way to be mistaken for a possible reunion. I got the impression that her idea was for me to fly up, then make like the Lone Ranger, leaving behind a silver bullet. It was not the worst offer I'd ever gotten, yet there was a certain chill to it just the same that failed to move me. But maybe that was just me being old-fashioned again. I took off my shirt and lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling fan for a while. That didn't help much either, though. An egg of an idea was trying to hatch itself in my brain, but it needed a little nudging along, so I got up, went over to my desk, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the last letter Vivian had sent me. I popped another beer and sat down at my table with its two undersize chairs and read it again for at least the hundredth time since she'd sent it to me. I knew it by heart--right down to the freaky line breaks, but I read it again anyway; it was like sipping from an empty glass. The letter was written in plain English, but as usual I went over it slowly, lingering on each word like a sun-dazed ar- chaeologist deciphering obscure hieroglyphics. She was right. I had backed down, or rather I had backed away, and it wasn't because Vivian hadn't been worth fighting for. I had fought harder for much less. At the time I had seen Matson's incursion as a test of loyalty on her part, and when all the signs made it clear that she had failed that test, I jettisoned them both, girlfriend and client, in a flash of pride. To hell with the both of them, I'd thought. The part about the money was also true, though I had re- fused to think about it. America might be a classless society, but there was a hierarchy of cash that could be overlooked only until the first time the waiter handed you the wine list. 56
The economics of the romance started dawning on me after the first couple of dates, when I began to realize that I was going to have to train half of Coral Gables in order to keep up with her. I came clean with her on the subject, and she laughed and said it didn't matter. But it does matter. And while her father treated me like an equal, most of her friends thought that she was slumming, that she would come around once the shine wore off my charm. My self-esteem had never been based on the gold stan- dard, but Fitzgerald was right: The rich are different. Their feet touch the ground only when they want them to, but mine were there all the time. In the culture of money, I was a definite outsider with little chance of conversion this side of winning the lottery. It was all right for a while, but I couldn't see the thing working for the long haul. I just didn't want to go through life feeling like one of Elizabeth Taylor's poorer husbands. Over the course of our affair, I gradually talked myself out of being in love with Vivian. I was like a man trying to rescue himself from a cult he had started. I told myself I was being realistic, noble, that I was doing her a favor, but I couldn't deny the hurt I saw in her eyes when she realized I was pull- ing away. I went from being too available to being too in- visible, and when she pressed me on it, I gave her that old bullshit answer that I was too busy. I knew exactly what I was doing, and when Matson came along, he became part of the exit strategy. Judging from my reaction in the bar that night, however, it had worked a lot better than I thought it would. And now Matson was dead, but nothing was finished. In fact, things seemed less finished now than when he was alive. If I closed my eyes, I could see the white yacht with its perilous cargo sitting quietly in the water as the sky dark- ened, the sun now far to the west and set on setting. Then something that had been trying to surface finally did, and 57
all of a sudden none of it made sense. Matson had money, but the boat I'd seen would have cost at least $3 million, and that much he didn't have. Sometimes people become more mysterious in death than they were in life, and that seemed to be
The economics of the romance started dawning on me after the first couple of dates, when I began to realize that I was going to have to train half of Coral Gables in order to keep up with her. I came clean with her on the subject, and she laughed and said it didn't matter. But it does matter. And while her father treated me like an equal, most of her friends thought that she was slumming, that she would come around once the shine wore off my charm. My self-esteem had never been based on the gold stan- dard, but Fitzgerald was right: The rich are different. Their feet touch the ground only when they want them to, but mine were there all the time. In the culture of money, I was a definite outsider with little chance of conversion this side of winning the lottery. It was all right for a while, but I couldn't see the thing working for the long haul. I just didn't want to go through life feeling like one of Elizabeth Taylor's poorer husbands. Over the course of our affair, I gradually talked myself out of being in love with Vivian. I was like a man trying to rescue himself from a cult he had started. I told myself I was being realistic, noble, that I was doing her a favor, but I couldn't deny the hurt I saw in her eyes when she realized I was pull- ing away. I went from being too available to being too in- visible, and when she pressed me on it, I gave her that old bullshit answer that I was too busy. I knew exactly what I was doing, and when Matson came along, he became part of the exit strategy. Judging from my reaction in the bar that night, however, it had worked a lot better than I thought it would. And now Matson was dead, but nothing was finished. In fact, things seemed less finished now than when he was alive. If I closed my eyes, I could see the white yacht with its perilous cargo sitting quietly in the water as the sky dark- ened, the sun now far to the west and set on setting. Then something that had been trying to surface finally did, and 57
all of a sudden none of it made sense. Matson had money, but the boat I'd seen would have cost at least $3 million, and that much he didn't have. Sometimes people become more mysterious in death than they were in life, and that seemed to be
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