No Place for an Angel (6 page)

When Barry got down to $23 and something, he did not tell the Waddells, but left in the night. Key West had its true mystery all about its streets at 3
A.M
. It became close kin to port towns in the Indies, Mexico, a distant relative of Spain. There was the dry stirring of a night wind in the palms and certain streets looked darker than anyone would care to think about. The bus station, in a hot nook of the city surrounded by warehouses and garages, burned a blue fluorescent light inside, so that bugs kept crashing against the windows. Barry stood in the shadows. He was alone there except for a Negro man sitting on a suitcase, immobile as an image. The bus appeared from around the corner and the driver sold them tickets. Before they left, a carload of sailors drove up and helped three of their number aboard. They reeked from drinking and fell asleep before the lights went out. When the bus stopped at Marathon, the air was fresh and cool. It smelled really good then and the lights of fishing boats looked in some way blessed, far out on the water. The highway unspoiled infinitely, leading north.

Barry left a note for Irene and Charles. They found it shoved under the door when they went out for breakfast. “It's clear I have mal occhio or nothing would have happened about the turtle or the child. See you back in New York. Ciao. B.D.”

The Waddells breakfasted beside the pool. The twins were still asleep.

A waiter came and handed Charles a note, and for one moment Irene thought it would be a phone call from New York offering Charles a new position—Come at once and take over Such and Such company, etc. But the note said, “My wife and I have a question—can you always tell your boys apart?” Charles glanced up and a silly couple waved at him. He penciled out firmly: “We do not speak the English,” and sent the note back.

“Where do we go from here?” Irene asked. She was just as aware as he was that they were down to the bottom of the barrel. They had spent far more than they had foreseen; they could not even get back to New York.

“There are three alternatives,” said Charles. “Drive north, stay here, or take a boat away.”

“Every one of them costs money,” said Irene.

“Perhaps I'll get a job here, then.”

She gave him a dark glance. Was he joking? “Why not?” he asked.

Irene finished her coffee and stood up. “Anything you want,” she said. “Anything you want to do.”

She walked back to the motel cabin. She wore a pink cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, striped pink-and-white cotton shorts, and dark glasses. She looked exactly right and knew it. She let herself in and sat on the edge of the bed.

She acknowledged it now; the cold had got inside. I know this world that is now, she thought, know exactly what I want out of it and how to use it, and I can't afford to live in it. Wasn't it meant to be a good joke, so neatly worked out? You couldn't believe that it hadn't been done on purpose.

Barry had some idea about going back to Savannah when he left the Keys, but what was drawing him there, he knew, was the fact that he thought he had seen someone who looked like Catherine, just when he went out of the art shop into the street. He had followed and satisfied himself that it was not Catherine, but still, like a scent, the resemblance drew him. He evaluated this, saw it as an empty fancy, and at Miami bought a ticket to Pensacola instead. From there he could decide whether to go home to the Gulf coast or head up toward North Carolina where he had an army friend he could call on for money. In Pensacola, he did exactly what Charles had predicted to Irene that he would do; he found a girl in the bus station and put up with her for a time. She even got him a job that kept him alive and fed. He would not have denied that it had been desire, pure and simple, that made him leave the Waddells; he had had a terrible attack of it since the child's death; he guessed that the Waddells had felt the same, but then they had each other. He explained all this to the girl and she said that it sounded to her as if any excuse was a good one. He disliked this reply and knew he would soon be leaving. . . .

“Barry had his mind on women,” Charles said, when he joined Irene in the cabin. She was still sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Charles,” she said, “we cannot live without money. It's a habit.”

“I never suggested trying.” There were two double beds in the lavish, shadowy unit where the air conditioner purred as gently as a kitten.

“You had only to throw a little weight around,” Irene said. “With Mercer and Paul both in Europe, of course they picked that time to knife you. They did it because they wanted your spot.”

“The sons of bitches.” Charles pulled out his shirttail and scratched.

“Why didn't you give them a fight?” she demanded.

“But if I sort them out, there're only more behind them. The world is full of bastards. Phalanxes of bastards . . .”

“All in grey flannel suits,” she said. “That's the oldest argument on earth.”

“You've saved a lot of breath, all the way down the Eastern seaboard,” he observed. “This must be Land's End.”

She didn't answer. It occurred to her that if a child could commit suicide anyone could, and that a suicidal tendency could exist in anyone. Irene herself loved nothing so much as life and hung back from the names of things, especially the emotions, as if to say I love, I hate, involved one in a commitment; it was like giving a pledge or a charm away and could be produced at the worst possible moment, exhibiting one's own signature, perhaps in blood, demanding recognition.

“Do you remember Siracusa?” Charles asked.

She looked up, obliquely. “Of course.”

“We were all three there. Only Mario is missing.”

“And Catherine,” said Irene.

“Catherine was not in Siracusa,” said Charles.

“That's right, she wasn't. I can't think why I thought she was.”

