“Are you sure that little state of mind isn’t just delayed adolescence?”
“You have a real nasty habit of picking at weak spots, don’t you? I keep wondering that myself. Give me time. Maybe I’ll grow up. Move over. My turn.”
They played doggedly and in silence. He won a little, but not enough to catch her. At last she was down to her last quarter.
“Last one,” she said. “Kiss for luck?”
Her perfume had an odd spicy flavor. Her hand was on the machine lever. He took her hand and pulled her quickly, almost harshly, into his arms. In his arms, with his lips driving down hard against hers, she felt neither frail nor fragile to him. She felt almost sturdy, and exceedingly alive. They swayed and bumped awkwardly against the slot machine. He released her. She was looking at him intently. “I meant the quarter, not me.”
“There are germs on money.”
“You just babble on, don’t you? Open your mouth and out comes bright sayings. Don’t you get tired?”
“It was a stupid thing to do and I’m sorry. I don’t go around doing things like that.”
She smiled. “I go around clawing big chunks of meat out of people who try it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“And I’m not entirely sure why, Fletcher. What are we getting into?”
“Nothing.”
“Repeat. Nothing. But it rocked me. It curled my stupid toes, and I have the horrid feeling that a bra strap popped. It shouldn’t rock me, Fletcher.”
“Nor me. Not on such short acquaintance.”
“There you go again.”
“I insist on a few clichés, for God’s sake.”
“Okay. Wipe your mouth. Let’s see if the magic spell worked.” She put the coin in the slot. “Put your hand over mine and we’ll both pull the handle.”
Somehow he had a feeling what was going to happen even as the handle was going down. He guessed that she did too. For while the wheels were still spinning, she reached down and picked up the front of her skirt and made a place for the coins which would overflow the scoop.
He saw the first bar snap into place, and the second, and at last the third. The machine made an agonized clanking, and then the coins showered down, overflowing the scoop, cascading into her skirt.
She looked at him with an odd expression. “That star-marks us, Fletcher. That marks us good.”
“Don’t get carried away.”
“You owe me five.”
“With that lapful you still want five?”
“I play for a lot of reasons, and I always play for keeps, Up with the five.”
He followed her slim straight legs as she went up the narrow stairs, holding the wealth in the yellow skirt. Ellis said, at the head of the stairs, “Oh, here you are? Good luck, I see.”
“All kinds of luck,” Laura said.
“I’ll bet,” Jane said a bit grimly. Fletcher resented her tone, but felt guilty.
Chapter Five
Fletcher drove slowly back home from the club, through the hot night and the empty streets. Jane sat far over on her side of the front seat, sat in her party dress, sat with a silence that made him dread the inevitable quarrel, yet angered him just enough so that in some curious fashion he found he was looking forward to it It was very late. Nearly quarter to three.
Usually she chattered brightly on the way home from such an event. From time to time she lifted a cigarette slowly to her lips. The street lamps swept across her calm face in regular cadence.
It was going to be a bad one, he knew. There hadn’t been a bad one since … since that trip he had made to Chicago in forty-eight. It had been a damn fool trip. He and Stanley Forman had gone out there to look over a small company which made thermostats with the idea of working out a merger agreement, based on a stock transfer. In the company offices Fletcher Wyant had shed his coat and dug into their figures. It took him three days to find the padded inventory figures, the falsified raw material position. He had said nothing to them, had spoken quietly to Stanley when he had a chance.
“Rigged books, Stanley.”
Stanley had given him a sleepy look. “Thought so. Which is worse, Fletch, cheating or being so stupid you get caught? I wonder, sometimes. We’ll let them wine us and dine us tonight and give our regrets in the morning. One year, I’d guess, and we’ll make an offer to the Receiver in Bankruptcy.”
