Jane Austen in Boca by Paula Marantz Cohen Page B

manuscript when Stan Jacobs walked in. He was wearing tennis shoes and was holding a racket, and had the air of someone who had wandered into the clubhouse by accident and happened to find three people he vaguely knew assembled in front of him.
    “Oh, hi there,” said Stan. He shook May’s hand, but then seemed to lose interest in the amenities of greeting and only nodded to Flo. “I heard that you might be here, and Norman and I usually have a tennis match on Thursdays at two, so …”
    “Good old Stan, gracious as ever,” laughed Norman. “Join us for lunch. Tennis today is off. I plan to drink at least two glasses of wine and give these two fascinating ladies my undivided attention all afternoon. Why the hell would I want to play tennis with you?”
    “The court’s reserved,” said Stan in a tone of mild irritation. “You know how hard it is to get a court here.”
    “Almost as hard as an audience with the pope,” laughed Norman, “and about as desirable, as far as I’m concerned right now. Though perhaps the ladies think otherwise.” He turned inquiringly to May and Flo. “We can play doubles if you like. The shop will outfit you in a jiffy.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s the kind of service we pay an arm and a leg for here.”
    Norman offered the idea without much enthusiasm, and May, who rarely went into the water above her knees and for whom tennis was as foreign as skydiving, demurred quickly.
    “I don’t play,” she explained, hoping that her athletic incapacity would not diminish her in Norman’s eyes. He looked as if he probably did all the sports like tennis, golf, and skiing that she associated with a lively, moneyed strata outside her ken. “But Flo is a wonderful player,” she added, hoping that her friend’s abilities might compensate for her own lack of them.
    “Well, we’ll eat first,” said Norman, “and then Flo can decide if she wants to play I hope she does. That’ll get me off the hook, and maybe she can beat Stan’s ass and really make it worth my while.”
    Stan looked doubtful about the idea of playing Flo, but he sat down and said nothing. Flo, who preferred the prospect of playing Stan to talking to him, remarked with exaggerated cheerfulness that she was “game for a game,” and didn’t need anything but a racket from the pro shop since she was wearing her shorts and tennis sneakers.
    “I always come prepared, since court time is at such a premium in Boca,” she announced. “You know you’re retired when you’re ‘on call’ for tennis.” She gave Stan a dazzling smile, which, if one didn’t know her, might have passed as an attempt to be friendly.
    In fact, it had always been a rule with Flo Kliman not to let unpleasant people register on her or cow her into submission. It was a compensatory strategy, she knew, that came from growing up in an era when women were supposed to defer to men. Herswas not a pliant nature, as she had demonstrated fifty years ago when she refused to entertain the banal dronings of the dental student judged by everyone in her circle to be a good catch. She could still recall the tearful pleadings of her mother, mystified by how her daughter, hovering on the brink of spinsterhood at twenty-four, could reject such a prospect. Fortunately, Eddie had come along soon afterward, a man secure enough to withstand a strong woman’s opinions and with a taste for combat that made spirited argument part of their marital sport. Flo felt she’d been lucky in her husband, as she had been in her career, but she still suffered pangs of envy when she saw women a generation younger who’d been able to embark more aggressively on their own paths. And her envy turned to awe when she looked at the present generation of young women, as exemplified in her great-niece Amy. Amy was twenty-one, a film student at NYU with an unshakable sense of her own worth and an openness to the possibilities of life that struck Flo as breathtaking. If she could