“I can understand though how tempting it all is to you. You have a power you never had before, and you can tell yourself that you are using that power on the side of the angels. You can also tell yourself that you are finding a wonderful security for your family.
“Though I am writing all this, I am still not such a fool as to ask you to give it up, to demand of you that you go back to the kind of work I thought you would always do. All I am asking, humbly, is that you think about all these things, and examine yourself to see how happy you are. If we are not happy, all the rest is not worth it. I am not a very complicated woman. I love you, and I want you to love me, and I think love is easier all around when life has good meanings, when work is good, and there are tangible ways to measure what you accomplish.
“I am asking you to think about it and when you come back to me, be ready to talk about it to me in such a way that we will not start trying to wound each other with words, just because both of us, perhaps, feel a little bit guilty. I can promise you that if you are convinced this is what you want to do with your life, I can certainly go along with it and do the best I know how. We have had a good thing working for us for a long time, darling, and I would crawl through glass, fire and cactus to keep it, and I think you would too. This good marriage is the product of luck, skill and labor. I just want to be terribly sure that we do not needlessly handicap ourselves. Do you understand? It sounds very spoiled and surly for me to say this is not the cruise I signed up for. Maybe nobody gets—or is entitled to get—exactly what they bargained for. But I can make a try, can’t I?
“Please don’t phone me about this, dear. It will be better to talk it all out face to face. So, while you are conventioneering about and doing this dirty little job for John Camplin, keep me in mind from time to time and try to get outside yourself and look back in and see if there’s been any changes made, any that you don’t especially like. I do love you. Jan.”
As he put the letter back in his pocket he looked up and saw the panel members were in place. About twenty-five men occupied chairs in the area that would have seated five times that number.
The moderator said, “I hoped that more members of this joint convention would have recognized the importance of the area we are discussing this morning. I can only tell the men sitting up here with me that I hope others will join us during the course of the morning, and I am ashamed at predicting such an optimistic turnout.”
As the moderator began the introductions of the members of his panel, a lean balding man on Hubbard’s right turned and said in a low voice, “Lou should know better by now, for God’s sake. Most of them are hung over and sacked out. Some are out by the pool getting their health back. The golf tournament is this afternoon. I know a couple marathon poker games going on. Some groups went out deep sea fishing. Lou is lucky there’s this many.” He glanced at Hubbard’s badge. “AGM, hey? Jesse Mulaney’s boys. Where you located?”
“Houston.”
“Jud Ewing, Federated—outa Chicago.” They shook hands. “I’ve known Jesse a lot of years. Be seeing you at the AGM cabana this afternoon, I suppose.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Hubbard said.
He tried to keep his mind on the discussion. He kept losing the thread of the arguments. He stuck it out for a little over an hour, until the moderator decreed a five minute break, and then he quietly walked away. As he started to walk past the AGM exhibit, he saw Fred Frick inside the enclosure talking to one of the twins. The other twin sat on an aluminum chair, working on her fingernails. Fred was grinning, grimacing, bobbing his head as he talked to the girl. Hubbard noticed that the girl’s expression was placid, slightly surly, unimpressed and uninvolved.
“Floyd! Hey, Floyd!” Fred called. Hubbard turned and went over to the exhibit. Fred and the twin moved closer to the velvet rope. “Floyd, I want you should meet Honey. Honey, this is Mister Floyd Hubbard, one of the brilliant young executives of AGM out of the home office in Houston, Texas.”
“Please to meetchew,” she said with colossal indifference.
“The girls have dresses on today. I guess you prolly noticed,” Frick said and jabbed Hubbard in the ribs with his thumb. “Mulaney figured it would be a little more dignified.”
“Honey, now you talk it over with your sister,” Frick said, turning back toward the girl. “You’ll get the same pay for just lying around in the sun and getting a good tan. Two o’clock. Cabana Fifty.” He slid under the rope and took Floyd by the arm and headed slowly toward the lobby.
