Джон Макдональд - A Key to the Suite

“Idiot! Stop being evasive. What else does it... do to you?”

“It... it makes me think we’re going to have to do a lot of talking to talk this to death.”

“I know. But we have to, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Because we’re grownups, aren’t we, Floyd? And because of Jan.”

“You better look away, honey, because I can’t seem to move a muscle.”

“And I couldn’t sleep. And all the way here, I couldn’t take a deep breath.”

“Cut it out!”

She turned away slightly. “It isn’t fair it should be worse today, darling. It’s supposed to be less.”

“Go take pictures. Go interview people.”

“Yes, master,” she said, and gave him a wicked and knowing grin, and walked over to where Cass Beatty stood talking to two other men. She took a letter out of her purse and gave it to Cass. He read it quickly, smiled, and put it in his pocket. Several minutes later Floyd saw him showing it to Mulaney.

Frick came over to where Hubbard stood alone and said, “Say, I saw you down there sitting in on that workshop crap this morning. You don’t have to let yourself in for that sort of stuff, Floyd. Like I tell my boys, it’s a lot of window dressing to make it look as if the convention is accomplishing something. Nobody ever gets anything out of that crud.”

“I guess it was interesting to me because it was new to me.”

Frick nudged him. “Like the man says, try everything once. You know, some outfits make their boys attend. That’s why there was a showing down there. But like Jesse says, nobody ever learned to sell by listening to somebody else talk about it.”

“You can either sell or you can’t?”

Frick looked at him with vague suspicion. “Well, there’s some things you can teach, the way I teach my boys, going right out there with them. And I guess some of the manuals don’t actually hurt anybody. But whenever one of our boys comes back from special training, the first thing I tell him is forget... I mean... uh...”

“The practical, realistic outlook, eh?”

Frick seemed heartened. “You hit it right on the button, Floyd. The best school is the school of hard knocks.” He punched Hubbard’s arm. “Everybody’s here to have a time. So stay loose. At the conventions, fella, everything goes.”

Hubbard did not have a chance to talk to Cory again until after the official lunch. When they went down, she rode with another group in a separate elevator. At lunch she was at an adjoining table. He felt vaguely irritated that she should be having such an obviously hilarious time talking to Carmer on one side of her, and Cass Beatty on the other. The two AGM wives were not there. He was seated between Charlie Gromer and Dave Daniels. Gromer was too wary of him to want to say very much, and Daniels was so woodenly drunk it required all his concentration to appear undrunk. The speaker was reasonably amusing, but his talk was too long.

As the big room emptied, he kept an eye on Cory, and moved in from the flank after she had reached the lobby. Carmer seemed reluctant to part company with her, but she solved it by putting her hand out and saying, “It was such fun talking to you, Tom. I hope it’ll happen again soon.”

As she turned to Floyd she said, “I knew it was you standing there. I’ve acquired a brand new seventh sense, darling. I’ve known just where you’ve been every moment.”

They moved over toward the wall. “Where do we start killing it with conversation?” he asked. “In a bar? By the pool? Some public place.”

She tilted her head to the side. “I’ve got to find a place to change film, dear. I’m at the end of a roll. It’s very sensitive. I have to have complete darkness. I can change it by touch. I looked in the girls’ room, but there’s no place there. There’s no window in your bathroom, is there?”

“No.”

“We could go up there first, and then think of a place to talk.”

“How smart is that, Cory?”

“You mean being seen?”

“No, I don’t mean being seen, and you know it.”

She sighed. “I guess it isn’t smart. Okay. Give me your key, dear. Where shall I meet you?”

“I’ll hang around here.”

She took the key. “It won’t take me five minutes.” She winked at him. “Coward!”

“I warned you.”

He sat in a lobby chair. He waited five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. After twenty minutes had passed, he went up to his room. He rapped on the door. It opened a small cautious way, and then swung wide. She walked away from him to stand by the terrace door, her back to the room.

He closed the room door and said, “Uh... get your film changed?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said in a small rusty voice.

“Well... I wondered what was keeping you.”

“I was just going to come back down. I took... some time out for tears.”

He walked close to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “Tears?”

She shrugged his hands off and moved a step away. “For no good reason, I guess.”

“Come on, Cory. What’s the matter?”

She whirled and stared angrily at him. “Why do we have to be so damn scrupulous and decent? Who knows what’s going to happen to anybody in the world tomorrow? Why do I have to be cheated? I’ve been cheated out of too much in my life.” Her face twisted. “So I’m shameless. I want to go to bed with you. Please, please, please.” She hurled herself at him, and he held her trembling body. With her face against his throat, she said, “Would it just be so terribly cheap it would spoil everything? Is it too soon?”

For an instant a ridiculous image came into his mind, a fragment of an old movie comedy, a man on the rickety wing of a high-flying airplane carefully pinching his nose before leaping wildly into space.

“Not cheap,” he said. “And not soon.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes,” and looked at him gravely, intently, stepped to the drapery cords, yanking the pumpkin draperies closed to fill the room with orange light, like a room at the edge of some giant furnace.

When he saw her nude, there was a virginal economy about her figure, but all smoothly sheathed, all projection of bone muted, sleekly functional as a seal. The feel of her when she slid into his arms made him gasp for breath. The texture of her was dry, smooth, firm and curiously heated, like silk fresh from the iron.

When he awoke it was dark, and the tall ceramic lamp on the table between the beds was on. He awoke with no memory of having gone to sleep, and no memory of when the lamp had been turned on, or who had done it. He looked at his watch and saw that it was a quarter to nine. He was on his back, and felt as if the whole area from his heart to his knees had been hollowed out, leaving only a papery husk which would collapse if he moved without caution.

She sprawled asleep on the neighbor bed, prone, her face toward him in the lamplight, breathing deeply and slowly through the slack swollen lips. Her delicate face had a puffed, strained, misused look, a residue of fevers. In the thickets of recent memory he saw that face, moving in the pumpkin light now gone, at all angles and distances, always with the same look, glazed, deadened, intent, the eyes half closed, the mouth wider. And he heard the sounds, the nasal petulant whining when all was not just as she wanted it, and the rhythmic coughing gasps when things went well for her.

His mind drifted, forlorn, trying to find analogies which could help him perceive the relationship and understand what had happened. He felt that sense of loss one has when someone dear has died, and in a little while he understood he mourned the loss of Cory, the fictitious Cory of the sea breeze and the phone call. He missed a girl named Cory, forever gone.