The Wrong Kind of Money (28 page)

Still, though Melody has stayed with the Lieblings for shorter periods in the past, a two-month house guest is something else again. Melody realizes this, and so does Carol. Still, both the guest and the hosts are trying to make the best of the situation, at least for the time being.

Meanwhile, the fact that Anne has been able to find employment while Melody has not has created a not imperceptible rift between the two best friends. We have not progressed very far into January, and Anne Liebling has already learned, at the end of a working day, not to ask her friend, “Well, how did job hunting go today?” She knows what the discouraged reply will be.

And is Melody the slightest bit resentful of Anne for having found a job, however boring, so easily? If so, Melody has given no indication. (Anne does not know that Melody, writing home to her mother in Tokyo, said, “It's funny, but it's much easier to find a job when you don't need one—if you're rich already, that is.”)

“Sales conference,” he says now. “We do this every year in January. This year it's Atlantic City.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Just a week. Back Friday night.”

She moves to the open suitcase and lifts the sheets of typewritten paper. “What's this?” she asks him.

“President's Message,” he says. “I have to deliver it tonight at the kickoff party.”

She reads, “‘In our more than two-hundred-year history …' Not a very exciting opening line, is it?”

“My mother's words,” he says. “They're carved in stone, I'm afraid.” He's glad to see there's no black eye, no swollen lip.

She makes a face. “I could do better than that,” she says. “How about, ‘As we plunge fearlessly into our third century—'”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I'll let you argue that one with Hannah Liebling.”

She looks at him. “Is it hard working for your mother, Noah?” she asks him.

He decides to give her an honest answer. “Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. But I consider it one of the challenges of my job.”

Now she lifts the handwritten notes from the case containing the carousel of color slides. “And this?”

“A script I'm working on.”

“A script?”

“To go with a slide show. I'm pitching a new Ingraham brand at the end of the week. Script still needs a lot of work.”

“Want me to help you?”

He glances at his watch. “No time, I'm afraid. I've got to be out of here in ten minutes.”

“Take me with you,” she says.

He tries to affect an easy laugh. “Sorry,” he says, “this trip is strictly business.” But this is not strictly true. To a lot of the salesmen this week in Atlantic City will be an outing, a holiday, a company-paid vacation.

“I'm serious,” she says. “Take me with you, Noah. I'll help you write your script. I've taken playwriting courses. I can type sixty words a minute. I won't be in your way. I'll make this part of my winter work program. What do you think of that?”

“No, no …”

“Please, Noah. It will give me something to do. I'll write a report on it when I get back to school. ‘The Business Sales Conference as Theater.' My adviser would like that! Because it is a form of theater, isn't it? Meetings to get the sales staff excited about what's coming up in the year ahead? Whipping them up—”

“I think of it more as employee relations,” he says. “Making the people who work for you feel they're appreciated.”

“But that's show business, too! So much of business is really show business. A girl in our class is working for some trial lawyers. She's going to analyze trials as theater pieces. How many people will be at this conference?”

“All together, about a thousand.”

“Would one extra girl, sitting in the back of the room, taking notes, be even noticed?”

“They'd think you were a spy from the competition, Melody.”

“That's just like the theater! In the theater everybody's always spying on what everybody else is doing. And in between the meetings I'll help you with your script. Oh, please, let me come, Noah.”

“No, that sort of thing is strictly against the rules,” he says, and yet he knows that this is not strictly true. A lot of the salesmen, and in this business they are mostly men, use sales conference to leave their wives and families behind, and connect with girlfriends. And in the bars of Atlantic City, the girls will be lined up, waiting.… “Besides,” he says, “how would we explain this sort of arrangement to Carol—and Anne?”

She looks at him. “Very simple,” she says. “We wouldn't tell them. It would be our secret, like our secret from the other night. I'll make up something. I'll say I've found a week's work in another city. You see, I've thought this through very carefully, Noah. You see how serious I am.”

