Tough Guys Don't Dance (3 page)

But let me describe the woman. It's worth the look. She must have been fifteen years older than my wife, and thereby, not far from fifty, but what a splendid approach! There used to be a porny star named Jennifer Welles who had the same appearance. She had large, well-turned promiscuous breasts—one nipple tilted to the east, one stared out to the west—a deep navel, a woman's round belly, a sweet buoyant spread of buttocks, and
dark
pubic hair. That was what encouraged the prurience to stir in those who bought a ticket to watch Jennifer Welles. Any lady who chooses to become a blonde is truly blonde.

Now, the face of my new neighbor was, like the porny star, Jennifer Welles, undeniably appealing. She had a charming upturned nose and a full pout on the mouth, as spoiled and imperious as the breath of sex. Her nostrils flared, her fingernails—the Liberation could go screw itself!—were scandalously well-manicured with a silver varnish to catch the silver-blue toning above her eyes. What a piece! An anachronism. The most complacent kind of West Coast money. Santa Barbara? La Jolla? Pasadena? Wherever it was,
she must certainly come from an enclave of bridge players. Perfectly groomed blondes remain as quintessential to such places as mustard on pastrami. Corporate California had moved right into my psyche.

I can hardly describe what an outrage this seemed. As well paste a swastika outside the office of the United Jewish Appeal. This blonde reminded me so directly of Patty Lareine that I felt obliged to strike. Do what? I could hardly say. At the very least, gore their mood.

So I listened. She was one immaculately dressed full-bodied lady who liked to drink. She could take them back to back. Scotch, of course. Chivas Regal. “Chivvies,” she called them. “Miss,” she told the waitress, “give me another Chivvies. Lots of diamonds.” That was her word for ice, ha, ha.

“Of course you're bored with me,” she said to her man in a loud and most self-certain voice, as if she could measure to the drop just how much sex she might be sitting upon. A powerhouse. There are voices that resonate into one's secret strings like tuning forks. Hers was one. It is crude to say, but one would do much for such a voice. There was always the hope that its moist little relative below would offer something of the same for your preserves.

Patty Lareine had such a voice. She could be diabolical with her lip around a Very Dry Martini (which, of course, count on it, she would insist on calling a Marty Seco). “It was gin,” she'd say in all the husky enthusiasm of her hot-to-trot
larynx, “it was gin as done the old lady in. Yes, asshole,” oh, and she would include you most tenderly in this jeer, as if, by God, even you, asshole, could feel all right if you were being kept around her. But then, Patty Lareine belonged to another kind of wealth, strictly derivative. Her second husband, Meeks Wardley Hilby III (whom once she most certainly tried to persuade me to murder) was
old
Tampa money and she drilled him good but not between the eyes, rather up his financial fundament thanks to her divorce lawyer, a whiz bomb (who, I used to assume to my pain, was probably massaging the back wall of her belly every night for a time, but then, one cannot expect less of a dedicated divorce lawyer—it pays off in presenting the witness). Although Patty Lareine was trim to bursting in her build, and in those days, peppy as a spice jar, he modulated the moxie of her personality down to more delicate herbs. With the aid of intense coaching (he was one of the first to use a video camera for rehearsal) he showed her how to be tremulous on the stand and thereby turn the judgmental eye into—forgive me!—one fat old judge melting away. Before they were done, her marital peccadilloes (and her husband had witnesses) came out as the maidenly mistakes of a desperately beleaguered and much abused fine lady. Each ex-lover appearing as witness against her was depicted as one more unhappy attempt to cure the heart that her husband had shattered.
Patty may have begun life as one good high school cheerleader, just a little old redneck from a down-home North Carolina town, but by the time she was ready to divorce Wardley (and marry me) she had developed a few social graces. Hell, her lawyer and she grew equal to Lunt and Fontanne in the manner they could pass a bowl of soup back and forth on the witness stand. One scion of old Gulf Coast Florida money was certainly divested of a share of his principal. That was how Patty came to belong to wealth.

The more I listened to the lady in The Widow's Walk, however, the more I could discern that she was of other ilk. Patty's wits were true wit—that was all she had to stand between her and the crass and crude. This new blonde lady now transforming my evening might be short on wit, but then, she had small need for it. Her manner came with her money. If all else was right, she would probably meet you at her hotel-room door attired in no more than white elbow-length gloves. (And high heels.)

