Alison Lurie - Last Resort

Another thing that made Lee different from Jenny’s friends in Convers was that she not only wasn’t part of a couple but didn’t seem to mind. Lee had been married once, but the marriage hadn’t worked out or lasted very long, though she had a grown daughter in Boston. Then she’d lived with a woman for a while, but that hadn’t worked out either. Right now she didn’t seem to be involved with anyone, or want to be. She’s been unlucky in love, and now she’s given up on it, Jenny had thought when she first learned this, whereas I’ve been lucky and am married to a famous man. But Lee didn’t seem to feel unlucky or sorry for herself the way Jenny’s divorced or widowed or never-married friends in Convers did, or show any sign of envying Jenny’s life. “Finally I’m living the way I want to,” she had said.

It was satisfying in a way to know somebody who didn’t value her more because she was married to Wilkie. Most of the time Jenny could never be absolutely sure of this. In fact, she thought, except for Lee Weiss, the only people in the world who I’m sure like me without reference to Wilkie are my parents and my children—and our cleaning lady in Convers, who really doesn’t like Wilkie at all, because of the run-ins she’s had with him over moving papers on his desk.

It wasn’t that most people schemed or expected to profit from Jenny’s connection to Wilkie. But she’d noticed long ago that if she met someone on her own, quite soon they would start talking about how much they admired his work, and how they would love to meet him. And when Jenny’s new friends met Wilkie, whenever he was in the room they would look at him and not at Jenny, and they would address most of their remarks to him. If the friend was a woman, sometimes she would sit close to Wilkie and kind of coo at him in a very irritating way.

It was restful to be with somebody who would never act like that. Lee had not said once that she’d like to meet Wilkie, and when Jenny had invited her to last night’s dinner party she had declined, giving the excuse that she had to stay at Artemis Lodge in case guests showed up.

“Oh, that’s too bad. But maybe you can come another time,” Jenny had consoled her.

“Sure, maybe,” Lee had replied, and somehow at that moment it became clear that she had absolutely no desire to meet Wilkie Walker. She doesn’t care anything about him, she’s my friend, all mine, Jenny had caught herself thinking childishly. And considering Lee’s opinions about environmentalism, it was maybe just as well that they should never meet.

It was always fun to see Lee. She knew so many amazing stories about Key West: its history, and the crazy characters who had once lived here, or still did. The Last Resort, Lee said people called the place. Not just because it was at the end of the Keys, but because it was where you went when other places hadn’t worked out.

Lee had been a therapist before she bought Artemis Lodge. “Yeah. Certified Ph.D. in counseling,” she had admitted. “But I burned out after a couple of years. I finally realized that I could spend the rest of my life sitting in a box in Brooklyn Heights all day long, forty hours a week, with a different unhappy person coming into the box every hour. And most of them I couldn’t really help because they were stuck in some destructive New York job or life situation, the same way I was. Besides, sooner or later most of them came down with transference. They began to project and thought they were in love with me, or they hated me, or I was their mother.

“I started to feel like a big waterlogged sponge. Not the kind you buy at Fausto’s, but the ones divers bring in here, dripping with weepy saltwater and gritty sand. When I came to Key West for a week’s vacation that first winter I thought, hey, this is what all those poor schmucks need: a little light and sun and air. Then I thought, hell, that’s what I need too.”

Having been a therapist came in useful, Lee said, when neighbors or guests got difficult. “It’s simple,” she had explained. “All you do is, you just repeat the last thing they said, and it makes them think you’re sympathetic and sort of defuses the situation.”

Because Lee had been a therapist and didn’t want to meet Wilkie, Jenny felt she could talk about him without being disloyal. She hadn’t said much yet, just a bit about the way he’d been for the last few months and that she was worried. “Yeah,” Lee had commented. “It sounds like there’s something on his mind.”

It was easy to talk to Lee about anything. She was interested in things Wilkie naturally wasn’t, even before he got so strange: novels and art, cooking and decorating and sewing and crafts. Lee had a big loom set up in her bedroom, and she had catalogs and patterns for all sorts of things you could make in a warm climate with cotton and silk and rayon chenille yarns. She’d taken Jenny to a shop on Duval that carried these yarns, and lent her a pattern for a sweater.

Besides, Lee was so attractive; it was pleasant just to look at her. That shouldn’t make a difference in how you felt about people, but it did. It was lovely to watch someone who moved so gracefully, and had such glowing butterscotch tanned skin and such thick, shiny dark hair, with red sparks in it when she sat in the sun on her wide front porch.

“Hi there.”

Jenny glanced up from the pot she was scouring. In the open doorway to the patio stood Tiffany (Tiff), the current girlfriend of the poet Gerald Grass, whom she and Wilkie had known slightly for years. They often met at official events, and she’d heard him read at a couple of pro-environment rallies where Wilkie had spoken—except it wasn’t reading really, it was more like chanting. The last time, Gerry had accompanied his chanting on Indian drums decorated with beads and feathers. He was sometimes interviewed about poetry and social protest on television and by newspapers and magazines, and shown in photos with folk singers and rock stars.

In general, Wilkie approved of Gerry. He might be a little naïve and theatrical, but his heart was in the right place. Jenny, however, could not quite forget that ten years ago he had left his wife, whom she really liked, replacing her with a series of younger and younger women.

Since last week Gerry and Tiff had been renting the apartment over the garage in the compound, and they had been at last night’s dinner party.

“Oh, hello.” Jenny turned off the faucet. She was not especially pleased to see Tiff, who appeared to her as pretty in an obvious California-blonde way and amiably uninteresting. At the party she had hardly spoken, but she had drunk a lot of very good Chardonnay.

“Hey, that was a really great lemon cheesecake you served last night,” Tiff said. “Where’d it come from?”

“Well, here, I guess,” Jenny admitted. “I made it.”

“Really? God, I could never do anything like that.” She gave an almost teenage giggle. “I figured it must be from one of those fancy food catalogs. I mean it was that good.”

“Thank you,” Jenny said, smiling to take the edge off her tone of voice, which reflected the belief that her cheesecake was probably better and certainly fresher than any catalog cheesecake.

“Gerry would love it if I could cook like that. But I can’t do anything except kiddie food. You know, like hamburgers and spaghetti,” Tiff added, taking Jenny’s smile as an invitation to enter and perch on one of Alvin’s chrome and yellow plastic kitchen stools. “And even then sometimes I burn stuff. But what I say is, if he wants a chef, he should hire one, right?”

“I guess so,” Jenny agreed neutrally.

“You can’t have everything, I tell him. He says sometimes he took up with me for my looks, but I think it was really to get his taxes done for free.” She giggled.