“I’ll get you one,” I said. There was no beer at the bar, but I knew there would be beer in Don’s refrigerator.
“Stay here, Jannaire,” Larry said. “I’ve got to make a phone call.”
“We’ll be right back,” I said.
Larry and I entered the kitchen, and he jerked his head toward the hallway. “Let’s go into Don’s study for a minute.”
We entered the study and Larry turned on the desk lamp. “Did you smell her, Hank?” he said. “Driving here from Hojo’s in the car I had to turn off the airconditioner and roll the goddamned windows down.”
“I’ll take her off your hands, Larry,” I volunteered casually.
“How? I can’t just ditch her. She’s liable to report me to Electro-Date, and I’ve got three more dates coming. Unfortunately,” he said bitterly.
“No problem. You said you had to make a phone call. I’ll just tell Jannaire for you that your boss sent you out on an emergency mission of some kind. You wait in here a couple of minutes, and I’ll take her out to the golf course. That’ll give you a chance to say ‘Happy Birthday’ to Don and bug out.”
“You don’t have to do this for me, Hank. I got into it, and I…”
“What the hell. You’d do the same for me.”
“I’m not so sure that I would. What is that smell, Hank?”
“Woman, that’s all, woman.”
“Did you see her fucking armpits? I’ve never seen a woman with unshaved armpits before, have you?” “No, but it kinda turns me on.”
“It turns me off! After I finish the three other dates, I’m going back to stewardae. The hell with this income tax dodge. I keep running into one goddamned fantasy after another.”
“Is Jannaire a Catholic?”
“She must be. There isn’t a Protestant in American who’d let hair grow under her arms.”
“Okay, Larry. Give me a couple of minutes,” I said, “and I’ll get you out of it.”
“Right. I’ll just talk to Don a second, and split. It’s a lousy party anyway, isn’t it?”
“They always are.”
I got two cans of beer out of the refrigerator, and rejoined Jannaire at the bar. Jotey behind the bar, was pointing out Don and Clara to her with his long black forefinger.
“Let’s go out by the golf course to drink these,” I said. “If people see us with beers, they’ll all want one.”
I popped the tops and handed her a can as we walked toward the No. 8 green, and skirted the sand trap. The green was on a gentle berm of filled earth, and we sat on the grassy slope facing the lighted back yard. The row of candles along the border made the milling people around the pool resemble actors on a stage set, with the candles serving as footlights.
“Where’s Larry?” she said.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Jannaire, but he said he simply couldn’t stand you. So he left, and I promised to take you home.”
“I could tell he didn’t like me,” she said, “but you don’t have to take me home. I can get a cab back to the Hojo’s on Dixie.” “Why Hojo’s?” “That’s where I left my car.”
“Larry’s crazy,” I said. “You’re the most attractive woman here tonight. Perhaps you said something to irritate him. Larry’s very sensitive, you know.”
“I don’t know what it could be. I know he didn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t have any last name, but it’s true. I had my name changed legally to Jannaire five years ago.”
“From what?”
“That’s what he asked. But that’s the way things always go with me. Men either like me or they don’t from the first moment we meet. And more men dislike me than like me. It’s always been that way, ever since high school.”
“What do you do, Jannaire?”
“About men, do you mean?”
“No. I like you. We’ve already got that established. Work, I mean.”
“Many of the women here tonight would know—a lot of them, I think. I design clothes, pant suits, mostly, under the trade name of Jannaire. I also own the Cutique, on Miracle Mile in the Gables.”
“Cutique?”
“Awful, isn’t it? But they remember the name, women do, and they come back. I also own two apartment houses, and I’m a silent partner in a few other business ventures. I keep busy.”
“I don’t understand this dating business, then. Why would a woman as attractive as you, and with some money besides—and a business—sign up with Electro-Date?”
She laughed. “Does Larry tell you everything?”
“No, but we’re friends, and we live in the same building. And he did tell me about Electro-Date.”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Norton…”
“Hank, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to call you Miss Jannaire.”
