Aggie came back up and said it would be twenty minutes. We fixed another drink from the little rolling bar. It was nice under the awning, watching the pedestrian traffic, laughing at bad puns. We went below and ate in the alcove off the main lounge, served there by a very skilled Cuban lad. A slightly resinous wine went beautifully with the mountains of Greek groceries. I left in good season, full of resolve. But once I was aboard my houseboat, my knees began to buckle. I nearly dislocated my jaw yawning. I stripped down and fell into my gigantic bed.
The rattlesnake buzz of the bedside phone awakened me and I groped for the phone in the dark, wondering how it had gotten to be night.
“Uh?” I said.
“Well, hi! Were you asleep?”
“Certainly was. What time is it?”
“Little after nine. Missed you, love.”
“Me too.”
“Wondered if you made it back okay. Tell you the truth, I found time for a little nap today myself.”
“Good for you.”
“I know you will be as upset as I am to know that the bride picked up another dreadful sunburn this morning and is in bed with chills. And terrible little runny blisters all over her big meaty thighs.”
“You are a mean one, aren’t you?”
“Not really. I feel sorry for both of them. As a doctor, he should have seen what was happening to her and gotten her out of the sun.”
“Interrupted honeymoon.”
“I had a drink with him before dinner. She was sleeping, finally. I really looked at him and listened to him. You know, he is a very good-natured, sweet, earnest, solemn, dull little fellow. He chuckles a lot, but he hasn’t any sense of humor. He laughs in the wrong places. Really, he’s a very good doctor. Practically any cancer clinic in the world, you go in and mention Dr. Prescott Mullen… Travis, I just don’t know how there got to be such a difference between what I thought he was and what he really is.”
“Myths. Meyer says we build our own myths. We live in the flatlands and the myths are our mountains, so we build them to change the contours of our lives, to make them more interesting.”
“I haven’t had such a dull life so far. I invested some of my very good years in Ellis, of course.”
“Right now is your very best year, maybe.”
“I see what Meyer means about myths. I mean you take some bored little suburban wife who plays bridge at the club every Thursday, she can dream that she and her tall brown tennis pro have something going, something unannounced, that they can never dare admit to each other. And that’s her myth. If she tries to carry it to the point of its actually happening, it will blow up in her face.”
“Like that, I guess.”
“And right across the front of her, just above the cleavage, she’s got a lot more of those runny little blisters. Hey Travis?”
“What?”
“I didn’t call you up to talk about the blisters on the doctor’s bride. I had something profound to say. About us. Now it sounds trivial, I guess. The point is, I don’t really want to think about us, about you and me, in the way I thought I would always have to think about somebody I was falling in love with.”
“Love, Annie?”
“Let me just barge ahead and leave explanations until later, okay? Being in love has been to me a case of being up to here in plans. Whatever you might think, I wasn’t being some kind of opportunist with Ellis. He was a very autocratic man, and he was very very experienced as far as women are concerned. I was dumb about him, and it is still sort of blank in my mind the way he hustled me into bed that first time. Then a person says, Oh, hell, whatever harm is done is done, and you get hung for a sheep as high as for being hung as a lamb. I think it goes like that. And l got to love him. He was a dear man in lots of little ways nobody knew about because he kept himself so much to himself. But let me tell you that anybody who had the wives he had certainly wasn’t an unattractive man. I hope you are following all this. Anyhow, with love came plans. I worked it all out. Some day he would divorce Josie and marry me, and do it soon enough so I could have a child with him, and the child would make him a warmer person to be with. Then came the news about the cancer, and so that plan was shot to hell. Right? So there was another plan. I would nurse him and care for him and he would live a long time, and the sickness would purify him. It would burn away the nasty. Then he. was killed and I was really really down. But I,put my life back together, and I am a very fulfilled woman, businesswise. Now here I am falling in love, and I don’t find myself planning anything about us, and that makes me wonder if it is love, really. All I think about is that maybe our lives are like the end of some long period of planning. I am here and you are there, and we are going to see each other now and again until we are too old and rickety to make it across Florida. But I know I am falling in love because I think of you and I turn hollow inside, and the world kind of veers. You know? Like it goes a little bit sideways for an instant. Hey I wanted to tell you all this as if it was something important. And when I stop talking to you, I don’t. want you to feel any kind of obligation to say anything about love. Men hate being pinned to the wall like that. If you feel it, someday you’ll say it,, and that will be okay. And if you don’t ever feel it, that will be okay too, as long as you don’t ever try to fake it.”
“Listen, I-”
“Don’t say anything, dear. I can talk enough for two. Any time. Anywhere. So go back to sleep. Good night.” Click.
I reached and put the phone back. We had been hooked together for a time by General Tel, and the softness of her voice in my ear in the darkness had recreated for me a world long forgotten, when I had stretched out on the leather couch in the hallway, phone on my juvenile chest, and while the family was in the next room listening to the radio, to Fred Allen or Amos and Andy I was linked to the erotic, heart-stopping magic of leggy Margaret who, at fourteen, kissed with her eyes wide wide open.
I remembered the previous night when, with her head resting on my chest, Anne had stared off into some thoughtful distance. I could look down and see the black lashes move when she blinked. I could see a tiny slice of the gelatinous eyebalclass="underline" You can repeat a word over and over until it means nothing, until it becomes just a strange sound. You can do the same thing looking at a familiar object until you see it in an entirely different way. Here was a strange wet globe, a shifting moving thing of fluids and membranes and nerves, tucked into muscle that could move it this way and that, that could shutter its lid to remove any dust, to moisten the surface of it. It had looked at me and relayed images of me into the gray suet of the brain behind that eye, where they would remain, instantly available whenever she remembered me. I stroked the dark hair. The wet eye blinked again. The dreaming thoughts behind it were unfathomable. I could never truly reach them, hers or anyone’s. And mine would always be as opaque to others.
The phone rang again and she said, “I was so darn busy exposing my beautiful soul, Travis, I forgot to tell you another thing I called about.”
“Such as?”
“I talked with Prescott about the drugs for Ellis. He told me. that after he got back to Stamford he had a call from Josie. She knew he had flown down to check Ellis over, and she called to find out how he was. He told her what he thought Ellis’s life expectancy was, and it depressed her. He knew that Josie still had a certain amount of influence with Ellis, so he told her to tell Ellis that there was really no point in his being so damned brave about his pain and to encourage him to make a connection and buy something. I think she must have tried to do that, because in early July he had several calls from her, and they all made him cross. Crosser than usual. He just didn’t like people meddling in his life.”
“But it was okay if he meddled in theirs.”
“Exactly. That’s just how he was. You know, you are really very good at sizing up people. It makes me nervous, in a way.”