The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

  She knew the pills by sight, and she gave me a look that on a less poised woman might have been described as brazen. “I do get off work, every night. Tonight included, if you’re up late.”

  “I plan to be,” I said, and I made up my mind to consider the rest of the week a vacation from all my cares.

  VERA MADE THE week go by quickly and painlessly, for me at least, like one of those vacations where you start dreaming about setting up housekeeping. Her sexual appetite may have been diminished but her intense desire for more narcotics helped her pretend. The hycodan was more potent than the Mexican codeine she normally supplied herself with, and within the week she’d lost some of that shimmering quality in her eyes and even her hair seemed dulled and flattened, as if the dope were leeching out the chemicals from her last permanent wave. When I said goodbye I made her a gift of the remaining pills, a gesture that prompted her to give me an address and a phone number in case I ever passed through town again, but I didn’t keep them. I didn’t expect her to be around if I ever got back.

  THE DOCTOR HAD been paid and moved out the afternoon before we were to leave, along with his nurse, and Collins was drinking gin and barking insults and orders at me and Park both. There was no show of gratitude for his involuntary cure, and though none was expected or required—we were being paid for our trouble—the return of the old Collins wasn’t particularly agreeable. Once he’d availed himself of one of Hot Springs’s more expensive prostitutes—more expensive and less attractive than the one I’d brought to my room that first night, just as Herb had warned—he declared himself ready to return to Wichita and save his empire.

  When the time came to go I elected to make the trip by train. Park said nothing but I knew he resented having to drive all that distance weathering the old cocksucker’s abuse. There seemed to be some residual fogginess to Collins’s demeanor from his months as a narcotics fiend—it didn’t occur to him, for example, that he could make Park drive and hire an airplane himself—but nothing sufficient to alarm the board of directors, I didn’t think, and most of the time it was camouflaged by his caustic disposition.

  I WATCHED OUT the window as we passed through the bright green, topographically complex southwestern Kansas terrain my father had grown up in. It was coal mining country now, populated by Czechs and Poles who’d moved there at the turn of the century to dig the anthracite, but in his youth it had been nothing but farmland. Some of my favorite boyhood memories were here, playing with cousins in barns, lording it over them as a sophisticated boy from the big city, on intimate terms with its gangsters and speakeasies. It was pure rot, of course, but they all went to the picture shows and they pictured Wichita as the very heart of urban sin and decadence. It struck me now that if Wichita really was that way I’d be happy as a clam there; as it was, the transition outside to the dull, flat plains of my own part of the state inspired something akin to dread in my soul.

  I got off at Union Station and had a porter haul my bags to a taxi. The sun hadn’t gone down yet when the cab pulled up in front of my house, and I noted ruefully how badly the lawn needed mowing. I resolved to canvas the neighborhood for some enterprising little bastard who’d do it on the cheap and went around to the back and unlocked the door, and upon entering was confronted by a musty odor that suggested no one had been inside for a few days at least. I looked around for a note and found none, and I supposed that Sally had gone off to stay with my mother for a few days in my absence. I hadn’t bothered wiring her to let her know I was coming home, so I really had no beef about it. Still, it irritated me, coming home and having no dinner on the table.

  I drove out to Stanley’s and ate a fried egg sandwich at the counter while listening to a snaggle-toothed lunatic next to me trying to explain his theory about the earth shrinking after the detonation of the A-bomb. In a decade the planet would be no bigger than the moon, in a century no bigger than a beach ball. Then he laughed and explained to me that it was no big deal, because the rest of the universe was contracting at exactly the same rate.

  “So you see? None of it matters at all. It just seems like it.”

  I nodded and finished my egg sandwich, swigged down my coffee, and went home.

  THIRTEEN

  UP GO THE LEGS, INTO THE AIR

  I HAD A MESSAGE waiting for me when I got back to the plant. I was to call a Mr. Wageknecht about a German camera we’d been discussing. Mrs. Caspian gave me the message without meeting my eyes, as usual, and I took advantage of that to admire her ample form which, it seemed to me, was getting a bit more so.

