ARTHUR FENSTEMAKER CHEWED ON a cold cigar and dribbled whiskey down the front of his silver dinner jacket. He paced about the second-story front gallery of the mansion, humming to himself, a little off key. He snapped his fingers, grunting, humming, sniffing the midnight air. He reached down inside his trousers and adjusted his undershorts. His assistant, Jay McGown, sat nearby, looking out over the city. Across from Jay, a large gray-haired man sat with hands folded, watching the Governor.
The butler brought them drinks. There was dance music coming from a group of Latin musicians belowstairs, and out front the guests in evening clothes wandered back and forth across the grounds and lounged on the whitewashed steps.
“I got to settle this in a hurry,” Fenstemaker said, biting on the cigar. The gray-haired man offered a light, but Fenstemaker waved it away. “They don’t let me smoke,” he said, “but they didn’t say nothin’ about chewin’. I invent new vices ever’ day.” He spit into a potted palm and went on: “Just got few minutes … Let’s get this business over with.”
He took hold of his drink and put it to his mouth, swallowing hard. Then he handed it to the butler. “You get me a better one, Jimmy? Like you’d make for yourself?”
“Miz Fenstemaker said half jigger.”
“I know all about that,” the Governor said. “But goddam! All it’s doin’ is makin’ me drink twice as much and I end up goin’ to the bathroom all night long.”
“Miz Fenstemaker …”
“She ain’t here, Jimmy. Now’s our opportunity.”
“How ’bout three-quarter jigger?” the butler suggested.
“All right.”
The colored man moved off with his empty glasses.
“Looky heah!” Fenstemaker said, and the gray-haired guest jumped perceptibly. The Governor stopped, thinking for a moment. He turned to Jay McGown. “You see that, Jay? That three-quarter jigger stuff? That boy’s already learned somethin’ about effective accommodation and compromise!” He laughed loudly and told the gray-haired man all about the butler being elected captain of his precinct over in niggertown. The guest, now totally mystified, jumped once again when Fenstemaker repeated the exhortation: “Looky heah, now …”
“Yes sir?”
“You want to take this business to the District Attorney?”
“I don’t know, Governor. I just don’t know. That’s why I’ve come to you. I thought —”
“I’ll get the D.A. on the phone right now — he’s a personal friend of mine. I’ll get him over here right now to listen to this damn thing, you give the word.”
“Governor … I …”
“You wanna set little trap, instead? You had some good practice, it seems. You got some money, marked bills? Might even try it on the District Attorney. Just for practice.”
Fenstemaker had his face down next to the gray-haired man’s, their noses nearly touching. The visitor was pressed against the leather chair. “Governor,” he said, “I keep telling you I just … don’t … know. This never happened to me before. That’s why I come to you for advice.”
Fenstemaker straightened up and talked over the fellow’s head. “Knew enough to tape-record that conversation. That’s knowin’ somethin’. That’s knowin’ more’n I know … You even made him count out that goddam money right out loud so it would get on the tape. Why hell, man! You know. Don’t give me that stuff. That old dog don’t hunt no more — that cow’s been bred and milked and damn near slaughtered.”
The visitor, looking holy, determined to keep the conversation on a high plain, shook his head from side to side and laid his hands open. “Governor … I …”
“How many others you bribed?”
“Governor …!”
“You give me some names? Just like to know myself out of curiosity. I deal with these people every day, understand.”
“Governor … I never in my life …”
“You must’ve dangled somethin’ a-front of him first conversation you had to make him go for the bait that way.” Fenstemaker examined the end of his cigar, as if it were a foreign object only recently extracted from his throat. He went on: “What in hell you say to him to make things develop the way they did?”
“I talked to him about the legislation. That’s all. We went out and had a drink. We got friendly. You know? — maybe I bragged on him some. We got us a couple dates for the night. You know? Friendly. Then he starts talkin’ about runnin’ in a statewide campaign and how he needed money for a race like that and how he could sure use a contribution from us. That was the first indication, Governor.”
“So actually all you did is make a little contribution to his campaign … That’s about all it boils down to.”
The guest sat up straight in the leather chair and crossed his legs, looking resolute. “I think you’d agree that, under the circumstances, it amounted to considerably more than that, Governor.”
Fenstemaker was silent for a moment. Then he said: “I think I just might dump this right back in your lap … Really none of my business.”
“Sir? You wouldn’t just …”
“Jay — go get me that reel of tape off that machine,” Fenstemaker said.
