Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“You do Gerry’s taxes?” Jenny asked, surprised.

“Sure. I can do anybody’s taxes. I’m a CPA.”

“Really.” Jenny looked at Tiff again: her tight red scoopneck T-shirt, tight white shorts, and gold frizz of hair.

“Except now I’m on vacation, so don’t ask me anything.”

“I won’t,” Jenny said, drawing back.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that like it sounded. It’s just that usually everybody I know is after me for free advice this time of year. And it gets worse in March and April. I mean, it would be all right if I was still working, then I could just tell them to call me at the office.”

“Mm-hm,” Jenny murmured vaguely. She turned on the water again; then, realizing that this seemed unfriendly, turned it off. In the resulting awkward silence she remembered Lee’s technique. “You would tell them to call you at the office,” she therefore repeated experimentally.

“Yeah. Except after I moved in with him last year Gerry made me quit my job. He said he couldn’t stand to share me with a computer. He has to have my full attention, he says.” This last sentence came out heavily charged with negative feeling.

“He has to have your full attention,” Jenny murmured, glancing again at Tiff and trying to see her as an appropriate companion for an established American poet in his fifties. It occurred to her that if there was anyone less suited to this role than a domestically incompetent sexpot, it was a domestically incompetent CPA.

“Yeah. I thought that was so great once, when I met him at this party in L.A. The kind of film people that were there, the guys I mean, all they ever want to do is talk about themselves. And if they look at you they never focus above your tits, you get to expect that.”

“You expect that, in Los Angeles,” Jenny prompted sympathetically, remembering early experiences of her own. Lee was right, she thought; her technique works.

“Yeah. But Gerry was different. He was just as handsome as any of the actors there, but he looked right into my eyes; I thought that was so great. Only now I feel kind of surrounded.”

“You feel—” Jenny paused and swallowed the rest of the repeat as it occurred to her that after all she was not Tiffany’s therapist.

“But that’s how men are, y’know. The more important they think they are, the more of your time they demand. I mean, look at you, right? Like Mrs. Hopkins said, your husband is a full-time job for you.”

“Mf.” This time, Jenny’s murmur was not an assent. She recognized Tiff’s tone; it was that of a standard-issue feminist. She would have recognized it sooner if Tiff had been dressed or spoken differently.

Now and then over the years, especially after the children were in school full time, many well-meaning and ill-meaning people had tried to suggest that Jenny was sacrificing a possible career to the demands of a chauvinist pig male. They lectured her, they lent her books, they invited her to join groups of women who got together to complain about their husbands. Jenny had been to one of these groups, where she had discovered that in some cases there was much to complain of, and also that when she herself didn’t complain, the other women thought she was silently boasting.

Theoretically, as a modern, enlightened person, Jenny supported the women’s movement, and occasionally had been persuaded to send a check to NOW. But in fact feminism had done nothing for her except make her chosen life seem peculiar and estrange her from her friends. She could agree with them that there was no reason why most men shouldn’t help with household tasks and child care. But Wilkie Walker was not most men: he was unique, irreplaceable. The work they did together might change, had changed, the world. Jenny didn’t want to be forced to abandon this work in favor of some theoretical “career.”

This conviction, unfortunately, had come between Jenny and many women who might have remained or become her close friends. But when they cooled toward her, or failed to warm, Jenny forgave them. They didn’t understand; they were married to ordinary replaceable men, men whose jobs could be done by someone else if necessary.

“Anyways, it was a great dinner.” Tiff resumed, perhaps registering Jenny’s silence, and backtracking. “And you were so sweet to that old guy who spilled his wine on the sofa.”

“Oh, that was nothing. Wine doesn’t stain if you put enough salt on it right away.”

“Yeah, really? I never knew that. But you were awfully nice about it anyhow. I wish I could be like that, but I get so goddamned sick of the wrinklies sometimes. Oh hell, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean your husband. But all these boring old writers Gerry knows that are always hanging around, and either they act like I’m not there, or they try to come on to me in this kind of slow, creepy way. Sometimes I feel like I’m going out of my mind. I mean, I guess you must run into the same thing, right?”

“Well, sometimes,” Jenny admitted reluctantly. In fact, only last night, when she was serving up the cheesecake, an elderly art critic named Garrett Jones had come into the kitchen, praised her cooking, put his arm round her in a too-friendly way, and given her a sloppy kiss. She hadn’t protested, because Garrett had obviously had a lot to drink and was only the Fosters’ temporary house guest; but she hoped she would never meet him again.

“And the women are worse. They act friendly, but mostly they’re just interested in Gerry. Half of them, the old ones, resent me because I’m not Cynthia—you know, his ex-wife. And the others resent me because I keep them from cuddling up to him. Well, I bet it’s the same with you.”

“No, not exactly,” Jenny said, irritated by this caricature of her own recent thoughts. She lowered another stack of dirty pots and pans into the sink.

“And then when I tell Gerry how it is, he says I’m oversensitive, or I’m being paranoid. Sometimes I think he’s getting to be like all the other old farts.”

“Really,” Jenny said, this time allowing a definite chill to enter her voice. She turned on the water again.

“I don’t hafta put up with that, I told him. I don’t hafta hang around if he isn’t ever really there for me, right?”

“I suppose not,” Jenny said. She opened the faucet further, causing some of the warm dirty water in the sink to splash onto her white sundress.

“Well, anyhow,” Tiff said in a weak voice over the noise of water drumming on aluminum. “I guess I better be getting back. I expect I’ll see you around.”

“Yes,” Jenny admitted without enthusiasm. “I expect you will.”

When he reached the corner of Reynolds Street, Wilkie Walker turned for a last long look at the house. The structure was nothing to him—a vacation rental, anonymously Floridian, surrounded by a white stucco wall cluttered with thorny purple bougainvillea. But behind that wall were the two things he cared most about in the world: his book and his wife.

He had made the right decision about the manuscript, Wilkie told himself as he stood on the weed-cracked sidewalk under a coconut palm. He had wavered for a while last week after reading a deeply infuriating letter requesting—in fact, ordering—him to vacate his emeritus-professor office at Convers for six months so that the building could be enlarged to accommodate a computing center. For several days he had played with the idea of revenging himself by accusing the author of this letter—not by name, but so that everyone at the university would recognize him—of the death of the Copper Beech. Slowly and fatally, its root system would be killed by the construction of some such ugly nonsense.

But in the end Wilkie had dismissed this idea. He must think of the survivors: his family, his friends, his critics, and his readers. Some, no doubt, would make the connection between himself and the Copper Beech. If he portrayed it as destroyed by human stupidity, they might think that Wilkie Walker believed that he too had been driven to his death by hostile and ignorant persons. This was not only untrue, it would make him seem weak, perhaps even somewhat paranoid.