“All right, Hank. That’s an odd name, too, isn’t it?”
“Come on, back to the truth about the electronic dating.”
“I happen to own twenty percent of Electro-Date, and it isn’t doing very well now, although it started out well enough. Miami is much too small for accurate matching, which is always half-assed at best, but there’re too many dating services competing. Anyway, when someone really bitches, as Larry did after his first date, they call me. I study the application questionnaire and sometimes take the next date myself. I’m sure if Larry and I had had a chance to talk together, as you and I are doing now, I could’ve overcome his objections to me, whatever they are.”
“No,” I laughed. “Not unless you shaved under your arms.”
“Fuck him, then! Do you want to blow a roach?” She opened her little gold mesh bag, and took out a stick.
“Go ahead,” I reached for my lighter, “but I never smoke pot. It doesn’t do anything for me, and I’ve been brainwashed. I’m a detail man, and by the time we’ve finished our indoctrination course, we never touch anything in the drug line.”
“Mary Jane isn’t a drug,” she protested.
“I know the arguments. And I can counter every one you bring up, too. But in my job, with drugs of every kind available to me, I leave them strictly alone. They scared us badly during training. I’m even nervous about taking an aspirin. And aspirin can be dangerous too. In some people, it burns holes through the stomach lining.”
I lit her cigarette. She inhaled deeply, held it in, and said through closed teeth, “What’s a detail man?”
“Drug pusher. I’m a pharmaceutical salesman for Lee Laboratories, and my territory includes Key West, Palm Beach, and all of Dade County. I’m supposed to see forty doctors a week and tell them about our products. I brief them, or detail one or more of our products, so they’ll know how to use them.”
“There’re a lot of drug companies, aren’t there?”
“Sure. And a lot of detail men, and a lot of doctors. But my job, especially for Lee Labs, is one of the best jobs in the world, if not the best. I work about five hours a week, when I work at all, and I make a decent living.”
“How can you call on forty doctors in five hours?”
“You can’t. I fake it, turning in my weekly report from the info in my files. Also I telephone from time to time—the doctors’ secretaries—to make sure the doctor hasn’t died on me since the last time I actually called on him. But I can usually make ten or fifteen personal calls in an afternoon when I want to. And if I set up a drugs display for one day in a hospital or medical building, that counts as forty calls for the week. I like my work, though, and I’m really a good salesman. I feel sorry for doctors, the poor overworked bastards, and I like to help them out.”
“Do they always let you in? Just like that?”
“Most of them do. There are three kinds of doctors, you see. It’s impossible for a doctor to read everything put out by the drug companies on every drug, but a few try. They all need a detail man to explain what a drug does, its contraindications, and so forth. So one doctor refuses to see detail men, and reads all of the literature, or tries to, himself. Another doctor never reads any
thing, but depends entirely on a detail man to brief him. The third kind doesn’t read anything or see any detail men either. And if you happen to get this guy for a doctor, your chances for survival are pretty damned slim.”
“So they see you, then?”
“Most of them, but you can’t always overcome their prejudices or their ignorance. For example, I might ask a doctor, ‘What do you know about migraine?’ Half the time, he’ll tell me that migraine headaches are psychosomatic, and that you can’t do anything for them. He doesn’t want to listen, you see. His mind is made up. In a case like that, you say, ‘Okay,’ and get onto something else. But when you’re lucky, you’ll run into an intelligent doctor, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know a damned thing about migraine. I get four or five cases a week, and I can’t do anything for them.’
“So then you tell him. It so happens that we’ve got a product that reduces or even stops migraine headaches. What happens, you see, is that tension, or something, nobody knows what it is exactly, causes the blood veins in your temples to constrict. Now this isn’t migraine, not yet. But these veins can’t stay constricted too long because you’ve got to get blood to your head. What happens, pressure builds, and the man can feel his migraine coming on. Then, all of a sudden, the tight veins open up and a big surge of blood gushes through these open vessels, and there’s your migraine headache. What our product does is keep the veins closed. They open eventually, but gradually, slowly. Without the sudden surge of released blood, the headache is either minimized or it doesn’t come.”
