A Key to the Suite

Six

Little Miss Cory Barlund came out of the eighth floor elevator at eleven thirty, paused to orient herself, and then began walking down the carpeted corridor that led to the AGM suite. She had the lithe walk of a model, all control, nothing sexy, nothing obvious. She wore her best “little nothing” dress, a junior dress, sleeveless, with a high collar, beltless, of such a calculatedly casual fit that it clung where and when it should, and swung free when it should, clinging and touching and releasing in the rhythm of her chin-high stride and the small movement of her toffee hair. The dress was the color of milk sherry. Her shoes were white and her small purse was white, and she wore gloves that matched the sherry dress perfectly. There were little gold buttons in her pierced ears. Her nylons were sheer as cobwebs, and latched to a riband of garter belt. Her panties were lace and her half bra was an A cup, and the aromatic redolence of the perfume behind her ears and on her wrists and between her breasts was forty dollars the ounce.

She moved down the corridor and kept herself from thinking by focusing on a pleasant sensual awareness of the slight movements of the fabric touching her body and the rhythmic little thump of the camera pack against her hip, dangling from the narrow strap over her right shoulder.

When she was more than halfway down the corridor, a door not far in front of her opened and Dave Daniels came out. He started to close the door, then noticed her. Unshaved, he was in shirt sleeves, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. She nodded coldly and tried to move around him, but he blocked her passage.

She backed up a few steps and said, “Let me by, please.”

“After I tell you you’re not kidding me a bit. I got an instinct. I always know the score.”

“Did you start drinking again? Or are you still drunk, Mr. Daniels?”

“Come on in and talk it over.”

“Not today. Not any day.”

He reached for her but she backed up swiftly. She said calmly, “You’re an idiot, Daniels. How much do you think you can get away with? I took voice lessons for five years. I know how to breathe and how to project. If you touch me, I could make a noise that would open every door on this floor. And if you bother me one more time, I’m going to explain to all the rest of them that I have to drop the article because you’re making it too difficult for me.”

Daniels leaned against the corridor wall. “So what will work?”

“Give up.”

“But now I got you on my mind.”

“And that will be a terrible source of worry and concern to me, Mr. Daniels,” she said, and walked past him and on down the corridor. He watched her intently until she turned into the suite, and then he went back into his room, lifted the bourbon bottle and drank from it until an involuntary gag closed his throat. “I’m Dave Daniels,” he said thickly. “I never miss. One way or another, I never miss. Never have. Never will.”

It was quarter of twelve when Floyd Hubbard, nearing the open door of the AGM suite, heard and recognized Cory’s laugh. Though her voice was light and almost frail, her laugh, as he had noticed the previous evening, was full-bodied, earthy, as if she had borrowed it from a more vigorous woman. The laugh moved his heart up into the peak of his chest, and he swallowed it back down.

She was in the suite with Bobby Fayhouser, Charlie Gromer and Les Lewis, and she was taking a picture of the three road men against the background of the small AGM exhibit which had been set up in the suite. The flash attachment made its quick white flicker of light, and she turned and smiled at him, winding the film as she turned. “Hi, Floyd. I want one of you too, even though I don’t know what you do yet. Bobby and Les have been telling me that for their jobs, AGM picks only those men who show potential top executive abilities.”

“Now hold it!” Bobby said. “That’s what Les told you, Cory. I’ve been told I’m as far as I’m ever going to get. Mr. Hubbard is more the executive type. All the home office operations, except sales, have been moved to Houston, and that’s where he is.”

“Move over by the couch, Floyd,” she said. “About there. What is your title, really?”

“I’m an administrative assistant to the executive assistant to the assistant to the vice president.”

“It won’t fit under the picture,” she said. “I’ll make you a vice president. Hold still. Turn your head a little bit away from me. There!”

“I’m immortalized,” Floyd said.

“If it comes out good, you can get extra copies from the magazine.”

“No pictures of me ever come out good. I always look like a mechanic who just got promoted to service manager. Joe’s Garage.”

Just at that moment, Jesse Mulaney arrived with a group, and the road men sprang into action, fixing drinks, reading badges, memorizing names. Frick came in with some more strangers. Hubbard maneuvered Cory over into an area of some limited privacy and said, “Now you can say it.”

“Say what, darling? Good morning?”

“No. You’re supposed to say the sea breeze made you giddy, so kindly ignore the whole thing, phone call included.”

