Then the girls and their dates all four spoke together. They said, “Great!”
“Now watch,” said one of the little girls, whose name was Teenie. “Cootie’s getting out that little ole rush book.”
Sure enough, the tiniest little notebook came out of the little cream silk bag of the other girl, who was called Cootie, and in it Nancy’s name and address were written down with a sliver of a gold pencil. The whole routine was a fake, but a kind fake, as long as Rob was there. The minute those two got her into the ladies’ room it would turn into another thing altogether; that she knew. Nancy knew all about mosquitoes. They’ll sting me till I crumple up and die, she thought, and what will they ever care? So, when the three of them did leave the table, she stopped to straighten the strap of her shoe at the door to the ladies’ room and let them go on through, talking on and on to one another about Rush Week. Then she went down a corridor and around a corner and down a short flight of steps. She ran down a long basement hallway where the service quarters were, past linen closets and cases of soft drinks, and, turning another corner and trying a door above a stairway, she came out, as she thought she would, in a nightclub place called the Fishnet, far away in the wing. It was a good place to hide; she and Rob had been there often. I can make up some sort of story later, she thought, and crept up on the last bar stool. Up above the bar, New Orleans-style (or so they said), a man was pumping tunes out of an electric organ. He wore rings on his chubby fingers and kept a handkerchief near him to mop his brow and to swab his triple chins with between songs. He waved his hand at Nancy. “Where’s Rob, honey?” he asked.
She smiled but didn’t answer. She kept her head back in the shadows. She wished only to be like another glass in the sparkling row of glasses lined up before the big gleam of mirrors and under the play of lights. What made me say that about a party? she kept wondering. To some people it would be nothing, nothing. But not to her. She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. Inadvertently, she drank from a glass near her hand. The man sitting next to her smiled at her. “I didn’t want it anyway,” he said.
“Oh, I didn’t mean—” she began. “I’ll order one.” Did you pay now? She rummaged in her bag.
But the man said, “What’ll it be?” and ordered for her. “Come on now, take it easy,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Nothing,” she said, by accident.
She had meant to say Nancy, but the man seemed to think it was funny. “Nothing what?” he asked. “Or is it by any chance Miss Nothing? I used to know a large family of Nothings, over in Mobile.”
“Oh, I meant to say Nancy.”
“Nancy Nothing. Is that it?”
Another teaser, she thought. She looked away from his eyes, which glittered like metal, and what she saw across the room made her uncertainties vanish. She felt her whole self settle and calm itself. The man she had seen that morning on the beach wearing a red bandanna shirt and shorts was standing near the back of the Fishnet, looking on. Now he was wearing a white dinner jacket and a black tie, with a red cummerbund over his large stomach, but he was unmistakably the same man. At that moment, he positively seemed to Nancy to be her own identity. She jumped up and left the teasing man at the bar and crossed the room.
“Remember me?” she said. “I saw you on the beach this morning.”
“Sure I do. You ran off when it started to rain. I had to run, too.”
“Why did you?” Nancy asked, growing happier every minute.
“Because the rain was so hot it burnt me. If I could roll up my sleeve, I’d show you the blisters on my arm.”
“I believe you. I had some, too, but they went away.” She smiled, and the man smiled back. The feeling was that they would be friends forever.
“Listen,” the man said after a while. “There’s a fellow here you’ve got to meet now. He’s out on the veranda, because it’s too hot in here. Anyway, he gets tired just with me. Now you come on.”
Nancy Lewis was always conscious of what she had left behind her. She knew that right now her parents and old Mrs. Poultney, with her rent collector’s jaw, and Miss Henriette Dupré, with her religious calf eyes, and the Nat-tiers, mother and son, were all sitting on the back porch in the half-light, passing the bottle of 6-12 around, and probably right now discussing the fact that Nancy was out with Rob again. She knew that when her mother thought of Rob her heart turned beautiful and radiant as a sea shell on a spring night. Her father, both at home and at his office, took his daughter’s going out with Rob as excuse for saying something disagreeable about Rob’s father, who was a big insurance man. There was always some talk about how Mr. Acklen had trickily got out of the bulk of his hurricane-damage payments, the same as all the other insurance men had done. Nancy’s mother was probably responding to such a charge at this moment. “Now, you don’t know that’s true,” she would say. But old Mrs. Poultney would say she knew it was true with her insurance company (implying that she knew but wouldn’t say about the Acklen company, too). Half the house she was renting to the Lewises had blown right off it—all one wing—and the upstairs bathroom was ripped in two, and you could see the wallpapered walls of all the rooms, and the bathtub, with its pipes still attached, had got blown into the telephone wires. If Mrs. Poultney had got what insurance money had been coming to her, she would have torn down this house and built a new one. And Mrs. Nattier would say that there was something terrible to her about seeing wallpapered rooms exposed that way. And Miss Henriette Dupré would say that the Dupré house had come through it all ab-so-lootly intact, meaning that the Duprés had been foresighted enough to get some sort of special heavenly insurance, and she would be just longing to embark on explaining how they came by it, and she would, too, given a tenth of a chance. And all the time this went on, Nancy could see into the Acklens’ house just as clearly—see the Acklens sitting inside their sheltered game room after dinner, bathed in those soft bug-repellent lights. And what were the Acklens saying (along with their kind of talk about their kind of money) but that they certainly hoped Rob wasn’t serious about that girl? Nothing had to matter if he wasn’t serious…. Nancy could circle around all of them in her mind. She could peer into windows, overhearing; it was the only way she could look at people. No human in the whole human world seemed to her exactly made for her to stand in front of and look squarely in the eye, the way she could look Bernard Nattier in the eye (he not being human either) before taking careful aim to be sure not to miss him with a purseful of rocks and oyster shells, or the way she could look this big man in the red cummerbund in the eye, being convinced already that he was what her daddy called a “natural.” Her daddy liked to come across people he could call that, because it made him feel superior.
