John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

“One enchanting little deal at that big dull party, Mike,” Shirley said aimlessly, and with a slight trace of bitterness. “A very brown man of about sixty, known hereabouts, they tell me, as a tireless tennis player. He had found out what we will delicately refer to as my status. But I didn’t know his, which seems to be professional widower. Anyhow, he kept calling me ‘my dear.’ Very uncle about the whole thing, you know. He said divorce is an emotional shock. His name is Van Cly or Van Clay. Something like that. He said the dangerous time is when the knot is finally cut, and he offered a suggestion of what to do with myself. And like a damn fool, because I really thought he was being quite nice, I had to ask him what he had in mind. So he said he had a nice little motor sailer, a jewel, not too much boat for one man to handle, and he knows the Bahamas like the back of his hand, and it would give me the perfect chance to relax. We could go around the Keys or through the canal and the lake, and spend a lazy month cruising the islands. He would show me places few people ever saw. ‘It would be so good for you, my dear.’ By that time, finally, I had the picture, so I got all hopped up about the idea and said it would be wonderful, and my mother and my little boy would enjoy it just as much as I’m sure I would. And all of a sudden he got very vague about the whole thing.”

“You are a cruel girl. You spoiled all his fun. Just think, you could have been a rich man’s plaything, and when he tired of you, he’d sell you to a native chief.”

“And I’d end my years in a crib in Port Said, a pitiful, broken thing, chanting my dreary invitations to sailors of all nations. Golly, I really missed a good thing, didn’t I? I wish I could remember that old clown’s name. Troy will know. Troy? Troy.”

She swung her legs off the chaise and stood up. “Hey! They’re gone!”

Mike stood up too. “We better check the cars. That’s the one thing neither of them are capable of doing right now.”

But the wagon and the Porsche were both there. Mike took the keys out of the Porsche and pocketed them.

“Maybe they’re just walking on the beach,” Shirley said.

They went back to the patio. They looked at each other and looked away, uneasy. “Mike, we shouldn’t have left them...”

“Are they teenagers?” he demanded irritably. “Are we chaperones?”

“But...”

“I know. I know. I know. Stay right here a minute.”

He left her there and, with a little crawling of apprehension he checked the master bedroom, the other bedroom in the main house, and finally the guest wing. No locked doors. No melodramatic confrontations. He went back to Shirley, where she sat cross-legged on a poolside mattress.

“We seem to be alone at last,” he said.

“Can we be sued for libel for what we were thinking? I guess they’re just walking on the beach.”

He sat in a nearby chair. “You know her. I can only guess. What... how much would she be capable of? She’s his stepdaughter.”

“I was worried. Is that an answer?”

“I guess so.”

“Maybe it’s what he’s capable of.”

“Right now he’s trying to nasty up his life as completely as possible.”

“Oh.”

“Look. Do you like her?”

“I don’t know, Mike. I don’t trust her. She’s amusing. And we have so much in common. Like her? You know, that’s getting to be an old-timey sort of question, isn’t it? Do people go around liking each other any more? Or just enduring. I like you, Mike. But with most people — I just keep my guard up, and lower it as much as I dare. I don’t understand the things people do any more. I used to think I did. I don’t any more. I can’t put myself in their place, I guess. It’s a world full of strangers. The world’s a big cruise ship, and you don’t want to get committed too far because the cruise ends. Why should you ask me if I like her?”

“I liked Troy a long time ago. I loved him. That’s an old-timey word too, for a friendship between men. So once you love, in any way, you make a commitment. Give away a chunk of yourself. So he’s calling the debt now. I don’t like Debbie Ann. I think maybe she’s a monster. I like Mary. And you.”

“Thank you, Mike.”

“Shirley, I got left behind somewhere. I’m put together of old-timey parts. I don’t react modern. I’m still on this good-and-evil kick. Okay, it hit both of us, soon as we found they were gone, they went off to crawl in the sack. Right? So I say, on one level, worse things happen all the time, don’t they? It’s incestuous only on a legal basis, no? It’s a forty-year-old man, a twenty-three-year-old woman, unrelated. So I ask myself, why the sweat? Isn’t copulation getting about as casual as shaking hands in certain circles? Who is going to tell on them anyhow? But all that fast talk I give myself doesn’t work so good. Maybe they’re walking on the beach. Maybe not. If they’re doing what we thought they were doing, then I’m just full up to here with outraged indignation, righteous horror. A real bluenose. Because it is evil. Capital E. Rodenska is old-timey. That’s my message to you.”

“Evil,” she said thoughtfully, “not because of the act itself, but who it can hurt. Mary, mostly. That’s what evil is, hurting people.”

“Would that be your only rule? That’s pagan, isn’t it? Shouldn’t there be rules of behavior? If Mary never knows, Mary isn’t hurt. That’s the way practically anything could be justified. You have to have a rule book and a scorecard.”

“They keep changing the rules and nobody keeps track of the score any more.”

“I’m inner-directed. That’s the new-timey word for old-timey. You’re a child of your times, Shirley. So you’re outer-directed more than I am. You go most by what people think of you, and I have to go almost all the way by what I think of me. So, contemplating a deal like what we thought, I get horror, and, honestly, what do you get?”

“Not horror. It would just be... offensive to me. It would make me feel crawly, because it’s an offense against good taste. Like watching your bridge partner peek into somebody’s hand. Maybe a little more than that because it’s in an emotional area. Maybe more like being in a supermarket and watching some woman bashing her four-year-old around and shrieking at him in public. You wonder what it’s doing to her and doing to the child, basically.”

“I don’t like to think what it could do to Troy. A man who despises himself can do a lot of filthy things, Shirley. Symbols, maybe. But what if he goes too far? What if he does something that really sickens him beyond his capacity to endure it? Then what does he do?”

She yawned. “The questions are getting too hard, Gramps. You are so old and wise. And the party is over. And I am pooped. So walk me home, huh?”

“I guess I can hobble along beside you, youngster. Wheezing.”

They went out into the night. They saw the running lights of something big, far out in the Gulf. The slow and meager swell curled lazily, thumped the beach, hissed and sighed.

As they walked toward the road she said, “Tomorrow I am being taken out fishing. By uncle. We’ll be after king-fish. I hate fishing. Have you been out on Troy’s boat?”

“Not yet. I looked it over. It looks nice.”

“I haven’t been out on it either. Debbie Ann says it’s dreamy. And very, very fast. I haven’t even had a close look at it.”

He remembered later how casually he said, “Let’s go peer at it by moonlight. We can stand on the flying bridge and pretend we’re cruising the Bahamas. I’ll be showing you places nobody ever saw before.”

“And how’s your tennis?”

They cut diagonally across the raked sand of the wide yard toward the boat basin where the Skimmer III sat pallid and quiet, moored to the pilings of the dock, serene in starlight. They made little noise as they walked across the sand. As they neared the boat he heard a curious creaking, an oddly familiar yet momentarily unidentifiable sound, audible over the surf sound when they were six feet from the boat, as rhythmic as the sea sound, but considerably faster. He did not yet understand when Shirley grabbed his arm with surprising force, pulling him to a stop. She made a hissing sound. He looked down into her eyes, dark and wide in the moonlight, and then suddenly realized that the quickening sound came from the cabin aboard the Skimmer III , the surging and creaking of the nautical bunk, the strenuous, cyclic pulsations of a mating, that only rhythm in the world which is almost as old as the cadence of the seas.