“Look at me, Floyd. Look right into my eyes. What do you think?”

“I think they’re not completely blue. There’s little brownish dots in the blue, close to the pupil.”

“Idiot! Stop being evasive. What else does it... do to you?”

“It... it makes me think we’re going to have to do a lot of talking to talk this to death.”

“I know. But we have to, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Because we’re grownups, aren’t we, Floyd? And because of Jan.”

“You better look away, honey, because I can’t seem to move a muscle.”

“And I couldn’t sleep. And all the way here, I couldn’t take a deep breath.”

“Cut it out!”

She turned away slightly. “It isn’t fair it should be worse today, darling. It’s supposed to be less.”

“Go take pictures. Go interview people.”

“Yes, master,” she said, and gave him a wicked and knowing grin, and walked over to where Cass Beatty stood talking to two other men. She took a letter out of her purse and gave it to Cass. He read it quickly, smiled, and put it in his pocket. Several minutes later Floyd saw him showing it to Mulaney.

Frick came over to where Hubbard stood alone and said, “Say, I saw you down there sitting in on that workshop crap this morning. You don’t have to let yourself in for that sort of stuff, Floyd. Like I tell my boys, it’s a lot of window dressing to make it look as if the convention is accomplishing something. Nobody ever gets anything out of that crud.”

“I guess it was interesting to me because it was new to me.”

Frick nudged him. “Like the man says, try everything once. You know, some outfits make their boys attend. That’s why there was a showing down there. But like Jesse says, nobody ever learned to sell by listening to somebody else talk about it.”

“You can either sell or you can’t?”

Frick looked at him with vague suspicion. “Well, there’s some things you can teach, the way I teach my boys, going right out there with them. And I guess some of the manuals don’t actually hurt anybody. But whenever one of our boys comes back from special training, the first thing I tell him is forget... I mean... uh...”

“The practical, realistic outlook, eh?”

Frick seemed heartened. “You hit it right on the button, Floyd. The best school is the school of hard knocks.” He punched Hubbard’s arm. “Everybody’s here to have a time. So stay loose. At the conventions, fella, everything goes.”

Hubbard did not have a chance to talk to Cory again until after the official lunch. When they went down, she rode with another group in a separate elevator. At lunch she was at an adjoining table. He felt vaguely irritated that she should be having such an obviously hilarious time talking to Carmer on one side of her, and Cass Beatty on the other. The two AGM wives were not there. He was seated between Charlie Gromer and Dave Daniels. Gromer was too wary of him to want to say very much, and Daniels was so woodenly drunk it required all his concentration to appear undrunk. The speaker was reasonably amusing, but his talk was too long.

As the big room emptied, he kept an eye on Cory, and moved in from the flank after she had reached the lobby. Carmer seemed reluctant to part company with her, but she solved it by putting her hand out and saying, “It was such fun talking to you, Tom. I hope it’ll happen again soon.”

As she turned to Floyd she said, “I knew it was you standing there. I’ve acquired a brand new seventh sense, darling. I’ve known just where you’ve been every moment.”

They moved over toward the wall. “Where do we start killing it with conversation?” he asked. “In a bar? By the pool? Some public place.”

She tilted her head to the side. “I’ve got to find a place to change film, dear. I’m at the end of a roll. It’s very sensitive. I have to have complete darkness. I can change it by touch. I looked in the girls’ room, but there’s no place there. There’s no window in your bathroom, is there?”

“No.”

“We could go up there first, and then think of a place to talk.”

“How smart is that, Cory?”

“You mean being seen?”

“No, I don’t mean being seen, and you know it.”

She sighed. “I guess it isn’t smart. Okay. Give me your key, dear. Where shall I meet you?”

“I’ll hang around here.”

She took the key. “It won’t take me five minutes.” She winked at him. “Coward!”

“I warned you.”

He sat in a lobby chair. He waited five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. After twenty minutes had passed, he went up to his room. He rapped on the door. It opened a small cautious way, and then swung wide. She walked away from him to stand by the terrace door, her back to the room.

He closed the room door and said, “Uh... get your film changed?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said in a small rusty voice.

“Well... I wondered what was keeping you.”

“I was just going to come back down. I took... some time out for tears.”

He walked close to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “Tears?”

She shrugged his hands off and moved a step away. “For no good reason, I guess.”