“How did you learn all that?”
“Well, in this case, we had a two-day conference in Atlanta, with all of the detail men from Lee Labs in the Southeast present. We had a doctor who has spent his life studying migraine. He briefed us, and our own company research men who finally developed the drug briefed us. We had two films, and then some Q. and A. periods. Then we all got drunk, got laid, and flew back to our own territories. But the thing is, a doctor who came out of medical school ten years ago, let’s say, was told that you couldn’t do anything about migraine. ‘It’s psychological,’ they told him. So he still believes it, and he won’t listen to you. And if he doesn’t read anything, and he won’t listen to you, if a patient has a migraine and goes to him, he’ll tell him that the headache’s all in the mind. It’s a shame really, because such people can be helped by our drug.”
“I’ve never had a migraine.”
“They’re pretty bad. They can last for hours, or even for days, sometimes. You’re nauseated, and you lie flat on your back in a dark room with a wet towel over your eyes. It’ll go away, eventually, but when a person gets a warning it’s coming—you know, the tightening of the temples and so on—he has time to take our product and prevent the damned thing—or at least to reduce the force of it.”
“Here,” she said, passing me the stick, “take a drag. Sharing is part of the high, you know.”
To please her, I took a short toke and returned the butt.
There was a happy shout, and I watched the guests gathering near the bar. It was time for Don to open his presents.
I rarely talked about my work, and not always truthfully when I did talk about it. But I had opened up to Jannaire, and probably bored the hell out of her. She had seemed interested, however, and the subject was interesting—at least to me. I wanted her to like me. She was a mature woman, at least thirty, I figured, and I couldn’t talk to her about inconsequential matters the way I did with younger women. I also realized, sitting there, that I hadn’t dated or slept with a woman older than twenty-five since I came to Miami. I wanted to kiss Jannaire. In fact, I wanted to rape her, right there on the No. 8 green, and yet I was reluctant to put my arm around her, afraid that I would be premature. Talking with Jannaire gave me an entirely different way of looking at a female.
“Do you want to watch Don open his presents?” I said.
“Not particularly. I should go, I think. I haven’t even met the host or hostess…”
“This isn’t a good time to meet them, either. Suppose we go somewhere and talk? To my apartment, perhaps?”
She laughed. “Apparently you like me better than Larry did.”
“I’ll just say ‘so long’ to Don, and wish him a happy birthday. Do you really want to meet him?”
“No, not in the middle of the big production number.”
It was a production number. A circle of chattering bodies surrounded Don and the card table loaded with presents. Don sat in a chair beside the table, while his daughter, glorying in being the center of attention, opened the presents, one at a time, and handed them to him for inspection. Don would read the card aloud, and the guests laughed or applauded his loot. Clara, with a pencil between her teeth like a horse’s bit, held a yellow legal pad. She would write the donor’s name down, make a cryptic note of the present, and later on she would write nice letters of thanks, which Don would sign as his own. It was a grim business.
I stepped up to Don, put a hand on his shoulder. “Happy birthday, Don,” I said in an undertone. “I’m splitting.”
“What the hell is this?” He said unhappily. “Eddie is in Chicago, Larry just left, and now you—my best friends, for Christ’s sake!”
I grinned. “Look what I’m leaving with—no, don’t look now, and you’ll understand.”
I nodded politely to Clara, and ran after Jannaire, who was already at the end of the patio and opening the gate in the Cyclone fence that led to the street.
9
As I drove down Dixie Highway toward Hojo’s I hugged the right lane and drove as slowly as I could get away with, wondering why I had exaggerated the healing properties of mygrote. Mygrote was effective in at least three cases in ten of migraine, but it sure as hell wasn’t the cure-all I had claimed for it in my discourse to Jannaire. I never lied to doctors about the product, so why had I snowed Jannaire? I was trying to impress her, I decided, but I was going about it in the wrong way. Jannaire was more than just another cunt, and I would have to use other tactics to impress her, if that was what I wanted to do.
