You fight that unsavory assignment, knowing it is a battle you must lose, and this time you have a stony, bitter awareness of the camera eye, and you ease your shame and your dreadful hate by enticing the fat man into those postures of intimacy which will guarantee the most ludicrous and shameful performance on his part. You feel absolutely nothing—no stage fright, no shame, no sensation. Your body is a nerveless dutiful thing you have learned how to despise. It is a gross, flexing thing, suitable only to pleasure fat fools. It takes him but two nights to prove his valor by losing back all his winnings, and a third night to lose an additional forty thousand. When he tried to find reassurance in you, he learns the heavy losses have induced impotence, and so he weeps, helpless, half drunk, rolling his head from side to side, and saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama.”
After a year of waiting, and trying not to remember you are waiting, you try to bluff Max out of turning over to you the problem of the lucky Venezuelan. But Max, of course, cannot be bluffed when he knows his hand contains the case ace. At least, this time, they see no reason to record the interlude. But after the Venezuelan has prided himself upon the success of a seduction, he reveals himself in his true sadistic arrogance.
He is a small wiry man, vain, fit and rich, much given to a careful combing of his glossy hair. Once he has convinced himself that you find him irrresistible, he becomes much too free with his small, swift, hard fists, his slaps, his gutter words, his glares of contempt. He has won heavily and now that he is losing with the same rapidity, he becomes frantic, and more cruel—more like a small vicious rooster. You reach the end of endurance a little before all the winnings are gone, and when an offhand blow lands squarely upon a recent bruise, you interrupt his naked, muscle-flexing parade with a full swinging kick that makes him scream like a woman.
When he crawls toward you with simple murder on his face, you flex that solid thigh and you feel the cartilaginous tissues of his nose flatten under the blocky impact of your knee, sickening you. But he still comes on, the eyes staring murder over the ruin of his face, whimpering in his eagerness to be at you, and he is stopped only when you smash the narrow vase against his head and dress in frantic haste, trying not to look toward him, and leave his hotel suite and go directly to Max, because the special problems of a special business are taken directly to the specialist involved.
It turns out that he is not dead. He is painfully, but not even seriously, injured. Max handles everything, quiets everything down with swift efficiency.
Afterward he will not explain how it was so readily handled, but he says, “Anybody knocks you around, you let me know fast. You don’t have to take that from any of these clowns, sugar. You’re too valuable I should let some mark mess you up. Here’s your cut, with a bonus. Take a couple nights off. Go visit your old man or something. Get yourself settled down. We’re taking the very best care of you around here, kid.”
And so, except for the “assignments,” you live in complete celibacy. If the body is to be used in the sly ways of an expensive shill, any dual usage is not to be contemplated. It is an age, indeed, of specialization. It is odd to think that any body, used by so few, could have become so brutally desensitized. Because, after all, there have been only five of them. Jackie was shocked, incredulous and almost frightened to learn you were virgin. And after him you can count only the friend he loaned you to, and Riggs Telfert, and the fat man and the vicious little Venezuelan. The five men in your life. Who else—at twenty-six—had ever accommodated such widely disparate types in a group so small?
And then along came Hugh Darren. Along came love. But when you have gone beyond a certain point, love becomes a luxury you cannot afford. So you fight like a cornered bandit. But what’s the harm in being friends? It can’t hurt anything, just being friends. Can it? And in a truly inevitable way, friends become lovers. You can only pray he will not notice how soiled is the body you place on this special altar. You pretend you are the clean thing he should have. And you cannot let him know about the love. That has to be hidden. Because, inevitably, it will end, and you elect yourself as the one most deserving hurt.
