Jubilation

I've been living in Jubilation for almost two years now. There's been a lot of change in that time, both for the better and the worse, as you might expect in any real and authentic town composed of real and authentic people with their ironclad personalities and various personal agendas, but overall I'd say I'm happy I chose the Contash Corp.'s vision of community living. I've got friends here, neighbors, people who care about me the way I care about them. We've had our crises, no question about it--mother nature has been pretty erratic these past two years--and there isn't a man, woman or child in Jubilation who isn't worried about maintaining property values in the face of all the naysaying and criticism that's come our way. Still, it's the people this whole thing is about, and the people I know are as determined and forward-looking a bunch as any you'd ever hope to find. We've built something here, something I think we can all be proud of.

It wasn't easy. From the beginning, everybody laughed behind my back. Everybody said, "Oh, sure, Jackson, you get divorced and the first thing you do is fly down to Florida and live in some theme park with Gulpy Gator and whoever--Chowchy the Lizard, right?--and you defend it with some tripe about community and the New Urbanists and we're supposed to say you're behaving rationally?" My ex-wife was the worst. Lauren. She made it sound as if I was personally going to drive the Sky Lift or slip into a Gulpy suit and greet people at the gates of Contash World, but the truth is I was a pioneer, I had a chance to get into something on the ground floor and make it work--sacrifice to make it work--and all the cynics I used to call friends just snickered in their apple martinis as if my postdivorce life was some opéra bouffe staged for their amusement.

Take the lottery. They all thought I was crazy, but I booked my ticket, flew down to Orlando and took my place in line with 6000 strangers while the sun peeled the skin off the tip of my nose and baked through the soles of my shoes. There was sleet on the runway at La Guardia when the plane took off, a foot and half of snow expected in the suburbs, and it meant nothing to me, not anymore. The palms were nodding in a languid tropical breeze, the chiggers, no-see-ums and mosquitoes were all on vacation somewhere, children scampered across the emerald grass and vigorous little birds darted in and out of the jasmine and hibiscus. It was early yet, not quite eight. People shuffled their feet, tapped their watches, gazed hopefully off into the distance while 100 Contash greeters moved up and down the line with crullers and cardboard cups filled with coffee.

The excitement was contagious, and yet it was inseparable from a certain element of competitive anxiety--this was a random drawing, after all, and there would necessarily have to be winners and losers. Still, people were outgoing and friendly, chatting amongst themselves as if they'd known each other all their lives, sharing around cold cuts and homemade potato salad, swapping stories. Everybody knew the rules--there was no favoritism here. Charles Contash was founding a town, a pret-a-porter community set down in the middle of the vacation wonderland itself, with Contash World on one side and Game Park U.S.A. on the other, and if you wanted in--no matter who you were or who you knew--you had to stand in line like anybody else.

Directly in front of me was a single mother in a powder-blue halter designed to show off her assets, which were considerable, and in front of her were two men holding hands; immediately behind me, silently masticating crullers, was a family of four--mom, pop, sis and junior--their faces haggard and interchangeable, and behind them, a black couple burying their heads in a glossy brochure. The single mother--she'd identified herself only as Vicki--had one fat ripe cream puff of a baby slung over her left shoulder, where it (he? she?) was playing with the thin band of her spaghetti strap, while the other child, a boy of three or so decked out in a striped polo shirt and a pair of shorts he could grow into, clung to her knee as if he'd been fastened there with a strip of Velcro. "So what did you say your name was?" she asked, swinging around on me for what must have been the 100th time in the past hour. The baby, in this view, was a pair of blinding white diapers and two swollen, rooting legs.

I told her my name was Jackson and that I was pleased to meet her, and before she could ask, "Is that your first name or last?" I clarified the issue for her: "Jackson Peters Reilly. That's my mother's maiden name. Jackson. And her mother's name was Peters."

She seemed to consider this a moment, her eyes drifting in and out of focus. She patted the baby's bottom for no good reason. "Wish I'd thought of that," she said. "This one's Ashley and my son's Ethan--say hello, Ethan. Ethan?" And then she laughed, a hearty, hopeful laugh that had nothing to do with rejection, abandonment or a night spent on the pavement with two exhausted children while holding a place something like 400-deep in the lottery line. "Of course, my maiden name's Silinski, so it wouldn't exactly sound too feminine for little baby Ashley, now would it?"

She was flirting with me, and that was OK, that was fine, because wasn't that what I'd come down here for in the first place--to upgrade my social life? I was tired of New York. Tired of LA. Tired of the anonymity, the hassle, the grab and squeeze and the hostility snarling just beneath the surface of every transaction, no matter how small or insignificant. "I don't know," I said, "sounds kind of chic to me. The doorbell rings and there's all these neighborhood kids chanting, 'Can Silinski come out to play?' Or the modeling agency calls. 'So what about Silinski,' they say, 'is she available?' "

I was doing fine, grinning and smooth-talking and sailing right along, though my back felt misaligned and my right hip throbbed where the pavement had bitten into it during a mostly sleepless night under the amber glow of the newly installed Contash streetlights. I took a swig from my Evian bottle, tugged the plastic brim of my visor down to keep the sun from irradiating the creases at the corners of my eyes. There was one more Silinski trope on my tongue, the one that would bring her to her knees in adoration of my wit and charm, but I never got to utter it because at that moment the blast of a Civil War cannon announced the official opening of the lottery, and everybody in line crowded closer as 10,000 balloons, in the powder blue and sun-kissed orange of the Contash Corp., rose up like a mad flock into the sky.

