The Beach Girls (6 page)

“Am I blushing? Leo, who are you? What do you do?”

“Well …”

“Understand that questions are not good form around here. But I’m an incurable snoop.”

“The answer is pretty ordinary, Christy. I’m a corporation executive from Syracuse, New York. I got very run down—for many reasons. So I took a six-month leave of absence.”

“You didn’t look so run down when you arrived.”

“I got into the car and drove. You should have seen me. Thirty pounds heavier. Flabby, jittery. I ended up in Jacksonville. I rented an isolated beach cottage and I bought a shovel.”

“A shovel!”

“To improve my health and character. Every day I shoveled beach sand from here to there, and the next day I would shovel it all back. More every day. Finally I found myself admiring myself in the mirror, flexing muscles and so on. So I sold the car and bought a boat. I wanted to be a valiant mariner. Calm in the eye of the tempest, steely hand at the helm.”

I saw the obvious chance to trap him. “Why did you stop here, Leo?”

“I had the vague idea of going down to the Keys, but I found that boats make me nervous. I keep worrying about going aground, and what the markers mean, and what to do about other water traffic, and what part of the boat is going to suddenly stop operating.”

“So you stopped right here?”

“To get my wind.”

“I’m a horrible snoop, Leo. I told you that.”

There was a sudden wariness about him. “Yes?”

“You got here last Friday. There was a letter in the box in the office for you on Saturday. From Syracuse, from a
law firm I think. Addressed to you, care of Stebbins’ Marina, aboard the
Ruthless
. So you meant to come here.”

“I laid out a route,” he said, too casually.

“Don’t spoil it. I love intrigue,” I said.

“And what would be my mysterious mission?” he asked lightly but guardedly.

I put my chin on my fist and scowled at him. “I suppose Sid Stark would be the most logical. He’s in all sorts of tax trouble. Maybe you’re a sort of undercover agent, finding out how much he’s spending on all those parties.”

“Hmmm. Any other ideas?”

“Well, you could be working for the syndicate which has been trying to buy this place from Alice and turn it into an expensive and mechanized yachtsman’s paradise. Then all we common people will have to move out.”

“Miss Yale, you have a lurid imagination.”

I liked looking at him and talking to him. His hands were good, lean, strong and long-fingered. I have a thing about hands. And it was an ugly-nice face, not improved by the bulging purple bruise on the right cheekbone, the puffed lips and the split on the side of chin, iodined and bandaged by me. On a man that kind of a face is fine. I can tell you what it does to you if you are of the female persuasion and have a Halloween face.

“You’re married, aren’t you?” I blurted. I have a nasty knack of not knowing what I’m going to say until I hear myself say it. In the past this has created quite a few problems down at the good old C of C.

“I was married, Miss Christy. I married young. My wife is dead. I’ve got two kids in boarding school, two boys, fifteen and sixteen. They’re in summer camp now.”

“Pry, pry, pry,” I said.

“Why were you so positive about me being married? It’s happened before. I’ve always wondered.”

I tried to figure out why I’d been so certain. “I suppose it’s a certain … aura of unavailability, Leo. Maybe a sort of naturalness in the company of a woman. As if you don’t have to prove anything. A woman senses the absence of the wolf call. Fix us some fresh things?”

He looked at his empty glass and then held it out. “Shank of the evening, but please make mine look less like iced coffee without cream this time.”

When I came back from the little galley with the two drinks he looked at me with evident curiosity. “While you were gone, Christy, I realized what’s been bothering me about you, on practically a subconscious level.”

“Hey, now!”

“Diction. When you talk casually you get that cracker slur and twang that I’ll swear is legitimate. But when you say something thoughtful, like telling me why I look married, you speak with a certain amount of precision.”

“That calls for the story of my life, stranger. Lay back. My pappy and all us Yales were born right here. Of course, looking at the town now, it’s like saying you were born on a merry-go-round at a carnival. But it wasn’t like this when I was a little kid. It was quiet and nice. No neon and floodlights and swimming pools and horrible glass jalousies.