As the big man steered her through the crowded room, threading among the tables, going out toward the veranda, he was telling her his life story all along the way. It seemed that his father was a terribly rich Yankee who paid him not to stay at home. He had been in love with a policeman’s daughter from Pittsburgh, but his father broke it up. He was still in love with her and always would be. It was the way he was; he couldn’t help being faithful, could he? His name was Alfred, but everybody called him Bub. The fellow his father paid to drive him around was right down there, he said, as they stepped through the door and out on the veranda.
Nancy looked down the length of the veranda, which ran along the side of the hotel, and there was a man sitting on a bench. He had on a white jacket and was staring straight ahead, smoking. The highway curled around the hotel grounds, following the curve of the shore, and the cars came glimmering past, one by one, sometimes with lights on inside, sometimes spilling radio music that trailed up in long waves and met the electric-organ music coming out of the bar. Nancy and Bub walked toward the man. Bub counseled her gently, “His name is Dennis.” Some people in full evening dress were coming up the divided walk before the hotel, past the canna lilies blooming deeply red under the high, powerful lights, where the bugs coned in long footless whi
rlpools. The people were drunk and laughing.
“Hi, Dennis,” Bub said. The way he said it, trying to sound confident, told her that he was scared of Dennis.
Dennis’s head snapped up and around. He was an erect, strong, square-cut man, not very tall. He had put water on his light brown hair when he combed it, so that it streaked light and dark and light again and looked like wood. He had cold eyes, which did not express anything—just the opposite of Rob Acklen’s.
“What you got there?” he asked Bub.
“I met her this morning on the beach,” Bub said.
“Been holding out on me?”
“Nothing like that,” said Bub. “I just now saw her again.” The man called Dennis got up and thumbed his cigarette into the shrubbery. Then he carefully set his heels together and bowed. It was all a sort of joke on how he thought people here behaved. “Would you care to dance?” he inquired.
Dancing there on the veranda, Nancy noticed at once that he had a tense, strong wrist that bent back and forth like something manufactured out of steel. She also noticed that he was making her do whatever it was he called dancing; he was good at that. The music coming out of the Fishnet poured through the windows and around them. Dennis was possibly even thirty years old. He kept talking the whole time. “I guess he’s told you everything, even about the policeman’s daughter. He tells everybody everything, right in the first two minutes. I don’t know if it’s true, but how can you tell? If it wasn’t true when it happened, it is now.” He spun her fast as a top, then slung her out about ten feet—she thought she would certainly sail right on out over the railing and maybe never stop till she landed in the gulf, or perhaps go splat on the highway—but he got her back on the beat and finished up the thought, saying, “Know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” Nancy said, and the music stopped.
The three of them sat down together on the bench. “What do we do now?” Dennis asked.
“Let’s ask her,” said Bub. He was more and more delighted with Nancy. He had been tremendously encouraged when Dennis took to her.
“You ask her,” Dennis said.
“Listen, Nancy,” Bub said. “Now, listen. Let me just tell you. There’s so much money—that’s the first thing to know. You’ve got no idea how much money there is. Really crazy. It’s something, actually, that nobody knows—”
“If anybody knew,” said Dennis, “they might have to tell the government.”
“Anyway, my stepmother on this yacht in Florida, her own telephone—by radio, you know—she’d be crazy to meet you. My dad is likely off somewhere, but maybe not. And there’s this plane down at Palm Beach, pilot and all, with nothing to do but go to the beach every day, just to pass away the time, and if he’s not there for any reason, me and Dennis can fly just as good as we can drive. There’s Alaska, Beirut—would you like to go to Beirut? I’ve always wanted to. There’s anything you say.”
“See that Cad out there?” said Dennis. “The yellow one with the black leather upholstery? That’s his. I drive.”
“So all you got to do,” Bub told her, “is wish. Now, wait—now, think. It’s important!” He all but held his hand over her mouth, as if playing a child’s game, until finally he said, “Now! What would you like to do most in the world?”
“Go to New Orleans,” said Nancy at once, “and eat some wonderful food.”
“It’s a good idea,” said Dennis. “This dump is getting on my nerves. I get bored most of the time anyway, but today I’m bored silly.”
“So wait here!” Nancy said. “So wait right here!”