“Go ahead, say you're bored,” I now heard clearly. “It's to be expected when an attractive man and woman decide to go on a trip. To be thrown together for all these days creates the fear of disenchantment. Tell me if I'm wrong.”

It was obvious that her interest in his reply was less than her pleasure in letting me know that they not only were not married, but were, by anyone's estimate, on a quick and limited fling. It could wrap itself up on any turn. Taken
as a beast on the hoof, Tweed-and-Flannels shouldn't be too hard to replace for a one-night stand. This lady had a body language to suggest that you would be given one thoroughgoing welcome on first night—only later would difficulties arise. But the first night would be on the house.

No, I'm not bored, Tweed-and-Flannels was telling her now in the lowest voice, not bored at all, his voice droning into her ear like white noise put on the audio system to dull your synapses to sleep. Yes, I decided, he must be a lawyer. There was something in the confidential moderation of his manner. He was addressing the Bench on a point of law, helping the judge not to blow the case. Soothing!

Her text, however, was obstreperous! “No, no, no,” she said, giving a light shake to her ice cubes, “it was my idea we come here. Your negotiations take you to Boston, well then, I said, my whim also takes me. Do you mind? Of course you don't. Daddy is mad about brand-new mama. Et cetera,” she said, pausing for a sip of the Chivvies. “But, darling, I have this vice. I can't bear contentment. The moment I feel it, everything says ‘Goodbye, my dear!' Moreover, I'm an avid map reader, as you have learned, Lonnie. They say women can't read directions. I can. At Kansas City, way back in—wait, it comes to me—in 1976, I was the only Jerry Ford woman in our delegation who could read a map well enough to drive from the hotel to his headquarters.

“So, there was your mistake. Showing me a map of Boston and its environs. When you hear that tone in my voice, when I say, ‘Darling, I'd like to see a map of this region,' beware. It means my toes are itching. Lonnie, ever since I was in the fifth grade and started geography studies”—she squinted critically at the melting diamonds in her glass—“I used to stare at Cape Cod on the map of New England. It sticks out like a pinkie. You know how children are about pinkies? That's their
little
finger, the one close to them. So I wanted to see the tip of Cape Cod.”

I must say I still didn't like her friend. He had that much-massaged look of a man whose money makes money while he sleeps. Not at all, not at all, he was telling her, laying his salad oil on her stirred-up little sorrows, we both wanted to come here, it's truly all right, and more of such, and more of such.

“No, Lonnie, I gave you no choice. I was a tyrant about it. I said, ‘I want to go to this place, Provincetown.' I wouldn't allow you to demur. So here we are. It's a whim on top of a whim, and you're bored stiff. You want to drive back to Boston tonight. This place is
deserted
, right?”

At this point—make no mistake about it—she looked at me full out: full of welcome if I took it up, full of scorn in the event I did not reply.

I spoke. I said to her, “That's what you get for trusting a map.”

It must have worked. For my next recollection
is of sitting with them. I may as well confess that my memory is damnable. What I recall, I see clearly—sometimes!—but often I cannot connect the events of a night. So my next recollection is of sitting with them. I must have been invited over. I must, indeed, have been good company. Even he was laughing. Leonard Pangborn was his name, Lonnie Pangborn, a good family name in Republican California, doubtless—and hers was not Jennifer Welles but Jessica Pond. Pond and Pangborn—can you understand my animosity now? They had the patina that comes off a TV screen from characters in a soap opera.

Actually, I began to entertain her considerably. I think it is because I had not spoken to anyone for days. Now, depression or no, some buried good humor in me seemed well rested. I began to relate a few stories about the Cape, and my timing was vigorous. I must have been as energetic as a convict on a one-day pass outside the walls, but then, I was so well on my way to getting along with Pond that it came near to lifting me out of my doldrums. For one thing, I soon divined that she was drawn to substantial property. Fine mansions on good green lawns with high wrought-iron gates gave her the same glow a real estate agent derives from bringing the right client to the right house. Of course, I soon figured it out. To the money she was born with, Jessica had added her own pile. Back in California she
was exactly that, a successful country real estate agent.

