Shadowland

been seeing this amazing girl every summer; and watching her sit down on Del's bed with her knees together, I knew, knew, knew, that my whole relationship with Del had just changed.

1

Miami Beach, 1975

But before we can really look at Rose Armstrong through Tom Flanagan's eyes and travel with these three young people through their final convulsive months at Shadowland, I must introduce a seeming digression. Up to this point, this story has been haunted by two ghosts: of course one is Rose Armstrong, who in a black bathing suit and a boy's shirt has just now sat down on Del's sug­gestively mussed-up bed, badly 'rattling' Tom Flanagan. The other ghost is far more peripheral; certainly the reader has forgotten him by now. I mean Marcus Reilly, who was mentioned less than half a dozen times in the first part of this story — and perhaps Marcus Reilly is a persistent 'ghost' only to me. Yet suicide, especially at an early age, makes its perpetrator stick in the mind. It is also true that when I last saw Marcus Reilly, a few months before he killed himself, he said some things that later seemed to me to have a bearing on the story of Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan; but this may be mere self-justification.

    At the beginning ot this story, I said that Reilly was the most baffling of my class's failures. As a Carson student, he had a great success, though not academically. He was a good athlete, and his closest friends were Pete Bayliss and Chip Hogan and Bobby Hollingsworth, who was on the same terms with everyone. A burly blond boy with a passing resemblance to the young Arnold Palmer, Marcus was bright but not reflective. His chief characteristic was that he took things as they came. His parents were rich — their house in Quantum Hills was more lavish than the Hillmans'. He could have been taken as one kind of model of the Carson student: someone who, though clearly he would never become a teacher, could be expected to have some slight trace of Fitz-Hallan about him always.

    After our odd, limping graduation, Reilly went off to a private college in the Southeast; I cannot remember which one. What I do remember is his delight in finding a place where suntans and a social life were taken to be as critical as grades. After college he went to a law school in the same state. I am sure that he graduated in the dead center of his class. In 1971 Chip Hogan told me that Reilly had taken a job in a Miami law firm, and I felt that small, almost aesthetic smack of satisfaction one gets when an expectation is fulfilled. It seemed the perfect job and place for him.

    Four years later a New York magazine commissioned me to do an article on a famous expatriate novelist wintering in Miami Beach. The famous novelist, with whom I spent two tedious days, was a self-important bore, turning out of his hotel onto sunny Collins Avenue in a flannel suit and trilby hat, with furled umbrella. He had consciously given two months of his life to Miami Beach in order to fuel his disdain for all things American. He pretended an ignorance of the American system of coinage. 'Is this one really called a quarter? Dear me, how unimaginative.' When I had sufficient notes for the article, I put the whole project into a mental locker and decided to look up Bobby Hollingsworth. I had not seen Bobby in at least ten years. He was living in Miami Beach, I knew from the alumni magazine, and owned a company that made plumbing fixtures. Once, in an Atlanta airport men's room, I had looked down into the bowl and seen stamped there 'hollingsworth vitreous.' I wanted to see what had become of him, and when I called him up he promptly invited me to his house.

    His house was a huge Spanish mansion facing Indian Creek and the row of hotels across it. Moored at his dock was a forty-foot boat that looked like it could make a pond of the Atlantic.

    'This is really the place,' Bobby said during dinner. 'You got the greatest weather in the world, you got the water, you got business opportunities up the old wazoo. No shit, this place is paradise. I wouldn't go back to Arizona if you paid me. As for living up North-wow.' He shook his head. Bobby at thirty-two was pudgy, soft as a sponge. A diamond as big as a knuckle rode on one sausagy hand. He still had his perpetual smile, which was not a smile but the way his mouth sat on his face. He wore a yellow terry-cloth shirt and matching shorts. He was enjoying his wealth, and I enjoyed his pleasure in it. I gathered that his wife's family had given him his start in the business, and that he had rather surprised them by his success. Monica, his wife, said little during the meal, but jumped up every few minutes to supervise the cook. 'She treats me like a king,' Bobby said during one of Monica's excursions to the kitchen. 'When I get home, I'm royalty. She lives for that boat — I gave it to her for Christmas last year. Squealed like a puppy. What do I know from boats? But it makes her happy. Say, if you play golf we could go out to the club tomorrow. I got an extra set of clubs.'

