Condominium (12 page)

She yawned and stretched, knuckled her scratchy eyes, put on her blue robe and trudged to the door. She opened it and looked through the crack until she saw Julian approaching rapidly. She let it swing wide and turned and walked away. He thumped the door shut, caught up with her, stopped her with both arms around her middle, worked the shoulder of her robe aside with his blunt bristled chin and kissed the top of her shoulder.

He turned her around and looked at her. “Hey, you all right?”

“Fan-damn-tastic.”

“What’s wrong with you, Bobbie, huh?”

“I was sound asleep when the phone rang. I think it would be very nice, very touching, if you sometime said you’d be along in fifteen minutes, so maybe I could pee and brush my teeth.”

“So go ahead, for God’s sake. You’re in a bad mood, huh?”

She looked at him, at the auburn hair carefully arranged and sprayed to cover the evidence of the receding hairline, at the heavy, dull, sensual features. He was such a towering hunk of solid meat and bone, of sun-crisped hair on massive arms and legs, he made her feel fragile and feminine. When she came out of the bathroom he had stripped down and lay supine on her unmade bed, thick fingers laced behind his head, afternoon sunlight filling the room. She saw that he was becoming tumescent in anticipation of her, the brute weapon lolling across his thigh, inching upward to each beat of his muscular heart.

She put her robe on the chair and got in with him. He folded her close and small in his big arms and said, “I thought you wasn’t going to phone down there anymore like yesterday, Bobs.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I had a couple of drinks and then I thought, Well, why not?”

“You shouldn’t get on the sauce so much.”

“I guess not. But what difference?”

“You’ve got a really great body, you know? A woman goes on the sauce, she goes down the road pretty fast. Look at Peggy Brasser.”

“I’ve got a long way to go before
that
.”

“Calling the office, you can get me jammed up, you know? When Lorrie says your name, she’s got that funny way of doing it already, like it hurts her mouth. She don’t play by any rules. She could go to your school-teacher husband and tell him about us.”

“She wouldn’t!”

“Hey. Lay down again. It’s no sweat. She won’t if you stop calling down there all the time.”

“Oh, great,” she said. “I’m just supposed to keep my mouth shut. What I am, I’m just available ass. Anytime you’ve got a minute or two in between renting an apartment or fixing somebody’s john, you can trot up to Two-C and get fixed up. Bam, bam, thank you ma’am.”

“Oh, shut up, Bobbie. Jesus! If you didn’t want it too, there wouldn’t have been a first time, right?”

“I was drinking.”

“I didn’t notice it slowed you down any. Then or since.”

“You’re a way of taking my mind off things, like drinks are.”

“What things?”

“I don’t want to talk anymore. Okay?”

“But that’s …”

“Shut up, Julian.”

For long minutes after she heard the discreet closing of the door as Julian let himself out, she could feel the fast bumping of her heart, slowing as her breath slowed. This time, as had happened several times recently, she had thought to remain a bystander, to help him along with apparent enthusiasm, but actually feel very little. Sometimes it had worked, but more often it did not. He seemed to have a strange knack of lasting just a little bit too long, and once she felt it beginning to happen, no matter how faint and far away, there was no stopping place for her. She felt that if she could learn the knack of deadness, learn in the midst of sweaty and energetic copulation to think of other things and to feel nothing at all, then she could start to be rid of him.

She showered, dressed, made the bed and fixed coffee. Each time she crossed the small kitchen she was aware of the hidden bottle under the sink, behind the two rolls of paper towels. Finally, she squatted and took it out. Without looking at it, she unscrewed the top, poured an unmeasured, unwatched amount into a water glass and drank it down. The tepid vodka bounced back up into her throat. She leaned against the sink and coughed shallowly, mouth wide, shuddered, swallowed several times. She put the bottle away and rinsed the glass. She looked out the window at the tropic jungle between the parking area and the bay. Fingers of heat felt their way through the narrow places of her body. Heat and softness, blurring the edges, melting the hard spaces.

“Nothing is wrong with me,” she said aloud.

