Some Faces in the Crowd (21 page)

She drank the way he had seen her do all these other things, doubles, fast, ready to go further than anybody else, closer to the pier. And then, as abruptly as she had lost interest in the dance, the dice, she said, “Oh, the hell with this drinking. Who wants to go swimming?”

The cigarette ad, who had been at the bar when they reached it, said, “Oh, God, that again? I gave up moonlight swimming about the time I had my first hangover. Once a season holds me fine.”

Paul was wondering if he could make his voice sound casual enough when he said it. “I’ll go swimming with
you.”

“Swell. Are you a good swimmer?”

“Oh, good enough to paddle around.”

“I feel like swimming tonight. I think I could swim to Cuba tonight.”

Remembering the General’s joke about Gerry and her impulsive night flights, Paul wondered about that last one. He wondered too if her escort was objecting to this improvised shift in the evening’s pairing. Paul even started to mutter something about it, but the sun god was ahead of him. “Good God, I’m glad she’s found a sucker she can entice into those inky waters. Otherwise I might have had to go myself.”

Paul and Gerry sat on the end of the Club pier. The water was black and uninviting as it sloshed up under the pilings. It should have been moonlight, Paul was thinking.

“I never win long shots,” he was saying. “And this afternoon, when I first saw you out there, it was an easy hundred to one against our ending up alone together like this.”

“I like people who are ready to do things without planning them ahead,” she said.

“Isn’t Bob the ready kind?” he asked, meaning the sun god left standing on his clay feet at the hotel bar.

“Oh, Bob …” The way his name trailed off told practically everything. “Bob is something like me. Only he isn’t quite up to me. So he bores me. And anyway, I like people who do something. All Bob did was inherit money. He …” Then she swung the rudder on the conversation. “What’re we talking about Bob for? Bob’s always around to talk about. How about you? You aren’t just a rich kid. I know you do something.”

“Eleven months a year I’m a commercial artist. A pretty good one. The other month, I go away somewhere, Tehuantepec last year, Key West this time, and try to paint for myself. A sailor rowing in Central Park. Awful one-sided compromise.”

“But better than nothing,” she said, and they talked a little about painting, nothing too flossy, about actual techniques, and the local problems with light and dampness, and the things she said were more businesslike and practical than he would have expected.

“You must have been painting a long time,” he said. That WPA thing was a long way back now.

“I don’t really paint,” she said. And then after a moment of silence, “I don’t do anything.”

“But I thought you didn’t like people who don’t do anything?” Paul said. He had meant it for banter.

“Maybe I don’t like myself.”

Then, abruptly finished with conversation, she said, “The hell with it. Let’s swim.”

He saw her poise for a moment on the edge and then arch and knife cleanly into the dark water. He plunged in after her, expecting to tread water and splash around in the dark. But she was already moving off from the pier, her head bent low into the choppy sea as she executed her rapid crawl. Paul, an average swimmer, had to exert himself to keep up with her. Before they were fifty strokes out from the pier this swim had taken on a disconcerting quality. When they passed the first marker a hundred yards beyond the landing Paul knew this was no hilarious midnight escapade. There was an intensity about this swim out toward a dark, far horizon that made Paul realize he had gone beyond his depth into waters measured in other ways than merely in fathoms.

The sea water poured down his throat when he gasped for breath and his body ached to turn back. But he feared doing this might lose everything he had gained this evening, this strange, wonderful girl, this water-gypsy who had risen for him out of the sea. Yet there was a limit to his endurance and he was beginning, for the first time in his life, to reach the edges of it. His stomach tightened with the panicky feeling that his next stroke would double him up in a cramp of exhaustion. Alone with all the salt water, he was going to have to swallow his pride and turn back, slowly work his way into shore. Just then Gerry’s face bobbed up close to his.

“Hello,” she said. She looked fresh and impish, and the sight of her so close to him revived him a little.

“I’m hungry,” she announced. “Let’s go back.”

His stomach felt too full of ocean water for an appetite, but when he finally managed to get back to the pier and climbed up beside Gerry he was suddenly exhilarated. Of course he was hungry. He was starved. He had kept up with Gerry Lawford, crazy Gerry Lawford, and he was ready for anything.

