The Vagabonds (23 page)

“But seriously, folks,” says the announcer, “they’re worth their weight in weeds, if it wasn’t for the holy sea cow we’d have golf courses instead of canals. It would be Algae Avenue all down this part of the world. But
seriously,
folks,” he repeats, “another name for manatee is dugong and its scientific name is—get this—Order Sirenia! I asked our Mr. Wizard and he says it got its moniker, get this, because—if you happen to be nearsighted or had an extra tot of rum—the sea cow resembles a mermaid, a foxy
siren
lady to sailors far from home.” The announcer makes a joke about the manatee as a “man-tease” and then the music resumes.

She reaches a town called Holmes Beach. There are signs to Anna Maria Island and signs to Longboat Key; at the intersection Claire turns left. Although she has the right-of-way and is driving carefully, she almost has an accident; she jams on the brakes not a yard away from a white Cadillac that neither slows nor stops. The other car is enormous, a 1960s Eldorado with fins, with ornamental wire wheel rims and a mounted tire casing painted red. When she brakes she sees an ancient lady at the wheel, wearing a Yankee baseball cap, and a dog at the rear window snarling, paws scrabbling at the pane. The driver does not acknowledge her but continues down the center of the road. Shaken, Claire pulls into the parking lot of a grocery store called Publix and turns off the engine and waits.

A school bus rumbles by. A man in a wheelchair wheels past. She tries to calm her breathing and, after some minutes, succeeds; she starts the rental car again and makes her way across the bridge to Longboat Key. Meme Lowenthal has faxed her a set of instructions, and the apartment is not hard to find, a gated complex by the bay, with a golf course and a swimming pool and men standing at attention in the guardhouse. Claire gives her name and they direct her to the manager’s office, where she is made welcome and provided with a parking sticker and a set of keys.

The manager is bald, and brown, with prominent gold-filled teeth; he smiles ingratiatingly and offers her the code for the elevator and a description of the facilities and services in the complex. “Will that be all?” he asks.

Claire nods. “You’re kind,” she says. “You’re very kind.”

“
De nada.
” The manager consults his checklist. “Does Madame wish assistance with the bags?”

She tells him no, she has packed a single overnight bag and asks herself if she should tip him, if he expects to be paid for his courtesy and decides probably not. For an instant, acutely, she misses Jim; he would have understood, her husband would have handled this but now she has to do so alone, her stomach aflutter at how to proceed. The manager opens the door and points her to her parking space and then to Building 3.

The lobby has a marble floor and floor-to-ceiling gilt-framed mirrors. Claire sees herself: a thin, drawn woman in a pantsuit, with a black scarf over her shoulders and a pearl choker and wintry northern pallor in her cheeks. She studies her reflection, and all assurance ebbs, drains. The elevator arrives. She enters the code and nothing happens; she tries it again and again nothing happens; then she checks the code and realizes she has reversed a digit—it’s 734, not 743—and the doors slide open soundlessly. With the conviction she is acting, enacting someone else’s part she rises to the seventh floor and the Lowenthals’ apartment; as soon as she has entered—an expansive water view, a wall-to-wall yellow carpet and long-fluked ceiling fans—she calls Jim’s lover, Robin. He answers immediately.

“I’m here,” she says, “in Longboat Key,” and he says, “Well, imagine that, a local call,” and Claire repeats, “I’m here.” “How was the trip?” he asks, and she tells him, “Fine.” She consults her watch: 3:52. The Lowenthals’ bookshelf has cases of shells—glass-mounted ornamental mollusks arranged in the shape of a rainbow. There are abalone shells and sand dollars mounted in ascending order, from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a palm. There are sea horses and starfish and whelks. Robin says he’ll come for her at five o’clock and take her to a bar for drinks and they can watch the sunset and figure out what’s what. “How will you get in?” she asks, and he says, “Don’t worry. Tell the guards.”

She worries nevertheless. She feels uncertain, ill-prepared; she knows she must visit with Robin but cannot imagine the things he will say or what she has come here to ask. She feels herself a prisoner inside this glassed-in high-rise tower, staring at the blue-green gulf, with nobody who knows her knowing where she traveled to, except for Meme Lowenthal; she telephones the girls. They are still in school, but she leaves her number on the machine and then says—brightly, absurdly—“Well, that’s that, I guess. We’ll be back as soon as possible: tomorrow, maybe. Or day after tomorrow. Love.”

