MacKinley was holding up the phone. Ford said, 'Don't go away.'
'We might be down on that big blue sailboat.' Not committing herself to stand there and wait, but making sure he knew where she would be. That was good.
'I'll probably be going back out to the stilt house in a little bit. You and your friends could stop out, look around, maybe have a beer.'
She knew what that meant but played right along. 'Sounds interesting. But I think I'd have to leave my friends here. They met some people on the sailboat last night.' Getting better and better. Why hadn't he thought to take a shower after work?
She drifted back into the circle of conversation, a pretty woman in white knit shirt, cut-off shorts, with the good legs of a tennis player. Ford headed for the office.
It was Jessica on the phone. She'd gotten his new home number from information; tried and tried but it was busy all afternoon. Then it wasn't busy, but he didn't answer and she was wondering why he hadn't tried to call her. 'Doc, I hope it's not because you're mad at me for abandoning you last night.'
Ford said don't be silly, he wasn't mad—looking out the window, watching Dr. Braun-Richards.
'Well, I wouldn't blame you if you were. Benny came on like such an ass. Doing his Mr. Macho routine. Working in the art world, living in Manhattan, he has a thing about proving he's not gay.'
Ford said he hadn't noticed, Benny had seemed like a very nice guy—enjoying the clean lines of Dr. Braun- Richards's body as he spoke on the phone; the soft facial contours, the way she laughed ... a little bit of the college girl left in those cut-off jeans.
'Then maybe I can take you up on your offer to have dinner. A little late, but my treat.'
'Dinner?' Ford had a redfish fillet and a mackerel in the refrigerator. He'd planned on cooking. 'Dinner would be nice, sure. But I was going to hang around the marina tonight. Jeth said he might need a little help . . . with some things.'
MacKinley looked up from his magazine, his eyebrows raised. He knew that Jeth didn't need any help.
Jessica's voice dropped, softened. 'I'd like to see you, Doc. Just for a little while if I can. Please? There's something I'd like to talk with you about.'
Ford watched Dr. Braun-Richards step onto the blue sailboat with the others, accept a drink from the owner. Ford said, 'Well . . . sure. For a little while. You want me to come out now?'
'The sooner the better.'
Ford said, 'Now . . . ah . . . well, sure. For a little bit. I can tell Jeth to wait.'
'Don't sound so anxious!'
Ford freed the lines of his skiff, aware that Dr. Braun-Richards was watching. Jeth was on the sailboat with the others, and Ford called, 'I'll be back in about an hour.'
Nicholes, who didn't know why he should care, called back, ' Bout an hour . . . right.'
The sailboat owner had his hand on Dr. Braun-Richards's shoulder, trying to show her something, and she turned away as Ford said, 'I'll probably go straight to the stilt house when I get back ... if you want to stop by.'
Nicholes said, 'In ba-ba-'bout an hour . . . right.'
Jessica's house: ceiling fans, throw rugs on pine floors, rattan furniture, hatch-cover coffee table near the fireplace, two cats lounging on the Bahama couch, another atop the stereo, un-framed paintings stacked in every corner, the odor of an old beach house mingling with the smell of paint supplies, incense, and cats.
When Ford pulled up to the dock, Jessica stood beneath the porch light leaning against the door frame, hip thrown out, hand behind her head, looking like a bus-stop blonde in a 1930s movie. But the hair was long auburn, and she didn't linger, meeting Ford at the steps, falling into his arms, hugging him.
'Boy, I missed you.' Then led him into the house, holding his hand. She was shaking.
'Are you okay?'
She swung down on the couch beside him, her hand coming to rest on his thigh. 'I am now. I missed you, that's all.' She was wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt—braless, too, which made Ford take a breath because he could see her in the soft light of the lamp beside the couch. She said, 'I feel like such a jerk going off and leaving you last night. You had something you wanted to talk about, and I could tell it was important, but I just left . . . and you're my best friend. For some stupid party so Benny could push my paintings.'