They went skipping down Duvall Street, actually skipping like a couple of crazy kids, and when they reached the all-night Cuban place, they both had two helpings of black beans and yellow rice, washed down with beer Gerry drank from the bottle. “An oral regression to infancy,” she called it, and they both laughed. They were laughing at things that were funny only to them and Paul felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have a Gerry Lawford in his life. The years before Gerry fell away to a flat, arid desert of monotony.

He walked her back to her hotel, the Southernmost House, it was called, an intriguing Victorian mansion of towers and great porches that dominated the point where the Atlantic met the Gulf. He stopped in for a nightcap at the old oak bar that looked out on the sea, and when they paused for a moment on the great balcony and listened to the waves, the night and what they had made of it suddenly gave him the courage, and he kissed her, feeling the recklessness, the restlessness passing from her lips to his. Then, with her kind of suddenness, she broke away.

“Let’s go conching in the morning. Call for me early—say between eight and nine. I’ll show you how the real conchs do it.”

Her door closed him off from her so suddenly that he was left with the effect of her having vanished from his side in some metaphysical way. He could almost have believed this hadn’t happened at all and that their evening had been simply an extension of his daydream. He walked back slowly to his hotel with his mind still flooded with the vision of that afternoon’s golden sweep across the sunlit sea.

Every morning since he had come to Key West, Paul had slept late, counting that one of his chief vacation pleasures. But this next morning he was up in time to see the clouds opening up for the early sun to pour through. Even the pelicans were still asleep, drifting idly in small groups, rocking gently with the tide. Paul pulled on some ducks and a sport shirt and went down to the beach. Suddenly, as if by signal, all the pelicans rose together and went flapping out to sea on some urgent pelican business. Paul realized this was the first day since he had come to Key West that he was really alive. He thought about Gerry, and, for the first time, about her always being with him. The only trouble was, he couldn’t quite see her in his tailored New York apartment. It was a little like bringing home to captivity some wild bird whose home is the open sea. He was in love with her, though, in a way he had not imagined a man of his temperament could be.

He walked down the beach to the Southernmost and when he didn’t find her on the downstairs porch, he went up and knocked on her door.

“Come on in, Paul,” she called and he entered to find her in white ducks with the legs rolled up to her knees, and an old sweatshirt. But somehow these had the effect of heightening rather than smothering her beauty. She was squatting on the floor finishing a hurried water color. Strangely, it was the scene Paul had been watching from the beach, the pelicans rising in formation from the rose water of the morning sea. It was done in swift, fluid strokes, and the rose color was redder, stronger than it had been. The peace and tranquillity of the scene that had impressed Paul on the beach was translated into disturbing colors and broken lines. Thumb-tacked on the walls were half a dozen other seascapes, all blurs and sudden strokes of color, suggesting rather than representing, all catching some of the recklessness and vitality that Gerry brought to everything she did.

“These are all yours?” It wasn’t really a question, merely an opener.

“Just splashing around.”

“But they’re damn good.”

“My God, Paul, I was only playing. Don’t look so serious.”

“But they’re—they’re big league. You should do something with them.”

“I will, darling. I’ll give them to you.”

She jumped up, and with a little mock curtsey handed Paul the one she had just finished. “To remember me by.” She laughed.

He took the picture, beginning to say something serious, trying to make it sound not too pompous, but she cut him off. “Hell with it. Let’s go conching.”

They walked down the street to the Negro “beach,” a narrow, rocky promontory where the rowboats were pulled up. They carried the one they were going to use out over the rocks and pushed off. She showed him how to pole it, and then, when they were out a little way, she said, “Let’s see if we can catch ourselves some crawfish first.” He held the boat for her while she poised the long three-pronged spear over the surface and peered down through the single fathom of light-green water to the edge of the shoal at the bottom. Suddenly the spear shot into the water and when she pulled it up the prongs were fastened to a small speckled brown lobster. Paul tried it after that but even after he spied one on the bottom, the deceptive angle of the spear beneath the surface made him overshoot the target. It was much harder than it looked.

She tried it again, and when she brought up a larger one, lost interest in the spear.

