Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“I didn’t want to play tennis but everybody else wanted to. Mostly Wilma,” Carol said. “What I am mostly is thirsty, and there isn’t anything except that rum stuff Sally Ann makes. I had two cups of it, and honest, I’ve got such a buzz my mouth feels numb.”

Carol stopped to fix her shoe. Kat looked back. Sammy and Angela were agile figures in white, bounding and racing dutifully in the afternoon sun. Wilma and Sally Ann sat on the bench in the shade of the umbrella, two brown women with gray curls, looking like sisters, one stocky and the other scrawny, two monied women who had ordered their world to their own liking, and seemed to spend most of their time wondering if they really liked what they had wrought.

Carol straightened up and began walking. “I should do more things like that to get tightened up. I’d like to be like Angela. She’s hard as a rock. She’s got dumpy legs, but she’s in wonderful shape. Do you think if I swam more it would help?”

“Swimming is good exercise.”

“You’re real trim, Kat. But I guess you’re naturally slender, aren’t you? I mean you don’t have to work at it. I weigh just the same as I did when I was nineteen, and my measurements are almost the same, but if I don’t watch it every minute, my hips blow up like a balloon.”

“I gain and then I take it off.”

“Gee, Kat, I don’t know about my spending so much time with them. There always seems to be some kind of a fight going on that I don’t understand. But who else is there to be with this time of year? And Sammy is real odd, you know? I never know if he’s making a pass at me, the way he kids around.”

“I don’t think he is, really. I think it’s just his manner.”

Carol frowned. “I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t want him really making a pass at me. I mean, it would be awkward. I’ve got nothing against passes. It makes you sort of confident, you know? Even if a girl doesn’t want an affair, it’s nice to know men think about it. I couldn’t pull such a dirty trick on Ben anyhow. But I think a husband should know other men find a girl attractive, don’t you?”

“I guess so. Will you come in and have something for that thirst?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll go home. Uh... Sally Ann says Sammy is making passes at me. She says it’s obvious.”

“Sally Ann is a liar and a trouble-maker, Carol.”

“Well. I guess so. Will you come over and have dinner with us some night?”

“I’d like to, after all the bay fill thing is over. It might be awkward right now, considering the stand the paper is taking.”

“Oh, Ben doesn’t have anything to do with that! That’s all Mr. Borklund doing that.”

“But Ben owns the paper. Mr. Borklund works for him.”

“All Ben cares about is designing those darn boats and building them and selling them for a loss.”

“Then the paper should stay neutral like the last time.”

“Oh, Mr. Borklund explained how they can’t do that again. He had a list of the advertising they’d lose. It was a lot of money. And there was something about zoning, something that might happen to the boatyard unless the paper came out in favor of it. Ben was mad for a week. He kept telling me he didn’t want to be pushed around. Mr. Borklund was at the house almost every night, and he’d bring men with him and they’d argue. Finally Ben just said the heck with it. He won’t even talk about it any more.”

“What was that about zoning, Carol?”

“I don’t understand that stuff. It was something about taxes and nonconforming. They could do something to him he wouldn’t like.”

“I guess the invitation had better wait until this is settled.”

“Sure, Kat. If that would be better for you.”

It was a little after five when Kat entered her house. As she started to close the door she watched Carol Killian walking away in her little white shorts, her gray-and-white-striped sleeveless blouse, carrying her racket and towel and little zipper bag, hair shiny-black in the sun, slow golden legs scissoring, hips flexing. She was, Kat estimated, about thirty-four, a curiously teenage thirty-four, childless, placid, a simplified, undemanding woman. Ben had provided her with a handsome home, a full-time maid, a new sports car every year, charge accounts, shopping trips. It had been Van’s sardonic opinion that Ben Killian had acquired exactly what he wanted when he had married Carol twelve years ago. She was decorative, faithful, undemanding, unquestioning, healthy and as unabashedly sensual as any Micronesian maiden. She was always there when he wanted her, and she could be readily ignored when he did not.

Her days were without event. She slept late. When she got up she had the sober problems of what to do with her hair, how to fix her face, what selection of clothing to make from the yards of closet in her dressing room. There was music in the house, and daytime television to keep her amused. Too many drinks made her sick to her stomach. She loved oils and lotions and scents, naps and deep hot baths. She had her own bathroom, with a large sunken tub and many mirrors. She lived like a pretty cat on a cozy hearth. She had her own bedroom, all quilted and cozied and dainty, with a deep salmon rug, tinted mirrors and a draped canopy over the bed.

Ben Killian was a remote man, complex, a listener who made the more articulate ones uneasy through the uncommitted quality of his listening. People were always asking him, somewhat plaintively, if he agreed, and he could say yes in a way that made it sound like no. His grandfather had started the paper late in life. His father had driven the competing paper out of business and had died early, when Ben was still in college. Ben had spent every possible hour of his childhood afloat, and had planned to become a marine architect and designer. But the brother, Arnold, the one who relished the newspaper business, died in a war in an unpronounceable village in Burma, and Ben was elected by circumstance to publish the Palm City Record-Journal . He went through all the necessary motions until he finally found J. J. Borklund, and then he went through less of them. Gulfway Marine Designs took more and more of his time and energy.

He was, as Van had once noted, a man constructed of spare parts. He had the heroic torso of a beef-cake western hero, the long leathery durable arms and curled thickened hands of a dirt farmer, the domed head and large bland unfocused bespectacled face of professorship, a pair of thin, stringy, tough, bowed little legs. He was in constant demand to crew for the ocean racers because he could do twice the work of younger men with half the fuss and many times the knowledge of the sea and the winds. He could cut, shape, drill, fit and finish fine wood with the loving skill of a master boatwright.

His attitude toward Gulfway Marine Designs was one of utter dedication. His attitude toward Carol was avuncular, gentle and slightly amused. His attitude toward the paper was one of slight but evident embarrassment, as though it was an affliction, a congenital deformity which strangers might notice and find distasteful.

Kat walked thoughtfully through her house, sat on the edge of her bed for a little while, thinking of what Carol had told her, and then phoned Jimmy Wing at the paper. When they told her he was out, she tried his cottage. Just as she was about to hang up, he answered.

“This is Kat. Are you in the middle of something? You could call me back.”

“I was at the end of a shower. When I turned the water off, I heard the phone ringing.”

“Oh dear! I hate to do that to anybody.”

“No strain. I’ve been doing my public-relations job for Palmland Isles, and I’m going to take it in in a little while. Not much chance to stick any flies in the ointment, which I hope you and your buddies will understand when they see the by-line. I reported what Tom said about the model being out of scale, but that’s no guarantee it will get by Borklund. Actually, it’s a hell of a big local news story, Kat. The biggest we’ve had in some time. I can’t legitimately underplay it.”