The visitor was on his feet, following Fenstemaker and Jay McGown across the old pine floor. “Governor, I just come to you for advice. I don’t want a lot of bad publicity. I don’t want any scandal. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want a fair shake before that committee. And I don’t like a shakedown racket of any sort …”
Mrs. Fenstemaker appeared at one of the jalousied doors. The Governor looked up, smiling. “Sweet Mama …?”
“They’ll all be leaving soon downstairs, Arthur, and I thought …”
“Be right down,” the Governor said. Mrs. Fenstemaker nodded and moved off toward the stairs.
“I can understand you’re busy,” the visitor said, still following Jay and the Governor. Jay picked up a reel of tape and handed it to Fenstemaker, who looked it over, balanced it in his palm, and held it out toward the visitor.
“Governor, you’re the only qualified man to judge.”
“Take it to the goddam District Attorney,” Fenstemaker said.
“I just didn’t want to cause any trouble. I thought it might all be handled without … I didn’t want to damage that boy’s career …”
“Damage!” the Governor hooted. “It’s plenty damaged already, mister. That boy’s ruined — one way or another — even if it never comes out in the open. I’ll see to that personally.”
“I think you ought to be the judge how it’s handled,” the guest concluded.
“Tell you what …”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Sir?”
“I’ll let you know, for Jesus sake. I’ll call you when I decide something.”
The gray-haired man smiled. “I’m deeply relieved that you …” His voice trailed off as Fenstemaker turned and left the room.
Downstairs, a half-hour later, Fenstemaker poked at Jay’s shoulder with his big hand, sipping a Scotch drink he’d managed to lift off one of the dinner guests. “Coonass is what it is, Jay,” the Governor said. “Real cedar chopper stuff. God damn it’s depressing.” He paused and gulped his drink. “You ever sell me, Jay, I hope to Jesus it’s for something big, something really important to you.”
“That fellow’s scared,” Jay said. “I don’t know which of them is worse.”
“Coonass,” the Governor repeated, shaking his head. “It’s like learnin’ everybody screws …”
At Earle Fielding’s hotel suite, at nearly the same hour, the young people sat in overstuffed chairs or flopped on the deep-pile carpet, holding on to each other, talking politics, discussing the weekend’s possibilities.
“You see the trophies?” Ellen Streeter asked someone. “Where are the trophies, Alfred?”
“Earle put them away somewhere,” Rinemiller said.
“Let’s see the trophies.”
“Wait for Earle,” Rinemiller said.
“He’ll never get back,” someone said. “Probably already jumped in bed with Ouida.” There was laughter round the room, and the fellow added: “Or maybe he’s set up a patrol outside his place to catch old Roy Sherwood sneakin’ in.”
Rinemiller got to his feet and went into Earle’s bedroom. In a moment, he returned with the tennis trophies, a half dozen of them, already engraved for the winners of championship and consolation brackets.
“They’re lovely and old-fashioned,” Ellen Streeter said, taking them from Rinemiller. “Little gold figures. Like Alice Marble and Don Budge.” She looked up at Rinemiller and some of the others and asked what they were doing. Rinemiller, Giffen, Huggins, and several girls were bent over a cardboard tournament chart, filling in names. “Seedings and pairings,” Alfred Rinemiller said.
“Seedings and pairings,” Ellen sang to herself. “Cockles and mussels …”
Harris and the girl named Cathryn sat across the room. Harris had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and Cathryn stared at his brown muscled arms.
“You’re gorgeous,” Harris said to her, making the muscles jump.
“You’re gorgeouser,” Cathryn said. She looked at his arms. Harris stared down her dressfront. “Where’d Willie go?” Cathryn said.
“You want Willie?” Harris said. His voice was high and careless. “I’ll go get Willie, you want him. I’ll take you to Willie, for God’s sake …”
Cathryn looked up in amazement. “Who’s Willie?” she said. “I don’t know any Willie.”
Ellen Streeter came over and sat with them. Harris shifted his attention to Ellen, wondering if he ought to attempt, one last time, to seduce her.
“Where’s Willie gone?” Cathryn said to Ellen Streeter.
“Yeah — where in the world is he?” Harris said irritably. “We’ve been worried nearly to death about where Willie’s gone.”
Ellen shrugged. Harris asked her who she was dating for the tennis tournament. She made a face, rolling her eyes, as if about to describe a female operation from which she was not quite fully recovered. “George Giffen,” she said.
