I took her out to dinner and we played grabass in the car, and it was that seldom once-in-a-while fine thing, being turned on by a woman who was also a person and had stuff going for herself, and knowing that even if my Wurlitzer rotted and fell off, even if her Charlies sagged and turned to empty Baggies, we’d still be buddies and craft companions and could laugh at all the bats and their bum plays.
Which was what I needed. Because you see, down where I lived, down here in my gut, I was foundering. I was going down for the third time, sucking up all the bile hi my nostrils and my mouth, feeling the tide beating black in my head. So Holdie was a life preserver. Hosan-nah!
Then, less than a month after I’d met her, I was doing some talking with the editor of a men’s magazine I’d written for. He was desperate for high-grade material. I was already boxed-in on assignments, didn’t have the time for him, and he was crying the blues.
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ve got just the writer for you. Holdie Karp. Really dynamite writer. You’ve seen her stuff in Cosmo and Esquire, haven’t you?”
He opened up like a flower after the rain.
I couldn’t wait to get over to her house in the hills, to tell her she could make a grand a month just selling reprints of her other magazine pieces. Picked up a couple of barbequed beef sandwiches and milk shakes, and came ripping into her driveway doing fifty. Almost hit her MG.
She was covered with black from changing a typewriter ribbon, hair dangling down onto her big chest, tongue hanging out at the sight of the food. She gave me an enormous, sloppy kiss and rolled her eyes like a panda, trying to figure out if she wanted food first, or bed first.
“No sex,” I said sternly. “No sex. I have the world’s greatest deal for you. Only the world’s most sen-say-sheh-null deal. A star you’ll be by this time tomorrow, buhbie. A star of the first magnitude!”
I came on like an eight-axle diesel. I ran her all the data on what the editor needed, on how she had the subsidiary rights to all her work and could sell it for more than what she’d gotten the first time because this was a national magazine and not a local newspaper or a dinky underground sheet. She reeled back and flopped on the sofa, barely missing crushing her dog, Roger.
“Let me see everything you’ve written in the past year,” I said. “Now! Jump jump jump!”
I knew that in one of the cubbyholes of her neat rolltop desk she had a stack of unpaid bills, and I knew she was too independent a creature to let me pay any of them for her. She was making money, but not a lot. She was on her way, and in another year or two she’d be one of the hottest female writers in the country…but right now she needed some bread. And here was I, God the Savior, ready to dump just globs and gobs of manna in her neat long-nailed hands. Ah, she would adore me!
Then I realized she wasn’t as enthused as I thought she should be. Her eyes were almost cold. Her mouth was tight.
“Come on, Rapunzel, bestir yo’ ass. Lemme see them carbons. Trot out the goodies!”
She got up and went over to the filing cabinet where she kept all the yellow second-sheet copies of her stories and articles. She fished around, not saying a word, and came up with a stack. She handed them to me, and I went over by the fireplace and sat down, started reading.
An hour went by. She lit the fire in the fireplace and fixed me a cup of her good coffee, with a wedge of coffee cake on the saucer. I read and read, and set aside half a dozen articles I thought would work.
Finally, I turned the last page of the last article, and realized I hadn’t heard her pounding her typewriter all the time I’d been reading. I knew she had a deadline on a piece about costume designers for Cosmopolitan due that Friday; and the silence suddenly scared me.
I turned around and she was still sitting in the same place on the sofa, watching me. Her body may have been in the same room with me, but her soul and mind were off someplace in faraway frigid Tibet, understudying the Dalai Lama.
“What’s the matter?”
She didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Nothing.” Which was still not saying anything.
Holdie Karp had turned me off.
“Listen, I think,” I said, “the piece on airline stewardesses would be perfect for him, if you wrote a new lead paragraph slanting it for men—every guy in America thinks stewardesses put out, right?—and drop in about five sexy paragraphs here and there. And the piece on nude models is perfect the way it is. And the—”
“No.”
I stared at her. “What?”
“I said: no.”
“What no? He’ll lay two-fifty on you for every one of these he uses. I can see three of them right here that can make it; that’s seven hundred and fifty bucks. What’re you, allergic to a life without bill collectors?”
“I don’t know if those nude modeling agencies are still down there on Santa Monica.”
“So what. These, three others, none at all. What’s it matter? This is Americana, baby. It presents a great picture of what it was like when you wrote it, and that was only six months ago. Of course they’re still down there. So change the names, make ’em fictitious. Who cares? The guys in Topeka who read the magazine don’t give a shit.”
“I care.”
I thought maybe I’d lost my way. “What the hell is wrong with you? Look, okay, don’t write a new lead on this one about the stews. I’ll take them down to his office tomorrow just as they are…I’ll lay them on him. He’s anxious to buy your stuff. He wants an original from you. Christ, Holdie, this can mean ten grand a year for you…you’ll have all the time you want to write the stuff you want to write. You’ve been telling me you want to get heavier behind short stories, well, this is your chance.”
“No.”
I was getting mad now. Didn’t this brain damage case know when I was trying to do her a favor?
“Well, fuck it, baby, I’m taking these down tomorrow, and if you have any qualms about the money, you can stuff the checks in your bidet for all I care!”
