Thomas McGuane: Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Tom?”

“Ah, Miranda.”

“Are you blown away?”

“A little.”

“Because you were upset?”

“Yes.”

“This is Michael.”

“I’m sorry,” said Michael.

“That’s all right. Did you have a nice time?”

“Yes, very.”

“Well, that’s fine.”

Michael said, “I’ve got a plane to make.”

“Well, good to see you and it’s fine with me that you had a nice time … and uh that there is a plane for you to make…”

“Thanks.” A perfunctory kiss to Miranda and away with him. When he was gone, Miranda said, “You didn’t fire anything?”

“Uh-uh. Couple blows of your coke. What’s that noise?”

“Michael going out.”

“Sounded like the house falling down.”

“Tom, I had this incredible orgasm.”

“Do I have to hear about your organism too?”

“Just this one. It was like a whole dream of sweet things to eat. I mean, it all came to mind. Spun sugar, meringue, whipped egg whites, and all these clear German cake icings—”

“How about when your chum shot off? Was it a blintz or an omelet?”

“Ask him.” She held Skelton’s head standing beside him. He ran his hand up to her openness. That one hurt too; fragments of a life presumed dead. When would the light come. He would have to watch that pale cocaine edge pale like acetylene flame. And how could you dream of The Garden when what you would have had her have would have been a kind of beer fart: or, at best, the relief of a scarcely visible blackhead yielding to opposed thumbnails. Here it had been everything short of glacéed almonds and it made Skelton mean. When the shining city is at hand, a special slum will be built for me and my meanness. I will be the person, if that’s what I am, in the slum; there will be one of everything; one rat, one tin can. The shining city will beckon in the distance. The shadow of the Bakunin monument will not quite stretch to my door. In the evening, the sound of happy syndicalist badminton finals will be borne to me on a sweet wind that sours as it enters my slum. I will behave poorly.

“Tom, what’s the matter?”

“Jealousy.”

“Well, that’s wrong. And you weren’t going to have any drugs any more.”

“I wasn’t going to have any jealousy any more either. You ought to see some of the things I wasn’t going to have any more. I’d like to cold-shake about a teacupful of reds and fire them right now. I’m just sick with hurt and jealousy and going back on myself. I want some more of that coke. And then to have to hear a description of that Viennese organism. God.”

Neither spoke for a time. Then Miranda said, “I’m twenty-four and I’ve been with a bunch of men—”

“—I know.”

“For whom there was always at least affection.”

“I understand.”

“And I won’t have it made an ugliness. You’ll have to think of another kind of innocence. I’ve been trying to get through too, you know.”

“I know, darling. I’m sorry. I want that of course too. But another thing comes in uh there, you see…”

They took the car and went to Rest Beach on the other side of the key. They could hear a fire engine down in the quarter off Simonton. It was hot and Skelton could smell fish in the garbage truck that went by bristling with palm leaves; a sign between the two men hanging off the back: WE CATER WEDDINGS. The wind was beginning to pull eastward into a weather change and the smell of City Electric was in the avenues.

They parked at Rest Beach and walked across between the sunbathers. There was not much wind and the sea was very plain under the empty sky. A long way off, a remote vessel, maybe a freighter, seemed absolutely still under its smoke which declined only slightly from the vertical before bluing away.

They walked out on the jetty, the sea trembling among the stones like gelatin. At the end, Miranda sat down, her brown thighs disappearing in her shorts. Her green, stony eyes did not seem to be seeing anything; and Skelton was not having a very good time.

“Haven’t you ever walked in on a woman before?” Miranda asked, pushing her hair back over her ears with her thumbs.

“Yes.”

“Once?”

“No, three times.”

“And what were the women like?”

“They were types.”

“They were all three types?”

“Two were types and one was a junkie.”

“And what was I?”

“You were my girl.”

Three striped sergeant-major fish, inches long, rested in the swell at their feet, surging in on each small roller, trusting the wave not to carry them clear to the rocks and riding out in it again, only to repeat in a loop, in and out again. The water was as green as the jar of squash blossoms.

“You look strange,” said Miranda, “are you crashing from that cocaine?” Skelton said nothing. “Well, it’s still Michael.”

“I guess.”

“Michael used to be my lover.”

“Why do I have to be so stupid about this?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know better than to be this way.”

“I know but you just are.”

“I’ll ride it out.”

Though he knew he could still maintain, Skelton felt that voluminous hollow rush inside, that slippage of control systems, the cocaine express. Mild enough on the face of it, he had known it in other days to be the first step on the ride to the O.D. Corral. It was a family tradition to go the distance. This time it had to be in another quadrant because he had recently seen that tremulous threshold where another breath is a matter for decision.

“I was the victim of timing. I’ve been thinking about death all day. Don’t ask me why. My mother told me this ungodly story—” Skelton at last could lose himself in something that would hold the jealousy away, stories of the dead, beginning with the man killed on the Indian mounds by bees; the usual powdered visages of cousins or acquaintances laid out next to an air conditioner or beneath a ceiling fan, more deeply foreign under their makeup than the maddest vices could have made them in life. Or when, in junior high, he had found with a friend, a drowned Cuban nun in the cistern. No more than four and a half feet long she floated face down in the stagnant water, her habit flowing like wings amid clouds of immature frogs and mosquito larvae. When his friend’s father, a pastry cook, came home, he looked into the cistern and said that he had known that she would do it sometime. Quite without passion, they carried the little body to the lawn; then all three at the same time dropped it on the grass, a black and white pile in draining cistern water and stranded tadpoles, a thing.

“That’s dreadful.”

“I know.”

“Why did you tell me that?”

“There uh was some connection…”

“Between all this dead stuff and you walking in on me?”

“Yes!”

“Well, what was it,” Miranda demanded.

“It’s just that when you realize that everyone dies you become a terrible kind of purist. There just doesn’t seem to be time for this other business.”

“But darling that’s all there is time for.”

In the clear water at the jetty’s end, the tide carried a few large jellyfish past. Ribbed as delicately as the squash blossoms, they swelled like a globe at the end of a glassblower’s pipe; then pulsed suddenly in the direction of the tide.

“Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

Thomas Skelton thought that key west was a town he could only take so much of. Without the ocean, he knew he couldn’t take it at all. It was one thing to be blanking out on a forty-hour week; and another to be unemployed and in Duval Street at a wrong hour; or in front of the Red Doors on Caroline Street when they came out with the stretcher and the shrimpers wandered into the night to smoke under the stars and look through the ambulance windows. The character with the knife was never cut off at the bar. He just strolled to the Wurlitzer and tried to remember exactly who he was. He played The Orange Blossom Special to someone down there looking at herself in the Formica who sat and never looked up. In the dreamboat evening of half-time wages the song was finished. The ambulance attendant held a hand mirror to the victim’s mouth; and tried to remember if he mailed in the guarantee on his air conditioner. The shrimper’s eyes filled to The Orange Blossom Special, which was his anthem. He recalled a childhood in Pascagoula when he’d never stabbed a soul, perforated a hymen, or put the boot to a man who was down.