“Those twin broads are so damn suspicious,” he complained. “For God’s sake, Connie’ll be there. And Sue Beatty and Cory. It’s out in the open, for God’s sake. They won’t come near the suite, but this is out in the sunshine. I was looking for you to tell you last night, Floyd. Just a little cabana party Jesse is giving for AGM and a bunch of his old friends in the business. This is an open afternoon on account of the golf tournament. So come in your swim trunks. Two o’clock.”
Hubbard managed to detach the grip on his arm. “Two o’clock. Okay.”
“I would have told you last night but I couldn’t find you.”
“I was around,” Hubbard said.
“You going up to the suite now?”
“I’m going up to my room, Fred.”
They got onto an elevator together. Frick winked spasmodically at him and said, his voice low, “Keep something under your hat. You want a room sometime, and you want to keep it private, here’s a key to eleven-oh-two.”
“Thanks, but I …”
“Don’t worry about it. Just put it in your pocket, Floyd fella. There’s only three out. You, me and Jesse. There’s a lot of traffic on eight.”
“I really don’t …”
“There’s an inside bolt on the door, so nobody’s going to walk in on you. Put it in your pocket, pal! I’m just following orders. If you don’t have a use for it, you don’t use it, right? But you got the key anyhow.”
They got off at the eighth floor and started down the corridor. Hubbard was not able to exhale completely until he was in his room with the door closed. He stood for a moment with his eyes closed. Outside the room he was endlessly on the alert for his first glimpse of Cory. It seemed important to see her before she saw him. He wanted to see her in some remote unflattering way so that by the time she turned toward him, the last dregs of prior magic would be gone.
He sat on the bed they had not used and read Jan’s letter again. When he had first read it, it had seemed slightly out of key, almost as though he was reading a letter meant for someone else. In this room that feeling was intensified. It was a woman he barely knew, writing to someone who no longer existed.
He put the letter in the top drawer of the dressing table, closed the drawer slowly. The cabana party was, he decided, as safe a situation as he could have asked for. It would give him a chance to strike exactly the right attitude, casual, seemingly grateful, uninterested in any repetition.
He sat at the desk and wrote postcards to Jan and the kids. He took them down to the lobby and mailed them. He went down to the shops on the lower level and bought swim trunks and a matching cabana jacket, sun lotion, dark glasses and sandals with rope soles. He had lunch in the grill. There was no special convention lunch.
At a little after two o’clock he went to the special bank of elevators for use by swimmers and sunbathers going to and from the pool and beach areas, dressed and ready for sun and swimming, braced to give the safe and proper responses to Cory.
Chairs, sun chaises and tables had been placed as close together as feasible on the concrete deck in front of Cabana 50. The cabana doors had been opened wide, and the road men were tending an improvised bar just inside the cabana. AGM flesh lay sprawled in the sun. He was greeted as he neared them. He smiled and waved. All the AGM people were there, plus a dozen middle-aged men, a few of them with their wives. A couple of gin rummy games were in progress. Connie Mulaney was knitting. Floyd saw the twins, greased, bikinied, supine. The hot weight of
the sunlight seemed to make all motions listless, to give all voices a buzzing quality.
He selected a sun cot on the fringe of the group, had spread his towel out and was beginning to rub the sun oil into his chest and shoulders when Bobby Fayhouser approached him and handed him a tall glass.
“Specialty of the day,” Bobby said. “It is chemically planned to replace the moisture you lose. We make it out of sweat.”
“Sounds delicious.”
“And rum. After three of them, if you should care to dive into the pool, check it with your foot first, to see if it’s the pool. We don’t want people diving into mirages.”
He thanked Bobby and took another quick look around, looking for Cory. He did not quite dare ask about her. He thought he could make it casual enough, but he was not quite certain.
When he turned to stretch out, he saw her standing six feet beyond his sun cot, standing and smiling at him, and he had no way of telling how long she had been there. She had a bathing cap in her hand. She wore a two-piece swim suit in a bold diagonal pattern of oyster and coral. It was wet, and droplets of water stood on her shoulders.