  “How are you these days, Mrs. Caspian? Is Mr. Caspian in town?”

  Her face burned and she looked down at her typewriter, even though there was only one other person in the office, a skinny fellow with horn-rimmed glasses whose name I could never remember but who on hot days smelled like chicken soup.

  “He’s not,” she said in a very small voice, appalled at my brazenness in speaking to her at the office. I felt like bending her over and taking her right there at the desk, right in front of no-name, but it could wait for that night. In that same small voice she continued, “I won’t be working here any more after the fall.”

  “You won’t?”

  For the first time ever in the office she looked me straight in the face, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glistening. “Our prayers have been answered, Mr. Ogden. Mr. Caspian and I are expecting a baby.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said, though in fact I was disappointed to hear it, since it presumably meant that our liaisons would be coming to an end. “I’ve got to go take care of some business, maybe I’ll see you before the end of the day.”

  I PHONED WAGEKNECHT from a phone booth at Central and Hillside. “I got all the pictures you want,” he said. “Once your man Huff gets a drink in him he gets pretty sloppy.”

  “You know Red’s? Out on 54?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Be there tonight at eight. If the photos are what we want, you’ll have your money.”

  I STOPPED BACK at the plant at four, mostly to see Millie Grau. Collins hadn’t returned yet but was expected back late in the afternoon. Millie looked radiant, more so than usual, and I complimented her on it. “A lot’s happened since you left. You were absolutely right about telling Donald about the baby. Oh, gosh, he was mad at me. He even called me a couple of names I wouldn’t have thought he knew. But he prayed on it, and you know what? He decided to forgive me.”

  Forgive her? I had to work to keep my mouth shut right then. Some lousy sack of shit in a cassock has to talk to God to decide whether or not Millie Grau was worthy of him? Sight unseen, I already hated this clown’s guts, but right then I wanted to bash his brains in with Millie’s Smith Corona.

  “That’s great. Knew he’d feel that way.”

  “He says it’s important for a modern couple to start life on an honest footing.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know, I think part of the reason he was mad was knowing we’re not equally . . . experienced. He pictured me as a . . . ” She stumbled over the word. “A virgin,” she whispered.

  “So he’s never . . . ” This time I stumbled, for want of a way to express such a thought acceptably to Miss Millie Grau.

  “Never,” Millie said. “And he’s thirty. I know that’s your next question.”

  It sounded like trouble to me. I considered telling her the story of John Ruskin being shocked into lifelong celibacy on his wedding night by the discovery that the genitalia of real women, unlike those in classical statuary, were hairy. But despite our recent conversational intimacy, I couldn’t bring up pubic hair in her presence, even couched in the most prudish terms.

  What the hell, I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t say something. “Are you certain he’s normal?”

  “He’s just very religious,” she said without complete conviction. “And he never met the right girl before me.”

  He hasn’t met the right one yet, I thought, and I halfway decided to do so
mething about it before Millie made a big mistake, the kind you don’t recognize until you’re a few years down the road and fixing it isn’t so easy.

  PARK AND THE boss were back that afternoon at four. I told Park to go home and take a shower and get Collins to Red’s by five. I wanted to see the look on his face when he saw the pictures. Park grumbled, but I told him it was Wageknecht with the candid shots and he shrugged. “Okay, that should be interesting at least.”

  We got a table at Red’s and the old man was pointing at women and talking about which ones he wanted to screw and commenting on their looks and denigrating their male companions. It was like old times, one of those nights where I kind of liked the old reprobate.

  “Look at that one, thinks she’s sitting on a gold mine. In five years’ time she’s going to look like Eleanor Goddamn Roosevelt.”

  I saw Barbara the b-girl sitting at the bar with her arm in a sling. She saw me, too, but pointedly ignored me, presumably associating me with her lunatic assailant Rackey.

