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  George went thoughtfully into his apartment.

  “Where were you? What kept you?”

  “Brooks Ames. He wants me to volunteer to be an armed guard. I think he’s lost his wits.”

  “Audrey says he worries all the time about thieves coming in here. He wakes up in the night, she says, and paces around, worrying and hearing noises.”

  “Some children hopped on the elevator and pushed all the buttons.”

  “I thought I heard children screaming. Who are they visiting?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Did you check for the mail?”

  “It won’t be there yet.”

  “Why can’t you just say you forgot to check?”

  “I didn’t check because it is too early to check.”

  “Instead of going three steps out of your way and looking in the box?”

  When he made no reply, she went back into the kitchen, holding her shoulders high and rigid. He sat on the couch and opened the package with the reel in it and took out the little instruction pamphlet and began reading it. At the Fisherama he’d had the clerk fill the spool on the reel with eight-pound monofilament, and fill the extra spool with twelve-pound. He reviewed how to remove the spool and replace it and then did so, admiring the oily click with which the spool settled into position on the reel.

  Elda leaned and spoke through the pass-through. “If you had any consideration at all, you’d go find out about the mail without my having to beg you.”

  “The children are using the elevators.”

  “Is that supposed to be humorous? You know it was nine months for Judy over a week ago.”

  “And you know she had the first two with about as much trouble as your average brown rabbit, and if there was any trouble, Hal could certainly phone.”

  “Maybe he phoned when we were marketing.”

  “If so, he’ll try again.”

  She came out of the kitchen, marched past him and went out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her. He went into the utility room and got his fish box and spinning rod. By the time he had taken the old reel off and put the new one on and threaded the line through the guides, she was back. In her anger she had forgotten to take a key. The door locked automatically. He decided not to answer the first knock. After the second knocking he waited just long enough so that when he opened the door, she stood there with her fist upraised to start again.

  “Couldn’t you hear me?”

  “Hear you what? You knocked and I came to the door and opened it.”

  “I knocked twice.”

  “Then evidently I did not hear the first knocking, or I would have opened the door.”

  He went and sat on the couch. She slung the mail at him from ten feet away. The corner of a small catalog stung the corner of his mouth and the rest of the mail fluttered down around him, on the couch and on the rug.

  “There is all your terribly important mail,” she said. “It ought to keep you busy the rest of the day.”

  He gathered it up. Ads, circulars, solicitations. “I’ll try to make it last. We retireds have to spread things out.”

  “Hah! Retired!”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “You may be. I’m not. What the hell has changed for me? Cooking, cleaning, shopping, dusting, laundry, bed-making. Not only you don’t have a job, you don’t even have a yard to take care of anymore. Retirement is one hell of a laugh.”

  He faked astonishment as he looked up at her. “My God! I never realized you’re working your fingers to the bone stacking dishes in the dishwasher and putting the washing in the washing machine. Wow! Here you are waiting on me hand and foot and—”

  “You can be one ice-cold sarcastic son of a bitch. You are—”

  “Exactly like my mother?” He jumped up from the couch. “I knew it was about time for that.”

  “She was a cold person, George. Through and through. And she had that terrible sense of … superiority, of being a little bit better than everyone around her, without any cause in the world that I could ever discover. You are exactly like she was.”

  “You know what you have? You have a compulsion to feel abused. Any idiot could run this apartment with one hand during the television commercials. But that would take away the kicks. You have to dawdle and futz around and fool around until you make every ten-minute job take an hour. Then you can blame me for keeping you in harness.”

  He saw the familiar tears well into her green eyes and spill and run. “That is stinking! That is a cruel stinking thing to say. I’ve worked hard and I’ve sacrificed having a life of my own just to—”

  “Come here to this garden spot where you can swim in the pool and walk on the beach and enjoy the sunshine.”

