Alison Lurie - Last Resort

She knew that in the 1990s many people found her attitude strange. “Jenny’s a walking anachronism,” a loudmouthed, temporarily tipsy acquaintance had said last year when introducing her at a college reception. “She devotes herself full time to her husband, like a Victorian wife.” And years ago her daughter, Ellen, in junior high school and in the first rush of intoxication with feminism, had asked her, “Mom, don’t you ever want to have a real job, and earn some money of your own?”

“No, darling,” Jenny had said. “Because no job I could possibly have could be as important as the work I do with your father.”

But now Jenny found herself wishing that she did have some kind of outside job. Since they’d arrived in Key West, Wilkie hadn’t asked her to do any research, and she still hadn’t been given the final chapter of The Copper Beech to edit and type into the computer. She also couldn’t persuade him to answer even the most pressing business letters or return phone calls. “Let it wait awhile. We’re on vacation, for Christ’s sake,” he kept saying.

Yes, Jenny thought, as she lay in the speckled shade by the lukewarm pool; but in the past she and Wilkie had worked just as hard on vacations. Often her computer could hardly keep up with their output of letters, essays, lectures, reviews, and books. Every morning after breakfast they would plan the day’s work, and Wilkie would often erupt from his study several times a day to add to the list. But over the last few months these discussions had slowed, slowed now to a complete stop. Most days there was nothing at all for Jenny to do. Wilkie still retired after breakfast to the guest bedroom she had set up as his study, sometimes requesting delivery of a sandwich and coffee or iced tea at noon; sometimes descending for a brief, almost silent lunch, then reascending with the Times under his arm. At five he reemerged and walked to the beach for his daily swim.

When they met people, Wilkie was almost his old self; often he talked freely and at length, volunteering information and opinions. But if they didn’t go out in the evenings a dark weight of silence settled over the luxurious tropical house. Wilkie, once so warmly communicative and confidential, spoke to her less and less, and sometimes hardly responded to her questions or comments. And when Ellen or Billy phoned he seemed to have almost nothing to say to them.

Something was wrong, dreadfully wrong—but what? When Jenny, trying to shield her growing anxiety under a light tone, asked Wilkie how he was, how he was feeling, or how he liked Key West, he always smiled perfunctorily, hardly glancing at her, and said “Fine, thanks.” The last time, though, when perhaps she hadn’t kept her tone light enough, Wilkie almost grated out these words, adding, “Why do you keep asking that? If I weren’t fine, wouldn’t you be the first to know?”

“Yes, I guess so,” Jenny had stammered.

What made everything worse was that in the past few days Jenny had realized that she herself was not fine. For one thing, she almost couldn’t bear this rented house, with its luxurious but exaggerated and rather vulgar contemporary decor. Most of the furniture seemed to have come from two stores on Duval Street that specialized in expensive camp. There was far too much chrome and leather everywhere, too many mirrors, and too many large-scale glaringly colored representations of tropical flora and fauna, especially flamingoes. Jenny had put some of the smaller monstrosities, like the phallic dark-red wax anthuriums, away in a closet. But there were others she couldn’t do anything about, such as the giant coffee table in the sitting room: a thick ice-green sheet of glass supported on the heads of two grinning plaster monkeys, which must weigh half a ton.

When the furniture wasn’t vulgar it was unfriendly, and encouraged unfriendliness. The free-form orange leather sofa was overstuffed and hard, like sofas in motel lobbies; the folding screens painted with exotic flowers and birds blocked the view of what other people in the house were doing, and the indirect lighting and heavy silk-shaded lamps made their expressions obscure. On the king-sized “floating platform” bed Wilkie and Jenny slept far apart, like strangers, and the bed didn’t sag or creak when he got up at night, so she wasn’t always aware of his absence.

Even the soundproofing, which was supposed to be such an unusual advantage in a Key West house, was unfriendly. Back home in Convers, even if Wilkie’s study door was shut Jenny could hear him moving around inside, sometimes playing tapes of waves or bird song as he worked. Here, when he went into the study after breakfast, it was as if he had totally disappeared.

What was Wilkie doing all day shut in that upstairs room with its camp cherry-vanilla color scheme and distant view of the sea? From material evidence, she knew that he filled in the Times crosswords and the Sunday acrostic; presumably he read the rest of the paper and some of the magazines whose change of address she had conscientiously arranged.

Perhaps Wilkie was napping in there, since he was still sleeping poorly at night. Or perhaps he was writing and rewriting The Copper Beech. But if so, why was he so silent now, so withdrawn? Once they had talked easily, continually, and when Wilkie was working on a book or an article or a lecture, which was practically all the time, he had shared his ideas with her and often incorporated her suggestions. “You’re my ideal reader,” he had told her more than once. “You appreciate everything that’s really good. And when you don’t understand something, it means I’m not making myself clear.” Now there were days when they hardly spoke.

Maybe Wilkie was having writer’s block, Jenny thought. He’d never had it before, but according to an article she’d read it could infect anyone anytime, and mostly you just had to wait it out. But meanwhile, what was she supposed to do all day? What was she actually doing?

Essentially, nothing. Wandering around the huge unfamiliar supermarkets, or lying in this antimosquito cage reading some magazine or novel, occasionally sploshing back and forth in that box of overwarmed water. No doubt Wilkie had noticed her idleness. Hadn’t he said just yesterday (after denying again that there was anything wrong or anything she could do for him) that she ought to get out and see the sights, meet some people?

Used as she was to following Wilkie’s directions, Jenny hadn’t yet really followed this one. Though she’d loved going to strange parts of the world with him, she hated being a solitary tourist in her own country. She’d tried it one day here: walking through the Hemingway House alone, and then sitting alone among families and couples on a glass-bottomed boat while the tour guide described the sea life swirling vaguely and promiscuously below their feet. She knew long before the day was over that she deeply disliked the public aspect of Key West: the homogenized “tourist attractions,” the raucous bars whose loud music and loud customers spilled out onto the pavement, the shops crowded with neon-pink seashells and T-shirts with extraordinarily vulgar slogans printed on them. The half-dressed tourists who thronged Duval Street, drinking and eating and smooching, not only offended her aesthetic sense but reminded her that Wilkie had hardly touched her since they’d arrived.

Even here, lying by the pool, Jenny wasn’t comfortable. The humid air was cloying; the giant potted hibiscuses—six or seven feet tall, some of them—with their huge red and shrimp-pink blooms, made her feel small, as if she were one of those miniature people in that children’s book, The Borrowers, that her son, Billy, had liked so much. And after all she was a kind of Borrower here, living in someone else’s house, among someone else’s outsized furniture, lying inertly by their outsized pool—A pool potato, that was what she was turning into.