Death by Association Read online

  She saw only one. It was a chair which shared a table with a small sofa, and the small sofa was occupied—occupied by the tall thin man who had moved like an older man, and the solid man who had moved a little as if he expected to break. Well, that would be better than a couple from the Ark. She crossed the room to the chair, stood in front of the chair and said, “Is this—?”

  “Not at all,” the tall, thin man—who was also a pale man, almost a gaunt man—said in a soft voice, in an oddly gentle voice. “Please do.”

  Mary Wister did. The pale man smiled at her, encouragingly. There was gentleness in his smile, and almost an offer of friendship, although there was no reason he should think she needed friendship, or encouragement. It was because she was only half a pair. That was it. He was encouraging her not to mind that she broke the pattern of the Ark. He was being gentle with the forsaken. “A long drink of water,” Mary thought, in a phrase which jumped into her mind suddenly, out of childhood. “Nothing but a long drink of water,” Who was he to be sorry for her? She could beckon and men that would make two of him would—

  Well, she had, and a man hadn’t. She had spent two years falling deeper and deeper into love, and had ended by being liked. Just liked. She had ended by being somebody to talk to. Fine. Wonderful. Then she felt that, ridiculously, she was flushing. That was all that was needed; to blush like a schoolgirl because a man told her, in a gentle voice, that an unoccupied chair was also unclaimed. She looked away from both the men, from the pale one who had spoken and the one with a square, weathered face who had merely, faintly, smiled and nodded and who had then, sleepily, closed his eyes. She caught the eye of a passing waiter; when he came, she ordered a drink—a martini, not a daiquiri without sugar—in a crisply casual voice, a voice from the best New York bars.

  “Very dry, please,” she said. “With lemon peel.”

  “It seems a pleasant place,” the thin man said to the man who sat beside him, although the man beside him had his eyes closed and might have been thought to be asleep. Possibly, Mary Wister found herself thinking, the music hurt his eyes. She realized she was looking at the solid man, trying idly to remember the name she had overheard him give at the desk, and looked away sharply.

  “They,” the solid man said, without opening his eyes, “tell me the food is good. The people seem peaceful.”

  It seemed to Mary, who had to overhear, but who continued resolutely to look away, who turned a little in her chair the more comfortably to move away, to withdraw—it seemed to Mary an odd thing for the solid man to say. The people were not noticeably peaceful; they were noticeably animated. The orchestra was not peaceful. By what association with what violence were they, then, to be described as peculiarly people of peace? By a man but now home from war? The solid man, she thought, looked a little old for that. The thin, pale man—

  The waiter brought her drink. He set it, on a square of paper, ornamented with a palm tree, on the table. She had to turn in her chair, sit straight in her chair, if she was to reach the glass. She turned and the pale man was reaching a long hand, a long white hand, for his own glass. How pale the hand was, how fragile! (She saw a square hand, a blunt hand, hard with bone and muscle. As if it were actually there, she closed her eyes against it, but only for a moment. That got you nowhere.)

  As she and the thin man leaned simultaneously toward the table, there was nothing which could keep their eyes from meeting. His eyes were brown; they were brown and they seemed to be tired. He smiled. The smile asked nothing, said nothing, yet it was not merely of the lips. Mary felt her own lips move, as if without her will, arranging themselves in the shape of something socially like a smile. Now he would speak, the long drink of water.

  “You’ve just arrived too,” he said, in the same curiously gentle voice. “Almost when we did. We were just agreeing it seems a pleasant place.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Mary Wister said, in a voice which said nothing, in a tone which ended it then and there. She took her glass from the table and moved back into her chair, withdrew into her chair. The long drink of water, she thought, as if that childhood phrase were pinned in her mind, fluttered there. But at the same time she thought, why am I doing this? What difference does it make? What’s the matter with me, anyway?

