Honeymoon in the Off Season

It had been, they told each other on the airplane, such a wonderful wedding. They said it many times. Too many times. A very nice wedding indeed. Really beautiful. The reception too.

He was a young man named Tom, a young man with ordinary brown hair, with eyes pleasantly weather-wrinkled at the corners, with a kind of collapsible grace. There had been, of course, a bachelor brawl the night before. His head still throbbed faintly. But that was less important than the curious anxiety.

This was his honeymoon. He wanted desperately not to look like a groom. The prize he had won sat beside him. Sara, the prize. Special. People always looked twice, and the more discerning looked at her three times. Alive. A luminescence from within. A prize — and a terrifying responsibility.

Anxiety made him alternate between a kind of heated giddiness and a heartfelt wish that his seat would open up beneath him and drop him into the Carolinas.

Wasn’t it a lovely wedding, darling?

It sure was.

He felt that in some strange way he had lost her by marrying her. They had seen each other across a room at a large party and he had phoned her the next day. On their fifth date he confessed that the moment he saw her his own date had become a drab article indeed. And she told him that the same thing had happened to her with her date. A month later they had decided they would be married. It was less a decision than an inevitability.

Once it was decided, they had been together every possible moment. They had spoken a billion words to each other, in cars, on long walks, in restaurants. They felt closer than any two people since the beginning of time. For an interminable time the wedding seemed impossibly remote. Then it was a month away, a week away, a day away, an hour away, and then, incredibly, it finally happened and they were married. Now they seemed to have nothing to say to each other.

He wanted to say to her, “Look, we wanted to get married, didn’t we? And now we are. So what’s wrong? Why do you seem like a stranger?”

Instead, they talked about how nice the Palmetto Grove would be. Such a honeymoon had been out of reach. His job was humble, though in time it would become very good indeed. Then had come the astonishing check from an uncle of hers long considered penurious. Be sensible and bank it, they told themselves. But they kept returning again and again to the brochure of the Palmetto Grove.

After all, how many first honeymoons do you get?

Friends were skeptical. “Florida in September? Who goes to Florida in September?”

Well, we’ve never been to Florida, either of us, and the rates are lower then, and this place is brand-new and air-conditioned, and it has three hundred feet of private Gulf beach, and just look at this picture of the swimming pool. Anyway, it isn’t as hot there in September as people think. There’s always a breeze, it says here. And here’s the floor plan of each apartment. Television and a restaurant and a bar-lounge and room service and... everything.

So they got off the airplane in the thick, misty glare of an early afternoon in Tampa. Somehow Tom managed to dribble some confetti after he thought it was all gone, and this made him so furious he was certain the car-rental arrangement would be fouled up. But the car was there waiting in the name of Mr. Thomas Browning, a fine, bold, yellow-and-white convertible. By the time the new luggage was loaded, his shirt was pasted to his back and there was a dew across Sara’s upper lip and along her hairline. They drove out of Tampa International, navigating by marked map toward Palmetto Grove. They felt more on their own, which made them act more gay and feel a great deal more nervous.

Ahead was two weeks at a glamour spot, with waiters in white serving tinkling drinks to tanned and sophisticated people around the huge, free-form pool. There would be cocktails and dancing in the muted richness of the bar-lounge, carefree hours on the sparkling white-sand beach.

The day was beautiful until they crossed the high span of the Sunshine Skyway and saw, far ahead and to their right, an exceptionally sullen-looking bank of thunderclouds.

They drove into the rain much sooner than Tom expected. When the first big drops struck he drove onto the shoulder and stopped, and pulled at the knob that raised the convertible top. It worked. The top puffed and creaked upward at a speed slightly better than the minute hand on a clock. By the time he could secure it, Sara was gasping, her bronze hair plastered flat. She told him it didn’t matter. She told him it wasn’t his fault. She told him so many times that he began to feel it was his fault; any fool would have stopped sooner and put the top up.

He felt his way south through a streaming and milky world, peering ahead through the misted windshield at the tail-lights of the cars that passed them. He got lost twice in the middle of Sarasota, finally found the Ringling bridges and the Longboat Key road. But he was certain that soaked as they were, amid the efficient service and glamour of the Palmetto Grove they would be restored.

They found the Palmetto Grove. The rain had stopped for a few moments. They drove in. They looked at it. They looked at each other.

“Oh, no!” said Sara. “No!”

“They... they haven’t built it yet,” Tom said in a strangled tone. The lobby part seemed to be nearly finished. There were piles of sand and lumber under wraps, roofing material, an abandoned and disconsolate bulldozer, and what seemed to be several acres of standing water ringed by mud. The architecture of the almost-finished portion was, indeed, extreme — roof angle like the wing angle of a tilting seagull. He parked as close as he dared and they hurried through the first fat drops of new rainfall. The lobby was high-ceilinged and huge. Four metal washtubs were strategically placed, with water spanging into them. The one on the registration desk was nearly full. A round, balding man was talking into a telephone. His face hung in tired and desperate folds.