I turned around and lit a cigarette.
It was dead silent for a long while.
Then she was speaking, behind me. I didn’t turn around, I just listened.
“You know, you come on just like a benevolent dictator. Deus ex machina. You try to steamroller me. My ex was like that, except he insinuated himself, not like you, like a jackhammer. He kept telling me I couldn’t do this or that, or the other thing, until I believed him. He got me so goddamned dependent on him that when we broke up I thought I had lost everything. I was right at the bottom, you know. But I wasted to be a writer. I wanted it more than I even wanted him back. So I worked, and I’m still working, and I’m not going to backslide. I’m not going to make the same mistakes I made with my life before. There was a guy after my ex, a rebound, you know. And I let him do for me, little things, but after a while I was dependent again. And I didn’t even love him! I know my pattern, and I’m not falling into it again.”
I was furious. I jumped up and came down on her like…like a steamroller, like a jackhammer, like a benevolent dictator…“Listen, you stupid, you! I’m ten years ahead of you in the writing thing. I starved and suffered, and I thought that made me holier than shit, because I didn’t deserve any good things happening to me. But that’s a crock of piss, you know, because I had talent, and I deserved whatever I could knock out of the rock for myself. And I’m trying to shortcut a little heartache for you. Do you think there’s some’fucking nobility in poverty? Don’t be an asshole! Poor is dirty, and poor is chained, and money means freedom, and it means you can write better and more, and what you want. So what the hell are you trying to do to me here, make me feel guilty for wanting to do you a favor?”
Then my mad passed. Just like that. I don’t hold it for very long. And she looked like she might cry, and I didn’t want that, God knows.
“It was your manner,” she said.
I was suddenly contrite. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I guess I was just so enthused about the possibilities, I didn’t reali
ze I was coming on strong.”
“But you understand why I can’t let you do it, don’t you?”
I understood. “Sure. I suppose. You want to do it yourself.”
“I have to. To prove I’m worth it.”
I nodded my head, too many times. “Right, right. I understand. I’m not stupid, I understand.”
I walked over to the typing table. “What’re you working on?”
“Short story.”
“What happened to that Cosmo piece? Aren’t you late with it?”
“I’ll finish it Don’t start prying.”
I gritted my teeth, and picked up the short story. “Mind if I read it?”
“No, I guess not.” She paused. She wanted to say something. I walked over slowly, kissed her lightly, and grinned. “Whose turn is it to put some fresh sheets on the bed?”
She grinned back. At first timorously, then with her comic rendition of naked lust. “Mine.”
She went into the bedroom and I heard her opening drawers. I sat down on Roger and started reading the short story. It was good. Very good.
She came in and started undressing. In front of me. I wanted to read her story. I wanted to be as impressed by her as a talent, as a substance, as I was by her in bed. It was tough concentrating on the story. She peeled down to black bra and red knit panties. Then she peeled out of them, too, and arched her back. I looked up, and smiled.
“Come along to bed, Johnny, like a good boy.”
Something went hard and flat in my gut.
She waltzed into the bedroom. I heard the bed springs creak. I didn’t move. She called. I didn’t answer. She called again, urgently. I tensed my jaw muscles and kept reading. I wasn’t going to let her do it to me. I’d see how good the story was, despite her.
She was silent a moment, then I heard her moving around. She came out bareass, wearing a fur vest. She paraded around in front of me, a voluptuous Raggedy Ann. “Hey, psssst, meester…kinky sex?”
“I’m reading your story,” I said.
She stopped moving and stood there, and I felt heat rising in the room. Then she reached over and grabbed it out of my hands. “Well, stop reading it! I don’t want you to read it. I want you to—”
I stood up and started to put on my jacket. She looked at me. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“I thought you said you understood?”
“I said it and I meant it. I do understand.”
“Then why are you going home? You’re being a bastard!”
I turned around three times, widdershins, like I didn’t know where the hell the wind was blowing from, but cold all the same. Outer dark waited.
“No, baby, I’ll tell you what I’m being. I’m being sick. You make me feel like a cock with a mouth at the other end that once in a while says something cute.”
“I—”
“No, fuck it, Holdie! A man likes to do for a woman sometimes, you know. He likes to do for her. That doesn’t make him a sexist or her a piece of property; it’s just a way of caring, you know what I mean? But you wont give me that. All you can handle is the cheapest thing I’ve got to offer. Now I know what a whore feels like. You reduce me to being a stud. Well, I won’t play that, baby. I’ve got to do some things for myself, too.”
“That’s not the way it is, at all!”
“Not, huh? Well, then, why is it that all I can think of in this scene is that big body of yours, and getting laid? Politics me? Violence me? Dissent me? What’s the world like me? Not on your life, baby. It’s just come in and stick it in and move it around and leave it behind because I don’t need anything from you but that.”
She dropped her jaw. I hurt inside.
“Well, it’s no price, baby. No price. What I get from you is promises of laughter, just promises, you know. And that ain’t near enough.”
