Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (2 page)

BOOK: Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)
5.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Frank was holding forth on his favorite topic. Frank is a lawyer, like myself, but he is also a transplanted New Yorker, than which there is nothing worse in the entire world. When a New Yorker moves to California, he will eventually stop reading
The New York Times
, and after a brief period of mourning he will begin referring to New York as “back east,” as if it were a remote province somewhere in China. Most migrants to Florida will refer to New York (or Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh or wherever they’ve come from) as “up north,” but not my partner Frank. New York is New York is New York, and there is no place like it in the world, and any other city, country, or even
continent
is but a pale reflection of that glittering city Frank still thinks of as home. The Sunday
New York Times
costs him two and a half bucks down here. He would gladly pay a full month’s draw for it. He is an impossible chauvinist, but he has been my partner for many years now, and he is a good lawyer and an endearing man when he is not comparing Calusa to the Big Apple. He was doing just that tonight, within earshot of the museum’s curator, who, I was certain, did not enjoy hearing the Ca D’Ped compared unfavorably to MOMA. I tried to hush him when he got on the topic of Calusa’s pretensions to culture, but once Frank boarded the Lexington Avenue Express, there was no stopping him.

“If Calusa was a fat banker—”

“Were,” Leona corrected.


Were
a fat banker,” Frank said, and glanced into the open front of his wife’s gown as though discovering an enticing stranger, “and if all its various writers, sculptors, and painters were the banker’s mistresses, they would all pack their frilly underwear and leave tomorrow morning. Nowhere in America is the local talent so taken for granted as it is in this sad excuse for a real city.”

“Frank’s a New Yorker,” Leona said to Dale, as though the obvious needed explanation and amplification.

I should explain that Dale O’Brien is a woman. There are still many telephone callers to her office who ask for
Mister
O’Brien, assuming that any lawyer named Dale O’Brien must also and perforce be a male. She is a female. Very much so. She is a female who is five feet nine inches tall, and she has red hair she prefers to call russet, and glade-green eyes, and a beautifully proportioned figure that was draped tonight in a shimmering green gown that matched her eyes. Those eyes seemed vacant and bored just now. Perhaps she had heard Frank sounding off once too often. Perhaps she was disenchanted with the insipid white wine the museum was serving in tribute to its “honored” artists. Or perhaps the heat and humidity had got to her. It is easy for the heat and humidity to get to you in Calusa during the month of August.

“I know a playwright down here,” Frank went on, “—I believe you know him, too, Matthew—who won the Drama Critics Circle Award back in his heyday, and who can’t get a house seat at the Helen Gottlieb, can you believe it? This is a man who can call any theater in New York, and get sixth-row-center seats to the biggest hit, but he can’t get a choice seat down here for any of the moth-eaten road shows that pass through. At the same time, of course, anytime there’s a charity benefit, no one’ll think twice about calling him and asking him to speak. The same applies to artists. The Carport decides to honor the local painters and sculptors, right? Okay, so
when
does it throw its munificent party? On a Monday night in August! You won’t find a goddamn
iguana
down here in August! Have Motherwell passing through
in January
, however, or Warhol, or anybody who doesn’t
live
here, and out comes the red carpet. And you can bet they won’t be serving warm white wine, either. Do you know what I think it is? Do you know what I
really
think it is?”

“It’s that it isn’t New York,” Leona said.

“Well, of
course
it isn’t New York,” Frank said. “But that’s not it. What it is, deep down in its heart of hearts, Calusa
knows
that most of the artists down here are dilettantes. Uproot a cactus plant, and you’ll find a self-proclaimed writer, painter, or sculptor sitting there in a hole in the sand. My friend says he’s afraid of identifying himself as a playwright down here because the dentist he’s talking to at a party will say, ‘
Are
you? Gee,
I’m
a playwright, too!’ The cultural pretensions of this city—
imagine
calling itself the Athens of Florida!—are simply unimaginable in terms of what the
real
world considers—”

“Matthew, let’s go,” Dale said.

I blinked at her.

“Please,” she said.

