A Man of Affairs (10 page)
I thought of myself and I felt small and I wondered if I wasn’t being pretty damn pretentious in sweating and fussing over moralities and ethics. How many shares of common stock can dance on the point of a needle?
I wasn’t going to kill anybody. I wasn’t going to wear a black mask and steal. I was for hire in the market place, and Mike Dean had made the best offer. I was a part of the vast cycle of life and death, and this was my one turn around the track, so I’d better run as gaudy a race as possible.
I got up and tried again, using a plug this time. I foul-hooked a horrible looking thing of about eight pounds. He put up a frenzied but lethargic and wallowing battle. He was black and he was mostly head and he had black spines all over him. He had two huge blue eyes. He had plates of bone in his mouth rather than teeth. When I got a stick to pry his mouth open, he bit it off. I worked the plug loose with my knife blade. When I rolled him into the water with my foot, he showed his gratitude by putting one of his spikes through my canvas shoe and into my toe.
I got back to the house a little after noon. I met Warren on the veranda as I was heading for my room. He tried to go right on by but I stopped him. I was shocked at the damage I had done. Shocked and, I must admit, pleased. The left side of his face, from hairline to jaw, was puffed out and empurpled. His left eye was swollen entirely shut.
He stood with my hand on his arm and he looked flatly at the center of my chest and said, “What do you want?”
I kept my voice down. “No more games with Booty. You understand?”
“You’re all through at Harrison, Glidden. You’re finished there.”
“Are you too tight to understand what I mean about Booty?”
“I understand you all right.”
“Well?”
“Okay, okay. No more games. What do you want me to say?”
I let go of his arm. I watched him walk away.
I had lunch with Guy Brainerd, Elda Garry and Cam Duncan. Elda was being very elfin. Guy was loaded with heavy-handed courtliness. I went to my room after lunch. I stretched out on the bed again. I had a plaintive wish for Bridget to stop by again, and I pushed it out of my mind and was soon asleep.
Someone shook my shoulder gently. I opened my eyes. Louise was beside the bed, sitting on her heels, her face a foot from mine. In the dim light that came into the room her expression was very tender and loving.
“Are you awake, Sam?”
“I am now.” I propped myself up on my elbow and reached for my cigarettes. She accepted one. She sat rather timidly on the edge of the bed, a safe distance away.
“I’m sorry about the way I acted.”
“Bridget talked to you. I didn’t want her to.”
“She’s terribly coarse, darling, but there’s something nice about her, I think. Some essential honesty. She made me understand… how and why it happened. So I had to come and apologize.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Please, Sam. Don’t be gruff. I want to forgive you if you’ll let me.”
“Let me get this straight. You want to forgive me.”
“Of course. You know, you were very naughty.”
“I was a very, very naughty man,” I said, remembering the tweak that Cam had bestowed on Elda.
“Of course you were. But we shouldn’t start with a misunderstanding.”
“Start?”
“I’m through defending him, Sam. I’m through being stupid and loyal to someone who isn’t worth it. I’m going to get a divorce.”
“Does he know that?”
“Not yet. But he soon will, believe me.”
“And then we get married.”
“Yes, darling. It’s perfect. It should have happened long ago. We’ve lost so much precious time. When you kissed me out there on the dock I knew.”
“So now what do you tell Mike Dean?”
“Sam, you’re acting so… odd. I know I hurt you. And I know you do feel a little guilty. Darling, how can I prove to you it has all come true?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at me and looked away. She said, very delicately, “Warren is out by the pool, out like a light.” She was wearing black shorts and a green sleeveless blouse. She toyed with the buckle on the shorts. She seemed to heave some sort of inward sigh and said with modesty and a kind of regret and a certain tinge of martyrdom, “If you really want me to, darling. If it would mean a great deal to you to… love me now.”
“I wouldn’t want you to sacrifice yourself, Louise.”
“I think it would be so much better if we waited, actually.” She made a little face. “I wouldn’t be able to forget that… this is where it happened with her. It would spoil it for me.”
“But a big coarse brutal guilty male wouldn’t be bothered by all those little nuances.”
“You keep sounding so odd.”
“I’m an odd guy.”