“Tell you what,” Harris said. “You help me find Willie, and I’ll take you home tonight and even to the by-God tennis tournament. Okay?”
Ellen Streeter smiled, looking at Cathryn. Cathryn made a gesture of innocence. She said: “I only asked where Willie might have —”
George Giffen came upon her from behind and placed both hands on her bare shoulders. “Hah, honey,” he said. “You gonna be at that tennis thang?” He massaged Cathryn’s shoulders, making her wince.
“I haven’t a date,” Cathryn said.
“You really ought to come,” Ellen Streeter said. “It’s the most glittering social and cultural event of the season. Last year, we —”
“Don’t worry,” Harris said. “I’ll get you a date. I got a fellow in mind. He’s not here now, but …”
“Last year,” Ellen continued, “we had what was called a Seated Drunk With Frictional Dancing.”
“I got this young fellow in mind,” Harris said. He took hold of the pasteboard chart on which the pairings had been outlined. He wrote in Cathryn’s name next to Willie’s. Then he thought a moment and put in Ellen Streeter next to his own. Giffen looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “Ellen’s my date for the tournament.”
“You don’t understand these things,” Harris said to him. “This is a mixed doubles tournament. That’s the whole point.”
“It’s like free love, doll,” Ellen said, smiling at everyone.
Night insects buzzed round Willie England’s head. They came piling in through the open windows of his second-story loft, seeking him out, feasting on his bare arms, cracking against walls and lightbulbs, banging window blinds and struggling in the turbulence of an ancient overhead fan. The fan stirred the air and flapped papers on Willie’s desk. He sat there typing, waving a hand in front of his face whenever the insects came near. He picked steadily at the typewriter keys, rising only to refill his glass of water or change a record on the phonograph. He had selected the music with great care — Benny Goodman, Rex Stewart, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Jelly Roll Morton — but he heard none of it, really. He was nearly finished with the issue of his newspaper, and his concentration was intense and absolute as the end came into sight.
He was several days ahead of schedule, and the printers would be enchanted. It was the earliest he had closed out the paper in months, and everyone indirectly connected with his one-man operation could now count on a monumental weekend drunk. Especially the printers. He thought of them, tight in a roadhouse or cultivating gardens or making love to their wives, or whatever it was printers did in their spare time. Whatever anyone did. The printers were his connective, the last narrowing umbilical that tied him to grim reality. What the hell did people do in their spare time these days? He hadn’t looked lately, not in years it seemed: not since he had been plucked from the one dull world and set down in the other, infinitely more gorgeous sphere of politics and rebellion. They’d set him down in this other place — Rinemiller out front, inspired with the idea of a free and independent truth-telling newspaper reporting on the melancholy activities of corrupt officialdom, Rinemiller out front, with Earle Fielding and others like him not far behind, paying the bills. They’d thrust Willie into this glittering world, and the experience had been exhilarating. All he had to do was print the truth, like Rinemiller said, and he’d shaken the universe a little. As much of it as he could see, in any event; the trouble was that he was seeing less and less of it now. He wondered what in hell people were doing, all those people who didn’t drink beer at the Dearly Beloved, the ones not included in weekend tennis tournaments.
He sat thinking about all the world’s dull people. He swatted insects and examined page dummies and decided it was not such a bad issue he had put together. Nothing that would send anyone to the penitentiary, like last year, but good minor league reporting all the same. What disturbed him now was that he was still going through the old motions, laboring like the elephant of the year before and producing, instead, one tiresome mouse after another. Perhaps all they needed was a new cast of characters or one last big-time villain? They were running short of evil, and it was becoming more and more difficult to find any significant amounts of muck to rake. He thought about the good old bad days. There had been a time at college when he had dared invoke such multiple disasters as to bring about oddly beneficial results: stirred a controversy and got his picture in Time Magazine and been given a year of study abroad.
But all that had passed, passed dead away. He’d lost his first newspaper job for printing a wirephoto of Sugar Ray Robinson in dancing clothes, surrounded by a dozen white (white as could be!) chorus girls. He’d got another job soon enough, but he’d never regained his vision, his cheerful libertarian’s optimism; not, at least, until Alfred and Earle and the younger politicians came round to buy it back for him.
