The Deceivers (18 page)

“That’s just dandy,” Carl said. “That’s fine.”

“Don’t worry about it. If he’s calling tonight, I’ll lie again. I find I have an entirely new knack of lying. I think I could become an expert.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We just won’t think about it.”

“What will the Stocklands think about it?”

“I don’t really care.”

“Eunice will have you pegged as a loose woman.”

“Has it not occurred to you, darling, that perhaps I am?”

She had fixed the lights. He opened the champagne and poured it. They sat on the two beds, facing each other, the bottle on the floor at his feet.

“You saw Joan today,” he said.

“I thought it would look horribly strange if I stayed away. But it was twenty minutes of hell. I’ve never felt like such a complete louse. I mean to sit there and chatter, just as though the world hadn’t suddenly been turned upside down. She’s a dear, you know. She’s the one who must, never, never find out about this.”

“She said the rest was doing you good. She said you looked radiant.”

“I didn’t know it showed. She asked me to be sure you were getting enough sleep. I’ve been very naughty about that, Carl. All you got last night were little bits and pieces of sleep. But I shouldn’t make a joke out of that. I suspect it is not in the best of taste. So I sat there and when she smiled at me, I felt perfectly willing to run out and cut my throat. It’s such a foul thing to do to her. And she’s such a warm sunny unsuspicious little guy.”

They drank and talked and soon the talk began to die, and the last of the bottle was divided between them. Her glass was empty first. When his was empty she took his glass out of his hand and took the glasses and bottle over to the bureau. Then she came back and stood between his knees and put her hands on his shoulders. The angle of the light shadowed her eyes.

She said, in a very low voice, “Last night, I was all tricked out in that terribly complicated clothing. Tonight I’m very very easy. No shoes, no bra, no panties. This pulls over my head and this I step out of. But at the moment, dearest, I’m terribly, terribly lazy.”

He stood up and pulled the sheath blouse up over her head, and free of her upstretched arms. He unbuttoned the side of the skirt and unzipped it. When it dropped she stepped out of it and then stood there looking at him quite gravely, her head slightly tilted to one side, her mouth soft and level.

“You’re glorious!” he said in a husky whisper.

And when he put his arms around her, his palms flat and firm on the planes of her back, her fingers worked quickly and efficiently at the buttons down the front of his sports shirt.

“I’m getting horribly bold and brazen,” she whispered.

“I like you this way.”

He pushed Bucky into a forgotten corner of his mind until morning when he was ready to leave her.

“What if Bucky calls again?”

“Then I shall lie again. And there’s nothing he can prove, is there?”

“You don’t want him to suspect, do you?”

“Don’t look so grim. The way I feel this morning, I’d like to throw it all in his face. I’d like to brag about it. And don’t look so alarmed, beloved. I won’t. But I’d like to.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Take a lovely little nap on this lovely Friday morning, and if I have any luck I’ll dream of you, and then I’m going to slosh in the pool. I brought a suit yesterday and came early and swam in the rain. It was lovely. And then I shall go eat a mountainous breakfast, and then go home and wander around the house feeling like half a person because I’m not with you, and then I’ll go buy something to wear just for you, and then I’ll come back out here as early as I dare, and have my swim and then go eat at Howard Johnson’s, and then come back and make myself as pretty and fragrant as possible, and then lie right here and think of you and how soon you’ll arrive and get myself all humid and bothered just thinking about you. Satisfied?”

“It will be the last time.”

“I won’t let myself think about that. And if I think about it at all, it’s only to tell myself that next time will be as much better than this time as this time was better than the first time.”

“We could stay two more nights. Saturday and Sunday. Joan comes home Monday. Bucky will be at the convention in Memphis.”

She sat up in bed, holding the sheet against her breasts. “I wouldn’t dare! I think he’ll get away Sunday and come back. But, darling, one more night! Oh, yes, we could have one more night. Oh, darling!”

“I’ll arrange it when I arrive tonight.”

She looked at him and said, “I would like to have enough nights here so that I could find out when it levels off, when it stops getting forever better for us. Already it’s the best there ever was, by far. Hurry back, my lover.”

