Life Penalty (34 page)

“Hello, Lila,” he said warmly. “I like it too.”

“None of you has any taste,” Dave grumbled.

“It looks like a beautiful day,” Lila enthused, changing the subject.

“Looks like rain,” Gail’s father replied automatically.

“It hasn’t rained in months,” Lila told them. “Do you want to see how I changed your room around?” she asked her daughter and son-in-law.

“It’s a mess,” her father said. “She made a mess.”

“Where’s the picture?” Gail asked when they were almost out of the living room.

They looked toward the wall for the enlarged photograph of Gail and Cindy being buffeted by the wind. “I took it down,” her mother said softly. “It was too painful for me to look at.”

“That’s when she got the itch back,” her father pronounced. “Once she moved that picture, she couldn’t stop till she’d moved everything. When she finally finished shuffiing the furniture around, she decided it was time to find a new building.”

“It’s just time for a change,” Lila said, leading them into the guest bedroom.

“Time for a change,” her father grumbled from behind them. “Time to get your head examined, you mean.”

“Oh, be quiet, Dave,” Lila exclaimed.

What was the matter with her parents? Gail wondered, pretending to study the furniture in the guest bedroom. They rarely argued; she couldn’t even remember her father raising his voice before unless it was in song. Now it
seemed all they had to do was look at each other for the bickering to start. Why?

“Is he all right?” Gail asked her mother after her father had left the room.

“He’s changed,” Lila said, as if she couldn’t quite accept the truth of her words.

“In what way?”

Gail’s mother shrugged, fighting unsuccessfully to hold back her tears. “He stopped painting. He never sings, not even in the shower. Says there’s nothing to sing about. He’s angry all the time. I can’t say or do anything right. He’s just—changed. She looked from Gail to Jack and back to Gail. “So, you unpack and have a rest,” her mother directed pleasantly, regaining her composure, “and we can go to the pool if you’d like, or maybe for a walk along the beach.” She stopped on her way to the door, hesitating. “You’re not mad, are you? About the picture?” She looked at the floor. “I just fell apart every time I looked at it.”

“It’s all right,” Gail said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I know.” Her mother smiled sadly, her lip trembling. Then she nodded a few times to herself and left the room.

“The room doesn’t look any different to me,” Jack said after she had gone.

“The bed was against the other wall before,” Gail told him. “And the drapes are new.”

“You want to go for a swim?” he asked, not really listening.

Gail shook her head. “No,” she said, lying back. “I think I’ll try to sleep for a while.”

“You’re wasting a nice afternoon,” he told her. She heard him opening his suitcase and changing his clothes. When he was finished, she was almost asleep. His voice caught her at the tip of consciousness. “You sure you don’t want to join me?”

She fell asleep before he could ask her again.

—

It took them thirty-five minutes to reach Capriccio’s. Not that it was such a long way, but the drivers in Palm Beach seemed uncomfortable at speeds over twenty miles an hour. (“What can you expect?” her sister Carol had once joked. “They’re half blind and they can’t hear if a horn honks. Besides, they’re not in a hurry.”)

“How’s Carol?” Gail asked, her thoughts on her sister.

“She sounded a little depressed when I spoke to her,” her mother answered.

“Why is she depressed?” Gail asked, hoping that nothing had happened between her sister and her new boyfriend.

“She missed out on another part,” her mother said, “and I think she’s a little nervous about our visit.”

“Why would she be nervous about your visit?”

“I don’t know. She seems nervous about our meeting this Stephen she’s living with. You met him, didn’t you, Gail?” Gail said she had. “What’s he like?”

“Very nice,” Gail told her. “He looks a bit like Jack Nicholson.”

“I always thought your father looked a bit like Jack Nicholson,” her mother said.

“You’re crazy, Lila,” Dave Harrington grumbled, and after that nobody said anything until they arrived at the restaurant.

Capriccio’s was filled when they arrived, and they had to wait another half hour for their table, despite having made reservations. When they sat down, Gail surreptitiously glanced around the opulent room at the other diners. For the most part, they were extravagantly dressed and coiffed. Gail estimated their median age to be sixty-five.