  “As if you earned it all for me? Just for me? Bullshit, George. If we had to retire on your very own pension, we damned well wouldn’t be retired yet, would we? And if we did hang around and retire on it, we wouldn’t be living here. We live here because they put an interstate past the farm.”

  “You would have sold it years ago.”

  “And you hung onto it because you’re so shrewd? Ha! It is to laugh, George Genius Gobbin. We did without a lot of things while the kids were growing up so you could hang onto that farm and go out there and pretend to be the big man bossing those thieving tenants around. You kept it for sentimental reasons, and if Hap hadn’t gotten after you to sell, we’d still be up there, if they hadn’t already fired you.”

  “So I’m a weak sentimental failure. Or I’m a cold superior person. And you haven’t decided which.”

  “You are cold and indifferent and hateful. And if you’d done your job as well as I did mine, you’d have been running that company instead of just being some kind of clerk.”

  “A vice-president, damn it!”

  “And you’re proud of that? Gee! I remember you telling me when Vance made every salesman a vice-president so they could get in to see more purchasing agents.”

  “You are not happy unless you’re pulling me down. What you are is an emasculator. Maybe I would have done better if you hadn’t been all the time right behind me, destroying my confidence.”

  “Destroying! That’s a wicked thing to say. I always tried to make you feel as if—”

  “I couldn’t do one damn thing right.”

  “Oh, you are so rotten and unfair. So-o-o unfair to me.”

  Elda stood there, facing him, her face crumpled with despair, and he knew that his next line was supposed to be an accusation about overacting, and then she would get back to his mother, and then transpose into his talent for spoiling things for everybody. Then he would go storming out in an enormous rage and come back later and they would comfort each other with a sexual solution.

  But the little anger he had drummed up had dwindled. He felt tired and misplaced. Quarreling was an evening affair, or a weekend affair. Not here in the sunlight, like this. He couldn’t storm out saying he was going to the office, or to the club. What he wanted to do, actually, was try the new reel.

  The pain and drama ebbed from her small face and she looked at him with growing concern when he did not respond.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” she asked earnestly.

  “I don’t know. I feel confused, sort of.”

  “What about?”

  “I stopped being angry. I don’t think I could get sore no matter what you say.”

  “Is that some new kind of way of saying you don’t …”

  “No. No, Elda. We’re here. How we got here is past history. You do what you do, and I do what I do. Maybe we’ll live longer. Maybe, hell, it will seem longer.”

  “Why do you say a thing like that?”

  “You’re still wanting to fight. I’m trying to say I’d like to fight. Okay? It’s something I’m used to. But I got to be angry or it’s just saying lines I know by heart.”

  “George!”

  “Look, I want to try out casting with the new reel, okay? I’m going down to the bay side
. Want to come along?”

  “The bugs are fierce. Well … sure. Give me five minutes.”

  As she changed she kept worrying about George, and she kept telling herself it was probably a good thing if they could stop having these nasty fights every so often, saying terrible things. She told herself she had always wished they could stop fighting. Maybe they had, now. She wondered why she should feel frightened. No, not frightened. Threatened.

  5

  WHEN HIS SECRETARY told him Loretta Rosen was on the line, Greg McKay’s heart gave a happy bound. Maybe, at long last, she had managed to rent one of those goddam apartments at Golden Sands to some off-season pigeon. To have at least one of the three rented would partially staunch a flowing wound.

  “Hey, Loretta. What’s the good word?”

  “The good word, darling, is one you won’t hear me saying over the phone. In fact, I don’t want to say any of this over the phone.”

  “What’s the matter? Didn’t they like it?”

  “They both thought the apartment was absolutely darling. They are a nice quiet couple, thinking in terms of a lease for one year before deciding whether or not to buy on the beach. I should have closed it right then and there, six hundred a month. But I always close in the office. How could I know? How could I guess?”

  “Know what? Guess what?”

  “A veritable plague of urchins, dearie. Little brown foulmouthed ones. They came charging around a corner by the elevators and knocked Mrs. Granlund right onto her patrician ass.”

