“I think maybe I’m beginning to. Maybe we can leave it that you can come over to Lauderdale whenever.”
“I don’t think so. Thank you, but I don’t think that would be wise. Besides, I really do expect to get the position in Hawaii.”
She turned her head and looked at her bedside clock. Ten past three.
“Travis?”
I slipped my arms around her and pulled her closer.
“Travis, do me a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Just get up and get dressed and get in your little rented car and go home.”
When I started to speak she pressed two fingers against my lips.
“Please, dear: I want to cry in peace. I want to cry for a long long time, and then sleep like death: Please go. Please don’t say anything. We’ve said it all.”
And so I dressed in darkness, picked up my gear, let myself out, making certain the door was locked. One of her alert security guards checked me, grunting recognition after putting his flashlight on my face.
And here is how it was for me, as I droned across Alligator Alley in the little tin car. I told myself there was no understanding women. I told myself she didn’t understand what she was throwing away. I told myself I would probably read about her in the papers, years hence, a hard-bitten little gray-haired woman who had been made head of something or other.
I felt lost and lonesome and, in a curious way, unworthy. I still kept telling myself there was no understanding them.
But honesty cannot be indefinitely suppressed. Yes, I knew exactly what she meant. I knew exactly why she had made her decision, and I was forced to admit that no matter what I thought of it, it was the right decision for Anne Renzetti.
Then came the hard part. I had suffered loss. I had been rejected. I was the lover cast out I was alone. And when I tried to plumb the depths of my grief and my loss, I came finally upon a small ugly morsel way down in the bottom of my soul. It was a little round object, like a head with a grinning face. It said ugly things to me. It kept telling me I was relieved. I strained for the crocodile tears, but the little face grinned and grinned. It shamed me.
And as I unlocked my houseboat and got ready to go back to bed, I realized that Annie had perhaps suspected that the little ugly feeling of relief and release would be there. We are all, says Meyer, in one way or another, large or small, hidden or revealed, rotten at the core.
Goodbye, Annie girl. I loved you as much as I can love. And I will feel an aching need for you for a long time.
So what if I did put the Flush aboard a freighter as deck cargo and go out to the islands? New place. Cleaner skies. Hadn’t I been saying sour things about all of Florida going down the drain under the polluting weight of an unending invasion of new residents?
Florida was second rate, flashy and cheap, tacky and noisy. The water supply was failing. The developers were moving in on the marshlands and estuaries, pleading new economic growth. The commercial fishermen were an endangered species. Miami was the world’s murder capital. Phosphate and fruit trucks were pounding the tired old roads to rubble. Droughts of increasing severity were browning the landscape. Wary folks stayed off the unlighted beaches and dimly lighted streets at night, fearing the minority knife, the ethnic club, the bullet from the stolen gun.
And yet… and yet…
There would be a time again when I would canoe down the Withlacoochee, adrift in a slow current, seeing the morning mist rising at the base of the limestone buttes, seeing the sudden heartstopping dip and wheel of a flight of birds of incredible whiteness.
On an unknown day dawn the road ahead, I would see that slow slide of the gator down the mudbank into the pond, see his eye knobs watching me, see a dance cloud of a billion gnats in the ray of sun coming through Spanish moss.
And once again maybe I would be wading and spincasting a pass at dawn, in an intense, misty, windless silence, and suddenly hear the loud hissy gasp of a porpoise coming up for air just a few feet behind me, startling me out of my wits, and see his benign, enigmatic smile as he sounded again.
Wild orchids, gnarls of cypress knees, circlets of sun slanting down onto green marsh water, a half acre of-wind moving across the grass flats, fading and dying, throaty gossip of wild turkeys, fading life of a boated tarpon, angelfish-batting their eye lashes moving coy and elusive between the sea fans, the full, constant, mind-warping, roaring, whistling scream of full hurricane.
Tacky though it might be, its fate uncertain, too much of its destiny in the hands of men whose sole thought was grab the money and run, cheap little city politicians with blow-dried hair, ice-eyed old men from the North with devout claims about their duties to their shareholders, big-rumped good old boys from the cattle counties with their fingers in the till right up to their cologned armpits-it was still my place in the world. It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.
It has too many magic moments that make up for all the rest of it. Too many flashes of a pure delight. I realized there was no point in trying to sleep. I dug out the tallest glass I owned, found four oranges in the cold locker that had no soft spots, made a tall mourner’s breakfast of juice, cracked ice, and Boodles gin, and took it up to my fly bridge forward of the sun deck, swiveled my captain’s chair, and put my heels on the starboard side of the control panel. The promise of dawn was a salmon thread over by the Bahamas.
I realized that Annie might never be aboard again, and there was a sudden sickening wrenching sense of loss, a kind of vivid despair. Loss with no dilution of relief.
When the drink was half gone my phone began ringing. I hurried on down, knowing who it was, hoping she wouldn’t give up. She was still there. “Yes?”
“Look. Not like this.”
I exhaled a long breath. “You’re right. Not like this, Annie.”
“Because, plus the rest, we were friends.”
“Are friends,” I said.
“And we keep the friends part.”
“You let me know what they say in Chicago.”
“I will.”
“I hope they offer it and you take it and work your tail off.”
“Thank you. But of course it will take some time to turn this over to somebody else. Properly. So…‘’
“We’ll see each other again.”
“So there’ll be time to end this a little better thar we did tonight. I was rotten. I’m sorry.”
“We’re both sorry.”
“How come two people can be more than the sum of the two individuals, and then so much les than the sum?”
“Comes of being some kind of human person Annie.”
“Okay, I had to call. Good night or good mornin, or whatever. Were you asleep?”
“I was topside with a cold drink, thinking Iong sorry thoughts and watching for the dawn. You?”
“I went down and sat at the water’s edge. Long sad thoughts. So I finally had to call.”
“Good luck to you, friend.”
“Good luck to both of us,” she said and hung up. I went back and nursed the rest of the drink, finishing it when the sun came up into the smutcl oozing red, bulging with the promise of angry burns on the young white hide of the visitors, and another deepening of the tan on the spare leather bodies of the lizardlike octogenarians on their retirement terraces. I went down and fell into sleep using it like a giant Band-aid. When the phone woke me at noon I felt an unlikely confusion, a sense of not knowing who I was or where.
Twelve
“WHERE ARE you?” I asked Meyer.
“In a Holiday Inn in Austin. What I have to report - is nothing to report. Except eyestrain.” He sounded tired and discouraged.