A Key to the Suite

Seven

On the morning of the second full day of the convention, Hubbard was up early. When he awakened, the pumpkiny orange glow in his room made him feel a sick, breathless excitement which he forced out of his mind as quickly as possible. He told himself he would be brisk, purposeful, cold and observant. As he ate breakfast, he studied the supplementary program of workshops and clinics and selected, as being potentially most useful to him, a discussion of foreign distribution methods and problems.

He was through breakfast twenty minutes before the discussion was scheduled to start, and so he checked the desk and found an unexpectedly thick airmail letter from Jan. He thumbed it open to see if there was any enclosure, but found only the sheets she had typed on her old portable.

“Darling, The kids are in bed and the idiot box is blessedly silent and all the emergencies of the day have been coped with, I think...”

He put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in his inside jacket pocket. He had a sudden feeling of disloyalty, so strong that he felt his face grow hot. The slight bulk of the letter in his pocket was an accusatory weight.

He walked along the exhibit ramp and noticed that the AGM twins were not yet on duty. A few people, moving slowly, were tidying their displays, putting out fresh stacks of brochures. They were turning on the prism lights, the floodlights and the hooded fluorescents.

Hubbard found the far corner of the Convention Hall where the discussion would take place. Chairs were arranged in a semicircle facing the table where the panel would sit. Three men sat at the end of one aisle, talking quietly and intently. He took Jan’s letter out and began to read it where he had left off.

“I am trying to think clearly, darling, and I want to put down exactly what I mean, so there will be no chance for you to misunderstand me. We seem to have a lot of trouble with misunderstanding lately. I guess I am taking the chance of trying to clear the air. Somebody has to. We have to talk to each other when you get back here and both make an effort to really communicate. What I am trying to do is give us a start on it. I am trying to give you something you can read and re-read and think about, in terms of us. I have been bitchy lately, and maybe my reasons aren’t good, but at least I should be able to put them down calmly.

“I guess the simplest way to say it, darling, is to tell you that this isn’t the cruise I signed up for. I can adjust myself to this kind of cruise, but first I have to be sure there’s no way back to what I thought it would be.

“I hope it doesn’t sound too corny to tell you that I know I married a dedicated man. I knew that you were concerned about the advancement of human knowledge in one small area where you are an expert. I knew you were willing to teach so you’d have the opportunity to do research. I was always joyous at your enthusiasms, darling. I did not expect we would ever have very much money. I expected you to work terrible hours and forget to eat and be so distracted by your work I would have to get used to wondering whether you remembered my name.

“It was like that, dear, exactly like that, and when it was like that we were both happier than we are now. We have a lot more money now. But things are not right, the way they used to be right. The last time I tried to tell you how I feel, it turned into the kind of argument we couldn’t have had before our lives changed. You accused me of being discontented because you have to take so many trips. I do not like having you away at any time, but that is a secondary thing. Floyd, you made what you are doing sound very plausible, so plausible that I wonder if you believe it yourself. You made it a lot more intricate than this, but you told me, in effect, that if a man has a talent for administration, then he is not pulling his share of the load if he turns his back on it and restricts himself to technical things. You said that there are thousands of technicians and very few administrators, and without the ability of the administrators, the technicians would never get constructive things done. You said I was trying to hold you back, which was really a nasty and unfair thing for you to say.

“Darling, I don’t want to try to argue about the validity of how a man should spend his life. You can argue that nothing can be proved valid, or argue that everything has its own validity. I am talking about you, about Floyd Hubbard. I cannot help it, darling, but this business of exalting the administrative stuff seems to me to be awfully tricky.

“Remember when you and Tony were running that long experiment on the conductivity of special alloys at absolute zero? I said to you, joking, ‘When you do come up with something special, they’ll use it to make better pots and pans.’ Can you remember how legitimately angry you got with me? Can you remember the arguments you used? You were a man doing a man’s work, and you were not afraid of idealism.

“Forgive me, but this administration thing you are in and have been in for at least two years seems to me to be the manipulation of human beings. Granted that you rearrange groups of people so they are more effective, and possibly happier, but it is nothing you can be particularly idealistic about.

