The white stucco cottage to which she led them was on the other side of the lawn, clear across the narrow island. It was much cooler here; a light flower-scented breeze blew. Over the arching doorway of the cottage a faded scrollwork sign hung, with one word on it: Desire. "This is the White Cottage," Mrs. Ball said, producing a key and opening the door. "The boys who ran the Reef before me were a little mad, I'm afraid. Larry Thompson and Tony Withers, sweet lads but queer as coots. I'm always meaning to take those idiotic signs down." The gondolier arrived just as she was saying goodbye and closing the door. Setting the two suitcases inside, he left before they could tip him.
"So. This is the Gull Reef Club." Atlas's heavy bloodshot eyes swept the cottage interior, which smelled of mildew and insecticide. There were four large beds covered in red nubbly cotton. The rough white walls were splashed here and there with framed water colors of palms, flowers, and fish. "Sizable cottages. They get two families in here easy, in season." He rattled the red plastic divider collapsed against a wall, then flung his jacket on a bed and took his suitcase into a bathroom. "Got to have a quick shower. I unquestionably stink."
Dazed by fatigue and excitement, Paperman opened his valise and swigged scotch from a bottle. He did not enjoy doing this, it was not his way of drinking. But nothing eased off palpitations like a little alcohol.
He was in a shaky state after a bumpy all-night plane trip with Atlas, who had never stopped guzzling bourbon out of paper cups all the way to Amerigo, to calm his nerves; first on the big plane to San Juan, and then on the little island-hopper. From the start Paperman had endured acute spasms of embarrassment. Atlas had bullied the ticket clerks at Idlewild, yelled at the skycap porter to get the lead out of his ass (and calmed the man's rage with a five-dollar tip), and annoyed the stewardess with ribald remarks each time she walked past. He had also made persisting indecent gestures at the poor girl's swaying rear, winking the while at a horrified white-headed lady across the aisle, and shouting, "Con permisso! Haw haw!" Atlas had roamed up and down the aisle when the seat-belt sign was off, talking to the other passengers, offering them whiskey, and every so often roaring out "Con permisso! Con permisso!" with hoarse howls of laughter. The aircraft, which was continuing on to Venezuela, carried many Latin Americans; and this repeated bawling of a Spanish phrase, with an added harsh "s" in permiso, was Atlas's idea of wit.
Paperman was a sensitive individual, who prided himself on dressing and acting with taste. He was self-made. He had run away at fifteen from middle-class parents who kept a furniture store in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Broadway press agent, with some industrial clients; and the assorted vulgarians, tinhorns, and loudmouths of the show business were types he was at great pains not to resemble. Just as abhorrent to him were crude businessmen of the Atlas variety. Square was the deepest term of anathema in his circle. It was an excruciating discomfort for Norman Paperman to have to travel in public with such a boorish, booming, atrocious square as Lester Atlas.
Paperman's friends were writers, actors, newspapermen, television people, and the like. Many were real celebrities. In a company of these he spent most of his nights at one Broadway restaurant or another, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking. Paperman's circle worked hard at dressing correctly and at reading the right books. Paperman and his friends, indeed, made a second career, beyond their professional work, of being up to the moment, and of never wearing, saying, or doing the wrong thing. This was not easy. In New York the right thing to wear or to read, to think or to say, to praise or to blame, can change fast. It can be damaging to miss a single issue of one or another clever magazine. Doctors complain of the flood of periodicals they must read to stay abreast of their profession; but their burden is almost light compared to that of being a New Yorker like Norman Paperman.
That was one reason Paperman was in the West Indies. He had broken down in the task.
3
About half an hour after he arrived Paperman almost drowned.