Keep it a fun thing, a light and gay thing, an extension
of friendship, not of the heart. No implications or obligations. Just love him, and keep it to yourself, and relish the wondrous things that happen between the two of you. Pile up the memories in a trunk in the closet of your mind, because after it ends it is going to rain every day for the rest of your life, and it will be nice to have something to look at. You have known, through every moment of love, that it would end when Max Hanes made his next demand. Because, in spite of your greed for Hugh, you cannot sneak Max’s dirty task into your emotional schedule, shrug it off and return to Hugh’s bed, to his special deftness with you, to that something so far beyond joy it has no word.…
She looked, dull-eyed, at the hushed, familiar luxury of Unit 190. This is where love gets killed, she thought. This is where we knock it on the head and kick it under the rug and forget it ever was. And why, with all that I know I’m going to lose, should I still have room to be sorry about losing the good will of that old man from Texas? The others were fools. He is not. There is no possible approach, but Max won’t believe me. This would be a very good night to be dead in. Just pull this night up like a blanket and be dead and safe forever.
• • • eight
Temple Shannard was brought awake too early on Monday morning, his third morning in the big bed beside Vicky’s bed in the glamorous Suite 803 in the Cameroon on the Strip in Las Vegas. He was pulled up out of heavy slumber that was doing him no good, brought rudely into a painful consciousness by the brutal pains in the abused cerebral cortex—pains such as might be caused by a brace and bit being turned slowly into his skull, with exquisitely thin ribbons of bone being pared away by the cutting edge of the drill. He had a thirst so massive he knew he would be unable to satisfy it. He lay for a time with his eyes squeezed shut against the faint morning light in the room, listening to the alarming sound of his heart, and wondering if he was going to throw up. His heart felt like a bowling ball rolling very slowly down a flight of wooden stairs.
He knew he had been drunk, but he did not care to look beyond the requirements of his immediate agony. He had the wary feeling that any sort of retrospection would make him feel considerably more miserable. He clenched his teeth against the agony of sitting up, waited a few minutes, and at last felt able to stand up and pad quietly into the bathroom and close the door.
You are damn near fifty-one years old, Shannard, he told himself, and this is one hell of a stupid thing to do to yourself.
His body felt drab, sour and sticky. He leaned his thighs against the chill of the tiled counter and drank four glasses of water, paused as though listening for something, sidestepped to the toilet, lowered himself to his knees and was extremely ill. Quite a long time later, after trying another glass of water and retaining it, he felt up to taking a shower. As he stood in the harsh roaring of the shower, his eyes closed, larger events tried to work their way into his mind, but he pushed them back, knowing he was not yet ready. He sensed that there would be very little armor he could wear, but he wanted to put on all that was available to him.
On most of the mornings of his life, Temple Shannard had awakened with the conviction that life was an important and wonderful phenomenon. He sensed that it might be a difficult proposition to support on this particular morning.
After more water, he set about shaving with more care than usual. For the sake of his morale, he wanted to give himself a particularly good shave. And, in spite of the tremor of his hands, he was determined not to cut himself.
Just as he finished one long stroke, the outside thought seemed to gather itself and plunge through the wall of his brain and squat triumphantly behind his eyes.
THEY WANT TO BUY YOU OUT.
He held the razor quite motionless and stared at his reflection.
YOU
’
RE TRAPPED, SHANNARD. YOU HAVE TO MOVE FAST. YOU
’
LL HAVE TO UNLOAD YOUR EQUITY. ONCE YOU
’
RE SQUARED AWAY, YOU
’
LL HAVE DAMN LITTLE CASH LEFT.
So, he thought, beginning another measured stroke of the razor, I’ve had little cash before, and I’ve made out. I’ll take their offer. I’m being squeezed out of a potential fortune, so I’ll just have to work twice as hard to worm my way into some more deals. I’ll have a little left to start with.
OH, BUT YOU WON
’
T
!
YOU LOST IT LAST NIGHT.
The shock and the fear struck him with an impact that actually made him lose his physical balance, sent him tottering sideways.
How much?
Maybe I didn’t lose at all!
How much did I lose?
He nicked his chin deeply, stanched it with a pasted-on scrap of toilet tissue. He opened the bedroom door cautiously. Vicky still slept. His suit was a heap on the chair. With hands made unsure by his fright and suspense, he went through the pockets and found his small notebook. He had a muddy memory of writing down the amounts of the checks they had cashed so obligingly. He turned slowly to the proper page and saw his own drunken writing, a clumsy, obstinate scrawl, but entirely legible. He added the short column, moving his lips. He added it again and got the same total. Sixty-three thousand dollars.
