Джон Макдональд - A Key to the Suite

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Bobby is bringing me one, thanks. As I was saying, you should be flattered. What’s so great about you, anyway? You’re kind of a stumpy little man, and you look as if you might drive a cab for a living, and you have sad, melting brown eyes, and you don’t have any special talent for making love, and I have shocked the hell out of you. What is it about you, dear?”

She stopped as Bobby brought her a drink. She thanked him and said, “I’m delving into the motivations of an AGM executive type now.”

“They’re the tricky ones,” Bobby said.

“Really, Bobby, your Mr. Hubbard seems to have very conventional ideas.”

“I’m at a convention, no?” Floyd said.

Bobby groaned and Cory said, “That isn’t the sort of conventional ideas I meant, sir.” Somebody called Bobby and he excused himself and walked away.

“Where were we, dear?” Cory asked.

“We were nowhere.”

“Do you think so? After all my hard labor?” She placed her hand on his ankle and began to stroke him almost imperceptibly. “I have to see just how invulnerable you are, darling.”

He fixed his mind on remote things which might save him. A winter waterfall. The pass patterns of the Baltimore Colts. The time he had the automobile accident. But the pressure, gentle, insistent, moved into each thought and moved it aside.

“If you try to be too stubborn, little bull, you’ll disgrace us all,” she said in a singsong tone. He hitched sideways abruptly, and rolled over into his face. She laughed softly and no longer touched him.

“So invulnerable,” she said. “Such a total rejection of poor Cory.”

She got up and came around and sat crosslegged on the concrete, facing him. “Why do you feel as if you have to fight it?”

“Because there are so many reasons why I shouldn’t bother. Can you understand that? All the rational reasons. Why lock the barn doors, and so forth. And who has to know? And when will you ever get a chance at anything like this again? Pat reasons, Cory. But every one of them cheapens me and diminishes me.”

“Why you? I took the initiative. I’m taking it again.”

“That’s the most insidious reason of all.”

She looked slightly startled. Her eyes seemed to change, to become more sober and thoughtful. “Maybe you’re as new a something to me as I am to you.”

“Maybe.”

“You seemed to like it, Floyd.”

“That’s a pretty pale word. I got a terrible dirty joy out of it. It was more like a battle. It wasn’t love. Love isn’t like that. We were antagonists. Like wrestling snakes and wondering how many bites you can endure before the venom kills you. You were full of contempt, Cory. You were trying to punish both of us.”

“Of course.”

“Then you realize that?”

“Who claims it isn’t a battle? Only a novice would think it isn’t.”

“You’re no novice.”

“I told you I was married once.”

“I don’t mean that.”

As she studied him he looked at her mouth in sunlight, at the almost invisible down on her upper lip, at the firm modeling of those lips, and found it almost impossible to relate the harmless image to that remembered agony the flickering tongue could produce, to the schooled cruelty of lips and teeth, to the thready whimperings and gutteral gaspings and the petulant, incredible demands.

“Do I make you sick?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Good! I’ll make you sicker and stronger. You’re a silly little man, you know. Silly and helpless and terribly shocked. I’m making love to you right now in my mind. I’m thinking of things you couldn’t believe. They’re boiling around in my mind. My breasts are starting to hurt, lover. And my...”

“Stop it, Cory! Please stop it!”

“The more you can hate me, the better it will be.”

“Cory, I’m not going up there with you. I mean it. It happened, and I suppose I’m even grateful in some eerie way, but I’m also smart enough to know this could... so easily turn into a compulsion. And that’s what I think you really want. You want me to lose the last fragment of myself, and be... be turned into a swine.”

“What made you say that? What made you use that word?”

“Why are you so agitated? It seems apt enough. As soon as I start ignoring everything in the world but you, and what you can do to me, then you’ll walk away.”

“But wouldn’t it be worth it?”

“Not to me, Cory. Not to me. I have a horrible affliction. Pride. And I’m trying to keep my own good opinion of myself. And I want no more of you. Thanks a lot.”

“Big talk. Big brave puritanical talk. I’ll be in your bed soon enough. And you’ll be happy about it. Wait and see. Let me know when you’re ready. Because I’ve been ready, terribly ready, ever since I woke up this morning, lover.”

She rose easily to her feet, traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips and walked away, pausing to sip her drink and look back at him, mocking him. She turned slightly toward him and made such a small, quick, imperceptible movement of her hips that he knew no one else could have noticed it, but to him it was like taking a skilled boxer’s blow directly under the heart. It stopped his breath and chilled his limbs. She went over to where Charlie Gromer and Tom Carmer were watching Stu Gallard whipping Fred Frick at gin rummy. He closed his eyes. The heat and light seemed to hold him suspended in a lazy void where his mind moved in a gluey rhythm and nothing was particularly important. His mind swung back to Cory, to visual memories of her which, in his sun-struck state, had the power of hallucination — a breast so close to his eyes in pumpkin light it blotted out two thirds of the world, a tidy, perfect breast, firm as papaya, with the tan-orange texture of the nipple area pulled shiny-tight in erectile joy — the milky musky texture of the skin at the back of her knee against his lips — and, stretching away from him, the slender V of her back, topped at a distance remote as in delirium by the toffee tangle of her hair, while her clenched hips burst upon his lap, as impossible to capture, as muscularly tantalizing as the fresh caught fish that leaps its life away on the floorboards of the boat...

He knew he had slept, and was surprised that he had. The sun had moved through a long segment of its arc. Most of them were gone. Cory was gone. He thought of her and felt the heavy weakness of the convalescent. The fever had broken for a time. He walked to the pool and swam four slow lengths. There was a bad taste in his mouth, and his arms and legs felt leaden.

He walked back and was standing, toweling himself, by the sun cot when Connie Mulaney came over, a tall rum drink in each hand. “If you say no, Floyd, I’ll have to drink them both, and I’ll make a spectacle of myself.” He took the drink, realizing she was holding herself under careful control, that she was considerably drunker than she looked.

She sat on the cot and patted the place beside her and said, “I want to get to know you before this whole damn thing is over, dear.”

He sat down and she touched glasses clumsily and said, “Here’s to sin.”

“To sin.”

“Everybody going. Host and hostess stuck till the dirty end. Look at my Jesse over there, snowing Jud Ewing. Both telling brave lies to each other. You know what?”

“What, Connie?”

“If this time you’d called me Mrs. Mulaney, I’d give you a hit right in the head. You got an instinct for those things, haven’t you?”

“For what?”

“For what to call people to get the right effect.”

“Do I seem to plan everything that carefully?”

“No, dear. You do it cute. I’m old enough to be your mother. You know that?”