18mm Blues (11 page)

Thinking of other places he'd rather be.

Cozumel, Mexico, came to mind. In a world out of the ordinary, seventy feet down in the Tormentos Reefs, among the huge coral pinnacles and heads, being merely one of the swimming creatures along with eagle rays and schools of angelfish. His favorite dive, Tormentos. Did the black, big-eyed, at least two-hundred-pound grouper he'd had such lengthy communion with there eleven years ago still claim that sandy valley? Groupers probably didn't have such a life span. But he hoped so.

Even more where he'd rather be was Litchfield, Connecticut. Home. The three-story Federal-style house. Not purely, severely Federal because of its Victorian revisions, but in its heart and bones recalling the year 1785. Painted white, of course, with black wooden shutters, and like most of the other houses there along North Street set back the distance of a large lawn. Wrapped in front and along nearly all of one side by a wide, railed porch. A glider on the porch, an old standing one of metal with springs that refused to be silenced and striped canvas-colored cushions, kept up for the sake of memories. Wicker chairs and tables that were brought from the garret of the barn every year about the time when the dogwood petals fell. Returned to the barn soon after yellowed maple leaves began accumulating in their seats.

He could go back. Would. Not phone and have younger brother Jeff meet him at Kennedy or Bradley. Hurry the surprise of himself up the uneven brick walk and up the five steps of the porch and on in to his father, Fred, and his mother, Ruth, and perhaps even his older sister Janet and perhaps even his grandmother Wilma. They would be at the supper table passing portions or eating from trays while watching television. They'd maul him with hugs, pepper him with kisses, and after things had settled he would sit and exchange updates with them and he would notice that his mother and father, as ever, couldn't be within reach of each other without in some way touching.

His mother would love readying his room on the top floor, the one where the apple tree tips scratched eerily across the window screen when there was wind. Just below where the wasps squeezed in and built combs. He'd lie in that bed and reacquaint himself with that certain darkness. He'd delight in regression.

He would be eighteen again, no, fifteen. It would be the June when he'd begun at the White Flower Farm. There'd be the early morning two-mile bike ride to work along the black-topped road, passing the piled and nearly continuous rock walls and the jostling patches of wild lilies with that particular day's blossoms enjoying their turn. He'd do whatever tasks the people at White Flower wanted, proud of being able to work, whether it was helping customers load purchased plants into their cars or dividing seedlings into separate containers or edging the display beds or merely deadheading petunias. It seemed the harder the work, the more he liked it, shoveling, hauling topsoil, stacking fifty-pound bags of mulch. He'd pedal home with his jeans caked and his fingernails jammed with soil, some days almost too exhausted to smile.

He loved plants, the astounding intricacy of ferns. The acquired strength of trees, all that. Irises. During their season he'd seldom pass their bed without giving way to appreciation for their tongues and beards and the perfect arrangement in their fragrant throats.

He had learned land, learned growing. His interest surpassed his White Flower Farm chores, was intensified by books dealing with famous gardens. Versailles, of course, Hampton Court, Blenheim Palace and other grand ones, and many just as grand to him in their own way such as Barnsley House, Old Westbury, Villandry, Cranborne Manor, Sissinghurst. There were texts to help affiliate him with André Lenôtre, William Kent, Inigo Jones, Henry Wise, and Capability Brown. And in some instances there would be examples of their plans, showing in scale and detail intersecting paths and
allées
, positions of trees and gates, statuary and fountains, walls and arbors,
parterres
and hedges.

On quite a few Saturdays he would take the bus down the length of Connecticut for the purpose of the main reading room of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue. He pored over articles published by the Royal Horticultural Society and such otherwise unattainable volumes as
The Formal Garden in England and Scotland, 1906
. And then he would take the long bus ride home with his head full of the future.

The University of Connecticut at Storrs. A landscape architect was what he'd be.

But at midterm of his fourth year at the university he'd been invited to spend the vacation at the home of his classmate Wendell Larkin, in Manhattan on East Seventy-fifth Street. Wendell's father, Matthew, was a gem merchant specializing in colored stones and pearls with offices in the trade district on West Forty-seventh.

Matthew Larkin asked Grady about landscape architecture. Grady explained some things and, in polite turn, asked Larkin about gems. Larkin had shown him, taken Grady to the office one morning and instructed him on how to use a loupe and let him look into a twenty-carat sapphire, a top-grade bright Ceylon. Grady wasn't merely interested, he was captivated by that intense blue inner atmosphere.