“You have a thirst for knowledge, darling, and you seem to satisfy it best with tangible things. Now that you are dealing with these intangibles, you are changing. I do not know how to say it without hurting you or angering you, so all I can say is that you are losing a kind of innocence which was always dear to me. I think you take the wrong kind of pride in what you are doing. You are learning how to push the little buttons which make people jump, and you are becoming cynical and skeptical about people. It is a kind of ‘watchfulness’ which I see in you. Your smile is the same and you seem to talk in the same way, and people like you as readily as ever, but you are on guard, even with me. I think you are becoming a political man, and once again I must sound childish to you as I say that I do not like the by-products — the compromise, subterfuge and, so help me, the ‘use’ of human beings. Darling, I am not accusing you of some enormous wickedness. But I think the kind of work you are doing now will change the essential texture of you, will harden you in ways I cannot clearly understand.

“I can understand though how tempting it all is to you. You have a power you never had before, and you can tell yourself that you are using that power on the side of the angels. You can also tell yourself that you are finding a wonderful security for your family.

“Though I am writing all this, I am still not such a fool as to ask you to give it up, to demand of you that you go back to the kind of work I thought you would always do. All I am asking, humbly, is that you think about all these things, and examine yourself to see how happy you are. If we are not happy, all the rest is not worth it. I am not a very complicated woman. I love you, and I want you to love me, and I think love is easier all around when life has good meanings, when work is good, and there are tangible ways to measure what you accomplish.

“I am asking you to think about it and when you come back to me, be ready to talk about it to me in such a way that we will not start trying to wound each other with words, just because both of us, perhaps, feel a little bit guilty. I can promise you that if you are convinced this is what you want to do with your life, I can certainly go along with it and do the best I know how. We have had a good thing working for us for a long time, darling, and I would crawl through glass, fire and cactus to keep it, and I think you would too. This good marriage is the product of luck, skill and labor. I just want to be terribly sure that we do not needlessly handicap ourselves. Do you understand? It sounds very spoiled and surly for me to say this is not the cruise I signed up for. Maybe nobody gets — or is entitled to get — exactly what they bargained for. But I can make a try, can’t I?

“Please don’t phone me about this, dear. It will be better to talk it all out face to face. So, while you are conventioneering about and doing this dirty little job for John Camplin, keep me in mind from time to time and try to get outside yourself and look back in and see if there’s been any changes made, any that you don’t especially like. I do love you. Jan.”

As he put the letter back in his pocket he looked up and saw the panel members were in place. About twenty-five men occupied chairs in the area that would have seated five times that number.

The moderator said, “I hoped that more members of this joint convention would have recognized the importance of the area we are discussing this morning. I can only tell the men sitting up here with me that I hope others will join us during the course of the morning, and I am ashamed at predicting such an optimistic turnout.”

As the moderator began the introductions of the members of his panel, a lean balding man on Hubbard’s right turned and said in a low voice, “Lou should know better by now, for God’s sake. Most of them are hung over and sacked out. Some are out by the pool getting their health back. The golf tournament is this afternoon. I know a couple marathon poker games going on. Some groups went out deep sea fishing. Lou is lucky there’s this many.” He glanced at Hubbard’s badge. “AGM, hey? Jesse Mulaney’s boys. Where you located?”

“Houston.”

“Jud Ewing, Federated — outa Chicago.” They shook hands. “I’ve known Jesse a lot of years. Be seeing you at the AGM cabana this afternoon, I suppose.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Hubbard said.

He tried to keep his mind on the discussion. He kept losing the thread of the arguments. He stuck it out for a little over an hour, until the moderator decreed a five minute break, and then he quietly walked away. As he started to walk past the AGM exhibit, he saw Fred Frick inside the enclosure talking to one of the twins. The other twin sat on an aluminum chair, working on her fingernails. Fred was grinning, grimacing, bobbing his head as he talked to the girl. Hubbard noticed that the girl’s expression was placid, slightly surly, unimpressed and uninvolved.

