The Beach Girls (11 page)

She was flown back in a cargo plane for the horrid ceremony of funeral and burial. The boys could not be consoled. Their safe warm life had been fragmented.

After they were back in school I traced Martha to Bimini. I flew down. She was a guest aboard a huge yacht out of Miami. She was half-drunk and slightly sullen and strangely indifferent. Yes, she had heard of Lucille’s death. Too bad, she said, but she didn’t seem particularly moved.

“Why did you split up?” I demanded.

She shrugged so violently some of her drink spilled into the concrete quay. She was squinting in the hot sunshine. Her shoulders were peeling. “I got myself dropped off at Rock Sound. On the twenty-second of October. End of cruise for little Martha.”

“Why? Was there a quarrel?”

“Do you have to have it all spelled out for you, Leo? Should I draw pictures? It got too cozy aboard the
Angel
. Three’s a crowd. Yes, there was a quarrel. A dirty one. She was having all the fun and games, and I was the maiden aunt and I didn’t like it.”

“But Lucille wouldn’t—”

She looked at me flatly, with animosity. “She did, old buddy. Eagerly and frequently. With bells on, after Rex got her conscience quieted down. The first time was not exactly rape, but she cried and carried on about it. After that it all got too damn cozy. The wide blue sea is a romantic place, Leo. And don’t blame her too much. You have to understand that, like two goofs, we’d put ourselves in the hands of a greedy, adept, merciless son of a bitch.”

I flew from there to Nassau looking for Rigsby. The
Angel
was gone. I found out it had been docked at Yacht
Haven. I hung around until, by luck, I found a man who had seen the next to the last chapter of the story, and remembered it well, probably because it had bothered him.

Rigsby had been aboard the
Angel
at dusk, with a young couple. A dark-haired woman had come out onto the dock, visibly wobbly with drink. She had stood beside the
Angel
, begging and pleading with Rigsby. My informant hadn’t been able to hear her very well. It had been something about love and something about money. Rigsby answered her curtly. The man had heard him telling her to go away, she was boring him. She continued the scene. People on other boats were watching. Finally Rigsby had bounded up onto the dock and slapped her so hard he knocked her down. She got up slowly, without a sound, and walked away. That was the night she had killed herself.

It is difficult for me to explain what this information did to me. Lucille had always been a woman of style and poise and dignity. He had dirtied all that. In that, and in other ways, he had made it impossible for her to live with herself, much less come back to me.

I went back home with that sour knowledge heavy on my heart. I told myself it was over. I told myself it was no more her fault than if she had been run over by a truck. It was my inattention that had made her nervous and vulnerable. Aboard the
Angel
they had been a pair of rabbits in the cave of the panther.

I tried to throw myself into my work with such intensity I could blank out that part of my mind which concerned itself with her. Hard work had become tasteless. Finally, telling myself that if I knew more about Rigsby, I would get over it more quickly, I put a top firm of investigators on him and paid them a great deal of money to do a thorough job. They couldn’t trace him back to his origins. It was an ordinary-sounding account.

He had no police record. It was only by reading between the lines that you could detect the stink of him. Three times he had been named corespondent in divorce suits. He was a brawler, and twice had put men in the hospital, but no charges had been filed. He used Elihu Beach as his home port and kept the
Angel
at the Stebbins’ Marina.

The summary was very cautiously worded. They said
that even though there was no police record, it was considered possible that Rigsby was unscrupulous in money matters, particularly where women were involved. It was believed that it was his habit to borrow sums of money from women with whom he became emotionally involved, and make no effort to return such sums when the affairs were terminated. In addition to Lucille, there had been three other suicides among his intimates, two female and one male.

I read the report so many times that I inadvertently committed long passages to memory.

And I began to make mistakes in my work. Not crucial ones, but it was a warning that sooner or later I would make one so large it might negate the progress of years.

I knew then that I had to go after Rigsby. It had become obsessive. It took over three months to so organize my work, splitting up duties and responsibilities, that I could ask a leave of absence from the Board, reasonably certain that my executive assistant could carry on throughout the summer. I talked to Sam Brayman who handles my personal legal matters. I had decided he would be the only one who would know how to contact me. Sam was horrified.

