The Turquoise Lament Read online

  Maybe it has a certain emotional importance, or significance, that all this was on the night before I got Pidge Brindle’s letter. Or perhaps I am straining at a gnat, or, once again looking for some way to make myself into a better person than I am.

  At any rate I hung around until just before the shift change and then, following a lady’s detailed instructions, walked down the corridor and around the corner and shoved the stairwell door open and, without going through it, let it hiss shut to the point where a folded piece of cardboard kept it from closing all the way and latching. Just beyond the doorway, I slipped into the treatment room through another door and pushed it almost shut. I sat on the treatment table and waited. The reflected glow of streetlights came into the room, glinting and glimmering on the glass and stainless steel of the medical equipment.

  I could not tell exactly how long it would take her, because if someone went down with her on the elevator, then, instead of getting off at three and walking to the stairwell and climbing one flight, she would ride all the way down, fake a trip to the rest room, and climb the three flights back up to four.

  I waited about five minutes before Marian Lewandowski, RN, pushed the door open silently, slipped into the treatment room and carefully closed the door. The latch clicked and the bolt made a tiny grating sound. She was a slender white shape in the darkness, a whisper of professional fabrics coming toward me, a barely audible “Hi, darling” as she came into the clandestine embrace, to be held and kissed in the stolen darkness.

  She had little body tremors of nervousness, and her whisper-voice had little edges of anxiety, and she had a talking jag. On the afternoon before Christmas, she had come to the lounge three times for a few minutes each time, to make sour jokes about being stuck on the three-to-eleven on that day, Christmas day and the day after. Lots of nurses were sick with the bug. A woman with a lovely, lively body, tons of energy, a face more worn than the body, blond hair tied tightly back, blue eyes a sixteenth of an inch too close together, lips a millimeter too thin.

  She kissed and trembled and said, “You know, I figure we were both kidding, talking a good game, neither of us going to show up, but all the time it was happening, you know, like getting carried along. It’s just kidding at first. Then it’s like a game. Like playing chicken.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I talk a good game, but the way it is with me, Norman is on pipeline work in Iran, no place I would want to take my two babies, and so here I am living with Norman’s mother again, and I wouldn’t really have to work except it would drive me out of my tree trying to live in her house with her, and that rotten old woman is holding a stopwatch on me right now, you can bet your life on it, figuring I’m late because I took time on the way home to get laid. When somebody bugs you and bugs you and bugs you all the time about something you haven’t been doing, you end up doing it, right?”

  “I guess you do.”

  “I wouldn’t know about this being a good safe place except for Nita, she’s on vacation, my best friend practically—she sneaks in here with a cardiologist she thinks is some day going to get a divorce and marry her, but it never happens.”

  “I guess it doesn’t.”

  “Mostly what is wrong with me, McGee, it isn’t just that Norman is away for such a long time and the old lady bugs me so, and if I know Norman he’s set up a shack job for himself, what is wrong with me, I guess, is … somehow the work is different being a nurse now. There are so many old ones coming in, coming in and dying all the time. It makes you think about time going by you, like you’re on a train that never stops and you look out the window at things streaming by that you’ll never see except that way. Dying isn’t scary because they come in here and they are so confused and kind of dim they don’t really know what is happening, and then all of a sudden they’re in a coma and they got an I.V. going, and a catheter and a bag, and an oxygen clip on their nose, and they don’t know a damn thing about living or dying anymore. That’s going to be me and you sometime, bet on it.”

  “But not yet.”

