Wheels

by Arthur Hailey

  “I think sales.”

  “One moment, please.”

  Erica could still hear the vacuum cleaner somewhere outside. At least, while that continued, she could be sure Mrs. Gooch was not listening.

  There was a click and another voice answered, though not the one she sought. Erica repeated the name she had asked for.

  “Sure, he’s here.” She heard the voice call “Ollie!” An answering voice said, “I got it,” then, more clearly, “Hullo.”

  “This is Erica.” She added uncertainly, “You know; we met …”

  “Sure, sure; I know. Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “What number?”

  She gave it to him.

  “Hang up. Call you right back.”

  Erica waited nervously, wondering if she would answer at all, but when the ring back came, she did so immediately.

  “Hi, baby!”

  “Hullo,” Erica said.

  “Some phones are better’n other phones for special kindsa calls.”

  “I understand.”

  “Long time no see.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  A pause.

  “Why’d you call, baby?”

  “Well, I thought …; we might meet.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps for a drink.”

  “We had drinks last time. Remember? Sat all afternoon in that god-dam Queensway Inn bar.”

  “I know, but …”

  “An’ the same thing the time before that.”

  “That was the very first time; the time we met there.”

  “Okay, so you don’t put out the first time. A dame cuts it the way she sees; fair enough. But the second time a guy expects to hit the coconut, not spend an afternoon of his time in a big gabfest. So I still say—what’s on your mind?”

  “I thought … if we could talk, just a little, I could explain …”

  “No dice.”

  She let her hand holding the phone drop down. In God’s name, what was she doing, even talking with this … There must be other men. But where?

  The phone diaphragm rasped, “You still there, baby?”

  She lifted her hand again. “Yes.”

  “Listen, I’ll ask you something. You wanna get laid?”

  Erica was choking back tears; tears of humiliation, self-disgust.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s what I want.”

  “You’re sure, this time. No more big gabfest?”

  Dear God! Did he want an affidavit? She wondered: Were there really women so desperate, they would respond to an approach so crude? Obviously, yes.

  “I’m sure,” Erica said.

  “That’s great, kiddol How’s if we hit the sack next Wednesday?”

  “I thought … perhaps sooner.” Next Wednesday was a week away.

  “Sorry, baby; no dice. Gotta sales trip. Leave for Cleveland in an hour. Be there five days.” A chuckle. “Gotta keep them Ohio dolls happy.”

  Erica forced a laugh. “You certainly get around.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  She thought: No, I wouldn’t. Not at anything, any more.

  “Call you soon’s I get back. While I’m gone, you keep it warm for me.” A second’s pause, then: “You be all right Wednesday? You know what I mean?”

  Erica’s control snapped. “Of course I know. Do you think I’m so stupid not to have thought of that?”

  “You’d be surprised how many don’t.”

  In a detached part of her mind, as if she were a spectator, not a participant, she marveled: Has he ever tried making a woman feel good, instead of awful?

  “Gotta go, baby. Back to the salt mines! Another day, another dollar!”

  “Goodbye,” Erica said.

  “S’ long.”

  She hung up. Covering her face with her hands, she sobbed silently until her long, slim fingers were wet with tears.

  Later, in the bathroom, washing her face and using make-up to conceal the signs of crying as best she could, Erica reasoned: There was a way out.

  It didn’t have to happen a week from now. Adam could prevent it, though he would never know.

  If only, within the next seven nights he would take her, as a husband could and should, she would weather this time, and afterward, somehow, tame her body’s urgency to reasonableness. All she sought—all she had ever sought—was to be loved and needed, and in return to give love. She still loved Adam. Erica closed her eyes, remembering the way it was when he first loved and needed her.

  And she would help Adam, she decided. Tonight, and other nights if necessary, she would make herself irresistibly attractive, she’d wash her hair so it was sweet-smelling, use a musky perfume that would tantalize, put on her sheerest negligee … Wait! She would buy a new negligee—today, this morning, now … in Birmingham.