He was wearing rubber fins and a face mask for the first time in his life, and he was charmed by the underwater beauty of the reef: by the parrot fish browsing on dusty pink coral, the gently waving purple sea fans, the squid staring with tragic human eyes set in little jelly bodies, and jetting off backwards as he drew near; and by the glowing clean pink color of his own magnified hands and legs. He was pursuing a cloud of little violet fish past a towering brain coral, and having a wonderful time, when he turned his head under water, and the breathing pipe pulled out of its socket. The mask filled. Before he managed to yank it off he had inhaled and swallowed a lot of warm, very salty water. Coughing, gasping, he retrieved the sinking pipe, and tried to put it back in the mask, noting that he had wandered out too far from the beach. He was a good swimmer. The trouble was that since his coronary attack he got out of breath easily, and it was bad for him to exert himself in thrashing, flailing motions. He fixed the mask, clumsily pulled it on, and again was breathing warm water. Again he tore it off, snorting and choking, and now he was scared, because he seemed unable to catch enough breath, and his frantic treading was failing to keep his head above the surface. He went under; he clawed himself up, uttering a feeble "Help!" With his eyes fastened on the beach, which now seemed five miles away, he kicked and splashed and groped in one spot. He thought, "This would be one hell of a stupid way to die," and he thought of his wife and daughter, and wondered what idiocy had brought him to this island three thousand miles from New York to sink and be lost in the sea like a punctured beer can. His heart thundered.
A strong hand grasped his elbow. "Okay, easy."
He saw a big red fish impaled bleeding on a spear, inches from his face. The person holding the spear gun had thick black hair, twisted in curls and streaming water. The face was a blank skin-diver face, all yellow mask and tube. "Lie on your back and float." The voice was boyish, quiet, good-humored. Some of the knots went out of Paperman's muscles; he obeyed. The hand released his elbow and took a cupping hold on his chin. "Okay?" Paperman managed a nod against the hard hand.
The skin diver towed him to the beach. He let go while they were still in deep water, so that Paperman could turn over and swim the last dozen strokes. Anxiously glancing toward the hotel veranda, Paperman saw Atlas talking with Mrs. Ball and two Negroes. Nobody had noticed the panic or the rescue. The skin diver stood in the shallow water, pushing his mask up on his forehead. He had a narrow sunburned face, a big hooked nose, shrewd smiling brown eyes, and a masculine grin. He flourished his staring red fish at Paperman. "Think that'll serve two? It's my dinner."
"I'd say four."
Nah. Take the head and tail off these brutes and there's not much left. But it's fresh. I guess it'll feed two."
The soft hot beach sand felt inexpressibly hospitable and good underfoot to Paperman. "You and who else?" he said, making talk to cover his embarrassment.
The man's grin became ribald. "Oh, you know. This babe." The intonations placed his origins unmistakably in New York or New Jersey.
"Well, look, thanks for pulling me out of there."
The skin diver slapped his ribs. He was a skinny sort, no taller than Paperman, and his bones showed in knobs under stringy muscles and coppery skin. "I got chilly out there. I'm going to have a dose of medicinal whiskey. You too?" He signaled toward the veranda.
"Sure." Paperman was trembling in the aftermath of the scare.
They fell into wooden lounge chairs on the sand. The coarse red canvas cushions, burning hot in the sun, soothed Paperman like a heating pad. "I'm getting old and stupid," he said. "I was up all night in an airplane. I just got here. I've never snorkeled before. I'm in lousy shape. And there I was roaring out to sea, the boy frogman."
His rescuer hung the mask on the back of his chair. Black wet ringlets fell on his forehead. "That's me. I'm a frogman."
Paperman glanced at him uncertainly. He had the New Yorker's usual horror of having his leg pulled. "Is that so? What are you, in the Navy or something?"
"UDT. Underwater Demolition Team, that is. We train here."
"Are you a naval officer?"
"Just a lowly enlisted man."
The swimmer lit a cigarette from a green shirt hanging on his chair, and told an odd tale of having volunteered in the Israeli navy in 1948 at the age of seventeen, to the dismay of his American parents, who had then been in Palestine for business reasons. He had forfeited his American citizenship. Then he had studied aeronautical engineering in England, with an idea of working for El Al. Now he was in the navy to get his citizenship back. "Israel's a great place. But I was just a kid," he said. "I'm an American. I want that green passport I lost. Luckily the navy needs lots of UDT nowadays."