“Are you going to turn on me,” Charles inquired, “with all your womanish contempt? Or are you going to say, I love you so much I'll live with you in a suburban development on $6,000 a year?”

“Neither one,” said Irene.

“Then what are you going to do?” he asked.

“It's for you to do something, not me.” She trailed away to thoughtfulness. “I'll get a job,” she offered, like a diver coming up with he didn't yet know what in his hand. “I had one once.”

“You weren't any good at it,” Charles said. “You used all the office telephones for making social engagements.”

“Everybody was doing that. And society was part of it, that was clear from the first.”

“I won't have you working,” said Charles. “Your life is too perfect. You worked it all out like a mathematical equation. I never saw anything add up so well.”

“I thought you liked that,” she said, after a silence.

“You didn't think anything. You followed your instincts. You always follow your nose.”

“Next you'll be calling me a bitch.”

“Is it just because I'm necessary to your life that you want me around? Is that all?”

“What a question! As if anybody could sort things like that out.”

“Isn't it always something from outside that makes us necessary to each other? After the boy's death, for instance, you are urgent, you have to be with me. . . .”

“You too,” she softly edged aside.

“But I think that always, almost every damn time it's more than habit, it's because something has stirred you. It's nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, Charles, why are you sitting there tearing the two of us up like an old theatre program? I think I'll shriek.”

“The cabin's soundproof, love, there's none to hear you.”

She laughed, and getting up, ran a comb through her hair. I'm here in this little box, she thought, on this distant spit of land, a little black comma on the globe. There is the big blue sea and the big white clouds and the enormous sky.

“You have not only solved life like a mathematical theorem, you've turned it into a perpetual motion machine. There will never come a season when Irene is not interested in the new styles, the new buildings, the good restaurants, the new people, the good places to go.”

“Oh, Charles!” She flung down the comb. “There're the boys, after all.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “There're the boys.”

“And anyway,” she argued, “if I have this gift you should be glad of it. It's all to benefit you,” she was inspired to add.

“That isn't true
at
all,” he said. “Not one little bit. Women can usually be trapped in some way by life. If they can't be trapped any other way, then children will trap them. But this was where you were cleverest. You had twins. Twin boys. Charming, intelligent, beautifully adjusted, liking nothing so much, so far, as each other's company.”

“I'm going out now,” she said coldly.

“Where to?” Charles asked.

“I don't know.”

She was not really angry with him, she knew. In fact, his nagging her this way told her only that his malaise was about to end; it was running out just about the right time, just when the land ran out, and the money. He would swing into action any minute now, she assured herself, and at that point, approaching the pool, she looked up and saw the twins poised left and right at the pool's end on diving boards. They waved at her and she saw their lips say Watch, and then they shot down beautifully matched. The water leaped crystal in the sun.

The angels are all human here, thought Irene, remembering her conversation with Barry. Smiling, she made a clapping gesture as their two brown heads sleekly broke the surface, eyes at once seeking her.

But Charles did not return to New York with Irene. Barry found her alone in the apartment in November. He himself was looking fine; he had had adventures. He had stopped in with his army friend in North Carolina and been introduced to a man who was going to California and wanted some advice on modern art, which he intended to buy from a dealer in San Francisco. He seemed to roll in money and invited Barry, an old friend, and the old friend's wife to an enormous new house in a suburb of Charlotte, and also to dinners at the country club. There were ways in which one could not remember, after a couple of drinks, if one was at the country club or the house. The man's kindness exceeded everything. If he had wanted pictures in the first place to please his wife, he now wanted them all the more to do a favor to Barry. It would never be clear if he himself actually wanted anything to do with art or not, and Barry gave up completely trying to have an answer about this, one way or another. He decided to relax and enjoy the whole debauchery.

“So I went along with them,” he said to Irene. “A first-class flight there and back. I will be entered as a deduction on next year's income tax. I was ‘art adviser.'”

“What was his wife like?” Irene giggled.

“Blonde and plump. She was okay. It was a nice trip.”

“So you didn't go to New Orleans?”

Barry did not really come from New Orleans. This was something he had tried several times to explain to Irene, and she always returned to saying he was from New Orleans. He came from a town near there, along the Gulf.

“I meant to go there from Pensacola, but there had been a storm, wires down on the roads, and the bus being all I could afford, I went up to North Carolina first, and then the fates took charge.

“So what's with Charles?” he asked.

“Oh, God,” said Irene. “Oh, God!”

“Is he still in Key West?”

“He's doing some sort of real estate work in the Keys. He stayed in Key West till the tourists started coming. He wants me to come there and live with him.”

“You won't do it?”

“I had to put the boys in school. Besides, I know Charles better than to think he's going to be satisfied there indefinitely. He'll want back in the swim and far better for him if I keep a foothold here. I took a job—dentist's receptionist, nine to five. I work crossword puzzles and answer the phone. I flew down once.”