It was as though the vibrations from the crystal structure of the blue had shot into Grady's eye and instantaneously appropriated his brain. He held the stone away but returned it to his eye, again and again.

Larkin realized Grady's fascination at once and was stimulated by it. He took other gemstones from his safe and introduced Grady to the interior realms of emeralds and rubies and the lustrous complexion of pearls. Larkin was the shower, Grady, the looker. What was supposed to have been a half hour of satisfying curiosity turned out to be three hours of engrossment. Grady was so dazzled, so taken, that he'd hardly tasted the pastrami sandwich lunch that Larkin had had sent up from the deli.

Grady and gemstones.

Coup de foudre!
Love at first sight.

He'd told himself perhaps he'd had such a reaction because of the kindredness of flowers and gems—their color, their mutual requirement of earth. Just as the beauty of flowers had to be grown, so did that of gems, crystal by crystal.

Grady gave a great deal of thought to that affinity and decided to use it. After he graduated and had his degree, he put off pursuing his landscaping profession, went to New York City and took the courses offered by the Gemological Institute of America. He wanted to be a certified gemologist. Larkin hired him full-time. Salary and commission, office and access to the safe.

He'd remained with Larkin four years.

Until Larkin took ill and had to close down.

Larkin had helped him get the job as a stone buyer for that most prestigious retail jeweler, Shreve and Company in San Francisco. Grady had gotten along well right from the start with the people at Shreve. He'd impressed them with his knowledge of gems and his business sense.

It was through Shreve that he'd become acquainted with Harold Havermeyer. The worst he'd heard of the man was that he was a shrewd deal-maker, in the gem trade a high compliment.

Harold cultivated Grady, gradually. Over a two-year period there'd been lunches and dinners and outings on his boat. Harold had allowed Grady to see only a degree more than his public face, enough to make Grady feel the privileged confidant. Grady hadn't been naive, not taken in. There just wasn't any reason to suspect Harold of self-serving motives. Their relationship was well within the normal business-social overlay, and it hadn't come as a surprise to Grady when Harold began dropping into the cracks of certain moments the hints of the possibility of Grady becoming affiliated with the Harold Havermeyer Company. Harold accelerated Grady's ambition, dilated it and shaped it to suit his own uses.

Grady was well aware of the direction he was headed and, when Harold had come right out and propositioned him with a bit more than a promise but less than an inevitability that a partnership of some kind would be down the road, Grady had joined HH and felt he was on the right course.

Meanwhile there'd been Gayle.

Brown-eyed, honey-haired Gayle, probably the most beautiful woman Grady had ever been around, and surely the most unrepressed. She was usually there when Grady got together with Harold, sometimes expensively dressed at lunch, often barely dressed at the pool or on the boat. Grady had plenty of opportunities to steal looks at her body, and frequently she caught him at it and sentenced him to solitary with a defiant stare.

The first time they were alone together at night was after a supper following the symphony. It was raining and she had volunteered to give him a lift home. They were in evening clothes, and she'd had her dress pulled way up to free her legs for driving. Grady had kept about half his attention straight ahead. They were going up Geary, the cadence of the wipers contrary to the tempo of Luther Vandross singing “She Doesn't Mind.” Gayle wasn't teasing. He doubted that she ever had been, when, late going through an amber light, she reached over and got his hand and led it to her, to the in between that she swung open for him.

Loose leg holes. Just a strip of silk, no impediment.

She told him later, and it was only half a fib and a commending one at that, that within the twenty blocks to his place she'd come twice. Because the touch had been his, she'd said.

For the following two months Grady had felt off-register, altered by so much sexual wallowing. The power she admitted he had over her body was flattering. Whenever he'd said he was burned out, one way or another, she'd ignite him. Had his system always had the potential to produce so much semen? Wasn't too much of anything toxic?

“We needn't get married but we should,” she'd told him one night when she was on top and they'd both just come and he was softening.

He'd known from the start she was clever. Had taken pride in that aspect of her, witnessed it often in the way she maneuvered, charmed out of uncomfortable situations, white lied so credibly. However, it wasn't until the fifth married year that he'd learned she was and had been most clever with him.