The service was slow and Gail found herself filling up on wine. When the food arrived, she discovered that she
wasn’t very hungry anymore, and so she ate little but continued drinking a lot. Her mother wondered aloud if she shouldn’t go a bit easy. Her father said she was entitled to tie one on occasionally, and refilled her glass. Gail shrugged and drank some more, beginning to feel vaguely dopey and very giddy.

“Slow down,” Jack advised quietly.

“Is there anyone in this room under eighty?” Gail chuckled out loud.

“Just the four of us,” her father replied every bit as loudly. Gail thought of the oxygen in the elevators of the condominium. “They certainly cling to it,” she stated on the way to the car, feeling herself more than slightly off balance.

“Cling to what?” Jack asked, helping her into the back seat.

“Life,” she muttered, resting her head against his shoulder.

Before she closed her eyes, she noticed that the car pulling away beside them had an interesting bumper sticker on its rear fender. God, Guns and Guts, it proclaimed boldly, Made America Great.

T
he weather predictions proved accurate. The skies were the blue of travel folders. The temperature rarely dropped below eighty, even at night, and the ocean, while often rough, was inviting and warm. There were surfers everywhere.

Gail lay on her lounge chair by the side of the multi-shaped pool (a square at one end which swerved to the right and opened into a larger rectangle at the other) and watched the other sun worshipers. Her father lay beside her, his eyes closed, his ears plugged by the omnipresent Sony Walkman. He rarely stirred, arranging his body in place at just after eight in the morning and remaining that way until exactly twelve o’clock, when he would suddenly, as if on an automatic timer, sit up and go in for lunch. By one o’clock he was back in poolside position, not stirring until the sun disappeared from his corner, when he would pack up his towel and retreat indoors. He rarely spoke. If he did, it was usually to disagree with something someone had said or to tell someone’s grandchild to be quiet. Gail wondered what he did when it rained. Her mother, who rarely came out to the pool (she was afraid of the sun’s rays, she explained, in the face of much derision from Gail’s father), told Gail that on rainy days Dave Harrington rarely got out of bed at all anymore.
They used to take little trips to the shopping malls, go to an early movie, perhaps visit with friends, but they didn’t lately, she said without further explanation, and Gail didn’t ask for one.

Gail looked toward the pool and watched Jack as he completed the last of the fifty lengths he had taken to swimming every day since they arrived. He raised his head triumphantly out of the water and shook his hair free, like a dog after a bath. He caught her staring at him and waved. She waved back, watching him climb from the pool and jog over in her direction.

“Tired?” she asked, handing him a towel.

He took it and ran it roughly through his hair. “No,” he told her. “It gets easier every day. I may increase it tomorrow. Try for fifty-five lengths.”

“Don’t strain,” Gail cautioned.

“Don’t worry,” he smiled, obviously pleased that she had. “Feel like a walk on the beach?”

Gail shook her head. “Not now.”

He looked disappointed. “Mind if I go?” he asked.

“No. Why should I mind?”

“No reason,” he said, dropping the towel to the chair beside her. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”

“Take your time.” Gail watched as he disappeared over the grassy dunes, down the steps to the ocean.

She looked back over at her father. His eyes remained closed. His skin was as brown and wrinkled as his swimming trunks. It was almost as if he were daring the sun to harm him. Gail lay back against her own chair and let her eyes drift back to the pool.

She heard voices approaching and turned to see three impossibly slim young men laying their towels across three vacant chairs on the other side of her father. They were effeminate and theatrical, their movements highly exaggerated, as if everything they said was of the utmost
importance. They must be the young men she had heard about the other day. They were the scandal of the building, as it turned out, having rented an apartment for the season from old Mrs. Shumacker. One was rumored to be her nephew, it was reported with raised eyebrows. Poor thing—to have such an obvious stereotype in the family.

Gail stared openly at the three men, who seemed mindful only of each other. They wore the briefest of bikinis, something that would further enrage the residents, no doubt, and they rubbed suntan oil on each other as if it were their mission on earth. Gail wondered if they ever worried about AIDS. She looked away when one of them caught her staring, closed her eyes against the sun and tried to ignore their conversation. But their voices were too deliberate, too studied to be ignored. Gail allowed herself to be drawn into their dialogue, like a university student auditing a class.