"Welcome, all you friends and neighbors," boomed an amplified voice, and all eyes went to the head of the line. There, atop the four-story tower of the sales preview center, a tiny figure in the Contash colors held out his arms in benediction. "And all you little ones, too--and remember, Gulpy Gator and Chowchy love you one and all, and so does our founder, Charles Contash, whose vision of community, of health and vigor and good schools and good neighbors has never shone more brightly than it does today in Jubilation! No need to crowd, no need to fret. We've got 2000 Village Homes, Cottage Homes, Little Adobes and Mercado Street miniluxury apartments available today, and 3000 more to come. So welcome, folks, and just step up and draw your lucky number from the hopper."

The press moved forward in all its human inevitability, and I had to brace myself to avoid trampling the young woman in front of me. As it was, the family of four gouged their ankles into my flesh and I found myself making a nest of my arms for her, for Vicki, who in turn was shoved up against the hand-holding men in front of her. I could smell her, her breath sweet with the mints she'd been sucking all morning and the odor of her sweat and perfume rising up out of the confinement of her halter top. "Oh, god," she whispered. "God, I just pray--"

Her hair was in my mouth, caught in the bristles of my mustache. It was as if we were dancing, doing the macarena or forming a conga line, back-to-front. "Pray what?"

Her breath caught and then released in a respiratory tumult that was almost a sob: "That there's just one Mercado Street miniluxury apartment left, just one, that's all I ask." And then she paused, the shining new moon of her face rising over her shoulder to gaze up into mine. "And you," she breathed. "I pray you get what you want, too."

What I wanted was a detached home in the North Village section of town, on the near side of the artificial lake, a cool $450,000 for a 90-by-30-foot lot and a wraparound porch that leered promiscuously at the wraparound porches of my neighbors, 10 feet away on either side--one of the Casual Contempos or even one of the Little Adobes--and I wanted it so badly I would have taken Charles Contash himself hostage to get it. "A Casual Contempo," I said, and the family of four strained against me.

She was fighting for position. The child underfoot clung like a remora to the long tapered muscle of her leg. The baby began to fuss. Vicki was put out, overwrought, not at all at her best, I could see that, but still her eyebrows lifted and she let out a low whistle. "Wow," she said, "you must be rich."

I wasn't rich, not by the standards (continued on page 104) Jubilation (continued from page 74)

I'd set for myself, but I'd sold my company to a bigger company and bought off my ex-wife, and what was left was more than adequate to set me up in a new life in a new house--and no, I was not retiring to Florida to play golf till I dropped dead of boredom, but just looking for what was missing in my life, for the values I'd grown up with in the suburbs, where there were no fences, no walls, no gated communities and private security guards, where everybody knew everybody else and democracy wasn't just a tattered banner the politicians unfurled for their convenience every four years. That was what the Jubilation Company promised. That and a rock-solid property valuation, propped up by Charles Contash and all the fiscal might of his entertainment and merchandising empire. The only catch was that you had to occupy your property a minimum of nine months out of the year and nobody could sell within two years of purchase, so as to discourage speculators. But to my way of thinking that wasn't a catch at all, if you were committed. And if you weren't, you had no business taking up space in line to begin with. "Not really," I said, enjoying the look on her face, the unconscious widening of her eyes, the way her lips parted in expectation. "Comfortable, I guess you would say."

Then the line jerked again and we all revised our footing. "Mercado Street!" somebody shouted. "Penny Lane!" countered another, and there was a flicker of nervous laughter.

From where I was standing, I could barely see over the crush. A girl in a short blue skirt and orange heels stood on a platform at the head of the line, churning a gleaming stainless steel hopper emblazoned with the Contash logo, and an LED display stood ready to flash the numbers as people extracted the little digitized cards from the depths of it. There was a ripple of excitement as the first man in line, a physed teacher from Las Vegas, New Mexico, climbed the steps of the platform. Rumor had it he'd been camped on the unforgiving concrete for more than a month, eating his meals out of a microwave and doing calisthenics to keep in shape. I saw a running suit (blue with orange piping, what else?) surmounted on yard-wide shoulders and a head like a wrecker's ball. The man bent to the hopper, straightened up again and handed a white plastic card to the girl, who in turn ran it under a scanner. The display flickered, and then flashed the number: 3347. "Oh, god," Vicki muttered under her breath. My pulse was racing. I couldn't seem to swallow. The sun hung overhead like an overripe orange on a limb just out of reach as the crowd released a long slow withering exhalation. So what if the phys ed teacher had camped out for a month? He was a loser, and he was going to have to wait for Phase II construction to begin before he could even hope to become part of this.

