Condominium Read online

  They went into the small office off the ground-floor foyer, opposite the two elevator doors. Lorrie Higbee stopped typing when they came in. She was a small woman with long dark hair that would have hampered her vision had her eyes not been set so close together on either side of the knife bridge of a long sharp nose. In profile all that showed was the end of the nose projecting from beyond a sheaf of shiny black hair. Head on, the visible items were the small dark eyes, the long nose and a ripe red bulge of underlip.

  “Mrs. Fish has been calling you,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  “Get the file on Four-C.”

  Mrs. Higbee went over to a file cabinet. She wore pale faded jeans, tighter than anything except the very best skin. Howard Elbright tried not to stare at her breasts wobbling unrestrained under her yellow T-shirt.

  She brought Higbee the file. Higbee sat at the larger desk and waved Elbright into the visitor’s chair. “Got that list? He’s got a list, Lorrie. How about that?”

  Elbright took it out of his wallet and unfolded it and read aloud, slowly and carefully. “The water which comes out of the hot faucets is quite warm, but not hot. The rain comes in under the sliding glass doors in the living room and the front bedroom. There seem to be two refrigerator shelves missing. The compressor on the air conditioner makes a loud yelping noise. The shower door will not close completely. The hot and cold controls on the sink in the smaller bathroom are reversed. The bathtub in the larger bathroom is badly chipped. The interior of one closet was never painted. Two wall plugs seem to be dead. There is a sizable crack in the balcony railing outside the living room.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Thus far.”

  “Thus far? Okay, now do you remember coming into this office the day you arrived?”

  “I do.”

  “What happened?”

  “Happened? You … gave me the keys and a stack of literature.”

  “You’re leaving out the most important part. Right in front of me and Lorrie you signed this here. You’ll find a copy of it in with the literature, right?”

  Howard Elbright had difficulty with the fine print. He read it with a growing dismay. He had certified that the apartment was acceptable to him in all respects, that all work had been completed, and the builder and the developer were relieved of any responsibility whatsoever for incomplete or unsatisfactory work or equipment.

  “You said it was a formality,” he said accusingly.

  “That’s what it is. A formal binding agreement. You don’t believe me, see a lawyer. What you should have done, you should have taken a day or two to check it out, right?”

  “My furniture was here. In the truck.”

  “You could have put it in storage. Anyway, I’ll tell you what I can do for you, Elmore. I think I can get you those missing shelves with no problem. I think I got some in storage we didn’t know where they went. About the air conditioner, you got the warranty papers on it, and the address of where it come from, and you can handle it yourself. Matter of fact, you can handle any of this stuff on your list yourself, getting a plumber, an electrician, a painter, whatever. Or you can let me go ahead. You let me do it, and it will be Gulfway’s cost plus ten percent. What my advice would be, you let me handle it because Gulfway can get some crew from the builder that put up this place, and you ought to do better even with the ten percent than when you go outside by yourself, not being acquainted locally. The way it works, you let me do it, it will come through on your monthly billing in addition to the management fee and the land lease and recreation lease and so on.”

  “But either way, I have to pay for every one of these things?”

  “There’s no way I can give you any free gifts, Elmore.”

  “Elbright. Please. Mr. Elbright. Think up a word association to help you remember. I was not very bright to sign that damned agreement. Bright. Elbright.”

  “That’s pretty good, Mr. Elbright. Isn’t that pretty good, Lorrie?”

  “Fan … tastic,” she said in a dead voice.

  “I won’t forget it again ever,” Higbee said. “I’ve got an almost perfect memory.”

  “Ha,” said Lorrie.

  “You want me to take care of the list?”

  Howard folded it and put it back in his wallet. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Suit yourself. To me it’s just another nuisance, but that’s what I’m here for, right?”

  Howard thought he could hear Higbee laughing after the door was closed. As he walked toward the elevators his ears got warm again. He pushed the button. One came down from three, empty. He rode it up to four, got off and turned left, toward the north wing. Four-C was the second door he came to as he walked along the narrow exterior walkway, behind the chest-high concrete wall.

  He took his key out, but before entering his own domain he leaned against the wall and looked out toward the east, across the jungly acres to the pale silvery blue of Palm Bay and the misty mainland beyond.

  You are now a retired chemist, he told himself. You are a very happy retired chemist, because you live in your fifty-eight-thousand-dollar condominium right here in Golden Sands on Fiddler Key with your loving wife. Your kids are grown and doing well enough. You have the use of an easement to the beach (thirty feet wide, no vehicles permitted) and an easement to the bay shore (twenty feet wide, no vehicles permitted). You are in reasonably good health (one infarction, healed). Edith too (high blood pressure difficult to control). Repeat: You are very happy, Howard. This is the Great American Dream. Enjoy.

  Edith was in the kitchen slicing a tomato. “You were so long,” she said.

  “We retired fellows take a long time over everything.”

  She looked at him. “Is everything okay, dear?”

  “Everything is just fine.”

  “Will they start soon? Not having hot water is driving me up my new walls.”

  “I’ll keep after them, never fear.”