  She sipped her drink, and looked away from the pale man and the solid man, looked at people safely distant. The men in the lounge were, for the most part, wearing sports jackets—only a few of which competed with the blaring music—and slacks. Here and there a man wore a white dinner jacket. The women were dressed more variously. The plumper were in flowered prints; a few were in dinner frocks; one or two were only partly in their dinner frocks. They must come, Mary thought—faces and bodies becoming pictures in her mind—from almost everywhere; from New York and from Des Moines; from Atlanta and Milwaukee; from the Upper East Side and, at a remove or two, from the lower. Some had been long in the sun and were brown from it, and some were newly red and a few—like the thin man at whom she did not look—were pale from the North, as she was herself. And they had come from the cold which shrinks the body to find the solace of the sun.

  Bernstein had explained what the place would be like when he had offered her a job, saying at the same time she probably wouldn’t take it, and that he wouldn’t blame her. But he had thought of her, all the same, and thought there could be no harm in making the offer. They couldn’t, he told her, pay her rates.

  “However,” he added, and grinned, teeth strongly white in a lively brown face, “we can offer you room and board. And a chance to get out of this.”

  He had gestured, then, toward the window of his office, twenty stories up on Madison Avenue. Sleet beat against the glass, rattled against the glass.

  He had realized that, while she was absent from New York, there would almost certainly be better jobs and she would miss them. His own agency would almost certainly have better, and others might. She would take herself out of circulation—oh, until late March, perhaps early April. But it was hers if she wanted it.

  Half a dozen Florida hotels wanted to do a “thing.” “This thing,” he told her. The hotels were pretty much of a kind; he’d call it medium-luxury. Rates from, say, twenty to thirty or thirty-five a person, American. Not “Gold Coast,” although one of the hotels was on the beach. Not Boca Raton. Not Palm Beach.

  “Pleasant places, they sound like,” he said. “Pleasant people, maybe. Anyhow, it ought to be warm.”

  The half dozen hotels wanted to do “this thing” as a group, although they were not under a single management. They wanted text, which wasn’t Mary Wister’s problem, and pictures, which were, if she chose. Good pictures. Water color or, if she wanted, oil. If she wanted any part of it, as he supposed she wouldn’t. So?

  “Yes,” Mary Wister said. “I”d like it, Bernie.”

  “You’re probably being a fool,” he said. “I can’t do better than I said.”

  “I’d like it,” Mary repeated. “I’m—tired of New York, Bernie.”

  He looked at her quickly with his warm dark eyes. But then he smiled and said he saw her point; said that New York was lousy in February. Particularly in February. He said she could start anywhere she liked, but that if he were in her place he’d start with The Coral Isles in Key West, and come north with the spring. “If any,” he added, looking again through the window at the driving storm. He had said he’d see to her plane tickets.

  “Train,” she had told him then, and had learned that there was no train beyond Miami, only the air or the highway. Train and a bedroom and then, because it seemed simpler, Greyhound bus. She found out afterward that The Coral Isles would have sent a car, but the bus had been fine. For the three hours or so, she hadn’t felt lonely in the bus, and the pictures had been bright. When the bus reached Key West, the people who had been on it vanished. It was as if they had never been; they lived for three hours or so, to surround Mary Wister with an abstraction of humanity, and then the abstraction disintegrated. “No aftertaste,” Be
rnie probably would say.

  Here, actually in The Coral Isles, it was obviously not so simple. The job would take her a week or more (at a guess) and humanity, not in the abstract, would impinge, if she let it. She didn’t, of course, have to let it. The long drink of water could smile and smile, and see where it got him.

  The long drink of water was not smiling, at least at her. He was talking to the man beside him.

  “It troubles you,” he was saying, to the solid man. “It shouldn’t.”

  “Not as you mean it,” the solid man said. “It has to happen from time to time. It goes with the job, you see. In this case there was no alternative. Or, none that I could accept, naturally. None that I could see in time.” The solid man paused and closed his eyes. “Perhaps that troubles me,” he said. “That I let it go too far; let it go until there wasn’t an alternative. However—” He paused. “He’s dead and I’m here,” he said. He paused for a longer time. “He was twenty-one,” he added.