The day was crisp, clear and bright, washed clean by Thursday’s rain. As he drove west along the straights and the sweeping engineered curves of the turnpike with the morning sun behind him, he could not for a time identify his feeling
of unease. And quite suddenly he realized that he regretted having brought up the idea of another night, and was disturbed that she had accepted it. Bucky’s suspicions troubled him. Her lies, which had seemed agile when she recounted them, now seemed clumsy.

But it was more than worry about Bucky, more than the feeling that their conspiracy had started to leak at the seams. It was, he sensed, the first awareness of the possibility of a surfeit of Cindy. Too much of her. She was sixteen years younger. And her ardors were becoming too … arduous. He smiled wanly at his own pun. He was wearied by two nights of sketchy and intermittent sleep, and he remembered, on this past night, being brought reluctantly and somewhat querulously up out of the sooty velvet of deep sleep by the mischievous insistencies of her fingers, the incandescent bloom of her lips, the furry whispering of a strand of her hair drawn across his face. She was at a pneumatic peak of supple health, and on this past night pride had been forced to take the place of wanting. Her energies were so shockingly impressive that what had been exciting had now started to become a little alarming. He felt like the man in the legend who had undertaken to empty the Seine with a sieve.

And he felt a sudden hot resentment that right now she should be back there snug in that sheeted battleground, restoring herself with the deep blurred sleep of satiety. He knew that he could survive one more night of their intricate gamboling, knew that by evening he would be eager again, but the thought of an additional night brought more despair than pleasurable anticipation.

He knew that today she would again visit Joan, and in the callous light of morning it seemed to him a shocking thing, wife and mistress exchanging pleasantries amid the sterile bustle of the County Memorial Hospital. She looked radiant.

Though he drove as fast as he dared, by the time he had changed, there was no time to stop for breakfast before he had to be at the office. At ten-thirty he had a chance to send Mrs. Brisbie out for a cheeseburger, coffee and a large vanilla milkshake. He was eating and working at his desk when Ray Walsh came in with the draft of an idea he was bird-dogging. It involved a substitution of materials on one of the basic items. He had gotten an okay from Production, Design, Purchasing and Engineering, and needed Carl’s approval of the cost picture. Ray pulled a chair over beside Carl’s and they went over the breakdown. The change-over would cause an
increased unit cost in the beginning, but when it leveled out it would mean an eventual saving. After Carl initialed his approval, Ray Walsh leaned back and grinned at him. Ray was a man in his middle thirties with prematurely gray hair, an open friendly manner, small shrewd blunt eyes. It was the general opinion that Ray would do very well for himself indeed, and it would be healthy to keep your guard up, but not to keep it too obviously high because if Ray climbed over your head one day, he would have a long memory. So he was treated with caution because of the extent of his ambition, and respect because of his abilities.

“Well, well,” he said. “Black circles under the eyes. Big energy-building milkshake in the middle of the morning. You must be taking this golden opportunity to really bounce the fillies around, Carl.”

Carl felt a dull anger which he was careful not to show. He smiled and said, “I’m the steady type, Ray. Just haven’t been sleeping too well.”

Ray winked and knuckled Carl’s shoulder and said, “Hell, man, who can sleep next to one of those lovely little tidbits? If you want to get lined up with a real jewel, and incidentally help get her off my hands, I can give you a …”

Carl heard himself say in a direct and gritty voice, “What I do or what I want to do doesn’t seem to me to be any of your God damn business, Walsh.”

The friendly Walsh smile turned to stone and faded quickly away. He picked up the draft of his proposal and stood up. “I appreciate your approving this, Garrett.” He headed for the corridor door.

“Ray! Wait a minute.”

Walsh turned and waited, expressionless.

“I apologize, Ray. My nerves are on edge.”

