I’ve sent out for some lobster, he told us. We have no choice but to drink until it arrives.
It turned out to be an excellent evening. The couple from New York reminded me of something I had not seen in a long time. We talked of yachts, which I knew because I had worked on them in Europe, and which they knew because they came from a world where everyone seemed to own one. We drank white rum, which Sanderson said was much better than gin, and by midnight we were all drunk enough to go down to the beach for a naked swim.
After that night I spent almost as much time at Sanderson’s as I spent at Al’s. His apartment looked like it had been designed in Hollywood for a Caribbean movie set. It was the bottom half of an old stucco house, right on the beach near the edge of town. The living room had a domed ceiling, with a fan hanging down and a wide door that opened on a screen porch. In front of the porch was a garden full of palms, with a gate leading down to the beach. The porch was higher than the garden, and at night you could sit there with a drink and see all the way into the city. Once in a while a cruise ship passed out at sea, brightly lit and heading for St. Thomas or the Bahamas.
When the night was too warm, or when you got too drunk, you could take a towel and go down to the beach for a swim. Afterward, there was good brandy, and if you were still drunk there was an extra bed.
Only three things bothered me at Sanderson’s — one was Sanderson, who was such an excellent host that I wondered what was wrong with him; one was Segarra, who was very often there when I came by; and the other was a man named Zimburger, who lived in the top half of the house.
Zimburger was more beast than human — tall, paunchy and bald, with a face out of some fiendish comic strip. He claimed to be an investor and was forever talking about putting up hotels here and there, but as far as I could see the only thing he did was go to Marine Corps Reserve meetings on Wednesday nights. Zimburger had never got over the fact that he had been a captain in The Corps. Early on Wednesday afternoon he would put on his uniform and come down to Sanderson’s porch to drink until it was time for the meeting. Sometimes he wore the uniform on Mondays, or Fridays — usually on some flimsy pretext.
Extra training today, he would say. Commander So-and-So wants me to help out with pistol instruction.
Then he would laugh and get another drink. He never took off his overseas cap, even after he had been indoors for five or six hours. He drank incessantly, and by the time it got dark he was steaming drunk and shouting. He would pace around the porch or the living room, snarling and denouncing the cowards and the back-dusters in Washington for not sending the Marines into Cuba.
I’ll go! he would shout. Goddamn right I’ll go! Somebody has to stomp them bastards and it might as well be me!
Often he wore his pistol belt and his holster — he had to leave his gun on the base — and from time to time he would slap leather and bark at some imaginary foe outside the door. It was embarrassing to see him go for his gun, because he seemed to think it was really there, riding large and loose on his flabby hip, just like it was on Iwo Jima. It was a pitiful sight and I was always glad when he left.
I avoided Zimburger whenever I could, but sometimes he took us by surprise. I would go to Sanderson’s with a girl I had met somewhere; we would have dinner and sit around talking afterward — and suddenly there would be a pounding on the screen door. In he would come, his face red, his khaki shirt stained with sweat, his overseas cap crushed down on his bullet-shaped head — and he would sit down with us for God knows how long, carrying on at the top of his lungs about some international disaster that could easily have been averted if they’d just let the goddamn Marines do their job, instead of keeping us penned up like dogs.