The ninth floor of the St. Francis Hotel.

Suite 908, where Grady had kept an appointment to show goods to George Keller, a client from St. Louis. Nothing unusual about that; quite a few clients preferred the courtesy. He'd come out of 908 at the very moment when the door to 909 across the way opened and a dark-haired middle-aged man wearing a hotel towel pushed a room service cart out into the hall.

Grady had caught at most a five-second glimpse of Gayle in 909, nude in an armchair. She was unaware that he'd seen her and denied it when he'd confronted her but only stood her ground for a half hour. Then she'd shifted her tack to confession and tears. It was, she contended between choking sobs and a lot of nose blowing, a first-time slip, a dumb dalliance. She pleaded forgiveness. Reasoned for it. Wasn't she deserving of one carnal error? (Her exact words.)

That her passion with him hadn't ever waned was in her favor. Was it possible she could come home from all those specious shoppings at Neiman Marcus, girlfriend luncheons at Fleur de Lys, browsings of Chinatown and so on, and still be able that same night to make such responsive love with him?

He thought so.

But he gave her the benefit of the doubt. Let her squirm off the hook for the St. Francis stray. Even if he couldn't forget it, he wouldn't ever bring it up.

Gayle was disappointed.

As though she felt he hadn't been adequately provoked by the chink in her that she'd exposed. She was determined that he should be. Increased her shoppings and browsings, made guesswork out of them and thinned her excuses until they were thoroughly transparent. It had been a sort of perverse campaign during which she taught him to decipher her lies the moment she was telling them.

And now this—the inevitable divorce from Gayle and the sudden severance from Harold Havermeyer.

Fuck them. And fuck Aunt Miriam in Rancho Santa Fe, who was most likely a dark-haired, middle-aged man or lead guitarist on tour with some heavy metal group currently playing Milwaukee.

Sand fleas were excited around his bare toes.

A gull swooped to see if he might leave a scrap.

He wasn't bilious bitter, but he did feel a seven-year chunk had been taken out of him, one out of every five of his days. Gayle wanted the house? Well, she couldn't have it, at least, not all of it. He had four hundred thousand equity in the house. Gayle could have what she was legally, if not morally, entitled to. Half. She could also have all her catgut-strung wooden tennis rackets, old framed photos of Yale rowing crews and other crap. If he had to, he'd fight and fight dirty for his two hundred thousand share. He was going to need that money and more … to get the Grady Bowman Company on the door and off the ground.

CHAPTER THREE

During the cognac and coffee phase of a sit-down dinner for ten last November, the conversation had somehow gotten onto the subject of wills, the legal kind, and Julia Elkins, with nothing to contribute, not even mild interest, had tuned out. Now she sort of wished she'd listened. Not that she felt it vital at age thirty-four to know more about wills than she'd managed to glean from certain books over the past couple of weeks, but perhaps, she thought, she'd missed something that would have put her on surer ground. She had to trust that this lawyer, Martin Browderbank, in whose reception room she was now seated, would understand the simple kind of will she wanted. It wouldn't do if he complicated and took weeks to draw up the papers for her signature. In fact it wouldn't do if he took days.

Tomorrow was Thursday, the eighteenth of June, the deadline she'd set on her mind's calendar. An arbitrary date, yes, but procrastination wouldn't become an adversary as long as she didn't let it get started.

Having a will was an afterthought, really. From her point of view what she could leave anyone wasn't much. Her collection of her own paintings were the most valuable and would be more so afterward. Then, there was her Jeep Cherokee, and a few minor pieces of jewelry such as the strand of pearls she now wore. She wanted Royce to have the paintings. For six years he'd been the steadiest, most dependable person in her life. Her next-door neighbor Royce, who couldn't help but lilt and be light of foot and drop the famous names he claimed he'd
been with
, which was how he put it. It didn't matter to Julia that Royce's homosexual escapades were figments. They were entertaining and amusing and, she believed, according to her extended way of believing, they were true. Kind, thoughtful, gentle-minded Royce, who looked after her cat, Maxx, and had surprised her several times when she'd returned from trips to find he'd put her studio in impeccable order. Royce, who really did know how to make the best
crème brûlée
she'd tasted since her days in France. He loved her in the way that had become acceptable to her. Their relationship was complex only in its simplicity. He was the only genuinely asexual person she'd ever known.