“Floyd! Hey, Floyd!” Fred called. Hubbard turned and went over to the exhibit. Fred and the twin moved closer to the velvet rope. “Floyd, I want you should meet Honey. Honey, this is Mister Floyd Hubbard, one of the brilliant young executives of AGM out of the home office in Houston, Texas.”

“Please to meetchew,” she said with colossal indifference.

“The girls have dresses on today. I guess you prolly noticed,” Frick said and jabbed Hubbard in the ribs with his thumb. “Mulaney figured it would be a little more dignified.”

“Honey, now you talk it over with your sister,” Frick said, turning back toward the girl. “You’ll get the same pay for just lying around in the sun and getting a good tan. Two o’clock. Cabana Fifty.” He slid under the rope and took Floyd by the arm and headed slowly toward the lobby.

“Those twin broads are so damn suspicious,” he complained. “For God’s sake, Connie’ll be there. And Sue Beatty and Cory. It’s out in the open, for God’s sake. They won’t come near the suite, but this is out in the sunshine. I was looking for you to tell you last night, Floyd. Just a little cabana party Jesse is giving for AGM and a bunch of his old friends in the business. This is an open afternoon on account of the golf tournament. So come in your swim trunks. Two o’clock.”

Hubbard managed to detach the grip on his arm. “Two o’clock. Okay.”

“I would have told you last night but I couldn’t find you.”

“I was around,” Hubbard said.

“You going up to the suite now?”

“I’m going up to my room, Fred.”

They got onto an elevator together. Frick winked spasmodically at him and said, his voice low, “Keep something under your hat. You want a room sometime, and you want to keep it private, here’s a key to eleven-oh-two.”

“Thanks, but I...”

“Don’t worry about it. Just put it in your pocket, Floyd fella. There’s only three out. You, me and Jesse. There’s a lot of traffic on eight.”

“I really don’t...”

“There’s an inside bolt on the door, so nobody’s going to walk in on you. Put it in your pocket, pal! I’m just following orders. If you don’t have a use for it, you don’t use it, right? But you got the key anyhow.”

They got off at the eighth floor and started down the corridor. Hubbard was not able to exhale completely until he was in his room with the door closed. He stood for a moment with his eyes closed. Outside the room he was endlessly on the alert for his first glimpse of Cory. It seemed important to see her before she saw him. He wanted to see her in some remote unflattering way so that by the time she turned toward him, the last dregs of prior magic would be gone.

He sat on the bed they had not used and read Jan’s letter again. When he had first read it, it had seemed slightly out of key, almost as though he was reading a letter meant for someone else. In this room that feeling was intensified. It was a woman he barely knew, writing to someone who no longer existed.

He put the letter in the top drawer of the dressing table, closed the drawer slowly. The cabana party was, he decided, as safe a situation as he could have asked for. It would give him a chance to strike exactly the right attitude, casual, seemingly grateful, uninterested in any repetition.

He sat at the desk and wrote postcards to Jan and the kids. He took them down to the lobby and mailed them. He went down to the shops on the lower level and bought swim trunks and a matching cabana jacket, sun lotion, dark glasses and sandals with rope soles. He had lunch in the grill. There was no special convention lunch.

At a little after two o’clock he went to the special bank of elevators for use by swimmers and sunbathers going to and from the pool and beach areas, dressed and ready for sun and swimming, braced to give the safe and proper responses to Cory.

Chairs, sun chaises and tables had been placed as close together as feasible on the concrete deck in front of Cabana 50. The cabana doors had been opened wide, and the road men were tending an improvised bar just inside the cabana. AGM flesh lay sprawled in the sun. He was greeted as he neared them. He smiled and waved. All the AGM people were there, plus a dozen middle-aged men, a few of them with their wives. A couple of gin rummy games were in progress. Connie Mulaney was knitting. Floyd saw the twins, greased, bikinied, supine. The hot weight of the sunlight seemed to make all motions listless, to give all voices a buzzing quality.

He selected a sun cot on the fringe of the group, had spread his towel out and was beginning to rub the sun oil into his chest and shoulders when Bobby Fayhouser approached him and handed him a tall glass.

