A Key to the Suite (12 page)

“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.

You would feel this way, he thought, if you killed some kind of innocent thing with your hands. If you conspired to kill it. If the two of you pursued it in its terror for a long way over rough country, enduring your own exhaustion in the dark joy of the chase, and then caught it at last, tortured it for a long time, then
bled it and gutted it and buried it and stomped the ground flat. It would be like this. You would not want to look directly at each other. You would be filled with a listless shame, but in some curious way you would be joined in a conspiracy of guilt. The worst of it, perhaps, is the knowledge that you will want to run the wild chase again.

Or, he thought, is it my own innocence I mourn? How could I have not known of this dimension in the world I’m in, where everything can be erased, leaving only the animal agony, the animal greed?

He turned his head to look at her again, and as he did so she opened her eyes. The light glinted on the tiny gold buttons in the small gentle ear lobes. Her eyes were an unfocused blue, and he saw them change as they saw him, saw them close and open again.

She pushed herself up, swung her legs off the bed to sit facing him. She gave an aching yawn, shuddered, scratched her head. “W’time is it?”

“Nearly nine,” he said. “When did we go to sleep?”

“Donno, dear. It was dark.” She stood up and swayed, then padded off into the bathroom. In a little while he heard the sound of the shower. He drowsed off and awakened when she touched his foot. She was sitting on the foot of his bed, looking at him. She looked at him with a mild, skeptical interest, the way a woman looks at something she might buy, if she can think of a use for it.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said.

“Let’s just say I’m not delighted with myself, either.”

She pulled her legs up, hugged them, her chin on her knees, looking at him with mockery. “Oh, you’ll be delighted with yourself soon enough, Hubbard. You’ll remember. You’ll strut.
You’ll love telling your friends about it. You’re a strong man, you know.”

“What are you trying to prove, Cory?”

She tilted her head, and her eyes changed. For the first time he had the odd feeling that she was not entirely sane. “I’ve proved it, haven’t I? I’m the best you ever had. I’m the best you’ll ever have. I made you holler, and that was a brand new thing for you, wasn’t it? Not like the other times you’ve done a little cheating, was it? Tell me I’m the best!”

“It’s the first time I’ve cheated.”

Her laugh was derisive. “Oh, come now!”

“It’s the truth, Cory. Why would I lie to you?”

She looked uncertain, slightly troubled. “You’re unusual, then. Why not?”

“Let’s put it this way. I haven’t really felt any need for anything I couldn’t get with Jan. I’ve been curious about a few other women, but not enough to make it worth while loading myself with a lot of middle-class guilt.”

“Now you’ve got something to feel guilty about, lover.”

“It’s going to take a while to sort out just how I’m going to feel about it.”

Her smile was like a sneer. “I’ll tell you one way you’ll feel, darling. From now on, your darling, adorable, innocent Jan is going to be like so much oatmeal. Every time you have oatmeal, you’ll remember steak.”

“I don’t think it will be that way, Cory. And I don’t know why you should want it to be that way. You act right now as if you hate me. I think it’s going to be fine with Jan and me, as it always has been.”

“You’ll find out.”

“I’m not going to be comparing. This was something else.”

“It was just exactly the same thing, dear, but better, because I’m better.”

“I’ll say you’re not the way I thought you’d be.”

“All girly-girl?” she said contemptuously. “Shy and blushing and sighing?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“The film I was using. It says not to change film in bright sunlight, Floyd. That’s all.”

“And there was no time out for tears?”

“Of course not.”

“Why the production, then?”

“I wanted you, and I didn’t want to take the chance of scaring you off, darling. You like to pretend you’re a decent man. I think that’s very quaint and nice, really. And in the beginning, you were so cute and boyish, trying to be so manly, dear.”

“I sort of lost the initiative pretty early in the game.”

“You wouldn’t have done much with it if I’d let you keep it. I knew you were irritated about that. I could tell. You were resisting me in little ways for quite a long time. And then you got to the point where you could stop thinking and worrying, and then I could give us a lot of hours of it.”

A sudden anger tightened his throat. “I think you’re an evil little bitch, Cory.”

She laughed at him. “I’m a choosy evil bitch and a delicious evil bitch and a very competent evil bitch. And all this competence is all yours, dear, for the whole convention.”

“No thanks.”

She laughed again. “Try to say that tomorrow, when you start wondering if the things you think happened really happened. You’ll want to find out all over again. You’ll have to find out, Floyd. You’re hooked, darling. Don’t fight it. Why spoil
the fun? My God, the way you look at me! Your little puritan soul is outraged. You hate me right now because I destroyed all your manly dignity and turned you into a rather untidy animal, and it hurts your pride to think how much there was that I had to teach you. By tomorrow, lover, you’ll realize that I wasn’t
using
you, and laughing at you. You’ll remember that I was far too busy being my own kind of animal, and you’ll remember how you learned to drive me practically out of my mind, and you’ll feel so terribly masculine and eager, you won’t be able to wait to get us in here with the door locked. Right now, lover, you’re ruined. You’d get as much kick out of looking at a mailbox as you get out of staring at me. If I hugged you, you’d probably gag. It astonishes you that I ever looked good to you. But you just wait, brother. Just wait and see.”

She got off the bed and began to get dressed, humming to herself. He could see movement out of the corner of his eye, but he did not watch her directly.

She came over and stood by the bed and said, “I’m off, darling.”

“Cory?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Why does it have to be so … antagonistic? Okay, you’re not what you seemed to be. And you’re something I never ran into before. And I’ll admit I was overmatched. But why does it have to be like … some kind of revenge? I haven’t tried to hurt you.”

“You’ve hurt Jan, haven’t you?”

“Possibly. What’s that to you?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Who are you getting even with?”

“Who’s asking you to try to understand me, dear? Just enjoy me.”

“You’re uneasy. Why should my asking you that make you uncomfortable?”

“I’m terribly comfortable. I can think of a dozen lovely reasons why I’m at peace with the world, dear.” She bent and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Do get a
good
sleep. You’ll need it.”

He heard the door open and shut quietly behind her. In a little while he got up and took a long shower, soaping himself many times. After he had dressed, he looked at the convention program to see what he had missed. Though the dinner speakers had not talked about any of his particular areas of interest, he vowed to miss no more of the scheduled events. He had also missed an official cocktail party prior to the banquet.