“Great,” Polly repeated. She started to slide away across the seat of the truck, but he didn’t remove his hand; instead, he tightened his grip. “Well, hey, thanks for the drink.”
“Hey, you’re welcome.” Mac turned full toward her. He kissed her hard but very briefly, releasing her before she had time to react. “See you at four tomorrow,” he repeated as she scrambled down out of the cab.
The pickup truck roared off, and Polly, in what her mother would have called a State, stood on the porch of Artemis Lodge. The door was locked, and only one ruby-chambered electric lantern burned in the hall. Either Lee was out, or she’d already gone to bed. Polly let herself in and climbed the stairs to her room.
What are you so upset about? she asked herself. Your luck’s turned. Tomorrow you’re going to see Cameron’s place, and who knows what you might find there? Pictures, drawings — letters and notes even, if Mac doesn’t stop you —
Or, let’s put it this way, another voice said. You’re going to meet a man you hardly know in a town you hardly know, in an empty house, where there probably aren’t any paintings anyhow, because probably that was just his way of getting you there, and doing what he wants to you.
And what you want, said another treacherous voice.
The room felt hot and close and crowded; Polly shoved up the sash of the window, but the breeze that blundered in, sticky with the odors of tropical flowers and auto exhaust and tidewrack, was even more insidious and oppressive. Sex, it whispered.
All right, you feel something, the first voice shrilled in Polly’s ear as she paced the narrow strip of straw matting between the bed and the open window. But that’s just because you haven’t made it with anyone in nearly a month; naturally you’re susceptible. It doesn’t mean you have to fall into bed with whoever comes along, especially not with a man.
All right, you’ll be alone with Mac. But if he makes what your mother would call an indecent suggestion, all you have to do is say no; he’s not going to jump you. If you can’t control yourself, if you have to sleep with someone, Polly told herself, it doesn’t have to be Mac. There’s Lee, for instance — a generous and warmhearted (if rather scatty) woman, who likes you and is right downstairs in the guest house.
Polly fixed the image of Lee in her mind; mentally she removed Lee’s flowered muumuu and contemplated her low full leathery breasts, her thick waist, her sturdy brown Polynesian hips; her bushy black armpits, the probable black bush below. ... But she felt less than nothing. Lee wasn’t what she wanted; what she wanted —
It was her old ignorant desire for the Romantic Hero, recurring like some persistent tropical weed. Over the last two years this rank growth had been, she’d thought, thoroughly rooted up, and the earth where it once flourished raked hard, trampled down. But now, in the steamy, unnatural climate of Key West, the weed had sprouted again.
It was an addiction, really, like Jeanne’s addiction to cigarettes. There ought to be an organization for it, Heterosexuals Anonymous, it could be called, and when the uncontrollable urge came over you, you’d telephone their hotline and some nice woman would talk to you till you felt better. Jeanne had said she’d been through everything, trying to stop smoking: group meetings and individual therapy and hypnosis and clove cigarettes and nicotine gum, changing to a brand she disliked, tapering off gradually, going cold turkey. Eventually she’d realized that she was becoming obsessed with smoking-or-not-smoking; and that this obsession was crowding out the whole rest of her life. She couldn’t concentrate on anything else properly; she couldn’t finish an article, or give a decent lecture, she couldn’t enjoy seeing her friends or going to a film or having a good meal or sometimes even making love with Betsy, because she kept thinking about cigarettes. So finally she decided, the hell with the whole thing. It was a lot easier, Jeanne said, just to have a smoke when she wanted one and then forget about it.
Is that how Polly ought to treat her own addiction? Should she just sleep with Mac once — assuming that was what he had in mind — and get it out of her system? Right now, she not only found him attractive, she liked him. But probably it wasn’t really affection she felt, just disguised sexual need, aggravated by the climate. And probably it was only a matter of time before he’d do or say some ugly chauvinist thing, and then she wouldn’t have to care about him.