  “There wasn’t any trouble, was there, about anything?”

  “What kind of trouble could anybody give me? I am immune,” he said. He hugged her and went into the living room and knelt and tried to figure out how the rain could come under the sliding doors. As he knelt there he had the grotesque feeling that he was part of some mass ritual, that up and down this west coast of Florida, on all these narrow elongated offshore islands tucked close to the subtropic mainland and named Clearwater Beach and Anna Maria and Longboat, Siesta Key and Casey Key and Manasota Key and Seagrape Key and this one he was on, Fiddler Key, there were thousands of sixty-two-year-old retired chemists named Howard something, all living in these tall pale structures by the sea, all of them at this moment kneeling and facing their sliding glass doors and wondering how the rainwater managed to seep in and stain their pastel shags. Face west, all you plump old men, and ponder your tropic fates.

  2

  GUTHRIE GARVER, known as Gus, was a small, quiet, knotty man. He and Carolyn had been the first couple to move into Golden Sands. They had moved into 1-C two days after the building was given a certificate of occupancy, when the land around it was still raw, with no swimming pool, tennis courts, or surfaced parking areas behind the building. One year ago last month, April.

  He was a sallow man with a white brush cut. He looked like a bleached Indian. When he swam in the pool, he revealed a spare, heavy-boned body, with nicks and slices and welts of scar tissue on tough hide which slid across the strings and slabs and lumps of lifelong muscle. He had spent his life on construction jobs, most of them very large and in very far places. He liked solid structure, well specified, well planned, competently built.

  Consequently he despised Golden Sands, but having spent six months looking at condominiums up and down Florida’s southwest coastline, he admitted to himself that he had not yet seen one he could not learn to despise. Carolyn had loved her bright clean shiny apartment. To her it was the symbol of the end of travel, a place for roots without the ev
er-present fear Gus would be sent somewhere else.

  After long deliberation Gus had told her one evening that if he couldn’t put up a better building using only toad shit and wax paper, he’d resign from the profession. But this upset her so badly and so obviously, he convinced her he was only kidding and vowed to himself not to mention his doubts to her again.

  They had their first Christmas together in the apartment, and a week later over at Beach Mall Shopping Plaza, only a quarter mile south, Carrie had slipped on a banana skin and broken her hip. That was the old comedy routine. Banana skin. She had been pushing the loaded cart as they walked toward their car. When she fell she shoved it out ahead into the path of a tourist Cadillac. Most of the groceries went up in the air and fell onto the hood and windshield. As Gus knelt by Carrie trying to figure out how badly she was hurt, he was bothered by the stout florid man from the Cadillac who was bending over Gus yammering about who would pay to have his car repaired. At last Gus lost patience and stood up and said, “Hush!” At the same time he pushed two rigid fingers into the fellow’s belly, two inches above the belt buckle. The man bent over and lowered himself to the asphalt pavement and sat like a fat baby, gray-faced and quiet.

  They operated on Carrie and pinned her hip. A week later she went into pneumonia, and they moved her into Intensive Care and then had to perform a tracheotomy. Just as she was finally recovering from the pneumonia, she had a stroke which paralyzed her whole right side. In mid-February he was able to move her into a nursing home. He had medical disaster insurance through an ASCE group policy, so his out-of-pocket expenses were 25 percent of her $9,000 hospital bill, less that portion covered by Medicare.

  In early April the doctor told Gus Garver that he could make a reasonable guess as to the permanent disability to be expected. There was some return of function to the large muscles of the right side, but he doubted it would ever be possible for her even to sit up without help, much less walk. Regarding communication, the stroke had destroyed that part of the left lobe of the brain which deals with the comprehension of speech and writing.

  “The condition is called aphasia. Sometimes, in younger patients, the right side of the brain can be trained to take over communication. But one could not hope for such a result in the case of your wife, sir. Yes, to a certain extent she is aware of her surroundings. And she would recognize you, yes. As you may have noted, she attempts to communicate on a subverbal level, to make simple wants known with … those sounds. Words are essential to the processes of thought, we now believe. Much of our thinking is in word forms. Deprived of the tools of words, the processes become more primitive and simplified: hot, cold, hungry, thirsty. No, I wouldn’t say her life expectancy is seriously impaired. At sixty-three she is quite a healthy woman, aside from her traumatic infirmities.”

  By mid-April Gus Garver had adjusted his needs to his resources. There was Social Security, the pension, the savings, the investments, the insurance and Medicare. The logical thing to do would be sell the apartment and find something to rent near the nursing home. But that seemed, somehow, to be letting go of life, even though he knew Carrie would probably never come home again. She seemed to be more present, the Carrie of memories, in the bright clean apartment than in her small shadowy room in the home. He sensed that it was good for him to take care of the apartment, serve as a member of the five-man board of directors of the Association, cook for himself, go grocery shopping, take the laundry down to the bank of coin machines at ground level. It created the subconscious feeling that she would one day return unimpaired, and he could not sustain that myth were he to move out.