Her abrupt request seemed not to faze Frank at all. He turned to Leona and continued with his premise as though trying to impress a new girl in town, his eyes continually flicking to breasts he surely knew as well as he did the Florida Statutes. We said our good nights, thanked the curator for a wonderful show, and went out to where I’d parked the Karmann Ghia. Dale was unusually quiet.

“Frank get on your nerves?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

A Karmann Ghia, for all its recent status as a “classic,” is perhaps not the best vehicle for transporting a leggy woman in a long gown. Dale was fidgeting on the seat beside me, trying to make herself comfortable. The air conditioner wasn’t working. When my former wife and I were divorced,
she
got the Mercedes-Benz with the air conditioner that worked.
I
got the Karmann Ghia. She also got custody of my daughter, whom I saw every other weekend and on alternating holidays. My daughter absolutely
adored
Dale, and was constantly asking me when we were going to get married; for all their hip attitudes about sex, today’s teenagers
nonetheless seemed a bit uneasy about grown-ups sharing the same bed without benefit of clergy. The bed Dale and I shared was actually
two
beds, hers on Whisper Key or mine on the mainland, whichever way the wind blew. The wind tonight seemed to be blowing out of the south: Dale’s house on the Gulf would be cooler than mine on the mainland. I made the right turn onto US 41, and immediately found myself in a traffic jam as monumental as anything conceived by Fellini.

“Shit,” Dale said.

It was unusual to find heavy traffic on the Tamiami Trail at 10:00
P.M.
on a sweltering night in August. In August, the snowbirds and their automobiles and campers were up north, where they
belonged
, with not a thought of migration in their heads. The roads were normally empty, the restaurants uncrowded, the lines outside the movie theaters nonexistent. Year-round residents like Dale and myself were grateful for the respite, while at the same time mindful of the
reason
for the peace and quiet: as Frank had put it, almost, only an iguana would find Calusa habitable during the summer months. Despite what the calendar said, summer in Calusa began at the beginning of May and often lingered through October, though many of the full-timers insisted that those two bracketing months were the nicest ones of the year. Native Calusans tended to forget that May and October were lovely
anywhere
in the United States. They also conveniently forgot that in May down here, you could have your brain parboiled if you didn’t wear a hat. August was worse. August was impossible. But a
traffic jam
in August? On a Monday night?

“What
now
?” Dale said impatiently.

It occurred to me, belatedly, that she had been somewhat impatient all night long. She had been impatient, first, with the gown she’d originally planned on wearing, telling me the moment I entered her house that it had come back from the cleaners with
a spot on it. She had next been impatient with the green gown she finally chose to wear, the one she was in fact now wearing, telling me that it was too tight and that the line of her panties would show. When I suggested that she forsake the panties altogether—an idea she might normally have found interesting if not particularly inventive—she had turned away and stomped off into her bedroom, leaving me waiting in the living room for the better part of a half hour, after which she’d emerged triumphantly resplendent, but complaining that she looked like a stuffed sausage. She had seemed impatient to get to the Ca D’Ped, and then impatient to leave it. As I got out of the car now to see what the trouble was up ahead, she was impatiently jiggling one sequin-slippered foot.

The trouble up ahead was a trailer truck that had jackknifed across the road, smashing into two automobiles in the process. The state trooper I spoke to said it might take an hour or more before the ambulances and the wreckers were out of the way. He suggested that I go back to the car and listen to some good music on the radio. Dale suggested instead that we pull off onto the dead-end street on our right, and then walk over to a place called Captain Blood’s, glaring its neon just up the road. Neither of us had ever been to this particular watering hole before, but a tall cold drink was a tall cold drink. In Calusa, it should be mentioned, there are more lounges called Captain Something-or-Other than there are orange trees. The town is nautically oriented, situated as it is on both the Gulf of Mexico and Calusa Bay. Captain Blood’s seemed from the outside like any one of the other Captains sailing US 41. A blue pickup truck was parked close to the front entrance. Orange and then blue neon blinked onto the barrel of a shotgun resting on a rack just inside the rear window.

The decor inside the place was exactly what one might have expected. Timbers and ropes, fishing nets and running lights in
red and green, a huge brass engine-room telegraph just inside the entrance door. An old man wearing a yachting cap was sitting alone at the bar on the right. A waitress turned from the bar at the sound of the bell tinkling over the entrance door, and came over to us with a smile on her face.