I got out of there, somehow, and got the car started, somehow, and managed not to go off the cliffs on the way home, somehow, and I swore when—if—I made it back to my apartment, somehow, Fd attack that fucking typewriter and write it all out, somehow.
This last will and testament of the man going down for the big third.
No death. Nobody dies of a broken heart. That’s too cheap gothic novel, too cornball. But outer dark awaits. I swore Td write it all down, Holdie Karp. Write it all down, about nails in the coffin.
And this is it.
A lot of us are reconstructed sexists. We ain’t perfect. Sometimes we call you chicks, and sometimes we call you baby, and there are even some who still slip up once in a while and call a woman a broad.
But we do the best we can.
A lot of us learned the hard way about women, that you aren’t the chattel we thought you were, what we were taught you were through two thousand-plus years of tradition and bad novels by men. But we learned, and we’re still learning. And it isn’t that easy for some of us who were brought up macho.
But we do the best we can, dammit!
And maybe it’s only fitting that some of us, the biggest offenders, get back some of the shit treatment we gave out. And maybe it isn’t.
ORMOND ALWAYS PAYS HIS BILLS
It was, perhaps, that Hervey Ormond had been a criminal for ten years. And when a man has been a criminal for that long—concealing it as well as Hervey Ormond—the first person to cry “Thief!” at him may well meet with misfortune.
Hervey Ormond shot his secretary three times.
Eleanor Lombarda was not a beautiful girl, a fact so obvious it had caused wonder among the more inquisitive residents of Chambersville. Wonder as to why Ormond—who was known to like his women full and fawning—had hired her. More, they wondered why he had kept her on for six years. Eleanor had been preceded by a string of comely girls, few of whom could actually take shorthand, or find the business end of a dictaphone. So it was with wonder that the residents of Chambersville saw the too-thin, too-nervous girl with the too-red face establish herself in the office of the Ormond Construction Company as Hervey Ormond’s personal secretary—for six years.
They might have been surprised to know that the reason for her stranglehold on the position was simply that she did a marvelous job. She was industrious, interested hi the work and kept things in top-drawer shape. She always knew what was going on, precisely.
That was another reason why Hervey Ormond shot her three times.
“I found the reports,” Eleanor said, her face white in the glare of the lone desk lamp. For the first time in her life her face was not florid but a pale and unhealthy white.
“Yes,” Ormond said slowly, thoughtfully, closing the office door, “I know you did.”
He had returned for the dossier left behind that afternoon. He had returned abruptly and without warning, at midnight, to find Eleanor leafing through his hidden file.
Eleanor’s voice was nervously firm. “You aren’t paying me enough, Mr. Ormond. I want a raise…a big raise.”
Hervey Ormond was a fat little man. No more fitting description could be summoned up than that He was a fat little man, almost the caricature of a butterball. Round of face and form, with rosy cheeks, little squinting eyes of gray paste, execrable taste in clothes and unsavory breath.
Luckily, it had not been his personal appearance that had made him his fortune. Perspicacity and a certain ruthlessness in business had done that.
That ruthlessness was now needed; much as he appreciated Eleanor’s sterling qualities around the office, she was tinkering with a long prison term for him as she riffled the papers.
“How did you get the drawer open?” he asked quietly, ignoring her demand for more money.
“The lock sprung,” she answered, a faint blush rising up from her long neck. It was this expanse of neck that had kept Ormond from making advances to her during the entire six years of their relationship. She had an exceedingly long neck and did not have the sense to wear necklaces or high-collared dresses to remove the exaggeration.
Ormond stared down at the desk
drawer momentarily. It had been forced. The blade of her letter opener was bent.
“You were snooping,” he said.
“I want that raise Mr. Ormond,” she persisted. “I don’t see any reason to beat about the bush; I want three hundred dollars a week, and I only want to work three days each week.”
She seemed uncomfortable making demands, but she was firm. They were outrageous demands, but she made them firmly and quickly, as though plunging through with an unpleasant duty.
Ormond continued to ignore her requests. “What made you think there was anything in that drawer, Eleanor?”
She fumbled for a second with one of the stacks of notated papers, sliding them back into a three-ring notebook, snapping the clasps shut.
She didn’t answer.
“Why did you go snooping, Eleanor? Haven’t we been friends for a long time? Haven’t I paid you well?” His voice was one of confusion. His tones remained on one level, not angry and certainly not vindictive. Merely inquiring, as though trying to establish some pattern here.
Her head lifted, and she assumed a defiant tone. “There have been some large discrepancies in the material orders. I’ve been noticing it for some time.
“Why, you’ve been using inferior materials on all those state road constructions! You’ve been cutting requisition quality for ten years! They could put you in prison for twenty…”
It was at this point that Eleanor Lombarda received her three bullets.
Night surrounded the office building of the Ormond Construction Company. It stood two stories high in a tract of carefully clipped lawn, on the highway outside Chambersville. As the night came down, the crickets of Chambersville tuned themselves raspingly and waited for their baritone accompanists, the frogs, to arrive.
In the office, Hervey Ormond sat slumped in his desk chair, turned away from the desk itself. He slumped over so he could watch the body on the floor. Remarkably enough, in spite of everything he had ever believed, there had been very little blood.
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