“Good God, Leo, you gone out of your mind? Don’t talk to me. Talk to a psychiatrist. You pick a fake name like Rice, and make like the secret service sneaking up on that guy. What the hell do you expect to do?”

“I don’t know, Sam. I don’t want him to know who I am. I don’t want him to make the connection. I want to meet that animal face to face.”

“And then what?”

“There must be some way to put him out of the woman business.”

“You’re not thinking straight, Leo.” He stared at me. “Suppose you can’t fix his wagon for him. You going to kill him? I’m your lawyer. It’s a fair question.”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought of that. I might.”

“Thats just fine. That will be great for the boys. Give them a hell of a fine start in life, reading how their daddy was hung.”

“They’ll have the trust fund you’re setting up, Sam. And I’m not much good to them the way I am. I’m not
much good to anybody. I’m not very damn interested in living. I didn’t know how much she meant. And she deserved better than what he gave her. Or I gave her. I have to see him, Sam. I want to see if I can get him to talk about her. I want to hear
how
he talks about her. I want to see what he is, what motivates him. I don’t want to have to kill him. I don’t even know if I could, given a fair chance. I’m not rational about this. I admit it. Maybe if I could beat hell out of him, it might be enough.”

He looked at the snap of Rigsby again. “This fellow looks pretty husky,” he said dubiously.

“I’ll be in shape by the time I meet him. I’ll give myself time for that.”

“As your attorney I—oh, the hell with it.”

I made the arrangements about communication with him. Then I left.

Getting in shape was torture, self-inflicted. Not a case of swimming and jogging up and down the beach, though I did that too. I shoveled sand until sweat blinded me, my back was like a toothache, my shoulders popped and creaked. At the limit of endurance I would think of him knocking her down while people watched, and I would keep on shoveling. I lived on steak and salad. I’d fall into bed and clamber out of it again in the morning, with monstrous effort. In the evenings, after I was able to stay awake, I read the books there had never been time for. In a month I was ready. I bought the boat and chugged south, looking for Rigsby.

Now he was thirty feet away. I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept racing and I couldn’t slow it down. I got up. I was stiff and sore from the beating I had taken. Western had handled me with ridiculous ease. Rigsby would probably find me no more difficult. I sat on the rail and put a cigarette between puffed lips. Tomorrow I would see him by daylight, look into the eyes which had looked at her, look at the hands and lips of the last man to touch her while she lived.

She hadn’t been bad or weak. Just restless and neglected. Particularly vulnerable. He had a fine eye for vulnerability. I wondered how many men had thought of killing him.

It gave me a feeling of hopelessness. I was just another
one. I’d think of it, as others had, and go my way in bitterness. He would go on, cruel and blithe, all the world his harem. An unmarked animal.

I snapped my cigarette out into the black water and heard the soft hiss as it struck. I went to bed hoping I could sleep …

 … and sleep and never wake up, ever.

I sat cross-legged at dusk on a Wednesday night up on the foredeck of the
Alrightee
where no one could see me from the dock. I was celebrating a twelfth anniversary—twelve nights since I had indulged myself in fiasco with Joe Rykler.

The poor darling. No man has ever been so ill-used by a woman. I selected him in such a horribly cold-blooded way, adding up the advantages of him. He is amiable and amusing and sometimes sweet, and possibly slightly weak. He has been twice married. I have never heard him make one of those greasy little hints about a woman. He was interested in me. And I saw sensitivity in him, a capacity for understanding.

So I walked around him, kicking his tires, slamming his doors, peering under his hood—and took him for a demonstration ride.