None of the next five people managed to draw under 1000, but at least they were in, at least there was that. "They look like they want houses, don't they?" Vicki said, a flutter of nerves undermining her voice. "I don't mean Casual Contempos," she said, "I wouldn't want to jinx that for you, but maybe the Little Adobes or the Courteous Coastals. But not apartments. No way."

Then a couple who looked as if they belonged on one of the Contash Corp.'s billboards drew number 5 and the crowd let out a groan before people recovered themselves and a spatter of applause went up. I shut my eyes. I hadn't eaten since the previous day on the plane and suddenly I felt dizzy. Get lucky, I told myself. Just get lucky, that's all.

A breeze came up. The line moved forward step-by-step, slab-by-slab. As each number was displayed, a thrill ran through the crowd, and they were all neighbors, or potential neighbors, but that didn't mean they weren't betting against you. It took nearly an hour before the men in front of Vicki--Mark and his partner, Leonard, nicest guys in the world--mounted the steps to the platform and drew number 222. I watched in silence as they fell into each other's arms and improvised a little four-legged jig around the stage, and then Vicki was up there with the sun bringing out the highlights in her hair and drawing the color from her eyes as if they'd been inked in. The boy fidgeted. The baby squalled. She bent forward to draw her number, and when the display flashed 17 she flew down the steps and collapsed for sheer joy in the arms of the only man she knew in that whole astonished crowd--me--and everybody must have assumed I was the father of those creamy pale children until I climbed up and thrust my arm into the hopper.

The stage seemed to go quiet suddenly, all that tumult of voices reduced to a whisper, tongues arrested, lips frozen in midsentence. I was going to get what I wanted. I was sure of it. My fingers closed on a card, one of thousands, and I fished it out and handed it to the girl; an instant later the number flashed on the board--4971--and Vicki, poised at the foot of the steps with a glazed smile, looked right through me.

There are people in this world who are content with the lot they're given, content to bow their heads and accept what comes, to wait, sacrifice and look to the future. I'm not one of them. Within an hour of the drawing, I'd traded number 4971 and $10,000 cash for Mark and Leonard's number 222, and within a month of that I was reclining in a new white wicker chaise longue on the wraparound porch of my Casual Contempo discussing interior decoration with a very determined--and attractive--young woman from Coastal Design. The young woman's name was Felicia, and she wore her hair in a French braid that exposed the long cool nape of her neck. She was looking into my eyes and telling me in her soft breathy reconstructed tones what I needed vis-à-vis the eclectic neo-traditional aesthetic of the Jubilation Community--"Really, Mr. Reilly, you can mix and match to your heart's content, a Stickley sofa to go with your Craftsman windows set right next to a Chinese end table of lacquered rosewood with an ormolu inlay"--when I interrupted her. I listened to the ice cubes clink in my glass a moment, then asked her if she wouldn't prefer discussing my needs over a nice étouffée on the deck of the Cajun Kitchen overlooking lovely Lake Allagash. "Oh, I would love that, Mr. Reilly," she said, "more than practically anything I can think of, but Jeffrey--my sweet little husband of six months?--might just voice an objection." She crossed her legs, let one heel dangle strategically. "No, I think we'd better confine ourselves to the business at hand, don't you?"

I wrote her a check, and within 48 hours I was inhabiting a color plate torn out of one of the Jubilation brochures, replete with throw rugs, armoires, sideboards, a set of kitchen chairs designed by a Swedish sadist and a pair of antique brass water pitchers--or were they spittoons?--stuffed with the Concours d'Elegance mix of dried coastal wildflowers. It hadn't come cheap, but I wasn't complaining. This was what I'd wanted since the breath had gone out of my marriage and I'd begun living the nomadic life of the (continued on page 132) Jubilation (continued from page 104) motor court, the high-rise hotel and the inn around the corner. I was home. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt oriented and secure.

I laid in provisions, rode my Exercycle, got through a couple of books I'd always meant to read (Crime and Punishment, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Naked and the Dead), took a divorcée named Cecily to the Chowchy Grill for dinner and afterward to a movie at the art deco palace designed by Cesar Pelli as the centerpiece of the Mercado Street pedestrian mall, and enjoyed the relatively bugless spring weather in a rented kayak out on Lake Allagash. By the end of the second month I'd lost eight pounds, my arms felt firmer and my face was as tan as a tennis pro's. I wished my wife could see me now, but even as I wished it, the image of her--the heavy, pouting lips and irascible lines etched into the corners of her mouth, the flaring eyes and belligerent stab of her chin--rose up to engulf me in sorrow. Raymond, that was the name of the man she was dating--Raymond, who owned a restaurant and had a boat on Long Island Sound.

At any rate, I was standing over the vegetable display at the Jubilation Market one afternoon watching my ex-wife's face superimpose itself on the gleaming epidermis of an oversize zucchini, when a familiar voice called out my name. It was Vicki. She was wearing a transparent blouse over a bikini top and she'd had her hair done up in a spill of tinted ringlets. A plastic shopping basket dangled from one hand. There were no children in sight. "I heard you got your Casual Contempo," she said. "How're you liking it?"

"A dream come true. And you?"