For an hour Claire prowls the apartment: unpacking her bag in the guest room bureau, arranging her toiletries by the shower stall, pouring herself a glass of Perrier and changing outfits twice. Aimlessly she leafs through old copies of
The New Yorker
and
Vogue.
She has never been to Florida, this separate world of Longboat Key, and nothing in it comforts her or makes her feel at home. A buzzer sounds loudly, repeatedly, and the intercom starts flashing. “We have a visitor. Robin,” announces the guard.

“Robin?”

“He says you’re expecting him.”

“Yes. Send him up.”

Then she realizes she will have to take the elevator down, since Robin does not know the code, and gathers her handbag and raincoat and double-locks the apartment door carefully and descends. Arriving, she enters the lobby just as a middle-aged gentleman climbs up the stairs; she asks, “Are you looking for someone?” and he tells her, “Claire.”

“I didn’t know what you’d look like.”

“I knew you by your photograph,” he says. He is tall and thin and wearing what she recognizes as a blond toupee. He has a scar on his cheek. His clothes are, she supposes, appropriate to Florida: yellow slacks with a black belt, and a silk shirt emblazoned with white calla lilies.

“Well,” she says, “I’m glad to meet you.”

“Under the circumstances.”

“Yes.” Unaccountably, she’s flustered, unsure of her manners or how to behave. “Do you want to come upstairs?”

“Let’s go.” He smells—it’s the cologne Jim used—of Paco Rabanne. “You brought your raincoat, didn’t you, you want to get out of here, right?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I don’t
need
this coat.”

“I need,” he announces, “a drink.”

“Me too.” In a single week, she tells herself, she has lost her mother and her husband and flown east and back to Michigan and just this morning traveled south, and it shouldn’t be surprising if she feels adrift.

“Who
are
these people? Who owns this apartment, I mean?”

“Friends from Ann Arbor. Do you know them: Meme and Arthur Lowenthal?”

He shakes his head. “Strange, isn’t it—so much security. All these apartments being guarded so they can stay safely empty. All those people in the guardhouse and nobody at home . . .”

Her throat constricts. “It’s quiet here.”

“I think about it often: homeless people everywhere and all this unused air-conditioned space. It’s not as if there
are
any homeless, of course, not on Longboat Key.”

“The air-conditioning.” Claire sneezes, twice. “I guess I’m just not used to it. The plane, the car, the apartment upstairs . . .”

He is polite; he opens the glass door for her, and the door of the little red coupe. She remembers watching Jim lean over and kiss this person on the cheek—when was it? just four days ago—putting his suitcase in the trunk and slamming the trunk-lid and then the two men disappearing south. “Oh Mary,” Robin says, “it’s so strange to be meeting like this.” She starts to remind him her name is not Mary, then understands he knows her name and “Oh Mary” is just an expression; she buckles her seat belt and thinks,
This is the seat my husband was sitting in, this was the belt at his chest.

There are speed bumps and palm trees and ironwork gates. There are golf courses and ponds. “McMansions,” Robin says. He points to stucco homes by the water, with tall capped chimneys and bright copper roofs. “Drug money mostly. It has to be that.”

“What brought you here?”

“The boys of Sarasota.” He smiles. She wonders, is he joking? “The circus museum. The climate. What else?”

“I’ve never been to this part of the world.”

“What I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he says, “is there’s no way of knowing if it could have been avoided. The catastrophe. I’ve been asking myself—all day, all night, every hour since the aneurysm happened—if there was
something
that could have been done. If Jimmy was or wasn’t carrying some sort of bomb inside, if it was an accident or a condition bound to explode.” His voice trails off; he signals a right turn and rotates the wheel with both hands. “Could have been in any way, I mean to say, handled—
treated
—better . . .”

“By you?” she asks. “Or the doctors?”

“By all of us. Jimmy was feeling, he told me, impatient; he was itching to get out of there, positively
mad
to leave. He didn’t get as far as
you
have, he never even made it here to Longboat Key. And they say it could have happened anywhere, they say—”

“Can we,” Claire interrupts him, “wait? I’m just not ready for this conversation yet.”