“Born here twenty-nine years ago, to be desperately accurate, stranger. Me and my four brothers. They’re all older, all very conservative, all married. They’re scattered up and down the coast, disapproving violently of their little sister living on a houseboat in a junky marina. Disgraceful bohemianism. Mother was a doll, and Daddy sure wanted a Southern-type belle in the family. It confused him when I began to look like Mickey Rooney, from the neck up. But I did have a lovely voice. He decided if I couldn’t have looks, I could have brains, so I was the only Yale he sent North to school.

“First year in boarding school I was playing a lady-like game of field hockey and a girl who looked like Tony Galento whaled me across the throat with her stick. I whispered for three months and when my voice came back, it came back like this. Like a boy with laryngitis at the time his voice is changing. Daddy wanted to sue. I spent six years in the North. Boarding school and Smith College. I came back and rattled around a while, then found my niche in the Elihu Beach Chamber of Commerce. I live aboard the
Shifless
with Helen Hass. The name of the boat is symbolic.”

“Is it a bohemian life?” he asked.

“That isn’t the word. I’d say casual. You’ve had a taste of how casual it can get tonight. You get a chance here to … say what you please and do what you please.
There’re very nice people here, Leo. You’ll find that out if you stay. But I guess it’s sort of a revolt against the way most people live. It can get … violent around here. And funny. And crazy. It’s never monotonous.”

“That I can believe. I haven’t been hit in the face or hit anybody else for twenty years. It was very unreal. Like finding yourself in a B movie.”

“It didn’t work like the B movies. The hero got clobbered.”

“I don’t feel like the hero type. I could have done just as much damage flailing him with a paper towel.”

“Leo, what’s the object of crewing for Lew?” I asked him.

“Object? It’s a chance to learn what they didn’t have time to teach me in Jacksonville.”

“But it’s learning the hard way. Lew Burgoyne is rough.”

“I couldn’t help but notice. Christy, I’m full of platitudes. Basically I’m a very dull man. I believe if you want to pick up something fast, you put yourself in a spot where you have to learn.”

“Throw the baby off the dock and yell ‘Swim to Mommy, dear’?”

“Exactly.”

“One word in there bothers me. Why do you have to learn fast?”

Once again I detected uneasiness and wariness in him. His smile was too casual. “Impatience, I guess.”

Conversation had run out. I had the feeling that he and I could talk to each other for years, and enjoy every minute, but for the moment we had run out and I knew sleep would be good for him. Time for me to leave.

There was a little pause after I finished my drink. Not a particularly awkward pause, but I filled it with one of my faces, the one with owl eyes and a goldfish mouth. It got the familiar grunt of laughter from him. I stood up and said, “Slave girl leave king on bed of pain now.”

“Christy, I’m very grateful.”

“ ’Night, now.”

“Just a moment.” He was looking at me with such a discomfiting intensity that I thought maybe there was a streak of the wolf there. “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make that face for no reason.”

“Oh, that! It’s just one of my faces. I’m Christy, the clown girl. A laugh a minute. Here’s one of my greatest.” I put the glass down and did my ape walk, knuckles almost on the floor, and made my ape face.

He laughed and then said, “I laughed, but it made me feel uncomfortable to laugh.”

I stared at him. “Why?”

“Because it’s like a nervous tic. I sense something compulsive about it.”

“Stranger, are you an exec or an undercover psychologist?”

“I guess I’ve always had to know what makes people do things, say things, form opinions.”

I felt very odd. Though we’d talked quite a lot, there had been an impersonal flavor about it. And suddenly it had become very personal, very immediate. To keep people out of your secret places, you make jokes.

“Question, then, is why Christy is a compulsive clown? Because people tell me I have a nifty sense of humor and I have to live up to it.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, to be a clown, you have to have the face to go with it. Then you practice. And pretty soon people are laughing like crazy. And you become a very popular girl.” I’d tried to keep it light, but something worse than usual happened to my voice. And my darn eyes started to sting. “What difference does it make?” I asked belligerently.

“The last thing I want to do is make you feel bad, believe me. I was just wondering about you. I’m sorry.”

“No harm done, stranger. Take care.”

“Christy?”