Her smile widened. "I got a job. At the Company office. I'm Assistant Facilitator for tour groups."

"Tour groups? You mean here? Or over at Contash World?"

"You haven't noticed all the people in the streets?" she asked, holding her smile. "The ones with the cameras and the straw hats coming down to check us out and see what a model city looks like, works like? Look right there, right out the window there on the sidewalk in front of the Chowchy Grill. See that flock of Hawaiian shirts? And those women with the legs that look like they've just been pulled out of the deep freeze?"

I followed her gaze and there they were, tourists, milling around as if on a stage set. How had I failed to notice them? Even now one of them was backing away from the front of the grocery with a camcorder. "Tourists?" I murmured.

She nodded.

Maybe I was a little sour that morning, maybe I needed love and affection, not to mention sex, and maybe I was lonely and frustrated and beginning to feel the first stab of disappointment with my new life, but before I could think, I said, "They're worse than the ants. Do you have ants, by the way--in your apartment, I mean? The little minuscule ones that make ant freeways all over the floor, the kitchen counter, the walls?"

Her face fell, but then the smile came back, because she was determined to be chirpy and positive. "I wouldn't say they were worse than the ants--at least the ants clean up after themselves."

"And cockroaches. Or palmetto bugs--isn't that what we call them down here? I saw one the size of a frog the other day, right out on Penny Lane."

She had nothing to say to this, so I changed the subject and asked how her kids were doing.

"Oh, fine. Terrific. They're thriving." A pause. "My mother's down from Philadelphia--she's babysitting for me until I can find somebody permanent. While I'm at work, that is."

"Really," I said, reaching down to shift the offending zucchini to the bottom of the bin. "So are you free right now? For maybe a drink? Unless you have to rush home and cook or something."

She looked doubtful.

"What I mean is, don't you want to see what a neoretro Casual Contempo looks like when it's fully furnished?"

The first real bump in the road came a week or two later. I'd been called away to consult with the transition team at my former company, and when I got back I found a notice in the mailbox from the Contash Corp.'s subsidiary, the Jubilation Company, or as we all knew it in short--and somewhat redundantly--the TJC. It seemed they were advising against our spending too much time on our wraparound porches, especially at sunrise and sunset, and to take all pre-cautions while using the jogging trail around Lake Allagash or even window-shopping on Mercado Street. The problem was mosquitoes--big, outsize central Floridian mosquitoes that were found to be carrying encephalitis and dengue fever. The TJC was doing all it could vis-à-vis vector control, and they were contractually absolved from any responsibility--just read your Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions--but in the interest of public safety they were advising everyone to stay indoors. Despite the heat. And the fact that staying in defeated the whole idea of the Casual Contempo, the wraparound porch and the free interplay between neighbors that lies at the core of what makes a real and actual town click.

I was brooding in the kitchen, idly itching at the constellation of angry red welts on my right wrist and waiting for the meninges to start swelling in my brainpan, when a movement on the porch caught my eye. Two cloaked figures there, one large, one small, and a cloaked baby carriage. For a moment I didn't know what to make of it all, but the baby carriage was a dead giveaway: It was Vicki, dressed like a beekeeper, with little Ethan in his own miniature beekeeper's outfit beside her and baby Ashley imprisoned behind a wall of gauze in the depths of the carriage. "Christ," I said, ushering them in, "is this what we're going to have to start wearing now?"

She pulled back the veil to reveal that hopeful smile and the small shining miracle of her hair. "No, I don't think so," she said, bending to remove her son's impedimenta ("I don't want," he kept saying, "I don't want"). "There," she said, addressing the pale dwindling oval of his face, "there, it's all right now. And you can have a soda, if Jackson still has any left in the refrigerator--"

"Oh, yeah, sure," I said, and I was bending, too. "Root beer? Or 7Up?"

We wound up sitting in the kitchen, drinking white wine and sharing a box of stale Triscuits while the baby slept and Ethan sucked at a can of Hires in front of the tube in the living room. Out back was the low fence that gave onto the nature preserve, with its bird-friendly marsh that also coincidentally happened to serve as a maternity ward for the mosquitoes, and beyond that was Lake Allagash. "At the office they're saying the mosquitoes are just seasonal," Vicki said, working a hand up under the tinted ringlets and giving them a shake, "and besides, they're pretty much spraying around the clock now, so I would think--well, I mean, they've had to close down some of the outdoor rides over at Contash World, and that means money lost, big money."

I wasn't a cynic, or I tried not to be, because a pioneer can't afford cynicism. Look on the bright side, that was what I maintained--there was no alternative. "OK, fine, but have you seen my wrist? I mean, should I be concerned? Should I go to the doctor, do you think?"

She took my wrist in her cool grip, traced the bumps there with her index finger. She gave a little laugh. "Chigger bites, that's all. Nothing to worry about. And the mosquitoes will just be a bad memory in a week or two, I guarantee it."