  Hurriedly, she began to dress.

  4

  The handsome, gray stone staff building, which could have done duty as a state capitol, was quiet in the early morning as Adam Trenton wheeled his cream sport coupe down the ramp from outside. Adam made a fast “S” turn, tires squealing, into his stall in the underground, executive parking area, then eased his lanky figure out of the driver’s seat, leaving the keys inside. A rain shower last night had slightly spotted the car’s bright finish; routinely it would be washed today, topped off with gas, and serviced if necessary.

  A personal car of an executive’s own choice, replaced every six months, and each time with all the extras he wanted, plus fuel and constant attention, was a fringe benefit which went with the auto industry’s higher posts. Depending on which company they worked for, most senior people made their selections from the luxury ranges-Chrysler Imperials, Lincolns, Cadillacs. A few, like Adam, preferred something lighter and sportier, with a high performance engine.

  Adam’s footsteps echoed as he walked across the black, waxed garage floor, gleaming and immaculate.

  A spectator would have seen a gray-suited, lithe, athletic man, a year or two past forty, tall, with broad shoulders and a squarish head thrust forward, as if urging the rest of the body on. Nowadays, Adam Trenton dressed more conservatively than he used to, but still looked fashionable, with a touch of flashiness. His facial features were clean-cut and alert, with intense blue eyes and a straight, firm mouth, the last tempered by a hint of humor and a strong impression, over-all, of open honesty. He backed up this impression, when he talked, with a blunt directness which sometimes threw others off balance—a tactic he had learned to use deliberately. His manner of walking was confident, a no-nonsense stride suggesting a man who knew where he was going.

  Adam Trenton carried the auto executive’s symbol of office—a filled attaché case. It contained papers he had taken home the night before and had worked on, after dinner, until bedtime.

  Among the few executive cars already parked, Adam noticed two limousines in vice-presidents’ row—a series of parking slots near an exclusive elevator which rose nonstop to the fifteenth floor, preserve of the company’s senior officers. A parking spot closest to the elevator was reserved for the chairman of the board, the next for the president; after that came vice-presidents in descending order of seniority. Where a man parked was a significant prestige factor in the auto industry. The higher his rank, the less distance he was expected to walk from his car to his desk.

  Of the two limousines already in, one belonged to Adam’s own chief, the Product Development vice-president. The other was the car of the Vice-President Public Relations.

  Adam bounded up a short flight of stairs, two at a time, entered a doorway to the building’s main lobby, then continued briskly to a regular staff elevator where he jabbed a button for the tenth floor. Alone in the elevator, he waited impatiently while the computer-controlled mechanism took its time about starting, then on the way up experienced the eagerness he always felt to become immersed in a new day’s work. As always, through most of the past two years, the Orion was at the forefront of his thought
s. Physically, Adam felt good. Only a sense of tension troubled him—a mental tautness he had become aware of lately, a nuisance, illogical, yet increasingly difficult to shake off. He took a small, green-and-black capsule from an inside pocket, slipped it into his mouth and gulped it down.

  From the elevator, along a silent, deserted corridor which would see little activity for another hour, Adam strode to his own office suite—a corner location, also a token of rank, rating only a little lower than a vice-president’s parking slot.

  As he went in, he saw a pile of newly delivered mail on his secretary’s desk. There was a time, earlier in his career, when Adam would have stopped to riffle through it, to see what was interesting and new, but he had long since shed the habit, nowadays valuing his time too much for that kind of indulgence. One of the duties of a top-notch secretary was—as Adam once heard the company president declare-to “filter out the crap” from the mountain of paper which came her boss’s way. She should be allowed to go through everything first, using her judgment about what to refer elsewhere, so that an executive mind could concern itself with policy and ideas, unencumbered by detail which others, in lowlier posts, could be trusted to handle.

