The Only Girl in the Game

by John D. MacDonald

  “I’m telling you, don’t declare it, baby. If you do, I don’t know where the hell you got it. It didn’t come from me. I can prove that by the auditors.”

  “The job, Max. The job. When do I go to work?”

  “Soon, cutie. I got to do some shifting around. I’ll get hold of you.”

  “This wouldn’t be a brush off, Max? It better not be.”

  “You’re too suspicious, kid. You’re going to work here. You can bank on that.”

  She paid Mabel Huss her back rent. She bought some pretty new clothes. She bought the little Morris Minor off a used-car lot, for cash. She told herself quite firmly that it had turned out to be a different world than she had been led to believe it was, and so she had made a logical and rational adjustment to the state of things-as-they-are, and given up any juvenile wistfulness about the-way-things-should-be. She had been running full tilt into a wall and knocking herself down. So they had noticed her and opened a doorway in the wall and she had walked through and gravely accepted their brass ring, good for another ride, her order of merit.

  She had to adjust to the stranger she had suddenly become. She decided that if you have built a structure in your mind and it comes tumbling down, you are under no obligation to rebuild it. You can merely cart the debris away, smooth off the area and keep it carefully swept. In that way you avoid the danger of having something else collapse on you. And it is quite neat.

  She had to overcome the nagging suspicion that she had changed in some visible way. Men seemed to regard her with a more knowing interest. Did her hips swing with a new provocative arrogance when she walked down a street? Was there a sluttish contour to her lips? Had the line of her breasts become coarsely obtrusive? There was a B.T. world, (before Telfert) and an A.T. world, and she watched her friends narrowly, almost hoping to detect any slightest flavor of knowing contempt.

  But she finally, in her honesty, found her friends unchanged. She caught unexpected glimpses of herself in mirrors and store windows, and was reassured. She knew that the changes in her, and they were unavoidable, were subjective changes. She was drinking a little bit more than was her habit. She, who had always appreciated the restorative effects of being alone, went to rather absurd lengths to avoid being alone. At night she slept long and heavy and awakened unrefreshed.

  Max called her in at the end of a week. “You’ll start two weeks from tomorrow, cutie, on the midnight to six. Four shows a night. They’ll have a room in the house you can move into next week. The room will be free, and you’ll sign for all meals and drinks, and we’ll stake you to the kind of outfits I want you wearing for the act, and pay you a hundred fifty a week.”

  “I don’t know if Andy will let me take that kind of money.”

  “Add the value of the room and food and it’s far enough over minimum scale so there’s no union squawk, and there’ll be no squawk from you, kid.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “I can tell because I got a pretty good idea of the kind of gal you are, Dawson, and because you had a tour of duty in Playhouse 190.”

  She stared at him, wondering at the subconscious warning that had suddenly turned her mouth dry. “What … what does that mean?”

  “It means that Al Marta, through X-Sell Associates, has got his thumb in a hell of a lot of pies. There’s some little unions, laundry workers and so on over into Arizona, and there’s some trade associations that’re into this and that, and in lots of cases Al’s people can make things run a lot smoother if there’s ways to put on pressure. Not the old-fashioned kind, like you bust a few arms, even though that can still be arranged, but the modern kind. Social pressure, Al calls it. One of the corporations operating out of the X-Sell offices downtown owns that Playland Motel, so when it was expanded a while back, they brought in the experts. You want to use modern methods, you get the experts. That whole unit in the back was designed for that special purpose, kid. You know, it really knocks me out the things they can do. Two-way mirrors, special lighting, concealed camera ports, superfast film. You know, they’ve got that playhouse bugged with induction mikes that can pick up a whisper from twenty feet, and they can amplify it loud enough to blow your head off. Al uses it twenty-thirty times a year, but even if it was only three times it would have paid itself out. There’s a hundred-thousand nut just in the electronics in that place, kid.”

  She tried to moisten her lips. She had that feeling of remoteness which precedes fainting. “I don’t … understand.”