“Conching’s more fun,” Gerry said. “I’ll show you how we dive for them.” Fixing a large circular glass to her eyes, she dived nimbly over the side. Paul was fascinated to watch her glide down through the twinkling green water to the rocks below. Watching her move along the bottom with slow-motion grace, he was reminded again of his earlier vision of her as a mermaid called up from the depths by his imagination.

But just then she popped up through the surface, crying, “Eureka!” triumphantly holding up a good-sized Queen conch.

She slithered over into the boat and handed Paul the goggles. “I know what let’s do. Let’s see who can stay down the longest.” She said it as a child might, as a spur-of-the-moment dare. But Paul, remembering last night’s swim, feared it might develop into more of an ordeal.

“But we haven’t got a watch, Gerry.”

“Oh, we can count, one-and-two-and …” She gave him the beat. “Oh, come on. It’s beautiful down there. It’s fun to stay down.”

Paul adjusted the goggles, inhaled until his temples began to pound, and dived. As Gerry had promised, he found himself enveloped in a shimmering green world more beautiful than he had imagined. He gripped a rock at the bottom to hold himself from rising and groped along, pleased with his unfolding ability to measure up to Gerry’s adventures. He wondered how much time had passed. He had begun keeping track but a large octopus that turned out to be a massive undersea growth had frightened him off his count. Water was slowly seeping in under the rubber rims of the goggles and his eyes were beginning to smart. Then his ears were aching and he had a sense of being squeezed within green walls that were pressing down and in and up at him. He thought he saw a conch a few feet ahead of him, but that was too far now. His lungs were ready to explode. Why, a man could die, die down here to prove something. But what? What did it mean to Gerry? He was shooting up toward the surface now, flailing his arms with mounting frenzy as he wondered if he could make it in time.

Then his head was above water at last and he was breathing, breathing, that first and last of luxuries.

“Ninety-three,” Gerry called. “Paul, I’m proud of you.” The praise, the smile, the warm camaraderie completely erased his choking panic of a moment before.

“Now count for me …” She could hardly wait to get the goggles on and be over the side again. She was gone in a swift little dive that hardly disturbed the calm surface.

Fifty … He could see her gliding leisurely along the bottom. Seventy-five … ninety … Soon she had passed his record and he waited for her to pop to the surface, chortling over her triumph. But she was staying down. One hundred … one hundred-and-twenty-five … He peered down anxiously. She wasn’t moving any longer. Just seemed to be sitting there—the mermaid again—at home on the bottom of the sea. One hundred-and-fifty … sixty … seventy-five … And this count slower than seconds—that was three minutes! The pulse of panic began to thump in his throat … No one could stay down that long … Suddenly he remembered those nightmare stories of giant shellfish that clamp down on a swimmer’s hands … Somewhere he had read how a Marine had been lost that way in the South Pacific …

In this same moment he dived, reached her, groped for her and they shot up to the surface together.

“Gerry—Gerry—are you all right?”

“Of course.” She laughed. “I was just getting ready to come up. How high did you count?”

“One hundred-and-seventy-five.”

“Dare me to stay down for two hundred?”

“Frankly,” Paul said, “I’ve had enough diving for one morning. You won’t be satisfied till the Coast Guard drags the bottom for you.”

“Okay,” she said, completely unconcerned. “Do you like conch? The couple who run the Southernmost are friends of mine. We can take these right in their kitchen and start working on them. I lived on these things one season down here when you could’ve turned me upside down and shaken me and never found a nickel.”

That day Paul felt as if he were gliding through life on skis the way Gerry had skimmed the surface of the sea. The lunch on the sun porch of the Southernmost, the walk through town to the fishing docks; the long talk on the beach; the cocktails at sunset, the fun of drinking together and the marvelous sense of growing intimacy; and finally the moonlight dance in the patio and Gerry Lawford, this crazy, unpredictable, magical girl, in his arms at last. His lips were against her golden cheeks and even the smell of her was of some fresh wild berry that one finds on the hills. Later tonight, or perhaps tomorrow, he would ask her. He was already trying it, phrasing it, like a stage bit player with one line to perfect: Gerry, you said you never turn down a dare. So, I dare you to marry me.