Alison Lurie - Last Resort

Possibly they could return to Key West every winter from now on, Wilkie decided. Jenny would like that too. With enough advance notice, she could probably find a house she’d prefer to this one. Or they might buy a place, as many of their acquaintances had. It was a good investment, everyone said so. They might even become Florida residents the way Howard and Molly Hopkins, and the Fosters, had done, staying at least six months and a day every year in a state with no income tax. Why not, after all? His editor was almost exhaustingly enthusiastic about The Copper Beech, and the balance of his advance would cover a substantial down payment on a substantial vacation house. If the first serial rights deal his agent was now negotiating went through, they probably wouldn’t even need a mortgage.

The ending of the book was better now, Wilkie thought. Instead of actually describing the melodramatic death of the Copper Beech in a great storm, he had cast the last chapter in the future conditional, and posited several possible futures. As a result, he had been able to include all the good passages of writing he would have otherwise regretfully had to discard.

Beeches are long-lived, he had written: some existing specimens are known to be well over three hundred years old. Yet one day the Copper Beech, like all trees and all men, will die. It might perish prematurely: struck by disease, demolished by human stupidity, or toppled in a great storm. But if we cared for it, and were vigilant, the Copper Beech might adorn and enrich the world and us for many more years—and so might all the other endangered flora and fauna on the earth. It was probably too optimistic an ending; but if you weren’t optimistic, in his experience, there was no chance of getting people to do anything at all.

Though only a few weeks had passed, it was hard now for Wilkie fully to recall the depressed, desperate, almost demented state he had been in before his gallstone attack—a state in which it had seemed clear that the only way out was one that would have destroyed not only his own life, but Jenny’s and possibly those of his children.

Three times Wilkie had done his best to accomplish this destruction, and each time Fate had thwarted him. He pictured her still as he had in his deranged state of mind: as a dumpy, elderly version of Justice. But now, instead of sneering spitefully at his failure to do away with himself, Fate was smiling, even perhaps rather smugly.

Later that same hot day L.D. Zimmern, the New York professor and literary critic, settled into a creaking wicker chair on the front porch of Artemis Lodge and extended his long thin legs. As usual, he was wearing an old denim work shirt and a skeptical, penetrating expression.

“Well, Cousin Lelia,” he said. “It’s fun to see you again. What has it been, five years?”

“I guess so,” Lee agreed.

“You look like a real native Key Wester. One of those, what is it they call them? Some kind of clam.”

Lee did not reply. Years ago, as a teenager, she had resolved that Lennie Zimmern would never again get a rise out of her. She pulled down her crimson embroidered mumu, wishing as she did so that she had followed her earlier impulse to change into jeans and a T-shirt before he arrived.

“A Conch, that’s it. Yeah.” He reached for the bottle of imported beer he had brought with him. “Quite a change from Dr. Weiss, Ph.D., with her briefcase and box of Kleenex for weepy clients.”

Again, Lee said nothing, though she thought that Lennie, on the other hand, was unchanged: still thin, dark, clever, and sour. His thick hair and close-cropped beard were grayer, his face more sardonically creased; that was all.

“So the place suits you?”

“I like it,” she admitted, gathering her forces. “I never expected to see you here, though.”

“Why not? I had two perfectly good motives: curiosity and cash. Besides, it was a chance to visit my favorite little cousin Merilee in her new natural habitat.”

In spite of her resolution, Lee winced visibly at the first utterance in many years of her silly adolescent nickname.

“Sorry. I should have said Lelia Weissfrau.” Lennie grinned as he made this old joke, which dated from the time when Lee, on becoming a feminist, had altered her original surname from Weissmann to Weiss. With difficulty, she did not react.

“Seriously,” he added. “When you get to be my age, you start thinking about your family. Like that Gauguin painting. Where do we come from, Who are we, Where are we going? I even have occasional embarrassing impulses to show people photographs of my grandchildren.”

“Oh yeah? Do you have them with you?” Lee asked.

“I must admit I do. All three.”

“Okay. Hand them over.”

For the next ten minutes Lennie and Lee exchanged photographs and family news. It was in a more relaxed manner that, as he put the snapshots away, she remarked “You know, I’m surprised you should come to a conference on The Writer and Nature. I thought you didn’t care for nature.”

“You’re right, I’ve never been a great fan. Seems to me it’s what civilization was invented to get away from. But there’s not too much of the stuff around here.”

“Come on.” Lee nodded at her trumpet vine, still thick with red and gold blossoms, and the leafy street beyond. “What do you call that?”

“Aw, that’s just pretty scenery. I have nothing against scenery, as long as it stays in its place.” Lennie raised his glass to the trumpet vine, and drank.

“And what really surprises me is that they invited you.”

“That’s easy. I’m here as the bad guy.” He set down the glass, pulled his still thick, coarse gray-black hair into two horns, and gave his cousin a devilish grin. “They need someone like me to rile them, make them rush to the defense of their favorite useless plant or animal, get the energy level up. Otherwise it’s all too nicey-nice. That’s why they’ve called my panel ‘Nature and Anti-Nature.’ I’m Anti-Nature. When I go on tomorrow, it’ll liven things up, you’ll see.”

“So what will you say?”

Lennie shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll start in on one of their heroes, say for instance Thoreau. You know he was a mama’s boy, like so many naturalists? Used to send his laundry home from Walden like some kid at summer camp.”

“Really?”

“God’s truth. Or should I say, Goddess’s truth?” Lee did not reply. “You still into all that?”

The answer was, Yes, in some ways, but Lee did not supply it. “But it’ll be three to one,” she said instead.

“So what?” He shrugged. “It’ll be easy going up against those famous softheads. Kind of fun, really. There won’t be any surprises; I know most of them already.” Lennie smiled. Altogether, there were fifteen speakers at the conference, and it was safe to say that in the past he had insulted or annoyed every one of them in some way, either in person or in print—though in many cases Lennie (unlike his victims) had forgotten this.

“Really.”

“Listen, I’ve known Gerry Grass since we were both at an arts colony thirty years ago. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s still stuck back there in the sixties, trying to get in touch with Nature. Wandering about the world looking for her like Bo-Peep’s poor lost sheep.”

“I thought he was a famous American poet.”

“Sure, why not? You don’t have to be intellectually brilliant to be a famous American poet. It’s a handicap, sometimes. Innocent egotism, good looks, romantic sensibility, a thrilling speaking voice, and a nice little lyric gift, that’s what makes it with the reviewers and the public. You met him yet?”

“Just yesterday, at the opening reception.”

“I hear he’s split with his girlfriend, what’s her name, Huff or Tiff or Spat, something like that. Poor dope. He should have been warned the moment they were introduced; he’s supposed to be sensitive to language.”