Scorpion in the Sea

FOUR

Diane Martinson sighed patiently, and decided to try one more time. She was on her third attempt to explain the fundamentals of basic household budgeting to the very young wife of a Petty Officer Third Class assigned to the frigate John L. Hall. She tried very hard not to show her exasperation. Her efforts represented the very essence of the Navy Relief work for which she had volunteered, but sometimes, Lord, it was very tough going.

“Mrs. Esposito, let me try again. This is important,” she said. “We know how much money comes into the bank every month from the Navy allotment, yes?”

Mrs. Esposito, struggling to control a squirming baby on her lap while also preventing an energetic four year old boy from tearing pages out of one of the waiting room magazines, clearly did not understand.

“Señora, I know nothing this allo‘mente; my hosband, he say to me how much money he get paid, an’ how much I spend for everything. It is the bank, they say to me, no write no more checkbooks, why? There is no enough money this month. But last month, it was OK. Ernesto — stop that! Immediamente!”

Diane curled her toes in frustration. The poor woman had not a clue as to how a checking account worked. The local banks were famous for this, happily taking the Navy enlisted wives’ government allotment check, and then casting these innocents loose into a sea of overdraft loans, instant mastercards, and bounced check charges. The woman was bent over in her chair, berating the four year old.

Across the waiting room, a sailor and his wife watched in embarrassed silence. The woman looked nervous; her husband had been giving Diane’s legs occasional appraising glances over the top of his magazine. She pressed her knees together under the table; her straight skirt was not especially designed for modesty. The small office was hot and humid in mid-afternoon; her sleeveless blouse was damp with perspiration, and her dark hair felt limp at the ends. She often wondered if it was such a good idea to volunteer for Navy relief; her looks tended to distract some of the “clients.” Sometimes she received not so subtle propositions, let’s talk about my problem some more, say, maybe, at the EM Club. She would then let it slip that her husband was the Chief of Staff to the Cruiser-Destroyer Group Twelve, and, most of the time, the propositions died a natural death. She decided to give up on Mrs. Esposito.

“Mrs. Esposito, I think the thing to do here is for you to go back to the bank; they have experts there, some who speak good Spanish, who can explain this better than I can. If I call the bank for you, and make the appointment, will you do that?”

Mrs. Esposito finally cracked the four year old across the back of his head with a plastic hairbrush. Diane winced. The child began to howl. Mrs. Esposito threw up her hands in exasperation, as if the child had finally passed all limits of propriety by crying. She shook her head over the whole problem of checking accounts, agreed to go see the man at the bank, smiled sweetly at Diane, gathered up the baby, the squalling boy, her diaper bag and her two handbags, and left, thanking Diane profusely for all her help.

Diane sighed. Jenny Frames, the other volunteer on duty, came in from the back office at that moment, and motioned for the sailor and his wife to come over to her desk. Her husband was the Exec on the Dale, the guided missile cruiser based in Mayport. The sailor looked almost disappointed.

“You look like you could use a little Navy relief, yourself, Diane,” she whispered as she went by. “I’ll take care of these people. Why don’t you call it a day?”

Diane nodded. “I think you’re right. The time does fly when, etc.” Jenny gave her a wry smile, and then greeted the couple as they sat down at her desk. Diane pushed back from the table and stood up; there were two splotches of perspiration on the blotter from her forearms; the lone air conditioner in the window struggled mightily, but cooled very little. She was conscious of the sailor’s watchful appraisal as she walked into the back office for her things. She really ought to frump it up a little before coming down here, she thought. Diane Martinson was a tall, elegant brunette whose looks tended to turn heads no matter what the setting, whether shopping in the Navy commissary at ten in the morning, or decked out in an expensive cocktail dress for one of her husband’s many Navy social functions.

She was not a beauty in the conventional, cover girl sense. She had widely spaced, dark eyes, a long and not quite straight nose, finely arched eyebrows, and generous lips; the total effect was to give her face a Latin cast. She was not athletic, which meant that her figure was softer, more lush than many of the wives who were part of the jogging and tennis set on the base. She would not wear shorts, preferring flattering skirts and simple blouses by day, and three-quarter length, designer evening gowns which accentuated her fine legs in the evening. On the beach she would wear a one piece, white maillot bathing suit rather than a bikini, and it was always a source of some frustration to other wives that Diane attracted more attention by covering up than they did by baring almost all.