“Specialty of the day,” Bobby said. “It is chemically planned to replace the moisture you lose. We make it out of sweat.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“And rum. After three of them, if you should care to dive into the pool, check it with your foot first, to see if it’s the pool. We don’t want people diving into mirages.”

He thanked Bobby and took another quick look around, looking for Cory. He did not quite dare ask about her. He thought he could make it casual enough, but he was not quite certain.

When he turned to stretch out, he saw her standing six feet beyond his sun cot, standing and smiling at him, and he had no way of telling how long she had been there. She had a bathing cap in her hand. She wore a two-piece swim suit in a bold diagonal pattern of oyster and coral. It was wet, and droplets of water stood on her shoulders.

The first look at her was like having an electric current run through his body. He had not realized to what extent he had been sensitized to her. “Got to get my towel and stuff,” she said, and walked by the cot. He watched her walk away from him. It seemed grotesque to him that she should look and walk like a lady. It seemed like some confusing miscarriage of justice that she could walk in front of all the world and seem fragile in her loveliness, tender and tidy and poised. There should have been a vulgar pouting of those merciless hips, an obscene slant to that tormenting mouth, some suggestion in her walk of that rubbery suppleness of body, that limber wildness, she used in such an inventive abandon that no dimension of her, no texture or convolution of her was forgotten to a rhythmic using. Yet here she was, untouched and untouchable, a very pretty slender girl with toffee hair and dark-blue blue eyes, and a sweet and delicate sculpturing of face.

He lay back and closed his eyes against the sun glare that came through his dark glasses, and felt the sweat begin to exude from his pores.

There was a round touch against his leg just above his ankle, and the effect was as if she had run her fingernails lightly up the inside surface of his leg and nested her fist in his groin. “Hi,” she said.

He opened his eyes and saw that she sat on the foot of the sun cot, and had pulled her feet up and was hugging her legs. Her chin rested on her knees. It was the same posture he had seen her in at the foot of his bed, naked from her shower, and he knew it was intentional. And she knew what it was doing to him.

“I... have to take back some kind of a tan to prove I was here,” he said in a weak attempt at casual conversation. He knew he had made an error in not moving into the middle of one of the small groups.

“I don’t like to stay in the sun too long in a suit,” she said. “It spoils my tan. Did you notice, dear, yesterday? I’m tan all over.”

“Not so loud!”

“Nobody can hear us, darling. Did you sleep well? Did you dream about me?”

“Let’s try a new topic, Cory.”

“Last night I’d almost decided to stay right there with you, and then I remembered I hadn’t fed Maynard. He’s my cat, a truly enormous demanding beast, half Siamese, half alley. As opposed to me, dear. I’m all alley, as I hope you noticed.”

“Cory!”

“I gorged him before I left, and left him another enormous bowl of goodies, so I can stay with you tonight, Floyd darling, free of the weight of responsibility.”

“Now listen...”

“So, whenever you’re ready, and you feel strong, we’ll just stroll away from here, one by one.”

“No, Cory.”

“You don’t want me?”

“That isn’t the point. It’s just that...”

“I want you, and that’s what matters isn’t it? You’d be terribly flattered if you knew how unusual that is, dear. The few times I ever do want anyone, I never want them again. But I could eat you alive. Believe me, darling, I can take it or leave it, and usually it’s a case of going through the motions.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Bobby is bringing me one, thanks. As I was saying, you should be flattered. What’s so great about you, anyway? You’re kind of a stumpy little man, and you look as if you might drive a cab for a living, and you have sad, melting brown eyes, and you don’t have any special talent for making love, and I have shocked the hell out of you. What is it about you, dear?”

She stopped as Bobby brought her a drink. She thanked him and said, “I’m delving into the motivations of an AGM executive type now.”

“They’re the tricky ones,” Bobby said.

“Really, Bobby, your Mr. Hubbard seems to have very conventional ideas.”

“I’m at a convention, no?” Floyd said.