I turned back again, warily. He had a horrible knack of making me feel exposed and uncomfortable. But I saw that he was the one looking uncomfortable. “What you said earlier, Christy, about the letter, joking about a secret mission. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to the other people about it.”

“Then I
was
right!”

“In a sense. Yes.”

“What are you here for?”

“I’ll make this promise to you. If I can tell you, I will.”

“Okay.”

“And you’re a great deal prettier than you think you are, Christy.”

“Don’t!” I wailed, and fled like a thief. I stumbled getting up onto the dock because he had turned the sting to tears and I wasn’t seeing too well.

Some of the gang were still down there by the
Lullaby
, but I didn’t want to join them. I went aboard the
Shifless
. I was glad Helen wasn’t home. It was just nine o’clock. On Thursdays she went to Spanish class and got back after ten.

You go along, minding your own business, and you get the illusion of invulnerability until somebody comes along and shows you how easy it is to peel off all your armor. Leo had brought Jerry back to me, brought him back to life. Big solemn gentle Jerry. Before Jerry there had been boys who made the automatic social gesture of trying to kiss the clown girl. I disguised terror with a buffoonery that collapsed them. Until Jerry. At first he responded to my clowning with a tolerance that was almost solicitude, as though I had a rash or a stammer. I could not divert him. And pretty soon I loved him with all my heart.

He wouldn’t let me go into any of my acts or imitations, or make any of my faces when I was with him. He said I was very funny and later on I could amuse the hell out of our children, but right now he felt more comfortable being in love with a girl instead of a joke book, and for him I could, by God, be a girl-type girl. And I was. For him. Thoroughly girl.

He told me I was beautiful, and it made me feel beautiful and when I felt beautiful, I didn’t have to be hilarious.

Then, with marriage inevitable, there was a little hitch in the timing. We decided to be very sensible and delay it until after his participation in a certain police action. Not a war, of course. God damn all sensibleness, all logical decisions, all reasonableness. They killed him over there, on a hill with a number instead of a name, and when they’re dead you can’t tell whether it was a police action or a war. So I went through all the motions of life for a year, while my heart rotted in my chest. No kids to amuse. No new name.

After a year I woke up and counted my losses, brushed up on all my acts, rejoined, in a limited fashion, the human race. At least my spinsterhood was not virginal. Twice on the beach, twice in his boat. That was all. So damn little, and so damn wonderful. Bright little memories for the empty nights.

So you make all the adjustments, lock all the cup-boards, sweep out the floor of your heart and wait with indifference for the years when you will be a very funny old woman. Then, without warning, an odd and gentle man comes into your life and responds to you in a way so reminiscent of Jerry that all the tidying up is undone. Debris all over the place. It isn’t fair.

I sat in the dark for a while and then I turned on a light and looked at myself in the mirror, trying to see prettiness. I really looked. Not that half-conscious morning inspection.

This hair—a coarse cropped thatch in four beach-bleached shades of sand and brown. This too-round face, devoid of any suggestion of a romantic gauntness. An after-thought of a nose, so inconsequential as to look embryonic. Mouth enough for a girl and a half. Eyes of a funny shade of green under furry black brows set into a face so asymmetrical that the left one is noticeably higher than the right. The figure, I freely admit, is a little jim-dandy. Things seem to be in the right places in the right quantities. It is a good and faithful gadget that can water ski all day without complaint, digest scrap iron, and slay any virus foolhardy enough to come within range. Only Jerry knew how well and quickly it learned its primary function. But unused now. Aching at times from disuse. Sad faithful gadget, whose basic remaining function is to hold this silly head five feet four inches off the ground.

Be pretty, girl, like the man says. So I moistened my lips and blinked my eyes at myself and attempted a provocative smile. I looked like an urchin stifling a gastric disturbance. I knew what was coming then. First time in years. It took me thirty seconds to strip, slip into my bed—teeth unbrushed—and huddle into a sour little ball of misery, with the pillow in a strategic position. I made it just in time.

Within seconds it was upon me, and I was snorting,
whooping and yawfling into the pillow, the sobs knotting and bursting. When Christy cries, she goes all the way, spasming in damp agony. When it’s over, and it usually takes a long time, my face looks as if my head had been boiled in beet juice.