“I tried to tell you before, back in the house. Only I couldn’t. I knew you’d start asking a lot of questions, and I don’t like talking about those years now. It was a bad time in my life.”
“Yes?” Polly said half-consciously. I was right this afternoon, she thought, feeling disoriented, as if she had made it happen.
“And besides, I figured you wouldn’t sleep with me if you knew. You were so down on Cameron, that bastard, that creep, that shit, you kept saying.”
“Jesus.”
“Y’know, after I saw you on Frances Street, I kept kicking myself for losing my chance. When you turned up again on Mallory Dock, I thought somebody up there loved me.” He pointed at the sooty lowering clouds. “Then when I got to Billie’s I found out you were the woman from New York that’d been hounding me, so I decided to get out of there fast. And I started to leave, right?”
“Right,” Polly echoed, dazed.
“But the thing was, you looked so great, sitting there. I couldn’t let you go. I thought, what the hell, it’s karma, as my friend Sandy would say. You’ve got to play it out.”
“You’re Hugh Cameron,” Polly said, finally taking this in.
Mac nodded.
“So that was your house.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s not for rent; you live there.”
“Yes — no. It’s rented all right, from tomorrow.”
“But nothing else you told me is true.” Now she was trembling, furious. “You’re not living with a woman called Varnie; and I suppose your name isn’t even really Mac.”
“Most of it’s true. I was living with her, till yesterday anyhow. And Mac is what everybody calls me down here. I never liked the name Hugh, I don’t know why I stood it for so long. Back in Nebraska, where I come from, it was a sissy name. I had to take all these jokes at school. ‘Who? Who Cameron? You, Cameron.’ ”
“You lied to me,” Polly said, paying no attention to this story.
“Well, yeah. But it was in a good cause.” Mac grinned, but nervously. “Anyhow, you lied to me too.”
“I did not.”
“Sure you did. You told me you were a lesbian.” Mac was smiling now. “Last night when I took you back to the Artemis Lodge I was almost scared to kiss you. I let go real fast, in case maybe you’d hit me.”
“I should have hit you,” Polly said, with a short hysterical laugh.
“Come on. It’s not as bad as all that. I’m the same guy I was this afternoon.”
“No, you aren’t.” You see, the tall winged goddess said in her mind. You rushed into this like a greedy, sensual fool. Now you are punished.
“I didn’t have to tell you,” Mac protested. “I could have kept quiet. Only I thought we should start out straight.” He grinned awkwardly.
“It’s a little late for that,” she said, with an angry tremor in her speech.
“Better late than never.”
Polly did not trust herself to answer. She turned away from Mac, staring out over the ocean, milky green near the deck, but dark and shaky beyond the lights, like some kind of poisonous Jell-O.
“Hey, baby.” Mac leaned toward Polly and put a strong hand on her arm. “Let’s give this a chance. You don’t know anything about me really.”
“I know enough,” she replied, casting a miserable glance at him and then looking away over the churning Jell-O toward other countries full of folly and deception.
“Hell, what do you want? Do you want me to take you back to the guest house?”
“I don’t know.” Polly’s voice shook. “Maybe you’d better.”
“Okay.” Mac stood up.
“I have to think.”
“Okay. You want me to call you tomorrow morning?”
“Yes — no. All right.”
14
“THAT’S REALLY WILD,” LEE exclaimed, laughing aloud as she chopped tomatoes and peppers for a gazpacho and fed them into her blender. The machine’s low-pitched pulsing roar syncopated with the snaredrum spatter of rain on the roof of the veranda; the storm she had been predict ing had arrived. “And you never had any idea who he was?”
“I did think of it for a moment,” Polly said. “But then I decided I was crazy.”
“You really liked him, too, huh? You thought he was a nice guy.”
“Mh,” she admitted.
“Hell, maybe he is a nice guy,” Lee shouted over the sound effects.
“He lied to me,” Polly said stubbornly, accusing the guest-house manager of moral laxness.
“Still —” Lee broke off. “Well, anyhow you got to see something of Key West. ... Right, honey?” she added, grinning and starting on a red onion.
“Mhm,” Polly agreed miserably. She had spent a hot restless night, broken by thunder, flashes of sheet lightning, and finally the crack and boom of a bursting tropical storm. Again and again Mac’s face appeared before her, and his body. You’re really a slow learner, Polly dear, she heard Jeanne’s voice remarking.
Toward morning, the drenched flashlit leaves outside took the form of Lorin Jones’s last photograph, which now wore a mocking lizard smile. You thought he might be yours, but he’s mine, this reptilian Lorin said without moving her lips. Still mine, always mine.
“So overall you’re ahead,” Lee continued. “All you have to do is get the facts out of the guy this afternoon.”
“I wish I never had to speak to him again,” Polly said with emphasis, trying to convince herself of this.
“Now, honey.” Lee turned off the machine with a sinewy brown hand. “I understand how you feel. But after all, if he’s got the data you need —”
“And if he’ll give it to me.” Polly sighed. The rainstorm suited her mood, which was one of streaming depression. She felt like crying, but maybe it was only the onion.
“Why shouldn’t he?” Lee threw in a bunch of peculiar-looking herbs: dark blood-red basil and loose uncurled parsley.
“Because he didn’t want to in the first place, that’s why.” Again Polly sighed, almost groaned.
“So what’re you going to do now?” Lee asked, pouring oil into the machine and muting its tone to a rumbling whir.
“I d’know. Maybe I’ll go look at some more galleries.”
“You might as well. There’s not much chance of a swim today, for sure.” Lee turned off the blender; the spatter of the rain continued, heavier and more insistent. “I’m sorry about the weather, honey,” she said. “But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The lesson for today, Polly thought, as she tramped through a dense foggy downpour that afternoon toward the current Revivals Construction project. Last night’s lowering clouds had sunk even farther over the island, drenching the loose-leaved unnatural trees, the peeling white-frame houses, and the potholed streets. Expect trouble, don’t trust anyone — that was the lesson.
Though it looked finished behind its eight-foot board fence, the house Mac and his crew were remodeling was only a shell. Within, it had been gutted down to the beams and siding; its roof joists were exposed, and its interior walls were mere scaffoldings of two-by-fours snaked with electric cables. The whole back side of the house was gone, covered now only by a sheet of dirty translucent plastic down which the greasy rain slid, giving the skeleton rooms the air of a stage set under construction. A table saw and a jumble of tools and boards sulked under other plastic covers, and a leak over the front door dripped sourly into an orange paint bucket.
“Sorry this place is such a mess,” Mac said, spreading Polly’s dripping poncho over a stack of boards, above which a bare, lit bulb hung from the end of a cord looped around a roof beam. “I’d like to take you out somewhere, but I’m still waiting for a call from the supplier. I sent the other guys home; there’s nothing more they can do until we get a delivery of sheetrock. Here, sit down.” He pulled a paint-spattered folding chair toward her. “Like some coffee?”