Poor Joe. I was dead. I was a zombie. A few times I felt a dim flickering of a response, gone as soon as it was noticed, like striking damp matches in a rain. It all seemed endless, and it had a nightmare quality about it, as though I found myself engaged in some muscular and incomprehensible activity and, out of social timidity, did not dare ask, What on earth are we doing? My mind divorced itself primly from our barren, embarrassing efforts, and went skittering off into montages of trivia. Had I remembered to change Mrs. Milroyd’s appointment on the books? Will the cleaners get my gray skirt back by Saturday so I can wear it to work Monday? I
wish Amy would stop wearing my blue robe when she goes up to take a shower, but how can I tell her in a nice way?

And from these diversions I would return suddenly to the bunk aboard Joe’s
Ampersand
, and be quite shocked to find myself in the midst of love, with a very small L. It reminded me of my first dancing class, when that horror of a Sherman boy used to come galloping over to me so he could push me about the floor like I were a wheelbarrow, and I would shut my eyes and pretend I was the only girl pitcher they let into the major leagues.

Not that Joe was a horror. He was determined and sensitive and knowing and adept. But he could have spent the same amount of time just as profitably trying to row D Dock out to sea with a popsickle stick, or is that illusion uncomfortably Freudian, my girl.

Were I younger, and had it been my first adventure in that ultimate art of being a woman, it would have terrified me. My frigidity would have appalled me. But, oh Brad, my darling, you know and I know that there is no danger of that. At times I almost frightened you, I know. And certainly shocked you. Then suddenly you were gone, and there was a spoiled, trivial little man, his mouth working, his forehead sweaty.

Poor little man, who had such a neat system for having his cake and eating it too that he was quite unprepared for ptomaine. It was as though all the time we were together I had been looking at your shadow on one wall of my heart, a shadow made large by the placement of the light. I thought the shadow was you, until with that movement of fright, you attracted my attention and I looked at you squarely and suddenly despised you, despised myself, and found our little apartment cloying and silly in its manufactured atmosphere of sensuousness.

However I have learned one thing of no value from Joe. Perhaps every woman at some time in her life has a little nibbling of curiosity about what it would be like, really, to be a whore, to give herself with automatic proficiency to any taker. That curiosity has been satisfied. I would be a dismal flop, Joe. They’d give me the worst room and the oldest bed and the most threadbare towels.

But why, Joe, oh why could you have let yourself think
you have fallen in love with me? How is it possible, after that night twelve nights ago? Love can’t start that way. I chose you because I thought you would not become emotionally implicated. I could not bear to hurt anyone. Not after the way I’ve been hurt. I can’t love you. Or anyone. To even attempt to would be like an old fighter getting back in the ring. They beat my brains out, dear. I can’t take another punch.

So you follow me about with sad brown eyes now, and you say alarmingly poetic things to me. I never thought you would be vulnerable as a high-school boy.

Joe, you are in love with the idea of love, not me. That’s why you married twice. Take a better look at me, darling. I’m a special kind of walking wounded. They sent me back from the aid station. They said, This girl’s heart looks chewed, as though something ate half of it and bruised the rest of it black. Something emptied her eyes and disconnected certain primary sensory areas.

I messed us up, Joe, not out of mischief, but out of an instinct for self-preservation. I wished to manufacture a distraction, and was not at all distracted in the manner planned, as you surely noted.

And in twelve nights my remorse has not diminished. It is not the remorse one feels from having done something dirty wrong. Remorse, rather, for involving another. Had I known the experiment would have been so resoundingly unsuccessful—which is, of course, specious nonsense—I would have chosen Orbie, that tough, sane, cynical, tidy redhead. No nuances there. It would have been a briefer interlude, with Orbie not particularly concerned whether I chose to be bystander or participant. But he would not have become involved, and I would not now feel toward him that uncomfortable responsibility I feel toward you, Joe Rykler.

It is a special torment to be unloved in a lovely place. Now the last dusk colors are gone, the water gray as tears, the high neon feeble against what is left of the light. The heavy air is laced with fish and tide, rope and varnish, sun-hot wood and airborn salt, along with an elusiveness of flowers and tropic growth. All my senses work sharply, in either loneliness or love. Brad said I had a special talent for being alive. Out in open water
a boy in a snarly little boat is trying to dump a golden gawky girl off her water skis while she caws her derision.