A Key to the Suite

Ten

When he checked out of the Sultana at eleven the following morning, the joint convention of COLUDA and NAPATAN was still in full swing. Groups talked in the lobby, and other groups headed toward and away from the committee meetings and the workshops, wearing their badges, interrupting each other with gossip and jokes and industry shoptalk, nursing hangovers or smug with sobriety.

As the cab drove away from the hotel, he glanced back at the welcome banner, and wondered vaguely what banner would replace it. He remembered a phrase from a college course taken long ago. Structured environment. He realized he had acquired a new appraisal of the convention as an institution. It wasn’t, as Mulaney seemed to believe, a fun-fest, a week of broads and bottles and letting down the hair. That was a minor part of it. Nor was it a dedication ceremony, or an educational device.

It was, he decided, an organized way of achieving a gratifying illusion of importance. It was anthropological in nature. It was as if fifty nomad tribes selected a ceremonial meeting place each year, and gathered there to do the ancient ceremonies, elect chiefs, sacrifice maidens, brew bitter remedies, initiate the young men. By gathering in such numbers they could convince themselves they were a great people, who would endure forever. They could make brave speeches to each other about their importance in the frightening size of the universe. They could rattle their symbols of rank, tell the glorious tales of victories since the last time of meeting, and, in quiet corners of the encampment, they could make secret devious plottings, trades, alliances and conspiracies. Thus, at the next convention, AGM should be represented by a cold, taut, canny cadre of men of maximum ability, men who — while remaining suitably affable — would seek out every advantage, every scrap of information, and give nothing away in return, men who would nurse weak drinks, remember names and attend all meetings. He decided to make a special report to John Camplin stating these views.

There was one curious incident during the flight to Houston, an incident which momentarily disturbed him.

He had a window seat in the forward part of the aircraft. After they were en route, he tilted his seat back and cautiously allowed the first memories of Cory to come filtering up into his conscious mind, keeping them at half strength until he became quite certain they would not sting. Superimposed over the fresh memories of her was the first vague outline of his future attitude toward what had happened. He was objective enough to recognize it as a defense device, a rationalization which he could reasonably hope to substantiate. She had been aimed at him like a weapon, and he had had no chance from the beginning.

As he remembered all of it, he felt a vague astonishment that he had been so reluctant to bed her again, so prim and righteous. He felt astonishment and a slight sense of loss. At 26,000 feet, virtue and reluctance seemed asinine.

She had been aimed at him, and she had faked the emotional involvement with the effortlessness of the professional. And she had slipped, fallen and died, which seemed a waste and a shame, but hardly a tragedy. Yet, through taking such a curiously moral stance, he had accidentally made the assuring discovery that the second infidelity diminished the guilt of the first, and that the sum of guilt over two was less than the guilt over one. It might be a little awkward to face Jan this time, but if the formula was consistent, the third would further lessen this middle-class burden of remorse, and by the time he had reached the twentieth, guilt should be reduced to a minor irritation, a psychic hangnail bothersome only when touched. He wished he had been a little more sober when he’d bedded Honey Constanto. She was a little too vague to be a satisfying memory.

Thinking of Honey, he fell asleep. Soon he was in a vast black shower stall, where a luminous liquid fell in heavy drops from the ceiling, like the first rain of a thunder-storm. Cory stood small and naked and smirking in front of him, silvery in the strange light which came from the heavy drops. “You see how it is?” she was saying. “You see how it has to be?” And he knew what she was going to do, and tried to scream at her, to beg her not to do it, but he could make no sound. And once she had begun, he could not let himself move, because they had told him that if he moved while she was doing it, it would kill him. He looked down in horror and saw her slide her hands right through the skin and flesh and bone of his chest and felt her hands in there, tugging and turning. “Jan wrote me and told me I had to do it,” she said. He felt the thing come loose in his chest and knew she would draw it out and knew he should not look at it, but he could not look away. The luminous rain was falling faster. Cory bit her lip and slowly worked his heart out through the skin, holding it in her cupped hands. He saw it was only a heart, red, wet, shiny and pulsing, and he felt an enormous relief and said, “I could have told you that.”