Bobby groaned and Cory said, “That isn’t the sort of conventional ideas I meant, sir.” Somebody called Bobby and he excused himself and walked away.

“Where were we, dear?” Cory asked.

“We were nowhere.”

“Do you think so? After all my hard labor?” She placed her hand on his ankle and began to stroke him almost imperceptibly. “I have to see just how invulnerable you are, darling.”

He fixed his mind on remote things which might save him. A winter waterfall. The pass patterns of the Baltimore Colts. The time he had the automobile accident. But the pressure, gentle, insistent, moved into each thought and moved it aside.

“If you try to be too stubborn, little bull, you’ll disgrace us all,” she said in a singsong tone. He hitched sideways abruptly, and rolled over into his face. She laughed softly and no longer touched him.

“So invulnerable,” she said. “Such a total rejection of poor Cory.”

She got up and came around and sat crosslegged on the concrete, facing him. “Why do you feel as if you have to fight it?”

“Because there are so many reasons why I shouldn’t bother. Can you understand that? All the rational reasons. Why lock the barn doors, and so forth. And who has to know? And when will you ever get a chance at anything like this again? Pat reasons, Cory. But every one of them cheapens me and diminishes me.”

“Why you? I took the initiative. I’m taking it again.”

“That’s the most insidious reason of all.”

She looked slightly startled. Her eyes seemed to change, to become more sober and thoughtful. “Maybe you’re as new a something to me as I am to you.”

“Maybe.”

“You seemed to like it, Floyd.”

“That’s a pretty pale word. I got a terrible dirty joy out of it. It was more like a battle. It wasn’t love. Love isn’t like that. We were antagonists. Like wrestling snakes and wondering how many bites you can endure before the venom kills you. You were full of contempt, Cory. You were trying to punish both of us.”

“Of course.”

“Then you realize that?”

“Who claims it isn’t a battle? Only a novice would think it isn’t.”

“You’re no novice.”

“I told you I was married once.”

“I don’t mean that.”

As she studied him he looked at her mouth in sunlight, at the almost invisible down on her upper lip, at the firm modeling of those lips, and found it almost impossible to relate the harmless image to that remembered agony the flickering tongue could produce, to the schooled cruelty of lips and teeth, to the thready whimperings and gutteral gaspings and the petulant, incredible demands.

“Do I make you sick?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Good! I’ll make you sicker and stronger. You’re a silly little man, you know. Silly and helpless and terribly shocked. I’m making love to you right now in my mind. I’m thinking of things you couldn’t believe. They’re boiling around in my mind. My breasts are starting to hurt, lover. And my...”

“Stop it, Cory! Please stop it!”

“The more you can hate me, the better it will be.”

“Cory, I’m not going up there with you. I mean it. It happened, and I suppose I’m even grateful in some eerie way, but I’m also smart enough to know this could... so easily turn into a compulsion. And that’s what I think you really want. You want me to lose the last fragment of myself, and be... be turned into a swine.”

“What made you say that? What made you use that word?”

“Why are you so agitated? It seems apt enough. As soon as I start ignoring everything in the world but you, and what you can do to me, then you’ll walk away.”

“But wouldn’t it be worth it?”

“Not to me, Cory. Not to me. I have a horrible affliction. Pride. And I’m trying to keep my own good opinion of myself. And I want no more of you. Thanks a lot.”

“Big talk. Big brave puritanical talk. I’ll be in your bed soon enough. And you’ll be happy about it. Wait and see. Let me know when you’re ready. Because I’ve been ready, terribly ready, ever since I woke up this morning, lover.”