He shoved his chair away from the desk, conscious for the first time in more than an hour of a cigarette in his mouth and music coming from the phonograph. He rose and washed his face in the open lavatory. He was drying himself when he heard the commotion outside, in the parking lot next to the old office building. He looked through one of the open windows but could see nothing. A car horn honked and someone yelled: “Willie! Hey Willie!” Harris’s voice was high-pitched, impatient. Willie squinted in the darkness and could see the outline of Harris’s automobile. He shouted hello.
“I’ve brought you a love gift,” Harris yelled back. There was the sound of a doorslam, and then the car pulled away. Someone remained on the gravel below. “Who is it?” Willie called out, and Cathryn Lemens answered: “How do I get up there?”
He directed her to the fire escape and waited in the window to help her up the final steps. She dropped down from the window ledge, looked round the deserted loft, and brushed thin strands of hair out of her face. “You’ve got me for a tennis partner if you like,” she said.
Earle Fielding bent down over the small boy and listened to the whispered protests. Earle tried hard, but understood none of it; the child wheezed and groaned and rolled over in his sleep, turning his back on the father, and whatever it was he might have been attempting to communicate was lost altogether on Earle. Earle straightened up and looked about the room, picking out familiar objects of the child’s world, illuminated in the half-light coming from the hall. He shuddered a little, nostalgia gripping him for an instant; he struggled with an emotion compounded from desire, from an overwhelming sense of loss, of failure. He wondered when it was that everything had started going haywire for him, and whether, given another chance and all the intelligence and common sense in the world, he could make anything from the shambles. He walked down the hall to Ouida’s bedroom, thinking about this.
“He looks good,” Earle said. “The boy looks real good.”
“He’s neurotic,” Ouida said, brushing her dark hair at a dressing table. “He’s sweet and bright enough, but he needs a man around. He misses you.”
“Perhaps he needs a brother or sister,” Earle said. “Let’s have another baby.” He smiled, not knowing what he meant by his own remark, unable to judge how Ouida might take it. She did not seem to take it any perceivable way. She looked up at him sharply, questioningly, and continued brushing her hair.
“I don’t think so,” she finally said.
“How’re you feeling?” Earle said. “You all right now?”
“Yes,” Ouida said. She stopped brushing and looked at her face in the mirror. She applied dabs of cream on her forehead and on either cheek.
“Sorry I wasn’t here,” Earle said. “You pregnant when I left?”
“If I wasn’t,” Ouida said, “I didn’t waste any time getting into trouble.”
Earle flushed and paced round behind Ouida, watching her rubbing the cream on her face. “I mean I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said. “If I’d known, I would never have left town.”
“I was all right,” she said. She began pinning her hair on top of her head. “I had some friends looking after me.”
“Who?”
She looked at him and smiled.
“My legions of lovers, Earle,” she said. “They were lined up at the hospital entrance, donating blood.”
Earle sat on the corner of the bed, smoking his cigarette. “It’s no goddam joke,” he said. “I talked to the doctor long distance, you know that?”
Ouida shook her head.
“He said you could’ve died. He told me that on the phone.”
“I don’t think it was all that serious,” Ouida said. “I felt fine.”
“I would’ve come home then, but he said you were being released. I would’ve called you, but I didn’t know what exactly I could say.”
“Your friends waiting for you at the hotel?” Ouida said.
“I love you,” Earle said. “I think I really do love you — despite everything.”
“What does that mean?”
“What?”
“Despite everything …”
“I mean our troubles. Why we can’t seem to keep the faith in any sense of the word.”
“I kept it,” Ouida said. “I think I’ve kept it a long time.”
“You have to expect that in men,” Earle said. “Men are going to go off on a bat of one kind or another. It’s inevitable … You have to expect it.”
“You have to expect it with women, then,” Ouida said.
“You’re a grown woman — you ought to act like one. You’ve got a child. You ought to have a couple of ’em.”
Ouida did not answer. She began to undress. Earle watched as she pulled stockings off her dark legs and slipped out of her skirt. He continued watching dolefully until she stepped behind the closet door. In a moment she was back in view, wearing a gown. “I’m going to bed,” she told him again.
“Who’re you seeing currently?” Earle said.
Ouida giggled and rolled over in the bed, her face away from him. “George,” she said. “George Giffen. I see George nearly every night.”
“Who is it?” Earle said. “Who the hell is it? I know there’s someone special. I know you pretty well by now. I can read you like a goddam book, you’re so transparent.”
Ouida rolled back over and looked at him, her eyelashes wet, face trembling.
“Well who’s it been with you the last three months? Or the last year? Or half the time we were in Europe? Or the month in Cuernavaca? You started this libertine business, Earle. You started it — exulted in it. I didn’t. I never did.”