There was a moment of silence, during which we both gazed out the window on the marsh--or swamp, as I'd mistakenly called it before Vicki corrected me. We watched an egret rise up out of nowhere and sail off into the trees. Clouds massed on the horizon in a swell of pure, unadulterated white; the palmettos gathered and released the faintest trace of a breeze. Next door, the wraparound porch of my neighbors-- the black couple, Sam and Ernesta Fills--was deserted. Ditto the porch of the house on the other side, into which Mark and Leonard, having traded $2500 of the cash I'd given them for number 632 and a prime chance at a Casual Contempo, had recently moved. "No," she said finally, draining her wine-glass and holding it out in one delicate hand so that I could refill it for her, "what I'd be concerned about if I were you is your neighbors across the street-- the Weekses."

I gave her a dumb stare.

"You know them--July and Fili Weeks and their three sons?"

"Yeah," I said, "sure." Everybody knew everybody else here. It was a rule.

From the TV in the other room came the sound of canned laughter, followed by Ethan's stuttering high whinny of an underdeveloped laugh. "What about the red curtains?" she said. "And that car? That whatever it is, that race car painted in the three ugliest shades of magenta they keep parked out there on the street where the whole world can see it? They're in violation of the code on something like eight counts already and they haven't been here a month yet."

I felt a prickle of alarm. We were all in this together, and if everybody didn't pitch in--if everybody didn't subscribe to the letter as far as the Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions was concerned--what was going to happen to our property values? "Red curtains?" I said.

Her eyes were steely. "Just like in a whorehouse. And you know the rules-- white, off-white, beige and taupe only."

"Has anybody talked to them? Can't anybody do anything?"

She set the glass down, drew her gaze away from the window and looked into my eyes. "Do you mean the Citizens' Committee?"

I shrugged. "Yeah. Sure. I guess."

She leaned in close. I could smell the rinse she used in her hair, and it was faintly intoxicating. I loved her eyes, loved the shape of her, loved the way she aspirated her hs like an elocution teacher. "Don't you worry," she whispered. "We're already on it."

Once Vicki had mentioned the Weekses and the way they were flouting the code, I couldn't get them out of my head. July Weeks was a salesman of some sort, aviation parts, I think it was--he worked for Cessna--and he seemed to spend most of his time, despite the mosquito scare, buried deep in his own white wicker chaise longue out on the wraparound porch of his Courteous Coastal directly across the street from me. He was a Southerner, and that was all right because this was the South, after all, but he had one of those accents that just went on clanging and jarring till you could barely understand a word he was saying. Not that I harbor any prejudices--he was my neighbor, and if he wanted to sound like an extra from Deliverance, that was his privilege. But I looked out the front window and saw that race car--"No excessive or unsightly vehicles, including campers, RVs, moving vans or trailers, shall be parked on the public streets for a period exceeding 48 continuous hours," Section III, Article 12, Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions--and the sight of it became an active irritation. Which was compounded by the fact that the eldest son, August, pulled up one afternoon in a pickup truck that sat about six feet up off its Bayou Crawler tires and deposited a boat trailer at the curb. The boat was painted puce with lime-green trim and it had a staved-in hull. Plus, there were those curtains.

A week went by. Two weeks. I got updates from Vicki--we were seeing each other just about every day now--and of course the Citizens' Committee, as an arm of the TJC, was threatening the Weekses with a lawsuit and the Weekses had hired an attorney and were threatening back, but nothing happened. I couldn't enjoy my wraparound porch or the view out my mullioned Craftsman windows. Every time I looked up, there was the boat, there was the car and, beyond them, the curtains. The situation began to weigh on me, so one night after dinner I strolled down the three broad inviting steps of my wraparound porch, waved a greeting to the Fillses on my right and Mark and Leonard on my left, and crossed the street to mount the equally inviting steps of the Weekses' wraparound porch with the intention of setting Mr. Weeks straight on a few things. Or no, that sounds too harsh. I wanted to block out a couple issues with him and see if we couldn't resolve things amicably for all concerned.

He was sitting in the chaise longue, his wife in the wicker armchair beside him. An Atlanta Braves cap that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Gulpy's Sports Emporium hid his brow and the crown of his head and he was wearing a pair of those squared-off black sunglasses for people with cataracts, and that reduced the sum of his expression to the sharp beak of his nose and an immobile mouth. The wife was a squat Korean woman whose name I could never remember. She was peeling the husk off a dark pungent pod or tuber. It was a homey scene, and the moment couldn't have been more neighborly.

"Hi," I said (or maybe, prompted by the ambience, I might even have managed a "Howdy").

Neither of them said a word.

"Listen," I began, after standing there for an awkward moment (and what had I been expecting--mint juleps?). "Listen, about the curtains and the car and all that--the boat--I just wanted to say, well, I mean, it might seem like a small thing, it's ridiculous, really, but--"

He cut me off then. I don't know what he said, but it sounded something like "Rabid rabid gurtz."

The wife--her name came to me suddenly: Fili--translated. She carefully set aside the root or pod or whatever it was and gave me a flowering smile that revealed a set of the whitest and evenest teeth I'd ever seen. "He say you can blow it out you ass."

