James Cain: The Institute

“You could send an anonymous card.”

“Which, with the money he has, he could have traced in two days. Come on, make sense.”

“Would you take advantage of me or not?”

“I told you, make sense.”

“I want an answer — yes or no?”

“Okay, then, no.”

After a long pause she said: “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not looking at me.”

“I’m looking at you now — straight. Now, what do my eyes say?”

“Lloyd, they say you’re lying.”

“I wouldn’t know how to make them look any straighter.”

“They look too straight.”

“I don’t know any other way to look.”

“That’s it, Lloyd. You would take advantage of me.”

To change the subject, I pulled the covers down, turned her on her stomach, and massaged her backside a little, with good hefty slaps, one-two-three, so that it sounded like artillery. Pretty soon I asked: “Hey? Why don’t you beat me back?”

“I don’t feel that way about it.”

“What way is that?”

“I don’t feel friendly.”

“O.K., I do, but if you don’t, that’s how we play it, anything to please a lady. So, call.”

“What?”

“Get on that phone, there on the night table, and call — your husband, to say you’ve changed your mind. If I get credit for being a rat, I may as well get the advantage.”

“You’d take it — it’s what I said.”

“ I said call, so call.”

“No use calling now. He was due in Philadelphia late this afternoon and won’t be back till tonight.”

“Then call him tonight.”

“All right.”

Suddenly she started crying. I took her in my arms and whispered that I loved her. “Get on,” I said.

“Oh no! That’s over!”

“Once more, to prove that I love you — and that you love me.”

“I couldn’t love a rat.”

“Rat loves you, though.”

“Dear God, don’t let me!”

“Hortense, didn’t you hear me?”

Turned out that she did.

At last, early that evening, we got up. Still undressed, she made the bed while I sat and watched. She admired the bed. When I said my mother had had it made to be slightly smaller than the beds in the stores, she looked it over again, touching it with her fingers. “It’s so simple,” she said. “Just the four turned posts and a turned piece in between, at the head, with the two side boards cut down in the middle. That’s all. And it’s maple; it’s not Wallace Nutting. I’m getting a bit tired of him.”

“Keep on. I love those friendly words.”

“Toward her ! Your mother !”

“Almost forgot yourself, didn’t you?”

“I don’t forget anything.”

Then we bathed, she in the tub and I in the glassed-in shower. When we toweled off facing each other, her attachments shook breathtakingly. She said: “Heaven only knows what happens now. It’s my infertile time of the month — supposed to be! Heaven only knows how it’s going to be.”

After we dressed, we went down in the freight elevator and out the back way to the car. I took her to the Royal Arms where the specialty is roast beef, and we gobbled down the whole thick portion. But even while we were eating, she kept questioning me about biography and biographers. “Especially where I come in, or can come in, if you still insist on that call.” Her questions were penetrating, so much so that they surprised me, and I sharpened up on my answers, putting things on the line, while she took notes, writing on the back of the menu. She had her mind on it, and insisted: “If I’m to put on this show for Richard, I have to have things straight, so I make sense, so he believes I’ve changed my mind for the reasons I say I have. I still say it would be much, much better if you didn’t make me, Lloyd, if we simply forgot about it.”

“I’m not making you, Hortense.”

“Oh yes but you are.”

“You’re going to call so you can sleep.”

“I’m going to what?”

“It’s not me who has this thing on the brain. It’s you. You’re in my power — that we both know — and I know I would never take the advantage I have. But you don’t know it, you can’t be sure. It’s for that reason — pure, yellow-bellied terror — that you’re going to put in that call. To be safe from me, as you think.”

“If I withdraw my opposition, I will be.”

“O.K., whatever you say.”

“Well? Won’t I be?... I better be!”

“You are now. As you know, but can’t be quite sure.”

“We go round and round and round.”

Watergate’s on Virginia, but at her suggestion I parked on New Hampshire around the corner from it. I got out her bag while she got the light coat. She was wearing the mink. We walked around to the marquee, and the doorman came running to take the bag. When he’d disappeared through the door, she turned to me. “Lloyd, you still want me to do it, go through with this?”

“Hortense, it’s you who wants to do it!”

“Then, okay, I will.”

“You want a bump on the backside?”

“I’ll stop by your place in the morning, at ten sharp. Please be out front, so I don’t have to get out or go in that lobby.”

“I’ll be there waiting.”

“I’ll call Richard when I get upstairs. On the way to Wilmington tomorrow, I can tell you what he said.”

“Then we’ll be together on it.”

“Goodnight.”

And she dived through the door without looking back.

I spent a bad night, though the beginning of it was nice as I lay there in the dark thinking how well the day had turned out. I even snickered now and then at the way her conscience was working, how, in order to neutralize danger, she was doing the one thing she knew and then blaming it on me. For awhile that seemed pretty funny. Then, down in my gut, something started to twist. I suddenly asked myself if that was how things were, if that was how they really were, if there wasn’t perhaps a little more to it. At long last the question popped out in the open: Where did I come in? How did I come in? At first, it had seemed to be her doing, the idea of telling Richard that she had switched. But now I made myself face the truth that there was more to it than that, that maybe my eyes were telling her things I hadn’t guessed yet even about myself. In other words, deep down inside, I began to suspect that I would take advantage of her, that I would somehow think of a way; that being the case, the way she was acting made sense. But often, when you realize something, you realize it all at once, so that it hits you in the face and things aren’t the same anymore. All of a sudden it wasn’t quite so funny, what she was about to do. Then out of the dark a hot flash shot at me. It said we were playing with fire, that however the thing turned out, it couldn’t turn out well. After a couple of these, I lay there asking myself: Should I go to Wilmington with her? Get out from under, the flashes said, get out while the getting is good, or it’s going to explode in your face in a way you’ll never forget. I’m human, and all this shook me. Then I thought: nothing risked, nothing gained. In a poker game there comes a time when you shove in your stack or quit with what you’ve got. And this was like poker, wasn’t it?

Then I slept. I knew what I was going to do.

In the morning I spent ten minutes finding keys to give her — to the back door and to the apartment — and putting the keys on a ring. Then I went downstairs and stood under the marquee, feeling like a fool, sure that she wouldn’t come.

A bright-green Cadillac turned the corner and came to a stop beside me, and then she was leaning over, unlocking the door so I could get in. She played it straight, saying “Good morning” and commenting on a “beautiful day.” I played it the same way, making a point of the car and how nice-looking it was. She said: “It’s just a car my husband runs around in.” And that seemed to exhaust the subject.