Florida

I would love to be able to write that this is how Marilyn and Victor fell in love, this wonderful, lustful long summer in Coulter Point, a long tide of dating and tempting, of careful seduction until neither could resist the other. I would love to write that the culmination of their courtship was a romantic proposal and a long-planned wedding that took place on an autumn day when everything was perfect, that their lives were borne from a cradle of charming, American splendor.

Quite the opposite.

Victor and Marilyn spent a bizarre and unforgettable weekend together, rarely leaving each other’s company at all. But Victor drove back to the city that Sunday, and Marilyn finished the last week or two of summer there at the point before she packed her bags, kissed Alice goodbye, and returned to Confluence with her father.

Confluence would have been the natural backdrop for the idyllic scenario described above. It wouldn’t take much imagination to paint the picture of Marilyn, wearing a long gown, floating down the steps of the First Presbyterian Church like a princess. The Coolidge family would have bought a full page wedding announcement in the Confluence Spectator, in which the details would read as if royal nuptials had taken place.

Instead, I can take you to a filing cabinet in the back of my offices here on Main Street, open one of its long drawers, and find an obituary so short it might otherwise go missing in the small ocean of advertisements on the bottom of the page:

Grace Victoria Salarino, infant daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Salarino of Confluence, passed away in the hours following her birth on March 18. The family will not receive visitors.

There aren’t many entries in Marilyn’s diary from this time. In fact, there is a span of more than fourteen months between when Marilyn made a note of packing her things to return home from Coulter Point, a strange sense of exhaustion overcoming her, and the next entry, made a few weeks before Thanksgiving:

“Victor and I are fighting over where to spend the holiday. If it were up to me (and I don’t think it is), we would stay home. As it is, I can only see another trip to the city to see his mother, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

Marilyn had become pregnant. Victor felt it was his duty to marry her, even though such an act effectively ended whatever relationship remained after she had returned to her father’s house carrying Victor’s child. The child, a tiny daughter arriving several weeks too early, was still born.

It’s entirely true that things could have been worse. Although Mr. Coolidge famously went so far as to write his daughter out of his will, there was still Victor’s money, and he had enough.
They decided to leave town. Victor bought an apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was flagrantly obvious that such a move would be difficult for their marriage, but Marilyn was determined to leave, and Victor was of the mind to oblige. Their home sat on the waterfront looking over the gulf.

Marilyn kept house and spent much of her time volunteering with a group of Cubans who ran a produce market with the Catholic church. Victor gathered a group of investors and opened two Salarino’s department stores. He spent a lot of time managing the shops, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was often on the balcony of their apartment with a drink.

They lived this way for four years.

Not that it was entirely bad. Yes, it was a difficult time that brought them there, but there were times that things worked well. They had no friends there in St. Petersburg. In fact, they hadn’t known anyone when they moved there—only each other.

There was the time they each forgot their keys to the apartment, Victor arriving home to find Marilyn sitting cross-legged on the stairway landing playing with seashells. Victor offered to climb up the side of the building, and Marilyn took him up on the offer. So he crept along, petrified, balancing on the top ledges of windows while he edged across to their balcony, pulling himself over the rail and consuming every ounce of energy he had left in the process—only to find they’d locked the door to the balcony, too.

And there was the time a little Cuban girl knocked on their door with an armful of kittens.

“Meess,” she said, “Papa told me we could not keep all of these keetey-cats and he said you should have one.”

Marilyn took one of the squirming varmints into her arm, and before she could say much back to the little girl, the kitten had nosed its way into the crook of her arm and fallen asleep, purring loudly. They kept him, and later Victor named him Ahab.

“Because he keeps chasing things he can’t find,” he said.

One of Victor’s investors made his money running a charter airline that ran tourists down to the keys, and he often offered to take Victor and Marilyn up for a ride. They did, on several occasions, fly with him. Marilyn loved it especially at night time, when they would soar above the coastline, the moon lighting up the surf below, and the lights stretched back inland until the marshland consumed them in inky blackness.

There was the time they began to fight, and the argument carried on and on, and eventually Marilyn told Victor she would wrestle him, and if she won, things would go her way. They tangled, Victor not really trying, but he was surprised by her strength and vigor. She pinned him, and then she leaned down and kissed him, and later they made love in the middle of the floor.

Still, there were no more children for Marilyn and Victor. Ahab would curl on the sheets between them as they slept.

Marilyn began to grow depressed their third year in Florida. She lost weight and ate only once or twice a day. Victor noticed, of course, but he decided not to say anything. Better for her to figure this out on her own, he thought. Still, he would take the time to ask her if she was all right.

The response each time was the same. “I’m fine.”