Cocoa Beach Read online

“Look,” he said, “I know what you’re afraid of. Do you think you’re the only one? I know. The horrors I’ve seen. The damned sights that have kept me awake, the men I couldn’t save. Hemorrhages that wouldn’t stop. The infections that spread and spread. Going to bed streaked with blood, soaked with it, and you’re too tired to give a damn. Then the voices. I still hear them, whenever I’m alone, like a Greek chorus. And every day, every morning you wake up thinking, My God, what horrible thing awaits me today? What fresh grief.”

  I bent my head over our clasped palms and gasped for breath. His other hand found the back of my head, my hair. His thumb comforted my ear.

  “Shh. You see? I know, Virginia. But I think—for the past few months, I’ve had a bit of hope now, because of you. A little pinprick of light, and it’s just out of reach, and do you perhaps understand, now, why I’ve written all those letters? Why I’ve kept writing, even when you didn’t reply? Because I can’t give it up. I can’t give you up, the possibility of you. Not this single darling person whose vital spark I’ve craved, the way one craves water in a desert. Not unless I was wrong, and there isn’t even that. Not even a spark left.”

  It was as if he knew exactly the words to win me over. Exactly what to say to overcome me. I knew I was sobbing, but I couldn’t hear my own sobs, or feel my own wet tears. I only felt his hand in my hair, supporting my head.

  “I know, Virginia. I know how you feel. I know your loneliness and your misery. I feel the same. We’re all alone, the two of us. All alone in this frightful black world. Can we not at least try to give each other comfort? Light some small lamp together, against the darkness?”

  And then, a quiet moment later: Please, Virginia.

  And I believe, looking back, that this was the moment of my capitulation. Please, Virginia. This was the moment I chose my course, the moment I threw my heart over the cliff and leapt after it. I felt the tumbling of my resistance like a physical event, starting in my head and clattering down my spine and the bones of my skeleton, until I had nothing left to support myself. Only him.

  And instead of feeling dread at this act of defeat, I felt freedom. I felt, in the instant of my leaping, as if I would never touch the ground again.

  I lifted my head, or maybe he moved it for me, with that hand that now caressed the side of my face, the curve of my jaw. I met his eyes without fear. My fingers wrapped around his and squeezed for all life.

  “Thank God,” he said, closing his eyes, but the bang of the door smothered the words.

  “Well!” said Hazel. “And to think we were worried to death.”

  Chapter 11

  Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 1922

  I spot Mr. Marshall right away, the first thing I notice when I follow Clara inside the wood-framed house at the southern end of Cocoa Beach. He’s sitting by himself, wearing a hat, hunched over a drink of some kind, but I’d know that prehistoric profile anywhere.

  The building, as you might guess, is the kind of place I believe they call a speakeasy. It’s just a shack, really—a plain wooden shack, big enough for tables and chairs and something that serves as a bar, not more than a couple of hundred yards down the beach from the old House of Refuge built by the Coast Guard in the previous century—so Clara tells me, anyway—in order to mop up survivors from all the shipwrecks. (The Florida coast, it seems, is a dangerous place to ply your sail, or whatever craft you happen to captain.) Whether the Coast Guard knows or cares what’s going on under its lee, I can’t say, but I certainly don’t see any signs of knowing or caring here tonight. Just Mr. Marshall of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, all by himself, miraculously arrived on Cocoa Beach on this moonless evening, taking note of our entrance with a small salute of his glass.

  In case you’re wondering, I’m much recovered from the ordeal of two weeks ago. I woke up the day after that meeting in the Japanese garden filled with all kinds of resolve, and the first thing I did—well, the first thing once Clara was awake, which came long after the breakfast I shared downstairs with Evelyn—was to tell my sister-in-law to pack her bags, because we were heading straight back up to Cocoa. Back to the town of Cocoa, Florida, where Simon Fitzwilliam, English doctor, captain in the British Army Medical Corps, citrus grower and bootlegger, met his fate.

