Part 3 (1/2)
”I'm sorry to hear it.”
”Just two short years. That's all we had.”
”Yes. That's too bad.”
”Any day now.”
”Those things happen.”
”I need advice about the Madrina.”
”What kind of advice?”
”They told me you know all about boats.”
”I don't know anything about s.h.i.+ps. Over a hundred feet is a s.h.i.+p, unless it is a submarine, and then it's still a boat.”
”Advice about selling it. If I should sell it here or have them take it back home. I don't trust Michael.”
”Who is Michael?”
”He is the captain. Maybe if it is best to take it home to sell it, you could help me.”
”A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money. A s.h.i.+p is a bigger hole into which you throw more money. If you don't want it, move off it right now. Get rid of the crew and all perishables, cancel the telephone hookup, and turn it over to one of the brokers. There are good ones here.”
”I really can't do that until after all that will and executor thing is taken care of.”
”And he isn't even dead yet.”
”The way you say that, you make me sound... terrible.”
”Not intended.”
”I didn't think it would be unreasonable, Travis, to suggest that we might help each other. And comfort each other.” She added a slight arching of the back, for emphasis. A very subtle movement of her left hand indicated that I should come over and sit by her.
I stood up and said, ”I'm dead, Anna. I'll walk you back around to the Madrina.”
She tossed off the rest of the brandy, frowned, shrugged, and let me walk her home. She hung on to my forearm with both hands and contrived to b.u.mp a hip into me every now and again.
”What if I want to fire Michael and he won't let himself be fired by me?”
I was supposed to volunteer a.s.sistance. ”Then you'll have to let the executor fire him, I guess.”
”He's worked for Harvey for twenty-three years.”
We stopped at the gangplank. She said, ”Would you like to come aboard and look around?”
”Not really.”
”You're not very gracious, are you?”
”Not very.”
”Well... if you feel terribly lonely and want someone to talk to who... faces the same kind of sorrow, I'll be nearby. Okay?”
”Okay Anna. Sure. 'Night.”
I walked slowly home to the Busted Flush. There was a sour smell in the night air, like a broken drain. Anna was a very tidy little biscuit, with her old dark eyes set in that child's face. She exuded a tantalizing flavor of corruption, of secret, unspeakable experience. There had been times in my life when I would have been happy to help her pa.s.s the time until old Harv died and then talked her into letting me help her take the Madrina home, by way of a lot of nice islands.
But I had seen the crocodile tears bulging in her dark eyes when she had said, ”Any day now.” And I had seen the greed behind the tears, the impulse to break into laughter. Everything old Harv had is now mine, fella. All, all mine. During those past two years she had probably been dreadfully afraid that he would live forever.
When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.
We are all at the mercy of the scriptwriters, directors, and actors in cinema and television. Man is a herd creature, social and imitative. We learn the outward manifestations of inner stress, patterning reaction to what we have learned. And because the visible ways we react are so often borrowed, we wonder about the truth of what is happening underneath. Do I really feel pain, grief, shock, loss?
It is as if we look inside and take a tentative rap at some bell that hangs in there. I had the horrid feeling that maybe my pain was tempered by some sick measure of relief, that I had escaped the trap of a permanent twoness.
Take a rap at that bell, dreading a possible flat, cracked, dissonant sound of self-pity, of a grubby selfishness.
But it rang true. It rang for her, for my lost girl. The loving and the losing were still larger than life. Than my life. The sound of the bell was almost unbearable. I was like a rat in a cage, subjected to supersonic experimentation. They run back and forth and roll at last onto their backs, chewing their paws b.l.o.o.d.y. I wanted to swim straight out into the sea. Or go visit Anna and help her into bed. Each was a form of drowning.
Five.
ON MONDAY morning I awoke glum, got up glum, dressed glum. The sky was a bright pewter, a radiance that cast no shadow but made people squint and walk hunched over, as if searching for something. It would be windless and silent one moment, then a hard blast would come slamming past, picking up dust devils and sc.r.a.ps of paper before subsiding into stillness. At sea on a day like this I would have been laying a course to the nearest shelter and checking the fuel level to see how fast I dared go to get there. It is the kind of weather that makes people cross.
Meyer was cross when he arrived at eleven for reheated coffee.
”How are you?” he asked, peering at me.
”Peachy.”
”I'm sorry. It is the standard question one asks. How did you get rid of little Anna?”
”Walked her back to her personal s.h.i.+p. What made you jump to the conclusion I got rid of her?”
”Not such a big jump. Why shouldn't you get rid of her? There'd be no reason to keep her around.”
”Who brought her and dumped her on me?”
”Lili MacNair. And it wasn't her fault. She just couldn't get the Farmer woman to leave.”
”Farmer?”
''Anna Farmer.”
”Don't look so exasperated, Meyer. I never caught her last name. Is she worth talking about, even? And does it matter a d.a.m.n one way or another what I do or don't do with my days or with my nights?”