I was awake at six-thirty, listening to a cardinal chirping out back. I got out of bed without waking Susan, put on a robe, and went into the kitchen. Joanna was sitting at the table, spooning cornflakes into her mouth, reading the newspaper.
I knew better than to talk to her while she was reading. Or for that matter, while she was eating breakfast. Joanna is not a morning person. The only time I could get away with talking to her before nine A.M. was when she was still an infant. Susan and I used to take turns getting up for the early-morning feeding. I’d hold Joanna in my arms and whisper sweet nonsense into her round little face while she gulped down formula that was surely inedible. Her eating habits hadn’t changed much. She liked her cornflakes soggy, she shoveled dripping spoonfuls of them into her mouth blindly, her eyes on the latest adventures of Hägar the Horrible. “Good morning,” I said, and she said, “Uhh.” I went to the refrigerator and took out the plastic container of orange juice.
I had picked and squeezed the oranges myself the day before. Old Reggie saw me picking them and asked whether I intended to squeeze the whole batch. I told him that’s what I was intending, yes. He said it was best to squeeze only what I’d be using immediately. That was the way to get the most benefit from them, and besides juice tasted better when it was squoze fresh. That was the word he used: squoze. I told him I didn’t have time to squeeze fresh juice every morning. I told him I tried to pick and squeeze enough oranges on Saturday or Sunday to last me through the week. Old Reggie shook his head and poked his cane at a lizard. The next time I saw him, I would have to apologize to him. Not for squeezing more oranges than I could immediately use, and not for the Modern Jazz Quartet either. Only for taking out on him all the things that were troubling me.
“What was all the excitement last night?” Joanna asked.
At first I thought she meant the fight between Susan and me. She’d undoubtedly heard us railing at each other. Then I realized she was talking about the phone ringing at a quarter to one, and my leaving the house shortly afterward. I didn’t know quite what to say. How do you tell a twelve-year-old that three people she knew and possibly loved had been stabbed to death the night before?
“Dad?” she said. “What was it? Why’d you leave the house that way?”
“Dr. Purchase called me,” I said.
“What about?”
I took a deep breath. “Somebody killed Maureen and the little girls.”
She put down her spoon. She looked at me.
“Who?” she said.
“They don’t know yet.”
“Wow,” she said.
“You’d better get dressed, huh?”
“I’ve got time,” she said, and glanced at the wall clock, and said immediately, “No, I haven’t,” and got up and ran for her bedroom. I put up a kettle of water to boil, and then I sat down at the table and sipped my juice and studied the newspaper. It made no mention of the murders. There were going to be renewed SALT talks. A governor in a nearby state had been accused of larceny. A Hollywood celebrity had played tennis at the Field Club on Sunday morning. Chris Evert had won the Virginia Slims singles tournament and Governor Askew had declared yesterday Chris Evert Day in honor of — should I keep my tennis date?
The water was boiling.
I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee, and then carried it outside to where a dozen small docks jutted out into the canal shared by the houses on both sides of it. The sun was just coming up. The wind of the night before had blown away whatever had been hanging over the city and smothering it; the day was going to be bright and clear. I crossed the lawn, greener here than out front, wet with early morning dew. The Windbag was tied fore and aft to the dock, one of her halyards banging against the aluminum mast and setting up a terrible racket. I climbed aboard and tightened the line, and the clanging stopped abruptly. I had named the boat over Susan’s protests; she had cost seven thousand dollars used, which was not bad for a twenty-five-footer that slept four comfortably. The water in the canal was still. Down the street, I heard an automobile start. I looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes to seven. The city of Calusa was coming awake.
I went inside the house, and then on through to the bedroom. Susan was still asleep, her hair fanned out over the pillow, her right arm bent at the elbow, the palm facing the ceiling. The sheet was tangled between her legs. I pushed in the alarm button on the back of the clock. Across the hall, Joanna was showering. I could hear the steady drumming of the water. The radio was on in her bedroom, her usual rock-and-roll station. She turned it on very softly each morning, the moment she got out of bed. It was as if she could not bear being without music at any time during her waking hours. I sometimes wished she would turn it on loud instead. This way, I could only hear the monotonous sound of the bass guitar, without even a hint of the melody.
I felt well rested, but I didn’t know what demands might be made on me later in the day, and I had the feeling I should be getting to the office instead of the Calusa Tennis Club. At the same time, I didn’t imagine Jamie would be up and around much before noon, and I could see no reason to be sitting at my desk at nine sharp, waiting for a call. I would, in any event, be at the office no later than nine-thirty, ten o’clock. I decided to keep the date, went into the bathroom I shared with Susan, took off my robe, and turned on the shower. As I lathered myself with soap Susan had bought on our trip to England the summer before, the soap she warned me constantly not to leave in the dish since it melted so fast and was so awfully expensive, as I watched rivulets of foam run over my chest, my belly, and my groin, I thought only of Aggie.
The Calusa Tennis Club had been undergoing alterations for the past six or seven months and was finally nearing completion. It promised to be even larger and grander than before, but meanwhile there was lumber stacked everywhere, and kegs of nails, and rolls of tar paper, and sawhorses marking off areas that were not to be trespassed while construction was under way. Mark Goldman was sitting on one such sawhorse, or rather leaning against it, his right ankle crossed over his left, his racket resting on his partial lap. He looked at his watch the moment he saw me.
“Thought you’d never get here,” he said.
Every time he said that, I automatically looked at my own watch. He said it every Monday morning. I had looked at the dashboard clock before getting out of the car, and it had read three minutes to eight. I had checked my own watch as I crossed the parking lot and the time then was two minutes to eight. But now, as Mark said what he said every Monday morning since we’d begun our game together, I looked at my watch like a damn fool.
Mark had curly black hair and dark brown eyes and a mustache he’d begun cultivating only two months back. When he started growing it, he told me mustaches were the thing. He said mustaches drove young girls wild. This was important to Mark because he was forty-eight years old and a bachelor. If he could not drive young girls wild, then whom was he supposed to drive wild — old ladies of thirty-nine or forty? No, no. He had been a successful bachelor all these years only because he watched the trends. “Trends, Matt,” he said. “You want to succeed in anything, you’ve got to watch the trends. Mustaches are a trend right now. There isn’t a girl under thirty who will even spit on a man without a mustache.”
“Will they spit on a man with a mustache?” I asked.
“Nobody likes a smartass, Matt,” he said, and cocked his finger at me.
He destroyed me.
Instead of taking pity on a man who was sporting a highly visible Ace bandage on his right wrist, he instead played better than I’d ever seen him play. His serves were devastating. The ball came in low over the net and then hit the court and bounced up high and away to the left, curving into my backhand. Because of my tennis elbow, I couldn’t follow through without wincing in pain. Most of my returns were weak little shots that popped the ball high up into the air to be met on the other side of the net by Mark’s overhead smash. When I did manage to return a serve with something more respectable, Mark dazzled me with a repertoire of cross-court slashes, dinky dropshots, infuriating lobs, and vicious volleys designed to take off my head if I had the audacity to step into their path. He won the first set 6–2, and the second 6–0. When he asked if I wanted to play a third, I told him he was a cruel and heartless bastard who took advantage of cripples.