Was that enough excuses?
"Pete," she said, "it isn't fair. You can't just break off in the middle."
I had to laugh at that. She puts her clothes back on after sitting naked by my pool and showing me her breasts, and I can't break off in the middle? Plus there was another reason that the comment struck me bleakly funny. I said, "I always broke off in the middle. Why do you think I failed?"
"Stop saying you failed." Then she added, "Failed at what?"
I squeezed my knees. I blinked toward the sky. Mauve seams showed now between steely slabs of cloud; even their wan light was enough to hurt my eyes. I was worn down, nerves abraded, slaphappy. Finally I said, "Okay, okay, what I failed at, what I was trying to do ... I was trying to be a writer."
"What?"
Had I choked on the humiliating word, or was Maggie forcing me, for some therapeutic or sadistic reason, to repeat the galling and preposterous admission? I said it again. It sounded brassy and mocking in the vacant twilight.
Maggie said, "I knew it!"
"Then why'd you have to ask?"
She didn't answer that. She said, "Were you already rich by then?"
"I'm not rich," I said. "And that's a really gauche question."
"It's not gauche. It's direct."
"Well, the direct answer is that I was basically broke. The money I made, that happened later."
"So you were living off your wife?"
"Christ, Maggie—"
"No value judgment," she said. "I'm just trying to understand. She supported you?"
I blew air past my gums and vaguely wondered how I'd fallen into this ambush of a chat. Resigned, I said, "She was a lawyer. Made good money, liked the idea of having an artsy type in the family. Made her feel unconventional, I guess. But the novelty wore off."
"So she left?"
I nodded. I hadn't blamed her then and I didn't blame her now. True, her leaving stung me, shook me, but that had more to do with pride than love.
Maggie paused but wouldn't quit. She said, "So what kind of writer are you?"
" Was I." I scratched behind my ear. "I guess I'd have to say I was the kind of writer who never quite finished anything. Clever beginnings, interesting middles, then nothing."
"Couldn't figure out the ending?"
"Nah, it wasn't that. Maybe some days I told myself it was—but it wasn't. Any idiot can figure out an ending. Finishing is something else."
"What else?"
"Finishing takes . . . what does it take? Conviction. Confidence. Takes believing that you've earned it."
"And you didn't think you'd earned it?"
I just shrugged to that.
"How come?"
"If I knew that ..." I began, then abruptly broke off. If I knew that, what?
I pushed out my lips and looked across the water. We were nearing the jetty at Fort Zack. Currents lifted a magenta chop. Channel markers flashed red and green. After a moment Maggie said, "Maybe finishing is just a habit."
"I wouldn't know."
"The conviction," she said. "The confidence. Maybe they come after. You finish something, then they're there."
I gave a noncommittal shrug. I wasn't sure I got it. The paradox struck me as a little glib, a little yoga-like. Frankly, I found myself irritated. In some perverse way, I cherished my failings; I'd lived with them a long time, was used to them in the way people get used to pets that smell. I sort of resented the idea of someone blithely stepping in and disinfecting them.
I didn't have long to brood on this, because as we scudded through the harbor entrance, the shock of tropical daybreak made everything start over. Low clouds sundered like a cracking egg, and all at once the naked sun was there, orange yellow, flinging spiky rays up toward the zenith and out across the water, so bright, hot, and instantly sovereign that in a heartbeat it became hard to remember that night had ever been. A puff of breeze that seemed to be the sun's own breath bumped the sailboats on their moorings. On land, blank windows flashed suddenly silver; flat black palms turned green and animate and shook their heads.
We were opposite Tank Island—excuse me, Sunset Key. Virgin daylight put a sharp gleam on the enclave's stamped tin roofs, and a jewel-like sparkle in its creamy yellow sand. Cool blue shadows stretched back from its contrived, imported dunes—and all at once I noticed something; or, to put it more precisely, something I'd been noticing for days finally ripened into meaning. I'd noticed it when I'd pulled my rented Jet Ski up onto the extended foreshore; I'd noticed it as I took in the view from Mickey Veale's study. Now, in the sharp and probing light of daybreak, it could hardly have been clearer: This was nothing like a natural Florida shoreline. True, Tank Island had been man-made to begin with, but it had been piled up from what was there and then been left alone. Whereas the real estate of Sunset Key had been designed, invented, tampered with, reshaped.