“All right,” Earle said. “I take full responsibility. I started it. I suppose it’s up to me to end it then. So let’s end it.”
“The way you’ve been wandering off and coming back again — I’d think you’d abandoned any right, any capacity even, for starting or ending anything.”
Earle was silent for a time. Finally he said: “Should I stay here tonight? You think it would be good for the boy for me to be here when he wakes up.”
“For a change. Sure. He might not recognize you … Stay anywhere you want … Goodnight.” She rolled over again, pulling the covers up over her head.
Earle sat on the edge of the bed several minutes, finishing his cigarette. He kicked off one shoe and debated with himself. He might, he thought, go sleep with the boy. Or make a bed on the front room couch. He thought about sleeping next to Ouida, wondering if everything could be miraculously resolved by morning. He thought about the others at the hotel suite and realized, with relief, that he was wide awake and nervous and in no condition for sleep. He slipped the shoe back on and walked through the apartment, rattling Alfred Rinemiller’s car keys in his pocket.
They were still talking politics in the hotel suite. Rinemiller, Huggins and Giffen sat together, attempting to work out the problems. Earle Fielding’s guests had gone through four of the whiskey fifths; Earle was still nowhere in sight, and they were all a little crazy drunk.
“What we really need,” Rinemiller was saying, “is some new faces at the state level. A young people’s ticket for Governor and Lieutenant Governor and on down the line. We do all right in the House — not too badly in the Senate — but we haven’t elected a single man at the state level … Same old hacks moving up every year.”
“Young man’s ticket,” Giffen put in.
“Might even run a nigger,” Huggins said. “Let’s run a young buck nigger.
“You ought to run for Governor, Alfred,” Giffen said.
“Not me — I had Earle Fielding in mind,” Rinemiller said.
“You ought to run,” Giffen repeated. Huggins was silent, thinking about running a colored man for Governor.
“Earle’s the natural for the race,” Rinemiller said. “He can afford to spend a hundred thousand, put on real campaign.”
“You run with him, then,” Giffen said. “You and Earle make perfect young man’s ticket. Governor ’n Lieutenant …”
“I wanna get a nigger in there somewhere,” Huggins said.
Harris brushed past, dancing with Ellen Streeter. Harris asked Ellen how about it. How about what? she wanted to know.
“You know,” Harris said. “I could really lose my head a little over you, El, but you never give a man a chance.”
“What chance?” Ellen Streeter said. “You’ve got your chance.”
“I mean there’s got to be more … Got to be … I’m that kind of person. For a relationship to mean anything at all to me, it’s got to be adult … mature.”
Ellen looked at him puzzled. “Adult …?” she said.
“I can’t be serious about a woman otherwise. I got to make love. It’s a dirty habit I picked up long time ago.”
“It scares me,” Ellen said. “It really does. Always has.”
“You’re thirty years old, El.”
“Who says I’m thirty?”
“You do. Two years ago when you told me you were twenty-eight. When I was tryin’ to lay you couple years ago.”
“I’m not thirty yet,” Ellen Streeter said.
“Twenty-nine, then,” Harris said, holding her close and speaking into her good-smelling blond hair. “How ’bout it? You can’t go through life this way. You’re missing out!”
“You make it sound so pretty, it’s a real temptation,” Ellen said.
Huggins wandered by, two girls on either arm. “We’re gonna run a Negro man next Governor’s race,” he was saying.
Rinemiller continued to sit with Giffen. He puffed his cheeks and rubbed his eyes. “I could do it, George,” he said, breathing heavily. “I know I could. Earle and I could put on a great campaign.”
“I know you could,” Giffen said, attempting to nod his head but succeeding in a mere lateral movement of the eyeballs.
“I got friends all over,” Rinemiller said. “All over. All kinds. Not just liberals — fatcats, conservatives, too. Businessmen. Captains industry. Could put together real tough little co’lition. Unbeatable. I know this business, by God … I know politics if I know nothing else. And people like me, you know that? Like me right off. Make friends ev’where I go. Can’t esplain it — just a quality I have.”
“That’s true,” Giffen said. “There’s that quality …”
Earle Fielding arrived, flanked by two bellboys carrying fresh ice and soda. Earle’s appearance seemed to give the party renewed vitality; people attempted to get hold of themselves, straightening mouths, tightening jaws, laughing a little. Earle moved across the room and handed over the car keys to Rinemiller.
