“You were kids,” he said.
He and Janet Lanier had so clearly been an audience for McCallum’s madness. But he had been the audience for other things, too: if he stood behind a lectern and lectured on literature, he was still only speaking publicly about works for which he had been a passive, willing audience. As a child, he had followed instead of leading. It was always someone else — his mother, that night in the living room; Sonja, in a discussion he thought had been only that, an exchange of ideas, dropping the bomb about Tony; all the way back to Gordon, who had explained things, like Sherlock Holmes to the young Dr. Watson. He would have believed anything his older brother said. It was as if things were not real until Gordon discussed them. He could remember, with slight humiliation now, asking Gordon whether it was true it was going to rain the next day.
He said goodbye to Janet Lanier, vaguely aware that she had not answered his earlier question, but taking her evasion as a dismissal of his concerns. Cheryl had seemed so protective of her mother, but in thinking it over, maybe what she said, even about her mother’s physical appearance, had been untrue. Maybe she knew her mother was still pretty, but she wanted to pretend otherwise because she feared McCallum’s affections might waver. Maybe her hair was attractively gray, but Cheryl had needed to emphasize her mother’s age, as opposed to her own youthfulness. She was a seductive girl. He remembered sitting with her in the restaurant, her drinking his drink while he was on the phone. There he had been, telling a white lie to Sonja about whom he was with, while she had probably spent the day fucking Tony Hembley.
Everywhere he looked, there were couples in the restaurant. Couples in booths, everyone with someone else, only a few tables filled with people clustered together who seemed to be friends: the odd man out, the unaccompanied woman. The customers seemed happy, smiling, and tan, vacationers taking time out, intent on having a good time.
The waitress handed him the menu and a list of specials. He ordered a scotch and water, changed it to a gin and tonic before the waitress walked away. It seemed more tropical. He was somewhere called Islamorada. Out the window he saw the window boxes, the pink pansies, the monarchs, he saw now, plastic butterflies on springs, bobbing in the breeze.
21
DRIVING INTO KEY WEST he passed what seemed like endless shopping malls, filled with building-supply stores, open-air nurseries, discount liquor stores, stores selling aloe products. In spite of the state of the economy, the building boom was still on in Key West. Its advantage to Gordon was that it had allowed him to move off a distant key onto Key West itself, which Beth had been lobbying for since she’d married Gordon on a sailboat at sunset five years before.
The previous night, after talking to Janet Lanier, Marshall had called from the seafood restaurant. Beth had answered the phone after so many rings he’d been about to give up. A party roared in the background: the Byrds, he had decided, as the music overwhelmed Beth’s voice. The best he could make out was that Gordon and some friends had gone on a late-night sail. She urged him to come immediately, while there was still seafood pizza. He heard people yelling, splashing in the pool. “What will you give me.…” he heard. It was the Byrds.
He told a white lie. Told her he’d run out of steam, was stopping to spend the night at a motel he’d just checked into; he’d be in Key West before noon the next day. It sounded as if a tractor had toppled into the pool. “Oh God!” Beth said, the rest of her sentence drowned out by women shrieking and music overlaying the Byrds — live music, he guessed. He wondered who the neighbors were.
Gordon’s first wife, Caroline, had left him after five years, taking their daughter with her, moving to Mexico. Gordon had heard, from Caroline’s cousin Rawlins, who passed through Key West and went into the shop Gordon worked in, that Caroline had remarried another American while she was in medical school in Mexico, and that they’d gone to Rome to join a group of American and French doctors. When Caroline left the United States, Gordon decided to, as he put it, “cut my losses” and not have further contact with Caroline or with Julia. Caroline had been bitterly opposed to his having a relationship with his daughter. She had done everything she could to thwart him, but leaving the country had finally been successful.
Gordon’s second wife stayed married to him for about two years. She had a teenage son when they married, but the boy was in military school and visited infrequently, usually for a week or so during summer vacation. They’d lived in Fort Lauderdale then, and Gordon had been a late-night weekend disc jockey for the local radio station, as well as assistant manager of the bar Lissa worked in. Sonja had asked Lissa, when she married Gordon, what the boy’s interests were. She wanted to send him birthday presents. She was very thoughtful about that sort of thing. The answer, as best Marshall remembered, had been pornographic magazines and fencing, which had pretty much stymied Sonja in her pursuit of appropriate gifts. That marriage had also ended badly, with Lissa getting a quickie divorce and marrying a much older man. About that time, Gordon had started to work for the dive shop he’d stayed at until he started living with Beth. Then he’d gone into partnership with another person, borrowing money from Evie, which had slightly shocked Sonja, along with five thousand dollars from Marshall and Sonja after a desperate late-night phone call, which he’d paid back after a year, with interest. Sonja had returned the interest part of the check, and Gordon — whether he’d been sincere or meant to be funny — had sent a “thank-you” gift of a pitcher shaped like a parrot, a set of glass swizzle sticks topped with pineapples, cherries, and bananas, and a box of instant margarita mix. As far as Marshall knew, Gordon had lived alone in between Lissa and Beth. He’d married Lissa in a large wedding in her hometown of Memphis, wearing a rented tuxedo to accompany his bride, in an ornate white bridal dress she’d told Sonja her mother had kept on a dress form in her sewing room from the day Lissa turned sixteen. For her first marriage, Lissa had eloped, but her mother had never gotten rid of the dress. Once a week — this was true years after the second marriage and was probably still the routine — Lissa’s mother set her hairdryer on “cool” and blew air on the dress to remove any dust. The curtains were kept pulled in the room so the dress wouldn’t yellow. Sonja had related this to him with amazement, late one night in bed. He and Sonja and Evie had gone to the wedding, flying out of Boston and staying at the Peabody Hotel, which was famous for having a flock of ducks that got off the elevator and marched into the lobby to swim in the fountain twice a day. The day before the wedding, Sonja and Evie had gone to Graceland and bought plastic place mats depicting Elvis in his various jumpsuits, smiling. He could remember the place mats propped up on the window ledge, Sonja shaking her head at them as she sprawled on the big bed: all those views of dead Elvis in his sparkle suits.
He had only met Beth twice: soon after her wedding, and a year later, when she flew to New Hampshire with Gordon to attend Evie’s birthday party. She was now in her early forties, a short, slim woman with streaked blond hair and inch-long red fingernails who seemed to him a mixture of simultaneous shyness and extroversion. She had blushed and mumbled when anything resembling a personal question was asked of her, but she’d also brought a big suitcase filled with Mary Kay cosmetics, which she sold, and had insisted the women who had come for coffee and birthday cake stand under falling mists of various fragrances to see which most suited them. Evie’s birthday present had been a bottle of perfumed lotion and a small pink kit containing blush, eyeshadow, and lipstick. Evie wore no makeup. She gave it to Sonja after Beth left.