John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

When he drove into the triple carport, parking between Mary’s station wagon and Debbie Ann’s little white Porsche Speedster, Mary said, “Will you come in for a nightcap?”

“I guess I better just...”

“Please, Mike. Just for a minute or two.”

Her voice was still casual, but the appeal was clear. He went into the kitchen with her. She made the drinks and they carried them out onto the patio. Stars were reflected, motionless in the black surface of the small swimming pool. He sat in one of the big redwood chairs and she sat ten feet away on a hassock.

“Did you like the Club, Mike?”

“It’s a gay place.”

“Bernard and I used to belong. But living up on Ravenna Key, we didn’t get down very often. It’s much handier, living here. We get a lot of use out of it.”

“The food is fine.”

“How about the people, Mike? How about the people?” She laughed. “You told me you are a qualified people-watcher.”

“I can’t say much without sounding pretentious. I got this out of it. They seem anxious. I don’t know why. It’s as if they had the correct scoop that tomorrow a hurricane washes the Club out to sea. Or Prohibition is coming back. Or sex is going to be outlawed. I don’t know. They seem to try too hard. They press. And it isn’t that a lot of them are retired, maybe a little too young. Most of them work. It’s the same all over the country, I guess. But it seems concentrated here, somehow. Like they have to do everything there is to do right now. It gave me the jumps. It’s contagious. I emptied two drinks faster than I like to drink, and I had to say whoa boy.”

“I feel that too, Mike. It’s... undignified.”

“That’s a word I was hunting for.”

“But there were lots of nice ones there.”

“Nice ones everywhere. I met one nice one. Shirley McGuire. She flattered me, laid it on with a trowel, butter from head to foot. I respond fine to flattery.”

“Oh, she’s Martha Tennyson’s niece. A new friend of Debbie Ann’s. I’ve met her, but I don’t really know her. She’s getting a divorce, you know.”

“She told me.”

“She’s an... interesting-looking girl.”

“She talked to me, and that Rob Raines talked to me.”

“What did Rob talk about?”

Mike crossed his fingers in the darkness. “Sailboats.”

“He’s very high on sailing. Debbie Ann crewed for him in Yacht Club races when she was practically a child. She has a silver cup they won. He seems very interested now, but I can’t feel he’s right for Debbie Ann. There’s a sort of... heaviness about him. He doesn’t seem to have the light touch.”

There was a silence. He heard the ice rattle in the bottom of her glass as she finished the weak drink she had made herself.

“Mike?”

“Yes, Mary.”

“About what you said this morning. I wanted you to come in because I thought I wanted to talk. But I don’t. Not yet.”

“Anytime.”

“I have to do some more thinking. And even then, I don’t want to... drop my troubles in your lap. When I do talk, I won’t be asking you to do anything. It will be just... to get my own emotions straightened out. And even that isn’t fair to you. To have you come down here and then—”

“Knock it off, Mary. I’m your friend. I’m Troy’s friend. I’ll listen because I want to. Okay?”

“Okay, Mike.”

He said good night to her and went out the kitchen door toward the private guest-wing entrance. The night was very still. The richness of jasmine hung in the air, almost too strong. He felt no desire for sleep, so he changed to swim trunks and slippers, took a towel and went over to the beach. After he was in he realized it made him uneasy to swim at night. The water seemed to have an oily texture. He could imagine monsters sleekly stalking this blundering thrashing chunk of live bait. When he stood up to walk out with courageous dignity, something brushed against his leg, and almost instantaneously he was fifteen feet from the water’s edge, breathing hard.

Face of a hero, he said to himself. Race of a hero. They need you in the Olympics, Rodenska. New event. Fifty-yard dash in three feet of water. Symbolic, anyway. You get scared of the things you can’t see. Comedy routine. Minnow nibbles fat man. Fat man roars out of water and then, with enormous nonchalance, peers up and down deserted beach to see if anybody was looking. Like Troy in Melbourne that time, when a lorry tire let go and made that prolonged and significant whistling, and when he came so damn close to dropping flat on the sidewalk, and then pretended he had stumbled.

Mike walked back and showered and went to bed, but his brain was a gaudy tin top, spinning and whining, his eyes glued wide open, his hearing acute. He guessed it was an hour later when he heard the car drift in with due consideration for those asleep. He walked over to the window, the terrazzo pleasantly cool against his bare feet. They sat there in the MGA, the parking lights on, talking in low tones. They got out of the car, met on her side of the car and kissed. Her back was toward him. He saw Rob’s hands slide slowly down from the small of her back to cup her haunches and pull her tightly against him. She acquiesced for a few seconds, then wriggled free, made a mock gesture of slapping him, giggled in a high tinkling way, and spun toward the door.

“Tomorrow?” he called.

“Phone and find out,” she said.

Mike went back to bed. He heard her stirring about in her room, with a quick tick-tack of heels which ended when she took her shoes off. He heard nothing for a long time, and then the soft closing of the other door to the bath they shared. A little while later the whispery roaring of the shower began.

He lay in darkness, moving closer to sleep, hearing her hum tunelessly above the shower sound, building pink and soapy and explicit visions of her, remembering what the McGuire girl had told him, and pretending in that drifting area of half sleep that when she had showered she would come sweetly, moistly, silently into his room and...

Sleep was suddenly rolled back by his sudden contemptuous realization that he had imagined himself right into a state of acute physiological readiness for her — the shallow breathing and the sweatiness and the ponderous gallop of his heart and the knotted loins.

He rolled and thumped his pillow and said to himself, Maybe you should go back into high school. Maybe start a nice collection of dirty pictures. An adolescent old man. It’s a fleshy trap. The mind is entirely satisfied with continence. But it’s the old ape body which strains with unreasoned desire. It knows how much time has passed. So it rests here, hairy, heavy, with all the scars and marks and saggings of forty years, all the blemishes and erosions of its ape maturity, waiting with a massive arrogance for the glands to force the mind into some sort of pretty rationalization which will clear the way so that it can again exercise its plunging primordial function, its mute declaration concerning the continuance of the race. It’s an ape thing, squatting on its hairy haunches behind a screen of brush, slack-jawed, picking lice off its belly, watching the young females of the tribe, and making plaintive rumblings in its chest.

You know all the rationalizations it’s trying to force on you. Health. Quiet the nerves. Natural function. And that most devious rationalization of all, entitled: What Harm Would It Do? No objective harm, of course. She’s no hesitant virgin. She’d be incapable of attaching any emotional significance to it.

It’s the subjective harm, Michael. To be desperately old-fashioned, the loss of honor. It would be just a switch on the salesman and the farmer’s daughter. You were asked down to relax and mend. The services of the daughter of the household were not included in the facilities available. And, because you have years to live, and nobody cares deeply how you live them, and sons to raise, let’s beware of the sophistry that nobody gives a damn what you do. Because you do give a damn. When there’s nothing left but your own image of yourself, it somehow becomes a more grievous sin to smear it.