Diane was by nature reserved; her face in composure projected a presence of cool indifference, especially to men. She had come to acknowledge long ago that she had a disturbing effect on men. It was now simply a fact of her life. She had also learned long ago that flirting always made things worse; now, at forty, she was finding that the shell of distant reserve she projected to keep men at a proper distance made her even more attractive to some of them, especially Navy men, often igniting just the opposite reaction, especially among her husband’s immediate contemporaries, the senior staff officers and commanders of ships and tenant commands at the base.

Her mother, a tall and rather plain woman, had sympathized with her daughter as she tried to understand what all the fuss was about.

“You’ve got ‘it,’ kid,” her mother would say. “You’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”

Nobody could quite explain to her exactly what “it” was, but boys, and later men, all seemed to know.

Diane gathered up her purse and car keys from the back office, and left the small, white Navy Relief building nestled at the foot of the St. Johns River lighthouse hill. She walked quickly across the sandy parking lot and opened both doors of her car to let out the accumulated heat. North Florida in springtime was like mid-summer anywhere else. The heat from the car hit her like a steam blanket, deflating what was left of her hair-do, and molding her skirt and blouse to her body. She finally slid sideways into the still hot car, closed the doors, lowered all the electric windows, squirming around on the hot vinyl seat for a moment, and drove off, not bothering to turn on the air conditioning for the three minute drive to the senior officer quarters area along the beach.

She parked the car in the driveway of the quarters, a three bedroom, ranch style house nestled in tall palms, and went in. All the senior officer quarters in Mayport were centrally air conditioned, which made life bearable in the oppressive Florida humidity. She went straight to the bedroom, shucked her clothes, and stepped into the shower. She stood there for several minutes, letting cool water run over her skin, washing away the traces of desperation from the steady parade of enlisted wives who had taken on married life in the Navy with no idea of what they were doing. Why on earth would any young girl marry a sailor, she wondered. Her conscience responded: you married a sailor. She smiled. Not quite the same; I married an officer, who was already a Lieutenant Commander, and who is now a senior Captain, in line for selection to Admiral. J. W. Martinson, III, was many things, but no one would call him a sailor. She smiled again at the thought.

She did two stints of volunteer work a week, one day as a Gray Lady at the naval hospital over on the Naval Air Station south of Jacksonville, and a second day in the Navy Relief office here at the Mayport Naval Station. The hospital work was less taxing emotionally than Navy Relief, because the Gray Ladies were able to keep their work pretty impersonal. The nurses were the ones who became emotionally engaged with their patients; the Gray ladies, so named because of their utilitarian, non-descript gray uniforms, did the things the nurses did not have time for, and thus remained in the background. Working in the Navy Relief office, on the other hand, meant going one on one with people in trouble, and it was inevitably depressing, even for just the one day a week she spent down there. Navy Relief was the Navy sponsored charity organization whose dollars and counseling attempted to smooth out the many bumps encountered by young sailors trying to support a family. Navy pay for a single young sailor was pretty good, and it got better with seniority. But for the junior enlisted man who married, and inevitably produced children, Navy pay was simply not enough to allow them to rise much above the trailer courts and food stamps lifestyle. The Navy did not permit the most junior enlisted to live in Navy housing, hoping through this policy to discourage them from getting married until they had achieved a few chevrons on their tunics and better pay.

Senior officers’ wives were expected to contribute their time to Navy Relief, as if by being senior officers’ wives they had accumulated some spare wisdom which might be helpful to the often very uneducated and frightened enlisted wives. Diane found the contrast between her fairly gracious lifestyle as a Captain’s wife, with beachside quarters, two cars, nice furniture and a great deal of social status within the close-knit Navy community a disturbing contrast to the plight of the besieged young women who came through the dilapidated doors of the Navy Relief office. On the other hand, she herself had no children, no career or job of her own, and not much else to do but to tend to housekeeping chores, do the shopping, and go out four evenings a week to dull Navy functions. On their last tour in Washington, she had briefly tried real estate, but J.W. had objected to her being gone evenings and almost every weekend because it interfered with his heavy social campaign to maintain visibility at the Navy headquarters. Her new “career” had, therefore, not flourished. She then went back to school and earned a masters degree, which now languished, unframed, in one of J.W.’s file cabinets. She had wanted to hang the certificate on the wall with all of J.W.’s many certificates, but he had protested, claiming the wall ought to reflect his accomplishments; after all, he was the provider, and her MA in English literature would not put food on the table.