  “Why we should have used it this time? Not because of you, baby. You’re like incidental. The way Al explained, there’s land operations in Florida, and that Telfert has pretty good holdings. Maybe some day there’s some deal that he might want to block, and then they got a print of the film and they got a copy of the tape in the vault in Miami, and he all of a sudden gets cooperative. It’s like insurance.”

  “The film?” she said in a fainting voice.

  He stood up. “Come on back here, kid. I had Brownie set it up on the projector for me. I figured you’d want a quick look. It’s all sixteen-millimeter black and white, and this is edited down to take out all the dull stuff.”

  She followed him into a small room behind his office, shut the door behind her at his suggestion. A projector squatted on a low table, aiming at a wall a little over six feet away.

  He checked the projector, clicked it on. “There’s no sound on this print. Sometimes they dub it on from the tape, but it’s expensive. Click off that light behind you, kid, and I’ll get this thing adjusted down sharp.”

  She turned off the light. The bright square on the wall came into focus. She looked through a window at the grotesqueness of her shame, stood with ice forming around her heart and looked down from a high place upon the ultimate catalogue of dishonor. Max’s casual voice came from far away, barely audible over a roaring in her ears and the dutiful whirr of the projector.

  “The air conditioning in that place is just a little bit noisy on purpose to cover up any camera shutter sound, kid. That guy on the camera is a real artist, you got to admit. That’s a zoom lens he uses to come in for the close-ups and then back away again. You need a lot of close-ups to make sure of identification, so you can tell it wasn’t faked in any way. He worked in Hollywood and got canned on a narcotics thing. By God, that Telfert is all man, isn’t he? Baby, one thing you don’t have to ever worry about is anybody peddling these for the smoker trade. I’m not saying they wouldn’t go over pretty good, but this is a confidential deal, and no prints ever get out of our hands unless the parties involved cross us up, and then who would blame us for making the extra buck? Now on this next part the camera is shooting from a different location and the lighting isn’t quite so good, but it’s.…”

  Without warning the heavy saliva ran into her mouth. Her throat filled and she bent over and, clinging to a chair with one hand for support, she vomited endlessly, agonizingly, onto the unseen rug. Max cut the projector, turned on the light and showed her to his private lavatory.

  When she was alone, trying to clean herself up, the reel began to run against a wall in the back of her mind and she was sick again. It was a long time before she felt strong enough to come out. She gave herself a last look in the mirror. Her face looked gaunted and yellow-gray, and she could not bring herself to look into her own eyes.

  “You look pretty raunchy, honey. You better sit down.”

  “No thanks,” she said in a toneless voice.

  “I didn’t know it would get you that bad, kid.”

  “Who … who else has seen it?”

  “Just me and Al and the guys in the lab. And the two guys on duty while you were at 190. That’s all. I’m leveling with you, Dawson. It wouldn’t do us any good to show it around. I’d figure that would be a dirty trick.”

  “A dirty trick,” she echoed, unable to comprehend this code of behavior.

  “But just keep one thing clear. I own you, Dawson. You take the job I offer at the price I offer. And if I tell you
to jump over the hotel, I want to see you out there trying as hard as you can until I decide to tell you to stop.”

  He came around his desk and moved close to her. “I’ll be easy to get along with, but the first time you ever cross me up, I’ll clip the best ten minutes out of that film strip and see they’re delivered to that doctor daddy of yours in San Francisco. Have you got the whole picture now?”

  She made a strangled sound of assent, turned and fumbled the door open and fled through the casino, aware that people were looking at her in a startled way. Once she was out in the incomprehensible sunshine she discovered that tears were running down her face, and she had bitten her underlip until it was bleeding.

  Back in her dingy room in Mabel’s Comfort Motel, motionless on the sagging bed, she accepted the fact she would have to kill herself. No matter how she tried to solve the equation, it always came out the same way. She spent two days in bed, unable to eat, unable to go out into the world, unable to answer Mabel’s cautious worried questions.