She ran off to get Rob. She had all sorts of plans in her head. But Rob was all taken up. There were now more of his friends. The Marine Room was full of people just like him, lounging around two big tables shoved together, with about a million 7-Up bottles and soda bottles and glasses before them, and girls spangled among them, all silver, gold, and white. It was as if while Nancy was gone they had moved into mirrors to multiply themselves. They were talking to themselves about things she couldn’t join in, any more than you can dance without feet. Somebody was going into politics, somebody was getting married to a girl who trained horses, somebody was just back from Europe. The two little mosquito girls weren’t saying anything much any more; they had their little chins glued to their little palms. When anybody mentioned the university, it sounded like a small country the people right there were running in absentia to suit themselves. Last year’s Maid of Cotton was there, and so, it turned out, was the girl horse trainer—tall, with a sheaf of upswept brown hair fastened with a glittering pin; she sat like the mast of a ship, smiling and talking about horses. Did she know personally every horse in the Southern states?
Rob scarcely looked up when he pulled Nancy in. “Where you been? What you want to drink?” He was having another good evening. He seemed to be sitting up above the rest, as though presiding, but this was not actually so; only his fondness for every face he saw before him made him appear to be raised a little, as if on a special chair.
And, later on, it seemed to Nancy that she herself had been, among them, like a person who wasn’t a person—another order of creature passing among or even through them. Was it just that nothing, nobody, could really distract them when they got wrapped up in themselves?
“I met some people who want to meet you,” she whispered to Rob. “Come on out with me.”
“O.K.,” he said. “In a minute. Are they from around here?”
“Come on, come on,” she urged. “Come on out.”
“In a minute,” he said. “I will in a minute,” he promised.
Then someone noticed her pulling at his sleeve, and she thought she heard Lorna Skelton laugh.
She went racing back to Bub and Dennis, who were waiting for her so docilely they seemed to be the soul of goodness, and she said, “I’ll just ride around for a while, because I’ve never been in a Cadillac before.” So they rode around and came back and sat for a while under the huge brilliant overhead lights before the hotel, where the bugs spiraled down. They did everything she said. She could make them do anything. They went to three different places, for instance, to find her some Dentyne, and when they found it they bought her a whole carton of it.
The bugs did a jagged frantic dance, trying to climb high enough to kill themselves, and occasionally a big one crashed with a harsh dry sound against the pavement. Nancy remembered dancing in the open air, and the rough salt feel of the air whipping against her skin as she spun fast against the air’s drift. From behind she heard the resonant, constant whisper of the gulf. She looked toward the hotel doors and thought that if Rob came through she would hop out of the car right away, but he didn’t come. A man she knew passed by, and she just all of a sudden said, “Tell Rob I’ll be back in a minute,” and he, without even looking up said, “O.K., Nancy,” just like it really was O.K., so she said what the motor was saying, quiet but right there, and definitely running just under the splendid skin of the car, “Let’s go on for a little while.”
“Nancy, I think you’re the sweetest girl I ever saw,” said Bub, and they drove off.
She rode between them, on the front seat of the Cadillac. The top was down and the moon spilled over them as they rode, skimming gently but powerfully along the shore and the sound, like a strong rapid cloud traveling west. Nancy watched the point where the moon actually met the water. It was moving and still at once. She thought that it was glorious, in a messy sort of way. She would have liked to poke her head up out of the water right there. She could feel the water pouring back through her white-hair, her face slathering over with moonlight.
“If it hadn’t been for that crazy rain,” Bub kept saying, “I wouldn’t have met her.”
“Oh, shut up about that goofy rain,” said Dennis.
“It was like being spit on from above,” said Nancy.
The needle crept up to eighty or more, and when they had left the sound and were driving through the swamp, Nancy shivered. They wrapped her in a
lap robe from the back seat and turned the radio up loud.
It was since she got back, since she got back home from New Orleans, that her mother did not put on the thin voile afternoon dress any more and serve iced tea to the neighbors on the back porch. Just yesterday, having nothing to do in the hot silence but hear the traffic stream by on the boulevard, and not wanting a suntan, and being certain the telephone would not ring, Nancy had taken some lemonade over to Bernard Nattier, who was sick in bed with the mumps. He and his mother had one room between them over at Mrs. Poultney’s house, and they had stacks of magazines—the Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Life, and Time—piled along the walls. Bernard lay on a bunk bed pushed up under the window, in all the close heat, with no breeze able to come in at all. His face was puffed out and his eyes feverish. “I brought you some lemonade,” said Nancy, but he said he couldn’t drink it because it hurt his gums. Then he smiled at her, or tried to—it must have hurt even to do that, and it certainly made him look silly, like a cartoon of himself, but it was sweet.
“I love you, Nancy,” he said, most irresponsibly.
She thought she would cry. She had honestly tried to kill him with those rocks and oyster shells. He knew that very well, and he, from the moment he had seen her, had set out to make her life one long torment, so where could it come from, a smile like that, and what he said? She didn’t know. From the fever, maybe. She said she loved him, too.
On the Gulf Page 9