Good old J.W. The depression brought on by a day in the Navy Relief office translated smoothly to the familiar pit in her stomach about the future of her marriage. She had begun to realize a few years ago that her main value to this marriage was to be decorously present and politically acceptable, another block checked off in J.W.’s carefully fashioned mosaic of corporate rectitude, aimed, as always, at being selected for Rear Admiral.

J.W. Martinson was more than just determined to make Admiral. He had explained to Diane from the first days of their marriage that reaching flag rank was his pre-eminent life goal. She had to admit: he had not attempted to disguise or minimize what was involved in a campaign to become an Admiral. He was going to do all the things required to make the coveted first star, which meant six month long separations when he was away on overseas deployments, fourteen hour days in the office when he was on shore duty, faithful attendance to Navy social requirements, and total involvement in whatever his current assignment demanded. He often remarked that a Cruiser-destroyer Group did not stop life at 1630; she was expected to understand and accommodate the round the clock aspects of his responsibilities. She would have the children and the household to take care of while he campaigned himself, with her help, of course.

Except the children had not materialized. The subject of children was now a carefully poulticed wound between them. After two years of trying she had suggested testing, but he had refused, declaring that it was almost always the woman’s problem, and that testing would answer a question she might not want answered. She had thought about that for a while, and then had had herself tested, which proved that in this case, J.W. was mistaken. She had not told him, because it was evident to her by then that the ego beneath his smooth, highly polished exterior might not be able to sustain such a hit.

How smug I was, she thought, not for the first time. Thought I had the guy figured out. Their love life had settled down to a routine that had become, after a few years and the tacit realization that the marriage would be barren, more an act of consideration than passion. He attacked his assignments with energy and tenacity, and would often drop into bed late at night without a sound, exhausted by the day and the prospect of getting up the next morning before dawn to be in the office before the current Admiral.

While his career consumed and presumably fulfilled him, their marriage provided Diane with less and less. Without a family focus, she had become bored with Navy life. She disliked the highly structured and so very busy activities of the wives’ clubs on and off base, where too many of the wives slyly threw around their husband’s rank while pretending to be just one of the girls. Diane did not care for bridge, did not have to jog, and was hopeless at tennis; she preferred to curl up with a good book. When she did get roped into the wives’ functions, she would keep her distance and amuse herself by watching the political interplay.

J.W. had occasionally sensed her restlessness. He would offer up the refrain that they had to play the game, Diane, if we’re going to succeed in this business; the top levels of the Navy have no room for non-conformists, characters, trouble-makers, or officers with controversial wives. But once they had come to Florida, she knew that if all she had to do was to lie around on the beach all day she would soon be driven to 11 A.M. vodka coolers like Mrs. Daniels next door, or to one of the bronzed young hunks who littered the Navy beach right behind her patio after four thirty. Hence the volunteering.

She had occasionally imagined what it would be like, to go out on the beach one day and signal some direct, uncomplicated interest, bring some guy back to the quarters, and screw his brains out. And then what? The fantasy always came apart at the “then what.” But it made an exotic diversionary scene in her mind whenever her dear, dedicated, and extremely promising husband, the Chief of Staff, found a few minutes in his terribly exciting professional day to pay attention to his wife. Not that it ever led to much these days. And now she finally knew why.

J.W. most definitely brought the office home with him. The first hour of his return from work was spent in a sort of debriefing, and she was always fascinated by the attention he paid to gossip; it made her wonder if senior officers in the Navy ever did any real work in the office. From his conversations at night, when he stayed awake long enough to talk, she had the impression that he spent much of the day keeping track of which of his contemporaries was going where and getting what plum assignments. Maybe that was why be brought those two briefcases home at night, and closeted himself in the study until the wee hours. The Admiral seemed to have a more balanced approach to life; he was on the base golf course by 5 P.M. every day. J.W. always said that the reason the Admiral could play golf was that the Chief of Staff did all the work, which was how it was supposed to be.