  Cocoa, Florida. It sounds so lovely, doesn’t it? Just saying the name gives you a marvelous, exotic charge, however great your troubles. We’ve passed our time at the beach, played all day in the heat and the blue ocean, and the surf and sun have so exhausted my daughter that she falls asleep almost before I tuck the blankets tenderly around her. Safe and sound. And I’ve settled in for the evening like any old grieving widow, in the lively company of my sister-in-law and the generally silent company of my brother-in-law, and I’ve waited.

  Waited for the turn of the moon.

  Now the moon has turned—has disappeared into the great Florida sky—and so this particular evening, instead of sitting down to a respectable supper, delivered on domed trays by hotel waiters dressed in crisp black and white, eager to please, I came forth from Evelyn’s room, smoothed my dress, and asked Clara if she knew about a place on the beach where a girl might have some fun this evening. (On the beach, mind you.) And her eyes went all bright and she said, Why, yes, I happen to know just the joint, and I said, Excellent, let’s go, and she said, But we’re going to have to find you something to wear, you know, and all that took a certain amount of time, and by good fortune Samuel happens to be working late tonight, because I dare say he wouldn’t have recognized us as we tripped out the lobby, having arranged for a chambermaid to keep watch over Evelyn, and climbed into the Packard baking quietly on the street outside.

  And now the sun’s gone down, and still the heat rises from the pavement and the sand dunes, saturates the atmosphere like you could part it with your two hands, except you can’t. You can’t just push it away. It’s simply there, eternal, whether you like it or not, sticking your flirty purple dress to your back, coating your face in a tanned-pink sheen, wilting the ostrich feathers that shimmer on your sequined headpiece, melting your crimson lipstick. On Clara the effect is sultry and rather spectacular; I haven’t dared to look in a mirror and see what it’s done for me. (The man in the corner isn’t exactly smiling, after all.)

  We sit at a small square table next to the musicians. It’s some sort of jazz, I guess, a strange and hypnotic noise. A few feet away a pair of girls dance together in abandon, feet flying and hands jiggling, cosmetics tracking down their faces in lurid, colored lines. Two more conventional couples give them a wide berth. A man in perfect formal dress dances alone, eyes closed, swaying rather dangerously close to the trombone. And that’s it. The other tables are empty. A barmaid makes a line for us; she must work on tips. I sit back in my chair and fan myself with my pocketbook while Clara orders for us. For such a tiny woman, she’s got a remarkably long neck, especially when it’s angled upward, as it is now, delivering our preferences to the waitress. She says something funny; they both laugh and glance at the man in the corner. Seems she’s noticed him, too.

  When the waitress moves away, Clara leans forward over the table. “Don’t look now, but there’s a chap sitting there in the corner, watching our every move. Just imagine!”

  “I noticed.”

  “Did you? Clever thing. Mamie says he’s some kind of bootlegger!” She says the word bootlegger with a particular breathless excitement, like highwayman!

  “Mamie?”

  “The waitress.”

  “Oh! Have you been here before?” (Innocently.)

  “Of course I’ve been here before! My goodness. How do you think we got in?” She laughs.

  “Well, it’s awfully nice of you, keeping me company this week when you might have been kicking up your heels in this place.”

  “Oh? And how do you know I haven’t? I do fancy a drink and a laugh, from time to time.”

  The door opens and a party spills inside, dressed in rakish elegance: three women and four men. The smell of
sweat and drunkenness invades the hot room. Mamie perks up from behind the bar, like a dog scenting a covey.

  “Speaking of which,” says Clara, “where the devil are our drinks? I want champagne tonight. I have the feeling we’re celebrating.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  “Why, your liberation! You’re free at last, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  Four champagne cocktails later, the place is packed. I don’t know where everybody comes from. It’s rather wild and marvelously amoral, as if by defying the Eighteenth Amendment we are defying all the laws of ordinary society. The cocktails—even on my inexperienced palate—aren’t very good, the cheapest of the cheap, but the satisfaction of your palate isn’t the point. It’s the satisfaction of your cravings, the satisfaction of the base animal inside you. Someone asks Clara to dance, and she takes his hand and dances, sweating and jiggling in the fug of jazz and cigarettes, a sick-sweet fume of rum and gin, and when he wraps his hand around her waist and bends to kiss her neck, I turn away, so swiftly that my shoulder hits a thick, dark-clad chest.

