Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“Yes, I should suppose so,” she agreed.

“God, if I had a wife like her I could do anything.”

“Unfortunately, she’s taken,” Molly said, adding ice to her glass and voice. She remembered something that Howard once said about Gerry, that the only reason he’d never made it into the first rank of American poets was that he was a copycat. If someone he admired began writing sestinas or waterskiing or keeping a travel journal of a trip to Scandinavia, Gerry wanted to do it too.

“You know, I need someone like that,” Gerry confided. “The way it is now, my life is clogged up with errands. Sending out manuscripts, scheduling readings, phoning for plane reservations, packing and unpacking, balancing the checkbook, paying the mortgage, getting the computer fixed and the grass cut, going to the supermarket and the drugstore and the cleaners. It weighs you down.”

“Couldn’t your girlfriend do some of those things?” Molly inquired.

“Tiffany?” Gerry grinned. “Tiffany is worse than useless. Yesterday I was working on a new long poem, it was really going well, so I asked her to drive over to Fausto’s for milk and tea. She came back with condensed milk and powdered iced tea mix.” He laughed. “And then she said I should have gone myself if I was so goddamned fussy.”

“I thought she was rather nice,” Molly said. “Very cute, too.”

“Cute.” Gerry laughed again, less happily. “I’ve just about had it with cute.”

In the sunny, cluttered kitchen of Artemis Lodge, with its long scrubbed-pine table, comfortably sagging wicker sofa, bright feminist wall posters, and hotel-size blender, Lee Weiss was unpacking groceries from the Waterfront Market. She wore a brilliant fuchsia mumu appliquèed with large purple flowers, and was humming a country-western song: “Please Help Me, I’m Falling.”

There were five double rooms and a single in Artemis Lodge, four with private bath. From mid-December to mid-April they rented for from $100 to $150 a night, or $500 to $700 a week, continental breakfast included. During these months the guest house was almost always full. Even with taxes, insurance, laundry, cleaning, gardener, repairs, and a part-time desk clerk, Lee would have done well financially with only two-thirds occupancy. The only problem was that she kept reducing or even waiving the rent for friends or acquaintances, and sometimes for women she’d never met whom friends and acquaintances claimed were ill or in crisis and needed to be in a warm, relaxed place like Key West.

As she stripped the cellophane from three bunches of red and orange carnations, Lee heard the slam of the screen door and then rapid footsteps. It wasn’t the tentative approach of a customer, or the guest she expected for lunch in half an hour, but someone familiar with the house, and in a hurry, almost bounding down the hall toward her: Perry Jackson.

“Well, hi there,” she said—surprised, since it wasn’t his regular gardening day.

“Lee, darling, I had to come over, I’ve got the craziest news.” Jacko leaned against the kitchen door frame in faded cutoff jeans and a dark-green T-shirt, assuming a pose that might have been photographed for a fashion page. He was also fashionably thin: thinner than a month ago, before he had what he described as “a dumb nothing cold”—a cold that had caused much anxiety among his friends. “You won’t believe it.”

“Okay, I won’t.” She grinned and slammed the freezer on a quart of coconut ice cream. “Tell me anyhow.”

“Alvin’s left me his house.”

“Shit, really?”

“Really. I just had a call from his lawyer in Chicago.”

“Hey, that’s fantastic!” Lee laughed with pleasure. “You want something to drink? A beer?”

“Beer would be great.”

“You mean the whole place?” She popped open a can, which foamed up excitedly as if in sympathy. “Or just your cottage?”

“Everything. It was in his will, the lawyer read me part of it. ‘To Perry Jackson, the only man who ever really loved me for myself, I leave my property at 909 Hibiscus Street, Key West, Florida, and all the buildings and contents thereon.’”

“Wow.” Lee opened a beer for herself. “You know though, that’s kind of sad. What he said.”

“Yeah. I figure that’s how it is a lot of the time for rich people. They can’t believe anybody really likes them, specially if they’ve got nothing much else going for them.” Jacko ran one hand through his perfect dark curls.

“I guess so,” Lee agreed, thinking that in Alvin’s case this view might have been correct. “Anyhow, it’s great.” She put a carton of milk and two of half and half into the fridge.

“Yeah, but the truth is,” Jacko said after a moment, looking down and rotating his beer can.

“What?”

“The truth is, it makes me feel kind of crappy. I never loved Alvin, not the way he meant. I was impressed by him at first: I knew I was a lightweight, and he was so heavy in the world. So sure of himself, so much in control. If he wanted to go to Bermuda or somewhere, and there wasn’t a convenient flight, he’d charter a plane. I was blown over by how cool he was about things like that. And about being gay. And of course by all the sophisticated people he knew, the places he’d been. But even when we were first together he was hard to get on with sometimes, y’know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know,” she agreed, suppressing the impulse to say more, to use words like “self-centered,” and “crabby.”

“And then, later on, I was really pissed at him. When I quit law school and moved here I thought, wow, I’m set for life.” Jacko looked down, contemplating the little dark hole in the top of his beer can.

“Y’know, there’s advantages in loving an older man,” he continued. “I can’t say I didn’t see them. You skip all those years of dead-end start-up jobs, living in cheap apartments, opening cans of cheap chili. But there’s disadvantages too. His friends are all older; they think of you as a bimbo, and either they ignore you or make passes.”

“Mm,” Lee said.

“And then Alvin had so much money, much more than I realized at first. There was a lot of competition for my job, from younger and younger guys. So one day I was just, what do they call it, deaccessioned? Desized?”

“Downsized,” Lee said.

“What got to me was the way he acted when he came here afterward. If he was alone it was okay, but mostly he brought along some new boyfriend, and then it was like I was just the hired caretaker. You know. ‘We’re going out to dinner at Antonia’s now, could you clean up the bathroom and bedroom, please.’ I wouldn’t say anything, but I’d sulk, and curse them behind their backs.” Jacko sighed and shook his head. “And now all this property. I was thinking, maybe I shouldn’t take it.”

“For God’s sake,” Lee exclaimed. “Are you out of your mind? You made Alvin feel loved, that’s what counts. Anyhow, he wanted you to have the place. You’ve got to go along with that.”

“I guess so.” Jacko slid onto a kitchen stool. “But you know, by his lights, Alvin was decent to me. I always liked plants and gardening, so he hired me to keep the property up, do the landscaping and maintenance and repairs. He introduced me to friends who needed a gardener or a caretaker, and pretty soon I had plenty of customers. And he never asked for the cottage back; I’ve been living here for years rent free.”

“In exchange for the work you do on the place, you mean.”

“Well, yeah. You know Alvin, he liked to get everything cheap.”

“He was a tightwad,” Lee said.

“Yeah. But I owe him a lot. You can’t imagine how ignorant I was when we met. I’d never seen an opera, and I thought espresso was some kind of air freight. I’d been in two plays by Shakespeare in high school, and never knew he was bisexual. I was a dumb Oklahoma hick.”