The Beach Girls (3 page)

Along came one of those silences, and right in the middle of it, Judy Engly cut loose over across the way in charterboat row. She’s sort of a plump, sulky-looking little girl. Been married now to Jack Engly nearly three years. No kids. Jack skippers his own boat named
Judy’s Luck
. They live aboard. When there’s women in the charter party Judy crews for him. Otherwise he picks up one of the boys hanging around looking for a day of crewing.

Even when you know just what it is, it isn’t so damn easy to take. I’ve seen tourists go right up in the air and land with their mouth open and their eyes bugged out. She starts low, like moaning, and goes on up until she’s yelling at the top of her lungs. Then it goes up into a long screech like somebody’s killing her and fades down like a siren into a sort of gurgle and some more moanings. And finally silence.

We sat it out. When it was over Anne Browder laughed in a nervous kind of way. Joe Rykler did a little soft cussing. Lew Burgoyne said, “God damn it, it ain’t decent! Afore Jack ever lays a hand on that little ole girl he ought
to pack up her mouth with a towel. And there ain’t no woman in the world ever enjoyed it that much. She’s just bragging on him. I wisht to Christ they’d move off someplace into a shack in the middle of a piney woods.”

“The guy it’s toughest on is Rigsby,” Joe Rykler said. “It about kills him to hear the proof that somebody else is getting something he can’t—”

“Now, Joe,” Anne Browder said.

“Am I saying something out of line?” he protested.

Alice cleared her throat. “I’ll tell you all one thing. Jack Engly is a big, sweet, shy guy. But I’ve seen the way he can horse a two-hundred-pound fish onto the dock. And if he ever catches that damn Rigsby snuffling around Judy, Rigsby is going to be just as sorry about the whole thing as a man can get.”

Judy’s standard demonstration had taken the edge off the evening. It seemed to make people sort of restless. Joe wanted to go over to one of the joints on the beach. Christy said she was too tired. Lew wanted to go down into town and I decided I’d go along with him. In the end it was only Joe and Anne Browder who went over to the beach, taking off in that little blue Volkswagen that Anne and Amy Penworthy own jointly and call Herman. This was an unusual thing as it is the first time I can think of that Anne went off alone with any one of us, or any man for that matter.

I’d tried to line Anne up a couple of times but …

 … I had about given up on Anne. That’s why it practically caught me off guard when I suddenly realized she was, in effect, accepting a date with me.

That was our first date, the same night Leo Rice arrived. I drove the little Volks out of the marina lot and went south on Broward, then turned left onto the approach to Beach Bridge with Anne Browder sitting demure and fragrant beside me.

“Any special place?” I asked her. I’d borrowed the Volks enough times so that I was familiar with the shift.

“Any place at all, Joe. But nothing fancy, the way I’m dressed.”

She was in short shorts in a sort of nubby pink fabric, and wearing a sleeveless white blouse with her initials embroidered in pink over the pocket. One thing about D Dock, there are no anatomical secrets. When the gals in residence come back from work during the summer they waste no time changing into as little as the law allows.

Anne Browder is the newest resident of D Dock. She moved in with Amy Penworthy last December, two months after she had moved from New York to Elihu Beach. Amy’s previous roommate, or houseboat mate, had gotten married and moved out. Amy works in the Elihu Beach Bank and Trust Company at the information desk. She is a jolly hearty gal of about thirty with pale brown hair, four million freckles and a sturdy figure. She originally came to Florida from Omaha to divorce a stinker named Milton. She and I have had a lot of good clean fun swapping horror stories about her Milton and my two expensive
marital mistakes. We both have some dandy anecdotes. I don’t recall how Amy met Anne Browder, but at the time she met her, Anne had found a job in the office of a Doctor Harrison Blalock, and she was glad to move out of a furnished room onto the
Alrightee
.

It was agreed that Anne improved the scenery at the Stebbins’ Marina. Her hair is dark blonde and she wears it in a perfectly suitable coronet braid. She is tallish, with a fine though unremarkable figure, but with superb, un-forgettable legs—great long legs of particularly flawless texture, so perfect that they seemed to have a whole new range of little tender curvatures and ripenesses that you never notice on ordinary legs. As a confirmed voluptuary, may I merely say that they seemed to have more special places to kiss. Let me tell you those legs have walked through a lot of my frustrated dreams.

