friends. You accepted, you know."
"You accepted."
"But I expect you to have some consideration for-"
"Don't expect anything from me, Jillian. Sorry I forgot. Sorry you had to hang around waiting for me. Now go to your party and have a good time."
"Do you mean it?"
"Why shouldn't I want you to have a good time?"
"I have had it with you, you bahstid!"
"Sorry, Jilly. I just don't go to parties unless I like the people."
She went clicking down the outside ladderway and clacked her way aft and off the Flush and down the dock and away into the night. I went below, turned on a few lights, built a drink, ran a thumb down the stack of tapes, picked Eydie, and chunked her into the tape player and fixed volume.
Eydie has comforted me many times in periods of stress. She has the effortlessness of total professionalism. She is just so damned good that people have not been able to believe she is as good as she is. She's been handed a lot of dull material, some of it so bad that even her best hasn't been able to bring it to life. She's been mishandled, booked into the right places at the wrong time, the wrong places at the right time. But she can do every style end do it a little better than the people who can't do any other. Maybe a generation from now those old discs and tapes of Eydie will be the collectors' joy, because she does it all true, does it all with pride, does it all with heart.
So I settled back and listened to her open her throat and let go, backed by the Trio Los Panchos, Mexican love songs in flawless Mexican Spanish. She eased the little itch of ru+ilujrnhcrrlng just how good my Irish lady had smelled, tasted, and felt.
A lot of the good ones get away. They want to impose structure upon my unstructured habits. It doesn't work. If I wanted structure, I'd live in a house with a Florida room, have 2.7 kids, a dog, a cat, a smiling wife, two cars, a viable retirement and profit-sharing plan, a seven handicap, and Page 23
shortness of breath.
God only knows how many obligations there would have been once we were living in the British Virgins. Sing to me, Eydie. I just lost a pretty lady.
Through the music I heard the bong of my warning bell. I put on the aft floods and trapped Meyer in the white glare, blinking. I turned them off and let him in. I could not use Eydie for background music, so I ejected the tape and put a nothing tape on and dropped the sound down to the threshold of audibility.
Meyer said, "I was here an hour ago, and there was a beautiful, angry lady here, all dressed up, with someplace to go but nobody to go with."
"Fix yourself a knock. She decided to go alone."
"I bet."
"I am a crude, selfish bastard, and she is through with me."
He came back with a drink. He sat and said, "They tell me that a ring in the nose bothers you for the first week or so and then you never notice it again."
"Until somebody yanks on the rope."
"Oh, she wouldn't do that without good cause."
"Who the hell's side are you on?"
"She'll be back."
"Don't put any money on it."
"Speaking of money..."
"Harry Broll?"
"Yes, indeed. I had a long, tiring day. I talked to twenty people. I lied a lot. This is what I put together. It is all a fabric of assumption and supposition. Harry Broll is a small- to medium-sized cog in the machine called SeaGate, Inc. It is Canadian money, mostly from a Quebec financier named Dennis Waterbury and New York money from a syndicate there which has been involved in other land deals. They needed Broil because of his knowledge of the local scene, the local contacts, legal shortcuts, and so on. It is a privately held corporation. They are going public. The offering price has not been set yet, but it will be about twenty-six or twenty-seven dollars a share.
Most of the shares will be offered by the corporation, but about a third of the public offering will be by the present shareholders. Harry will be marketing a hundred thousand shares."
Cause for a long, low whistle. Old Harry with two
"You accepted."
"But I expect you to have some consideration for-"
"Don't expect anything from me, Jillian. Sorry I forgot. Sorry you had to hang around waiting for me. Now go to your party and have a good time."
"Do you mean it?"
"Why shouldn't I want you to have a good time?"
"I have had it with you, you bahstid!"
"Sorry, Jilly. I just don't go to parties unless I like the people."
She went clicking down the outside ladderway and clacked her way aft and off the Flush and down the dock and away into the night. I went below, turned on a few lights, built a drink, ran a thumb down the stack of tapes, picked Eydie, and chunked her into the tape player and fixed volume.
Eydie has comforted me many times in periods of stress. She has the effortlessness of total professionalism. She is just so damned good that people have not been able to believe she is as good as she is. She's been handed a lot of dull material, some of it so bad that even her best hasn't been able to bring it to life. She's been mishandled, booked into the right places at the wrong time, the wrong places at the right time. But she can do every style end do it a little better than the people who can't do any other. Maybe a generation from now those old discs and tapes of Eydie will be the collectors' joy, because she does it all true, does it all with pride, does it all with heart.
So I settled back and listened to her open her throat and let go, backed by the Trio Los Panchos, Mexican love songs in flawless Mexican Spanish. She eased the little itch of ru+ilujrnhcrrlng just how good my Irish lady had smelled, tasted, and felt.
A lot of the good ones get away. They want to impose structure upon my unstructured habits. It doesn't work. If I wanted structure, I'd live in a house with a Florida room, have 2.7 kids, a dog, a cat, a smiling wife, two cars, a viable retirement and profit-sharing plan, a seven handicap, and Page 23
shortness of breath.
God only knows how many obligations there would have been once we were living in the British Virgins. Sing to me, Eydie. I just lost a pretty lady.
Through the music I heard the bong of my warning bell. I put on the aft floods and trapped Meyer in the white glare, blinking. I turned them off and let him in. I could not use Eydie for background music, so I ejected the tape and put a nothing tape on and dropped the sound down to the threshold of audibility.
Meyer said, "I was here an hour ago, and there was a beautiful, angry lady here, all dressed up, with someplace to go but nobody to go with."
"Fix yourself a knock. She decided to go alone."
"I bet."
"I am a crude, selfish bastard, and she is through with me."
He came back with a drink. He sat and said, "They tell me that a ring in the nose bothers you for the first week or so and then you never notice it again."
"Until somebody yanks on the rope."
"Oh, she wouldn't do that without good cause."
"Who the hell's side are you on?"
"She'll be back."
"Don't put any money on it."
"Speaking of money..."
"Harry Broll?"
"Yes, indeed. I had a long, tiring day. I talked to twenty people. I lied a lot. This is what I put together. It is all a fabric of assumption and supposition. Harry Broll is a small- to medium-sized cog in the machine called SeaGate, Inc. It is Canadian money, mostly from a Quebec financier named Dennis Waterbury and New York money from a syndicate there which has been involved in other land deals. They needed Broil because of his knowledge of the local scene, the local contacts, legal shortcuts, and so on. It is a privately held corporation. They are going public. The offering price has not been set yet, but it will be about twenty-six or twenty-seven dollars a share.
Most of the shares will be offered by the corporation, but about a third of the public offering will be by the present shareholders. Harry will be marketing a hundred thousand shares."
Cause for a long, low whistle. Old Harry with two
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