The bartender came, a bronzed blond man, barefoot, with ice-blue eyes and huge shoulders. His right hand lacked two fingers. The frogman took the stubby glass full of dark whiskey and ice, and pointed at the dead fish. "How about that, Thor? Can Sheila clean it now?"
"You be figure eat here tonight? You better ask Amy. The governor having a party, I tink ve full up."
"Okay. Chuck it on the ice, anyway."
The bartender nodded, twisted the fish neatly off the spear, and left.
Paperman sipped the whiskey, feeling better with each passing moment. The main beach of Gull Reef was a curve of clean white sand, bordered with palms and the round-leaved gnarled trees called sea grapes. The sand was warm and silky, trickling in his relaxed hand. Never had Paperman seen such an ocean, so tranquil that it reflected the puffy white clouds. Off to the right rose the hump of Amerigo, the serried green ridge stretching north and south, with red-roofed white buildings of the town climbing from the harbor along three rounded hillsides, and the bold carmine splash of the fort at the water's edge.
"This is not hard to take," he said, yawning and stretching.
"Amerigo? It's a dream. I've been in Italy, the south of France, Tangiers, and all that. I think this is maybe the most beautiful place in the world."
"But peculiar," said Paperman.
"How so?"
"Well, take that bartender. I never saw a bartender like that. He looks like the fourth or fifth Tarzan they had in the movies."
"Thor's not a bartender, really. He crossed the ocean by himself in a sailboat. He's one of those. A Swede."
"What's he doing tending bar?"
"Saving money for a new boat. He piled up his yawl on the reef out in Pitt Bay."
Paperman hesitated, then said, "I'm thinking of buying the Gull Reef Club."
The frogman cocked his head, crooked teeth flashing in his brown face. "Really? Is it for sale?"
"There was an ad in the New Yorker three weeks ago."
"Oh. The New Yorker."
"Don't you read it?" If I come across it. It takes six or seven weeks to get here."
This startled Paperman. He was in the habit of pouncing on the New Yorker each week within an hour after it was delivered to his favorite newsstand at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. In the same way he pounced on the New York Times each night as soon as it appeared on the streets, and he bought all the editions of all the evening and morning newspapers one after the other, though nothing changed but one headline, and though he knew well that these changes were made mainly to sell papers. He was an addict of ephemeral print. It had never occurred to him that the New Yorker was not instantly available all over the world-perhaps a day or so late at most, at the far end of the jet routes. He said, "You could have it sent airmail."
"At about a dollar a copy? Why?"
Paperman shrugged. Such a question merely betrayed the frogman's mentality: a square. "What do you think of the Club? I mean, as a business proposition?"
"I don't know anything about business. I'm sort of surprised she's selling it. She seems to go with the place." He sat up in a cross-legged slouch. "Is that what you do in the States? Hotel business?"
"No."
Paperman sketched his background, told about his heart attack, about his acute depression afterward and his disenchantment with Manhattan: the climbing prices, the increasing crowds and dirt, the gloomy weather, the slow bad transportation, the growing hoodlumism, the political corruption, the mushrooming of office buildings that were rectilinear atrocities of glass, the hideous jams in the few good restaurants, the collapse of decent service even in the luxury hotels, the extortionist prices of tickets to hit shows and the staleness of those hits, and the unutterably narrow weary repetitiousness of the New York life in general, and above all the life of a minor parasite like a press agent. He was quite as hard on himself as on the city. The long and the short of it was that his brush with death had taught him to make one last try to find a better way of life. Once he had seen the advertisement for the Gull Reef Club he had known no peace, he had been unable to sleep nights thinking of it, and now here he was. "And I'll tell you something," he said, "I didn't realize how disgusted with my life I actually was until I came here this morning. Coming to this island is like being born again. It's like getting a reprieve from a death sentence." He smiled with a tinge of embarrassment. "It's almost like finding out that there's a God."