“Come on, Cory. What’s the matter?”

She whirled and stared angrily at him. “Why do we have to be so damn scrupulous and decent? Who knows what’s going to happen to anybody in the world tomorrow? Why do I have to be cheated? I’ve been cheated out of too much in my life.” Her face twisted. “So I’m shameless. I want to go to bed with you. Please, please, please.” She hurled herself at him, and he held her trembling body. With her face against his throat, she said, “Would it just be so terribly cheap it would spoil everything? Is it too soon?”

For an instant a ridiculous image came into his mind, a fragment of an old movie comedy, a man on the rickety wing of a high-flying airplane carefully pinching his nose before leaping wildly into space.

“Not cheap,” he said. “And not soon.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes,” and looked at him gravely, intently, stepped to the drapery cords, yanking the pumpkin draperies closed to fill the room with orange light, like a room at the edge of some giant furnace.

When he saw her nude, there was a virginal economy about her figure, but all smoothly sheathed, all projection of bone muted, sleekly functional as a seal. The feel of her when she slid into his arms made him gasp for breath. The texture of her was dry, smooth, firm and curiously heated, like silk fresh from the iron.

When he awoke it was dark, and the tall ceramic lamp on the table between the beds was on. He awoke with no memory of having gone to sleep, and no memory of when the lamp had been turned on, or who had done it. He looked at his watch and saw that it was a quarter to nine. He was on his back, and felt as if the whole area from his heart to his knees had been hollowed out, leaving only a papery husk which would collapse if he moved without caution.

She sprawled asleep on the neighbor bed, prone, her face toward him in the lamplight, breathing deeply and slowly through the slack swollen lips. Her delicate face had a puffed, strained, misused look, a residue of fevers. In the thickets of recent memory he saw that face, moving in the pumpkin light now gone, at all angles and distances, always with the same look, glazed, deadened, intent, the eyes half closed, the mouth wider. And he heard the sounds, the nasal petulant whining when all was not just as she wanted it, and the rhythmic coughing gasps when things went well for her.

His mind drifted, forlorn, trying to find analogies which could help him perceive the relationship and understand what had happened. He felt that sense of loss one has when someone dear has died, and in a little while he understood he mourned the loss of Cory, the fictitious Cory of the sea breeze and the phone call. He missed a girl named Cory, forever gone.

You would feel this way, he thought, if you killed some kind of innocent thing with your hands. If you conspired to kill it. If the two of you pursued it in its terror for a long way over rough country, enduring your own exhaustion in the dark joy of the chase, and then caught it at last, tortured it for a long time, then bled it and gutted it and buried it and stomped the ground flat. It would be like this. You would not want to look directly at each other. You would be filled with a listless shame, but in some curious way you would be joined in a conspiracy of guilt. The worst of it, perhaps, is the knowledge that you will want to run the wild chase again.

Or, he thought, is it my own innocence I mourn? How could I have not known of this dimension in the world I’m in, where everything can be erased, leaving only the animal agony, the animal greed?

He turned his head to look at her again, and as he did so she opened her eyes. The light glinted on the tiny gold buttons in the small gentle ear lobes. Her eyes were an unfocused blue, and he saw them change as they saw him, saw them close and open again.

She pushed herself up, swung her legs off the bed to sit facing him. She gave an aching yawn, shuddered, scratched her head. “W’time is it?”

“Nearly nine,” he said. “When did we go to sleep?”

“Donno, dear. It was dark.” She stood up and swayed, then padded off into the bathroom. In a little while he heard the sound of the shower. He drowsed off and awakened when she touched his foot. She was sitting on the foot of his bed, looking at him. She looked at him with a mild, skeptical interest, the way a woman looks at something she might buy, if she can think of a use for it.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said.

“Let’s just say I’m not delighted with myself, either.”

She pulled her legs up, hugged them, her chin on her knees, looking at him with mockery. “Oh, you’ll be delighted with yourself soon enough, Hubbard. You’ll remember. You’ll strut. You’ll love telling your friends about it. You’re a strong man, you know.”

“What are you trying to prove, Cory?”

She tilted her head, and her eyes changed. For the first time he had the odd feeling that she was not entirely sane. “I’ve proved it, haven’t I? I’m the best you ever had. I’m the best you’ll ever have. I made you holler, and that was a brand new thing for you, wasn’t it? Not like the other times you’ve done a little cheating, was it? Tell me I’m the best!”