“Look,” I said, clearing my throat as we stopped at a red light at Sunset Drive, “I’ve got two tickets to the Player’s Theater tomorrow night. It’s The Homecoming, a Pinter play. Perhaps you’d like to see it.”
“Yes, I’d like very much to see it. But not if you’re going to tell Larry Dolman.”
“Tell him what?”
“That you’re dating me, and that I have a partial interest in Electro-Date.” “Why not?”
“For one thing, he works for National Security, and I don’t want those snoops to know anything about my business. For another, I’ve been lining up Larry’s next date in my mind, and I don’t want him to suspect that I had anything to do with it, you see. I have a hunch that he could be very nasty if he had a grudge.”
“He could. I advise you not to play any tricks on him.” “Oh, I won’t.” She laughed. “The trick’ll be his problem, not mine!”
“I don’t tell Larry everything. But going to the play will just be the first date, Jannaire. My overall plan, after I convince you how sweet and charming I am, is to get you into the sack. Eventually, anyway; I’m not going to rush it.”
“A woman admires frankness, Hank, but you’re awfully crude.”
“Not crude,” I laughed. “Basic.”
I parked in the Hojo lot. She leaned toward me, kissed me on the lips, banging her wet hot hard tongue against my teeth. I felt the flames of her furnace breath for a second, and then she was out of the car before I realized what happened.
“I’ll meet you at the theater,” she said, waving, and climbed into her silver-gray Porsche. As she backed out of the slot, I noticed that the little car had battered front fenders.
There was no way, as I thought back on this first encounter, to tell that Jannaire was married. A married woman cannot easily get out of the house for two nights in a row. She had gone to Don’s birthday party with Larry, and the next night she went to th
e play with me. Two nights later, I met her downtown at the Top of the Columbus for cocktails and dinner. The following week I had lunch with her twice, once at Marylou’s Soul House, and once at LaVista. The lunches were both short, lasting less than an hour and a half each time, but she arrived on time, and left hurriedly because of business appointments.
My hours, the few hours I put in each week, were flexible, but Jannaire was always busy with her boutique (the Ugh! “Cutique”), her real estate interests, her designing, her clients, and with her home and husband. But I never, not once, suspected that she was married, or even that she had ever been married.
The evidence, however, or the clue, was always there, but I had failed, in my infatuation, my frustration—and there were times when her peculiar admixture of odors made me almost insane with desire—to recognize the obvious evidence.
She always met me somewhere, and she always drove home alone. I had never picked her up at her apartment, and I never had an opportunity to drive her home. With the number of separate dates we worked in during a period of almost six weeks—perhaps sixteen dates altogether—I should have suspected something.
The problem was, I was always trying to get her to come to my apartment. I had never concentrated on getting her alone at her place because she said that her aunt from Cleveland was visiting her for the season. She had established this house guest early, and I had accepted the aunt as a fact of coexistence. Also, from time to time, Jannaire would make an excuse to turn down a date because she was doing something or other with her aunt. That was another peculiar thing; why did she give me her home telephone number? I had no ready story prepared to explain to a jealous husband why I was calling his wife. I had no objections to running around with a married woman, of course, but to run around in Miami, visiting public places (I had even taken her to The Mutiny, the private club at Sailboat Bay) could have—in fact, it did—place a man’s life in jeopardy. My life.
Except for the single, swift erotic kiss I got on parting—never on greeting—a kiss that always promised everything and delivered nothing, I was no closer to seducing Jannaire after six weeks than I had been on the first night at Don’s house. I had cupped her breasts in the car a couple of times, as we were driving somewhere, and they were as firm as clenched fists. But that was all. When I propositioned her, which I did two or three times during each date, she merely smiled and changed the subject or smiled and continued to ask me questions about myself. As a consequence, Jannaire knew a great deal about me, but I knew very little about her.
The Shark-Infested Custard Page 8
