Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“Okay, you keep track of the weather forecast and let me know.” Lee hung up and cleared her throat. “Another customer who wants me to guarantee sunshine,” she said, and laughed. “See, the problem is most people can’t admit that they want to do nothing on vacation. That’s because according to the moral system most Americans buy into, it’s sin: the sin of laziness and sloth. But at a resort the rules are changed. As long as it’s hot and sunny, especially if you’re near water, you can take off most of your clothes and lie around doing nothing for hours at a time, and it doesn’t count. Sloth is redefined as ‘sunbathing,’ even if you put a towel over your face and slather yourself with total sunblock. So naturally if it’s cloudy, they complain.”

“I guess that’s true.” Jenny laughed.

“Sure it is. Take a look next time you go to the beach, or pass a motel pool. Most people aren’t in the water, they’re flat out around it. They could save the airfare and room fees if they would stay home, turn off the phone and TV, and lie down in the bedroom, or out in the yard if it was warm enough. And in the evening they could go to expensive restaurants, just like they do here.”

“If you did that where I come from people would think you were sick,” Jenny said. “I mean, you know, mentally.”

“Oh, absolutely. And I’m all for it. If everyone realized how dumb and unnecessary sunbathing was, not to mention what it does to your skin, I’d probably go broke.” She laughed. “Hey, let’s have some lunch. There’s some pretty good fish stew left from last night, and I can make a salad.”

“Oh, I can’t, not today,” Jenny said. “I have to get back. Maybe next time.”

“Sure,” Lee said. “Well, see you Monday.”

I could have stayed for lunch, Jenny thought as she descended the steps of the guest house. The truth was that she had been afraid to stay for lunch; afraid that she would start complaining again about Wilkie, and boring Lee, who was already bored by him even though they hadn’t met. And afraid of showing how important Lee was to her, because what if she didn’t feel the same way? After all, Lee had lots of friends in Key West; she couldn’t possibly love and need Jenny the way Jenny loved and needed her.

It had been raining off and on for days, and the effect on the landscape was depressing. Key West needs sunshine to look its best, Lee had said, and she was right: in bad weather the island seemed drab and shabby and makeshift. Now the quaint little white-painted gingerbread houses were exposed as peeling and gray; most of the bright flowers had been beaten down into the earth, and the luxuriant tropical trees hung over the badly paved streets like clumps of heavy wet spinach.

Because Key West is built on coral rock, Lee had explained, rain drains off very slowly. This morning when Jenny walked to work there was water collected dirty-gray around clogged gutters everywhere, splashing pedestrians like her whenever a car passed. In some places, for instance at the corner of United and Simonton, the streets were two to three feet deep in muddy runoff, and filled with soggy floating debris and with stalled rental cars whose engines had flooded.

Instead of going home Jenny headed for the Key West library, a large pink stucco building surrounded by dripping exotic foliage. Usually it was more or less empty, but today the rooms were crowded with people who would otherwise be strolling past the shops on Duval Street or at the beach. There was also an identifiable population of homeless persons: men and a few women who, in order to avoid the police, normally slept during the warmth of the day on a bench or under a bush in some park, and stayed awake at night when it was cool. Half a dozen of these people, driven indoors by the rain, were slumped on library chairs, pretending to read newspapers or magazines, or blatantly dozing.

Jenny pulled off the stiff, sopping-wet London Fog raincoat that she should never have brought to Key West. It was not only too formal, it didn’t keep out the tropical rain, which seemed to come from all directions at once, including the horizontal. She shook out her damp hair, then, hesitantly, approached the circulation desk.

Back in Convers, the staff of the college library always fell all over each other to help Jenny—once even literally, when Mrs. Ormondroyd and one of her assistants collided coming out of the stacks behind the charge desk, both carrying books for Wilkie. Here it was very different. The collection was much smaller, and most of what Wilkie wanted had to be ordered on interlibrary loan. The staff was polite, but it had soon become clear that obtaining items for a temporary resident on a permanent resident’s card wasn’t their top priority. Jenny was not too surprised now to hear that nothing she’d requested had arrived.

Wilkie wouldn’t like that, she knew. In the past he had always been tolerant when a book or a fact was temporarily unavailable. But lately he had developed a nervous impatience, a demand that what he wanted should appear immediately. “You tell them Professor Walker has to have it now, this week,” he had said this morning about some book on tides, ocean currents, and navigation in the Keys—a topic unrelated in any way Jenny could think of to The Copper Beech.

It wasn’t fair, Jenny thought. She was doing everything she could, everything Wilkie asked her to do, just as always. But now she was doing it without joy, and without the rewards. In the past Wilkie had always been lavish with praise and compliments for everything from her creamy scrambled eggs to her discovery of a lost footnote. “Darling, you are a wonder,” he used to say, sometimes more than once a day. But now he was withdrawn and unappreciative. And ungrateful: on Wednesday when she came home with a magazine he wanted he had snatched it without even thanking her.

In Key West, even when she had specifically asked that a book be held for Wilkie, it was sometimes reshelved. Hoping that this had happened now, Jenny made her way through the stacks to the shadowy corner where the Florida Collection was kept. But the gap on the top shelf was still there, which meant that when she got home Wilkie would be angry. He would have the face she had seen more and more often lately: the one she had seen this morning over breakfast, in the heavy wet light from the patio: the face of a detached, disapproving man, who didn’t even answer when she asked him to please pass the key lime marmalade. “I think he’s tired of me,” she had told Lee on Wednesday, and for the first time Lee had not been reassuring. “I suppose it’s possible,” she’d said. “Men are like that.”

The fluorescent tube above the stacks, which was on a timer, went out, leaving Jenny in semigloom. She rested her forehead against a row of books and began to weep silently, sheltered by the curtains of pale, damp, silky hair that fell forward on either side of her face.

“Hey, Jenny? Is that you?” The fluorescent light buzzed on, and Jenny wearily raised her head. She saw a man perhaps ten years her senior in a waterproof green poncho. He was tall and loosely put together, with curly gray-blond hair, warm brown eyes, and large reddish ears. Focusing, she recognized him as Gerry Grass.

“Oh, hello,” she managed weakly, pushing her hair back.

“Hey—Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She swallowed a throatful of tears and then a dim smile, realizing that her face must be wet, her eyes red. “Well, actually I’ve got rather a bad headache,” she improvised. “Sinus. This weather, I guess.”

“Hey, that’s rough. I know; I used to have what I told myself was sinus every winter when I lived in Ottawa. But I think now it was the boredom as much as the climate.”