“It’s the first time I’ve cheated.”

Her laugh was derisive. “Oh, come now!”

“It’s the truth, Cory. Why would I lie to you?”

She looked uncertain, slightly troubled. “You’re unusual, then. Why not?”

“Let’s put it this way. I haven’t really felt any need for anything I couldn’t get with Jan. I’ve been curious about a few other women, but not enough to make it worth while loading myself with a lot of middle-class guilt.”

“Now you’ve got something to feel guilty about, lover.”

“It’s going to take a while to sort out just how I’m going to feel about it.”

Her smile was like a sneer. “I’ll tell you one way you’ll feel, darling. From now on, your darling, adorable, innocent Jan is going to be like so much oatmeal. Every time you have oatmeal, you’ll remember steak.”

“I don’t think it will be that way, Cory. And I don’t know why you should want it to be that way. You act right now as if you hate me. I think it’s going to be fine with Jan and me, as it always has been.”

“You’ll find out.”

“I’m not going to be comparing. This was something else.”

“It was just exactly the same thing, dear, but better, because I’m better.”

“I’ll say you’re not the way I thought you’d be.”

“All girly-girl?” she said contemptuously. “Shy and blushing and sighing?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“The film I was using. It says not to change film in bright sunlight, Floyd. That’s all.”

“And there was no time out for tears?”

“Of course not.”

“Why the production, then?”

“I wanted you, and I didn’t want to take the chance of scaring you off, darling. You like to pretend you’re a decent man. I think that’s very quaint and nice, really. And in the beginning, you were so cute and boyish, trying to be so manly, dear.”

“I sort of lost the initiative pretty early in the game.”

“You wouldn’t have done much with it if I’d let you keep it. I knew you were irritated about that. I could tell. You were resisting me in little ways for quite a long time. And then you got to the point where you could stop thinking and worrying, and then I could give us a lot of hours of it.”

A sudden anger tightened his throat. “I think you’re an evil little bitch, Cory.”

She laughed at him. “I’m a choosy evil bitch and a delicious evil bitch and a very competent evil bitch. And all this competence is all yours, dear, for the whole convention.”

“No thanks.”

She laughed again. “Try to say that tomorrow, when you start wondering if the things you think happened really happened. You’ll want to find out all over again. You’ll have to find out, Floyd. You’re hooked, darling. Don’t fight it. Why spoil the fun? My God, the way you look at me! Your little puritan soul is outraged. You hate me right now because I destroyed all your manly dignity and turned you into a rather untidy animal, and it hurts your pride to think how much there was that I had to teach you. By tomorrow, lover, you’ll realize that I wasn’t using you, and laughing at you. You’ll remember that I was far too busy being my own kind of animal, and you’ll remember how you learned to drive me practically out of my mind, and you’ll feel so terribly masculine and eager, you won’t be able to wait to get us in here with the door locked. Right now, lover, you’re ruined. You’d get as much kick out of looking at a mailbox as you get out of staring at me. If I hugged you, you’d probably gag. It astonishes you that I ever looked good to you. But you just wait, brother. Just wait and see.”

She got off the bed and began to get dressed, humming to herself. He could see movement out of the corner of his eye, but he did not watch her directly.

She came over and stood by the bed and said, “I’m off, darling.”

“Cory?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Why does it have to be so... antagonistic? Okay, you’re not what you seemed to be. And you’re something I never ran into before. And I’ll admit I was overmatched. But why does it have to be like... some kind of revenge? I haven’t tried to hurt you.”

“You’ve hurt Jan, haven’t you?”

“Possibly. What’s that to you?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Who are you getting even with?”

“Who’s asking you to try to understand me, dear? Just enjoy me.”

“You’re uneasy. Why should my asking you that make you uncomfortable?”

“I’m terribly comfortable. I can think of a dozen lovely reasons why I’m at peace with the world, dear.” She bent and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Do get a good sleep. You’ll need it.”

He heard the door open and shut quietly behind her. In a little while he got up and took a long shower, soaping himself many times. After he had dressed, he looked at the convention program to see what he had missed. Though the dinner speakers had not talked about any of his particular areas of interest, he vowed to miss no more of the scheduled events. He had also missed an official cocktail party prior to the banquet.

