Elmore Leonard
Gold Coast
For Bill Leonard
ONE DAY Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.
Karen knew where they were doing it, too. In one of the condominiums Frank owned, part of Oceana Estates.
Every Friday afternoon and sometimes on Monday, Frank would put his spare clubs in the trunk of his Seville-supposedly to play at La Gorce, Miami Beach-and drive north out of Fort Lauderdale instead of south.
There were probably others, random affairs. Frank did go to Miami at least twice a week to “study the market” and play a little gin at the Palm Bay Club. He could have a cocktail waitress at Hialeah or Calder. He visited the dogtracks regularly, the jai-alai fronton once in awhile. Cruised for gamefish out in the stream with some of his buddies; went bonefishing in the Keys, near Islamorada, several times a year. Frank could have something going anywhere from Key West to West Palm, over to Bimini and back and probably did. The only one Karen was sure of, though, was the frosted-blonde thirty-six-year-old real estate woman in Boca.
Frank’s actions, his routine, were predictable; but not his reactions. If she confronted him, or hinted around first, with questions like, “Do I know her?” or, “Are you going to tell me who she is?”
Frank would say, “Who’re we talking about?”
And Karen would say, “I know you’ve got a girl friend. Why don’t you admit it?”
And Frank would say-
He might say, “Nobody told you I have a girl friend and you haven’t seen me with anybody that could be a girl friend, so what’re we talking about?”
And Karen would say, “The real estate woman in Boca,” and offer circumstantial evidence that wouldn’t convict him but would certainly put him in a corner.
He might deny it out right. Or he might say, “Yeah, sometimes I go to Boca. Not that it’s any of your fucking business.”
Then what? She’d have to get mad or pout or act hurt.
So Karen didn’t say a word about the real estate woman. Instead, she drove her matching white Caddy Seville up to Boca one Friday afternoon, to the big pink condominium that looked like a Venetian palace.
She located Frank’s white Seville in the dim parking area beneath the building, on the ocean side, backed it out of the numbered space with the spare set of keys she’d brought, left Frank’s car sitting in the aisle, got into her own car again and drove her white Seville into the side of his white Seville three times, smashing in both doors and the front fender of Frank’s car, destroying her own car’s grille and headlamps and drove back to Lauderdale. When Frank came home he looked from one matching Seville to the other. Karen waited, but he didn’t say a word about the cars. The next day he had them towed away and new matching gray ones delivered.
Weeks later, in the living room, she said, “I’m getting tired of tennis.” And said to the dog, sniffing around her feet, “Gretchen, leave, will you? Get out of here.”
“Play golf,” Frank said. He patted his leg and the gray and white schnauzer jumped up on his lap.
“I don’t care for golf.”
“Join some ladies’ group.” Gently stroking the schnauzer.
“I’ve done ladies’ groups.”
“Take up fishing, I’ll get you a boat.”
“Do you know what I do?” Karen said. “I exist. I sit in the sun. I try to think up work for Marta and for when the gardener comes-” She paused a moment. “When we got married-I mean at our wedding reception, you know what my mother said to me?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘I hope you realize he’s Italian.’ She didn’t know anything else, just your name.”
“Half Italian,” Frank said, “half Sicilian. There’s a difference. Like Gretchen here”-stroking the dog on his lap, the dog dozing-“she’s part schnauzer, part a little something else, so that makes her different.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Karen said.
“Get what? She’s from Grosse Pointe. I lived in Grosse Pointe one time. What’s that? You buy a house.”
“She wasn’t being a snob. At least not when she said it.”
“All right, what did she mean I’m Italian? What was she? Hill, maybe it was shortened from Hilkowski. Are you a Polack maybe? What’re we talking about?”
“What she meant,” Karen said, “the way you lived, what you were used to. You’d probably be set in your ways. You’d have your man things to do, and I’d have to find woman things to do. And she was right, not even knowing anything about what you really did, or might still be doing, I don’t know, since you don’t tell me anything.”
“I’m retired.” Frank said, “and you’re tired of playing tennis and sitting around. All right, what do you want to do?”
“Maybe I’ll just do it and not tell you,” Karen said.
“Do what?” Frank asked.
“Not tell you where I go or who I see. Or make up something. Tell you I’m going to play tennis but I don’t, I go someplace else.”
“Stick to tennis,” Frank said. He stopped stroking Gretchen. “You have a very hard time coming right out and saying something. You want to threaten me, is that it? Because you’re bored? Are you telling me you’re gonna start fooling around? If that’s what you’re saying, say it. A man comes to me and gives me some shit out the side of his mouth. I tell him that’s it, get the fuck out or talk straight. Now I’m much more patient with you, Karen, you’re my wife and I respect you. You’re an intelligent, good-looking woman. I tell you something, I know you understand what I’m saying. I’m not dumb either, even though I didn’t go to the University of Michigan when I was younger or one of those. Especially I’m not gonna look dumb, like have people point to me and say, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy, his wife’s ballin’ the tennis pro, the dumb fuck’s paying the bill,’ anything like that. No-you get bored and a little irritable, okay, use your head, work it out some way. But don’t ever lie to me, all right? Or threaten me, like you’re gonna pay me back for something. I know all about paying back. I could write a book about paying back then look at it and realize I left a few things out.”
“My mother was right,” Karen said. “You can do anything you want, but I can’t.”
“Your mother- You’re a big girl,” Frank said, “you were a big girl, what?, forty years old when we got married. You should know a few things by forty years old, uh, what it’s gonna be like married to a half-Italian with varied and different business interests. You know what it’s like? In the Bible. You got this house, eight hundred grand-sightseers come by the Intercoastal in the boats, look at it, ‘Jesus Christ, imagine living in a place like that.’ You got the apartment in Boca on the ocean. You got clothes, anything you want to buy. Servants, cars, clubs-”
“Go on,” Karen said. “I have a dog-”
“Place in the Keys. Friends-”
“Your friends.”
“I’m saying it’s like in the Bible, you got anything you want to make you happy. Except there’s one thing you’re not allowed to do, and it’s not even unreasonable, it’s the natural law.”
“What is?”
“A wife’s faithful to her husband, subject to him. It’s in the Bible.”
“If I don’t tell you what I’m doing, I’m being unfaithful?”
“What do you want to argue for? Haven’t I been good to you? Jesus Christ, look around here, this place. The paintings, the furniture-”
“Your first wife’s antiques.”
“I don’t get it. Five years, you don’t say a word-”
“Five and a half,” Karen said.
“Okay, there’s some very rare, valuable pieces here. I happen to like this kind of stuff,” Frank said. “But anything you don’t like, sell it. Redecorate the whole place if you want.”
“Keep me busy.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
Saying she was bored and irritable-while he went off to visit his girl friend in Boca, a real estate woman. Five and a half years of playing the good wife and now having the Bible thrown at her.