Exhilarated, Cliff starts to pour another drink, then decides he’ll have that drink with Marley. She gets off at ten—he’ll take her out for a late supper, somewhere nicer than the Surfside, and they’ll celebrate. She won’t know what they’re celebrating, but he’s glad now that he didn’t burden her with any of this. He trots down the stairs and out into the warm, windless night, into squeals and honks and machine gun fire from the arcades, happy shouts from the Ferris wheel, now lit up and spinning, and the lights on the miniature golf course glossing over its dilapidation, providing a suitable setting for the family groups clumped about the greens. The bright souvenir shops selling painted sand dollars and polished driftwood, funny hats and sawfish snouts, and the sand drifting up onto the asphalt from The World’s Most Famous Be-atch (as an oft-seen t-shirt design proclaims), and the flashing neon signs above strip clubs and tourist bars along Main Street, the din of calliope music, stripper music, tavern music, and voices, voices, voices, the vocal exhaust of vacationland America, exclamations and giggles, drunken curses and yelps and unenlightened commentary—it’s all familiar, overly familiar, tedious and unrelentingly ordinary, yet tonight its colors are sharper, its sounds more vivid, emblematic of the world of fresh possibility that Cliff is suddenly eager to engage.
Chapter 9
IT’S A GOOD week for Cliff and Marley, a very good week. There is no recurrence of demons, no witches, no bumps in the night. Jerry is furious with him, naturally, and threatens to fire him, but he has no leverage—the job is merely a pastime for Cliff and he tells Jerry to go ahead, fire him, he’ll find some other way to occupy his idle hours. He works on the book and is surprised how easily it flows. He hasn’t settled on a title yet, but anecdotal material streams out of him and he’s amazed by how funny it is—it didn’t seem that funny at the time; and, though he’s aware that he has a lot of cleaning up to do on the prose, he’s startled by the sense of bittersweet poignancy that seems to rise from his words, even from the uproarious bits. It’s as if in California, those years of struggle and fuck-ups, he realized that the dream he was shooting for was played-out, that the world of celebrity with its Bel Air mansions and stretch limos and personal chefs masked a terrible malformation that he hated, that he denied yet knew was there all along, that he didn’t want badly enough because, basically, he never wanted it at all.
The relationship, too, flows. Cliff has his concerns, particularly about their ages, but he’s more-or-less convinced himself that it’s all right; he’s neither conning Marley nor himself. He can hope for ten good years, fifteen at the outside, but that’s a lifetime. After that, well, whatever comes will come. It’s not that he feels young again. His back’s still sore, he’s beginning to recognize that he needs more than reading glasses, but he no longer feels as empty as he did and he thinks that Marley was spot-on in her diagnosis: he was lonely.
They make love, they go to the movies, they walk on the beach, and they talk about everything: about global warming, the NBA (Marley’s a Magic fan; Cliff roots for the Lakers), about religion and ghosts and salsa, about dogs versus cats as potential pets, about fashion trends and why he never married, and veterinary school. Cliff offers to help with the tuition and, though reluctant at first, Marley says there’s a well-regarded school in Orlando and she’s been accepted, but doesn’t know if she’ll have enough saved to go for the fall term. Cliff has major problems with Orlando. There’s no beach, no ocean breeze to break the summer heat, and he dreads being in such close proximity to the Mouse and the hordes of tourists who pollute the environment. Rednecks of every stamp, the blighted of the earth, so desperate in their search for fun that they make pilgrimages to Disneyworld and commingle with one another in a stew of ill-feeling that frequently results in knuckle-dragging fights between hairy, overweight men and face-offs between grim-lipped parents and their whiny kids. But he says, “Okay. Let’s do it.”
He’s scared by what he’s beginning to feel for her, and he’s not yet prepared to turn loose of the pool ladder and swim out into the deep end; but his grip is slipping and he knows immersion is inevitable. At times, in certain lights, she seems no older than twenty. She’s got the kind of looks that last and she’ll still be beautiful when they cart him off to the rest home. That afflicts him. But then she’ll say or do something, make a move in bed or offer a comment about his book or, like the other night at the movies, the first movie he’s attended in years, reach over and touch his arm and smile, that causes him to recognize this is no girl, no beach bunny, but a mature woman who’s committed her share of sins and errors in judgment, and is ready for a serious relationship, even if he is not. That liberates him from his constraints, encourages him to lose himself in contemplation of her, to see her with a lover’s eye, to notice how, when she straddles him, she’ll gather her hair behind her neck and gaze briefly at the wall, as if focusing herself before she lets him enter; how her lips purse and her eyebrows lift when she reads; how when she cooks, she’ll stand on one foot for a minute at a time, arching her back to keep on balance; how when she combs out her hair after a shower, bending her head to one side, her neck and shoulder configure a line like the curve of a Spanish guitar. He wants to understand these phrasings of her body, to know things about her that she herself may not know.
The ninth morning after Cliff quit working for Jerry (he hasn’t made it official yet, but in his mind he’s done), he’s lying in bed when Marley, fresh from a shower, wearing a bathrobe, tells him she’s going to visit her mother in Deland; she’ll be gone two or three days.
“I meant to tell you yesterday,” she says. “But I guess I’ve been in denial. My mom’s sort of demented. Not really, though sometimes I wonder. She never makes these visits easy.”
“You want me to come along?”
“God, no! That would freak her out. Totally. Not because you’re you. Any man would freak her out…any woman, for that matter. She’d hallucinate I’m having a lesbian affair, and then all I’d hear the whole time is stuff about the lie of the White Goddess and how we’re in a time of social decline. It’s going to be hard enough as it is.” She hoists a small suitcase out from the back of the closet. “I want this visit to be as serene as possible, because the last day I’m there, I’m going to tell her about Orlando.”
“It’s not that big a move,” he says. “You’ll still be within an hour’s drive.”
“To her, it’ll be an extinction event, believe me.” She rummages through her underwear drawer. “One day you’ll have to meet her, but you want to put that day off as long as you can. I love her, but she can be an all-pro pain in the butt.”
Gloomily, he watches her pack for a minute and then says, “I’ll miss you.”
“I know! God, I’m going to miss you so much!” She turns from her packing and, with a mischievous expression, opens her robe and flashes him. “I’ve got time for a quickie.”
“Come ahead.”
She leaps onto the bed, throws a leg across his stomach, bringing her breasts close to his face; he tastes soap on her nipples. She rolls off him, onto her back, looking flushed.
“Better make that a long-ie,” she says. “It’s got to last for two days.”
After she’s gone, Cliff mopes about the apartment. He opens a box of Wheat Thins, eats a handful, has a second cup of coffee, paces. At length, he sits on the bed, back propped up by pillows, and, using Marley’s laptop, starts working on the book. When he looks up again, he’s surprised to find that four hours have passed. He has a late lunch at a Chinese restaurant on South Atlantic, then drives home and works some more. Around eight-thirty, Marley calls.