“But I’m going to get used to you. You can at least kiss me.”
She felt good under my hands and I guess her response was all that could be desired. Her lips were moist and parted and she breathed hard. And then she wriggled free as though I were about to be naughty, and put her mouth close to my ear and whispered that she loved me. And then she went out, smiling back at me.
Boy wins girl. Boy wins rich girl. High school dream comes true at last.
But I wished to God she wouldn’t remind me so strongly of a brunette Elda Garry. And I wished I didn’t have the horrible suspicion that that smoldering look was misleading.
I couldn’t go back to sleep.
When I heard the
Try Again
coming in, I looked at my watch and found it was only a little after three. I pulled on my clothes and went down to the dock.
SEVEN
THE FISHERMEN were full of high spirits, pleased with each other and the boat and the day. They had brought two sail and a marlin to gaff and released them. Puss had hung the marlin and both Tommy and Mike said she had performed like an expert. She had reel blisters and aching shoulders.
They brought back a renewed spirit of holiday that affected the rest of the group. Calypso records were piled on the changer. Everybody congregated at the pool.
As soon as I had changed I intercepted Mike when he was away from the others and said, “I’ll sign up, Mike.”
“Good! Good!” he said heartily, but I could have sworn that for a moment there was a slight look or expression of disappointment.
“When do I sign?”
“No hurry about the details. Just one fast question, Sam. Will I get the proxies?”
“You will now.”
He nodded. He wasn’t using any charm on me. There was no handshake of welcome to the club, glad you’re aboard. I was one of Mike Dean’s boys now, and by God, I was going to be used. I hoped I’d be used so extensively I wouldn’t have very much time to think about all the things that might have been. I would ride the crest until I had it made, and then I would bow out and buy into a little business of my own. A nice clean little business. And be productive and constructive as hell.
And right now I could start celebrating. Tomorrow everybody would be signing papers. And maybe tomorrow we would be leaving. I wondered just how the hell I would go about explaining it all to Gary and Gene and Al and Walt. They would think I’d been had. They’d think I’d sold out. I knew I hadn’t been had. I knew I hadn’t sold out. I was playing it just the way any one of them would have played it had they been given the same opportunity.
What was going to happen wasn’t my fault. It was Tom McGann’s. They could blame the dead.
Time to celebrate.
So, for the second time in my life, I got royally and ponderously drunk. I am big and so it takes a lot. I took a lot. I don’t remember dinner. I was celebrating. Mike Dean’s new boy. Hooray. One third of a millionaire. And my old man never made more than fifty-five bucks a week in his life.
The afternoon swirled around me and plunged into the night. After a session of complete blackouts and partial blackouts, memory is sadly fragmented. I think I did a lot of dancing, and I can remember trying to play pingpong, and I can remember adding an uncertain basso profundo to some barbershop singing. And I can remember a time of dubious clarity when I sat out on the dock with Bonny Carson and we had a bottle which we handed back and forth at stately intervals. I was explaining to her about the cycle of life and death and your one turn around the track and how just about any human activity you can think of is pretty damn meaningless. She was telling me in between times how meaningless her life was. Every time either of us would say anything beautiful, we’d get tears in our eyes and we’d kiss each other tenderly and moistly and then pass the bottle again.
I woke up at six-thirty. I was on top of the bed. I wasn’t undressed. Half my brain was broken glass and the other half was rusty rivets. They clattered together when I moved. I plodded into the bathroom. I was thoroughly pasted with lipstick and there was an inexplicable scratch on my chin. I had the queasy trembles and the black remorses.
A half hour later, feeling but slightly better, I was sitting at the pool over a second cup of black coffee and wondering whether I could risk any kind of food when Bridget Hallowell appeared, disgustingly bright and cheerful. She wore a little blue and white checked sun suit, very brief. Her legs were long and golden and very lovely.
I covered my eyes with my hands and looked out at her through a little space between two fingers.
“The life of the party,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“Oh, the things you said. And the things you
did!”
“My God, Bridget.”
She laughed. “All right, ole Sam’l. I’ve got a kind heart. I’ll take you off the hook. You neither said nor did anything disgraceful. You were just a big happy smiling drunk, harmless and childlike in your beautiful simplicity. You kissed all the women and you kept shaking hands with everybody.”
