James Cain - The Institute

“Yes, at last it makes sense.” But then I remembered. “Except for one thing,” I said. “Why did you do it at all? We agree, I think, that I am overwhelmingly irresistible and all that. But you were underwhelmed plenty until you came to that picture of me heaving a pass in a football game. Where did that come in? What did it have to do with football?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We have all day... all night.”

After awhile she said: “It was seeing your neck, your bare neck, your beautiful bare neck, in that picture... that left me...”

“Yes? Where?”

“Shook to the heels.”

“Give. Say it.”

“When I was in high school, I was invited for a visit to the home of a girl who lived in Maryland on a farm in the Greenspring Valley where her father raised racehorses. And one morning we hid out in the carriage house next to the stables, to see a stallion serve a mare. It was terribly exciting, more so than I’d have believed. He courted her like a schoolboy, prancing around in front of her, before finally going through with what he was there to do. Once, for a second or two, he was only a few feet from us — where we were peeping through the window — and for that long he arched his neck. We could have reached out and touched it. We could actually see the beat of his heart in the pulse of one of the blood vessels. Lloyd, it actually throbbed. Well, one day in Newark, when Delaware was playing Maryland, this Maryland boy threw a pass, and I could see his neck, which was bare. And it throbbed the way that stallion’s had. Lloyd, when I saw that picture just now, with the same bare neck showing, when I knew I was in the same room with that boy, with that neck, that beautiful neck, I had to sit down. But how did you know? How could you know how I felt?”

I told her about the sea nettle. “Strange,” she whispered. “You knew just by looking at me?”

“Let’s say I hoped. Don’t forget, I wanted you bad, from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

“They told me that your name was Palmer — Brisket Palmer. I memorized it.”

“Yes, and how that came about was: My football jersey itched. It was wool, and it felt like fleas. So I found a cotton shirt to wear underneath it, and that did it except for the neck. So my mother snipped it out with some buttonhole scissors. That left my neck bare. Every sportswriter decided the idea was to show off a thing of beauty. So one of them called me ‘the Brisket’ — and it stuck. Just the media being fair and impartial and scrupulous, as usual.”

“It was a thing of beauty, and still is. So firm, so round.”

“Sign of physical strength, which I have.”

“Did you know it has a mole, a tiny double mole, beside the Adam’s apple? It looks like a little hourglass.”

“I shave over it every morning.”

She kissed it, then went on: “Now I’ll really be depraved. You know what? If such a thing were possible, if it could happen again, I’d climb on board once more and—”

“Well, what’s impossible about it?”

“You mean it can be done? Three times in one afternoon?”

“To a studhorse, with something as good-looking as you, all things are possible. Up, pretty creature, and on!”

“Lloyd, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It was the last carefree moment we had for some time.

She rolled off, snuggled close, and lay for a long time without speaking. Then: “Lloyd, I’ve been thinking. I could give a little dinner and ask about six couples and let you do your stuff — talk about biography while your great big chest bulged your puff-bosom shirt — and hope one of the six would take the bait. But a better idea, I think, would be a little dinner for six. You, some dame I’ll think of to round it out nicely, Richard, me, and a couple I know of named Granger who’re not Du Ponts but are filthy rich and are already literary to some extent. They were friends of that pair of Du Ponts who were friends of the Henry Menckens — so they’ll know what you’re talking about. I imagine they might get a kick out of being a part, the main part, of something intellectually important. And I don’t see how Richard could make any trouble. He’d look awfully small, trying to.”

“But why would he?”

“I told you why.”

I thought that over and asked: “You think he’s out? Unless you change your mind?”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“I know, but is he out, once and for all?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just Brisket Palmer who hates to give up. He’s my one bird-in-hand, you know. Before going for birds-in-the-bush, I thought we might figure an angle on him.”

I probably said more, because I suddenly realized that I was talking along without getting any reaction. When I looked at her again, she was up on one elbow, staring hard at me. “Lloyd, you wouldn’t take advantage, would you?”

“How ‘take advantage’?”

“Of me. With Richard.”

Now, so help me, the only advantage I had on my mind, at least until then, was how to get in sync with her twitch. It hadn’t occurred to me, as apparently it hadn’t to her until just then, that if I wanted to take advantage of the situation, I now had her over a barrel. For several moments we had it, eyeball to eyeball. We both knew what she meant. But I couldn’t quite own up, and my mouth took over, to fudge. “How — make it plainer, please. How could I take advantage?”

“By betraying me, Lloyd.”

“I ask you to make it plainer, and you—”

“By telling Richard about it, what went on in this bed today — which would solve all of his problems, dirt cheap, as he would regard it — as well as all your problems. He’d be rid of me without having to pay me a cent, and you’d have your institute, sealed, delivered, and paid for. Because, of course, the amount you say it would cost — twenty million, I think it was — would be nothing to him, compared with what he would owe me as a property settlement in a regular divorce. Cheating wives don’t get paid, as I think you very well know. So that’s how you could take advantage. And for this institute, if you can, you will.”

“Just like that — chitty-chitty, bang-bang?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Couple of things wrong with that theory, though.”

“What things?”

“His reaction, for one thing. The way he might act, correct it. But, of course, as we lie here, we can’t be sure what he would do. Most likely, if I went to him with this tale, he would kick me out but quick. Then he’d go to you, and you’d tell him... what?”

“Why, the truth, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! Why—” She must have talked for ten minutes, saying how sure she was. Finally I cut in: “Or in other words, you’d lie, figuring it was my word against yours. Then he decides to take your word, and I’m out and you’re in. Chitty-chitty, bang-bang.”

She closed her eyes and lay there a long time. “But he could take your word, Lloyd.”

“Okay, I’m out and you’re out. So—”

“So what!”

“We’re out together — out there, in here.”

“You mean you think that after you had cost me my marriage, I’d come sneaking back to you? How stupid can you get?” She paused. “I see myself doing it, Lloyd.”

“I see myself doing it, too — in a pig’s eye, I do. The whole idea is silly, so silly as to be completely ridiculous. Why, the idea of my going to him—”

“You wouldn’t have to go.”

“You mean I could beam it to him by radio?”

“You could telephone and not say who you were.”

“And he wouldn’t recognize my voice? Or have any idea who it was that would know what you did in this bed? How stupid can you get? You, I’m talking about.”