  And then Mabel Huss, ignoring her protests, took her out into the desert to the absolute solitude of the stone house.

  “I’m leaving you here with this grub. Mabel said. “I’ll be after you in a few days. Don’t know what’s chewing you to pieces. But if there’s anyplace you can settle it, it’s right here. Soon as I go you’ll be finding out there’s nobody here but you and God. So get squared off with Him and yourself.”

  She rattled away in her old car, neither looking back nor waving.

  Betty Dawson mended herself in four days—or, more accurately, she adjusted herself to a future of living with what could never be mended. Mabel picked her up after the fifth day. After the first long anxious look, Mabel smiled with relief and approval.

  On the way back to town Mabel said, with startling perception, “I guess you found out it’s hard to think of anything you can’t get along without somehow, except life itself, Elizabeth. If you have to, you can make do without legs, eyesight, freedom or love. People always have, always will.”

  “You just sort of … add up what’s left, I guess.”

  “And keep telling yourself it’s important.”

  “One thing, Mabel, I’ve got time before I have to go to work to fly home and spend a couple of days with my father. It’s overdue.”

  “It makes a good place to start, Elizabeth.”

  So you build a new life within the limitations of the irreparable mistake, and do as much with it as you can. You bemuse yourself with the symbols of your own gallantry. You work hard and well at your profession, and you cherish your friends and amuse your acquaintances, and try hard to forget that you are, in the dirtiest sense of the word, on call. Just when you are beginning to wonder if that special mortgage on your soul requires no payments, Max assigns you the problem of the lucky man from St. Louis, a fat foolish man with a streak of slyness in him.

  You fight that unsavory assignment, knowing it is a battle you must lose, and this time you have a stony, bitter awareness of the camera eye, and you ease your shame and your dreadful hate by enticing the fat man into those postures of intimacy which will guarantee the most ludicrous and shameful performance on his part. You feel absolutely nothing—no stage fright, no shame, no sensation. Your body is a nerveless dutiful thing you have learned how to despise. It is a gross, flexing thing, suitable only to pleasure fat fools. It takes him but two nights to prove his valor by losing back all his winnings, and a third night to lose an additional forty thousand. When he tried to find reassurance in you, he learns the heavy losses have induced impotence, and so he weeps, helpless, half drunk, rolling his head from side to side, and saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama.”

  After a year of waiting, and trying not to remember you are waiting, you try to bluff Max out of turning over to you the problem of the lucky Venezuelan. But Max, of course, cannot be bluffed when he knows his hand contains the case ace. At least, this time, they see no reason to record the interlude. But after the Venezuelan has prided himself upon the success of a seduction, he reveals himself in his true sadistic arrogance.

  He is a small wiry man, vain, fit and rich, much given to a careful combing of his glossy hair. Once he has convinced himself that you find him irrresistible, he becomes much too free with his small, swift, hard fists, his slaps, his gutter words, his glares of contempt. He has won heavily and now that he is losing with the same rapidity, he becomes frantic, and more cruel—more like a small vicious rooster. You reach the end of endurance a little before all the winnings are gone, and when an offhand blow lands squarely upon a recent bruise, you interrupt his naked, muscle-flexing parade with a full swinging kick that makes him scream like a woman.

  When he crawls toward you with simple murder on his face, you flex that solid thigh and you feel the cartilaginous tissues of his nose flatten under the blocky impact of your knee, sickening you. But he still comes on, the eyes staring murder over the ruin of his face, whimpering in his eagerness to be at you, and he is stopped only when you smash the narrow vase against his head and dress in frantic haste, trying not to look toward him, and leave his hotel suite and go directly to Max, because the special problems of a special business are taken directly to the specialist involved.

  It turns out that he is not dead. He is painfully, but not even seriously, injured. Max handles everything, quiets everything down with swift efficiency.

  Afterward he will not explain how it was so readily handled, but he says, “Anybody knocks you around, you let me know fast. You don’t have to take that from any of these clowns, sugar. You’re too valuable I should let some mark mess you up. Here’s your cut, with a bonus. Take a couple nights off. Go visit your old man or something. Get yourself settled down. We’re taking the very best care of you around here, kid.”

