The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  I managed a grin that was probably no worse than fatuous, and hooked a leg over one edge of the garden table where there was some room left; she had it piled high with books, scratch pads, a Corona portable with the lid still on, a half-empty mint-julep tumbler, and two big ash trays filled to the brim. The book she’d been reading lay ajar on her flat sunburned stomach. It was Humphrey Slater’s Conspirator, of all things.

  “They tell me you’re a writer,” I said. It sounded as bright as a moron on a quiz show.

  “Don’t call the cops.” She shook out her heavy gray bangs solemnly. “I’m out on probation. Anyway you’re not the injured party. My stuff’s for women, about women.”

  “I wasn’t complaining. It looks like a pretty good deal.”

  “It’s hell,” she told me briskly. “I’m always begging them to take me back on the chain gang, but they want me to suffer. How about you? A musician’s life should be rather satisfying, in many ways. They usually seem to me so wrapped up in their art that nothing else has much of a chance to worry them. But on the other hand they must do so much traveling, they can never settle down and strike roots.”

  I said I supposed that covered a lot of people and a lot of territory, these days, and she smiled her benevolent smile for me that had a slightly feline cast to it.

  “Don’t be so damned noncommittal with me, young man. People are my business. I like them, and I’m fixing to like you if you’ll give me half a chance. Tell me about yourself—get it off your chest instead of all this cageyness and moping around.”

  I laughed, not very heartily. “Not much to tell—”

  “Oh, go on with you. Of course there is, and a lot more than I’ve any business hearing about, I dare say.”

  It would have been a pleasure to go debonair on her and bow myself out of there with a few well-chosen suavities. The only trouble was that for all I knew she might be holding the stakes as well as publishing the dope sheet and handicapping the horses.

  “This is most flattering,” I said, and firmly suppressed a shudder. “I hope you realize that I’m like every other guy—my favorite subject is me, and I love to talk about it. Where shall we start?”

  “Just go ahead and talk.” She lighted a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one, before I had a chance of coming up with a match; she was using one of those long black holders that have a cartridge of chemicals in them to filter out most of the kick. “Start anywhere you like, my friend, I promise none of it will be used against you.”

  The sun was bearing down on the back of my neck. I mopped up the sweat with a towel and said casually enough, “It still isn’t much of a story, any way you look at it. I was born in ’18—White Plains, New York. One of those wartime deals. Mother was very young and beautiful, Dad wore cavalry boots with spurs that jingled. She was impressed but Fritz wasn’t. That the kind of stuff you want to hear?”

  “Go on,” she said placidly, watching me from behind the glint in her sunglasses. “You’re doing all right now.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So that left her with me, and the insurance, and a few dollars’ worth of pension. We had it pretty good, though. The family helped out at first, and by the time I was six or seven she’d already made a name for herself on the concert stage.”

  Mrs. Garand nodded thoughtfully. “Lillian Bailey.” she said. “Of course.”

  “You knew her?” I demanded, more startled than incredulous.

  “I remember an interview with her in Chicago, when I was a sob sister on the Tribune back in the twenties. She played the harp like an angel, and she was a hell of a nice gal, but your father’s name wasn’t Bailey, young man, and there couldn’t’ve been any pension.”

  “Do we have to go into that?”

  “We don’t. But you should for yourself, and get it out of your system. Bastards have been respectable for a long time.”

  “I’m not complaining,” I assured her. My headache was killing me, but it doesn’t make sense to start something you can’t finish. “There’s no question about it, Mother was tops. But you asked me to talk about myself. I wasn’t any prodigy, but I managed to major in music at Columbia in ’37. Not good, not bad. She wanted to send me to Europe, the Vienna conservatory, enjoy the advantages she’d missed herself. Only I knew I didn’t have the stuff in me, and while we were still arguing about it the Nazis took over Austria, and I got a job with Buddy Van Zell’s outfit at the Bamboo Room in Pittsburgh. It was the year after that, when she’d come down to visit me, a speeding ambulance hit the sidewalk right in front of the hotel and smashed her to bits.”