“We got it all figured, Earle,” Giffen said. “We gonna run you and Alfred for Governor and Lieutenant Governor next year.”
“And a black man for Attorney General,” Huggins said.
Earle smiled. Someone handed him a drink. He hoisted it as in a toast. “Throw the goddam rascals out!” he said.
“Yeah!”
“Yah!”
Rinemiller excused himself and went into the bathroom. He stood over the toilet bowl and blotted at the perspiration that had flashed across his forehead. He thought about money, standing there weaving over the toilet bowl, wishing he had only half — a quarter even — of Earle’s. He decided, standing there, realizing that he was somehow, incredibly, not going to be sick, the future almost automatically suffused with limitless opportunity, that he really should work on Earle Fielding about their running together. If not next year, some year soon. Earle was a good and valuable friend and one hell of a fine politician. No one better. Too bad about Earle and Ouida, he thought.
He turned and lurched out and lay down for a few minutes in one of the vacant bedrooms, holding his head. Presently, he turned over and reached for the telephone. He dialed the number, and on the third or fourth ring Ouida’s voice came on.
The child, he thought. Oh Jesus I hope I didn’t wake that boy. Little Ole Earlie.
“Ouida,” he began, “I hope to Jesus …”
“What …?”
“Ouida?”
“Yes.”
“How are you, honey?”
“Fine … Who …”
“You think I could come over see you? I need to talk.”
“Who … Alfred? Is that you, Alfred?”
“This Alfred, honey. You think I might cover over an’ visit?”
“The two of you? You and Earle? You want to spend the night here?”
“Yes … I mean no. You and mean … Me … Is what I me. Sit talk few minutes. You’n me. Always felt … Had a special feeling … That time we kissed … Remember? That time? Had feelin’ ’bout … Didn’t wake the boy, did I?”
“Alfred … I’m already in bed. I’m sorry. Really. Perhaps we can talk this weekend at the ranch. Would you like that? You’ll come out, won’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rinemiller said. “Ranch.” He repeated it again — “ranch” — as if it were an insight into something. It was not until he rang off that he remembered everyone was coming to the ranch for the weekend. It wasn’t a country house rendezvous with Ouida after all.
Still … he was able to tell himself there was some promise in what she’d said. She hadn’t hung up on him, hadn’t said No, Alfred, hell no and go way and quit buggin’ me. She was nice enough on the phone. He tried to remember what it was like when he had kissed her in the hotel room two years before, his hands touching her dressfront and Ouida gasping every time he pulled her hips against his. He lay back in the empty bed now, wondering about the Fieldings. There was record music coming from the front rooms. Fats Domino sang it to him …
Ah’m gonna be uh wheel someday
Ah’m gonna be some bah-dy
Ah’m gonna be uh real gone cat
’N then Ah woan wahn yew …
Willie’s phonograph droned on in the second story loft. Willie sipped wine from a peanut-butter glass and watched the girl, who sat cross-legged, like a small boy, on one of the work tables. She was slim and small-boned, neck and arms like flower stems; yet oddly voluptuous, full-breasted and going heavy in the hips, like a dancer who had never quite taken her work seriously. Her clothes were a puzzle too; she exuded a kind of chic provincialism, and he considered the conflicting images: Cathryn visiting smart little dress shops, looking for something a bit different; Cathryn bending down on her knees in a glum college dormitory, tracing off a fifty-cent dress pattern. He couldn’t determine which it was with her, and now that he’d asked, he was afraid he might have said the wrong thing.
“I had no business,” he said, hesitating, searching for the right words.
“Why not?” she said. “I wish I were a debutante. The truth is, my father’s a traffic cop. He has to renew a note every year at the bank to send me spending money.”
“Still,” Willie said. “I had no business making smart cracks.”
He had taken a good look at her and suggested that she was either very rich or very poor — that she was definitely not middle class.
“I was thinking tonight how long it’s been since I carried on a normal conversation with anyone,” Willie said. “Without talking in the secret code. You know what I mean? I can’t remember the last time I carried on a really dull conversation — I mean commonplace stuff. The weather, neighbors, family. Realism. Paddy Chayefsky. You know?”
She nodded her head. Her sweet laughter filled the big room.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m glad you’re not a rich girl.”
“I’m not glad about it,” Cathryn said. “Why should it please you?”