"No, no," I said, brushing right by it, "you misunderstand me. I'm not here to complain, or even to convince you of anything. It's just that, well, I'm your neighbor, and I thought if we--"

Here he spoke again, a low rumble of concatenated sounds that might have been expressive of digestive trouble, but the wife--Fili--seeing my blank expression, dutifully translated: "He say his gun--you know gun?--he say he keep it loaded."

Things are not perfect. I never claimed they were. And if you're going to have a free and open town and not one of these gated neoracist enclaves you've got to be willing to accept that. The TJC sued the Weekses and the Weekses sued them back, and still the curtains flamed behind the windows and the garish race car and the unseaworthy boat sat at the curb across the street. So what I did to make myself feel better was buy a dog. A Scottie. Lauren would never let me have a dog--she claimed to be allergic, but in fact she was pathologically averse to any intrusion on the rigid order she maintained around the house--and we never had any children either, which didn't affect me one way or the other, though I should say I was one of the few single men in Jubilation who didn't view Vicki's kids as a liability. I grew to like them, in fact--or Ethan, anyway; the baby was just a baby, practically inert if it wasn't shrieking as if it had just had the skin stripped from its limbs. But Ethan was something else. I liked the feel of his tiny bunched sweating hand in mine as we strolled down to the Benny Tarpon Old Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in the evening or took a turn around Lake Allagash. He was always tugging me one way or the other, chattering, pointing like a tour director: "Look," he would say. "Look!"

I named the dog Bruce, after my grandfather on my mother's side. He was a year old and house-trained, and I loved the way the fur hid his paws so that he seemed to glide over the grass of the village green as if he had no means of locomotion beyond willpower and magic.

That was around the time we began to feel the effects of the three-year drought that none of the TJC salespeople had bothered to mention in their all-day seminars and living-color brochures. The wind came up out of the south carrying a freight of smoke (apparently the Everglades were on fire) and a fine brown dust that obliterated our lawns and flower beds and made a desert of the village green. The heat seemed to increase, too, as if the fires had somehow turned up the thermostat, but the worst of it was the smell. Everywhere you went, whether you were standing in line at the bank, sunk into one of the magicfingers lounge chairs at the movie theater or pulling your head up off the pillow in the morning, the stale smell of old smoke assaulted your nostrils.

I was walking Bruce up on Golfpark Drive one afternoon, where our select million-dollar-plus homes back up onto the golf course--and you have to realize that this is part of the Contash vision too, millionaires living cheek by jowl with single mothers like Vicki and all the others struggling to pay mortgages that were 35 percent higher than those in the surrounding area, not to mention special assessments and maintenance fees-- when a man with a camera slung around his neck stopped me and asked if he could take my picture. The sky was marbled with smoke. Dust fled across the pavement. The birds were actually shrieking in the trees. "Me?" I said. "Why me?"

"I don't know," he said, snapping the picture. "I like your dog."

"You do?" I was flattered, I admit it, but I was on my guard, too. Journalists from all over the world had descended on the town en masse, mainly to cook up dismissive articles about a legion of Stepford wives and robotic husbands living on a Contash movie set and doing daily obeisance to Gulpy Gator. None of them ever bothered to mention our equanimity, our openness and shared ideals. Why would they? Hard work and sacrifice never have made for good copy.

"Yeah, sure," he said, "and would you mind posing over there, by the gate to that gingerbread mansion? That's good. Nice." He took a series of shots, the camera whirring through its motions. He had a buzz cut and a two-day growth of nearly translucent beard and wore a pair of tricolored Nikes. "You do live here, don't you?" he asked finally. "I mean, you're an actual resident, right, and not a tourist?"

I felt a surge of pride. "That's right," I said. "I'm one of the originals."

He gave me an odd look, as if he were trying to sniff out an impostor. "Do they really pay you to walk the dog around the village green six times a day?"

"Pay me? Who?"

"You know, the town, the company. You can't have a town without people in it, right?" He looked down at Bruce, who was sniffing attentively at a dust coated leaf. "Or dogs?" The camera clicked again, several times in succession. "I hear they pay that old lady on the moped, too--and the guy that sets up his easel in front of the Gulpy monument every morning."

"Don't be ridiculous. You're out of your mind."

"And I'll tell you another thing--don't think just because you bought into the Contash lifestyle you're immune from all the shit that comes down in the real world, because you're not. In fact, I'd watch that dog if I were you---"

Somewhere the fires were burning. A rag of smoke flapped at my face and I began to cough. "You're one of those media types, aren't you?" I said, pounding at my breastbone. "You people disgust me. You don't even make a pretense of unbiased reporting--you just want to ridicule us and tear us down, isn't that right?" My dander was up. Who were these people to come in here and try to undermine everything we'd been working for? I shot him a look of impatience. "It wouldn't be jealousy, would it? By any chance?"

He shrugged, shifted the camera to one side and dug a cigarette out of his breast pocket. I watched him cup his hands against the breeze and light it. He flung the match in the bushes, a symbolic act, surely. "We used to have a Scottie when I was a kid," he said, exhaling. "So I'm just telling you--you'd be surprised what I know about this town, what goes on behind closed doors, the double-dealing, the payoffs, the flouting of the environmental regs, all the dirt the TJC and Charles Contash don't want you to know. View me as a resource, your diligent representative of the fourth estate. Keep the dog away from the lake, that's all."