He feels his cheeks redden. “No, it wouldn't work, Melody,” he says. “I'm sorry.” And yet why is he thinking that it could work? If only … If I were only still that boy on the Harley.

She turns away from him. “It doesn't have to be sex,” she says. “I didn't say it had to be sex. I know that's what you're thinking. You've probably been thinking that all along. It's true I like you—very much—but it doesn't have to be that. Mostly, I want something to
do
—something exciting. I can't just sit around this big apartment, day after day, doing nothing!”

“Something will come along for you, Melody,” he says. “I'm sure of that.” Her mention of sex startles him. Had he been thinking of that, too?

“Fat chance. I hang around the theaters, trying to sneak through stage doors, trying to interview performers, the production crew.… I'm treated like a trespasser, a nuisance … trying to watch rehearsals from backstage … being kicked out … it's so humiliating … and meanwhile that asshole keeps telephoning all the time!”

He is a also little surprised to hear her use the word
asshole.
“What asshole?” he says.

“That asshole I brought here on New Year's Eve. Bill Luckman!”

“What's he been doing?”

“Calling me up. Three, four, five times a day. Sometimes he disguises his voice so I'll think it's a job offer. But then he calls me a tease. Tells me to stop holding out on him, to stop stringing him along. Sometimes, when I'm alone here and hear the phone ring, I feel like I want to scream!” She stares at him defiantly now.

“What do you say to him when he says things like that?”

“Sometimes he says worse things! I just hang up on him.”

“Good girl. That's the only thing to do. He'll get the message after a while.”

“Will he? Sometimes, when I'm alone in this apartment, I think, what if he should come to the door?”

“There's no way he could get up here, Mellie. You're in the most secure building in New York. But if anything should happen, just dial eight on the house phone for the security office.”

“That's another reason why I wanted to go with you.”

“Look, if this—this asshole gives you any more trouble, I'll be staying at Resorts International in Atlantic City. Just give me a call, okay? If I'm in a meeting, say it's an emergency, and they'll bring me out. Okay?” He starts to reach out to touch her arm, but then he checks himself.

Just then the telephone rings, and both of them look quickly at the phone on the bedside table. “I'll get it,” Noah says.

“Hey, Noah.” It is Frank Stokes's voice. “You about ready? The car's waiting downstairs.”

“I'll be right down,” Noah says, and hangs up the phone. “I've got to go,” he says, and snaps his two suitcases closed.

Grabbing the suitcases, he turns toward the bedroom door, then turns back to look at her. She is standing there, her arms crossed across her bosom, hugging her shoulders. Her chin is up, but there are tears in her eyes. “Don't worry about me,” she says. “I can take care of myself. I always have. And I didn't say there had to be sex. Remember that.”

“I'm sorry, Mellie,” he says, and turns and heads out the door.

Alone in the apartment, she walks down the long corridor to the living room, and parts the curtains to look down on the entrance courtyard below. She watches as Noah and Frank Stokes emerge from the building and walk to a waiting limousine. She watches as the driver loads their luggage into the open trunk. She watches as the driver opens the rear door of the car, as the two men climb inside, and as the door closes, concealing the passengers behind tinted glass. She watches as the car pulls out into the street and drives away.

Then, directly across the street, she sees the figure of a young man. He is wearing tight black spandex running shorts, and he is standing on one leg, braced with one hand against the trunk of a tree. His other hand grasps his ankle, and he is flexing his knee up and down, as though to relieve a cramp in a peroneus muscle.

Recognizing him, Melody bangs on the windowpane for his attention, but he is too far below her on the street to hear her.

She flings open the window and leans out. “Hey, Luckman!” she calls down to him.
“Hey, Luckman!
”

He puts his other foot down and, shielding his eyes with a bandaged left hand, looks upward, into the sun.

“Hey, Luckman!” she calls again. “How's your hand, asshole?”

Then she raises her fist and gives him the finger. She slams the window shut, and then, laughing, runs down the hall to the yellow guest bedroom, knowing exactly what she is going to do.

