Even though Annie Renzetti had been free of her fifty-three proctologists since Monday, she did not seem to be unwinding completely. I sensed a reserve. I roamed the area while she did her office work. Even though we had been circumspect for over a year, it is just not possible to conceal a relationship in a hotel setting. She was the boss lady, and I was “him.” I was her “him,” my status known to the bookkeepers, the room maids, the dishwashers, the bartenders, the waitresses, the girls at the desk, the grounds keepers, the pool sweeper, the beach tenders, the lifeguards, the tennis pro, and the in-house maintenance men. So I was conscious, and had been for some time, of a discontinuous but consistent appraisal.
Gossip can exist only when the relationship gossiped about can have some effect upon the community, good or bad. What are they really like when they’re together? Do they say anything about us? Will they break up? Will that change her? Will somebody else come along? What will that do to the situation here? What does he/she see in her/him?
She was the queen bee of the hotel and I was the prince consort, the sporadic visitor, and a source of some concern and uncertainty to them. By instinct Annie had fastened upon a very good personnel management technique. She treated every employee with courtesy, fairness, and impartiality. She pitched in on any kind of unpleasant work when there was an emergency. She did not make a confidant of any employee and thus kept a certain distance from them all. She listened to complaints, prowled the whole area at unexpected times, rewarded top performance with raises, and fired the lazy, the indifferent, the thieves, and the liars. I was proud of the job she was doing, and at the same time felt a little uncomfortable with it. She was a paragon. And she was making a hell of a lot of money for the chain.
I bought myself a Bloody Mary at the pool bar and borrowed some of the bartender’s Cutter’s. He was stiff and formal with me. “Yes, sir. Celery, sir?” The safest place to keep me was at full-arm’s length. It can make a person lonesome.
I went back to her cabana, the last one in the row, up on six-foot pilings, let myself in, positioned myself in the middle of her small living room, and tried to undo some of the damage of too many days spent sitting in cars and offices and airplanes. One
John D. MacDonald very sound rule for the care of the body is always to keep in mind what it was designed to do. The body was shaped by the need to run long distances on resilient turf, to run very fast for short distances, to climb trees, and to carry loads back to the cave, so any persistent exercise you do which is not a logical part of that ancient series of uses is, in general, bad for the body. A succession of deep knee bends is destructive, in time. As are too many pushups. As is selective muscle development through weightlifting. As is jogging on hard surfaces. A couple of years of such jogging and you are very likely never to walk in comfort again. Man is a walking animal, perfectly designed for it. The only more efficient human energy use is the bicycle.
So what I am after when I have been too sedentary, and feeling bad because of it, is limberness. The unstretched tendons try to lock in place, resisting extension and contraction both. Stretch slowly like a cat awakening. Then twist and bend slowly, as far as you can, in any position where you can feel the muscles pulling. Hold that position, then push it a little farther. Hold it, then push again. Loosen all the fibers in that fashion, slowly and without great strain, until you have limbered your entire body. Then play the Chinese morning game of imitation slow-motion combat, striking the long slow blow, balancing on one leg, retreating, defending, striking again. Then it is time to take the long slow swim along the beach, breaking it up with little speed sprints. Crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, working the muscles you’ve limbered up.
Anne Renzetli came back to the cabana after I had finished my swim and my shower and had stretched out on the long padded window seat in the living room to scan a magazine called Motel 110
CINNAMON SKIN
and Hotel Management Practice. It said the shape of the soap makes a big difference in how long it lasts. As she was apologizing for having to take so long over her management chores, I scooped her up. She clung in warmth and fragrance, with a soft and smiling mouth, and I backed to the couch and sat with her, holding her on my lap, holding her close-a small and tidy woman, as electrically alive as a basket of eels.
A long time later, as the sun was dipping down into the red-brown smog that now greases the edge of the sky all along our coasts, I made us our drinks and we took them out onto the shallow porch, in the deck chairs side by side.
“I flew into Tampa,” I said, “got a connection to Fort Myers, and picked up a rental car there and drove down.”
“Down I-Seventy-five?”
“No, down the old coast road, the Tamiami Trail. An exercise in masochism. I get the feeling that if I’m away for three days, I can see the difference.”
“Maybe you can. My company subscribes to a service for me, and the last issue had an article about Florida population. We’re getting a thousand new residents a day. Permanent residents. A little
_ family every six minutes. In the public restaurants of Florida, one and a half million people can have a sit-down meal at the same time.“
“No more. Please.”
“We’re the seventh largest state. We get thirty-eight million tourists a year.”
“And the rivers and the swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying. They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard. The developers make big campaign contributions. And there isn’t enough public money to treat sewage.”
“Poor baybee!”
“Poor Florida. Everything is going to stop working all at once. Then watch the exodus. Okay, coming down that way this morning depressed me. But you cured the depression. You’re a natural resource they can’t drain and pave.”
“You say lovely things. Where’s Meyer? What did you find out?”
So I told her the whole thing. It was pitch-black night before I finished. She hadn’t seen the photographs of Evan Lawrence, a.k.a. Jerry Tobin, and she wanted to see the Xerox copy of the Texas news story, reproduced from microfilm. We went in and turned on the lights. I fixed fresh drinks while she studied the clipping and the photo.
“She was a very pretty girl, wasn’t she?”
“Yes indeed she was. They played down the angle that she was probably running away with Evan Lawrence.”
“Was she?”
“Her big brother, Marty, thinks so.”
I gave her the drink and sat near her. She kept looking at Evan Lawrence’s face in the color enlargement, her expression odd.
“What’s the matter, Annie?”
“What I was going to say before, out on the deck there when you told me all about it, I was going to say I couldn’t make it sound like something that really happened, those two things, those two women. It seems so sort of pointless. I mean, they both adored him, right? What was the need? Suppose he was with them for years and years and got tired of them. Like taking out insurance on the wife. That sort of dirty thing. But, looking at him…”
“Looking at him what?”
“I can sort of understand. I think this is a kind of man most women never get to see even once in their lives. I knew one like that when I was very young. He used to come to our house. I was about thirteen. He used to bring his wife. She didn’t have very much English. I think she was Hungarian. He was trying to make a deal with my father. He wanted a tract of land my father had inherited. He wanted to build some kind of factory on it, and he was trying to get my father to take a stock interest instead of demanding cash for the land. I heard years later that if my father had taken the stock interest, he would have become a very rich person in a very short time. I looked at that man with the Hungarian wife and I fell madly, totally in love with him.”