I was stubborn. I wasn't listening. "He can swim."

The man let out a short, unpleasant laugh. "I'm talking about alligators, my friend, and not the cuddly little cartoon kind. You may or may not know it, because I'm sure it's not advertised in any of the TJC brochures, but when they built Contash World back in the Sixties they evicted all the alligators, not to mention the coral snakes and cane rattlers and snapping turtles--and where do you think they put them?"

•

All right. I was forewarned. And what happened should never have happened, I know that, but there are hazards in any community, whether it be South Central LA or Scarsdale or Kuala Lumpur. I took Bruce around Lake Allagash--twice-- and then went home and barbecued a platter of wings and ribs for Vicki and the kids and I thought no more about it. Alligators. They were there, sure they were, but so were the mosquitoes and the poison toads that looked like deflated kick balls and chased the dogs off their kibble. This was Florida. It was muggy. It was hot. We had our share of sand fleas and whatnot. But at least we didn't have to worry about bronchial pneumonia or snow tires.

The rains came in mid-September, a series of thunderstorms that rolled in off the Gulf and put out the fires. We had problems with snails and slugs for a while there, armadillos crawling up half-drowned on the lawn, snakes in the garage, walking catfish, that sort of thing--I even found an opossum curled up in the drier one morning amidst my socks and boxer shorts. But the Citizens' Committee was active in picking up strays, nursing them back to health and restoring them to the ecosystem, so it wasn't as bad as you'd think. And after that, the sun came out and the earth just seemed to steam till every trace of mold and mud was erased and the flowers went mad with the glory of it. The smoke was gone, the snails had crawled back into their holes or dens or wherever they lived when they weren't smearing the windows with slime, and the air was scented so sweetly it was as if the Contash Corp. had hired a fleet of crop dusters to spray air freshener over the town. Even the thermometer cooperated, the temperature holding at a nice equitable 78 degrees for three days running. Tear the page out of the brochure: This was what we'd all come for.

I was sitting out on my wraparound porch, trying to ignore the decrepit boat and magenta car across the street, Crime and Punishment spread open in my lap (Raskolnikov was just climbing the steps to the old lady's place and I was waiting for the ax to fall), when Vicki called and proposed a picnic. She'd made up some sandwiches on the brown nut bread I like, Asiago cheese, sweet onions and roasted red peppers, and she'd picked up a nice bottle of Chilean white at the Contash Liquor Mart. Was I ready for some sun? And maybe a little backrub afterward at her place?

Ethan wanted to go out on the water, but when we got to the Jubilation dock the sound of the ratcheting motors scared him, so we settled on an aluminum rowboat, and that was better--or would have been better--because we could hear ourselves think and didn't have to worry about all that spew of fumes, and that was a real concern for Vicki. We might have been raised in houses where our parents smoked two packs a day and sprayed Raid on the kitchen counter every time an ant or roach showed its face--or head or feelers or whatever--but there was no way any toxins were entering her children's systems, not if she could help it. So I rented the rowboat. "No problem," I told Vicki, who was looking terrific in a sunbonnet, her bikini top and a pair of skimpy shorts that showed off her smooth, solid legs and the Gulpy tattoo on her ankle. The fact was I hadn't been kayaking since the rains started and I was looking forward to the exercise.

It took me a few strokes to reacquaint myself with the apparatus of oars and oarlocks, and we lurched away from the dock as if we'd been torpedoed, but I got into the rhythm of it soon enough and we glided cleanly out across the mirrored surface of the lake. Vicki didn't want me to go more than 20 or 30 feet from shore, and that was all right, too, except that I found myself dredging up noxious-smelling clumps of pondweed that seemed to cast a powerful olfactory spell over Bruce. He kept snapping at the weed as I lifted first one oar and then the other to try to shake it off, and once or twice I had to drop the oars and discipline him because he was leaning so far out over the bow I thought we were going to lose him. Still, we saw birdlife everywhere we looked--herons, egrets, cormorants and anhingas--and the kids got a real kick out of a clutch of painted turtles stacked up like dinner plates on a half-submerged log.

We'd gone half a mile or so, I guess, to the far side of the lake where the wake of the motorboats wouldn't interfere over-much with the mustarding of the sandwiches and the delicate operation of pouring the wine into long-stemmed crystal glasses. The baby, wrapped up like a sausage in her life jacket--or life cradle might be more accurate--was asleep, a blissful baby smile painted on her lips. Bruce curled up at my feet in the brown swill at the bottom of the boat and Vicki sipped wine and gave me a look of contentment so deep and pure I was beginning to think I wouldn't mind seeing it across the breakfast table for the rest of my life. It was tranquil--dragonflies hovering, fish rising, not a mosquito in sight. Even little Ethan, normally such a clingy kid, seemed to be enjoying himself, tracing the pattern of his finger in the water as the boat rocked and drifted in a gentle airy dance.