'You didn't have fun?'
'A lot of smiling and nodding and everyone so superior, talking about Rauschenberg's latest breakthrough and the next political fund-raiser—my God, what happened to your face?' She was touching the scratch marks on his cheek tenderly, concerned . . . her own face becoming blurry to Ford's eyes at close range: Lombard filmed through a filter; a genuinely classic face.
'I took a spill at the marina. Tripped on the dock.'
She kissed his cheek, then his lips, too, very softly. That was a new one. 'You big clumsy lug. Yesterday it was vultures, today the dock. You need someone to look after you.'
'Took the skin right off, huh?' Like a little boy with a scrape.
'I've got some antibiotic cream in the bathroom—' She was already standing. 'You're sure you don't need it? Then some wine. Last night a very fat, rich man gave me a twenty-year-old Chardonnay that is supposed to be wonderful. He said he bought a case at auction, and I'd hate to even guess what it cost him.'
'Wine,' said Ford. 'That would be nice.' He would have preferred Old Milwaukee to old Chardonnay, but why be ungracious?
She went into the kitchen, patting each cat on the way. Ford stood, hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts, heard Jessica call for music and touched the digital buttons of the stereo until he found public radio: Dvorak, maybe, with a lot of timpani. Then he studied the paintings. Over the fireplace was a big print by Chrzanoska, a sole-eyed woman with a pearl headpiece, holding a cat over her bare breasts. There was something haunting in the woman's eyes, something that reminded him of Jessica . . . and he found it touching that she did not display her own work as prominently. Some of her watercolors were on the side walls: wading birds feeding at low tide; an old man in a wooden skiff; storm clouds approaching a lone mangrove island, everything frozen in an eerie bruised light. There was a canvas on the easel, too, something new, and he peeked beneath the paper dust guard to see a man wading the flats. The man wore only brief khaki shorts, his thigh muscles flexing as he lifted his leg to take a step, very wide shoulders, body hair covering the rib cage. An impressionistic treatment, but anatomically suggestive in certain details and oddly sexual. Only the hands, face, and some of the background hadn't been finished.
'You weren't supposed to see that. Not yet.' Jessica stood holding the wineglasses, uneasy. He had never seen her embarrassed before. It changed her face; gave it a nice color. She said, 'It's not done. I wanted to wait, get my courage up because . . . it's you.'
'Me? I don't have a face.'
'It's not done yet, silly.'
'That's the way I look when I go collecting? And I thought I wore boots.'
'Ah, Doc, please don't chide me . . . and don't smirk like that.' She bumped him with her shoulder as she handed him his wine. 'I've been trying to make myself paint what I feel, not what I see. I got into such a rut; that's what coming to Sanibel was all about. I don't know that I was ever really good, but I was successful; my first shows got great reviews. I'm just trying to find that thread again, the honesty that's in me. It's a hard thing to get back, honesty. Once you've lost it, it's damn hard to recover . . . and you've heard this speech way too much, over and over from me.'
He had heard it. Jessica had been in New York only for a year before being embraced by some powerful critics who heralded her as the Renaissance stylist of American impressionistic gothic—whatever that meant; Ford didn't know. They said she was breaking old ground in a new way, and for a couple of years she could do no wrong. But then she fell from grace. In the eyes of the critics, everything she did was wrong and, worse, she had invested badly, spent lavishly; ended up in debt with a bunch of paintings that wouldn't sell. She had borrowed from her agent until her agent dropped her, and that should have been the low point, but it wasn't. For the next year she lived in a Greenwich Village flat sleeping all day, avoiding work at night, doing drugs in hip discos and fighting depression. She wasn't quite twenty-five. But then she somehow caught herself. She got a low job on some marketing firm's ladder, worked hard, lived cheaply, and paid off the debts. And saved enough to rent this working retreat on the island.
Jessica said, 'You don't like it, do you?'
