Alison Lurie: Last Resort

“Look, I’m sorry I flew off the handle about Wilkie Walker,” Lee said, apparently taking Molly’s silence for rebuke. “I know you weren’t deliberately planning to make things unpleasant for me.”

“No. I wanted to make them easier for Jacko, that’s all,” Molly said. “He’s been trying to rent Alvin’s house ever since those people from New York canceled, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lee admitted, her tone shifting to one of concern. For years her friend Perry Jackson, who was also a year-round resident of Key West, had made his living partly as a landscape gardener and partly as the caretaker of the estate of a former lover, a rich, fussy, tiresome old man called Alvin. He had the rent-free use of a one-room cottage on Alvin’s property, and was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about plants. Last month, Jacko had tested HIV-positive.

“How’s he doing?” Lee asked. “I haven’t seen him since Sunday, but he’s due here this afternoon.”

“Oh, he looks fine. It could be ten years, you know. Or more.”

“He told me he’s thinking of flying to Europe in July or August.”

“I’d go now, if I were him,” Molly said slowly.

“Jacko wouldn’t do that,” Lee protested. “He wouldn’t let us all down that way in tourist season. And besides, it’s winter now over there.”

“All the same, I’d go fairly soon,” Molly said. “While I was well.”

“You think he’s getting sick? Oh hell—Has he—Did he say?—” Her voice faltered.

“No, not at all. It’s just that one never knows. It could be ten years, or it could be ten months.” In Molly’s mind, death appeared as a sort of invisible flying red dinosaur, like the one on a red rubber stamp marked AIR MAIL that she sometimes used. Or rather, considering everything, there was probably a whole company or battalion or army of flying red dinosaurs. These stupid, greedy reptiles cruised forever over the Earth, occasionally and randomly swooping down to snatch someone in their long carnivorous jaws. Sometimes, since they were not only stupid but clumsy, they dropped their victims again in a more or less damaged condition (heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, fractured hips). But, drawn by the scent of blood, they would be back.

Molly herself was one of those whom the flying dinosaurs had snatched up and dropped. As a result she now had bad eyesight, a wonky heart, and crippling arthritis. Not too long from now, presumably, the dinosaurs would return for her. When her arthritis was worst, she hoped it would be soon.

One raw icy day last spring, when she was just back in Convers and winter was supposed to be over, she had stood on her porch staring at the foul frozen heap of dirty snow the town plow had dumped across her driveway again, and felt in her aching wrists and knees the exhausting, probably impossible labor of shoveling it away so she could reach the supermarket. Then she had raised her eyes to the heavy ashen sky that promised still more snow. “All right!” she had called aloud. “Come and get me now, why don’t you?”

But usually Molly wanted the flying dinosaurs to stay away a little longer, because the world was full of things she didn’t want to miss: an upcoming party, a new detective story by Tony Hillerman or Susan Conant, a Thai restaurant that had just opened, a visit from a granddaughter back from an archaeological dig in Ireland. Also, always, there was her curiosity as to what would happen next. For her, both Convers and Key West were full of interesting characters and ongoing soap operas, and her children’s and grandchildren’s lives were like long-running, richly populated comic strips. Would Captain Tony run for mayor again? Who were the man and woman seen making love in the empty lot behind the glass shop on Simonton Street at noon? Would her son be transferred to his west coast office, and if so would his wife refuse to leave her job, as she had threatened? Would her niece Clarissa marry the self-proclaimed Druid she had recently met? It would be a shame, really, to miss the next installment.

“Hey, here’s Jacko now,” Lee said.

A white pickup truck had just pulled into the driveway of the Artemis Lodge. Stylized green flames flowed backward across its hood, and the inscription on its door read GREENFIRE GARDENERS. From it, a beautiful young man emerged. He had curly dark hair, aquamarine eyes, an athletic physique, and a deep golden tan. It was impossible to tell from his appearance either that he was ill or that he was gay.

Molly looked at him with concern. Like everyone who knew Jacko, she was always watching him now for signs of illness. So far there had been none, but the anxiety of this surveillance had begun to show in the watchers, producing the look of eyestrain and narrowed, focused vision that Molly remembered in plane spotters on Cape Cod during World War II. Meanwhile Jacko, perhaps consciously, seemed determined to prove their watch unnecessary. A month ago he might have taken the porch steps casually; now he bounded up them two at a time.

“Hi, how’s it going?” he asked. “Hi, Molly!”

“Oh, fine,” Lee replied flatly. “Except I hear you’ve just rented Alvin’s house to a world-class homophobe.”

“A homophobe?” Jacko took this in slowly. “You mean Wilkie Walker?”

“That’s right.” Lee nodded sourly. “He thinks we’re disgusting and unnatural. He wrote a whole book about it.”

“That was years ago,” Molly protested. “Twenty years at least.”

“You said he was a famous scientist,” Jacko protested, glancing at her uneasily; he liked celebrities, and would sometimes announce their presence in Key West to his friends.

“Yeah, so what?” Lee growled.

Jacko did not reply, but Molly could almost see the words LOOK, I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT, I JUST NEEDED A TENANT passing through his mind as if on the illuminated bulletin board in Times Square, and being denied utterance. Avoidance of the unpleasant was one of his basic instincts.

“Hey, is it okay if I let Marlene out?” he asked, gesturing at his truck, where a plump white cat with green eyes stood with its paws on the sill.

“Oh, sure. Those two women from Montreal with the allergies went home Sunday, thank God.”

Released, the cat followed Jacko back up the porch steps and leapt onto the low back of a wicker rocker, where it sat upright, waving its tail as the chair swayed.

That would make a good picture, Molly thought in spite of herself, for she had given up art. Every few weeks lately she made up her mind not to draw anymore: it was too hard to see the paper, too awkward and painful to hold the pen. Besides, there was no point in it. The New Yorker, under its new management, wasn’t buying her vignettes; and her dealer was politely dim about sales possibilities, definitely discouraging about a show. But then something would catch Molly’s eye: a spider and her web in a shop doorway, a bearded monkeyish man with a live monkey on his shoulder, a sweet-lime tree swarming with ragged black and white children.

“I just want you to know, I’m not coming to your house while those people are on Alvin’s property,” Lee warned Jacko.

“Really? That’s too bad,” he said in a neutral tone.

“And don’t you ask me to meet them, either,” she told Molly. “If I see them I’ll spit on them.”

“Oh yeah?” Jacko said. “Mrs. Walker too?”

“Yeah. Because in a way she’s worse than him. She’s a traitor to her sex. If she has any sex, which I doubt. And Walker’s a creep, take it from me. You’re going to wish you’d never rented Alvin’s house to them.” Lee laughed angrily, but Jacko did not respond; he merely smiled with the tolerant confidence common among physically beautiful people, who know that they make a contribution to the scene simply by being there.