“We squirreled the money up there behind a beam.”
“Eighty-seven dollars it got to be. Runaway money, but Willy decided not to loan us the car. Jaimie, do you still love that girl a little bit?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you to love me. That would be a hell of a thing. Sooner or later you’d get awfully damned bitter about Buster and Charlie and Jack. But it wouldn’t hurt to love that boathouse girl. She can’t hurt either of us. You see, it was the sweetest part of my life. We invented how to make love. Nobody had ever done it before. We discovered it, and the rest of the human race couldn’t know what they were missing. Oh, Jaimie, bless you, what happened to us?”
“Sundry things, here and there. But where is this taking us?”
“Don’t be dull, hon. I’m proposing, of course. Stay right where you are! Don’t get tense. We both know you’re going to have to leave here, for the ordinary dreary reason you can’t make a living here. No. Let me finish. If I list this place at eighteen, I can move it within two days. I’ll go on the wagon. We’ll trade in our two exhausted little cars on something big and new and sexy, winnow our belongings down to the minimum, and take off and keep going until we find a place to try new things in. A trial escape, Jaimie. Not a marriage. My two hundred will keep coming in. So you won’t have to make a lot to keep us. Suppose we do get along. Then we can play it by ear. If we should decide we could live up to having kids, then we could see if we could start one, and then chop off my two hundred a month. You see, hon, what we’d have would be somebody to try to please, and somebody to say ‘I’m sorry’ to, and somebody to hold tight to when the nights are too black. And we start with that... that residue of tenderness from a long time ago. I think we know each other pretty well, and I think we’re both gentleman enough not to prod the other guy where it might hurt. I would try very hard to be good for you, and keep things light and fun and unpossessive, and I know you’d be good for me. And I have just one last thing to say. This didn’t just suddenly occur to me. It happened a couple of weeks ago, after I cried in the rain and came back to bed and you were gentle with me. I started thinking about it then. Since then, Gloria died and you’ve lost any reason to stay here. Jaimie, what do you think?”
He sat up and drank and settled back again. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Christ, it isn’t exactly what you’d call the chance of a lifetime. You know, though, you wouldn’t have to work for a while. You could get yourself sorted out.”
“I have to do something.”
“Yes, indeed you do. I’m neat. I make a lot of my clothes. I cook pretty well.”
“But terrible coffee.”
“I know. I know. So make your own.”
He sat up. “It isn’t every day I get propositioned.”
“It isn’t? I do. Oh, I’m sorry, hon. That’s the kind of joke I won’t make any more.”
“Mitch, I want to think about it.”
“I didn’t expect you to tear home and start packing.”
“But I do think I’ll go on home.”
“You could stay here. Please stay here, Jaimie.”
“I have to go. I couldn’t even tell you exactly why. Don’t be sore.”
“I’m not sore. It’s perfectly all right. Really. Just drive with care. I can’t afford to lose you too many times, my Jaimie.”
He stood just inside her doorway and kissed her. Barefoot, she seemed small. She tiptoed up snugly against him, her arm around his neck. Her solid weight moved him back against an angle of the wall by the door. His right hand, under her fleecy coat, traced the soft and heated planes of her back, down to the padded ledge of hip. At the end of the kiss he held her there, her lips at the base of his throat, her forehead pressing round and hard against his jaw. He looked beyond her and saw the palm fronds and the fat leaves of dwarf banana swaying violently in the inaudible wind.
“Goodnight,” she whispered and turned away from him. He let himself out. He had to cross the pool area to get to his car. He looked toward her big window from the far side of the pool, looked into the dark room. She was standing at the window. Only the pale short coat and the lesser pallor of her hair were visible.
Twenty-four
Throughout the next week Jimmy Wing spent more time at his cottage than ever before. Mitchie stopped to see him a few times. At first she was confident and enthusiastic, but she became uncertain the more she became aware of his lethargy.
“So it was a dumb idea,” she said at last. “So it was a dream, Jaimie.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to say it, dear. Your enthusiasm speaks for itself.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t thought it out.”
She stood up and went to the door. He followed her more slowly. She turned, with a sad, wise smile. “It’s one way to give me the message.”
“It isn’t like that, Mitch.”
“Isn’t it? Anyway, I’m off your back. You know where I am. Give me a ring sometime.”
“Sure,” he said too heartily. “I’ll do that.”
When the rackety sound of her little car was gone he searched himself for some feeling of relief, but, as during all the recent days, he felt nothing. He knew that it was implausible, and perhaps even dangerous, to have so little discernible reaction, but he could not summon up any sense of alarm.
The days were strange. Loella, the motel maid, had ceased coming over to clean the cottage, and it seemed too much effort to find out what had happened. The cottage grew increasingly cluttered. He had no routines, ate when he was hungry, slept often and heavily, sweating profusely in his sleep, dreaming of beasts and fleeing. He wondered how much money he had left in his account, but did not want to make the effort of reconciling his checkbook. He guessed it was about four hundred dollars.
He wrote to friends in far places, asking about the chance of a job. Usually the letters were too long, and he did not mail them. He tried to make a beginning on a half dozen ideas for magazine articles, but the prose seemed flat and artificial and he quickly lost interest.
The phone rang quite often that first week. He seldom answered it. Once, when he answered, a man offered him a free trip to Cape Coral and a free airplane ride over the new development, where hundreds of fine building lots were available, adjacent to the best fishing grounds on the west coast of Florida.
Another time a woman with a high, mad, whining voice chanted obscenities at him, terming him a Commie dupe.
He could not determine which of those two calls seemed more unreal.
He saved personal letters, unopened. One afternoon he decided to read them and looked all over the cottage for them and could not find them, and had to assume he had thrown them out accidentally.
He glanced at each day’s newspaper. The things he had always covered had been divided up among several people. When they weren’t by-lined, he could almost tell by the style who had written them. The paper constantly, stentoriously hailed the new era of prosperity which would enhance the area, courtesy of Palmland Development.
On his table was the carton Brian had dropped off, containing the junk from his desk drawers at the paper, a long accumulation. He did not open it.
Once, when he answered the phone, it was his sister Laura.
“I’ve been trying and trying to get you, Jimmy. I thought maybe you’d come here. I thought, being in so much trouble, you might come here.”
“I was going to. I just haven’t gotten around to it.”