“The worst blow,” one was saying, “was when they hired that awful woman, Helene Van Elder, to do the sets. Here I’ve slaved my ass off for two and a half years writing this damn play and she tells me that she wants to do the whole backdrop in silver foil, and I thought, I wish I was dead.”

“How was it resolved?” another of the men asked.

“It wasn’t. They never did the play. The director had some sort of a nervous breakdown.”

“Who was the director?”

“Tony French,” came the reply. Gail recognized the name. He was a noted Broadway light. Gail wondered if she would recognize the names of these three men as well. She tried to steal a glance back in their direction, but the sun was now obstinately in her eyes.

“Poor Tony,” the highest of the voices proclaimed. “He’s just never gotten over Auschwitz.”

“Jesus, Ronnie,” laughed one of the others, “you’ve never gotten over high school.”

The writer chuckled. “High school was no laughing matter.” He paused dramatically. “Anyway, I suppose it was for the best that they killed the play. You’ll never guess who they were thinking of for the lead?”

“Who?” the others asked in unison.

“Raquel Welch! Can you imagine? For the part of a sixty-year-old woman with scars all over her body. They thought she might give it sex appeal. Naturally, I screamed bloody murder. I told them whoever heard of a sexy sixty-year-old woman, and of course, they hit me with Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. I told them that the last I heard, Mae West was dead. They told me I didn’t know a tinker’s damn about sexy women to begin with. I suggested Monica Campbell.”

“Monica Campbell? That dinosaur!”

“She couldn’t act her way out of her last face-lift.”

“Come on, you guys, be generous.”

There was laughter. “None of us, Ronnie,” he was told, “is particularly known for his generosity.” There was more laughter.

Gail let herself be drawn into another conversation that was taking place on her other side. It was a debate much more common to the area—where to eat dinner. “I don’t like Bernard’s,” a woman was saying to the great protestations of her colleagues. “Oh, I know it’s your favorite restaurant, but it’s just too rich and too noisy for me. I like somewhere quiet and intimate.”

“You like somewhere cheap,” she was told.

“Did you see the couple who moved into 502?” another woman interrupted. “I went up in the elevator with them yesterday. He’s absolutely gorgeous—looks just like Don Ameche.”

“Isn’t Don Ameche dead?”

“Is he?”

“I didn’t say it was Don Ameche; I just said he looked like Don Ameche. My second husband looked just like Don Ameche,” she continued. “Who told you he was dead?”

Gail turned her head back toward the three homosexuals.

“Did you see the movie with that gorgeous Mel Gibson,
The Year of Living Dangerously
, I think it was called,” the voice she recognized as Ronnie’s was saying. The others muttered something Gail couldn’t quite make out. “I thought I’d write a play for that woman who played the man, you know, the dwarf.”

“She died,” one of the others said.

“She died? My God, when?”

“I think you’re wrong. I never read that she died.”

“Oh well, there’s always that little guy who used to be on ‘Fantasy Island.’ You could write something for him.”

“He died.”

“What? What are you talking about? He isn’t dead. What did he die of?”

“I don’t know.” He paused dramatically. “Dwarfs die,” he pronounced finally, shrugging his bony shoulders.

Gail got up from her chair and headed for the ocean. It seemed that there were only two things that people talked about anymore—death and food. These were certainly the two preoccupations of life in Palm Beach—who died and where they had eaten dinner the night before.

She climbed the steps to the top of the dune, watching out of the corner of her eye for snakes in the wild grass. She had heard the caretakers talking on her way out to the pool. A family of black snakes was supposedly living out here, well hidden by the strip of dense foliage that the government refused to allow the residents to cut back. Something about the natural protection fFom the ocean, Jack had tried to explain. Gail cast a wary glance around
for the snakes, even though they were said to be harmless. She reached the top of the steps and looked out at the immense expanse of salt water.

As it did every time she climbed these steps, the sight took her breath away. Thousands of miles of rolling ocean suddenly stopped right under her feet. It just stopped, she thought, amazed as always. And yet, there was fear it might one day choose to continue, sweeping away the high-priced residences and elaborate highways. Indeed, it was rumored that the old highway was lying out there somewhere, covered by sand and seaweed. Jack dismissed this as romantic babbling, and Gail had wondered how something that had meant death and destruction could be described as romantic.