As the limousine enters the Lincoln Tunnel, heading for the New Jersey Turnpike, Frank Stokes turns to Noah and says, “You're kind of quiet this afternoon. Something on your mind?”

“Thinking about Friday's presentation,” he says.

“B-Day, huh?” Frank is one of the few people in the organization who know about the new label, and B-Day is what they have christened the day when it will be unveiled.

“That's right.”

“Don't worry. Something tells me we're going to have a hit on our hands.”

But of course Noah is not thinking about Friday's presentation, or B-Day, or about anything remotely connected with that, though perhaps he should be. He is thinking about Melody.

He has been aware for some time that Melody has developed some sort of schoolgirl crush on him, and he is ambivalent about what to do about it. There is something about the way she looks at him, and then, of course, there was this afternoon. It is not an unflattering situation. What man Noah's age would not be flattered to have a beautiful eighteen-year-old—no, not even eighteen, because Melody's eighteenth birthday is still five months away—form a schoolgirl crush on him? The very phrase “schoolgirl crush” probably dates him, he thinks. Do college-age girls have crushes anymore? They certainly don't call them that. They have affairs—light, casual, uncommitted affairs, with no consequences expected or even considered. Has Anne had affairs? He hopes not, but he cannot be sure, and if she has, it would be hard for him to condemn her for this, in today's atmosphere, with condoms being freely dispensed in boarding school infirmaries. Today a teenager's parents are expected to roll with the punches, or else go back to the dinosaur age.

Anne must have been eight or nine when Carol decided to explain the facts of life to her, and Carol had told him about it later. “I was trying to tell her as honestly as possible about what happens when a man and a woman make love,” she said. “And I was trying to describe it in a way that was—well, you know, both scientific and poetic. And she suddenly turned to me, and said, ‘Mother, are you talking about fucking?'”

“And
zen
what did you say?” he asked her with a grin.

“I couldn't believe my ears. I
think
I turned red as a beet, and I
know
I fought a terrible impulse to slap her across the face. But then I laughed and said, ‘Yes, I'm talking about fucking.'”

And so here he was now, in this situation, or Situation, capital S, as in Seduction. He had seen it beginning to happen—oh, perhaps eight months ago, when both girls were home from Ethel Walker on spring break. There had been a bowl of peanuts on the coffee table, peanuts in their shells in a silver bowl. Odd, the way details stand out. He had noticed Melody shelling peanuts, cracking the papery husks between her fingertips, dropping the husks in an ashtray, then carefully removing the brown skin from each nut, taking care not to let the two halves of each nut fall apart. Then, when she had a handful of perfectly shelled, perfectly skinned nuts in her hand, she extended her cupped palm and offered them to him. That gesture, the outstretched hand, the offering of the nuts, and the faint smile on her lips when she offered the nuts to him, told him everything. There were no words needed, and his heart opened like a door. “Thank you” was all he had been able to say.

In the days of his bike, there had been plenty of easy sex. Girls loved his bike. They loved the speed, and they loved the noise and the wind in their faces as they clung to his waist from the buddy seat behind. These were the town girls, of course, the townies upon whom his brothers at Delta Chi Epsilon looked with undisguised disdain. The “nice” girls from Wellesley, Smith, or Holyoke were either too prim or too timid to accept bike dates. Or perhaps they knew what bike dates usually led up to. Bennington girls, of course, were always a little different. They enjoyed their reputation of being a little wild, a little Bohemian. They even called their campus The Left Bank—the Left Bank of Pownal Creek. But even Bennington girls would not accept bike dates. Why had they sent Anne to Bennington? Because that was where she wanted to go, naturally, and one reason she wanted to go there was because that was where Melody, her best friend, wanted to go.

There was one town girl he remembers in particular—Loretta, or Lorena, or Louella, or something like that. If he ever knew her last name, he has forgotten it now, but she worked as a telephone operator for New England Bell, and he had made her acquaintance while placing a long-distance call. Sight unseen, she had agreed to a date on his bike.