“How did I get to bed?”
“Bonny came in crying. She said you were dead. She said you were full of beautiful thoughts, but you were dead. She wanted somebody to get a shovel because she was going to bury you personally right where you had fallen. We inspected the body. Fletcher and Cam lugged it back to the room and came back dusting their hands and looking superior. Look around and see if you notice anything missing.”
It took longer than it should have before I saw that the
Portess
was gone.
“They left at daybreak,” she said. “Your amiable little debauch will be completely overlooked in view of what happened later. That was really juicy. Are you in so much pain you can’t hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Jack Buck had been sweet-talking Puss McGann. I guess he thought it was time. So he maneuvered her into the night. She fought him until I guess she realized that he was very, very determined. So she had sense enough to scream. And, very fortunately, she was heard. I had a good ringside seat to your little go-round with Warren, and I had just as good a seat at this one, but this one was no contest. That cute little Tommy gave away four inches and thirty pounds. But he moved so fast you could hardly see him. I don’t think Jack Buck landed punch one. It didn’t take a minute and a half for Tommy to cut him to ribbons and knock him colder than a press agent’s heart. Mike got indignant and told Port Crown he ought to fire Buck. Port got up on his horse and told Mike it was none of his damn business. Mike told Port that he was willing to admit Texas has the biggest of everything. They’ve got people with more money and less sense than any other state in the union. Port told Mike that he’d yank the rug out from under him in their Crown-Dean Corporation. Mike said to go ahead and be damned and kindly get himself and his funny looking, boat and his round-heeled daughter and his hunky wife off the island just as damn well soon as he could, and if he wanted to leave Jack Buck behind, they’d cut strip bait off him and troll with it tomorrow and see if they could find any catfish with strong stomachs. Port told Mike to come to Texas and he’d shoot him dead. And stumped off to bed. So, darling Sam, nobody is going to remember that you were a little squiffed. You’ve been upstaged.”
“I am grateful.”
“I see that you are patched up with Louise.”
“Thanks to you.”
“She was pretty tough to talk to. She had a hard time understanding my motives. Are you certain you can get all your messages across?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s worth a try. She’s a very handsome dish. I’d trade all my talent for a chance to look like that.”
“You look just fine.”
“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you, sir.”
“What are your plans for the day?”
“That’s up to dear Elda. She has the vivid and entertaining article I wrote.” She went into a startlingly effective imitation of Elda Garry. “It’s so perfectly charming, darling, so terribly valid and significant, but don’t you think it may be just a fraction too frivolous? We, at
Blend,
are doing a sincere job of putting out a valid book for young Americans. And, after all, aren’t we dealing with very real and serious matters here?”
“Like that?”
“And then I’ll rewrite three or four times for dear old Elda, and then she’ll stick some real wet Eldaisms into my copy before it’s printed up, and then all those young Americans will get a real and valid and significant puff job about Mike Dean, American. That’s how it’s done, sweetie. That’s how the wheels go round.”
She looked toward the house and said, “And now, being terribly sensitive and tactful and so on, I shall flee. Because here comes the Lady of Shalott.” She left the table. Louise joined me. She was back in the pink swim suit with the black trim. She managed to look radiant and tremulous and faintly disapproving, all at the same time.
“Good morning, my darling,” she said. “Wasn’t that girl sitting with you? And how is your poor head?”
“The head thumps. And Bridget was sitting with me. She briefed me on what happened after I folded.”
“It was horrible, really. Mike was awfully angry. I’m glad they’re gone. They were unwholesome people. But I really don’t see why there has to be so much fighting all the time. Honey, why did you drink so much?”
“Well, I guess I was sort of celebrating.”
She patted my hand. “I was so afraid you’d go around saying why you were celebrating. I mean it would have been embarrassing for me, don’t you see? I’ve got to tell Warren in my own time in my own way, and I don’t want one of these hasty things. They’re in such bad taste, don’t you think? I think there should be some time between a divorce and another marriage. And I certainly won’t be seen in public with you until the divorce is final. You do understand, don’t you?”
