“Low lights.”
“But this stuff is way past due now and I really…”
“Close harmony.”
“Seven o’clock then. But why? I’m pleased and so on, but why?”
“Because a McGee never never gives up.”
“Wow, you’re after me every minute, huh? Tireless McGee. Once a year, with bewildering frequency, turning a poor girl’s head, never giving her a chance to catch her breath. But make it seven-thirty. Okay?”
I went back topside and lost my game, and the next, and the next, while the Juniors cheered their Leader on. I lost $14.40. I paid off. The air was colder, and the heat was going out of the slanting sunlight. The Juniors were getting restive.
“Here,” I said to Meyer. “Put it in something with a future. Jump the culture trend. Electric hairbrushes.”
Meyer smiled and surveyed his flock. “With your money McGee, I’d rather be trivial. What I’ll do, I’ll send Junior off, when the time is ripe, to invest it all in bean sprouts, water chestnuts, almonds, candied ginger and wonton, and we’ll choke it all down aboard this fifty-four feet of decadent luxury afloat, and play your fool records and all tell lies.”
“Got a date.”
“Mmmm,” he said. He counted them. “Darlings, I see you are seven. Those of you who can be trusted to go round up one amiable young man each, respectful, attentive, light-hearted young men, raise your right hand. Three of you? Ah, four. Splendid. All of you take your little roses and slippers and beach bags and buzz off now, and get dressed, warmly and informally, and gather up your young men and we shall all meet at Bill’s Tahiti at seven promptly.”
They trooped off my boat, making their little bird noises together, smiling back at us, waving.
Meyer leaned on the sun deck rail and said fondly, “Darlings all.”
“That’s a pretty sloppy formation. Shouldn’t you have them marching by now?”
“They are products of an increasingly regimented culture, my boy. Group activities give them a sense of security, of purpose, of adjustment. I am their vacation substitute for a playground director. Left to their own devices on vacation, they would become restless, quarrelsome, bitter, aimless. They would have a dreadful time. Now when they return to one of those dreary states which begin with a vowel, they will treasure the memory of being kept busy every minute. The western world, my dear McGee, is being turned into one vast cruise ship, and there is a shortage of cruise directors.” He turned and gave me a somber hairy look. “After that phone call, you played even worse, if that is possible.”
“An old friend.”
“With a problem, of course. McGee, that expression is rapidly becoming obsolete too. In our brave new world there will be nothing but new friends. Brand new ones every day, impossible to tell apart, all wearing the same adjusted smile, the same miracle fabric, the same perfect deodorant. And they will all say exactly the same things. It will take all the stress out of interpersonal relations. From what I have been able to observe of late, I suspect that all the females could be called Carol and all the males could be called Mark.”
He lumbered down my ladderway, refused an ultimate brew, and went trudging off toward his ugly little cruiser tied up to a neighboring dock. On its transom, in elaborate gold, was the name The John Maynard Keynes.
At the appropriate time I drove over to the mainland, across the 17th Street Causeway, and from there north to the back street where Nora Gardino lives in what was once a gardener’s cottage for a large estate. Only that small corner of the grounds is unchanged, framed on two sides by the original wall, with the fierce ornamental iron spikes on top of it, screened on the other two sides by tropical growth, rich, thick and fragrant. As I drove in, tires crunching the brown pebbles, I wondered if, back in a world no longer comprehensible to us, my vehicle had ever called at the main house, now long gone, replaced by a garden apartment project.
I drive a Rolls, vintage 1936, one of the big ones. Some previous owner apparently crushed the rear end, and, seeking utility, turned her into a pickup truck. Another painted her that horrid blue that matches the hair of a grade school teacher I once had, and I have named her, with an attack of the quaints, after that teacher. Miss Agnes. She is ponderously slow to get up to cruising speed, but once she has attained it, she can float along all day long in the medium eighties in a rather ghastly silence-a faint whisper of wind, a slight rumble of rubber. Miss Agnes was born into a depression, and suffered therefrom.
My lights made highlights on Nora’s little black Sunbeam parked deep in the curve of driveway. I went up onto the shallow porch, and a girl answered the door. She was big and slender. She had a broad face, hair the color of wood ashes. She wore a pale grey corduroy jump suit, with a big red heart embroidered where a heart should be. I did not catch her name exactly, not with that Gaborish accent, but it sounded like Shaja Dobrak. She invited me in, after I had identified myself, and said that Nora would soon be ready. In her grey-blue eyes, above her polite and social smile, were little glints of appraisal and speculation. Two Siamese cats, yawning on a decorator couch, gave me much the same look, though slightly cross-eyed.
The decor had been changed since that last time I was at the cottage. Now it was gold and grey, with accents of white and pale blue, a small, charming, intimate room. She made me a drink and brought it to me, and sat with her own in a chair facing me, long legs tucked under her, and told me she had worked far Nora seven months, and had been living at the cottage for four months. She was a grown-up, composed, watchful and gracious, and extraordinarily attractive in her own distinctive way.
In a little while Nora came hurrying out, and I got up for the quick small old-friends hug, the kiss on the cheek. She is a lean, dark, vital woman, with vivid dark eyes, too much nose, not enough forehead. Her voice is almost, but not quite, baritone. Her figure is superb and her legs are extraordinary. In spite of the strength of her features, her rather brusk and impersonal mannerisms, she is an intensely provocative woman, full of the challenging promise of great feminine warmth.
She was in a deep shade of wool, not exactly a wine shade, perhaps a cream sherry shade, a fur wrap, her blue-black hair glossy, her heels tall, purse in hand, mouth shaped red, her eyes sparkling with holiday. Her face looked thinner than I remembered, her cheeks more hollowed.
We said goodnight to the smiling Shaja, and as we went out Nora said, “I haven’t had a date in so long, I feel practically girlish.”
“Good: My car or yours?”
“Trav, you should remember that I would never slight Miss Agnes that way. She’d sit here and sulk.” After I closed her in and got in beside her she said, “I hate to be a bore, but I left a letter on my desk that has to go out tonight. Do you mind?”
“Of course not.” As I turned out of the drive I said, “I thought you were a loner.”
“Oh, Shaja? She is a jewel. I’m in the process of setting the shop up so that she can buy in, a little at a time. She’s the only one I’ve ever found I can really depend on. Or live with. She has a very precise sense of privacy, of fairness, of sharing. And… she reacts to things the way I do. We’re men’s women, both of us. No sorority overtones. No girlish giggles and confidences. And we’re both tidy as cats. No hair in the sink, no crud on the dishes. So it works. She’s married to a man years older than she is. She gets two letters a year from him. He’s in a Hungarian prison. Four years to go, I think, and then the problem of trying to get him out of the country somehow, and get him over here, but she has a wonderful confidence that it is all going to work out. She is absolutely marvelous in the shop. If a woman is torn between something terribly expensive, and something quite suitable, Shaja has a little trick of raising one eyebrow a fraction of an inch and changing the shape of her mouth, and sighing in an absolutely inaudible way. We’re doing just fine, and how are you doing, Trav, darling?”