We were in deck chairs, sitting on Tiger Lily ’s stern, where we could look across the docks to the marina office and the shallow-water mooring where the fishing skiffs-the Bonefishers and Makos, the Aquasports, Egrets, and Lake and Bays-sat motionless on their lines, big outboard engines tilted upward like the wings of old fighter planes on a carrier. Through their silence, the engines implied velocity and a certain competence.
She’d brought me my standard drink: Bud Light in a big glass over ice with a squeeze of lime. I now took a sip and said, “Yep. It’s way too risky to date among the marina family.”
“Exactly. Everyone agrees. But if anyone could make it work, it’s those two kids. Janet loves the big lug so much, the first time they had trouble, you know as well as I do, that’s why she moved her boat up to Jensen’s. Thought the distance might help, and it did. Since then, they’ve been doing great. Jeth stays on her houseboat when he doesn’t have a charter, and you know how often Janet overnights here. Hell, I think it’s been good for all of us, because now everyone at Jensen’s has gotten to be like part of our extended family. And they’re such a fun, crazy bunch.”
Jensen’s Marina on Captiva is one of the last of the old Florida fish camps. Run by three brothers who also happen to be raving individualists, walking into Jensen’s is like traveling back four or five decades. I said, “The guides up there, Dave, Bob Sabatino, and Jimmy, when they clean a female black tip, they’ve been saving the unborn sharks for me. And Janet, of course, she’s one of the few people I trust to take care of my fish.”
JoAnn nodded. “While you and Tomlinson were on Guava key, she was here every night helping Jeth. Until it happened.”
What happened was, the previous weekend, Janet and Jeth had had some minor squabble. In all human pairings, sometimes varying with the situation, there is a dominant member. Janet was the more forceful of the two, but never in an overpowering, offensive way. She was more goal-oriented than Jeth, much better with details, and so she tended to control the relationship. The argument had something to do with Jeth’s seeming lack of professional drive. How could he expect her to marry him, to produce a family for the two of them, if he continued working as a handyman around the marina and guiding only when he felt like it?
It was a serious subject as far as Janet was concerned. Marriage was important to her. It was her second try, and getting everything right was vital. There was a good reason. A couple of years back, Janet had come to Sanibel an emotional and physical wreck after quitting her teaching job in Ohio. She had had to quit her job because she was suffering anxiety attacks and depression so severe that she could no longer function. It took us awhile before she trusted us enough to tell us the story. It was not a happy story. Her first husband, the only man she’d ever loved, had been driving home late after work one snowy night. On the same road, coming from the opposite direction, was a woman who had no license because of her long history of alcohol abuse.
All that Janet could remember from that night, and the week that followed, was a highway patrolman coming to the door… and a nurse crying with her, at her bedside, because of the miscarriage she’d suffered.
It was a long, long time before she could bring herself to date anyone.
When she’d finally healed sufficiently, Jeth was a good choice. He has the looks and the build of a college line-backer, but he is one of the kindest, most mild-mannered men I’ve ever met. Even so, Janet’s prodding had finally pissed him off and he apparently told her to go find another man if she wasn’t satisfied with his professional aspirations or his income.
“That’s how it got started,” JoAnn told me. “It wasn’t a big fight. Nothing serious-at least, that’s what Janet told me, and she had no reason to lie, Doc. This was two days after it happened, and she was absolutely devastated. Broken-hearted. I don’t think the girl’s stopped crying all week.”
Coincidentally, that same weekend, Janet had been invited to an all-night bachelorette party in Sarasota. She and her girlfriends were to spend the evening going from bar to bar in a limo. Lots of drinking and dancing and harmless fun.
“But it wasn’t so harmless,” JoAnn told me. “The last thing Janet did before she got in the limo was try to call Jeth at his apartment. She tried a couple of more times before midnight. He still wasn’t home, which made her mad for some reason, so she stuck the cell phone in her purse and decided the best way for her to stop worrying about what Jeth was doing was to have a hell of a good time on her own. Which she did. There were five or six girls in the party. They went to a couple of bars, then to one of those male review strip clubs. That set the mood. Then, at Passe Grille, they happened to run into a bunch of local guys who were having their own bachelor’s party. Great-looking guys all of them, and one of them started hitting on Janet.
“You know how shy she is, Doc. I think she’s cute as can be but, let’s face it, she doesn’t have the kind of looks or the kind of body that guys tumble over. She wasn’t used to that kind of attention from a man so smooth. Plus, all the other girls had matched up with one of the bachelors, and there was a kind of screw-it, let’s-have-fun attitude. No one was gonna tell, especially the girl who was getting married ’cause it was her last night of freedom and she was behaving worse than any of them.”
JoAnn noticed that my glass was empty. She stood and got another beer from the little on-deck fridge. Stopped to exchange pleasantries with two of the guides, Javier Castillo and Neville Robeson, then took her seat again, sipped her drink, and turned her face toward me. Said, “We’ve had some great talks, you and me, Doc. Someone like you, I feel like I can say any damn thing that comes into my mind, and it’ll be okay. One thing we’ve never talked about, though, it’s something that most men don’t know or even suspect about us women. It’s not all the time, and the mood has to be just right. But it happens. What it is, when women get together in that kind of situation, sexuality can be… well, contagious. I’ve felt it myself plenty of times. It’s like being part of a pack. You all get horny as hell at the same time, and there’re suddenly no rules at all ’cause the whole group’s doing it.” She paused for a moment, considering what she’d just told me. “You’re a scientist. You think there could be some kind of biological reason for feeling that way? Herd instinct, maybe?”
I didn’t feel like smiling-intimate stories about friends told by a third party make me uncomfortable. But I smiled anyway. “I’d prefer not even to guess about something like that. So what happened at the party?”
Janet and her friends had drunk a lot and they’d kept drinking is what happened. Janet and the handsome guy she’d met ended up alone in the back of the guy’s Mercedes. She wasn’t too drunk to know what she was doing. It was consensual, it seemed safe and fun at the time, and it was very, very passionate. She’d never done anything like that in her life. Didn’t think she was capable of doing something like that. I had a hard time believing it myself… but, in a way, it made perfect sense, too. Janet’s one of the plain, doughy-looking ones. Round face, mousy brown hair, legs and thighs prone to heaviness. Very quiet and competent and dependable. Good with computers and bookkeeping. She’s in her mid-thirties now. Probably seldom in her life experienced the overwhelming flattery of a certain kind of man who’s very good in bars.”
JoAnn said, “Janet told me it was like being temporarily insane, and I know exactly what she means. She wouldn’t let the guy go all the way. But they got stripped down and real sweaty. Completely dropped all her inhibitions probably like she never had before-”