    'I'm sorry, but I don't play,' I said.

    'Don't play golf?' For a moment Bobby seemed totally perplexed. He had taken me into his world so completely that he had forgotten that I was not a permanent resident there. 'Well, hell, why don't we go out in the boat? Laze around, have a few drinks? Monica would love that.'

    I said that I might be able to do that.

    'Great, kiddo. You know, this is what that school of ours was all about, wasn't it?'

    'What do you mean, Bobby?'

    His wife came back to the table and Bobby turned to her. 'He's coming out on the boat with us tomorrow. Let's toss some lines overboard, catch dinner, hey?'

    Monica gave a wan smile.

    'Sure. It'll be great. Now, this is what I'm saying — our old school had one goal, right? To get us to where I am now. And to know how to live once we get here. That's the way I see it. To make us into the kind of people who could fit in anywhere. I want to write in to the alumni magazine and say that you can travel all over the Southeast and see my name whenever you stop to take a leak. And that's almost true.'

    Monica looked away and turned over a lettuce leaf on her salad plate to peer at its underside.

    'Do you ever see Marcus Reilly?' I asked. 'I under­stand he lives here.'

    'Saw him once,' Bobby said. 'Mistake. Marcus got involved in some bad shit — got disbarred. Stay away from him. He's a downer.' 'Really?' I was surprised.

    'Oh, he was a big deal for a little while. Then I guess he got weird. Take my advice . . . I'll give you his phone number if you like, but stay away from him. He's a failure. He has to stick his nose above water to suck air.' The next morning I called the number Bobby had given me. A man at the other end of the line said, 'Wentworth.' 'Marcus?' 'Who?'

    'Marcus Reilly? Is he there?' 'Oh, yeah. Just a second.'

    Another telephone rang. It was lifted, but the person at the other end said nothing. 'Marcus? Is that you?' I gave my name. 'Hey, great,' came the breezy, husky voice of Marcus Reilly. 'You in town? How about we get together?' 'Can I take you to lunch today?' 'Hell, lunch is on me. I'm at the Wentworth Hotel on Collins Avenue, just up on the right side from Seventy-third Street. Tell you what, I'll meet you outside. Okay? Twelve o'clock?'

    I called Bobby Hollingsworth to say that I would not be able to go out on his boat. 'That's fine,' Bobby said. 'Come back next time, and we'll go out with a couple of girls I know. We got a date?'

    'Sure,' I said. I could see him lolling back on a deck chair, propping a drink on his yellow-terry-cloth belly, telling a good-looking whore that whenever you took a leak in the Southeast, you could read his name just by looking down.

    There was nothing splendid about Collins Avenue up where Marcus Reilly lived. Old men in canvas hats and plaid trousers below protruding bellies, old women in baggy dresses and sunglasses crawled beneath the side­walk awnings of little shops. Discount stores, bars, cut-rate novelty shops where everything would be an inch deep in dust. At the Wentworth Hotel, the motto Where Life Is a Treat was painted on the yellow plaster. The lobby seemed to be outside, in a sort of alcove set off the sidewalk.

    At five past twelve Marcus came bustling out, wearing a glen-plaid suit, walking quickly past the rows of old people sitting in aluminum-and-plastic chairs as if he were afraid one of them would stop him.

    'Great to see you, great to see you,' he said, pumping my hand. He no longer resembled the young Arnold Palmer. His cheeks had puffed out, and his eyes seemed narrower. The moisture in the air screwed his hair up into curls. Like the expatriate novelist's, his suit was much too warm for the climate, but he had none of the novelist's internal air conditioning. Marcus snapped his fingers, smacked his palms together, and looked up and down the street. I could smell violence on him, as you sometimes can on a dog. 'Jesus, hey, here we are. What is it, fifteen years?'

    'About that,' I said.