The first look at her was like having an electric current run through his body. He had not realized to what extent he had been sensitized to her. “Got to get my towel and stuff,” she said, and walked by the cot. He watched her walk away from him. It seemed grotesque to him that she should look and walk like a lady. It seemed like some confusing miscarriage of justice that she could walk in front of all the world and seem fragile in her loveliness, tender and tidy and poised. There should have been a vulgar pouting of those merciless hips, an obscene slant to that tormenting mouth, some suggestion in her walk of that rubbery suppleness of body, that limber wildness, she used in such an inventive abandon that no dimension of her, no texture or convolution of her was forgotten to a rhythmic using. Yet here she was, untouched and untouchable, a very pretty slender girl with toffee hair and dark-blue blue eyes, and a sweet and delicate sculpturing of face.
He lay back and closed his eyes against the sun glare that came through his dark glasses, and felt the sweat begin to exude from his pores.
There was a round touch against his leg just above his ankle, and the effect was as if she had run her fingernails lightly up the inside surface of his leg and nested her fist in his groin. “Hi,” she said.
He opened his eyes and saw that she sat on the foot of the sun cot, and had pulled her feet up and was hugging her legs. Her chin rested on her knees. It was the same posture he had seen her in at the foot of his bed, naked from her shower, and he knew it was intentional. And she knew what it was doing to him.
“I … have to take back some kind of a tan to prove I was here,” he said in a weak attempt at casual conversation. He knew he had made an error in not moving into the middle of one of the small groups.
“I don’t like to stay in the sun too long in a suit,” she said. “It spoils my tan. Did you notice, dear, yesterday? I’m tan all over.”
“Not so loud!”
“Nobody can hear us, darling. Did you sleep well? Did you dream about me?”
“Let’s try a new topic, Cory.”
“Last night I’d almost decided to stay right there with you, and then I remembered I hadn’t fed Maynard. He’s my cat, a truly enormous demanding beast, half Siamese, half alley. As opposed to me, dear. I’m all alley, as I hope you noticed.”
“Cory!”
“I gorged him before I left, and left him another enormous bowl of goodies, so I can stay with you tonight, Floyd darling, free of the weight of responsibility.”
“Now listen …”
“So, whenever you’re ready, and you feel strong, we’ll just stroll away from here, one by one.”
“No, Cory.”
“You don’t want me?”
“That isn’t the point. It’s just that …”
“I want you, and that’s what matters isn’t it? You’d be terribly flattered if you knew how unusual that is, dear. The few times I ever do want anyone, I never want them again. But I could eat you alive. Believe me, darling, I can take it or leave it, and usually it’s a case of going through the motions.”
“Can I get you a drink?”
“Bobby is bringing me one, thanks. As I was saying, you should be flattered. What’s so great about you, anyway? You’re kind of a stumpy little man, and you look as if you might drive a cab for a living, and you have sad, melting brown eyes, and you don’t have any special talent for making love, and I have shocked the hell out of you. What is it about you, dear?”
She stopped as Bobby brought her a drink. She thanked him and said, “I’m delving into the motivations of an AGM executive type now.”
“They’re the tricky ones,” Bobby said.
“Really, Bobby, your Mr. Hubbard seems to have very conventional ideas.”
“I’m at a convention, no?” Floyd said.
Bobby groaned and Cory said, “That isn’t the sort of conventional ideas I meant, sir.” Somebody called Bobby and he excused himself and walked away.
“Where were we, dear?” Cory asked.
“We were nowhere.”
“Do you think so? After all my hard labor?” She placed her hand on his ankle and began to stroke him almost imperceptibly. “I have to see just how invulnerable you are, darling.”
He fixed his mind on remote things which might save him. A winter waterfall. The pass patterns of the Baltimore Colts. The time he had the automobile accident. But the pressure, gentle, insistent, moved into each thought and moved it aside.
“If you try to be too stubborn, little bull, you’ll disgrace us all,” she said in a singsong tone. He hitched sideways abruptly, and rolled over into his face. She laughed softly and no longer touched him.