  “Feel how I’m shaking? I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Nita says don’t try to use the table, it’s so high and narrow you could fall off and break somebody’s back, she said there’s a rollaway in here … there it is, I can just make it out, and the thing to do is open it a little ways and pull the mattress out and put it on the floor. Look, this is weird, the way I feel. I’m a nurse, dammit, and you know the reputation we got, and I like you a lot. I really like you, and I’ve been excited for hours thinking about you, but would it be a mean, rotten, dirty trick if—if I asked if we just skipped it? Would you get really sore?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe it’s his mother there waiting and waiting. Why should I make such a big thing? It isn’t a big thing anymore in the world. We’ve got the rights that only men used to have. Well, just hold me like this and kiss me like you did before, for a little while, and then I better be going, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  And in about ten minutes we were on the mattress together. Her flesh was cool, and as pale in the darkness as the uniform had been. Her thick curls had trapped odors of medication and asepsis. I heard the muffled bong of the corridor call bell, a night shriek of city brakes, the thunder-roll of a jet, fast and high, and soon the more immediate bumpity-thud, bumpity-thud of Mrs. Norman Lewandowski’s pale, pretty and earnest hips against the compressed kapok of the thin, hard, rollaway mattress. Thus we exorcized our private ghosts, leaving old and dying far behind as sensation rushed forward in the rich, frictive celebration of life and living.

  I dozed after she was gone and awoke with a start, chilled to the bone by the air conditioning, which had dried the sweats of effort while I slept. It was only 12:11 by the little red Pulsar digits. I buttoned my shirt wrong on the first try, and when I did it wrong again on the second try, I seriously considered sitting down on the floor and crying a little.

  I drove stately old Miss Agnes home through the tropic night, sitting at the big wheel in one of the deepest, saddest, most dismal postcoital depressions I have ever known. I was an absolutely trivial, wasted, no-good son of a bitch. I wanted to moan, tear my hair out and gnaw my hands raw. This had really been one great December. Point with pride, you dumb horny old scavenger. You zapped Pidge just because you missed her the first time around, and you’re trying to make a perfect score, right? And since you got back, there have been a half-dozen casual availables, and if you put your mind to it you can remember four out of six of their names and maybe three out of six of their faces. And now this lonely nurse person. Like shooting fish in a barrel. No. More like using a shotgun to kill a minnow in a teacup. What is wrong with you this year, fellow? Should you be married, for God’s sake? Should you look in the yellow pages for your friendly neighborhood monastery? Should you sign up for a double orchidectomy? You have to do something, because something is definitely wrong with a grown man who spends the idle hour ramming his right self into chance acquaintances, no matter how willing they might be, no matter how far away Norman is.

  When have you been like this before?

  I locked Miss Agnes and walked the empty dock to Slip F-18 and boarded the Flush. Tired as I was, I went through the motions of checking the little panel in the bulkhead to see if any uninvited visitors had been aboard in my absence. I cut the switch with the special key, let myself in and remembered to use the key again on the inside switch. That is where most security systems fail. Thieves wait for you to deactivate it on the outside, then jump from cover and make you take them inside. If you have a double switch on the alarm circuit, with a sixty-second delay, it can be wired so that if the inside one isn’t deactivated in time, you get sirens, bullhorns, calliope music, anything you might want to hear.

  I remembered when I had been like this the last time. The last time it had been a defensive reaction. I had suspected a far deeper involvement with a lady than I had wanted. And so I had tried to cure it with warm poultices
of other ladies, or at least to muffle it, blur it, diffuse it.

  Pidge? Lou Ellen? Oh, no, McGee! She’s just a kid. Well, not quite. She used to be a kid, and not too long ago. She’s not at the bottom of all this cut-rate Lothario routine. Couldn’t possibly be. Use the acid test on her. Okay. Would I, Travis McGee, bring thee, Linda Lewellen Brindle, aboard this houseboat to live herein and hereon, with me, happily, so long as we shall all remain afloat?

  Hell, yes!

  I went to bed then, dismayed, not knowing I would get her letter the next day.

  Seven

  Darling,

  This feels like the tenth letter to you, and I have the strange feeling you know what was in the other nine I threw away, just like I picked up the phone all those times and didn’t call you. In all the letters I threw away I said I love you so many times you have to be used to hearing it from me by now. And you can’t hush me up the way you kept doing when we had that absolutely incredible weekend here together after I seduced you. That word looks funny written out. I looked at it so long I had to go look it up to see if it was spelled right. I found out I can lie down and close my eyes and think about us, and remember exactly what it was like the different times and different ways, and after a little while I feel all hot and out of breath and dizzy. Do you think of me like that? Do men ever do that? Can you get big just by thinking about me? I hope you can. Because it was a lot more than just games, wasn’t it?