Anne arrived after I’d had the
Ampersand
tied up at D Dock for just about a year. I zeroed in on her right away and got nowhere. It wasn’t a case of not getting to first base. I couldn’t even catch a ride to the ball park. I noticed one thing about her. She smiled briefly and infrequently. She had very little to say. Her every move was curiously controlled. She could make a five-second production out of lifting a cigarette or a glass to her lips. It gave her personality such a flavor of remoteness and coldness that all other hopefuls were chilled off. But I knew it wasn’t remoteness or coldness. I had seen it before. You see it in a special kind of female, the ones who are always on the borderline of hysteria. The ones with the fires well banked, but plenty hot.

I went through my gamut, like they say, from A to B. She is about twenty-six. I am thirty-one. I am big, dark-haired and look slightly unkempt at all times. This awakens the mother in them. They want to sew on buttons and cook for me. I have brown eyes and I can look very hurt. I have various lines of patter and chatter that have proved out well. Also, I am a romantic figure. I am a writer who lives and works on his boat. They are inclined to sympathize with my creative urge to write a big novel. They are saddened that I must waste my substance by writing do-it-yourself books in order to support myself and my two ex-wives.

I did all my tricks for Anne Browder and she looked right through me and out the other side, wistful and, damn it, bored. She used the brush like an expert. I did some spy work, trying to dig useful information out of my old pal Amy. But apparently Anne did not indulge herself in girl talk. Amy admitted she had done some prying, but all she could learn was that Anne had quit her job in the North because of some kind of emotional involvement with somebody in the same outfit. The only sop to my pride was that she wasn’t dating anybody else either.

By April I was in a frenzy. She had me wringing my hands. In May I made a serious effort to get her out of my system. I stalked the public beach until I found a cute, bright little vacationing stenographer from Atlanta, and I took her on a cruise down to Marathon. That little adventure quieted me down and I was able to finish the current do-it-yourself work briskly after I got back.

And all of a sudden, with no warning, here was Anne, legs and all, in the seat beside me. I turned north along the beach, having decided on a place called Melody Beach, where the booths are deep and dark and there is a live trio on Fridays and Saturdays, soft music in a romantic mood. It was ten o’clock and the place was half full when we went in. When those legs went by, male heads snapped around.

We got a booth. The waiter lit our candle. We decided we’d done all that could be done about beer, and so we switched, me to an Irish mist and the lady to a light rum on the rocks, with lemon twist, please.

I looked across at her. “Well!” I said. And there’s a great line. It has sparkle. Somehow she could give me stage fright, make me feel as if I were sixteen again, in a rented tux.

“It’s pleasant here,” she said.

“Let’s set up a schedule. I’m misspending my middle years. I know fun places all the way up and down the coast. I’ll make out a list for us.”

“Thanks, but I don’t really like to go out very much, Joe.”

Our drinks came. I tried to be charming. I got a few smiles, meager and polite. So I said to myself, the hell with it, and I grabbed her hand. She tried to pull it away.
She couldn’t get it back without making a scene she apparently didn’t want to make, so she let her hand rest flaccid in mine and looked at me with great coolness.

“Please let me go.”

“First you listen, Anne Browder. Who are you? What are you? I want to know. Girl inside a wall a mile high. Me with no ladder. You’re hurting about something. That’s obvious. You need to spill it. I listen just fine. And I don’t tell what I hear. Somebody clobbered you. So you’re scared of everybody. I’m a harmless type. Just old Joe Rykler, friend of the working girl.”

She didn’t answer me. I released her hand cautiously. She yanked it back, hoisted her glass and drained it in one gulp. It was the first hasty careless motion I had seen her make. It was encouraging.

“What do you want from me?”

“I guess I want to be your friend.”

“Joe! Do me the courtesy of being honest.”

I leaned back. “All right. I want to hustle you into the sack. Is that a criminal urge?”

“What good would that do?”

“My God, I don’t know! Does it have to be constructive? What harm would it do?”

She was looking at me intently. She moistened her lips. “It’s all so pointless. It’s—a compulsion.”

“Who clobbered you?”

“May I have another drink, please? I clobbered myself, Joe. You see, I thought it would be a very shrewd idea to become pregnant. So he would leave his horrible wife. But when I told him, he was terrified. It turned out she was also pregnant, about four months. He hadn’t mentioned it. Suddenly he was a scared little man, no longer my hero. A three-year affair ended right there, Joe, in our little hideaway full of the treasures we’d both bought for it. He knew a man who knew a man. Very reliable. It was done in Philadelphia, and they had a room where, afterward, I rested all day, counting the bricks in the wall opposite my window. I imagine the … result of love was given over to the municipal sewage system. They say it’s very efficient.”

