "It all fills me with awe. But I think you did it for the sake of your own morale."
"Why is he so often right?" she asked me.
"Because he is Meyer. It's a character flaw. What are you doing here anyway?"
She looked exasperated. "We are waiting for some kind of a turbo-seal whatsit that has to be flown down from Racine. It blew yesterday. Made a noise like a gigantic fart. My dear little captain will not proceed without it. Some sort of fetish, no doubt. It is going to shorten our little cruise, maybe down to no cruise at all. But what the hell. Lovely place here. Not a trace of mal de mer. Of course, it does work out a bit more pricey than a hotel suite. But the two dear little papers I added to the chain last year are churning out money you wouldn't believe. It's almost vulgar what you can make these days out of a monopoly morning paper in a city of forty thousand people, after you really get into automation and electronics and all."
"Jay Gould would have loved her," Meyer said.
"Too," she said. "My taste would have run more to Diamond Jim Brady. Or John Ringling."
"How did you make out?" Meyer asked me.
"The doctor arrived," I said. "With new bride. Blond. With a fantastic pelvis."
Meyer looked startled and then amused. "Not according to Anne's plan at all. So you were the catcher in the awry."
"Please!" Aggie said. "Not when I'm thinking of eating. I'll go down and make sure they are fixing enough for three."
"I can't stay, Aggie. Really."
"Nonsense, dear boy. I would really resent it if you left. Today we are eating Greek. With the feta cheese, the moussaka, the grape leaves, and all. And they always fix tons, so there'll be enough for them too."
She went off belowdecks. I said, "That has really turned into some kind of special lady."
"Always was, had you but the eyes. How is Anne?"
"Recovering from the shock. She really runs one of the better places around. Anyway, I can give you a very quick rundown of the facts and hunches so far. Ellis was hurting badly, refused to admit it. The doctor tried to talk him into one of the hallucinogens to moderate pain. Good chance pain was getting worse. Ellis set up some kind of contact. They called back with a time and place for the meet. He went up there with a batch of Krugerrands to pay for his hash or fix or whatever. Traces found of a heavy motorcycle in the shrubbery. Possibility that the vendor, confronted with an elderly fellow, decided to keep the product and the money both. Or perhaps it was a scam from the beginning. Come to the place alone, Dads. Or no sale. Knowing there would be no sale anyway. Oh, one more thing, which may or may not fit: Josie's boyfriend, since the separation, is one Peter Kesner, weird cinematic genius who made two motorcycle movies on small budgets and got a big reputation. I mention it only because motorcycles have started cropping up. I thought I might go see my friend Blaylock about people who peddle from their bikes. I mean, if it's a common practice or what. I can see the advantages. Nares can stake out street corners, but they can't stake out the countryside."
"Why so far upstate?" Meyer asked.
"That's a question for Blaylock. It might be a territorial thing."
Aggie came back up and said it would be twenty minutes. We fixed another drink from the little rolling bar. It was nice under the awning, watching the pedestrian traffic, laughing at bad puns. We went below and ate in the alcove off the main lounge, served there by a very skilled Cuban lad. A slightly resinous wine went beautifully with the mountains of Greek groceries. I left in good season, full of resolve. But once I was aboard my houseboat, my knees began to buckle. I nearly dislocated my jaw yawning. I stripped down and fell into my gigantic bed.
The rattlesnake buzz of the bedside phone awakened me and I groped for the phone in the dark, wondering how it had gotten to be night.
"Uh?" I said.
"Well, hi! Were you asleep?"
"Certainly was. What time is it?"
"Little after nine. Missed you, love."
"Me too."
"Wondered if you made it back okay. Tell you the truth, I found time for a little nap today myself."
"Good for you."
"I know you will be as upset as I am to know that the bride picked up another dreadful sunburn this morning and is in bed with chills. And terrible little runny blisters all over her big meaty thighs."
"You are a mean one, aren't you?"
"Not really. I feel sorry for both of them. As a doctor, he should have seen what was happening to her and gotten her out of the sun."
"Interrupted honeymoon."