  You are going to have me on your hands. I guess you know that by now. Or you’ve guessed it. I’m going to walk along the dock and walk aboard and find you and say Hello dear, here I am to spend a little time with you, like the rest of my life. Then what are you going to do? Nothing at all. It’s ordained. Way back when I stowed away, it was all settled for us even then. I am very rich and I can cook. What do you want anyway?

  But don’t start looking for me tomorrow. I have this thing about neat. I want to wrap up this whole part of my life and seal it and put it away in a cupboard and never look at it again. When I’m with you I won’t ever get freaky again because I don’t have to think about things not being right, because they are right every minute, no matter what we are doing.

  The Professor taught me that the worst thing you can do is run away from things, and it marked me. So I have things to settle first, and then I’ll be heading toward you as fast as they can fly those birds. Two days after you left, I went and had my first long talk with Howie. He was really awfully upset. He didn’t know how to take it. He just refused to believe me. I guess he’s really in love with me, the poor ox. When he wads his face up, he looks just like a baby about to start to cry. It took a lot of long talks to make him see that if he loves me, he has to let me go. Could I ever let you go? I don’t think I could, darling. I wouldn’t be strong enough. Thinking about us gives me the strength and patience to talk nicely to Howie.

  Now he’s resigned to it. He’s very morose, at least he was, but now he seems a little better. I guess it’s because of the final cruise. You should see my poor hands! We’ve been working like maniacs to get the Trepid ready. Because it’s too much boat for one person to sail a long distance, we agreed to sell her here. Howie is a really good salesman. That’s what he should be doing, I guess. Anyway, there is a man named Dawson who is very interested in her. And the price is okay, I guess. $130,000. He is being transferred from here to Pago Pago in American Samoa. He works for a land development company and he seems young to be so successful. He says that he’ll be down there several years on a project, and that the Trepid is exactly what he wants. He says that he can get her surveyed there, and if she is as sound as she looks, he will be able to get a bank draft for the full purchase price, and we can fly home from there.

  I am even sort of looking forward to the voyage, darling. I think Howie has the idea I’ll “come to my senses” or some fool idea like that. But I will be alone on the beautiful sea, thinking of us. I couldn’t stand him even kissing me. But I’ll feel better for making the cruise because it will let him know that I am completely serious about divorcing him, and it will prove to me that I am not some kind of flippy person going around hallucinating at the drop of a—of a what? A spook? Already all that is a bad dream, thanks to you, darling. I am the most stable girl in the world. I am in love. That helps a girl a lot.

  So now the Trepid is lovely again, looking fresh and proud and new. Everything aboard her has been checked over and over again, and as you know my father was a nut about fail-safe backup things, so no need to worry. I came back here to the apartment to pick up the last of my things and wander around and think of you and smile secret satisfied smiles at myself in the mirror. Remember when you came up behind me and put your chin on top of my head and we were like a funny totem pole in the mirror, making horrible faces? And to finish this letter which I started yesterday.

  We have been working on the charts and figuring out time and distance, dear. We’ll have about 3000 miles to go, and we are going to top off the tanks and really push it because even at standard cruise, there is still a tiny safety factor. With allowance for weather, the best we can do, running all the time, is a hair under two hundred miles a day, so sixteen days should just about do it. It is a shame to miss some lovely islands, but they would mean nothing to me unless I shared them with you. It is a shame not to use the wind when the wind is good. But the man wants the Trepid as quick as he can get her, and I want to be out of this marriage just as quick. And so it goes.

  Darling, you took a flippy girl with weird teeth, lumpy boobs, fat thighs and nothing-type hair and you’ve made her feel almost beautiful. I hope you’re satisfied. I mean I am going to make real sure you’re satisfied.