“So invulnerable,” she said. “Such a total rejection of poor Cory.”
She got up and came around and sat crosslegged on the concrete, facing him. “Why do you feel as if you have to fight it?”
“Because there are so many reasons why I shouldn’t bother. Can you understand that? All the rational reasons. Why lock the barn doors, and so forth. And who has to know? And when will you ever get a chance at anything like this again? Pat reasons, Cory. But every one of them cheapens me and diminishes me.”
“Why you? I took the initiative. I’m taking it again.”
“That’s the most insidious reason of all.”
She looked slightly startled. Her eyes seemed to change, to become more sober and thoughtful. “Maybe you’re as new a something to me as I am to you.”
“Maybe.”
“You seemed to like it, Floyd.”
“That’s a pretty pale word. I got a terrible dirty joy out of it. It was more like a battle. It wasn’t love. Love isn’t like that. We were antagonists. Like wrestling snakes and wondering how many bites you can endure before the venom kills you. You were full of contempt, Cory. You were trying to punish both of us.”
“Of course.”
“Then you realize that?”
“Who claims it isn’t a battle? Only a novice would think it isn’t.”
“You’re no novice.”
“I told you I was married once.”
“I don’t mean that.”
As she studied him he looked at her mouth in sunlight, at the almost invisible down on her upper lip, at the firm modeling of those lips, and found it almost impossible to relate the harmless image to that remembered agony the flickering tongue could produce, to the schooled cruelty of lips and teeth, to the thready whimperings and gutteral gaspings and the petulant, incredible demands.
“Do I make you sick?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Good! I’ll make you sicker and stronger. You’re a silly little man, you know. Silly and helpless and terribly shocked. I’m making love to you right now in my mind. I’m thinking of things you couldn’t believe. They’re boiling around in my mind. My breasts are starting to hurt, lover. And my …”
“St
op it, Cory! Please stop it!”
“The more you can hate me, the better it will be.”
“Cory, I’m not going up there with you. I mean it. It happened, and I suppose I’m even grateful in some eerie way, but I’m also smart enough to know this could … so easily turn into a compulsion. And that’s what I think you really want. You want me to lose the last fragment of myself, and be … be turned into a swine.”
“What made you say that? What made you use that word?”
“Why are you so agitated? It seems apt enough. As soon as I start ignoring everything in the world but you, and what you can do to me, then you’ll walk away.”
“But wouldn’t it be worth it?”
“Not to me, Cory. Not to me. I have a horrible affliction. Pride. And I’m trying to keep my own good opinion of myself. And I want no more of you. Thanks a lot.”
“Big talk. Big brave puritanical talk. I’ll be in your bed soon enough. And you’ll be happy about it. Wait and see. Let me know when you’re ready. Because I’ve been ready, terribly ready, ever since I woke up this morning, lover.”
She rose easily to her feet, traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips and walked away, pausing to sip her drink and look back at him, mocking him. She turned slightly toward him and made such a small, quick, imperceptible movement of her hips that he knew no one else could have noticed it, but to him it was like taking a skilled boxer’s blow directly under the heart. It stopped his breath and chilled his limbs. She went over to where Charlie Gromer and Tom Carmer were watching Stu Gallard whipping Fred Frick at gin rummy. He closed his eyes. The heat and light seemed to hold him suspended in a lazy void where his mind moved in a gluey rhythm and nothing was particularly important. His mind swung back to Cory, to visual memories of her which, in his sun-struck state, had the power of hallucination—a breast so close to his eyes in pumpkin light it blotted out two thirds of the world, a tidy, perfect breast, firm as papaya, with the tan-orange texture of the nipple area pulled shiny-tight in erectile joy—the milky musky texture of the skin at the back of her knee against his lips—and, stretching away from him, the slender V of her back, topped at a distance remote as in delirium by the toffee tangle of her hair, while her clenched hips burst upon his lap, as impossible to capture, as muscularly tantalizing as the fresh caught fish that leaps its life away on the floorboards of the boat.…
A Key to the Suite Page 11