With the pressure off him and transferred to Stanley Forman, Fletcher unwound a bit too far. The application of intense concentration over a three-day period had left him in a state of nervous exhaustion. And the drinks had hit too soon, and too hard. The executives of the thermostat firm had spread the royal carpet. The evening, for Fletcher, had soon begun to blur, with one club, one night spot, merging into the next with no memory of going from place to place. Stanley disappeared somewhere along the route. Fletcher found himself with a tall, knowing redhead, and he found that he was being exceptionally witty and charming. He was entrancing her with very little effort. It gave him a feeling of vast power. The other men were gone and he was alone with the redhead in a small place where the music was too loud, and he had his hand on her under the table.
And then, again without memory of transition, they were in his hotel room. There was a towel to subdue the bedside lamp, and she lay beside him, a wise-eyed, sleek-hipped girl with astonishingly small hard breasts, set wide apart. In a moment of clarity he accused her, fumblingly, of being paid off by the thermostat firm. She asked him if, at this particular moment, it actually made a hell of a lot of difference. It was an argument he couldn’t seem to answer.
She was patient, and practiced, and adept. She got to him, through the mists of alcohol, and he slid from her into sleep. The jarring sound of the telephone woke him in the morning. He had the feeling it had been going on for some time. His head was a blue-white agony as he groped and found it and mumbled into it.
Stanley’s voice was sharp and angry. “Goddamn it, Wyant, where the hell are you? This plane is going to take off in ten minutes. I’ve been calling you all morning.”
Fletcher looked behind him. The redhead was gone. He tried to make his voice clear and decisive. “Sorry, Stanley. I can’t make the flight.”
“And just why the hell can’t you make the flight?”
“Because, goddamn it, I got drunk and I just woke up, and if I stand up right now, it’s going to kill me.”
Stanley was silent for a few moments. “All right. Catch the next one if you can. Better phone your wife, or she’ll meet the plane. I wired this morning. The office will let her know. I told them the deal is off. You should have heard the tears and sobs of anguish. See you later this afternoon then, Fletch.”
He hung up the phone and barely had time to lurch to the bathroom before being wrenchingly ill. He went back to the bureau and looked at his wallet. His money was all there. His watch was running. It was fifteen minutes after ten. He groaned with semirelief as he lay back on the bed. There was a faint scent of the redhead in the room. A scent of her, mingled with the faint odor of love. He hoped he wouldn’t be sick again. He rubbed his eyes. Time to call Jane. Better think of something, first. And his voice had a telltale huskiness. While he was wondering what to say, he fell asleep again. He woke up at three. He felt better. But his health began to dissolve as he realized that Jane had already met the plane, had talked, no doubt, to Stanley Forman, who might be just mad enough to tell the truth.
He phoned his home. Jane answered. Her voice was chilly.
“I’ve been trying to get you, darling. The circuits have been busy.”
“Is that right?”
“Of course, darling. And I missed the plane this morning because I had a slight touch of food poisoning. Thought I’d better lie down here in the room for a while.”
“With whom?”
“What? Aw, honey, don’t say things like that. You know they’re not so.”
“Where do the lies stop, dear?”
“What do you mean?”
&nbs
p; “I met the plane at one. Stanley Forman told me you had told him you’d call me. I waited and waited. I phoned the hotel there an hour ago and asked if you’d checked out. They said you hadn’t. I asked if you’d placed a long distance call to Minidoka and they said you hadn’t. Keep talking, dear.”
“You’ve got a hell of a nerve checking on me that way!”
“Don’t bluster, dear. It isn’t becoming. I’m not upset. You’re just a big boy, dear, and you’re six hundred or so miles from the flagpole. Isn’t that what they used to say in the army? I’ll expect you when I see you.”
He started to counterattack and found the line was dead. He banged the phone up. He called the airport. “Sorry, but all the flights are booked solidly, sir. Perhaps tomorrow morning, if that wouldn’t be too late. No, I’m afraid it will have to be tomorrow afternoon.”
He took a long shower, ate too heavily, checked out too late to save a day’s rent, climbed morosely onto a train at five of five. He sat alone in the smoking car with his long, savage thoughts. His face felt grainy and abused. His hands still trembled with hangover. He thought of what he had done, and of how it had happened. Those thermostat people had set her on him, like sicking a dog on a lame horse. Or, he thought with a faint glimmer of objective humor, like sicking a Sabine woman on a Roman soldier. The ultimate of service. The American merchandising ideal, combined with the farmer’s definition. It was a hell of a thing, he thought, to remember so damn little about it, now that the price was apparently going to be paid.