“...don’t care what you think, old buddy. This is a sieve, and a sieve is a thing with holes, and somehow it is raining harder in here than it is outside.” He listened for a time, eyes closed, lips compressed. “...So better you should bring over water wheels. And tropical fish, old buddy. No. Everybody’s gone home. Had I both sense and courage, I too would go home.” He hung up. He looked at the Brownings with a crooked and hopeless smile. “Don’t tell me. All day I’ve been buoyed up by the forlorn hope that you might not get here.”

“Are you the manager? My name is Browning,” Tom said.

“They keep telling me I am the manager. I am Mr. Meecham. I took your hundred bucks. I confirmed your reservation. Welcome to the Palmetto Grove. You are our very first guests. Welcome, indeed.”

“But we can’t stay here, can we?” Sara said.

Meecham came around the desk with something faintly maniacal in his smile. “Aha! But you can. I insist. I was told to be open on the fifteenth of September. So I am open. Voilà! I do not have quite two hundred units as in the brochures. Nor one hundred. Nor even ten. But I do have one. One! For the Brownings, who have just arrived.”

He took them to their unit. It was on the ground floor of a half-finished building close to the main building. To reach the door they walked a plank across a morass. Meecham opened the door with an extravagant flourish. The colors were bright — and so fresh that Tom wondered if it was safe to strike a match.

“The lights work,” Meecham said, demonstrating. “The beds are made. Water runs out of the faucets. See? The refrigerator is busily making ice. The stove is hooked up.”

Tom said, “Really, Mr. Meecham, I think it would be better all around if we—”

“Every day at three o’clock my wife loses her mind. Today, before that sorry event occurred, she indulged herself in a gesture.” He opened the refrigerator door. They saw milk, eggs, bacon, orange juice. He opened a cupboard to display coffee, sugar, salt and pepper. He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne with a red ribbon tied around it.

“Welcome,” he said, smiling wildly. “Welcome to the Palmetto Grove.”

Tom looked at Sara and knew that they could not leave. Not now.

Meecham said, drawing himself up, “Now some sad truths. No pool. The filtration unit is somewhere between here and Detroit. Next week they will install the ranges in the kitchen. We have a bar-lounge, sort of, but there’s been a hitch in the liquor license. The lawyers are ironing it out, they say. I am proud to announce that the Gulf of Mexico is over there somewhere. Only because nobody could figure how to make it unavailable. What else? The air conditioning. Yes. Air conditioning by Mother Nature. Little men come around and thump on the ducts and go away, shaking their heads. I will help you with your luggage. And then I too will go away. The night watchman comes on duty at dusk. I believe there is mathematically a very small chance that before morning the entire enterprise will be washed out into the Gulf.”

After dinner in Sarasota, they drove back to the Palmetto Grove. Fifty feet inside the entrance Tom put the rented car firmly into the mud up to the hubcaps. It had started to rain again, hard. He carried Sara across the mud flats. They sat in the room and listened to the rain. The lights flickered and went out. Meecham had told them where the candles were. Tom read the brochure by candlelight.

“Dance to the music of the Harmonaires in the bar-lounge. Watch sunset over the Gulf from the promenade deck. Breakfast in bed? Phone for room service.”

Sara began to laugh. It was too close to hysteria. They broke open the champagne. Tom looked at her across the candle flame. She was very lovely indeed.

“So is it so terrible?” he said. “Champagne and candlelight? I guess it’s — sort of an adventure.”

“A damp one,” she said, and glowed at him. A fine girl and a fine glow. In a moment of revelation Tom suddenly understood that things were just fine. The awkward hiatus of formal politeness, of being strangers to each other, was gone. And he knew it had fled much more quickly than if they had walked into the glamour world of the brochure.

In the gray dawn a fire fight started in the Korean hills. Tom sat bolt upright, trembling and sweaty. The fire fight of his dream turned into the reality of simultaneous revving up of bulldozers, power saws, mechanical staplers and nailing devices, pipe threaders, cement mixers, riveting guns. Plumbers beat on pipes: plasterers plastered; carpenters whonked nails home; electricians clanked about. And all of them bellowed at one another over the din in hearty, early-morning voices.

Sara’s first home-cooked meal as Mrs. Tom Browning was marred by their having to yell at each other to be heard. As they were having coffee a huge man with a ginger beard and a crate of tools lumbered in, nodded gravely and began taking the cupboard doors off. When queried he said, “Hung wrong. Take ’em off. Rehang ’em. That’s the system around here. Do everything twice.”

After Sara washed their dishes, they took a turn around the property. The sun was bright and hot. Standing water was gone and the mud was turning to dust. They watched an irritable man painting a mural in the lobby. They watched some even more irritable men laying tile. Meecham appeared beside them and yelled over the noise, “Crash priority. Every day a mob scene — until the rain starts. Then they go home. Rained every day for the last twenty-one days. You wake up early?”