“Don’t you see?” she said. “Can’t you see what it really is? Can’t you see what it’s always been, sweetheart?”

And with her thumbs she pressed it, and the thick red membrane broke, and she thumbed it aside. He shouted at her, telling her she was spoiling it, that there was no one around to fix it. He yelled that it was not what Jan wanted her to do, that she was making a mistake. But she thumbed it open, spoiling it, and held it in horrid triumph, and he stared into it and saw, to his utter horror, that the inside of it was...

“Hey!” the man beside him said. “Hey, fella!”

Hubbard struggled up out of sleep, sweaty and confused, his heart racing.

“Must of been having a nightmare, the way you were whining and jumping around, fella. You okay?”

“Yes. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Bad one?”

“Pretty bad. Yes.”

“You should hear my wife get going. She sits up in bed with her eyes wide open and howls like a hound dog. It’s a hell of a job waking her up. You woke easy.”

Hubbard looked directly at him for the first time and saw a man of his own age, casually dressed, with thinning blond hair and a wide, pleasant, sunburned face.

“I hardly ever dream like that,” Hubbard said in apology. “I haven’t been getting enough sleep, I guess.”

“On vacation?”

“No. Business trip.”

“Me too. Checking out some raw land for a possible syndicate operation. Resort housing. Waste of time this trip, though. What’s your line?”

The terror and confusion of the dream was still strong in his mind, yet he had begun to be aware of the symbolism of the dream, and it afforded him a sour amusement. “Lately I’ve been in the business of killing things.”

The man looked at him oddly. “You mean like an exterminator?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

The man said, uneasily, “It must be an interesting line of work.”

“At first it isn’t very pleasant. But then one day you realize you’re getting used to it, and you wonder if that’s really very healthy, but you don’t quit because it’s a good job and everybody likes the way you do it.” He realized he was speaking with too much intensity, but he could not stop. “Finally you get to like it. Do you understand? You get to like it, and then there’s no point in quitting, is there? I mean why should a man quit any kind of work he likes?”

“I guess... it’s a good thing to like your work,” the man said, and swallowed, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“I’m sorry. I was just making a bad joke. I was just kidding around.” He knew he had gone too far. He tried to smile reassuringly at the stranger, but the smile was curiously out of control. It kept coming and going, very rapidly. He could feel his mouth twitching with the smile, and he could feel his eyes begin to sting. “I... I’ll tell you what I really do,” he said.

“Listen. Don’t trouble yourself. Don’t bother, fella,” the man said. “Just get your rest.” He got up hastily and moved up the aisle and picked another seat on the half-empty flight.

It was a full thirty minutes before Floyd Hubbard was able to smile at himself and at the alarmed man.

When you plug along too hard and too long, your nerves get a little unraveled. Like the damn-fool tears last night. But this wasn’t as bad as that. And the next time won’t be as bad as this. When you know what to expect, you can handle it easier. For a little while he thought of Cory and Honey and Jan, with an equal ration of fondness for each of them, fondness, patience and understanding.

Then he took his dispatch case from under the seat and, using the surface of it as a desk, began to list in longhand the reasons why he felt Jesse Mulaney was inadequate in his job, the list that would form the meat of the typed confidential report he would deliver by hand to John Camplin before the day was over. As he labored to keep it as terse as possible, it made him think of the brevity of the news items he had found in the early edition of the afternoon paper, the one he had bought fifteen minutes before his flight left. Daniels had been given fourteen lines on page nine. Cory had been given twelve lines on page six. In neither case had the hotel been mentioned by name.

Just as he finished, he heard the strident note of the engines change and knew they were beginning to descend for the landing at Houston. He latched his belt, tightened his buttocks, and began the shallow breathing which would bring the plane in safely, time after time.