  Mrs. Garand said evenly, “That was ten years ago.” The glint in her sunglasses did not waver.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Ten years ago my last birthday. So I was twenty-one, and she’d taught me to swim by myself. There was some money coming to me, too, and I found a booker who was willing to take a chance. Two months later I opened at the Coronet Lodge, in Silver Springs, Colorado, with a brand-new crew. Not good, not bad.”

  “You’re making that sound like a motto for yourself.”

  “Sorry. It just slipped out. We made out okay, as hotel bands go, until the draft broke up the game, right after Pearl Harbor. You don’t want to hear about the Rover Boys on kitchen police, or Bailey goes to War, do you?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “For a writer,” I said, “you pick the darnedest verbs, ma’am. Anyway, there wasn’t much to that, either. I got to be boss of an old tin-can truck with a three-inch gun mounted on back. At Kasserine, Fritz still wasn’t much impressed, but later on we did manage to push him around some. You read the papers, so you know how it all came out. Then after a while some of us got to go home, and some didn’t. I had no special place to go, so I took up California for the climate. My first day in slacks and a sport shirt the cops grabbed me off in an orange-juice stand on Hollywood Boulevard for busting up the joint. They told me later I’d been irked with the proprietor—he wouldn’t listen when I ordered him to open fire, there were some Tiger panzers coming up La Brea. Don’t worry, they talked me out of these inconvenient notions at the veteran’s hospital. They were awfully patient about it. And what’s your hobby, ma’am, when you’re not writing books or liking people?”

  “I play croquet,” she told me calmly. “You must try it sometime. There aren’t any kings with holes behind them, and it’s a very popular game in Bermuda.”

  The jolt went clean through me before I recognized the source of her information. “Oh, sure, Bermuda,” I said inanely, steadying myself with an effort. “Yes, ma’am. No holes behind kings in that deal. I see where Miss Ryan has been doing a little talking for you, too.”

  “My dear boy, you’re old enough to know that all women are born gossips.”

  We looked at each other for a while in silence. She reached for her mint julep and drained it like a man: the movement dislodged Slater’s Conspirator from her stomach. I slid off the table and retrieved the book for her and remained standing there, without quite allowing my foot to trace a circle on the tiles.

  “I bet you like her,” I said at last, forcing a grin and feeling like the village idiot.

  “Certainly I do. Lorna’s a very sweet child, although I should imagine that most men are scared to death of her. They’ve all become so accustomed to sophistication in a pretty girl that the lack of it sends them up a tree much faster than a scalded cat. She was raised in convent school back East, you know. Now that I come to think of it, both of you are orphans.”

  It seemed to me as if she hesitated almost imperceptibly on that last word, and I had trouble hanging on to my grin. “She scares me, all right,” I said. “You must’ve heard me throw that bobble yesterday on the piano.”

  “I heard you, yes,” Mrs. Garand allowed her sunglasses to slip hall an inch below the bridge of her thin, hawklike nose and inspected me briefly across the rims. There was nothing trivial about the inspection; once again she reminded me of a scientist examining a somewhat doubtful spec
imen. “The question is,” she observed, rather dryly, “how much difference it would make to either of you.”

  “Now there’s a point,” I said, dropping the grin in a hurry. “But you should know that at this stage a man is usually too muddled to take sensible stock of the situation. Besides, there seems to be very little time, and worst of all I get the impression that the line forms to the right.”

  “Oh, Lorna has this young whippersnapper on a string who considers himself engaged to her, and who drove her down in his fancy courtin’ flivver,” she informed me calmly. “He’s the Bel Air society type, too much money and too much swash; she’ll know better than to get stuck with him. I suppose there’s quite a wolf pack snapping at her pretty ankles, back in town, but so far none of them have shown up here. You’re a funny guy, Bailey, and I do mean peculiar. I daresay it’s high time you get wise to yourself and stop floundering around in a swamp of silly complexes and guilty feelings. I still don’t believe you’re much bothered about this girl, but if you are, a little competition is hardly likely to do more than make you use your elbows, which might be an excellent idea, at that.” She swung her legs off the chair and rose lazily, stretching herself with the unabashed indolence of a woman who has long ceased to care about appearances. “Lobster Newburg for lunch,” she reminded me. “But you wouldn’t be hungry, I know. Class dismissed.”