About that water. The TJC assured us it was unpolluted by human waste and uncontaminated by farm runoff, and that its rusty color--it was nearly opaque and perpetually blooming with the microscopic creatures that make up the bottom of the food chain in a healthy and thriving aquatic ecosystem--was perfectly natural. Though the lake had been dredged out of the swampland some 40 years earlier, this was the way its water had always looked, and the creatures that lived and throve here were grateful for it--like all of us in Jubilation, they had Charles Contash to thank.

Well. We drifted, the dog and the baby snoozed, Vicki kept up a happy chatter on any number of topics, all of which seemed to have a subtext of sexual innuendo, and I just wasn't prepared for what came next, and I blame myself, I do. Maybe it was the wine or the influence of the sun and the faint sweet cleansing breeze, but I wasn't alert to the dangers inherent in the situation--I was an American, raised in a time of prosperity and peace, and I'd been spared the tumult and horror visited on so many of the less fortunate in this world. New York and LA may have been nasty places, and Lauren was a plague in her own right, but nobody had ever bombed my village or shot down my family in the street, and when my parents died they died quietly, in their own beds.

I was in the act of extracting the wine bottle from its cradle of ice in the cooler when the boat gave a sudden lurch and I glanced up just in time to see the broad flat grinning reptilian head emerge from the water, pluck Ethan off the gunwale and vanish in the murk. It was like an illusion in a magic show--now he's here, now he isn't--and I wasn't able to respond until my brain replayed the scene and I felt the sudden horror knife at my heart. "Did you--?" I began, but Vicki was already screaming.

•

The sequence of events becomes a little confused for me at this juncture, but looking back on it, I'm fairly certain the funeral service preceded the thrashing we took from Hurricane Albert--I distinctly remember the volunteerism the community showed in dredging the lake, which would have been impossible after the hurricane hit. Sadly, no trace of little Ethan was ever found. No need to tell you how devastated I was--I was as hurt and wrung out as I've ever been in my life, and I'll never give up second-guessing myself--but even more, I was angry. Angry over the Contash Corp.'s failure to disclose the hazards lurking around us and furious over the way the press jumped on the story, as if the life of a child was worth no more than a crude joke or a wedge to drive between the citizens of the community and the rest of the so-called civilized world. Alligator Mom. That was what they called Vicki in headlines three inches high, and could anyone blame her for packing up and going back to her mother in Philadelphia? I took her place on the Citizens' Committee, though I'd never been involved in community affairs in my life to that point, and I was the one who pushed through the initiative to remove all the dangerous animals from the lake, no matter what their size or species (and that was a struggle, too, with the environmentalists crying foul in all their puritanical fervor, and one man--I won't name him here--even pushing to have the alligators' teeth capped as a compromise solution).

It wasn't all bad, though. The service at the Jubilation Nondenominational Chapel, for all its solemnity, was a real inspiration to us all, a public demonstration of our solidarity and determination. Charles Contash himself flew in from a meeting with the Russian premier to give the eulogy, every man, woman and child in town turned out to pay their respects, and the cards and flowers poured in from all over the country. Even July Weeks turned up, despite his friction with the TJC, and we found common ground in our contempt for the reporters massed on the steps out in front of the chapel. He stood tall that day, barring the door to anyone whose face he didn't recognize, and I forgave him his curtains, for the afternoon at least.

If anything, the hurricane brought us together even more than little Ethan's tragedy. I remember the sky taking on the deep purple-black hue of a bruise and the vanguard of the rain that lashed down in a fusillade of wind-whipped pellets and the winds that sucked the breath right out of your body. Sam and Ernesta Fills helped me board up the windows of my Casual Contempo, and together we helped Mark and Leonard and the Weekses with their places and then went looking to lend a hand wherever we could. And when the storm hit in all its intensity, just about everybody in town was bundled up safe and sound in the bastion of the movie palace, where the emergency generator allowed the TJC to lift the burden from our minds with a marathon showing of the Contash Corp.'s most beloved family films. Of course, we emerged to the devastation of what the National Weather Service was calling the single most destructive storm of the past century, and a good proportion of Jubilation had been reduced to rubble or swept away altogether. I was luckier than most. I lost the back wall that gives on to the kitchen, which in turn was knee-deep in roiling brown water and packed to the ceiling with windblown debris, and my wraparound porch was wrapped around the Weekses' house, but on the plus side the offending race car and the boat were lifted right up into the sky and for all we know dropped somewhere over the Atlantic, and the Weekses' curtains aren't really an issue anymore.

As for myself, I've been rebuilding with the help of a low-interest loan secured through the Contash Corp. I've begun, in a tentative way, to date Felicia, whose husband was one of the six fatalities we recorded once the storm had moved on. Beyond that, my committee work keeps me pretty busy, I've been keeping in touch with Vicki both by phone and e-mail, and every time I see Bruce chase a palmetto bug up the side of the new retaining wall, I just want to smile. And I do. I do smile. Sure, things could be better, but they could be worse, too. I live in Jubilation. How bad can it be?

I felt a prickle of alarm. We were all in this together, and if everybody didn't pitch in what was going to happen to our property values?

There are people in this world who are content with the lot they're given. I'm not one of them.

I glanced up just in time to see the broad flat grinning reptilian head emerge from the water.