  He saw Carrie for two hours each day, from three until five. He would sit at the left side of the bed, her good side, or at the left side of her chair and hold her hand and they would watch the small screen of the television set he had gotten for her. It did not matter to her whether the sound was off or on. She watched the movement and the color. He sat and thought back to a flood-control project in Assam, a highway in Peru, an airfield in Fiji, thought of dead friends and jungle mountains, village cantinas and village maidens, rock slides and typhoons, while in the silent room on the back street of this small city of Athens, Florida, he watched without comprehension the prancings and grimacings of the gameshow masters.

  Whenever he had any free time, he examined the structure of Golden Sands. It stood upon pilings which reached an unknown distance down into the native marl. He estimated there would have to be over three hundred of them. From the ones he could inspect he saw that they were set to a minimum of fourteen inches diameter. Reasonable safety factor would call for a working capacity of fifty tons each.

  Sure, the architect and the project engineer could call for any specifics they wanted. Fifty tons apiece. Forty-foot depth. ASTM standards. Minimum compressive strength of four thousand psi after four weeks. You could call for independent testing lab reports. You could watch them like eagles.

  But these were uncased auger-drilled poured pilings, with the grout in direct contact with the native materials. All concrete was supposed to be pumped into the hole under steady positive pressure as the auger was pulled. And the grout had to be first class. Good cement up to federal specs, commercial-grade fly ash, fresh clean water, some Pozzolith #8 retarder or equivalent, and fine aggregate, all measured and mixed in spanking clean equipment.

  To do it right you had to have men who knew what they were doing and were committed to doing it according to the book. Gus Garver couldn’t inspect the underground pilings, but he could inspect the visible cast-in-place concrete and make a judgment of the piling work from that.

  Over a period of weeks he had made notes of the defects he had found. He found construction joints badly located, impairing the strength of the structure. He found one where the bond at the joint was faulty. Where one pour stops, after the concrete has set, it is necessary to sandblast the face of it, scouring away the cement down to the exposed coarse aggregate solidly embedded in mortar. Then, before the new pour is made against that face, all the debris and dried drippings have to be blown out by compressed air. He found a hairline crack in a joint, and when he found two places along the crack too deep for the blade of his penknife, he had returned with a two-foot length of stiff leader wire and satisfied himself that the joint had been carelessly prepared in addition to being badly located.

  He found joint marks and fins, surface voids and stone pockets, irregularities and leakage stains. In a bearing surface area where he knew that the specifications had called for class-A concrete, he found a wall in the garage portion where the pour had been skimpy, where he estimated cement content at four sacks per yard instead of six. He could tell by the look of it, by the sandy feel, by the way he could scrape it away with his pocket knife. He found a stone pocket in that wall and stuck the blade of his knife into it and worked the stones loose easier than he should have been able to. In earthquake country, he thought, the damned wall would come down like a giant Nabisco.

  All the finish work seemed to be good enough. He did not pay much attention to it. It was all cosmetics. He was concerned with stress, with the ability of the materials, as used, to withstand all anticipated stress. Put something up and you want it to stay.

  He could not make as informative an inspection of the pre-stressed concrete work. He knew only that it was more complicated and there were thus more things which could be done badly or not at all. The forms could lack the rigidity to prevent displacement by an external vibrator. The inserts could be installed a little bit off. The hidden tubes, ducts, spacer bars, anchorages and so on could have been improperly secured in place before the pour. Some congenital damned fool could have attached imbedded inserts to the main stressed steel. They could have skimped on the shoring during construction and gotten too much deflection in the stressed members. Some could even have been repaired after chipping or cracking, rather than replaced. The wires, strands and bars could be underspecified in some instances, and random sampling couldn’t hope to catch it al
l.

  The structure seemed to Gus to have been properly designed and engineered. It had that look. The elements and components were of sufficient size and apparent sturdiness. And he knew that good engineering adds a sufficient safety factor to overcome the minor goofs and oversights during normal construction, the ones not caught by inspectors and specialists. But in genuinely sloppy concrete work, as this seemed to him to be, there comes a point where the accumulated goofs eat up all the safety factor, and then if there is enough stress on any portion, enough to crumble it or crack it, the deflection is transmitted to other portions of the structure. They in turn crack or twist or crumble, and the whole thing comes down.

  He remembered—what year was it, 1957?—going into Mexico City from the south after the earthquake. Mike had parked the Rover on the east side of Insurgentes, and they had put on their hard hats and walked across to take a look at what was left of the apartment house which had come down two nights previously. It would be impossible to determine just where the first failure occurred, but once it started, all the slab floors came down, one atop the other, so that something almost a hundred feet high was transmuted into a rubbly pile about sixteen feet high. The slab floor had remained curiously intact, forming a horrid sandwich, ten slices of bread with thin dollops of meat between them. Mike had picked up a piece of concrete as big as a walnut and had kneaded it between his powerful fingers until it crumbled to dust. He slapped the dust off his hands and gestured toward the work crews and said, “The folks were in bed when the jolt brought it down. Some Mexican comedian owned it.” They did not have to discuss the problems of mixing good structural concrete. Or the penalty for not doing it right.