  And so, except for the “assignments,” you live in complete celibacy. If the body is to be used in the sly ways of an expensive shill, any dual usage is not to be contemplated. It is an age, indeed, of specialization. It is odd to think that any body, used by so few, could have become so brutally desensitized. Because, after all, there have been only five of them. Jackie was shocked, incredulous and almost frightened to learn you were virgin. And after him you can count only the friend he loaned you to, and Riggs Telfert, and the fat man and the vicious little Venezuelan. The five men in your life. Who else—at twenty-six—had ever accommodated such widely disparate types in a group so small?

  And then along came Hugh Darren. Along came love. But when you have gone beyond a certain point, love becomes a luxury you cannot afford. So you fight like a cornered bandit. But what’s the harm in being friends? It can’t hurt anything, just being friends. Can it? And in a truly inevitable way, friends become lovers. You can only pray he will not notice how soiled is the body you place on this special altar. You pretend you are the clean thing he should have. And you cannot let him know about the love. That has to be hidden. Because, inevitably, it will end, and you elect yourself as the one most deserving hurt.

  Keep it a fun thing, a light and gay thing, an extension of friendship, not of the heart. No implications or obligations. Just love him, and keep it to yourself, and relish the wondrous things that happen between the two of you. Pile up the memories in a trunk in the closet of your mind, because after it ends it is going to rain every day for the rest of your life, and it will be nice to have something to look at. You have known, through every moment of love, that it would end when Max Hanes made his next demand. Because, in spite of your greed for Hugh, you cannot sneak Max’s dirty task into your emotional schedule, shrug it off and return to Hugh’s bed, to his special deftness with you, to that something so far beyond joy it has no word.…

  She looked, dull-eyed, at the hushed, familiar luxury of Unit 190. This is where love gets killed, she thought. This is where we knock it on the head and kick it under the rug and forget it ever was. And why, with all that I know I’m going to lose, should I still have room to be sorry about losing the good will of that old man from Texas?
The others were fools. He is not. There is no possible approach, but Max won’t believe me. This would be a very good night to be dead in. Just pull this night up like a blanket and be dead and safe forever.

  • • • eight

  Temple Shannard was brought awake too early on Monday morning, his third morning in the big bed beside Vicky’s bed in the glamorous Suite 803 in the Cameroon on the Strip in Las Vegas. He was pulled up out of heavy slumber that was doing him no good, brought rudely into a painful consciousness by the brutal pains in the abused cerebral cortex—pains such as might be caused by a brace and bit being turned slowly into his skull, with exquisitely thin ribbons of bone being pared away by the cutting edge of the drill. He had a thirst so massive he knew he would be unable to satisfy it. He lay for a time with his eyes squeezed shut against the faint morning light in the room, listening to the alarming sound of his heart, and wondering if he was going to throw up. His heart felt like a bowling ball rolling very slowly down a flight of wooden stairs.

  He knew he had been drunk, but he did not care to look beyond the requirements of his immediate agony. He had the wary feeling that any sort of retrospection would make him feel considerably more miserable. He clenched his teeth against the agony of sitting up, waited a few minutes, and at last felt able to stand up and pad quietly into the bathroom and close the door.

  You are damn near fifty-one years old, Shannard, he told himself, and this is one hell of a stupid thing to do to yourself.

  His body felt drab, sour and sticky. He leaned his thighs against the chill of the tiled counter and drank four glasses of water, paused as though listening for something, sidestepped to the toilet, lowered himself to his knees and was extremely ill. Quite a long time later, after trying another glass of water and retaining it, he felt up to taking a shower. As he stood in the harsh roaring of the shower, his eyes closed, larger events tried to work their way into his mind, but he pushed them back, knowing he was not yet ready. He sensed that there would be very little armor he could wear, but he wanted to put on all that was available to him.