  That was why few of the thousands of letters yearly which individual car owners addressed to heads of auto companies ever reached the person whom the sender named. All such letters were screened by secretaries, then sent to special departments which dealt with them according to set routines. Eventually the sum of all complaints and comments in a year was tabulated and studied, but no senior executive could cope with them individually and do his job as well. An occasional exception was where a correspondent was shrewd enough to write to an executive’s home address—not hard to find, since most were listed in Who’s Who, available in public libraries. Then an executive, or his wife, might well read the letter, become interested in a particular case, and follow through personally.

  The first thing Adam Trenton noticed in his office was a glowing orange light on an intercom box behind his desk. It showed that the Product Development vice-president had called, almost certainly this morning. Adam touched a switch above the light and waited.

  A voice, metallic through the intercom, demanded, “What’s the excuse today? Accident on the freeway, or did you oversleep?”

  Adam laughed, his eyes flicking to a wall clock which showed 7:23. He depressed the key connecting him with the vice-president’s office five floors above. “You know my problem, Elroy. Just can’t seem to get out of bed.”

  It was rarely that the head of Product Development beat Adam in; when he did, he liked to make the most of it.

  “Adam, how are you fixed for the next hour?”

  “I’ve a few things. Nothing I can’t change around.”

  From the windows of his office, as they talked, Adam could see the early morning freeway traffic. At this time the volume was moderately heavy, though not so great as an hour ago when production workers were heading in to factories to begin day shifts. But the traffic pattern would change again soon as thousands of office employees, now breakfasting at home, added their cars to the hurrying stream. The pressures and easings of traffic density, like variations in the wind, always fascinated Adam—not surprisingly, since automobiles, the traffic’s chief constituent, were the idée fixe of his own existence. He had devised a scale of his own—like the Beaufort wind scale, ranging from one to ten degrees of volume—which he applied to traffic as he viewed it. Right now, he decided, the flow was at Volume Five.

  “I’d like you up here for a while,” Elroy Braithwaite, the vice-president, said. “I guess you know our buddy, Emerson Vale, is off in orbit again.”

  “Yes.” Adam had read the Free Press report of Vale’s latest charges before leaving the newspaper beside the bed where Erica was sleeping.

  “Some of the press have asked for comments. This time Jake thinks we should make a few.”

  Jake Earlham was the Vice-President Public Relations, whose car had also been parked below as Adam came in.

  “I agree with him,” Adam said.

  “Well, I seem to have been elected, but I’d like you in on the session. It’ll be informal. Somebody from AP, the Newsweek gal, The Wall Street Journal, and Bob Irvin from the Detroit News. We’re going to see them all together.”

  “Any ground rules, briefing?” Usually, in advance of auto company press conferences, elaborate preparations were made, with public relations departments preparing lists of anticipated questions, which executives then studied. Sometimes rehearsals were staged at which p.r. men played reporters. A major press conference took weeks in planning, so that auto company spokesmen were as well prepared as a U. S. President facing the press, sometimes better.

  “No briefing,” Elroy Braithwaite said. “Jake and I have decided to hang loose on this one. We’ll call things the way we see them. That goes for you too.”

  “Okay,” Adam said. “Are you ready now?”

  “About ten minutes. I’ll call you.”

  Waiting, Adam emptied his attaché case of last night’s work, then used a dictating machine to leave a series of instructions for his secretary, Ursula Cox, who would deal with them with predictable efficiency when she came in. Most of Adam’s homework, as well as the instructions, concerned the Orion. In his role as Advanced Vehicles Planning Manager he was deeply involved with the new, still-secret car, and today a critical series of tests involving a noise-vibration problem with the Orion would be reviewed at the company’s proving ground thirty miles outside Detroit. Adam, who would have to make a decision afterward, had agreed to drive to the test review with a colleague from Design-Styling. Now, because of the press conference just called, one of Ursula’s instructions was to reschedule the proving ground arrangements for later in the day.

  He had better, Adam decided, reread the Emerson Vale news story before the press session started. Along with the pile of mail outside were some morning newspapers. He collected a Free Press and a New York Times, then returned to his office and spread them out, this time memorizing, point by point, what Vale had said in Washington the day before.

