Джон Макдональд - A Key to the Suite

“Those twin broads are so damn suspicious,” he complained. “For God’s sake, Connie’ll be there. And Sue Beatty and Cory. It’s out in the open , for God’s sake. They won’t come near the suite, but this is out in the sunshine. I was looking for you to tell you last night, Floyd. Just a little cabana party Jesse is giving for AGM and a bunch of his old friends in the business. This is an open afternoon on account of the golf tournament. So come in your swim trunks. Two o’clock.”

Hubbard managed to detach the grip on his arm. “Two o’clock. Okay.”

“I would have told you last night but I couldn’t find you.”

“I was around,” Hubbard said.

“You going up to the suite now?”

“I’m going up to my room, Fred.”

They got onto an elevator together. Frick winked spasmodically at him and said, his voice low, “Keep something under your hat. You want a room sometime, and you want to keep it private, here’s a key to eleven-oh-two.”

“Thanks, but I...”

“Don’t worry about it. Just put it in your pocket, Floyd fella. There’s only three out. You, me and Jesse. There’s a lot of traffic on eight.”

“I really don’t...”

“There’s an inside bolt on the door, so nobody’s going to walk in on you. Put it in your pocket, pal! I’m just following orders. If you don’t have a use for it, you don’t use it, right? But you got the key anyhow.”

They got off at the eighth floor and started down the corridor. Hubbard was not able to exhale completely until he was in his room with the door closed. He stood for a moment with his eyes closed. Outside the room he was endlessly on the alert for his first glimpse of Cory. It seemed important to see her before she saw him. He wanted to see her in some remote unflattering way so that by the time she turned toward him, the last dregs of prior magic would be gone.

He sat on the bed they had not used and read Jan’s letter again. When he had first read it, it had seemed slightly out of key, almost as though he was reading a letter meant for someone else. In this room that feeling was intensified. It was a woman he barely knew, writing to someone who no longer existed.

He put the letter in the top drawer of the dressing table, closed the drawer slowly. The cabana party was, he decided, as safe a situation as he could have asked for. It would give him a chance to strike exactly the right attitude, casual, seemingly grateful, uninterested in any repetition.

He sat at the desk and wrote postcards to Jan and the kids. He took them down to the lobby and mailed them. He went down to the shops on the lower level and bought swim trunks and a matching cabana jacket, sun lotion, dark glasses and sandals with rope soles. He had lunch in the grill. There was no special convention lunch.

At a little after two o’clock he went to the special bank of elevators for use by swimmers and sunbathers going to and from the pool and beach areas, dressed and ready for sun and swimming, braced to give the safe and proper responses to Cory.

Chairs, sun chaises and tables had been placed as close together as feasible on the concrete deck in front of Cabana 50. The cabana doors had been opened wide, and the road men were tending an improvised bar just inside the cabana. AGM flesh lay sprawled in the sun. He was greeted as he neared them. He smiled and waved. All the AGM people were there, plus a dozen middle-aged men, a few of them with their wives. A couple of gin rummy games were in progress. Connie Mulaney was knitting. Floyd saw the twins, greased, bikinied, supine. The hot weight of the sunlight seemed to make all motions listless, to give all voices a buzzing quality.

He selected a sun cot on the fringe of the group, had spread his towel out and was beginning to rub the sun oil into his chest and shoulders when Bobby Fayhouser approached him and handed him a tall glass.

“Specialty of the day,” Bobby said. “It is chemically planned to replace the moisture you lose. We make it out of sweat.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“And rum. After three of them, if you should care to dive into the pool, check it with your foot first, to see if it’s the pool. We don’t want people diving into mirages.”

He thanked Bobby and took another quick look around, looking for Cory. He did not quite dare ask about her. He thought he could make it casual enough, but he was not quite certain.

When he turned to stretch out, he saw her standing six feet beyond his sun cot, standing and smiling at him, and he had no way of telling how long she had been there. She had a bathing cap in her hand. She wore a two-piece swim suit in a bold diagonal pattern of oyster and coral. It was wet, and droplets of water stood on her shoulders.

The first look at her was like having an electric current run through his body. He had not realized to what extent he had been sensitized to her. “Got to get my towel and stuff,” she said, and walked by the cot. He watched her walk away from him. It seemed grotesque to him that she should look and walk like a lady. It seemed like some confusing miscarriage of justice that she could walk in front of all the world and seem fragile in her loveliness, tender and tidy and poised. There should have been a vulgar pouting of those merciless hips, an obscene slant to that tormenting mouth, some suggestion in her walk of that rubbery suppleness of body, that limber wildness, she used in such an inventive abandon that no dimension of her, no texture or convolution of her was forgotten to a rhythmic using. Yet here she was, untouched and untouchable, a very pretty slender girl with toffee hair and dark-blue blue eyes, and a sweet and delicate sculpturing of face.

He lay back and closed his eyes against the sun glare that came through his dark glasses, and felt the sweat begin to exude from his pores.

There was a round touch against his leg just above his ankle, and the effect was as if she had run her fingernails lightly up the inside surface of his leg and nested her fist in his groin. “Hi,” she said.

He opened his eyes and saw that she sat on the foot of the sun cot, and had pulled her feet up and was hugging her legs. Her chin rested on her knees. It was the same posture he had seen her in at the foot of his bed, naked from her shower, and he knew it was intentional. And she knew what it was doing to him.

“I... have to take back some kind of a tan to prove I was here,” he said in a weak attempt at casual conversation. He knew he had made an error in not moving into the middle of one of the small groups.

“I don’t like to stay in the sun too long in a suit,” she said. “It spoils my tan. Did you notice, dear, yesterday? I’m tan all over.”

“Not so loud!”

“Nobody can hear us, darling. Did you sleep well? Did you dream about me?”

“Let’s try a new topic, Cory.”

“Last night I’d almost decided to stay right there with you, and then I remembered I hadn’t fed Maynard. He’s my cat, a truly enormous demanding beast, half Siamese, half alley. As opposed to me, dear. I’m all alley, as I hope you noticed.”

“Cory!”

“I gorged him before I left, and left him another enormous bowl of goodies, so I can stay with you tonight, Floyd darling, free of the weight of responsibility.”

“Now listen...”

“So, whenever you’re ready, and you feel strong, we’ll just stroll away from here, one by one.”

“No, Cory.”

“You don’t want me?”

“That isn’t the point. It’s just that...”

“I want you, and that’s what matters isn’t it? You’d be terribly flattered if you knew how unusual that is, dear. The few times I ever do want anyone, I never want them again. But I could eat you alive. Believe me, darling, I can take it or leave it, and usually it’s a case of going through the motions.”