Alison Lurie - Last Resort

“You always had the nerve,” Jacko said. “All you needed was a little push. Come on, Marlene. Time for some lovely kibbles.”

Her back stiff under the white pique sundress, her hands hot and wet on the wheel, Jenny Walker drove toward Artemis Lodge. It was Tuesday afternoon, and she wasn’t supposed to be there until Wednesday morning, but she couldn’t wait any longer: she had to talk to Lee. Anyhow, she had to talk to someone, and Lee—so warm, so lovely, so unjudging—was the only possible person.

Since Sunday afternoon, when she saw her husband kissing Barbie Mumpson, Jenny had been in a state of confused misery, gradually deepening to despair. She’d planned to tell Lee about it the next day, but that had been impossible. When she got there Monday morning the place was crowded with people mourning and exclaiming over the death of a local real estate agent called Tommy Lewis, which was featured on the front page of the Key West Citizen. Even Jenny had been drawn into the conversation when she realized that he was the man in the wheelchair whom Wilkie had seen drown at Higgs Beach the day before.

According to Lee’s friends, it hadn’t been an accident at all. Tommy, who was terminally ill with AIDS and in constant pain, had deliberately released the brake on his wheelchair and steered it off the pier into ten feet of water. He was strapped in, so he couldn’t rise to the surface, and by the time the police and the ambulance arrived he was dead. Tommy’s friend Dennis had known what was coming, and just before it happened he went back to the car, pretending to be getting Tommy a sweater, so that nobody would suspect him of murder afterward.

If Wilkie were still Jenny’s trusted and beloved husband, she would have tried to remember all the details in order to relate them when she got home. But he hadn’t really spoken to her in weeks; and since she’d seen him kissing Barbie Mumpson, she was afraid to have him speak to her; afraid of what he might say.

For over twenty-five years, whenever she had a serious problem, Jenny had taken it to Wilkie. He would listen patiently, console her, advise her. After a while, what had seemed “really heavy,” as their son Billy put it, would begin to weigh less. Under Wilkie’s steady gaze the problem would lose substance, like a block of ice gradually melting into water and mist. What helped tremendously was that Wilkie looked at everything in a long-term perspective. Compared to global warming or the destruction of animal species, even awful things like the fatal illness of Jenny’s favorite aunt, or Billy’s flunking chemistry at Cornell, began to diminish and dissolve. Such events, Wilkie’s response suggested, were a natural part of life. They would pass; or they would not pass, but would be survived.

Now, though, Jenny couldn’t go to Wilkie with her pain and her problem; he was the problem. What she’d seen on Sunday had proved to her something she’d dreaded for months, but hadn’t wanted to know: that her marriage was probably over.

And now an unpleasant, long-forgotten incident from the early years of her marriage surfaced in Jenny’s mind, like an ugly catfish rising to the surface of a clear forest pool. It had occurred in Manhattan, when she was making conversation at a literary party with a nervous, goggle-eyed woman who claimed to be a close friend of Wilkie’s first wife. “I’m sorry for you,” this woman had whispered, or rather hissed. “You look like a nice girl. But you’d better watch out. He won’t stay with you either.”

After all these years of happiness the prediction, or curse, of the catfish woman was about to come true, Jenny thought. It was clear that Wilkie didn’t love her any longer—maybe didn’t even like her. She wasn’t sure yet that he loved Barbie Mumpson instead, because he had started being strange and cold and distant long before he’d met Barbie. Besides, how could someone as brilliant and serious as Wilkie love a ninny like Barbie?

But a lot of men did love women like that, Jenny thought. Sometimes even brilliant, famous men. She knew several who had left their wives for girls half their age, often silly blondes like Barbie—who was, Jenny recalled now, thirty-six, about half Wilkie’s age.

Of course not all men were that way. Jenny’s father, as far as she knew, had never run after stupid blondes. And Gerry Grass had said outright yesterday that girls like Barbie bored him. He knew the type: “art groupies,” he called them. In the sixties and seventies, he said, when he started appearing at political demonstrations and writers’ festivals, there were a lot of girls like that around. Most of them were totally uninteresting; they couldn’t tell one poem or one poet from another, and they had no real depth. They weren’t “grounded.”

Jenny had been glad to hear this, even if it possibly wasn’t relevant to her situation. She had felt grateful and warm toward Gerry, but she didn’t even want to see him now, because shortly after that he had become part of her problem.

At first, talking to Gerry in his disorderly apartment over the garage—or rather, listening to him, which was what men always wanted and needed—had been a relief and a diversion. She hadn’t of course told him what she’d just seen. Instead she had listened while Gerry read his poem about the heron, in which he imagined himself becoming the bird and soaring over the “blood-pulsing” ocean. She continued to listen when he went on to deplore the current condition of poetry and its audience. Even ten years ago, he said, he had real hopes for the literacy of our civilization. But now, though he tried to keep up his courage, telling himself that there must be readers out there somewhere, often his energy flagged.

“I keep fighting, keep writing. I hang in there,” he had said. “But it’s damned hard sometimes.”

“Mm,” Jenny replied, with a sympathetic, automatic smile.

“We’re in a bad piece of history.” Gerry took another gulp of vodka and tonic.

“Mm.”

What made it harder, he continued, was not having support at home—having what, when you got right down to it, was an enemy in your own house. Yeah, he meant Tiffany.

“Oh, surely, she ... Jenny began, but then her voice trailed off. Why should she defend Tiff, whom she didn’t like or approve of—who was really just another Barbie Mumpson, with more self-confidence and a degree in accounting. After all, Gerry too was one of those famous men who had left a very nice wife for what in his case had turned out to be a series of younger women.

“The goddamned truth is,” Gerry went on, “women these days, most of them, aren’t on your side.”

“Mm,” Jenny said, thinking of Cynthia, Gerry’s ex-wife, who had certainly been on his side and also very sweet, though not much of a cook and a bit spacey—Wilkie once said she was the kind of person who should stay off all drugs, even marijuana. So why did you leave her? she thought.

“They’re all suspicious of men; they have a chip on their shoulders—Sometimes I think their shoulders are covered with chips,” Gerry said, producing in Jenny’s mind an image of Tiff looking suspicious and sprinkled with wood chips and sawdust. “When you ask for a little help, a little warmth or sympathy, they think you’re trying to exploit them or denigrate them. You want to know what Tiff said before she cut out?”

No, not particularly, Jenny thought, but Gerry did not wait for an answer.

“She told me, ‘If you need your proofs read, you can hire a professional proofreader. I want to relax when I’m on vacation.’”

“Really,” Jenny said, without surprise.

“I have to tell you, I envy Wilkie,” Gerry continued. “There aren’t many women around like you these days, so understanding, so beautifully supportive—and so beautiful too,” he added, giving her an appreciative, romantic look. “I just hope he knows how lucky he is. I hope he’s grateful.”