Feast of Murder(43)

Actually, Fritzie was more than a little relieved to find that Sheila really hadn’t been well brought up. For one thing, that solidified Sheila’s image in Fritzie’s mind. It would have been terrible to have been going around for the last she didn’t know how long, thinking of Jon as married to someone no better than a chorus girl, only to find out that the new wife had gone to Spence and been presented at the Junior Assemblies. For another, Fritzie was very tired, and a little panicked. Usually, food served outside didn’t bother her too much. The wind carried the smells away and flies came, which always made her feel faintly sick. Today, for some reason, the mere sight of Danish pastry had been enough to make her ravenous—and that was very odd, because she hadn’t eaten Danish pastry in years. Maybe it was because of the saving up. A few years ago, Fritzie had taken the advice of one of her favorite women’s magazines and started “saving up” calories for holiday parties. For three or four weeks before she was supposed to eat somebody else’s fattening but lavishly proffered food, she would allow herself only 400 calories a day instead of her usual 800. Those 400 uneaten calories would be her “calorie bank,” which she could spend on Alida Halstead’s chicken lasagna or Muffy Stegner’s full-cream tea from Martha Stewart. It was a very good system, really. It let her eat like a horse when she was out and inflamed the envy of all her friends, who stood around at parties nibbling on celery stalks and wondering out loud how she managed to eat like she did and never gain any weight. The only problem with it was that it made her feel as if she wanted to spend her life in bed, and not with a companion. Fritzie never wanted to spend her life in bed with a companion. Being naked in the presence of other people made her much too self-conscious about her thighs.

After the breakfast party had broken up and everyone had gone below—especially Tony, who hadn’t spoken to her but who had needed her, Fritzie was sure of it—Fritzie had gone below herself, crawled into her bunk, and closed her eyes. In no time at all, she had been in one of those floating states that always reminded her of the man who had had himself suspended in water. She had been awash on a sea of projection, rocked by the real sea and half-asleep and busy making plans all at once. She worked out what she would do about lunch—not go—and about dinner and schemed pleasantly through the ways she might make contact with Tony. In the middle of all that, she must have fallen asleep for real, because when she came to with a start in the middle of a dream about executing Sheila in an electric chair made of maraschino cherries, her watch said two o’clock.

Two o’clock, Fritzie thought, sitting up carefully so that she didn’t hit her head on the beam. She ought to feel good about it’s being two o’clock. That meant lunch was over and she had missed it, without ever having had to go through an elaborate charade to pretend that was not what she was doing. At home with her own friends, she wouldn’t have had to pretend at all. They all skipped lunch all the time, too, because it was the only sensible way to live on a night when you had to go out to dinner. Here, though, Tony and Jon would stare and disapprove, and she didn’t like to put herself through that.

There was a basin and a jug of water secured into the top of the cupboard that was built into the cabin’s other long wall. Fritzie got up and went to it, poured water out, found soap, and started to wash her face. When she was done she got her makeup out and applied it very carefully, until she looked, as she thought of it, “like herself.” Then she put the makeup away and went to the door to look out into the hall.

“I don’t know what these figures are supposed to mean,” Calvin’s voice said, floating down to her from somewhere out of sight. “They’re not my figures.”

“If you’re going to use unicorns, you’re going to have to be careful not to fall into clichés,” a woman’s voice said. “Everybody thinks they know everything there is to know about unicorns, and it’s enough to drive you crazy.”

Fritzie analyzed the woman’s voice and came up with the picture of the small black-haired one who had come with Jon’s friend Mr. Demarkian. She analyzed the laugh that followed the little lecture on unicorns and came up with Tony. Then she bit her lip and shook her head. The woman was very familiar, but she couldn’t quite work out why. The idea of Tony falling in love with anybody made her sicker than the sight of flies on food.

She came out of her cabin, closed the door behind her, and made her way carefully to the staircase-ladder that would take her up on deck. She passed the room where Tony and the woman who had come with Mr. Demarkian sat and stuck her head in the door, noting with relief that they weren’t anything at all like sitting close together. Tony was stretched out on the floor, and the woman had taken a perch on Tony’s water cabinet.