  I watched her disappear in a long, swinging stride among the tangerine trees and the date palms. The pool lay deserted again, shimmering quietly, its blue of an almost malevolent intensity. The moment she was gone I flopped on the nearest rubber mattress and lay sweating and shaking and breathing fast for what seemed like a very long time, as if after an excess of heavy physical exercise.

  When deliberate reason finally came back on top, things began to look up a little. I decided I’d held up my end, after all, and that Eve Garand was nothing but a nosy old witch with a knack for upsetting people and worrying confidences out of them by sheer force of insinuation. The old sob-sister technique—she could even afford to come right out and admit as much. It amused me to consider that actually she might prove herself helpful yet. She undoubtedly had matchmaking ideas. Not the simple ones of a frustrated spinster, but the kind a chemist has in mind when he’s fingering his test tubes.

  The shakes left me at last. I went back to the bungalow, showered, and shaved carefully, brushed my hair until it looked right, worked on myself the way a handler grooms a show dog. I phoned the gift shop and had them send over a ten-dollar box of candy, charged to my account. When the bellhop came whistling across the lawn with it and knocked on Lorna’s door I was right behind him.

  She was wearing something cool and simple in green-checkered cotton, the least bit tousled from lying down in it most of the day, and she blinked at the box. “For me?”

  “A sudden inspiration,” I said. “It came to me just like that. ‘She looks so frail and delicate,’ I told myself, ‘it must be because nobody ever sends her a box of candy.’”

  The bellhop smirked and got out from under my feet. The girl in the green wrap stared at me in wide-eyed astonishment.

  “But you shouldn’t have. Really.”

  “I couldn’t think of any other way to make you go swimming with me.”

  She frowned doubtfully. “I was reading a book,” she told me. “One of Eve’s. If I get out in the sun too much, Mr. Biedermayer will be mad. He says I photograph like a Mexican, in a coat of tan.”

  “He the fellow who’s supposed to take pictures of you here? The one who was to phone you last night?”

  “Yes, of course. But some rush jobs came in, and he said he’d be delayed in town for a few days.”

  “I bet he told you to enjoy yourself while you were waiting,” I suggested with a wink.

  “How did you—Oh, all right. You’d better come in and sit down while I change.” She was suddenly gay, as if we were plotting to steal a march on the indulgent Mr. Biedermayer. Her nails slit deftly through the gaudy cellophane wrapper of the candy box. “Aren’t they super! You’ll have some, won’t you? When a man gives me candy it’s usually just an excuse for indulging his own sweet tooth.” She smiled at me bewitchingly, and slipped into the bedroom, munching on a chocolate cherry.

  I let out my breath and sat on the arm of a chair. Her living-room was a duplicate of mine—same size and shape, same phony French provincial pieces, same carpet, same chintzes. The only difference was a matter of atmosphere. Not the copy of Harper’s Bazaar on the table, or the green leather handbag and matching gloves flung carelessly on the couch, or the faint trace of Cassandra in the air—these were no more than props and commonplace enough, lacking significance. What affected me may easily have been simple imagination, or the backlash of a conscience still too little flexible for the demands made upon it. The room was, after all, only one of a score built and furnished exactly alike—modern, not very large, and impersonally cheerful. There was no reason why it should have given me a sense of danger, of alarm, and high excitement. Not then, on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock.

  Lorna Ryan emerged from the bedroom in one of those beachcoat arrangements, a crimson print piqué in three or four installments, the style that is designed to let them do a genteel sort of strip tease for you at the pool-side. She executed a languid pirouette to show it off. “Nice?”

  “I’ll buy it.” Joe Cornero’s gruffly scornful voice rang in my ears. They’re worse than actresses, Mr. Bailey, and that’s for sure. All they ever care about is what they can see in the mirror.