Again there are speed bumps. “OK.” The road is narrow, newly paved, with chain-link fence on either side. Robin negotiates a parking lot—dirt, with a sign announcing: “Customers Only. All Others Towed.” He parks by a Dumpster, then points to the beach. “Welcome,” he tells her. “The Starfish. Best February sunset and Bloody Marys in town.”

“I didn’t mean,” she says, “I
never
want to talk about it. Only that I do need time.”

“A little vodka, right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have rushed.”

She cannot tell if this is kindness on his part, or a form of condescension. He opens her door with a flourish, mock-gallant, and strides wordlessly ahead into a wooden trellised area, then down a gangway festooned with starfish into a dark bar decorated with fishermen’s knotted rope nets. Lobster pots and a rowboat hang suspended from the ceiling, and the inside wall has a pair of stuffed blue marlins and an oil painting of mermaids draped across rocks. A waitress in a miniskirt approaches, and Robin kisses her on both cheeks and says “Hiya, darling,” then turns to Claire and says, “This is Gretchen, isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she perfect? Too bad she’s not my type.”

Gretchen smiles; she has heard this before. “Inside or outside?” she asks.

There are three or four men at the bar. Otherwise, the Starfish is empty and Robin points outside. “We’re here for the sunset, not company, darling, we need to banish old man winter from our Michigan visitor’s cheeks.”

“You’re from Michigan?” The waitress smiles confidingly at Claire. “A lot of folks come down this way from Michigan.”

“Can you blame us?” Robin says. “It’s
snowing
there.”

Claire’s eyes adjust; the bar, she understands, is dark only by contrast to the bright beach and the water beyond. They go out into a sitting area and take their places by the railing, at a table with a parasol and weathered wooden chairs. “What are you drinking?” Robin asks, and she orders Chardonnay. “For me, the usual,” Robin says, and Gretchen tells him, “Gotcha.” There are no other customers outside on the wooden deck, and almost immediately the girl returns through swinging doors carrying a tray with wine, a bowl of peanuts and pretzels and an outsize Bloody Mary. “Chin-chin,” offers Robin. “Your health.”

“And yours,” says Claire. They click glasses. Seabirds she cannot recognize fly past, and gulls beneath her ruffle, preening, facing what she calculates is north. The sun is warm. “All right,” she says, “I’m ready. I’m ready to discuss it.”

“Have a pretzel.”

“Thank you, no. Why don’t you say what you’re trying to
say.
”

The scar on his cheek is shiny; it makes an
S
beneath his chin and stops at the base of his throat. “How long were you married?” he asks.

“Nineteen years. It would have been twenty this coming October. Does that make a difference? Why?”

“Don’t be angry with me. I want us to be friends.”

“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

He nods. Now watching the water, Claire feels three things, and she feels them in rapid succession—so rapid she can’t tell which impulse to follow, which desire to obey. First, she wants to throw her drink at him, to wreck his gay complacency and awful floral shirt. Second, she wants to condole with this man who loved the man she lived with, or used to, and loved. Third, she feels somehow flirtatious—or not so much flirtatious as eager to engage in conversation:
I’ve never been friendly with lawyers, I don’t have any lawyers as friends.
It is, she tells herself, the glass of wine; it is the exhaustion of travel and strain of new surroundings and if I sit here just a minute it will pass. The only thing I need to do is wait for this to pass.

“There’s dolphins,” Robin says.

“What?”

“Out there to your left.” His fingernails have been bitten; he points. “Two of them, watch.”

And sure enough a dolphin leaps, its black bulk curling suspended above the line of surf. A second dolphin does the same, and then they both submerge. “Oh
Mary,
” Robin breathes, and now she wants to cry.

“They’re beautiful.”

Clouds come from nowhere visible and, of a sudden, the sun is a haze—a windswept, orange glaze of light; she shivers and empties her glass. Yet sitting here above the tide, with only a few rocks and footprints and seagulls in her line of sight, Claire feels impelled to talk to him, confide in him—improbably, not that he wants to know or will care—and tell what did and did not happen in the house in Saratoga, the news of her new legacy and how her brother and sister behaved. It’s not so much the strangeness of their meeting here—two adults adrift in the Starfish, two grown-ups with nowhere to be or to go—as how her brother looked at her and how her sister refused to, the old repudiation and family game of dismissiveness:
who is this person and what do we share but a name?