  “It shouldn’t worry you,” the thin man said, in his gentle voice. “How about another drink?” He smiled at his companion. “I prescribe it,” he said. He raised a long, thin hand to a passing waiter, who veered.

  This was a different waiter. It was inevitable that he should consider the three of them together, inevitable that he should look, first and expectantly, at Mary Wister, that he should, quite without realizing it, offer himself as a catalyst. The thin man, the sleepy man, waited too.

  “Nothing, thank you,” Mary Wister said, wanting another drink, holding an empty glass. And, unreasonably, she was furious. Even so simple a transaction as buying a drink was impossible of achievement. You moved an inch, you nodded your head, you said, “Martini, please,” and you locked with others. People grappled with you.

  The thin man smiled faintly and ordered for himself and the solid man.

  “If I could have my check, please?” Mary said.

  Because this was the wrong waiter, a check took time, which Mary Wister was left to sit through, ignored (politely) yet uncomfortably conscious of herself, flushed by the consciousness of herself; as annoyed, now, with herself as with the long drink of water and the man who couldn’t bother to keep his eyes open. It had all become ridiculous, and she had become ridiculous. She had become the properly brought up young woman who couldn’t speak to strange men. That was the way they locked with you, grappled you in. They made you childish, made you absurd. They—

  The check came and she signed it—and had to search her bag for her room key, because she had forgotten the room number, and could not write it in its allotted space. Prudish—and, in addition, incompetent. She wrote her name, hating the thin man for having created a situation out of—out of nothing.

  “Miss Wister?” a football player in a red jacket asked, solicitously, with hope. She nodded. “Mr. Grogan would be very happy if you would have a drink with him,” the red jacket told her. “Mr. Grogan, the manager.”

  “Of course,” Mary Wister said, and started to get up and found, because she had been sitting awkwardly, one foot was numb. It needed that, she thought, and stamped the foot. She followed the red jacket.

  “Pretty girl,” the thin man said to the sleepy one. “Or didn’t you notice?”

  “Naturally,” the sleepy man said.

  “Very stand-offish,” the thin man said. “Just toward us, do you suppose?”

  “Wants to keep herself to herself,” the sleepy man said.

  “Wary of wolves,” the thin man said. “Disconcerted when her foot went to sleep.”

  “Naturally,” the sleepy man said, and closed his eyes.

  II

  She had goneto bed early, after a drink with Mr. Grogan, who was large and red faced and white haired, who was hearty, who said, “Any way you want to do it, lady. Any way at all,” and had seemed to mean it; after an admirable dinner at a table by a window in a big dining room, presided over by a wiry headwaiter in a frenzy about, so far as Mary could see, nothing in particular, since the service was almost as excellent as the food. She had gone out for only a little time into the soft night, and seen moonlight on the sea and on the façade of the hotel and on the bougainvillaea and softly colored lights at the bases of palm trees; had heard music from beyond the tennis courts and had gone close enough to see a patio with tables around it and couples dancing. But then she had gone up early to bed.

  She had not gone immediately to sleep, because irritation remained in her mind. But now the irritation was not with the long drink of water, or with the sleepy man, but with Mary Wister herself. For no reason at all, by getting off on the wrong foot—probably, she thought, the one which subsequently had gone to sleep—she had behaved absurdly in a situation too trivial to require behavior of any kind. That was the heart of it, she had thought, stretched in bed, under a light blanket, moonlight sifting through Venetian blinds onto the bed. She had made an issue where there was no issue; adopted an “attitude” in circumstances which required nothing so positive. Nobody was trying to get to her, to impinge upon her. A man of no importance was trying to sit peaceably and have a drink, accepting with tolerance but without special interest the fact that others, including a brown-haired young woman in a green dress, were near by, also having drinks. She herself, for no reason whatever, out of a clear sky, had made a “thing” of it. There’s only to be said of me, Mary thought, that the sky wasn’t clear, won’t be clear for—oh, for a long time.

