Irving Wallace - The Man

Finishing her eye makeup, she reexamined her relationship with Arthur Eaton. The first of their three public meetings, the Steinbrenner one, had been largely exploratory. She had perceived that Eaton had become conscious of her not only as an individual but as a glamorous and pretty girl. He had wanted to know about her, rather formally but persistently, and she had told him all that she believed he should know.

At the Flannery party he had come in sports coat and slacks-gorgeous man-and she had been wearing the open-necked jonquil silk blouse and yellow shantung skirt, and been bare-legged and gay, and he had sought her out, remembering things she had told him about herself, and then for the first time telling her something of his own life and feelings.

The Noyes party had been the best. After most of the guests had departed, he had been one of the few top-level ones to remain. He had sat in a deck chair near the pool, drinking brandy steadily, and his eyes had followed her from the cabaña to the pool. She had known that in her tight white two-piece swimming suit she was a feast for any male’s eyes. Later, drying, she had sat at his feet, joining him in the brandy, and when it was very late and they were almost the last, she had realized that her father had gone and that she must call a taxi. Eaton had insisted upon driving her to Arlington.

She still remembered the drive. They had both been drunk, or rather she had been drunk and he had been high, and she had sat curled close to him and held one of his hands when it was free from the wheel, and he had covered hers firmly with his own. In the darkened street before her house he had kept the motor idling, and then, never taking his eyes from her face, he had turned off the ignition.

“You are quite a young lady,” he had said. “I don’t think I have ever met anyone quite like you before.”

“I hope not. There’s no one anywhere like me.”

“I suppose you have a hundred young men to keep you occupied.”

“I could have. I don’t. Not one.” She waited, but he was silent, troubled, and so she had helped him. “I have no patience, any more, for immature children. I’ve had all the young intellectual buzzards, dedicated patriots, ex-collegians-on-the-rise I can stand. Too tiresome. If I can’t have what I want, I’ll pass.”

He had taken an eternity to say the next. “What do you want, Sally?”

Despite her intoxicated state, she had maintained her control. “Oh, I don’t know. Someone like Mrs. Eaton’s husband.”

“You’re teasing an old man, Sally. Not fair.”

“You’re not old at all, and I’m not teasing one bit.”

“I see… I must make a confession, too, Sally. I’ve found you more refreshing than anyone I’ve met in ages. I don’t have much free time, except occasional evenings. Perhaps you would let me call you for dinner sometime.”

Her heart had almost burst. “Anytime!” She had sat up in the front seat, gone across the wheel, taken his surprised face in one hand, and kissed him on the lips. “There,” she had said. “Now I’m a fallen woman, and you can’t abandon me. I’ll be waiting for that dinner.”

The morning after had been her best morning in years. But that entire day, and in the several days following, he had not called, and she had begun to believe that she had invested too much in his promise and her hope. Either he had been drunk and indiscreet, and had now sobered and forgotten the flirtation, or he had weighed it and decided that a married Cabinet officer could have nothing to do, no matter how innocent, with the neurotic half-his-age daughter of a senator. Then, in her misery and consequent drinking, Sally had decided that it was his wife who was to blame. Despite flimsy rumor, Kay Varney was his wife, and was coming home or was home already, and that was it, the fact of it, and good-bye rendezvous and good-bye dinner.

And then, the other evening or morning, she had forgotten which, she had read Reb Blaser’s column. Arthur and Kay Eaton were-it was in black print, rumor or not, it, was in print-separated, with divorce imminent. The effect upon her was like that of a half-dozen vodkas. She soared. She walked on air. She was ten miles high, and almost in orbit. Her prospects rose with her. The fact that Arthur Eaton had not yet telephoned her, as he had said he would, meant only that he was busy with man’s work and not that he was confined by husbandhood.

In her exhilaration Sally had wanted to telephone him, chide him for not keeping his word, but her instinct restrained her from this aggressive act. Also, she had told herself, it would have been in poor taste, after that wonderful Reb Blaser story. Eaton would call. Of this she was more certain than ever. If he did not, they would meet soon, and this time she would make sure that he knew of her desire for him. Yesterday she had even begun to think about contriving accidental meetings, when the Frankfurt tragedy had broken over her. As the daughter of a senator, she knew what that meant. Arthur would be busy for a while, busier than ever.

She had completed her makeup and was content with the result. She went to her wardrobe to search out the proper dress for this first day of a new administration, a day that had brought her Arthur (since Reb Blaser’s column, she had determinedly begun to regard him as her Arthur) to within a step of the Presidency. Holding out and rejecting dresses, she wondered how she could prove her love to Arthur Eaton. She could, of course, give herself wholly to him-not difficult-and let him be young once more and enjoy what he had certainly been deprived of by Kay Eaton. Still, such giving was too easy and rarely guaranteed endurance of a relationship. Mature men required much more. They wanted a woman interested in them, interested in their lives, their careers, a woman as concerned about them as they were concerned with themselves. At night a woman could resurrect a man’s ego in bed. But day had more hours. Successful women, the great courtesans of France, for instance, the mistresses of the rulers, women like Madame de Pompadour, survived and remained on top because they were not only love partners but helpmates. How could she be a helpmate to a public figure already so successful, the foremost member of the President’s Cabinet? How could she be of any use to a public figure who already possessed everything?

Just as she settled upon the simple blue Galletti suit and removed it from the hanger, something crossed her mind. She recalled her father’s conversation with Talley, and her own conversation with her father. Evidently Arthur Eaton did not have everything, yet. Overnight his position in the Cabinet was insecure. At the same time, overnight, he was the next in line to the Presidency. Senator Hankins and her father were working to keep him in the Cabinet, and believed that they would succeed. Representative Miller was working to make him President at once, but her father did not think this was possible. Clearly Arthur Eaton could use help. She wondered what help she could offer. If she were to come to know this Dilman, know him well, she might succeed, as a woman, where august councils failed. She might convince Dilman that Arthur Eaton was indispensable to him and to the country, that he must not only be retained as Secretary of State but must be given a heavy share of the Presidential powers. But she did not know Dilman, and it was hopeless, and then it occurred to her that she felt she knew Dilman, and then she remembered why.

It was because of last night’s party, the one that had given her the hangover, the one young Harriet Post, a Senate secretary who was as crazy as herself, had taken her to, a boozing, literary party of the avantgarde Washington crowd, lower-level, black-and-white. A Negro poet, reedy and homosexual and maybe talented, had given it in his unkempt, sparsely furnished, barnlike upstairs flat, above the hall with the sign over it, JESUS NEVER FAILS, on Georgia Avenue.