Hubbard felt curiously furtive as he rode down in the elevator. Noisy delegates got on at nearly every floor. He had the feeling that if anyone stared closely at him they could not fail to see the stains of strenuous debauch.

He ate alone at a small table in a small dining room of the hotel specializing in broiled meat. The flames under a large open broiler made a flickering light. He felt as if all reality had been distorted in some small prismatic way, just enough to make him feel wary and dubious. His hands did not look or feel like his own. The morsels of steak were alternately tasteless and delicious. He had the compulsion of all rational men to analyze, to reason, to reach conclusions — but his mind rebelled at all formal patterns. It veered, swooped, tilted — shying away from all structured devisings. He was tired and hungry and he did not want to think about Cory Barlund.

As he ate he became aware of another time in his life, long ago, when he had felt this same way, when he had experienced this same dull complexity of guilt, deceit and confusion. It took him many minutes to remember the exact incident, because he had buried it deeply, had camouflaged the place where it lay with all the devices of self-esteem.

He had been twelve years old, a tough and resolute kid, hardened in urban ways, familiar with all the survival devices a large family must use when an industrial accident has permanently maimed the father, and the compensation is a little less than adequate. He knew the protocol of the gangs and the schoolyards, the uses of valor and guile. But a duality had come into his life at that time, a troublesome thing. He had been unable to completely conceal from his teachers his quickness of mind, and the quality of his imagination. No matter how carefully he cultivated the moronic expression, the monosyllabic answer, his grades were better than he wanted them to be. And he found himself saddled with a lust for reading. Reading was particularly reprehensible in his circles, outside the family, and he had to fill his need in complete secrecy. A slightly older boy named Mark learned of Floyd’s secret vice. Mark was unacceptable. He was tall and plump. He could not run or fight or play games. He used big words, had a talent for sarcasm and responded to persecution by winding his arms around his head and squalling.

But Mark read books, and he steered Floyd toward some wonderful ones, and they would argue about what they had read. Mark also brought Floyd into a little group headed by Mr. Ellinder, an instructor in the high school, a man with a small mustache, a collection of pipes, and many shocking opinions about a lot of things Floyd had always taken for granted. They called the little group The Book League, and they had their meetings in the room over the garage where Mr. Ellinder lived with his mother and an aunt.

In that way the duality was partially resolved. Floyd could run with the pack, pretend dullness and indifference in school, and still have an outlet for expressions of the growing agility of his mind. He knew Mr. Ellinder was a great man who would be recognized by the world after his book was published. He had been working on it for a long time.

One rainy Saturday afternoon Floyd finished a book sooner than he had expected. Mr. Ellinder had loaned it to him. He wanted another book by the same man from Mr. Ellinder’s library in the room over the garage. Mr. Ellinder had promised to lend it to him next. So he walked a dozen blocks with the book tucked carefully under his raincoat. He knocked at the garage door and there was no answer. He tried the door and it was unlocked. He went in furtively and moved silently up the narrow stairs, telling himself there would be no harm in leaving the book and taking the other one, because it had already been promised to him.

He had tiptoed halfway across the upstairs room toward the bookshelves when he heard a sound to his right. He snapped his head around and stared toward the dormer alcove where stood the old couch with the Navajo blanket on it, saw Mark there, looking soft and blurred and blind without his glasses, and saw, glaring at him over Mark’s bare chubby shoulder, the fierce, indignant face of Mr. Ellinder.

“Get out!” Mr. Ellinder whispered. “Get out of here!”

Floyd had run all the way home through the rain. He lay on his bed and listened to the rain on the roof and tried not to think about anything. Mark arrived over an hour later. The rain had stopped. His mother called to him to tell him. Floyd did not ask Mark in. He went out into the small back yard.

“Paul wants to talk to you,” Mark said with a nervous defiance.

“Paul?”

“Mr. Ellinder. He’s scared you’ll tell. He wants to talk to you.”

Floyd had sobbed once, and hit Mark in the mouth as hard as he could, without warning. Mark sat down hard in the mud and began to cry like a girl. Floyd ran into the house and looked out the window and saw Mark get up and fumble around and find his glasses, wipe them on his shirt, put them on and walk away.

When he was back in his room, the room he shared with an older brother, Floyd felt very much the same way he now felt, as he finished the expensive meal in the resort hotel. Drained, dulled, guilty, mourning the loss of something which had never existed, yet half convinced he had been the agent of its destruction.