  “So who’s this coming to meet us?” Collins wanted to know.

  “It’s a surprise. Private dick I hired to get us some pictures.”

  Right then Wageknecht showed up at the door. He looked around for us, gave a little wave and headed in our direction. He was holding a manila envelope, and he slapped it on the table.

  “I don’t suppose you feel like looking at ’em right here,” he said.

  I took the envelope and peered inside. “That’s the best part about Red’s,” I said, “Everybody minds his own damn business.”

  I pulled out one shot. It wasn’t perfect, but you could tell it was Huff with someone in shadow, but definitely male, kneeling in front of him. “Close enough for government work,” I said, and pulled another picture out.

  “Show me, goddamnit,” the old man said.

  The next one was perfect: Huff on his knees, eyes closed in ecstasy and oblivious to the presence of Wageknecht’s spy camera, the recipient of his attentions giving the lensman a coy, conspiratorial wink. I handed that one over to Collins and the first one to a very subdued, wide-eyed Herman Park.

  Collins squinted, held the pictures at arm’s length, then brought it very close to his face. “Is that . . . ” Something like a smile was fighting its way to his lips, and he gave me a sidelong look. “This is a goddamn fake.”

  “Nope,” Wageknecht said.

  Collins let out a laugh that soared over the jukebox and drew the attention of half the bar. Park flipped the eight-by-ten over, even though no one was close enough to the table to see, and looked as though he desperately wished he were elsewhere.

  “Ogden told me about this but I didn’t believe it. What the hell. So Huff is a faggot after all.” He looked over at Wageknecht.

  “Looks that way,” Wageknecht said, betraying no offense.

  “Look at that son of a bitch. Goes to show you never can tell.”

  “They’re all over the place,” Wageknecht said. “Sometimes in disguise.” He winked at Park, who looked away, shuddering.

  Jerking his thumb at me he addressed Wageknecht. “How much is this cheap son of a bitch paying you, son?”

  “Five hundred is what we agreed on.”

  Collins jerked a thumb at me. “Tomorrow he’s going to give you another five hundred. And if we ever need a private dick again you’re the one we’ll call, not that fucking idiot Fish.”

  I handed him the envelope with the five hundred and told him I’d send the rest the next day.

  “That’s swell,” he said. “Hope to work with you again some time.” He was looking right at Park as he said it, and poor Herman looked like a gypsy’d given him the evil eye.

  IT WAS NINE o’clock when we left, early enough for me to stop by Mrs. Caspian’s apartment. When I rang the doorbell she answered wearing a baby blue peignoir, and was made up like a child’s idea of a movie star, too heavy and too much color. Nonetheless, the fact that she was waiting for me gave me what I needed, and I pushed past her into her parlor. She grabbed my hand and led me into her bedroom and we screwed like I’d just gotten off of a desert island. She made even more noise than she had previously, and when we were finished we both lay there sweating and breathing hard.

  “My God, Mr. Ogden, what are we going to do about the baby?” she said, the first words she’d spoken since I walked in the door. “My husband hasn’t touched me in months.”

  “Does he know about it yet?”

  “No, not yet. He’s coming home this weekend.”

  “Okay, here’s what you do. Get all dolled up like you did for me tonight, and when he gets home you get him in bed under any pretext possible. Rape him if you have to, you’re a good strong gal. How far along are you?”

  “It’s two months, I think.”

  “Perfect. A month from now you tell him he got you pregnant, and seven months from now when the baby comes tell him you’re in premature labor.”

  “But the doctor won’t like that. He won’t lie for me.”

  “I’ll find you one who will,” I said. Odds were Dr. Groff knew a bribable obstetrician. Hell, those guys probably had to lie for their patients all the time. “We’ll get through this, Mrs. Caspian, and once the baby’s here we’ll keep meeting like before. Trust me on this.”