What a disappointment Provincetown must have been to her. We offer our indigenous architecture, but it is funky: old fish-shed with wooden-stairway-on-the-outside Cape Cod salt-box. We sell room-space to tourists. One hundred rented rooms can end up having one hundred outside stairways. Provincetown, to anyone looking for gracious living, is no more uncluttered than twenty telephone poles at a crossroads.

Maybe she was deceived by the delicacy of our site on the map: the fine filigree tip of the Cape curls around itself like the toe of a medieval slipper! Probably she had pictured swards of lawn. Instead, she had to look at honkytonk shops boarded up and a one-way main street so narrow that if a truck was parked at the curb, you held your breath and hoped nothing scratched your rented sedan as you went on through.

Naturally, she asked me about the most imposing house our town can point to. It sits on a hill, a five-story château—the only one in town—and is fenced about in high wrought iron. It is far removed from its gate. I couldn't say who lived there now, or whether he owned or rented. I had heard the name and forgot. It is not easy to explain to strangers, but in the winter, people choose to burrow down in Provincetown. Getting to know new arrivals is no simpler than traveling from island to island. Besides, none of my acquaintances, dressed as we were for winter (dungarees,
boots and parkas) would ever get past a gate. I assumed that the present seigneur of our one imposing house had to be some kind of rich gink. So I drew on the rich man I knew best (who happened, indeed, to be Patty Lareine's ex-husband from Tampa) and I moved him all the way north to Provincetown and loaned him the château. I did not wish to lose momentum with Miss Jessica.

“Oh, that place belongs,” I said, “to Meeks Wardley Hilby the Third. He lives all alone there.” I paused. “I used to know him. We went to Exeter at the same time.”

“Oh,” said Jessica after quite a pause, “do you think we could pay him a visit?”

“He's not there now. He rarely stays in town any longer.”

“Too bad,” she said.

“You wouldn't like him,” I told her. “He's a very odd fellow. At Exeter he used to drive all the deans crazy by tweaking the dress code. We had to wear jackets and ties to class, but old Wardley would get himself up like a prince of the Salvation Army.”

There must have been some promise in my voice, for she began to laugh happily, but I remember that even as I began to tell her more I had the strongest feeling I should not go on—just as irrational as an unaccountable smell of smoke—do you know, I sometimes think we are all of us equal to broadcasting stations and some stories should not be put on the air. Let
us leave it that I had an unmistakable injunction not to continue (which I knew I would ignore—that much is to be said for an attractive blonde!) and at the moment, even as I looked for the next words, an image came to me across the years, bright as a coin from the mind, of Meeks Wardley Hilby III, of
Wardley
, gangling along in his chinos, his patent-leather pumps and his old dinner jacket that he wore every day to class (to the consternation of half the faculty) his satin lapels faded and scuffed, his purple socks and heliotrope bow tie standing out like neon signs in Vegas.

“God,” I said to Jessica, “we used to call him ‘goon-child.' ”

“You have to tell me all about him,” she said. “Please.”

“I don't know,” I replied. “The story has its sordid touches.”

“Oh, do tell us,” said Pangborn.

I hardly needed encouragement. “Attribute it to the father,” I said. “There has to be a powerful influence coming from the father. He's dead now. Meeks Wardley Hilby the Second.”

“How do you tell them apart?” asked Pangborn.

“Well, they always called the father Meeks and the son Wardley. There was no confusion.”

“Ah,” he said. “Were they at all alike?”

“Not much. Meeks was a sportsman and Wardley was Wardley. In childhood, the nurses used to tie his hands to the bed. Meeks's orders. It was
calculated to put a stop to Wardley's onanism.” I looked at her as if to say, “This is the detail I was afraid of.” She gave a smile, which I took to mean, “We're by the fire. Tell your tale.”

I did. I worked at it with great care, and gave them a full account of the adolescence of Meeks Wardley Hilby III, never stopping to chide myself for this outrageous change of venue from the palace on the Gulf Coast to the northern estate here on the hill, but then, this was only Pond and Pangborn I was telling it to. What would they care, I told myself, where it took place?