John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

Though Mike had entered into the beach arrangement with many reservations, it turned out to be almost astonishingly pleasant. By the time Debbie Ann got back with Shirley, there was still a pink line of sunset low over the Gulf. Just as drinks had been fixed, a couple, neighbors named Briggs and Mildred Thatcher, came walking north along the beach, heading home.

They accepted a drink, confessed a lack of plans, inspected the steak, and agreed to help with it, provided they could contribute one large bowl of salad. It was already made and on the ice, so Briggs went home and drove back with it.

As it was obvious Shirley and the Thatchers would see the news item on Troy in the morning paper, Debbie Ann told Shirley and the Thatchers of Troy’s mishap, telling it in a joking way. She covered her mother’s absence by saying she was visiting friends. All in all, Mike thought she handled it very well.

And he soon found he enjoyed talking to Briggs Thatcher. He was about forty-five. They had two girls in college in the north. Briggs had been almost at the peak of a highly successful career as an industrial designer when he had had a coronary that had nearly killed him. Now, after one year of being an invalid, and a second year of being cautious, he was getting back into his profession slowly and carefully. He worked at his home on the Key, on small projects for the firm he had once owned. He had an agile, unorthodox intelligence, and his wife, Mildred, was a musician of almost professional calibre.

After the steak, perfectly done, had been consumed to the last scrap, they sat around in the big deck chairs on the cabaña porch and talked with that special intimacy sometimes achieved with strangers. The dark water was phosphorescent, and the stars looked bright and low.

Mike had gathered that the Thatchers kept themselves from participating in some of the attitudes of the residents of the north end of the Key. He was cued by Mildred’s imitation of Marg Laybourne, high comedy which could have been vicious, but wasn’t. So at one point he said to Briggs, “I guess all this, this social community, is sort of a unit. But I’m not up on the tribal customs.”

Briggs said, in his dry way, “It takes a little while to get the picture, Mike. These people call themselves Floridians. We’re guilty of that sometimes. But it would be like our embassy people in Mexico calling themselves Mexicans. We’ve got our tight little structure here. Same as on Ravenna, Siesta, Manasota, Casey, St. Armands, Longboat — all these exclusive sandpits along the west coast. Own houses, pay taxes, vote — but it doesn’t make us a part of Florida. It’s like a bunch of cruise ships. Come the hot months, the cruise will be over, and eighty percent of us will flee north. When we’re here, we don’t accept the environment. We alter it. Air-conditioning. Screening. Bulldozing out the natural stuff and replacing it with tropical exotics for the next freeze to kill. We’ve got our clubs and maids and gossip and pretty boats and yardmen and confused offspring. The Kodachrome life. But it isn’t Florida. Not their Florida.”

He made a wide, nearly invisible gesture toward the mainland and continued, saying, “Oh, there’s some fine people living snug in this icing on the cake. Productive human beings. But too many of them are rootless. So they fill their days with a special emptiness made up of garden clubs, cocktail parties, social vendettas, adventures in pseudo-culture, hypochondria, semi-alcoholism, random fornications, sports cars, and when it gets so dull that even they become aware of it, they take all their frantic aimlessness to Jamaica or Cuba or Nassau. And brag about their hangovers when they get back. But I’m the big serious wheel. I sit around designing a new soap dish. Significant.”

“We’re all just a mess,” Debbie Ann said.

“Not as messed up, honey,” Briggs said, “as the sixteen-to-twenty group, the children of these people. Charge accounts, club memberships, no obligation to go get an education. They knock themselves off on the highways with miraculous efficiency, and the drama of mourning is intense but short, because when you’ve ceased feeling very much of anything else except the sensations of self-gratification, it’s tough to summon up legitimate grief. I will now knock this off, to the audible relief of all.”

“But you can live here,” Mike said. “Without going native.”

“If you have some purpose beyond watching the golden years go by. And if, like Mildred and me, you can get a certain amount of amusement out of watching the monkey cage, and throwing the random peanut.”

“It’s all those wooden-headed colonels that get me down,” Mildred said. “They think people are troops or something. There ought to be one day a month set aside for them, so they could stride about clanking their medals and yelling atten-shun.”

“My anti-militarist wife,” Briggs said. “One of them once ordered her to go get him a drink. Sure you can live here. The sand and the sea, et cetera. Enjoy it. Be my guest.”

There was a long time of lazy talk. World problems were settled. And the impromptu party ended. The Thatchers drove on home, forgetting the empty salad bowl. Debbie Ann and Shirley did the minor scullery work required. Mike thanked them and said good night and went for a walk south down the beach.

He was standing, staring at tracks of swift phosphorescence a few feet from shore, wondering what was causing them, when Shirley McGuire said, “Boo, you all.”

She was two feet from him. The soft sounds of the waves coming in had masked her approach.

“Turn your back while I get back into my skin. Like putting on long johns.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where’s Debbie Ann?”

“She wanted to drive me back to the Tennysons’ but I said I’d rather walk — it isn’t much over a mile — and I asked her if she wanted to walk with me, it’s so beautiful, and she said no thanks. So when I was thinking it was all kind of spooky and deserted and there was a figure in the distance, and I was going to make a big circle around it, it turned out to be you. Want to walk with me?”

“Sure. And carry your shoes again, even.”

“Not necessary. These are for beach walking.”

After they had walked in silence for a while she said, “That was especially nice tonight, Mike.”

“I thought so.”

“It’s something I’ve missed. It was like that around my home, that kind of talk. But not after I was married. I should have been smart enough to see that it was a bad sign that anything abstract made Bill uncomfortable.”

“So you quit because the talk was bad?”

“Don’t be nasty, Mike. The bad talk was a symptom. Bad drinking was another. And getting beaten up was another. You say you’ll stick it out for the sake of the chee-ild, and then when said chee-ild sees you get hammered to your knees in front of his high chair, you start wondering how much good it’s going to do him to grow up in that kind of an environment.”

“I’m sorry. It’s too easy to make a cheap remark.”

“A marriage can be impossible, Mike. Mine was. That’s all. I had it just about as rough as it can become, and this is just as much convalescence as it is divorce. I’m not trying to unload my troubles. I just... want you to know this isn’t self-indulgence. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So we drop it. I’ve been thinking about you. And all this going on with Troy. You’re like the man who came to dinner and found out he was expected to cook it and serve it and clean up afterward.”

“It makes me feel important. You know. Needed. One of life’s empty little pleasures.”

“Ah, you’re a bitter man, Rodenska.”

“No, I can’t be bitter, baby. A little fat man is never bitter. He just pouts. You got to have the big lean type to be bitter.”