"I had a drink with him before dinner. She was sleeping, finally. I really looked at him and listened to him. You know, he is a very good-natured, sweet, earnest, solemn, dull little fellow. He chuckles a lot, but he hasn't any sense of humor. He laughs in the wrong places. Really, he's a very good doctor. Practically any cancer clinic in the world, you go in and mention Dr. Prescott Mullen... Travis, I just don't know how there got to be such a difference between what I thought he was and what he really is."
"Myths. Meyer says we build our own myths. We live in the flatlands and the myths are our mountains, so we build them to change the contours of our lives, to make them more interesting."
"I haven't had such a dull life so far. I invested some of my very good years in Ellis, of course."
"Right now is your very best year, maybe."
"I see what Meyer means ab
out myths. I mean you take some bored little suburban wife who plays bridge at the club every Thursday, she can dream that she and her tall brown tennis pro have something going, something unannounced, that they can never dare admit to each other. And that's her myth. If she tries to carry it to the point of its actually happening, it will blow up in her face."
"Like that, I guess."
"And right across the front of her, just above the cleavage, she's got a lot more of those runny little blisters. Hey Travis?"
"What?"
"I didn't call you up to talk about the blisters on the doctor's bride. I had something profound to say. About us. Now it sounds trivial, I guess. The point is, I don't really want to think about us, about you and me, in the way I thought I would always have to think about somebody I was falling in love with."
"Love, Annie?"
"Let me just barge ahead and leave explanations until later, okay? Being in love has been to me a case of being up to here in plans. Whatever you might think, I wasn't being some kind of opportunist with Ellis. He was a very autocratic man, and he was very very experienced as far as women are concerned. I was dumb about him, and it is still sort of blank in my mind the way he hustled me into bed that first time. Then a person says, Oh, hell, whatever harm is done is done, and you get hung for a sheep as high as for being hung as a lamb. I think it goes like that. And l got to love him. He was a dear man in lots of little ways nobody knew about because he kept himself so much to himself. But let me tell you that anybody who had the wives he had certainly wasn't an unattractive man. I hope you are following all this. Anyhow, with love came plans. I worked it all out. Some day he would divorce Josie and marry me, and do it soon enough so I could have a child with him, and the child would make him a warmer person to be with. Then came the news about the cancer, and so that plan was shot to hell. Right? So there was another plan. I would nurse him and care for him and he would live a long time, and the sickness would purify him. It would burn away the nasty. Then he. was killed and I was really really down. But I ,put my life back together, and I am a very fulfilled woman, businesswise. Now here I am falling in love, and I don't find myself planning anything about us, and that makes me wonder if it is love, really. All I think about is that maybe our lives are like the end of some long period of planning. I am here and you are there, and we are going to see each other now and again until we are too old and rickety to make it across Florida. But I know I am falling in love because I think of you and I turn hollow inside, and the world kind of veers. You know? Like it goes a little bit sideways for an instant. Hey I wanted to tell you all this as if it was something important. And when I stop talking to you, I don't. want you to feel any kind of obligation to say anything about love. Men hate being pinned to the wall like that. If you feel it, someday you'll say it,, and that will be okay. And if you don't ever feel it, that will be okay too, as long as you don't ever try to fake it."
"Listen, I-"
"Don't say anything, dear. I can talk enough for two. Any time. Anywhere. So go back to sleep. Good night." Click.
I reached and put the phone back. We had been hooked together for a time by General Tel, and the softness of her voice in my ear in the darkness had recreated for me a world long forgotten, when I had stretched out on the leather couch in the hallway, phone on my juvenile chest, and while the family was in the next room listening to the radio, to Fred Allen or Amos and Andy I was linked to the erotic, heart-stopping magic of leggy Margaret who, at fourteen, kissed with her eyes wide wide open.
I remembered the previous night when, with her head resting on my chest, Anne had stared off into some thoughtful distance. I could look down and see the black lashes move when she blinked. I could see a tiny slice of the gelatinous eyeball: You can repeat a word over and over until it means nothing, until it becomes just a strange sound. You can do the same thing looking at a familiar object until you see it in an entirely different way. Here was a strange wet globe, a shifting moving thing of fluids and membranes and nerves, tucked into muscle that could move it this way and that, that could shutter its lid to remove any dust, to moisten the surface of it. It had looked at me and relayed images of me into the gray suet of the brain behind that eye, where they would remain, instantly available whenever she remembered me. I stroked the dark hair. The wet eye blinked again. The dreaming thoughts behind it were unfathomable. I could never truly reach them, hers or anyone's. And mine would always be as opaque to others.