  She slipped a small, cool hand under my arm and laughed at me. It was a friendly laugh that wiped out every one of the exotic-orchid contours in her face and made her suddenly appear like any other bright young thing with a new outfit for the beach. “You couldn’t buy it,” she assured me, half seriously. “Josette designed it specially for me. And you didn’t take a piece of my candy!”

  “I’ll have one now,” I said, and quickly, lightly, kissed her small, upturned, strawberry-luscious mouth.

  She did not draw back or remove her hand, but she stiffened and pulled me along to the door. “I didn’t mean that,” she told me, not too steadily.

  Outside the jitters vanished as promptly as they’d come upon me in that living-room. Our walk through the park, arm in arm, drew an assortment of disapproving stares from the occupants of front porch lounges we passed on our way. Two wrinkled old Japs spraying date palms in the orchard paused long enough to sneer at us and nudge each other. The pool with its accessories was all ours, the Garand woman, her books, and her typewriter nowhere in evidence; only the brimming ash trays and the empty julep tumbler were still there. The water was warm, almost enervating; the scent of the tangerine trees hung sweet and heavy in the parched, hot desert air.

  A private swimming-pool, under such circumstances, makes a fine, serviceable setting for a fast job of fraternizing with the enemy. It strongly suggests, after all, the physical intimacy of sharing a bathtub and stops short only at mere details such as a few scraps of cloth, or the application of soap to your partner’s back. It takes a girl who is either very clever or very innocent to stand off the scores of possible boarders’ tactics in this situation. The fact remains that in two hours of it, with the sun already sharply declining toward the mountains, I did not make a single pass at Lorna Ryan. The simple reason was that she quite obviously did not expect one.

  By five-thirty or so she halted a spirited game of toss ball with a gasp of apparently genuine dismay. “Oh, I forgot!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re supposed to take it easy. The doctor—” You’re supposed to get this woman out of my hair.

  “It’s all right. I feel swell. You’re pretty good medicine for me.”

  She shook her head decisively, and swung herself lithely up the chrome-steel ladder to the tile walk. “You mustn’t get tired. You’d better rest awhile now, before sundown. Please.”

  We lay in silence on our backs, on adjoining mattre
sses, watching the drama of the rapidly lengthening palm-tree shadows, and she let me hold her hand, like kids in junior high. The first husky whiffs of the evening breeze came sighing in, still genial enough to dry us quicker than a towel; they were soon due to freshen into squalls that would carry the bite of distant snow. My headache had long disappeared, its place now occupied by a strange mixture of serene contentment and perplexed frustration.

  I reminded myself that the deal called for me to make like a wolf, not like a jackass. There was no sense in feeling small about it or in throwing in my hand. I was doing the lady a favor, whether she knew it or not—it wasn’t my fault that she’d got herself involved with the Hitchcock dynasty in such a tactless manner. She’d be better off now if she’d let me take her in tow as per schedule. A trip to Bermuda wouldn’t harm that school-girl complexion, not nearly as much as whatever they’d cooked up for her in case Bailey couldn’t slip her the business. She squeezed my hand just then. “I’m getting chilly.”

  “Think we should turn in?”

  “I guess so. It’s nice out here, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Will you play the piano for me?”

  I jerked my head around. She was looking at me without a trace of mockery or self-consciousness, solemnly expectant. She had removed her cap, and the breeze was ruffling through her glossy black locks affectionately, as if it enjoyed the privilege.

  “Sure, any time,” I said. “But yesterday I didn’t do so good, if you remember.”

  “That was yesterday,” she pointed out calmly. “You were worried about something. I could tell.”

  The bathhouse faced to the southeast and was already gloomy with the dusk. I rolled the picture window shut and snapped switches; the small electric log in the fireplace responded in a cherry glow while on the bar a light sprang up inside the grinning mountain-lion skull they kept there to impress you with the frontier flavor of the joint. This time she sat down next to me behind the Blüthner—unhesitatingly but with no hint of coquetry. This lime the jackass in me did not want to play.