“Just the two of you?” she asked, and then led us into a vacant back room with a jukebox. There were a dozen or more booths fashioned of high-backed wooden benches and varnished hatch-cover tables. We settled in a booth farthest from the juke, which was blaring a country-western ballad. Dale sat on one side of the table, I sat on the other. She ordered a gin and tonic. I ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks.

I think I should mention right now that the last time I’d had a fistfight was when I was fourteen years old. An important point, perhaps, since I am now thirty-eight and presumably wiser, and certainly bigger, and possibly stronger than I was back then when a high-school jock named Hank advised me to keep away from his cheerleader girlfriend, whose name was Bunny Kaplowitz. Until then, I had always thought only the
good
guys were named Hank. What Hank said was, “Keep away from her, dig?” or jock words to that effect. I told Hank he was a moronic turd. I remember the words clearly and distinctly. They are etched in acid on the restoration Dr. Mordecai Simon put into my mouth in the city of Chicago, where I was living at the time. No sooner had I uttered those memorable words than Hank blackened both my eyes, dislocated my jaw, and knocked out one of my molars. Under anesthesia in Dr. Simon’s office, I vowed eternal fidelity to the policies of a man named Gandhi, since immortalized for a whole new generation in a film of the same name.

The fight back then had to do with protecting one’s disputed turf, a masculine prerogative in this land of the free and home of the brave, where macho males strut about in Calvin Klein
designer jeans. The turf in that long-ago instance was a nubile cheerleader. The turf tonight, as I was about to discover, was a thirty-two-year-old woman named Dale O’Brien. We are both sensible, mature attorneys, Dale and I, officers of the court sworn to uphold the laws of the state and the nation. Together, and considering the vast sums of money our respective parents had invested in the pursuit of our separate law degrees, we should have known better than to allow ourselves to become a “turf” and a “defender of the turf,” which was most certainly what we
did
become at precisely ten-fifteen. I remember looking up at the clock—set into a ship’s wheel on the other side of the room—a moment before disaster loomed.

It loomed in the shape of two young cowboys—both in their mid-twenties, I guessed—who came sauntering out of the men’s room. They were not wearing designer jeans. Their jeans were faded and their boots were scuffed, and they wore cowboy shirts with embroidered pocket flaps and little pearl snap buttons on the flaps and at the cuffs, and they wore great big ten-gallon hats tilted over their sunburned faces and they wore kerchiefs around their necks, a blue one for the blond guy with the mustache, and a red one for the guy with the black beard. It was not unusual to see an occasional cowboy in Calusa. You do not have to ride very far out of town before you come into cattle country. The state of Florida, in fact, counts cattle breeding as among its chief sources of revenue, ranking it fifth after narcotics, tourism, manufacturing, and farming.

The two cowboys, who went directly to the jukebox, looked as if they might be quite at home tossing thousand-pound steers over their respective shoulders. The blond one had to be at least six-four, with the awesome bulk of a wrestler, and the one with the black beard was just as tall, with the hard, lean, muscular body of someone who’d begun lifting weights at an early age,
probably in a correctional center someplace. I was willing to bet he had tattoos on both arms. The first thing they did was pour what appeared to be a hundred dollars in coins into the jukebox. The next thing they did was push a multitude of buttons—every button in sight, it seemed—after which the first of their selections flooded the room: the same country-western ballad that had been playing when we walked in. Dale rolled her eyes and said, under her breath, “Oh, no, not again,” and the blond cowboy immediately said, “What’s that, lady?” qualifying him at once as a recipient of the Better Hearing Award, since the din of the jukebox should have drowned out anything but a shout.

Dale, of course, did not answer him.

BOOK: Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)
5.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Skeletons in the Closet by Terry Towers
Rapsodia Gourmet by Muriel Barbery
El Caballero Templario by Jan Guillou
Life in Shadows by Elliott Kay
Trick or Treatment by Simon Singh, Edzard Ernst M.D.
Wrong Side of Hell by Stone, Juliana
The Wedding Night by Linda Needham