James Cain - The Magician's Wife

She took it, glanced at it, said: “You’re supposed to leave it open when you say ‘Kindness of Miss Conlon.’ Sealing it’s not polite.”

“Unless Miss Conlon is nosy.”

“How much is this check; Mr. Lockwood?”

“It — sweetens the pot, that’s all.”

“I want to know. If I do make a claim and it’s paid, I can pay you back — and I want to. Now say: How much?”

“Buster, you mind your own business.”

She came over and sat in his lap, patting his cheek and kissing him. “You don’t know what it means,” she whispered, “having a friend like you.”

“I don’t like it, you being kicked around.”

“Mr. Lockwood, you make me want to cry.”

“Now! There’s nothing to cry about!”

“Oh, yes, there is. We’ve been so busy, talking them first things first, I haven’t told you all. If things should start breaking for me, thanks to you, Mr. Lockwood, it would be heaven right on this earth. Like if I get the money, I could do things for my folks, up in Havre de Grace, like taking the mortgage up that’s hanging over their heads. And I got job offers too, now that my picture’s been in and everyone’s talking about me — even Mike will put me on. I used to strip, Mr. Lockwood, and I can go back to that trade. If I do say it myself, I look good in my G string. Wait! I’ll show you—”

“No, please! Not now, and not here!”

“O.K., but when I start ecdizzying around— Mr. Lockwood, there’s a word and a half, ecdysiast. Who invented that? Do you know?”

“Mr. Mencken, I think.”

“Who’s he?”

“Writer. Dead now.”

“Well, he did something for our business. Because you play around with it, it’s a laugh — oh, I’ve used it often. Two of them, specially — you leave off the T and—”

“Never mind, I can imagine!”

“It comes out—”

“No!”

“Funny!”

She laughed as she flirted with him, playful as a puppy. But then suddenly she wrapped an arm on his head, held his face up to hers, and said: “I’m making it up to you — this check you wrote, I mean. But there’s one thing I’d like understood: I loved that guy — Alec, I’m talking about. Maybe I wasn’t a saint, the way I treated him, but in my heart I loved him. And he loved me, Mr. Lockwood. O.K., the money was there, and sometimes it went to his head, so foolish ideas got in it. But he loved me. Well? What do you call that? Pushing me out that night—”

“Greater love hath no man—!”

“That’s right! And he did lay down his life!” She waited a long moment, then reverently whispered: “For me!”

“... Are we done?”

“Did you hear me? I’ll make it up to you.”

“Thanks, Buster.”

“You want me to call?”

“Well, why don’t I ring you?”

“I mean, today? Tell you how I make out?”

“Oh, by all means! Please!”

“Well, on that other — of course you have to call me.”

“O.K., we’ll leave it like that.”

At last he got her out and shortly after went out to lunch, eating in the drugstore. Then he came back and began marching around, looking at his watch, drying his hands on his handkerchief. Around three, when his phone rang, he jumped for it. “Clay?” said Mr. Pender. “It’s all over — the boys did their stuff, police, reporters, and a faceless silent guy that looked like an adjuster. She’s in the clear — they really had nothing on her. The insurance, of course, would be bad, back to back with something else, but when nothing else was there, it didn’t mean a thing. So she’s happy as a lark, having a bath in mud. She’s putting her claim in and is going to collect, I think. And next week she goes to work for Mike Dominick, in a show he’s putting together to take the place of the magic — ecdizzying, she calls it, and I’m sure it’s going to be dizzy.”

But Clay’s conscience stirred, he not wanting Buster to bear any part of the cost his act had caused her. He said: “Swell, Nat — you’ve covered yourself with glory. But what’s the tab? On that claim. What are you charging her?”

“Oh, I have nothing to do with that.”

“I thought you’d taken it over.”

“She doesn’t need a lawyer, may be better off without one. Of course if there’s trouble about it, then I’ll step in, of course. But so far it’s her affair, and you’re all paid up, boy. If that’s what you’re worrying about.”

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

“I’m paid in full, Clay. And thanks.”

“Hey, I bet that’s ethics.”

“It’s good for the grass, makes it grow.”

He had hardly hung up when the phone rang again, and this time Buster gave her account, at somewhat greater length, but even more cheerfully. He gave his congratulations and listened to more of her thanks. She wound up: “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

“I’ll look forward to it, Buster.”

“I’ll make it up to you. Nice.”

“O.K., she’s a sweet, harmless thing, and you clobbered that snake but good. All’s well that ends well, and now get on with your life.”

He got on with his life by asking Grace to dinner and taking her to the club, the first time she had ever been there. She was still in her mood of elation, though resentful of “that girl — why, the nerve of her, showing up as she did at the funeral, and after accusing Sally.” To his mouth came a hot retort, but he caught himself in time and said mildly: “Oh, well, it’s been a dreadful time for everyone, and for her too, no doubt. At least she mourned him — she was sorry he was dead, which was more than Sally could say.” It was more than Grace could say, as she had already confessed, in bitter shame — which may have been why she changed the subject to the blue haze on the water. “Do you see how it blots out the shoreline, on the other side of the bay, so everything seems suspended between heaven and earth, day and night, yesterday and tomorrow, in kind of a smoke-blue Nirvana?” But Nirvana got a jolt when three children fetched up against her, all in bathing suits, and a mother called out her apologies. Indeed, the place swarmed with children, and he apologized too. “It’s the pram race they had today,” he explained, “but if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. It goes on all summer this way, but I assure you that after Labor Day it’s a wholly different place.”

When he said “Labor Day,” he remembered, all of a sudden, what he had quite forgotten: the hotel reservation he had, the one Miss Helm had got him, the following week in Atlantic City. It seemed like a thing from another century, but he had it, just the same, and in a moment he said: “Grace, forget the kids. Speaking of Labor Day, I happen to think of something else. Pat Grant kept after me to go somewhere and relax, so they have this beauty contest down at Atlantic City, and I thought: ‘Once in a lifetime, why not?’ So I’m reserved. I have a sure-enough suite — sitting room, bedroom, and bath — forty dollars a day. How’d you like to share it with me?”

“... Are you propositioning me?”

“Well, you’re pretty enough. Yes, I am.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Get thee behind me, please! ”

“You sound almost as though tempted.”

“Tempted? I’m practically a gone duck!”

“O.K., then, it’s a date?”

“I didn’t say so. Not — yet.”

Thoughtfully she ate her crab soup and after some minutes went on: “Clay, I never concealed from you how you made me feel, even that first night. That first — evening. ‘Night’ sounds so damned intimate — no doubt I betray myself. Well, I owned up, didn’t I? And I might have landed you, have stolen you away, even from luscious Sal, if I had made the try. I couldn’t, I was bound. By — what I felt I must do, the campaign I had to start. But you know what it was, we’ve been all over that. Now, however, that’s changed. The main thing holding me back, as I said the other night, doesn’t exist any more — Alec’s dead, and I don’t have to fear for him the way I once did. And she seems, the way she talks, just as cold on you as you seem to be on her. So, I’m out of my vows! I’m free — to work my wiles on you.”