  She sniffed. “I do. You’re a wonderful man, Mr. Ogden.”

  THE NEXT DAY I slept late, and when I got up I typed out a letter to Mr. Huff on Sally’s portable Remington.

  Mr. Huff,

  Some of us think things are going along just fine at Collins. Others seem to think Mr. Collins’s time is through. We would be most grateful for your support at this time, and any influence you might exert over those members of the board inclined to displace him.

  Yours,

  (signed)

  Wayne Ogden

  Maybe the letter should have been anonymous. After all, as far as I knew, I was committing a felony. But the risk inherent in using my name and Collins’s was outweighed by the value of reminding Huff that we had the upper hand in the matter. From now on he was playing for our side.

  I noted at the bottom that there was an enclosure and placed the glossy eight-by-ten along with the letter in the same manila envelope Wageknecht had provided.

  I RECOGNIZED HUFF’S secretary from that brief period before the war when I used to actually perform a useful function in the publicity and marketing department. A dour middle-aged woman with thin hair arranged in a fluffy, transparent nimbus that from certain angles allowed glimpses of bare scalp, I remembered that though she was a sourpuss she could be gotten to with a joke. I told her the one about the priest and the rabbi and the minister and St. Peter, just about the only clean one I knew, and she laughed. Then I asked to see her boss.

  “What about? He’s pretty busy today.”

  “I have something to give him personally. Charged to do so by the Big Man himself.”

  “I can give it to him.”

  “Mr. Collins insists. I don’t mind waiting.”

  She probably didn’t want to hear any more stupid jokes, because she got up and went into Huff’s office. A minute later he came out, looking distracted and impatient.

  “Here you go,” I said. “Mr. Collins wanted you to have this.”

  He took it without a word and went back into his office.

  That night I finally phoned Sally at my mother’s house to let her know I was back. She was frantic, and I couldn’t tell if she was mad at me or scared or both.

  “A pervert called me and asked for you, and when I told him you were out of town on business he said he was going to come over and do something terrible. Didn’t you get my telegram?”

  “No. What did he sound like?”

  “Like one of those telephone perverts. And he said he’d been watching me, he told me what I was wearing that morning and he got it right. I think he got a big kick out of thinking he scared me, so I just pretended to laugh and told him I’d cut off his tiny shriveled little thing if he showed
.”

  That was Sally, all right. If the army had taken women for combat units she would have been a natural. “I mean did he sound young? Old? Like a southerner or someone from around here?”

  “He sounded like one of the Bowery Boys in the movies.”

  “Don’t worry about it, baby. Those perverts are usually harmless,” I told her, and I was thinking that when I finally met up with my pen pal I might just follow Sally’s plans and carve a little piece of the son of a bitch loose.

  THE PHONE RANG in the morning and I didn’t answer it. I was shaved and dressed and didn’t want to wait for Sally to make breakfast so I knocked on the bathroom door and told her I had a meeting to go to. There was no sign on the street of anybody watching the house: no suspicious cars, no strangers hiding in the trees, no men in trenchcoats and dark glasses, so I got into the car and backed out of the drive.

  Fifteen minutes later I was at Stanley’s reading the morning Beacon’s account of a three-car wreck on West 54 that left eight dead, listening to a jovial, well-dressed fat man three stools down besmirch the honor of the counterman’s sister.

  “There must be something wrong with the way your folks raised her,” he said, voice loud and urgent.

  “Same as me and the others,” the counterman said. He was lean and wiry with big bony fists, and I was thinking the fat man might want to temper his comments. “We all came out all right.” He didn’t seem too bothered by the attack on his sister’s reputation.

  The place was empty at that hour—it was ten o’clock by the time I got out of the house—which was a good thing, because the fat man was getting pretty wound up, and a large audience might have inhibited him. “It’s like she can’t help herself. She sees a man she takes a shine to, up go the legs, into the goddamn air.”