Irving Wallace - The Man

She shook off the lassitude of drink, pulled a fresh index card before her, and began copying again.

Her wavering pencil had neared the bottom of the card, when abruptly it stopped, and hung there as if impaled.

There had been a sound outside the door.

Her head went up, her back arched, her heart thumped.

She listened.

Then there was a voice, and another voice, both muffled, barely audible, but as strident as fanfares against her ears, amplified and amplified again by her mortal terror.

Beyond the closed door, the voices seemed to converge upon her until they were recognizable, one that of Douglass Dilman, the other that of Beecher, his valet.

A cold sweat bathed her, and her clammy fingers tightened about the pencil as panic gripped her heart and head.

Impossible, was all that she could tell herself. But, simultaneously, the shock of fear cleared her head. She remembered for the first time since she had stood drinking her champagne after dinner: it was not an ordinary feature-length film they had seen, but two Signal Corps short subjects (running time, twenty-eight minutes) and one Air Force documentary (running time, seventeen minutes). No wonder it was over. No wonder the President was outside the door.

She was trapped, she and Arthur trapped, because of her stupid miscalculation, caught red-handed without prepared explanation or lie.

The voices, indistinct outside the door, rose and fell. Desperately her numb fingers sought help from her numbed brain. She threw the pencil into her purse, shoved the index cards together and jammed them haphazardly into the purse; then, holding the purse, she grabbed up the folder and stumbled out of the chair. Blindly, choking, she darted to the side of the bed. Casting the purse on the bed, she knelt, tore open the briefcase, and stuffed the folder into it.

She leaped to her feet, wildly searching the bedroom. Across the bed, past the towering headboard and Lincoln portrait on the wall, was another white door, the one leading into the adjoining Lincoln Sitting Room. It was her escape hatch, her only hope. If she could only get out before he came in. She went swiftly around the endless bed, half running, reached the door to safety, was about to open it, when she realized that she was empty-handed.

She spun back into the room, and then wanted to scream with anguish. There it was, the sonofabitching purse, the indicting purse fat with her notes for Arthur. There it was, glittering and mocking her, lying on the far side of the bed.

She bounded to the bed, reached over it for the purse, lost her balance, and fell across the blanket cover. She had snatched the purse and rolled over to regain her feet when she heard the creak, like the report of a firing squad, outside the corridor door. On an elbow, hypnotized, she watched the doorknob turn. She was lost.

In that living instant of horror, a flash of recollection was illuminated out of her past: she had got into José’s dingy flat in Greenwich Village, while he was playing with the band uptown, to rummage through his effects and find out if he had left a wife down in Puerto Rico. She was still on marijuana, and insanely jealous, and would not have an affair or marriage with a bigamist, and she would not take his word. She had heard his footsteps on the wooden boards outside, the key rattling in the unlocked door, and she had been trapped. She had thrown herself on his mattress, sprawled and in disarray, and pretended sleep. Thus he had found her, the first time in his room, and had accepted the fact that she had got drunk in the saloon downstairs waiting for him, and come up to sleep it off. It had deceived him completely, poor bewildered primitive, and she had blotted out his suspicions by giving herself to him. They had eloped the next day, the silly annulled episode, but the point was, he had not found out why she had been there, because of her cleverness. Had he found out, he would have cut her throat. He had been a nut, like herself in those sick days, and he would consent to any degradation except question of his word, his only wealth of pride.

The memory passed through her mind with the speed of enlightenment.

Her gaze remained riveted to the doorknob. It had turned once, yet the door had not opened. She heard Dilman’s voice call out something to his valet. Still the door did not open, as she heard the distant reply from Beecher.

Could she lift herself off the bed, retrieve her now fallen evening shoe, reach the second door, get through it and close it, before the President came inside? Maybe. She started to sit up, then saw the door beginning to open, and more clearly heard Dilman wearily relate the last of some instruction for the morning to his valet.

Too late.

Breath locked in her lungs, she kicked off her other pump, lifted her legs high, and rolled to the middle of the bed. Her hair was mussed, which was all right, and one of the thin straps that held up her green bodice had slipped loosely down her arm, and the skirt of her cocktail dress, a part of it, she knew, had caught to the blanket in her falling back and rolling, so that her garters and a portion of one thigh were exposed. She did not know which to cover first, her thigh or her lace brassiere, but then she covered neither, for the door was opening and she must pretend sleep, pretend to have passed out, and this way she would look it. Besides, in this privacy, he wasn’t a President or politician or any big shot at all, but just a poor, lonesome colored man who’d had no attractive woman around for weeks, and she was the best-looking female in the White House. Let him know, let him know. José had been diverted. The colored man would be diverted, too, diverted and flustered, and would not bother to reason and concern himself with why she was there. She’d make it, she was sure, confident now, if only the champagne didn’t make her nauseated. She released her taut muscles, threw one arm out limply, so that her bodice dropped even farther and one spidery cup of the white brassière was almost fully revealed.

The door opened.

Her eyes closed tightly, and she tried to contain her breathing to the natural shallow breathing of sleep.

She waited for the exclamation from him, astonishment or harsh annoyance. Neither came. There were only the soft sounds of shoes rubbing on the carpet, of human movement, of a stifled yawn.

She eased one lid open to form a slit of vision. He filled the thin, long frame: his broad back was to her, his dinner jacket already removed, his white suspenders and dress shirt sharply contrasting with his thick growth of kinky inky hair. His stubby black hands were unfastening the white bow tie. He undid it, dropped it on the table, opened his collar. He began to turn, and knowing middle-aged men, she guessed what was next. He would make his way to the bed to sit, remove his shoes and socks, and stick his feet into comfortable bedroom slippers before settling down to read.

He had come around quickly, before she had closed her eye. For a second, she had the record of his petrified expression at discovering her: at once startled, at once confounded, at once agitated.

Her eyelid covered the slit. She feigned deep sleep, inhaling and exhaling through her mouth. She sensed, not heard, his advance toward her.

“Miss Watson-Miss Watson-”

She must seem to be too drunkenly unconscious to hear him. She breathed on, squirming slightly to her side in his direction.

“Miss Watson?”

Her bare arm felt the light touch of his blunt fingers, and involuntarily the nerves beneath the skin jumped, but she remained inert. His fingers pressed into her arm, and then pulled at her arm, shaking her. The pretense was over. She must do what must be done well and speedily.

She opened her eyes slowly, dazed eyes, closed them, then suddenly opened them wide in a double take, and instinctively hunched her shoulders in a position of self-protection. Her hand went to her mouth. “What-what are you doing here? What-where am I?” She tried to make her voice disoriented, distraught.