Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“So then what happened?” Jacko sighed.

“Nothing. Well, everything, maybe. I don’t know. She’s coming to lunch today. We haven’t even kissed yet, but there’s time. She’s down here for two months, renting a house near Higgs Beach. I don’t know if she’s ever had a serious relationship with a woman, but I’m hoping she’s open to it.” Lee, still contemplating the spray of orchids, fell into a daze.

“Mm,” Jacko prompted.

“She’s a lot like me in some ways; she admires the same films and books, she knits and weaves—she got really excited when she saw my loom. I think Key West is going to be great for her; she’s spent every winter freezing up in New England somewhere. The only problem is, she’s married. But it sounds like that relationship is more or less dead. He’s much older than she is, a retired professor.”

“Ah?”

“Another thing that’s kind of romantic, I don’t even know her last name yet. Just Jenny.”

For the first time, Jacko did not smile sympathetically; instead he frowned. “You said her husband’s a retired professor, a lot older?”

“Oh yeah. Like twenty or thirty years, maybe. She can’t be much over forty.”

“And they’re down here for the first time, in a house on Hibiscus Street?”

“Yes—How do you know that? Have you met them somewhere?”

Jacko looked at the floor, out the window, toward the front hall, and finally at Lee. “I guess I better tell you,” he said.

“Tell me what?”

“I know your girlfriend’s last name.” Jacko looked away again, cleared his throat. “It’s Walker. Jenny Walker.”

“Walker?” Lee frowned.

“They’re living in Alvin’s house.”

“How do you mean? You mean, she’s—Oh, shit.”

“You said you always wanted to know bad news,” Jacko bleated, moving back as if anticipating violence.

“That’s okay.” Lee set her jaw. “Hell, I should thank you. You’ve probably saved me a lot of grief.”

“I hope so. Hey, I’m really sorry.”

“No sweat,” Lee said as casually as she could manage. “There’s other fish in the sea.”

“That’s right,” said Jacko, for whom the oceans had always teemed. He smiled, relieved.

With some difficulty, Lee suppressed her true reaction to Jacko’s news for the remainder of his visit. But once she was alone, her face darkened. Jenny Walker, she said to herself. The first woman I’ve seen in four years that I could really love. So beautiful, so gentle, and she’s read all of Willa Cather. Except she’s married to Wilkie Walker, so probably she thinks like him about everything. Probably she votes Republican and thinks all homosexuals are sick.

I might as well phone now and tell her not to come to lunch, Lee told herself. A whole pound of jumbo shrimp that I went all the way to Stock Island for, wasted. Goddamn it to bloody hell. She turned to the cupboard, took a chipped breakfast plate out of the stack, and flung it at the cellar door, where it smashed with an explosive crunch.

It’s like some awful kind of retribution, Lee thought. I said that if I met Wilkie Walker’s wife I was going to spit on her. And by God, I did spit on her too, when we were at the beach. I was sprinkling the tenderizer on her leg, and I wanted it to work faster, so I spat on my fingers and rubbed it in. A vivid image of Jenny’s upper leg and half-exposed haunch: white, smooth, cold from the sea and flushed with streaks of red, appeared in her mind. Yes, she thought.

No. You can’t, don’t love her, Lee told herself, opening a cupboard door to get the broom and dustpan. It’s just cognitive dissonance. The theory that you naturally overvalue someone you’ve helped, because the more wonderful they are, the more wonderful and important it was to help them. Nobody wants to think they’ve rescued some uptight homophobic Republican from panic and jellyfish.

But hard as she tried, Lee could not superimpose upon Jenny the role of uptight homophobic Republican. Okay, she was that self-satisfied old bastard Wilkie Walker’s wife. She was also beautiful, intelligent, and desirable. That, years ago, she had married Wilkie Walker did not prove the contrary; other intelligent women had made similar mistakes.

As she gathered the fragments of crockery into the dustpan, memories gathered in Lee’s mind. She recalled how under the influence of her freshman English teacher and Wilkie Walker’s stupid book, she herself had married before graduating from college, in order to get over her “neurotic attraction” to women. To make everything worse, she had chosen a conservative Presbyterian from rural Ohio who shared Walker’s view of homosexuality as an unfortunate disease, as if she wanted to reinforce her guilt and her determination to become “normal.”

With a sigh, Lee recalled some of the things her husband had said about what he called “deviants,” even before their marriage, and his discomfort when two obviously gay men were shown to the table next to theirs in a restaurant on their honeymoon. She remembered his political views, and the expression on his face as he politely suggested that her Brooklyn relatives would not enjoy a vacation in the country—assuming, that is, that as urban Jews they would have no appreciation of rural WASP America.

She recalled how awkward his family had made her feel when she visited Ohio: the embarrassed twitch of their features when she did not know the name of some common flower or tree. No doubt if she were to become better acquainted with Jenny she would soon see these expressions again, on Jenny’s face.

But on the other hand, possibly she wouldn’t see them. Possibly Jenny wasn’t in complete agreement with Wilkie Walker. After all, she hadn’t said anything positive about him: only that she couldn’t have supper with Lee because she had to make dinner for her husband, and that she could come to lunch anytime because he worked in his study all day and usually had a sandwich at his desk. Also, that day at the beach, Jenny had said that her husband would think her a “total idiot” for having misread the sign about men-of-war.

Perhaps Jenny wasn’t totally an idiot about her husband, at least. Perhaps, even, she was in the state of growing discomfort and disillusion Lee remembered so well from her own marriage. Maybe what she needed was help in resisting the clinging, stinging jellyfish personality of Wilkie Walker. Maybe Lee could rescue her again, from him.

Opening the fridge, Lee removed the jumbo shrimp and put them in a saucepan with half a glass of white wine and a handful of fresh herbs. She’d have to go very slowly. Jenny might agree with everything Wilkie Walker thought and said. She might be completely happy with him. But if she wasn’t ...

Years ago, broke and battered and bruised by marriage—at the end, literally as well, though she had to admit she’d got in a couple of good licks herself at the time of the final breakup—Lee had despaired of vengeance on the homophobic WASP world. Back then, a twenty-six-year-old lesbian graduate student and single mother from Brooklyn had no power in that world. But now—Well, now we would see.

She turned off the stove and removed the lid from the pan, exposing the shrimp, now no longer gray and hard-shelled and icy-cold, but a delicious pale, steaming pink.

5

ON A WARM DAY in February, in Alvin’s postmodern chrome-yellow and chrome kitchen, Jenny Walker confronted the remains of last night’s dinner party, her first in Key West. Every horizontal surface was covered with the plates and cups and glasses and flatware and cooking pots for eight people, all coated in the dried remains of homemade cheese dip, seafood bisque, lemon chicken, tropical fruit salad, cheesecake, three kinds of wine, and mixed drinks.