Then the calm, cool, lovely face broke into a dozen pieces. She put her head down on the table in the crook
of her arm. I wondered how long it had been since she had cried. She didn’t make much noise crying. Once in a while I could hear her over the music. They were playing “Lullaby of Birdland.” Tears make it a sad tune indeed. I went around to her side of the booth. She didn’t shrug off the arm I put around her, so I left it there. The new drinks came.

Finally she sat up, dug Kleenex out of her straw purse, dabbed at her eyes with it and honked into it. Pink and puffy around the eyes, but still lovely. I took my arm away. It was indicated.

“Joe?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Joe, I can’t get over it. Ten months now. I’m no nearer being over it.”

“You’ll have to give it more time.”

“I don’t love that scared little man. I loved the man I spent the three years with. I still love him.”

“Love is one of the big words.”

“I knew I was waiting for one man. When I met him I knew he was the one. He was the first. And maybe the last. I don’t know. I’m scared.”

“What should you be scared of, Annie?”

She gulped her drink again, then laid ice cold fingers on my bare forearm. “Scared of telling you the reason why I came over here with you, Joe.”

“There’s nothing scarey about me.”

She looked at me with a discomfiting intensity, her head slightly tilted to one side, her eyes ten inches from mine. “Last May you went away for a week with that cute little girl.”

“That seems to be one of the worst-kept secrets of our age.”

“Why did you go away with her?”

“You mean in addition to the obvious reason? Because you, Miss Browder, had gotten under my skin. You were making me nervous. I took her like a cure.”

She frowned at me. “But what about the girl, Joe? Suppose she had taken it seriously. Suppose it hurt her?”

“I didn’t want that to happen. That was a problem of selection. Francie was a nice kid. She had other plans for herself. They didn’t include me.”

She bit her lip for a moment and then said, “So it was without love.”

“When you net them by telling them you love them, it’s the worst kind of cheating, Anne. Almost any man can get away with that.”

“If it was without love, wasn’t it … sort of messy?”

“Messy? I don’t dig you, doll.”

“Oh, just sort of coarse and greedy and empty.”

“I didn’t notice it was. Hell, it was fun. We provisioned the boat in Marathon and I went a way north into the islands, hundreds of them. We fished and told corny jokes and went skinny dipping over the side by sunlight and moonlight, got tan all over, ate like pigs and made love whenever it seemed like a good idea. There was no talk of love and eternity.”

“I wondered if you did that because of me. I had to ask. But, Joe, how did it make you feel?”

“Relaxed. It took the tensions out. Francie was a dandy girl.”

“Joe?” She looked down and drew a small slow pattern on the back of my hand with the tip of her finger. “Joe, suppose I’d gone with you instead of that Francie.”

“Wait until my heart drops back out of my throat. If you’d been the one, it would have been the same only more so. A hell of a lot more so. I mean it would be like the man says—accepting no substitute.”

“Get me another drink, Joe.”

I signaled the waiter. I expected red welts to pop up on the back of my hand where she had drawn her shy little design.

“Anne. Anne. Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“I wouldn’t want it to mean anything to you, Joe. That wouldn’t be fair, because it wouldn’t mean anything to me. You understand it wouldn’t mean anything to me. It would be like pretend. But I wouldn’t want it to be messy. I couldn’t stand that. Or a stranger. It has to be somebody I like. I want it to … change what I am, just a little. To put … that brick wall further away from me. Further back. You know? I could see the edge of a window. Thirty-one bricks down that edge. In the office we had to be very remote with each other. They frowned on that sort of thing. It was a big legal office, as hushed
as a church. Dark suits and white blouses and not too much makeup, and no costume jewelry. They preferred pearls. But in our place I could wait, my hair tousled, musky with perfume, pacing and waiting. He could manage one night a week in the city, sometimes two. I bought one thing for us that I keep thinking about. A little Japanese shadow box, only so big, with a glass front and a place for a little light. It was a garden, a man standing with arms folded, a woman on her knees before him. Symbolic of us, I thought. When I closed the apartment I put it on the bathroom floor and smashed it to bits. The head broke off the little kneeling woman. Joe, I’m going to cry again.”