  Adam had met Emerson Vale once when the auto critic was in Detroit to make a speech. Like several others from the industry, Adam Trenton had attended out of curiosity and, on being introduced to Vale ahead of the meeting, was surprised to find him an engagingly pleasant young man, not in the least the brash, abrasive figure Adam had expected. Later, when Vale faced his audience from the platform, he was equally personable, speaking fluently and easily while marshaling arguments with skill. The entire presentation, Adam was forced to admit, was impressive and, from the applause afterward, a large part of the audience—which had paid for admission—felt the same way.

  There was one shortcoming. To anyone with specialized knowledge, many of Emerson Vale’s arguments were as porous as a leaky boat.

  While attacking a highly technical industry, Vale betrayed his own lack of technical know-how and was frequently in error in describing mechanical functions. His engineering pronouncements were capable of several interpretations; Vale gave one, which suited his own viewpoint. At other moments he dealt in generalities. Even though trained in law, Emerson Vale ignored elementary rules of evidence. He offered assertion, hearsay, unsupported evidence as fact; occasionally the young auto critic—it seemed to Adam—distorted facts deliberately. He resurrected the past, listing faults in cars which manufacturers had long since admitted and rectified. He presented charges based on no more than his own mail from disgruntled car users. While excoriating the auto industry for bad design, poor workmanship, and lack of safety features, Vale acknowledged none of the industry’s problems nor recent genuine attempts to improve its ways. He failed to see anything good in auto manufacturers and their people, only indifference, neglect, and villainy.

  Emerson Vale had published a book, its title: The American Car: Unsure in Any Need. The book was skillfully written, with the attention-commanding quality which the author himself possessed, and it pr
oved a bestseller which kept Vale in the spotlight of public attention for many months.

  But subsequently, because there seemed little more for him to say, Emerson Vale began dropping out of sight. His name appeared in newspapers less frequently, then, for a while, not at all. This lack of attention goaded Vale to new activity. Craving publicity like a drug, he seemed willing to make any statement on any subject, in return for keeping his name before the public. Describing himself as “a consumers’ spokesman,” he launched a fresh series of attacks on the auto industry, alleging design defects in specific cars, which the press reported, though some were later proved untrue. He coaxed a U.S. senator into quoting pilfered information on auto company costs which soon after was shown to be absurdly incomplete. The senator looked foolish. A habit of Vale’s was to telephone reporters on big city dailies—collect, and sometimes in the night—with suggestions for news stories which just incidentally would include Emerson Vale’s name, but which failed to stand up when checked out. As a result, the press, which had relied on Vale for colorful copy, became more wary and eventually some reporters ceased trusting him at all.

  Even when proved wrong, Emerson Vale—like his predecessor in the auto critic field, Ralph Nader—was never known to admit an error or to apologize, as General Motors had once apologized to Nader after the corporation’s unwarranted intrusion into Nader’s private life. Instead, Vale persisted with accusations and charges against all automobile manufacturers and, at times, could still draw nationwide attention, as he had succeeded in doing yesterday in Washington.

  Adam folded the newspapers. A glance outside showed him that the freeway traffic had increased to Volume Six.

  A moment later the intercom buzzed. “The fourth estate just got here,” the Product Development vice-president said. “You want to make a fifth?”

  On his way upstairs, Adam reminded himself that he must telephone his wife sometime today. He knew that Erica had been unhappy lately, at moments more difficult to live with than during the first year or two of their marriage which began so promisingly. Adam sensed that part of the trouble was his own tiredness at the end of each day, which took its toll physically of them both. But he wished Erica would get out more and learn to be enterprising on her own. He had tried to encourage her in that, just as he had made sure she had all the money she needed. Fortunately there were no money problems for either of them, thanks to his own steady series of promotions, and there was a good chance of even bigger things to come, which any wife ought to be pleased about.