  So I will mail this on the way back to the boat and today is Christmas Eve, so God only knows how long it will take. We will be taking off early tomorrow morning, and I imagine we’ll be tying up at Pago Pago no later than Thursday, the tenth of next year, the first year we are going to spend most of together. All the dumb lines of the dumb old songs have become wonderful. We don’t have a song yet! Kiss Meyer for me. Say hello to everybody. Tell everybody that Lou Ellen is coming home. They won’t know you mean me if you say that. You can use Pidge to outsiders, okay? But never to me between us alone. I am so damned incredibly happy! I loooooooooove you.

  Lou Ellen McGee

  PS: If you don’t remember proposing, that’s okay. You can always take care of the details later on.

  Meyer’s fever was up again on Thursday. Not dangerously high. High enough to make Kwalty irritable. He changed some of the medication and ordered more fluids. I sat in his room and when he dozed I read my letter again. I didn’t overdo it. I don’t think I read it more than fifteen times. Did I feel the stirring then of some terrible premonition? No. I was clam happy, with goof grin and a little song to hum, a foot to tap. Life had suddenly revealed to me its long-concealed and exquisite design.

  When Meyer would seem to want something, I would go get a nurse to take care. He was dim and grumpy. He seemed to bring some of the dozing dreams out into daylight and a mild delirium of fever. Once he sat halfway up, face twisting, and said harshly, “No! Don’t let him, Cable!”

  I went to him and pushed him back. “Hey, Meyer. You’re okay. All that happened a long time ago.”

  His eyes cleared and he looked up at me, then tried to smile. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  I sat again, knowing that in the brain warped by fever, Meyer had gone back in time to the Cypress County jail when Deputy Lew Arnstead had beaten him cruelly while Deputy Billy Cable watched. When you have been beaten to helplessness and still the beating goes on and on until you wonder if you will live, that is when the marks go deep.

  I went to lunch and came back in through one of my newly discovered private entrances where I did not have to con my way past the Gray Ladies with their file of visitor’s passes. Meyer was still on the no-visitor list, but Kwalty had given me verbal assurance that I was his exception. When I walked down the corridor of Four South I came upon
Marian Lewandowski at the nurses’ station, checking through the patient records. She glanced at me and said hello and I watched the pink blush move up out of the collar of the white uniform and up her throat, suffusing her forehead last of all. She swallowed and moved ten feet down the corridor with me, glancing nervously back to see if we were clueing her peer group.

  “Anybody see you leaving?” she asked, barely moving her lips.

  “No. How’d you make out at home?”

  She made a mouth. “The usual. Nobody could ever be good enough for Norman. When she accused me other times, I get so mad I yell at her. So I had to get mad last night too. Listen, it was crazy. I wasn’t going to do it, really. I did cheat before, but it was different. It was a big beach-picnic thing, blankets, everybody smashed, and Norm had gone off with a girl he used to go with, in her car, to get more beer, and he didn’t come back soon enough.”

  “Marian!” somebody called from the station.

  “I’ll come to four fifty-five, huh?” she said, and spun and went striding back. I watched her. An alert, heads-up pace, little white cap, teacup size with blue edging, riding squarely atop the clenched blond curls, white shoes with rubber ripple soles, toeing in, the long stride swinging the hips. It was a difficult, almost impossible feat to relate that brisk professional image to the night creature of the rollaway mattress, so quickly sensitized that she jerked, flexed, gasped at each caress until, in response to the body language of tugging and reaching, I had rolled her under.

  And now I could not conceive of ever wanting to take her one more time. And suspected that she too would like to avoid a rerun. This is one of the new relationships in a transient society for which there is no word or phrase in common use. Marian and I were not friends, because friendship grows out of mutual concerns and out of being together at many times in many places. We were not lovers, because there was little or no continuity of desire. We were not completely casual libertines, dissolute and uncontrolled. Each of us had fed a great many bits into our personal computers, at breakneck speed. Is he-she physically attractive to me? Is he-she clean and healthy? Will he-she be circumspect and private about it? Is he-she seeking some kind of angle or advantage I don’t know about? Is he-she likely to be kinky in some kind of vulgar, unpleasant or even alarming way? Could he-she be hunting some kind of long-range emotional security and personal involvement I can’t afford? Are there so many shadow areas in the computer response to the questions that the anticipated pleasure is not worth the unknown risk?