“Yes!” Tom shouted.

“Good thing. If you hadn’t, the noise would have waked you up. Got to go see the man about the greeves.”

He went away. They changed to swim suits and went onto the beach. They swam. They found shells and small black sharks’ teeth. They stretched out on a blanket on the highest slope of the beach. Sara was thoughtful. Finally she said, “Darling, did he say greeves?”

“I think so.”

“Well, what are greeves?”

“Just — plain old greeves. You know.”

And she had that glowing look again, and he looked at her shining eyes and long legs, and he kissed her there on the honeymoon beach, a long, sunbaked kiss, until a voice said, “I dowanna bust this up, folks, but we gotta put in a coconut palm right where you got your blanket.”

So they drove to St. Armand’s Key and bought some groceries. Sara fixed lunch, and during the noontime lull she said, “Darling, this is a strange sink. Cold comes out the hot and hot comes out the cold, all of a sudden.”

A small man in smudgy white overalls, half a sandwich in his cheek, appeared in the screened doorway and said, “Lady, you got it good. Upstairs, hot comes out both. You two going to work the front or the restaurant?”

“We’re guests,” Sara said with dignity and curious pride. “The very first ones.”

He stopped chewing. “You’re paying for this?”

Tom nodded.

The little man shrugged, tapped his temple, and went away.

Rain didn’t fall again that day, or the next or the next. The work progressed with astonishing speed. They asked Meecham about greeves. He said the only thing he knew about them was that they had to have them and they hadn’t come yet. When they came he’d tell them what they were, if he could find out. And if they came. The manager’s apartment was finished and the Meechams moved in. Tom and Sara agreed that they felt slightly put out at having to share the Palmetto Grove. It had been cozy with just the two of them and the watchman after dark.

They had begun to feel proprietary about it. Tom kept track of work accomplished. They made tours of inspection. After he had, in a sense, supervised the installation of the filtration unit for the pool, the crew chief handed him the bill. Tom took it to Meecham. Sara got into a spirited hassle with the architect over colors. She won her point by saying, “It is very demoralizing for a woman to get her first look at her face in the bathroom mirror in the morning and find it all blue-green from the reflection.”

Several more units were completed. Sara and Tom came back from grocery shopping one day to find a Minnesota car parked at the Palmetto Grove. They were very annoyed.

“Can’t those fools see it isn’t finished yet?” Sara said.

“What kind of fathead would try to move in so soon?” They looked at each other and exchanged a most comfortable smile.

That evening the bar-lounge opened, without furniture. Meecham bought them a stand-up drink and they took the second one out to the pool. In the morning Tom saw the couple from Minnesota checking out. The man was banging the counter with his fist and yelling, but there was too much noise to hear what he said. Three more groups checked in that day.

On the next day the restaurant opened in a minor and plaintive key of confusion. And the bar-lounge furniture came. And more units were completed.

Finally, forlornly, it was the very last day of their honeymoon. They lay side by side on sun cots by the pool. They held hands comfortably and inconspicuously. There was a throng of sun-browned people grouped picturesquely around the blue pool. A waiter in a white coat brought a tray of tinkling glasses to a party on the far side of the pool.

“It’s getting like the brochure,” Sara sighed.

“Well, nearly,” Tom said. The major sounds of construction were over.

“So tonight,” she said, “I wear something rustly and we dance.”

“To the Harmonaires.”

“They’ll be better tonight, I think. After all, last night was the first time they’d ever played together. That’s what the little one said.”

“Air conditioning and everything,” Tom said, and sighed.

“Since yesterday.”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

They cooled off in the pool, and when they went back to their sun cots Sara nudged Tom and whispered to him to look at a couple who had just arrived. Tom smiled. They were a cute couple, and they might just as well have worn sandwich signs labeled “Honeymoon!” Tom and Sara looked at them with a sort of fondness and tolerance, feeling practically middle-aged.

“Hope she shook the confetti out of that swim suit,” Sara said.

The couple sat quite near them. Tom could sense how awkward they were with each other. He knew that they were in that curious climate of politeness and formality. He hoped they would come out the other side, as he and Sara had done, into that perfect and exciting accord that can be the result of a honeymoon of greatest perfection. He felt an empathy for the nervous, brand-new bridegroom, sensed the quality of the young man’s quiet desperation.

They heard the girl say, “But if it isn’t even finished yet, why do they take your money? I don’t think it’s right.”

“It’ll be okay, Marie,” the boy said.

“But it’s — sort of — well — crude. All that hammering.”

Tom wanted some way to tell them that it would be all right. If the marriage was all right, it would be all right anywhere; and they’d find that out soon enough. Too bad, he thought, that they hadn’t been married early enough to have experienced the worst of it.

And while he was considering the futility of trying to tell the new couple anything, he was enormously surprised to hear Sara take care of the whole thing.

He saw their startled faces as his Sara turned toward them and with sweetness and only a hint of condescension said clearly, “You should have been here in the old days, dears.”