  But then, having slept not too well on the train, having ridden a long distance in the bus, Mary had evaded the question—whatever it was—by going to sleep, and it had still been only a little after ten. Music, softened by distance, was drifting through the open window, with the moonlight, with the soft air. She had slept with few dreams, although once she had dreamed for an instant—or an hour?—of a brown hand clenched in a fist. She had awakened, and it was not yet eight o’clock.

  She had put on a white sleeveless dress, with the light coat over it. She had packed up her sketch pad and carried it through silent corridors and down the stairs and through the empty lounge, past the closed piano, the tables bare of drinks. She had gone to the porch, bright now in sunlight, and found it almost empty too—but not quite empty. On a chaise longue, in the sun, the thin man was lying. Dark glasses hid his eyes. Already, the sun was reddening his face. He was very long and very thin, and stretched there, his white hands folded in his lap, he was defenseless.

  Mary started across the porch and then was conscious that he had turned his head to one side and was looking at her; conscious that, once again, he was faintly smiling. She took another step and hesitated, and turned toward him.

  “Good morning,” Mary said. “It’s a nice morning.”

  He took off his glasses and started to sit straight. But Mary shook her head and smiled, and then walked on. Things were evened up; everything was all right again. All right, tied up and put away.

  “Very,” the thin man said after her.

  She forgot the long man as she walked out into the bright morning. The sea rolled in gently toward the land, and sparkled as it rolled. She went along a walk and past the tennis courts and came to a deserted, sheltered area by a sandy beach. Beach chairs and chaises were arranged there neatly, waiting for those who, later, would come to sun themselves. But now there was no one; she had it to herself. She walked out on a long pier which led away from the beach and over the sparkle of the water; she passed ladders which led down from the pier into water so clear it seemed to have no depth. She stopped and watched a hundred, or a thousand, tiny fish, none longer than an inch, swimming in formation. They swam, each seemingly at a prescribed distance from the tiny fish on either side, the tiny fish before and behind, away from the land. Then there was a signal—there must have been a signal. On an instant, the little fish half turned, swimming at an angle to the land; turned again and swam toward the land; about-faced, then, faster than they could be seen to turn, and swam away again in the shallow, bright water, above the sand.

 
She left the little fish, still engaged in their intricate manoeuvres, and walked to the very end of the pier. She looked back, then, across the water at The Coral Isles itself, long and sprawling in the sun, seeming to reach arms out toward the sea. Now several more people were sitting, or lying, on the chairs and chaises on the porch, toasting in the sun. A hotel servant was moving about on the porch, attentive to needs which, from her distance, were not apparent, and his red jacket was bright in the sunlight. Mary Wister sat on a bench at the end of the pier and began, quickly, to sketch. She would look at things today and get them down, roughly, in black and white. The next day, or the day after, her choices made, she would begin in color. One or two of the color sketches would serve, back in New York, as foundations for more finished work. For once, she had time, which was rare in her trade.

  Having time, being at her trade, she forgot time. It was almost two hours before she remembered breakfast; it was another fifteen minutes before the thought of breakfast became imperative. She walked back along the pier, then. She stopped for a moment where she had seen the tiny fish, but now they were making their patterns somewhere else. She went through the sheltered area of beach, and already half a dozen sun worshippers were lying in it, wearing as little as possible and, in the cases of two women, burning as red as seemed likely or desirable. There was, Mary Wister thought, walking on, some magnification in intense coloration of the skin; surely, the woman lying face down on a chaise, did not in fact have such massive shoulders.

  She went along a walk, around the tennis courts, and saw, at one side of the deserted dancing floor, tables set in sun and shade. At the same time, she saw Mr. Grogan, as large and red faced and cordial as he had been the evening before. He was sitting at a table with—yes, with the solid man of the cocktail lounge. Mr. Grogan saw her, arose beaming, and beckoned. He urged her not to tell him that she had not had breakfast. When she could not tell him this, he was all a puller out of chairs, urger on of waiters.