“It’s easier,” Willie said. “It’s easier on my tender jazz-age psyche: I get a terrible case of the nostalgia in the evenings. I have this thing about girls I like. I’ve got to know all about them — everything. I’ll want to see your yearbook pictures and old love letters and photographs when you were coming to puberty and who it was first kissed you. And whether you were in the senior play. All that stuff. I always want to live it over again with the girl and feel poignant because I wasn’t there. Wasn’t there to see how pretty you were when you were thirteen, for example.”
“I was terrible at thirteen,” Cathryn said.
“It’ll be easier with you,” Willie said. “Not as much fun; I mean not as poignant — no real pathos — but I won’t be agonized about it. With rich girls it’s different. Their young girlhood is about as remote to my experience as playing stickball on the streets of New York. My father was a salesman for the National Biscuit Company. Growing up was bloody dull. So I sit around wishing I had been sent off to dancing school when I was twelve; sorry because my family never vacationed in the same resort town year after year — you know? The way it is in resort towns when you see the same good families reappearing every season? I hitched East on vacation few years ago, and it had a terrible depressing effect on me. Just looking at all those damn prep schools stuck away in the hills. I visited Cambridge and lay alongside the river and looked at those crazy spires at Harvard. I was melancholy for a week. Damn near ruined me …” He looked at the girl and grinned. “See? I make one hell of a revolutionary.”
Cathryn slipped off her sandals and pulled her bare feet up on the worktable. “Fascinating,” she said. “I never had this problem.”
“It’s this new social mobility,” Willie said. “Damned lousy democratic way of life. And it’s worse down here where there aren’t many really old and good families left. What we’ve got is new money; status hasn’t solidified. You like that? You can move up — or at least drift in and out. It’s bad enough having to come to terms with the money itself … Very conspicuous consumption … You become acquisitive; you want things. But even then it’s not enough. You end up wanting the impossible things — like a new childhood.”
“All I want,” the girl said, “is a red M.G.”
“No unhappy thoughts about your misspent youth?”
“In my youth I wanted a red M.G.”
“You’ll get it,” Willie said. “You’re bound to.”
“I’ll end up a schoolteacher driving a five-year-old business coupe!”
“Maybe it’s because of my age,” Willie said.
“What is?”
“All this wishing I’d gone to summer camp and attended Choate School and Harvard and married a girl from one of those junior colleges you never heard of. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old. Because I’m thirty.
“You don’t look thirty.”
“Only as young as you feel,” Willie said. “I feel thirty. And shallow and superficial and defeated. Compromised. No more revolutions. I missed all that, too. I need an enthusiasm. I feel about ready to sell out. Except nobody would buy me off …”
“Good heavens!”
“I don’t ordinarily groan this way,” Willie said.
“Reading that paper of yours I thought you were irrevocably committed to the class war,” the girl said.
“I want a red M.G.,” Willie said.
Roy Sherwood lay across the bed, propped on his elbows, smoking a cigarette. Through the open window, from a great distance, he could hear the college towers clanging the half-hour. Only he hadn’t any notion what hour. One or two or three in the morning — it was all fuzzy in his head — and it was not that he wished so much for sleep now as simple, primitive release. Escape of any sort. Willie was right, he decided. My life, my wonderful, uneventful, irresponsible well-ordered life, is suddenly become complicated. He looked out through the window, marveling over the moonlight that seemed more spectacular than a noonday sun. I only want, he said to himself, to be left alone. Damn their souls — all of them — Ouida, Earle, Ellen, old Fenstemaker, Willie, even. Were they all out there, lurking in the shadows, ready to sandbag him with ambitions? He sniffed the gardenia bush through the window and rolled over on his back. He wondered if Earle Fielding really was outside, waiting for his next move, looking for the lights to dim.
Ouida came down the hall and sat on the bed. She smoked his cigarette.
“I hope that wasn’t Earle who called,” Roy said.
“No,” Ouida said. “It was Alfred. I can’t imagine why, either. Have I ever given Alfred any reason to think …?”
“Nobody gives Rinemiller any reason to think,” Roy said. “He does it all by himself. What’d he want at this hour?”
“To come out here. To see me. Just the two of us. He wanted to talk. Just the two of us … He kept saying that … I can’t imagine …”
“Keep away from him,” Roy said. “He’s up to no good.”
“Oh?” She lay alongside him and kissed his face. “What are you up to?”
“Good,” Roy said. “Good works. I’m the world’s greatest lawyer, politician and Zen archer, and I’m up to true and good and beautiful works.”