It had been on account of the Avery kid. Hell, you are supposed to be on the lookout for things like that. The leg was definitely broken and there were a lot of bruises, but the bruises were all the same age and color, and X-ray found no old healed breaks. And after all, a fall down a flight of stairs will cause a lot of damage. A very silent little girl. It could talk but wouldn’t talk about the fall. That should have tipped her off. Nervous little big-eyed mother. You hesitate, wonder, and finally decide to leave it alone. The kid goes home. Two months later it is back. With a broken finger, arm, shoulder, pelvis and skull, with internal bleeding and with pressure building inside the skull. A dying blonde named Anne. Come home then and start having a couple of off-duty drinks daytimes, and one day get big Julian up to fix the leaking faucet and start kidding around, and all of a sudden as you are beginning to get annoyed and beginning to get ready to turn him off, he has you perched on the edge of the bathroom countertop next to Gil’s toothbrush and towel and aftershave, and he has somehow slid that big purply thing up into you, and he is grunting and thudding
away, and you are clinging to him and sobbing and gobbling with shock, fright, guilt, consternation and shame.

“Nothing is wrong with me,” she said again, knowing that some terrible thing she could not define was happening and had been happening for a long time, starting well before the Avery child was brought in, long before the affair with Julian Higbee began or the drinking began. It made her think of the summer days of her Florida childhood in Tangerine, where her father owned small groves. A storm could climb the sky behind you while the sun shone brightly all around you. And before the day began to darken, before you could hear the thunder, there would be a change you could not define. Perhaps it was the way the wind turned the leaves or moved the grasses. These are the little winds plowing across my heart, she thought. A blond child and Smirnoff and Julian. The sad little winds have names. The storm is so close behind me now that if I looked straight up, I could probably see the leading edge of it. Soon I will hear the rumble of the thunder.

“I am all right,” she said, and the tears ran down her face, tickling the pale fuzz at the corner of her mouth.

She sat on the kitchen stool and folded her arms on the countertop and laid her cheek against the cool Formica in the circle of her arms. She shut her teeth so tightly her ears rang and then she whispered, “Whatever is becoming of me now?”

When Julian Higbee sauntered into the office, elaborately casual, Vic York stood up from where he had been half sitting on the corner of Lorraine’s desk, one leg dangling, and said, in his raspy, rusty high-pitched voice, “Well, here he is finally at last. Mister Julian Higbee himself. Kid, I was about to give up and come back
tomorrow, maybe first making an appointment through your beautiful little wife and better half and helpmate here.”

“Hi, Vic,” Julian said. He looked at Lorrie. She was pale and her eyes looked wide and frightened. He felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. “What you want, Vic?”

“Hey, I found a place where we can have a little talk, you and me. Come on, kid.”

Lorrie got up quickly when they left, and closed and locked the office door behind her. She hurried after them as they went across the basement parking area, between the support columns, to one of the service rooms. She got there just as Vic closed the door behind them. She tried the latch. Vic had apparently bolted it on the inside.

She leaned her ear against the utility door and covered her other ear. One of the residents, a Mrs. Dawdy, had just gotten out of her car. She stared at Lorrie and came over, brows raised in query, and said, “Is something wrong, dear?”

“Get the hell away from here!”

The woman backed off. “Well, parm me, I’m sure. You don’t have to be shitty to me, you little slut.”

Apologize later, Lorrie told herself. She could hear voices in the service room, Julian’s loud and angry and blustering, Vic’s much fainter. Then there were other sounds. Faint gasps and grunts of effort. Thudding thumping sounds. She squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to stop listening, and could not. There was a sour taste in the back of her throat. In an eerie way, it was much like listening that time to Julian and Mrs. Fish, the big nurse. There was the same sense of both fascination and personal loss. It had been evil to keep on listening and then say nothing to him, nothing to stop him doing it with her. Nurse Fish was freeing her from Julian. Now
Vic was doing the same thing, somehow. It frightened her. She could hear no further sounds. She hammered on the locked door, hurting both fists.

The door opened a few inches and Vic filled the opening, looking out at her with disapproval. “What are you banging on the door for? What are you yelling about? This is dumb, Lorrie sugar.”

“Let me in. Let me see him or I’ll call the police.”

“Go ahead.”

“Let me in!”