  “But … the rules say no children!”

  “I know. I know. That’s what I’d already told the Granlunds. The kids didn’t even stop to find out if they’d killed her. She claimed she wasn’t hurt at all. But it gave her a nasty little limp. And it turned them both off Golden Sands but good. I tried to retrieve the situation by marching them down to the manager’s office. Lorrie Higbee was very evasive at first. Finally she confessed that Julian rented an apartment on the sixth to two couples on vacation with small children, apparently for a nice fat figure.”

  “It’s illegal!”

  “Not really. The Declaration says no children under sixteen. But that’s for the owners who live in their apartments. Not renting to anybody with little kids is more like an unwritten rule, you know? Greg, dear, I tried. I really tried, but it was no way.”

  “Did you rent them anything?”

  “Elsewhere? As a matter of fact, I did. But, believe me, I am trying to fill yours first, God only knows why. You didn’t buy them through me, darling.”

  “I bought them predevelopment, from Marty Liss.”

  “I know. I know. Two years ago. But if you’d had your wits about you, you would have come to Loretta first and said, Loretta dearest darling, if I buy those three, will you keep them full or sell them at a profit, and I would have said, Greg, honey, my crystal ball says that the days of investing in condominium apartments have just about ended, and it will be a good way to get bruised.”

  “Bruised? I’m getting lacerations you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I can believe. There’s something else I want to tell you. When can you get away from those torts and writs and things? It’s important to you.”

  “You’ve had lunch? So’ve I. What say I stop by your office in … oh … forty minutes?”

  McKay’s secretary was watching her automatic typewriter clatter through line after line of boilerplate in a trust agreement, waiting for it to stop so that she could type in the specifics McKay had dictated.

  “I’ve got two stops to make,” he said. “I’ll be back by three or a little after. Okay?”

  “What about the admiral?”

  “When is he set for?”

  “Quarter of.”

  “Well, I’ll try to hurry and you try to keep him from having a heart attack.”

  Ten minutes later, as he turned onto Fiddler Key and drove south toward Beach Village, he was wondering if he should have tried to get some other realtor to handle the renting of apartments 2-D, 2-E and 2-F. Having a realtor at all was an additional expense. According to the management contract, ten percent had to go to the manager no matter what. And another ten to Loretta took a good bite out of any rental. On the other hand, she had found that January through March rental for 2-F, three thousand gross, twenty-four hundred by the time they finished cutting it up.

  He had been involved in several closings for clients where Loretta Rosen had been involved as a realtor. He had found her to be energetic, shrewd, handsome and funny. He guessed she might be even as much as ten years older than his thirty-four, but his guess was based on conversation clues, not on her looks. If she was that age, she worked very successfully to conceal it. She was a medium-tall slender lady with a long gleaming weight of dark blond hair. Her tanned face was very mobile and expressive, her pale gray eyes striking. She had a gravelly voice and salty turn of phrase, and a hundred small nervous mannerisms, forever folding and unfolding her sunglasses, lighting one cigarette from another, fingering her hair back, tapping her teeth with a pencil eraser. She knew everybody. Her advertising logo said, SEE LORETTA! She seemed to work twenty-six hours a day.

  He parked beside her little building on the outskirts of the Village. The front-office girls knew him. Loretta was waiting in her small office in the back. She sprang up from behind her desk and shook his hand, and waved him into the big comfortable armchair across from her. She went to the door and said, “Hey, Bonny, no calls, okay?” She closed the door and went behind her desk, leaned back in her chair, shook a match out and grinned at him. “Big mystery, huh?”

  “So far.”

  “Hmmm. The guard is up. Sweetie, relax. I’m going to try to do you some good, even though I shouldn’t, I guess. It could be a question of ethics. But it is also a question of friendship. We’re friends?”

  He smiled. “So far.”