  “Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Do you have a moment?”

  “Mr. Marshall!”

  He takes my astonishment for assent, I guess. Wraps one hand around my waist and the other around my fingers and starts to dance, far more competently than I imagined a Prohibition man was capable of.

  “I don’t want to dance,” I say.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then what are we doing?”

  He whirls me near a corner, where the music is muffled, and leans near my ear. “You need to go home, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. This isn’t the place for you.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Trust me.”

  “I don’t trust you in the least. I don’t know why you’re here. Shouldn’t a revenue agent be arresting everybody?”

  “Look,” he says, in a voice of pained exasperation, “just take your friend and get out of here. As far as you can. Back to town, safe and sound.”

  “What if I’d rather be here?”

  He draws back and frowns at me. Only an inch or two taller, but terribly fierce. “Why? Why would you rather be here, of all places?”

  “Because I want to have a little fun tonight, that’s all.”

  And his fingers clench on mine, and his brow—if possible—takes on an even more terrible grimace. “This isn’t fun, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. This is business, deadly business, and you’re a fool to mix yourself up in it. You’re a damned fool—pardon me—to think you can beat these fellows at their own game.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  I open my mouth to make some indignant reply, and he just seizes me by the shoulders and stares at me, breath tasting of spearmint and virtue, nose parked a mere half inch away from mine, and after the shock wears off—a few seconds, that’s all—I pull back and yank my hand free to smack him. He takes the blow with admirable calm, so I raise my hand for another try and someone grabs my wrist. Clara. She’s smiling; her lips are smeared. “Is this poor fellow troubling you, my dear?”

  “He was just leaving.”

  “Pity!” she says, giggling, and she tugs me away, into another room, more richly furnished than the last, where we collapse on a pair of red velvet chairs to be served a greasy, satisfying supper.

  “Tell the truth. You’re a regular here, aren’t you?” I say.

  “I cannot lie. But what about that chap of yours?”

  “He’s not my chap. He was making a nuisance of himself.”

  “That bad, was it? I’m surprised. He strikes me as the kind of fellow who knows how to kiss a girl properly.” She extracts an olive pit from between her lips and reaches for the champagne. Not just the supper but the drinks are better in this room. The champagne—a vintage Pol Roger—rests in a bucket of ice next to our table, just as if we’re not in America at all. Perhaps four or five tables occupy the space around us, filled mostly by men in dinner jackets who have presumably driven up here from various points of law-abiding civilization, just like us, along the road that keeps pace with the ocean.

  “He didn’t kiss me.”

  “He was about to.”

  “Far from it. He’s not the kissing type.”

  “I don’t know how you could judge a thing like that, on so little acquaintance. Unless you’ve met before?”

  “No,” I say swiftly.

  Her eyes grow a little sharper, and she nods to her right. “There he is again, if you haven’t noticed. He must be absolutely goofy for you. Are you quite certain you’re not tempted?”

  I follow her glance, and for an instant our eyes meet—his keen, mine resolute. In that second of contact, I have the familiar impression of a thick, unscalable jaw and hair so short as to bristle from his head.

  “Quite certain.”

  “Because I expect he’s a tremendous lover, once you work past his inhibitions. Think of all that feral energy he’s got.”

  “My God. How do you imagine all these things?”

  “Darling, I just know. Let’s just say I haven’t spent the last few years like you have, busy with hearth and home. For one thing, I haven’t got either one. Hearth or home.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  Clara takes the bottle by the neck and refills my glass. “Well, then. A girl’s got to keep busy somehow, if you take my meaning.”

