Джон Макдональд - A Key to the Suite

The shy one walked in. He looked troubled. They asked him how it was. “Damn it. Every time I’d get set, some goddam noise in the hall would...” One of the salesmen could contain himself no longer and burst into a high wild guffaw that started the others going. The shy one stared at them with growing comprehension, then gave a roar of anger and charged the nearest one and made an almost alarmingly successful attempt to hurl his tormentor through the nearest window. At the expense of one split lip and one minor nosebleed, they finally pinned him down and sat on him until he had cooled off.

Out at the Pagoda Bar, beyond the Olympic pool, a florid sales manager decided after three Bloody Marys that he couldn’t face the idea of lunch, and the only thing to do with his hangover was take it back to bed and hope it would be gone by late afternoon. He looked at all the flesh exposed to the sun and fancied he could hear it sizzling. Two couples went away, leaving just two people at the bar for the moment, the sales manager and a dark-haired woman in a white bathing suit. She was deeply tanned, her shoulders gleaming with oil and perspiration. She was plain but pretty enough, and she looked bored. She was four stools away. He looked at her thighs, where the brown flesh bulged as it escaped the stricture of the swimsuit fabric. He was conscious of her having glanced over at him a few times. Never when you want one, he thought. Always when you don’t. On a weary impulse, courting rejection, he took his room key out of his pocket, held it under the level of the bar, rapped it against the wood to attract her attention, then held it so she could read the number on the plastic tag, looking at her with a fixed stare of inquiry and defiance.

She looked away quickly, her lips thinning, her face darkening slightly. He felt relief. He signed the check, left a tip and turned to go. The woman coughed. He turned and looked at her. She stared at him without expression and gave him a single abrupt nod of agreement. As he started the enormous journey to his room, he focused his mind hopelessly on the memory of the bulge of thigh, trying to summon up visions of delight, anticipation, but feeling only the weariness of too many hotels, too many conventions, too many million miles back and forth across the land, too many women, so many that now the memories of all of them had merged at last into a single unstimulating vision, white, gasping, fatty, strap-marked and secondhand.

Little Miss Cory Barlund came out of the eighth floor elevator at eleven thirty, paused to orient herself, and then began walking down the carpeted corridor that led to the AGM suite. She had the lithe walk of a model, all control, nothing sexy, nothing obvious. She wore her best “little nothing” dress, a junior dress, sleeveless, with a high collar, beltless, of such a calculatedly casual fit that it clung where and when it should, and swung free when it should, clinging and touching and releasing in the rhythm of her chin-high stride and the small movement of her toffee hair. The dress was the color of milk sherry. Her shoes were white and her small purse was white, and she wore gloves that matched the sherry dress perfectly. There were little gold buttons in her pierced ears. Her nylons were sheer as cobwebs, and latched to a riband of garter belt. Her panties were lace and her half bra was an A cup, and the aromatic redolence of the perfume behind her ears and on her wrists and between her breasts was forty dollars the ounce.

She moved down the corridor and kept herself from thinking by focusing on a pleasant sensual awareness of the slight movements of the fabric touching her body and the rhythmic little thump of the camera pack against her hip, dangling from the narrow strap over her right shoulder.

When she was more than halfway down the corridor, a door not far in front of her opened and Dave Daniels came out. He started to close the door, then noticed her. Unshaved, he was in shirt sleeves, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. She nodded coldly and tried to move around him, but he blocked her passage.

She backed up a few steps and said, “Let me by, please.”

“After I tell you you’re not kidding me a bit. I got an instinct. I always know the score.”

“Did you start drinking again? Or are you still drunk, Mr. Daniels?”

“Come on in and talk it over.”

“Not today. Not any day.”

He reached for her but she backed up swiftly. She said calmly, “You’re an idiot, Daniels. How much do you think you can get away with? I took voice lessons for five years. I know how to breathe and how to project. If you touch me, I could make a noise that would open every door on this floor. And if you bother me one more time, I’m going to explain to all the rest of them that I have to drop the article because you’re making it too difficult for me.”

Daniels leaned against the corridor wall. “So what will work?”

“Give up.”

“But now I got you on my mind.”

“And that will be a terrible source of worry and concern to me, Mr. Daniels,” she said, and walked past him and on down the corridor. He watched her intently until she turned into the suite, and then he went back into his room, lifted the bourbon bottle and drank from it until an involuntary gag closed his throat. “I’m Dave Daniels,” he said thickly. “I never miss. One way or another, I never miss. Never have. Never will.”

It was quarter of twelve when Floyd Hubbard, nearing the open door of the AGM suite, heard and recognized Cory’s laugh. Though her voice was light and almost frail, her laugh, as he had noticed the previous evening, was full-bodied, earthy, as if she had borrowed it from a more vigorous woman. The laugh moved his heart up into the peak of his chest, and he swallowed it back down.

She was in the suite with Bobby Fayhouser, Charlie Gromer and Les Lewis, and she was taking a picture of the three road men against the background of the small AGM exhibit which had been set up in the suite. The flash attachment made its quick white flicker of light, and she turned and smiled at him, winding the film as she turned. “Hi, Floyd. I want one of you too, even though I don’t know what you do yet. Bobby and Les have been telling me that for their jobs, AGM picks only those men who show potential top executive abilities.”

“Now hold it!” Bobby said. “That’s what Les told you, Cory. I’ve been told I’m as far as I’m ever going to get. Mr. Hubbard is more the executive type. All the home office operations, except sales, have been moved to Houston, and that’s where he is.”

“Move over by the couch, Floyd,” she said. “About there. What is your title, really?”

“I’m an administrative assistant to the executive assistant to the assistant to the vice president.”

“It won’t fit under the picture,” she said. “I’ll make you a vice president. Hold still. Turn your head a little bit away from me. There!”

“I’m immortalized,” Floyd said.

“If it comes out good, you can get extra copies from the magazine.”

“No pictures of me ever come out good. I always look like a mechanic who just got promoted to service manager. Joe’s Garage.”

Just at that moment, Jesse Mulaney arrived with a group, and the road men sprang into action, fixing drinks, reading badges, memorizing names. Frick came in with some more strangers. Hubbard maneuvered Cory over into an area of some limited privacy and said, “Now you can say it.”

“Say what, darling? Good morning?”

“No. You’re supposed to say the sea breeze made you giddy, so kindly ignore the whole thing, phone call included.”

“Look at me, Floyd. Look right into my eyes. What do you think?”

“I think they’re not completely blue. There’s little brownish dots in the blue, close to the pupil.”