Besides, in a case like this it would be wrong to turn to Lee. You didn’t use another woman like that, you had respect for her feelings, her integrity as a person — where had she heard that phrase recently? Yes, from Jeanne. If Jeanne were here now, though, she would tell Polly not to do what she was in great danger of doing.
Eleven thirty-five. Late, but Jeanne often stayed up late. And even if she’d gone to bed, this was a crisis, she wouldn’t mind getting up. Unless of course she and Betsy — but then Polly remembered how, when she and Jeanne had slept in the same bed, Jeanne would always unplug the telephone before they “tumbled about a bit.”
Polly tiptoed downstairs to the lobby, stopping at each creak of the staircase, shifting as much of her weight as she could to the worn mahogany bannister.
In the sleeping house, the ringing of the phone in the apartment on Central Park West sounded so loud that Polly expected Lee to appear at any moment, followed by several of her guests. All right, let them come. Help me, she would say to them and to Jeanne. If you don’t, I’m going to do something irrational, something dangerous. But nobody answered the phone, and nobody came.
13
AT A QUARTER PAST four the following afternoon Polly sat on the wide leaf-littered steps of Hugh Cameron’s house, under heavy bulging clouds that had done nothing to lower the temperature. It seemed if anything warmer than yesterday; the light had a diffuse, oppressive purplish tint. Mac’s not coming, she thought for the fourth or fifth time. You should be glad; now you can’t do anything you’ll be sorry for afterward. But she didn’t feel glad; she felt ashamed and angrily disappointed, like a recovered alcoholic who’d tried to fall off the wagon in front of a package store that turned out to be shut.
If she could have reached Jeanne her resolution might have been strengthened; but Lee, who should have been on the same side, was no help. In spite of what some people might have taken as a sexual rejection, she had remained friendly and interested. “Had a good time last night?” she had asked at breakfast, and when Polly admitted that it hadn’t been too bad, and that she was meeting Mac again today, Lee grinned knowingly. Probably she was a sexual addict herself; probably most people in Key West slept with anybody they fancied who came along, regardless of their sex, occupation, age, marital status, or political party. Sure, go on, enjoy yourself, she had said to Polly, more or less; Polly had listened to her, and now look what had happened.
The whole trip to Key West had been a waste of time and money, a useless expense of spirit. Today, for instance, she had spent hours in the newspaper files at the county library without finding a single reference to Lorin Jones. She had also gone to the county courthouse and, after an interminable delay, seen a certificate that listed the cause of Lorin’s death as “pneumonia.” Lennie Zimmern had told her what he thought was the truth; but Polly still had doubts.
She stared across the cracked and tilted sidewalk and the potholed street at the cemetery opposite. Could Lorin Jones be buried there? And if so, how could Cameron stand to look out every day on the grave of the woman he’d deserted and allowed to die?
This Key West cemetery wasn’t like the ones up north. There were no weeping willows, no pruned shrubbery, no clipped lawns and orderly, ranked tombstones. Instead, behind an iron gate and a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire (what for?) was a wide expanse of untidy open land crowded with funeral monuments. No, not monuments, Polly realized — tombs. Soapy white marble and rough gray stone packing cases lay scattered in the long faded grass, like the debris of a freight-train wreck. Some were crowned with statuary or elaborate scrolled carvings, and many with garish arrangements of plastic flowers: waxy crimson and orange roses, purple pansies, white lilies. Most unpleasant of all, under several of the nearest tombs the earth had shifted or buckled, so that they canted up into the air at a crazy, improper angle. You could almost imagine that the dead people inside, Lorin among them, were trying to get out, or had already gotten out. Maybe that was the reason for the barbed wire. Maybe they were there, invisible, all those evil spirits who, like Lorin Jones, had died violently or too soon, clinging to the cyclone fence with their thin dry lizard hands, clamoring for the lives they had lost.