  I don’t quite take her meaning. I don’t really want more champagne, either—my brain is already swimming—but I drink anyway, and then I venture, “The last time I saw you, you looked miserable.”

  “Well, I was miserable. I was frightfully miserable. It was awful at first, to be perfectly honest. I couldn’t stay in dreary old Cornwall after all that, catching drizzle while the house fell to ruin, so after a bit, when the dust had properly settled, I moved to London and started living again.”

  “But what did you do? You must have taken work of some kind.”

  “Work? Oh, darling. Don’t use such words.” She waves her hand. “I had a bit of money from my parents. And the chaps paid for everything. If a girl learns how to play her cards properly, she shouldn’t have to buy a thing.”

  I fall silent at that, because what can I say? I prod the remains of my supper. The giddy recklessness that carried me into this place tonight has died away, like the fizz in my champagne, leaving me flat and merely drunk. If this is what drunk is: muddy and blurred and pieced together, the Expressionist vision of yourself.

  “I’ve shocked you,” Clara says.

  “No. Not really.”

  “Yes, I have. You think I’m some kind of prostitute.”

  “No! Of course not.”

  “I suppose it’s a species of prostitution. But so is marriage, when you think about it. It’s all just trade. His money and your—whatever it is you’re inclined to give him. A meal, a well-ordered house, a bit of affection, a child or two. Sex, naturally, or else he’s going to get that elsewhere, with women like me.”

  I touch the back of her hand with my fingers. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true, and I’m not ashamed. Why should I be? We’re all ever so much more modern now. And I don’t see why I should have become a dried-up little maiden aunt, just because some silly archduke got himself assassinated by a petty half-mad nationalist one June day and ended up taking most of Europe’s eligible young men with him. The fellow I should have virtuously married lies under a cross in France somewhere, and I never even knew him.”

  “Not all the eligible men.”

  “No, that’s true. But the ones who survived are practically useless, or else terribly maimed, and I’ve had enough of nursing. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? It’s true, though. That’s one of the reasons I love America. You have so many strapping, healthy young men running about. Playing at their golf and tennis. Racing speedboats in Biscayne Bay. They’re so tall and tanned and vigorous, I want to weep for the excess of it. If only I came here sooner, when I was
young enough to get married.”

  “You’re not that old.”

  “Oh, I am. I am old. I shall never marry now. I should never burden some poor chap with all my eccentric tendencies. It’s too late for me. You see? You’re the lucky one, really. You had a moment of marriage at least, even if you hadn’t married the man you thought. A moment of contentment, and a daughter to show for it. I’ve only got this.” She waves her hand again, and when it returns she lets it fall on the neck of the bottle, at rest in its bucket. She pours the last dregs in democratic shares: a drizzle for her, a drizzle for me. “And if you’re not going to encourage that fellow to drag his primeval jaw over here to seduce you with, I jolly well will.”

  “Oh, Clara, don’t!”

  But she’s already tossed down that last drizzle of champagne, already risen from the table in a swish of fringed black gossamer. The look of flushed determination on her face terrifies me. I reach for her hand.

  “Now, darling. You let me manage this,” she says, and she bends her finger in the direction of Mr. Marshall.

  I don’t imagine he can resist her, even a man like him, a man doing his job, whatever it is. Clara is absolutely irresistible in her current moment, all lustrous and mettlesome, stylishly daring, a glossy trick pony you can’t help watching. Waiting to see what she does next. But Marshall doesn’t wait. He fixes on the doorway instead, as if something’s going on in the main room, something of terrible interest, and only when Clara arrives at his table does he look at her, a second late, and then around her shoulder at me, and then back at her.

  She places her two hands on the edge of the table and leans toward him. She’s asking him something, and her endless necklace of imitation pearls, knotted in the middle—they must be imitation, right?—dangles exactly between them.

  He replies. She replies back, pulls out a chair from a nearby table, and slides it into intimate proximity with his. Sits, graceful as a dancer, one leg extended to the side and the other folded atop, and rests her chin upon her laced fingers. Like a dreaming child, only dangerously grown up.