She turned off the shower, and shook her hair out, attacking it vigorously with a hair dryer and styling brush, while she let the air conditioning dry her off. She could have pulled it off, the going through the motions, the dutiful wife routine, the polished facade, except for one little perturbation: the Wave Commander in Norfolk that had apparently been the real center of J.W.’s affections for two goddamn years!

She continued to brush her hair while letting the waves of anger recede. She had found out about her husband’s girlfriend by accident. At first she had been terribly hurt, awash in feelings of inadequacy, bereft at the invasion of intimacy caused by another woman, wondering if he was compensating somehow for the absence of children in their marriage. But then the hurt had turned to anger as she had thought it through. J.W. was intimate with nothing but his own ambitions. She did not have a loving, caring marriage — she had a role, ironically much like the faceless woman in Norfolk had a role — written, directed, and produced by J.W. Martinson, III, in his pursuit of an Admiral’s flag. The Wave Commander worked in the inner sanctum, the executive offices of the Atlantic Fleet Commander himself. Diane knew in her bones that her dear husband was probably using his girlfriend and her unique access in exactly the same way that he was using her, to further his career.

She had not decided what to do, if anything. Yet. She was pretty sure that J.W. did not know that she knew; he was sufficiently conceited to assume that she could not know. She had come to depend on the anger to sustain her when the hurt occasionally caught her unawares. She was finally recognizing that what really hurt was the lost opportunity to have had a real love in her life. At forty, the chances were getting pretty slim.

She glanced at her watch. She had two hours before she had to get herself dressed and painted up for yet another reception at the Officers’ Club, in honor of yet another visiting fireman. She no longer kept track of who the various guests of honor were these days; J.W. always gave her a thorough briefing while he got dressed, and repeated it in the car. She would listen dutifully, fix a few key things in her mind so that she would have something intelligent to say to the great man of the hour, and then settle into the role of decorous prop while her husband cruised the party, getting his “face time” with the Admiral and checking the bases. Navy receptions, she had long ago decided, were designed to be exquisitely boring so that the men would ache to get back out to sea. Many of the other officers, inevitably married, who came on to her at the cocktail parties were dependably carbon copies of her husband, very busy, very important, and very interested in talking about themselves, their careers, their commands, and how everyone junior to them knew that they were someone to be reckoned with.

She decided to take a nap. She stood nude by the bedroom window for a minute, staring out through the sheers at the line of silver blue sea visible over the dunes behind the house. The discovery that even her marriage had been compromised by J.W.’s pursuit of promotion had accentuated her deep need for some thing that was missing from her life, some passion, some vital element that would make her life as a woman and an individual come alive. She knew that it was part sexual and part intellectual, and also partly a desire for something to happen before she ran out of time, and yet the revelation of her husband’s infidelity had partially unnerved her, awakening doubts about her own self worth as a woman. She wondered if she would have the courage to go after whatever it was she was seeking, and the temerity to carry it through if she found it.

Maybe, she thought, there really is no way around it: maybe she should just go out and have an affair of her own. And then she laughed at herself, and recalled the episode last year when one of her acquaintances on the base had “gone off the reservation,” as J.W. phrased it, and spent a three day weekend at one of the south Florida resorts with a “close friend” while her husband was deployed to the Mediterranean. The woman had eventually become a basket case, torn between her physical desire for a rematch and the terrible guilt, which was increasingly amplified by the everybody-knows syndrome inescapable on a small naval station like Mayport. The poor woman had eventually confessed all to her husband, against the somewhat cynical advice of her married friends (deny, deny, deny — it’s what they’re desperate to hear, dear), and then she, and her friends, had had to endure the emotional quagmire of their “getting it back together.” Diane shivered.

She contemplated taking a Valium, but took an aspirin instead and slipped into bed, setting her alarm clock for four thirty. Fantasize, my dear, fantasize. Playing around was simply too hard, as J.W. was fond of saying, and J.W. ought to know, the son of a bitch. And, yet, she wondered. Her marriage was rapidly hollowing out to nothing more than going through the motions. But when she asked herself the vital questions, what would she do, where would she go, her mind failed completely. She realized as she drifted off to sleep that she was going to have to come to grips with her problem, but had not the slightest idea of what to do about it.