Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“Really?” Lee said a little skeptically, setting two tomatoes on the window ledge to ripen.

“Really.” Jacko grinned. “Shit, you know, I can’t take it in yet. I figured what I’d probably get from Alvin’s lawyer was a letter telling me to vacate the cottage by the end of the month.” He laughed.

It was what Lee had expected too, knowing Alvin, but she did not say so. Instead she unpacked three dozen assorted croissants and brioche for her guests’ breakfasts and began wrapping them in plastic to keep fresh. “So what will you do with the property?” she asked. “You think you’ll sell the place, or part of it?”

Jacko shook his head. “No, what for? Anyhow, it could take up to a year to settle the estate, that’s what the lawyer said. After that—I don’t know. Just play it as it lays, I guess.” He drank again, set the can down. “The first thing I’m going to do is get rid of that hideous night-blooming cactus in the front yard.”

“Yeah?” An awkward, thorny, barren-looking gray-green vegetable monster, nearly eight feet tall, appeared in Lee’s mind. “You didn’t plant that yourself?”

“No way. I don’t see the point of something that’s ugly three hundred and sixty-four days a year. It came with the house. Alvin wouldn’t let me take it out, he had some kind of weird attachment to it.” He laughed. “And then I’m going to invite my mom down to visit, so I won’t have to go to Tulsa this spring.”

“Good idea,” Lee said. Jacko visited his mother twice a year, attempting (not always with success) to get into and out of town without seeing his other relatives, most of whom violently disapproved of him and his way of life. “I’d like to meet her.”

“Sure, we’ll fix it up. I just have to clear out one of the dressing rooms in the pool house and put in a bed.”

“Can’t she stay in the apartment over Alvin’s garage?”

“Not now. It’s rented to this famous poet from California. Gerald Grass, his name is.”

“Never heard of him,” said Lee, who, though she read sporadically but with enthusiasm in women’s literature, made no attempt to hear of any male poet.

“So you’re a property owner,” she added presently, putting a bag of jumbo shrimps and ice into the refrigerator.

“Will be, anyhow.” Jacko’s smile brightened, dimmed. “The only thing is ...

“Mm?”

“I wish I hadn’t been tested, that’s all. I’d be on cloud nine now.”

“Mm,” Lee repeated noncommittally. In her view, ignorance was never bliss. She visualized Jacko’s cloud, not as they are usually portrayed in art, but as she had seen them in the White Mountains: a thick pale-gray mist, blocking visibility. If it were me, I’d have taken the test soon as I could, she thought.

“Some of my pals think I should have had it done years ago,” Jacko said, demonstrating, as he sometimes did, an apparent ability to read minds. He looked away at the dry pods of the women’s tongue tree shaking in the breeze outside the window.

“Well, yeah. I can see that.”

“I can’t. I had a professor at the U of O who was always going on about how knowledge is power. But the way I figure it, with good news you ruin the surprise. And if it’s bad, why find out before you have to?”

“I’d like to know if there was bad news,” Lee said. “Nobody wants to live in a fog.”

Jacko shrugged, smiled slightly. It was not his habit to contradict anyone. “Could be,” he said vaguely. “Anyhow, it could be worse. I could be twenty.”

“I guess that’s so,” Lee said, frowning, thinking of kids she knew around town who were twenty, or not much more, and already ill or, in one case, dead.

“The way it is now, by the time I go, I’d be finished anyhow. Once you hit forty, forty-five, it’s over, even for me.”

“Over, that’s crazy,” Lee protested. “Hell, I’m fifty-two; my life isn’t over, not by a long shot.”

“Yeah, but I want to be remembered as young and beautiful.” Jacko grinned casually, as if he were kidding. “I don’t want to watch myself turn into an old queen, going to bars and cruising the young guys. People saying, You won’t believe it, but he used to be really hot. I don’t want to turn into a sick, ugly old man like Alvin. And mean. I’d be mean.”

“Aw, come on, Jacko,” Lee said, laughing. “You could never be mean; it’s not in you.”

“Listen,” he told her. “If I was old and sick and ugly, I’d be mean, you’d better believe it.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not going to hang around till I’m like poor Tommy Lewis, shoved along the street in a wheelchair, hooked up to a breathing machine. Soon as I know it’s over for me, I’m out of here.” He smiled easily. “So how’s business?”

“Good. Full up. I lost two more flamingo beach towels yesterday, that’s all. It was those women from Southampton in the big balcony room.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s always that way. It’s the rich guests that lift things. They figure, cute towels, it won’t matter to her, what’s a few dollars?”

“You could send them a bill.”

“Yeah, I might do that. Sometimes people pay up, if they think they might want to come again. Or they could decide to stay somewhere else next time. Maybe I’ll just write it off as a tax loss.” She smiled.

“You’re looking good today, you know,” Jacko said.

“So are you,” Lee replied, though with less emphasis; Jacko always looked good. “Well, the thing is,” she added, trying and failing to suppress a wide, embarrassed smile, “I’ve got some news too. I think I’m in love.”

Jacko raised his eyebrows. “Hey, really? Anyone I know?”

“No.”

“One of your breakfast and bed-me types.” Jacko grinned. It was not unknown for Lee’s guests to propose an erotic fling, often with the same slightly embarrassed sensual hopefulness with which they asked for extra pillows, or an egg with breakfast. Now and then she obliged them.

“No.”

Jacko registered Lee’s expression and the shift in her grip on a bottle of tonic, as if it were about to become a weapon. “Sorry,” he said. “So do you want to tell me about it?”

“Yeah, sure. I—” She sat down at the kitchen table, took a breath, paused.

“Okay; how did you meet, for instance?”

“Well, hell, it was kind of ridiculous. And kind of romantic. Day before yesterday, I rode my bike down to the city beach for a swim, but the jellyfish sign was up, so I just walked out along the pier. Nobody was in the water except this one woman, and then she started to scream. So I went in and helped her out onto the beach, and shook some tenderizer on her leg, where she’d got stung. She’s got beautiful legs, so long and white and smooth, and this goddamn amazing long silky hair, not blonde but the palest pale brown. She was terrified, shivering all over. She didn’t know about jellyfish; she thought she’d been attacked by a shark or something.”

“So you rescued her, and she fell into your arms.”

Lee gave Jacko a fast, furious look. “Of course not. She thanked me, and I rode back home. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again in this world, but yesterday morning she turned up here to thank me, with a beautiful white moth orchid. You can see it right out that window.” She pointed.

“Oh, yeah. Lovely,” Jacko agreed. “It’s a sign, don’t you think, the flowers people give you? This car dealer I once dated, he sent me one of those orchids that look like a bunch of big brown spiders, very rare and expensive, according to him. I should have figured out then I was the fly, but—”

“You know, it kind of reminds me of her, that long spray of creamy white flowers,” Lee interrupted, gazing out the window.