  “The thing is, maybe I’d be doing you too small a favor for it to matter too much to you. I mean you talked about being lacerated, but you could have been sort of kidding. You are a partner. Are you really hurting, or were you kidding?”

  He asked for scratch paper. She slid a yellow pad over to him. “These are guesstimates, but close,” he said. He worked it out. “Cash down on the three, eighteen thousand. Cash for furnishing the three apartments, about twenty-two thousand. Call it forty invested. Total outstanding mortgages at this time, about a hundred and twenty thousand. Annual interest charges, about ten thousand five hundred. Annual assessment about three thousand. Repairs and maintenance, call it fifteen hundred. So that means total carrying costs of about fifteen thousand, plus reduction of the principal amount of the mortgages.”

  He showed her the figures and said, “The legal fees I earn go into the kitty, and the partners split it all up each year according to a formula which favors the guys who’ve been aboard the longest. So it isn’t exactly all that great. I’ll admit it. The apartments are a real drain. I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder why I got into such a thing. It’s going to make me old before my time. And some of the money was my wife’s: ten thousand of the twenty-two we put into decorating. Nancy had fun doing the decorating and buying the furniture. But with no rentals, it isn’t fun anymore. We’ve been jabbing at each other about it. Tales out of school. Sorry.”

  “You’ve told me just what I have to know. Really. All kidding aside, it wasn’t a good investment, Greg.”

  “I bought one at Shoreline four years ago, paid forty and sold it for fifty-eight. I guess it made me overconfident or something.”

  “Look, I was never very high on Golden Sands. It seemed to me there aren’t enough apartments to support the facilities. I had a client seven months ago. Stan Wasniak. I tried to find the right place for him and his wife. He knew I was a little bit dubious about Golden Sands, but his wife flipped so badly over it, I had to close or lose it. Wasniak read me pretty good. I ran into him yesterday. He says that as of the first of June, it is really going to hit the fan. He’s an office
r of the Association. He told me they’ve been over all the financial records and there is just no way they can operate that thing without more than doubling the monthly assessment, plus a double assessment in June to take up the slack.”

  His mouth sagged. “Double? From three thousand to six thousand a year for those three of mine? God, that really kicks it in the head. I can’t make out at all.”

  “The way rentals are going, no. You can’t. Even without that extra, I don’t think you can make out.”

  “Have you got some kind of answer?”

  “Yes, but you aren’t going to like it. It could be called biting the bullet. You are a young man with a good profession. I’ve been around a long time. I was divorced when I was twenty-two, and I’ve made out because I’ve got money sense. I manage a lot of property for a lot of people. I have seen too many guys go through too much agony trying to save things, only to lose them in the end. Sweetie, my old battle wounds tell me that Golden Sands is going sour. I’ve seen some of them go that way, and it isn’t pretty. As your friend, and your volunteer financial manager, I think you ought to dump those three just as fast as you can. I think you ought to cut the price down to where I can take you out of them fast.”

  “How far down is that?”

  “The present state of the market, I’d say that in order to get people to stand still for a hundred and sixty something a month assessment, you’ve got to get down under thirty-five thousand. Furnished.”

  He swallowed hard and fingered his throat. “God; Loretta. It will add up to better than a sixty-thousand-dollar bath, counting everything in.”

  “You made a sixty-thousand-dollar mistake. You are entitled to one of those at your age. If you’d bought only one, you’d have made a twenty-thousand-dollar mistake. If you’d bought six, you’d have—”

  “Please. I thought of buying six. And didn’t.”

  “Praise the Lord for small blessings. Do you want me to go ahead and try to move them?”

  “Probably yes. You are probably right. It would be such a wonderful sense of relief. But I’ve got to talk it over with Nancy first.”

  “Of course. But I think you should move pretty fast. I’ve got some pigeons I can work. Usually I let people … find their way out of their own swamps. But … I don’t know. We’ve worked together and I like you, I guess.”