He had never made a particular fetish of faithfulness. Yet, during the years of his marriage—twelve at that time—there had only been three women besides Jane. And two of those had been overseas, over in the crazy wartime wonderland of London. Many months with a warm, loyal little FANY—what was that again?—First Aid Nursing Yeomanry—though they claimed quite happily that they hadn’t done any nursing since the Boer War. Code work, you know. Silly little hats with the round fuzzy button on top. Sturdy legs in impossible stockings. That had been Beatrice. And the other, of course, had been Hannah, the Ingrid-faced OSS typist, who had the little flat, and who had cooked those gargantuan meals for him, and after the heavy, spicy food each evening, they had tumbled into bed, leaving the dishes on the table just three feet away. Then she had been sent home, and after that he had found Beatrice, and then he had been sent home for discharge and a terminal promotion to Major.
Now the third was the redhead and she had no name that he could remember, and she was in this country. He had never told Jane of the women overseas. Yet he guessed that she suspected and had, in some coldly feminine way, checked it off to wartime and absence. He knew, obscurely, that this was much the worst, for Jane was in this country too, only three hours away by air. You did not need others when you had Jane, he thought. You didn’t need anything else at all. But he had taken something else. Or been taken by something else. He preferred to think of it that way.
He and Jane had watched the intrigues among many of their friends. One of the intrigues had culminated in a double divorce and a double marriage, with a switch of partners. All good friends, of course. Jane had said it was dirty. In his heart he agreed. So they had prided themselves on being so well mated that there was no need of dirty little subterfuges.
He rode through the night, wondering what he would do, what he would say. He arrived in the Minidoka station that night, three years ago, at quarter of four in the morning. He’d had the crazy idea, during the taxi ride to the old house, the one they had left two years later, that Jane had gone and had taken the kids. He unlocked the door and carried his bag in, carried it upstairs. He risked the hall light and his heart gave a great leap when he peered into the dimness and saw the high warm mound of her sleeping hip, the rest of her, from her waist up, in darkness. He had been quiet in the bathroom, and had undressed in the hall, turned out the light, carried his clothes in in darkness.
He had slid cautiously into his half of the double bed—twin beds now, though pushed close together always—and had lain back and risked a long deep breath of thanksgiving. She said, in the darkness, in the voice she used over the telephone, “Have a ducky time, dear?”
“Just dandy, thanks.”
“Good night, dear.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” And, after a time, he had slept. She had been dressed almost formally for breakfast the next day. For three days he had tiptoed lightly around her. But it couldn’t go on. Then the fight came one evening, when both kids were at the movies. One of those bitter, almost meaningless, destructive quarrels.
And, he thought, God forgive me, I lied to her and finally made her believe it, because I didn’t have the guts to tell the truth and risk losing her. Because her ideas of integrity are one hell of a lot higher than mine. I made her believe it, and then we had to be together again, right then and there, because it was something we both needed as a kind of proof. Right then and there, with the lights out in the living room, there on the couch, and with as much heat and heart in it as though we had been separated for years instead of days.
And now, three years later, there had not been anyone else since the redhead, and Jane sat over in her corner of the car, remote, unapproachable. He let himself fill with righteous anger. Goddamn it, he hadn’t done anything. What the hell kind of a jail was she trying to keep him in?
“You seem pretty quiet,” he said mildly.
“Do I? I’m sorry.”
“Get it off your chest, Jane.”
“What in the world do you think you’re talking about?” She looked out the window. “You’re going right past our street!”
“I know it,” he said grimly.
“Isn’t it a little late for melodrama, dear? I need my sleep. I’m very tired.”
He drove on in silence, parked in windless tree shadows, lit two cigarettes, handed her one. He said, “Jane, I’ve lived with you for fifteen years. I know you pretty well. I know when something is eating on you. There is something eating on you right now. I think I know what it is. Let’s get this over before we go home.”
