“In that case, why don’t you have a drink with my sister and me at our table?”
“Oh, I don’t want to intrude.”
“Nonsense, old man. We’d love to have you. If you really aren’t committed, I’m going to insist.”
“Well, if you’re sure it won’t be an intrusion.”
“Quite the contrary. Be a genuine pleasure. You know how it is between a brother and sister. All right for a while, but eventually it gets pretty dull. Especially for the sister. Come along, old man. Just bring your glass with you.”
Now Avery Lawes stood up, glass in hand, and came with Carl across the room to the table, and Lisa, watching them come, could see that Lawes was a slim, erect man with a graceful carriage and a rather narrow, good-looking face. His nose was finely shaped, and there was about his mouth a softness and sensitivity that indicated not so much weakness as vulnerability. Lisa noticed these things objectively, with no emotional accompaniment except that of a vague reluctance to emerge from her semi-isolation and engage in a routine of sociability with a man she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. “My sister Lisa,” Carl said. “Lisa, this is Avery Lawes.” Lisa smiled and held out a hand, and he took it briefly and released it. His fingers were dry and hard, with very little flesh on the bones, and the touch of them was not offensive. He bent forward slightly from the hips. “How do you do, Miss Sheridan,” he said.
She said that she was doing fine. “Won’t you sit down?” she said.
He took a chair across from her. He drank from his glass, and she saw that it was Scotch he was drinking. On the rocks. It followed, she thought. First family of Corinth and all that. High class stuff. Why did high class stuff almost always drink high class Scotch?
“Carl tells me you were in the University together,” she said. She laughed. “You can see that we were talking about you.”
“Convinced I knew you the moment you came in,” Carl said. “Just took me a minute or two to place you.”
“It’s remarkable that you remembered me at all. After so long a time.”
“I have a good memory for names and faces.” Realizing that he had said this twice before, Carl shot an almost ludicrously contrite look at Lisa. “I mean, it’s just one of those little knacks a person has sometimes. Would you like to have that drink freshened?”
“It’s Scotch. I’ll finish it and have another.”
He finished it. Carl finished his daiquiri. Lisa, nursing her third for sustenance, said in response to Carl’s inquiry that she was not ready yet. The waiter came and left and came back, and everyone was beginning to feel pretty good, not drunk but just temporarily dissociated from the three people they would recover later in the night or wake up with in the morning.
“That class in Investments,” Carl said. “The professor’s name. I’ve been trying to remember it. It was Barnsdorf.”
“That’s it. Barnsdorf. It was Barnsdorf, all right.”
“I kept thinking Barnswell and Barnstorm. It was Barnsdorf, though. Wacky old boy. There was a fellow at the frat house who did a perfect imitation of him.”
“Yes. Nutty as a peach orchard bore, they used to call him. I never knew why a peach orchard bore was considered particularly nutty, but that’s what they called him. Not so nutty at that, though, I guess. I understand he made over a million dollars just playing the market.”
“I’ve heard that myself, but I never quite believed it.”
“You never can tell about these odd old boys. Supposed to be all theory and no common sense, but sometimes they’re pretty shrewd. Sometimes they surprise you. Wonder if old Barnsdorf is still living?”
“Oh, I should think so. Been some publicity if he’d died. Especially if he’d left over a million dollars.”
“That’s right, isn’t it? That’s a way to tell if he really has it. All we have to do is wait for him to die.” Avery turned to Lisa. “Is this your first time in Miami?”
“Yes. We only arrived today.”
“Is that so? Only been here four days myself. Are you staying long?”
“I don’t know, really. Carl has been ill. He came down to rest and get some sunshine.”
“So he told me. Hope you didn’t come along for the same reason. Have you been ill too?”
She felt all at once a strong and dangerous compulsion to tell him. Yes, she wanted to say, I have been ill too, I have been ill for many years with an illness that is a result of learning something wrong at a time when it should have been learned right, or perhaps of not learning at all something which should have been learned naturally in the normal process of ceasing to be one phase of person and beginning to be another, and still again, perhaps it is something you are born with and can’t help, and the simple truth is that no one actually seems to know what causes it, or what to do about it, least of all the person who has it. You were talking about the old professor at the University, Mr. Lawes. You said he was odd. That is the name of my illness, Mr. Lawes. I suffer from the illness of oddness. For instance, would you believe it, I can look at you and talk with you and ever touch you without revulsion, but I cannot possibly understand how any woman on earth could get excited about the prospect of sharing your life or your bed, even in return for the privilege of becoming a Lawes of Corinth. On the other hand, I can remember a girl named Alison from a long time back, and a woman named Bella from a very short time back, and I can remember others in between these two, and for these I had, and have now in remembrance, a feeling that would astonish you. Isn’t this odd of me? Isn’t this very odd? There is a name for this oddness, Mr. Lawes, and the name derives from the name of an island where a woman named Sappho once lived and wrote poetry and was, they say, very beautiful. It is a name for those with this illness of oddness, the illness that I have, and it is not pleasant to be odd in a way that is different from the oddnesses that are accepted, like that of the old man who was only good for laughs and possibly a million dollars. If you are odd in a way that is not accepted, you are quite likely to suffer for it. Do you understand me? It is this conflict, this threat of massive retaliation, that is never lost entirely from the consciousness, even if it is never executed, that nourishes a sickness of guilt and diffuse fear and in the end quite possibly destroys you. So I have been ill too, and I am still ill, and I have come to Miami to sit in the sun. My brother has brought me here, and I know very well what he is thinking. Would you like to know? He is thinking with great innocence that a husband would cure me. He is thinking that if I deliberately adopted the form of normalcy the substance of normalcy would develop in its own time. He is thinking that I am really a very pretty woman with a good background and that it is his duty to guide me to an eligible man and to encourage my cultivation of this man. Object, matrimony. A kind of desperate asylum, if you follow me. And do you know something? Being aware of this, I am inclined to submit. Rather, let us say, I have been driven to submit. Not because I am convinced that it is the cure he thinks, but because I am convinced that there is at least no other. And I will tell you something else. Though he wouldn’t admit it and probably doesn’t even realize it, Carl is at this moment thinking of you, and I am thinking myself that you are, of all the men I’ve known or am likely to know, quite possibly the least offensive. Do you hear that? Do you understand me?
Better run, Mr. Lawes. Better get up at once and run as if the devil were after you, for it may be that he is.
“No,” she said, “I have not been ill.”
“Good. Are you ready now for another daiquiri?”
“Yes, please.”
“Carl?”
“All right.”
They had two new daiquiris and a Scotch, and Lisa sustained the lift, and it became night. Avery and Gail talked about things that had happened at the University when they were there and about things that had happened to them since they’d been there, and Lisa listened for a while and then began to think about things that had happened to her, but this threatened the lift, so she began listening to the canned music and watching the formulistic people. And after quite a while Carl asked her if she would like to have dinner, and she said she thought that she would.