“Go ahead. Call the cops. Then neither one of you has a job and everything you own gets thrown out in the street. I thought you were the one with sense. Go turn his bed down. I’ll walk him in through that back door in about five minutes.”

He shut the door in her face and she turned and did as he had told her. She left their back door open.

It was closer to ten minutes before they arrived, Julian with gray slack face, leaning heavily on Vic, scuffing, dragging the heels of his sandals. There were tear tracks on Julian’s face.

Vic grinned merrily at Lorrie and swung Julian around and sat him on the side of the bed. Julian sighed heavily several times as Lorrie helped him undress. He rolled to face the wall, knees pulled up. She covered him over and left him, quietly closing the bedroom door.

Vic was waiting in the tiny kitchen. “What I wanted to say was he took it good, like I figured he would. You noticed I didn’t mark him none. I didn’t think you’d like that. There is some cartilage sprung between his ribs that will hurt him for breathing for a couple weeks probably. And if he should piss some blood, not to worry. He is going to be too sore all over to get out of bed tomorrow. Better he should rest up. He understands if it ever happens again, it’s a hospital case, like a week maybe.” He held out his
lumpy broken fists, with the dimpled knuckles where the bone had been compressed in combat long ago. He winked at her. “Better me with these than he sends some punk kid with a pipe wrapped in a towel to scramble his head. Always hire a pro. Look after him, Lorrie. See you around, huh?”

LEGRANDE MESSENGER
eased himself to a more comfortable position in his big black leather lounge chair in Apartment 7-A and told himself the pain would soon go away. And he wished that this Mr. Stanley Wasniak would go away.

“We believe,” Wasniak was saying, “that everybody here in Golden Sands is entitled to a personal explanation from one of us that got elected to be officers of the Association. You could say that everybody turns out to be a patsy, some kind of pigeon for the group that set this whole thing up. Everybody thought an average eighty-one fifty would cover it, but it has got to be more than twice …”

“Mr. Wasniak.”

“…  more than twice what we counted on. What I want to assure you, we’ve been over the contracts and charges and all with a fine-tooth comb and—”

“Mr. Wasniak! Please!”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“I am trying to tell you that I am not particularly interested in what the monthly charges might be. Whether they are eighty dollars or eight hundred dollars is a matter of indifference to me.”

Wasniak stared at him, mouth hanging open for several seconds. “Well, excuse me all to hell, Mr. Messenger. I din’t know I was talking to some kind of millionaire-type person.”

“I am sorry if I was rude. I’m in pain.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No. It comes and goes. When I hurt I am likely to be irritable, as Mrs. Messenger will doubtless confirm.”

“I didn’t mean to bug you when you’re …”

“Sit down, sit down again, please, Mr. Wasniak. You may have to run through it again, as my attention was … less than perfect the first time. Let me ask some questions to clarify my own thinking on this. Would you say that it was or should have been obvious to the developers that the monthly maintenance would not cover the costs?”

“Oh, hell yes. What Liss says, he says the original figures were worked out for a lot more units, but then the project got cut back by a regulation on density, and they never changed the figures. Look at me. I’m supposed to be retired. I’m supposed to be fishing, playing golf and all that. What am I doing? I am running around like a damn fool asking people to understand it isn’t my fault they pay double from now on. How I got sucked into this I’ll never know. I wanted to be Mr. Popularity maybe. Some popularity!” He checked his list. “You go from a hundred and five to two oh two. One of the things I’m supposed to tell you, you can inspect the books. Hadley Forrester has all the books and records in his apartment, in Seven-D, right here on the top floor. It averages out—”

“I’m sure that the accounts are in good order, and I am sure that there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it.”

“I’m telling you, that’s a lot better attitude than I’ve been running into most places, Mr. Messenger.”

“I appreciate your stopping by. And you’ll forgive me for not seeing you to the door, Mr. Wasniak?”

“No, don’t you trouble yourself. A real pleasure talking to you, sir. The new billing will be along first of the month.”

Just as Wasniak opened the door, Barbara Messenger was reaching to put her key in the lock. She gave him a brilliant smile as he stood aside to let her in. “Hi, Mr. Wasniak. I thought I’d be back here before you arrived.”