“It isn’t important, really.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it is a little silly of me. I’m an adult I guess. Or should be. I ought to get used to such things. Other women do.”
“What things?”
“Oh, things. Going out for cocktails and dinner and a dance and watching your husband glow and hover all evening.”
“Just how did I do that?”
“Glowing like a two-dollar lantern every time you looked at Laura Corban. Hovering around her as if you were afraid something might swoop in and damage her or something. You were a fool and everybody in the club saw it. They’ll be whispering all week. Going down there into that cellar with her and spending hours alone down there with her, while I tried to talk to that hideous Ellis Corban, and neither of us could say what we were thinking. Then seeing you come up with her, and she all flushed and excited and her skirt up around her waist. What was I supposed to think, Fletcher?”
“That I’d backed her up against a slot machine down there and she was very tasty.”
“Don’t be coarse and ridiculous!” she snapped.
“Coarse—I’ll stand still for that, but I think you’ve won the ridiculousness medal. She was flushed and excited because she hit the jackpot. There were college kids down there with us. As far as my glow is concerned, that was a glow of apprehension. I didn’t know what she’d do next. And as far as hovering is concerned, I was trying to be able to get there in time if she did go off her rocker.”
“Oh, you make it sound perfectly all right, don’t you?”
“Possibly because it was perfectly all right and you’re in a big tizzy about nothing at all. Damn it, they asked us out tonight. They paid the shot. I paid some attention to her. I even danced with her, you may have noticed. I think that was expected of me. She doesn’t dance well, if that makes you happier. She’s too stiff. Inhibited or s
omething.”
“Hah!”
“What does that mean?”
“Calling that woman inhibited hands me a big laugh. She’s about as inhibited as Max Baer. I know that type. It was written all over her, and all over Ellis, too, the poor man.”
“I guess I can’t read that kind of writing.”
“She’s a floozy, Fletcher. God, you ought to be able to see that. She’s tail, Fletcher. Every other man in the club could see it, if you couldn’t.”
“Now who’s coarse?”
“Sometimes there’s only one name that fits. And what’s more, I bet she doesn’t even get any pleasure out of it. I bet she just rocks back on her round heels just to see how much trouble she can make. You told me Ellis wasn’t happy with that other company. It’s as plain as the nose on your face what happened. She just ran through all the men in view and got restless. I don’t see what you see in her, frankly. That long upper lip and her mouth open all the time. Adenoidal, I’d say.”
“I tell you, I don’t see anything in her. I’m not attracted to her. And I don’t think she—as you so deftly put it—is tail.”
“But you’re going to find out, aren’t you?”
“Oh for Christ’ sake, Jane! You talk like a crazy person.”
“I’m not crazy. But you better watch yourself, bud. You’re getting to that age. You’ve got to prove you’re a man or something. Like that time in Chicago.”
“Let’s stay on the subject.”
“You find the subject pretty attractive. You want to talk about her. You’re getting some kind of filthy pleasure out of talking about her, aren’t you?”
He held his teeth tight shut for the space of three breaths. Then he said slowly, “We don’t get anywhere bickering, Jane. She’s an odd woman. Not like others we know. I’m perfectly willing to admit that. I don’t envy Ellis. It looks as though he’s got himself a hell of a problem. I don’t know what makes the woman tick.”
“But you’d like …”
“Please let me finish this. I’m trying to be as objective as possible. If I seemed to pay too much attention to her, I’m sorry. Maybe I did. But it wasn’t an attempt to make passes. It was an honest, though perhaps misguided, attempt to find out what motivates her. It interests me, because I want to be able to depend more and more on Ellis as time goes by. I want to know if she is going to cut loose and give him so much personal hell that he won’t be of any use to us down at the shop. I do not think we ought to see too much of them. You know I don’t like to be too close to anybody who is working for me. I seriously doubt, and I believe you do too, that there’s going to be any whispering due to my actions tonight.”
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