He looked into his wallet and found a little over a hundred dollars in cash. He went to the bureau and found three fifty-dollar chips among his keys and his pocket change. He walked naked to a deep chair by the draperies that muted the morning light, and sat down, feeling weak and confused and dizzy. He ran totals and balances in his mind. And finally he realized he had inadvertently made himself the victim of an ultimate irony—if he sold to the people Marta had contacted, and if he returned at once to Nassau and sold every other asset he had, including the house and the boat and the car, and applied every dime against his liabilities, he would very probably come out exactly even, exactly broke.
He told himself there was probably some mistake. He couldn’t have lost that much. But he knew he had. And every time the figure floated into his mind, bloated and obscene, the sweat broke out on his body.
Vicky turned and sighed in her sleep and nestled down again. He felt a need to be closer to her. He went over to her bed and lowered himself very slowly and cautiously onto the edge of her bed, so as not to awaken her. She slept nude, and in her last stirring she had turned herself half onto her back, one arm curled above her head. The edge of the sheet cut diagonally across her chest, leaving one plump firm breast exposed. At thirty, it had a sag so slight that only the most absurd of perfectionists could have faulted it. The nipple was a dusky orange-pink, unwithered. The creamy globe, laced with the faintest blue tracery of veins, had a
warm sweet texture well and deeply remembered in the neural patterns of his hands and his lips. Her face had that pleasant sulkiness of a sleeping child, and her body was tenderly described by the soft blue clasp of the blanket molded to it.
He felt the rising, tautening thrust of desire for her and remembered it was a phenomenon quite typical of his infrequent hangovers, as though liquor stirred up the guilts and insecurities that could best be combatted by this sweet and ready conquest.
Her eyes opened just then, and they were blind for a little while before she brought them to a focus on him. He hitched closer to her, smiled, gently cupped his brown hand on the naked impudence of the exposed breast, and whispered, “Good morning, darling.”
“Take your stupid hand off me!”
There was a long moment of shock before he could obey her. He could not have been more astonished had a kitten gamboled up to him and disemboweled him. Never, except in illness, had she refused him. Never had she spoken to him in such a tone. It was not merely annoyance or irritation. It was anger and contempt, plus a much more frightening thing—indifference.
She got up slowly with one cool and casual glance toward him, went into the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind her. It seemed a long time before she came out. He sat in robe and slippers. She came out of the bathroom naked, as was her habit, and without a glance toward his chair began to busy herself with the mechanics of dressing. He had thought it a simple and endearing habit, not quite innocently provocative, a gesture of trust and closeness. Yet now, somehow, through her very nakedness and the way she handled her body, she managed to express a cool contempt.
“I guess I had a very stupid time for myself,” he said.
“Quite.”
“I dropped a bundle. I guess that’s the right wording.”
“I know. You told me how much, when you came in at three-thirty. You woke me up to tell me. Sixty-three thousand dollars. And after that exhibition, you wanted to be cuddled and comforted. You wanted me to dry your eyes and kiss your wounds and tell you how wonderful you are. You couldn’t have been more revolting, dearie.”
She hammocked her breasts into her bra, snapped it, hitched at it, and gave herself a profile glance in the mirror.
“I guess it was because I was disappointed, Vicky. That
conference came out so badly. I guess I … got some reckless ideas.”
She came back from the closet, laid a gray suit on her bed and said casually, “I couldn’t possibly be less interested in probing your motives, dearie. In the vernacular, I couldn’t care less.”
“It seems to me,” he said with a trace of surly anger, “that if you saw I was being a damn fool, you might have stopped me.”
She whirled and looked at him. “Stopped you?
Stopped
you! Hugh tried. I tried. You have no idea how ugly you were. Nobody could have stopped you, you silly old son of a bitch!”
“You’ve never spoken to me like that before!”
She shrugged and turned away, saying, “Haven’t I, dearie?”