They lay on the bed in the back room with only light showing from the kitchen and dining area. There was a faucet dripping somewhere, and occasionally the Fielding boy loosed a sad complaint in his sleep. They traded the cigarette back and forth and Roy fretted with the radio. In a few minutes, he thought, he either would or wouldn’t make love to Ouida, and however it went, whatever success they might have, there was no release in sight. Life had become intolerably complicated in a few short weeks, and he wondered if this was what he had been unconsciously working toward all along. Avoiding any positive steps, one automatically narrowed alternatives. Resisting commitment of any kind, one was exposed to pitchmen of every sort. A pox on the irresolute! He’d get Willie to write it up, newsmagazine style: As it must to all men, the awful weight of responsibility came to State Rep. Roy Sherwood one day last week …
He wondered how long it would be before his father or uncle or older brother called, wanting to know what in hell all this talk was about his being censured. Who’s this married woman youah carryin’ on wif, boy? You can’t behave, we send Cousin Sammie up theah take you place and brang you back fah to practice the law. Lahk you should be, anyhow.
At breakfast that morning Fenstemaker had thought it a great joke. Roy considered Fenstemaker a moment, deciding he was either a dirty old man or the world’s second greatest lawyer, politician and Zen archer. The Governor had tugged on his big nose, sitting there at breakfast in the Mansion, and said, “You good boy, Roy, but that ain’t good nuff. Up in Washington right now, in the Statler, they already made the beds and swept the rooms — and ev’body’s out runnin’ round makin’ history. Lots of history been made on top of a woman, but you ain’t gonna make it that way. Not just yet, anyhow …”
Ouida sat up and snuffed out the cigarette. “I’m going to undress,” she said.
“Wish you wouldn’t,” he said.
“Why?”
“You’ll make things awfully difficult.”
“You’re a dud, you know that?” she said. “I thought we were all set to change the rules.”
“It’s just … Well, Earle’s in town. Rinemiller’s calling you on the phone. Your boy down the hall here, he’s whooping in his sleep. It’s an unwholesome environment …”
She held on to his hand and he began to speak again: “… I’m basically a poet, fundamentally a poet … Shy, sensitive, communicating on several levels of consciousness. Ambivalent is what I am …”
“All right,” Ouida said, smiling. “I’ll wake the sitter. We’ll go somewhere else. Where shall we go?”
“I’ll think about it,” he said. He lay there thinking.
“What about your house?”
“My cat’s there,” Roy said. “Name of Sam Luchow. A shy, sensitive basically ambivalent cat. I wouldn’t want to give Sam Luchow the trauma. He’s anxious enough as it is …”
Theories spun round in his head, schoolboyish and implausibly proper, vaguely Freudian. What he wanted, actually, was not to have Ouida. Would he have preferred to wander on out the front door and spend the next year rooting in his own bedcovers, pawing the ground, moaning about his unrequited love? It could not be entirely that. He did not want to get himself hopelessly involved with a girl he cared far too much about. Carnality had been such a tyrannizing factor between them from the beginning that he felt some effort ought to be made to establish another set of values before embarking on the obvious.
But then she pulled open her dressfront and lay against him, and his last uneasy conviction flailed the air and died. Her skin smelled wonderfully good, and they had some lighthearted beginnings.
Later, he pulled himself from bed and, partly dressed, bent down to kiss her fluttering heart. But she would not let him leave, coming awake in his arms and beginning to cry, and it was dawn before he got out of the house. He paced off the distance to the car and was just stepping inside when Earle Fielding grabbed him, whirled him around, and clipped him lightly on the chin.
The motion was all so smooth and effortless, so lacking in violence, that Roy could only sit on the damp grass and smile, looking about the neighborhood, watching the weird morning light touch the tops of houses. From a railroad siding miles away a single switch engine thudded against a boxcar. The lawn’s moisture was coming through the seat of his trousers. He touched his jaw and attempted to look serious.
Earle stood above him, embarrassed. On stage. His movements were oddly wooden as he circled warily. Finally he bent down and extended a hand.
“Aw hell, Roy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Roy looked up at him, still serious.
“You want a sonofabitch,” he said, “I’ll be your sonofabitch, Earle.”
Fielding began backing off and waving his hand. “Naw,” he was saying. “Jesus … forget it …”
Half a block down the damp street, the engine in Rinemiller’s car exploded like a cannon in the stillness of the dawn. Roy sat back down on the grass and watched Earle and the auto vanish over a hill.