Ray took two steps toward the desk. “So your nerves are on edge. Maybe you better wake up and look around you, boy. You’re tabbed as an odd-ball. You’ve built a home away from home. You’ve got everything so flattened out you don’t have any pain or strain. You’ve got a nice easy routine.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“This isn’t the most aggressive outfit in the world, but once in a while they like a few changes here and there, for the better. A lot of people think it’s pretty damn funny that you’re supposed to be the big costs boy, but you never come up with anything constructive. You make big contributions, you do. You’ve got a specialty. You sit around and make hilarious
comments. Don’t you believe in what the hell you’re doing, Garrett?”

“Do you?”

“That’s just the kind of odd-ball reaction I’d expect. You’re perfectly right. What you do and what you want to do is none of my God damn business. I’ve seen your type before. You’re another hunk of dead weight the rest of us have to haul around. Wake up, boy. Check the next conference. Nobody expects anything constructive from you. And your jokes don’t get much of a laugh. You just sit in.”

“You better knock it off, Walsh.”

“Gladly,” he said, and banged the door when he left. Carl knew that he had not made an enemy by his irritable response. He had just brought resentment and enmity out into the open. But the trouble with that was that now Ray would feel entitled to carry the knife openly. And Ray Walsh could be dangerous.

The most uncomfortable part of it was the sneaking knowledge that Ray was right, up to a point. He had contented himself with the function of merely measuring and reporting. And though it had never been explicitly stated, he was also expected to come up with cost-cutting ideas and follow them through.

He pressed the switch on the intercom and said, “Mrs. Brisbie, come in here a moment.”

She came in with the usual look of competent inquiry on her pale thin face, her implausible breasts cantilevered in front of her.

“Round up Misters Finch, Goldlaw and Sherban and send them in here, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

He realized that it had been a very long time since he had had a departmental conference with his three assistants. When things were running smoothly he thought nothing was as inane as a meaningless conference. Nothing seemed as ridiculous as a think-fest.

Finch and Goldlaw came in and sat down on invitation and they talked idly until Will Sherban arrived. The meeting lasted forty minutes. After they left he was faced with another sour self-appraisal. They felt that he had a private policy against any constructive suggestions affecting operations outside the department. There were too many of their memos to him that had died in the files. Lou Goldlaw, of the phenomenal memory, had cited chapter and verse. He had sensed
in them the resentment toward him which is the inevitable reward of the bureaucrat.

He had said the only thing he could—that all such memos would be given specific and immediate attention, but not to go running off in all directions to the extent that normal procedures would deteriorate. He felt as if he had begun to erect a defense against the machinations of Ray Walsh, but a rather frail one. And for the first time in several years he felt the nervous flutter of insecurity, saw himself waiting in a hundred anterooms for the hopeless interview, collar too large on the scrawny neck, broken shoes highly polished, clothes neatly mended and pressed. We’re sorry, Mr. Garrett, but our policy prevents our employing anyone over forty.

He brushed the plaintive and ridiculous image out of his mind. His New York contacts were good. Ballinger seldom released an executive except at his own request.

But it would be very very wise to take a more aggressive attitude. And to try, for God’s sake, to convince himself that the destiny of the Hillton Metal Products Division of the Ballinger Corporation was the most important thing in creation.

During most of the day he was able to compartmentalize Cindy, to keep her stowed in a locked cupboard in the back of his mind. But in the late afternoon she broke out and from then on she moved, slow and naked, through all his thoughts, her head tilted slightly, gray-blue eyes wide and touched with lust, lips apart in provocative question, tousled hair falling to her fragrant shoulders. And she made a stirring in his loins, made him feel breathless and sweaty. And guilty.

When he got home at five-thirty, he went to bed, setting the alarm for seven-fifteen. When it awakened him he felt drugged and sullen and sticky, with a furry taste in his mouth. A quick shower did little to throw off his feeling of depression.

He did not get to the hospital until eight o’clock.

When he saw Cindy sitting beside Joan’s bed, he felt as if his heart had stopped, and then, reluctantly, assumed an accelerated beat. Joan saw him first and smiled at him as he came in the doorway. Her smile was warm and genuine. Cindy turned and smiled also. It was an apologetic, tremulous and slightly frightened smile. She wore a sleeveless red blouse, a crisp white skirt, sandals with white thongs tied around her slim brown ankles.