When Wilma finally took aim, Arthur Wilkinson was the hapless target, and there was not one damn thing any of us could do about it. He had less chance than a lovely wench when the Goths came to town. His eyes glazed over. A broad fatuous grin was permanently in place. She was at his elbow, steering him, to keep him from walking into immovable objects. He thought her junebug cute, delicate and dear, infinitely valuable. He felt humble to be so favored, to be awarded this rare prize. Any hint that the junebug might be a scorpion didn’t offend him. He just couldn’t hear what was said to him. He laughed, thinking it some kind of joke.
After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue. I had kissed the dear little cheek of the junebug bride. She’d smelled soapy clean. She called me a dear boy. My present was a six pack-Metaxa, Fundador, Plymouth gin, Chivas Regal, Old Crow and a Piper Heidsieck ‘59. For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift. She left a message for the yacht that wouldn’t be back to pick her up. And I knew the two of them would not come back to Lauderdale as long as she was in command. She had sensed the appraisal of the group, and would require a more gullible environment.
Three days after they left, we all knew something was wrong with the Alabama Tiger. Instead of his benign and placid condition of mild alcoholic euphoria, he swung between morose sobriety and wild, reckless, dangerous drunks. The permanent houseparty began to dwindle. It was Meyer who dug the reason out of him after finding the Tiger sitting lumpily on the beach at dawn with a loaded.38 tucked inside his shirt. And because he wanted a little help keeping an eye on him, Meyer told me the story.
Wilma had secretly invited the Tiger over to headquarters at the hotel one morning. With a deftness, Meyer said, more common in the Far East than in our less ancient cultures, she had quickly learned how to turn him on and off, as if he were a construction kit she had wired herself. Then, with a dreadful control, she had taken him right to the edge and hung him up there, incapable of either release or retreat.
“In his own deathless words,”, Meyer said, “whooflin‘ and shakin’ like an ol‘ hawg hung on the charger wires. He honestly began to believe it was going to kill him. He could feel his heart beginning to burst. And she was laughing at him, he said, her face like a spook. Then suddenly, without release or warning, he felt dead. He heard her singing in her shower. After she was dressed, she kissed him on the forehead, patted his cheek and left. He thought of killing her as she bent over to kiss him, but even that seemed too unimportant for the effort involved. Suddenly he had become an old man. She had accepted the tension between them, the contest of wills, and had taken a little time out to whip him before leaving. It might interest you, McGee, to know that it happened last Thursday morning.” She had married Arthur Thursday afternoon. “There could be a little heart damage,” Meyer said. “There certainly seems to be plenty of emotional damage.”
Monday night, late, I walked over to the Tiger’s big flushdeck Wheeler and from fifty feet away I decided, with that sense of loss you have when a legend ends, that the oldest permanent floating houseparty in the world had finally ended. One small light glowed. But from twenty feet I picked up the tempo of Hawaiian music on his record player system, turned very low. Approaching, I made out a girl-shape in the glow of dock-lights, dancing alone slowly on the after deck under the striped canvas canopy, highlights glinting on the glass in her hand as she turned.
She saw me and angled her dance toward the rail, and I saw that it was one of the Ching sisters; Mary Li or Mary Lo, the identical twins who sing-and-dance at the Roundabout, closed Mondays. She was involved in a variant of the dance forms of her native Hawaii. It is impossible to tell the twins apart. Almost impossible. I had heard that Mary Lo is distinguished by a tiny vivid gemlike tattoo of a good luck ladybug, but so ultimately located that by the time one encounters it, any thought of choice has long since been obviated.
Her hair swayed dark and heavy as she turned, and her smile was white in duskiness. “Hey you, McGee,” she said in a low tone. “Long as one little thing keeps swinging, Poppa Tiger’s bash is still alive. You haul aboard, make yourself a cup there.”
As I made my drink she said, “We running a fox roster, man, the chicks who swung good here, keeping him braced up.”
“How is he making it, Mary?”
“Now he smiled some tonight, and he cried just a little time because he said he was done for good and all, but a little time back my sister came topside all tuckered and said he made out, and now they sacked out like death itself, and this here is the party, McGee man, down to just me. And now you, but Frannie coming by after she gets off work at two, bringing the bongo cat, and I say things pick up from here, pick up good. A swinger boat, with booze like a convention, you got to brace the management when he’s down.”
“The only reason, Mary?”
She stopped her dance eye to eye, a handspan away. Like that dirty-mind cop wants to close us down, Poppa Tiger goes way upstairs and has the clout to mend his ways. Like our nephew needed the school letter that time, Poppa Tiger writes pretty. I just want to keep the free booze coming man, and tap that locker full of prime beef, and get the boat kicks.“
“I knew better. I thought it would be nice to hear you say it, Mary.”
“Brace up this dead drink for me, on the house. It’s fat vodka, one cube and a smitch from the little cranberry juice can.”
“Gah.”
“Don’t drink it, just make it.”
We had some drinks, and I watched her dance, and we had some laughs because the old bear was on the mend. Frannie brought along some other kids from the club she was working. And as an unexpected by-product of celebration, I learned beyond any chance of confusion that the night dancer had been Mary Lo.
Selections from the Tiger pack are not my usual type, as it tends to be too casual and mechanical for the ornamented romanticism of the McGee, who always wants a scarf in token to tie to the crest of the cut-rate helmet, wants the soul-torn glance, the tremors of the heart, the sense-or the illusion-of both choice and importance. But Mary Lo left no bad taste. She made it like a game for kids, chuckling and crooning her pleasures, and it did indeed pleasantly blur the use Wilma made of the same game.
After they have strangled the king with boiling wine, it is therapeutic to get a little tipsy on a more palatable brand.
Two
ARTHUR FELL back into my life on that Tuesday afternoon. Acquaintance rather than friend. The dividing line is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.