Looking at them, Fletch said, “Maybe a swim isn’t a good idea.”
“Who cares?” Moxie took Fletch by the hand.
“Don’t swim out too far,” Fletch said to Stella and Gerry.
He pulled Moxie sideways a moment and looked into the living room.
Edith Howell and Frederick Mooney were together on a Victorian loveseat. She had a gin and tonic in hand. His drink was in a short brandy glass.
“Revivals,” Mooney was opining, “are anti-progress. Been far too many of ’em, lately. We must get ourselves out of the way, and let the young people create anew.”
“But, Freddy,” Edith said, “Time, Gentleman, Time was a great musical. It still is.”
“Come on.” Fletch tugged Moxie’s hand. “We’ll go see the sunset. Out the back way. Through the Lopezes’ yard.”
17
“So,” Fletch said. They were walking along Whitehead Street. Moxie’s beautified head made Fletch feel he was walking along with a gift-wrapped package on a stick. “Gerry Littleford’s mind runs to stabbing people with knives.”
“That was nothing,” Moxie said. “Forget about it.”
“Your usual domestic incident? I thought things were getting rather serious there.”
“You should never believe an actor,” Moxie said. “It’s not what’s said that counts. It’s the delivery.”
“Including what you just said.”
“I am lying, the liar said,” Moxie said. “I wish he wouldn’t use that stuff all the time.”
“You mean you wish he would use it some of the time?”
“Sure. When he has an angry scene to play. He can become really frightening on the stuff.”
“I saw that. But that’s not acting, is it? I mean, it’s just reacting to a drug.”
“Acting is a drug, Fletcher. All art is. A distortion of perspective. A heightening of concentration. But when Gerry’s just doing an ordinary hard scene the stuff works against him. Sets his timing off. Makes him overact.”
“Do you use that stuff, Moxie? Like, for an ‘angry scene’?”
“’Course not. I’m a better actor than Gerry.” She looked across the street, at the big sign on the brick wall. “Wish I could go in there,” she said. “I’d love to see Hemingway’s bedroom. Also the room where he wrote. That was cute, what we did when we were playing pool. You have a good enough memory to be an actor.”
“Moxie, do you think there are different rules for creative people?”
“Sure. There have to be special rules for being that alone.”
“Something your father said this afternoon. Something about the obligations of talent being primary. We were talking about his relationship with you, and your mother, I guess. He said: ‘Many men can love a woman and have a child; only a few can love the world and create miracles’.”
“Dear O.L. Always the pretty turn of phrase.” She walked in silence a moment. “I guess he’s right.”
“How can there be different rules for different people?”
“You just said it yourself, Fletch. I just said it. At the house you just said I couldn’t go out—it wouldn’t be safe. I just said I wished I could tour Hemingway’s house. I wish I would be one hundred percent efficient as a creative person and one hundred percent efficient as a business person. I wish I didn’t have to have a Steve Peterman living many of the normal aspects of my life for me.” She turned him sideways on the sidewalk. “Look at me.”
“I can’t.” He put his free hand over his eyes to shield himself from the sight of the kilograms of rouge, powder, lipstick, those foolish huge sunglasses on her face. “It’s too ’orrible.”
“I’m standing on a street in Key West,” she said. “A marvelous live and let-live town. But, if you observe closely, I have to stand here observing different rules.”
“There’s been a murder.”
He walked forward again.
“Sure.” She walked with him. “If Jane Jones were involved in a murder, she could walk down the street without disguising herself as Miss Piggy. I can’t.” Crossing a sidestreet, the sun was warm on his face. “It’s a question of energies, really,” Moxie said. “Where do creative energies come from? If one has them, how does one best use them? When they wear down, how does one refurbish them? It’s a joyous problem. It’s also a responsibility, you see, all by itself. An extra responsibility. I guess, as Freddy says, a primary responsibility. And one just can’t be totally responsible for everything. Few chefs take out the garbage. The day just isn’t that long. No one’s energies are that great.”
Hand in hand, they walked through the long shadows of the palm trees on Whitehead Street.
After a while she dropped her hand.
“I know what your question is,” she said in a low voice. “Your question is: do different rules for creative people give them the right to commit murder?”
“Don’t cry,” Fletch said. “It will make gulleys in your face powder.”
“I did not murder Steve Peterman,” Moxie said. “It’s important that you believe me, Fletch.”
Fletch said, “I know.”
“Wow!” Moxie said. “What’s all this about?”
“Sunset.”
There were hundreds of people on the dock. Spaced to keep out of each other’s sounds, there was a rock band, a country band, a string ensemble. There was a juggler juggling oranges and an acrobatic team bouncing each other into the air. There was a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing the funny walk through the crowd. There was an earnest young man preaching The Word of The Lord and a more earnest young man in a brown shirt and swastika armband preaching racial discrimination, and a most earnest young man satirizing them both, exhorting the people to believe in canned peas. Each had an audience of listeners, watchers, cheerers, and jeerers.
Across the water, the big red sun was dropping slowly to the Gulf of Mexico.
The people milling around on the dock, ambling from group to group, looking at each other, listening to each other, taking pictures of each other, were of every sort extant. One hundred miles of Florida Keys hang from continental U.S.A., like an udder, and to the southernmost point drip the cream and the milk and the scum of the whole continent. There are the artists, the writers, the musicians, young and old, the arrived, the arriving, and the never-to-arrive. There are numbers of single people of all ages, sometimes in groups, the searchers who sometimes find. There are the American families, with children and without, the professional and the working class, the retired and the honeymooners. There are the drug victims and the drug smugglers, the filthy, mind blown, and the gold-bedecked, corrupt, corrupting despoilers of the human being.
“Wow,” said Moxie. “What a fashion show.”
The people there were dressed in tatters and tailor-made, suits and strings, rags and royal gems.
“You should talk,” Fletch said, grinning into her huge plastic glasses.
“So many people for a sunset.”
“Happens every night. Even cloudy nights.”
“What an event. Someone should sell tickets. Really. Think what you have to do to get this many people into a theater.”
After touring the crowd, listening to the music, watching the performers, Fletch and Moxie found an empty place on the edge of the dock and sat down. Their legs dangled over the water.
“What an outer reality,” Moxie said.
“Which reminds me,” Fletch said. “Simple enough question: who is the producer of Midsummer Night’s Madness?”
“Steve Peterman.”
“I thought you said he was executive producer, or something.”
“He is. Sort of. There is another producer, Talcott Cross. I never met him. His job is finished, for now. He worked at setting things up. Casting. Most of the location work. You know, hiring people.”