The phone rang again and she said, "I was so darn busy exposing my beautiful soul, Travis, I forgot to tell you another thing I called about."
"Such as?"
"I talked with Prescott about the drugs for Ellis. He told me. that after he got back to Stamford he had a call from Josie. She knew he had flown down to check Ellis over, and she called to find out how he was. He told her what he thought Ellis's life expectancy was, and it depressed her. He knew that Josie still had a certain amount of influence with Ellis, so he told her to tell Ellis that there was really no point in his being so damned brave about his pain and to encourage him to make a connection and buy something. I think she must have tried to do that, because in early July he had several calls from her, and they all made him cross. Crosser than usual. He just didn't like people meddling in his life."
"But it was okay if he meddled in theirs."
"Exactly. That's just how he was. You know, you are really very good at sizing up people. It makes me nervous, in a way."
"Exactly how?"
"Well... anybody who is really good at reading people can be very good at finding the areas where they are vulnerable and then taking advantage of that vulnerability. You know what I mean."
"I will have to get Meyer to explain me to you."
"Can't you do that yourself?"
"Not as well as he can. According to him I take all emotional relationships much too seriously."
"It is very nice for a person to be taken seriously."
"I had this same conversation with a girl named Margaret before you were born. She was fourteen. She wanted to be taken seriously."
"And did you?"
"To the point where I couldn't eat and I walked into the sides of buildings."
"I'm jealous of her. And so, good night again, my love."
Once again she hung up quickly, before I could equivocate.
Meyer says that if I could, for once and all, stop my puritanical ditherings about emotional responsibility, I would be a far happier and less interesting man. In childhood I was taught that every pleasure has its price. As an adult I learned that the reprehensible and dreadful sin is to hurt someone purposely, for no valid reason except the pleasure of hurting. Gretel, in her wisdom about me, said one night, "You are never entirely here. Do you know that? You are always a little way down the road. You are always fretting about consequences instead of giving yourself up totally to the present moment."
Add those ingredients together and stir well, and you can come up with a lasting case of psychological impotence. Meyer said to me, "You spend too much time in the wings, watching your performance onstage, aching to rewrite your own lines, your own destiny."
"And just what the hell is my destiny?"
I can never forget his strange smile. "It is a classic destiny. The knight of the windmills. The man rolling the stone up the mountain. The endlessness of effort, Travis, so that the effort becomes the goal."
Right, in a sense. But Meyer is not all that infallible. There are times. Annie had been totally now. An immersion. So vital and hungry I had no need to be the man in the wings. I turned on the handy projector in the back of my head and ran through a box of slides, of still shots of her in the underwater green of the towel over the bed lamp, when she was biting into her lip and her eyes were wide and thoughtful, and she was shiny with the mists of effort. Being the neurotic that Meyer believes I am has the advantage of giving me a far narrower focus of pleasure than if I did not truly give a damn. The now is that unexpected, unanticipated place w
here the mind and the body and the emotions all meet in a proper season,. destroying identity, leaving only an intensity of pleasure that celebrates all parts of that triad: body, mind, and spirit.
It is the difference maybe between gourmet and gourmand. In a world of fast food chains, the gourmet seldom eats well. But this again is too much of a celebration of sensitivity: "Oh, my God; look at how vulnerable and sensitive I am!" Which becomes a pose. And turns one into that kind of gourmet who looks for sauces instead of meat. The only suitable attitude toward oneself and the world is the awareness of pathetic, slapstick comedy. You go staggering around the big top and they keep hitting you with bladders, stuffing you into funny little cars with eighteen other clowns, pursuing you-with ducks. I ride around the sawdust trail in my own clown suit, from L.L. Bean's end-of-season sale: marked-down armor, wrong size helmet, swaybacked steed, mended lance, and rusty sword. And sometimes with milady's scarf tied to the helmet, whoever milady might be at the time of trial.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 19 - Freefall in Crimson Page 7