She rose easily to her feet, traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips and walked away, pausing to sip her drink and look back at him, mocking him. She turned slightly toward him and made such a small, quick, imperceptible movement of her hips that he knew no one else could have noticed it, but to him it was like taking a skilled boxer’s blow directly under the heart. It stopped his breath and chilled his limbs. She went over to where Charlie Gromer and Tom Carmer were watching Stu Gallard whipping Fred Frick at gin rummy. He closed his eyes. The heat and light seemed to hold him suspended in a lazy void where his mind moved in a gluey rhythm and nothing was particularly important. His mind swung back to Cory, to visual memories of her which, in his sun-struck state, had the power of hallucination — a breast so close to his eyes in pumpkin light it blotted out two thirds of the world, a tidy, perfect breast, firm as papaya, with the tan-orange texture of the nipple area pulled shiny-tight in erectile joy — the milky musky texture of the skin at the back of her knee against his lips — and, stretching away from him, the slender V of her back, topped at a distance remote as in delirium by the toffee tangle of her hair, while her clenched hips burst upon his lap, as impossible to capture, as muscularly tantalizing as the fresh caught fish that leaps its life away on the floorboards of the boat...

He knew he had slept, and was surprised that he had. The sun had moved through a long segment of its arc. Most of them were gone. Cory was gone. He thought of her and felt the heavy weakness of the convalescent. The fever had broken for a time. He walked to the pool and swam four slow lengths. There was a bad taste in his mouth, and his arms and legs felt leaden.

He walked back and was standing, toweling himself, by the sun cot when Connie Mulaney came over, a tall rum drink in each hand. “If you say no, Floyd, I’ll have to drink them both, and I’ll make a spectacle of myself.” He took the drink, realizing she was holding herself under careful control, that she was considerably drunker than she looked.

She sat on the cot and patted the place beside her and said, “I want to get to know you before this whole damn thing is over, dear.”

He sat down and she touched glasses clumsily and said, “Here’s to sin.”

“To sin.”

“Everybody going. Host and hostess stuck till the dirty end. Look at my Jesse over there, snowing Jud Ewing. Both telling brave lies to each other. You know what?”

“What, Connie?”

“If this time you’d called me Mrs. Mulaney, I’d give you a hit right in the head. You got an instinct for those things, haven’t you?”

“For what?”

“For what to call people to get the right effect.”

“Do I seem to plan everything that carefully?”

“No, dear. You do it cute. I’m old enough to be your mother. You know that?”

“That’s a lie!”

“Not if I was from Kentucky, believe me. I don’t know if I’d want a son like you. It would scare me, a little.”

“Why would it scare you?”

“You’ve got all your ducks in a row. That’s an old expression.”

“It may look it to you, Connie, but believe me, my ducks are scattered around every which way.”

She peered at him. “What’d I want to say to you anyhow?”

“I guess you’re telling me I’m tricky.”

Her white hair looked slightly unkempt. The drinks had sagged her face. “Y’know, dear, there’s a new kind of people in the world,” she said. “Can’t understand them. Smooth quiet people. Exactly so many drinks. Right clothes and right car and right opinions. Don’t you get bored with yourself?”

“Doesn’t everybody, Connie?”

“Me? Four kids married, three grandbabies. I don’t get bored with me. Or Jesse.” She leaned closer and looked at him with a slurred challenge. “You know I still like to go to bed with him? You young ones, you think there’s something nasty about that, don’t you?” She patted her stomach. “Stayed nice for him. As nice as I could. You know what it is, dear? It’s... it’s a giving sweetness. It’s cozy. It’s like saying all the years are right. Will you have that, when you’re an old hulk like my Jesse?”

“I hope so.”

“I’m still his best girl. That’s a good thing... isn’t it?”

“It’s a good thing, Connie.”

“Ah, how well I know him, Floyd! How well! He wants to be a tricky son of a bitch. He wants to be cute too. But it doesn’t work for him. He’s trying something now. Do you know that? I do. I don’t know what it is, but he feels guilty about it. It could have something to do with you. He’s scared of you, dear. We both are. You’re one of the new kind of people.”

“I don’t want you to feel like that.”

“You watch out for my Jesse. What was I saying to you? There was something I wanted to... oh, it’s him and Jud telling lies to each other as if everything was all right. I love him. I told you that, didn’t I? But he has to keep tearing himself apart, because no one will tell him. I shouldn’t talk to you. But it’s in your hands, isn’t it? You could be my son, and it’s in your hands and nobody knows what you’re thinking. I shouldn’t say these things to you. I’m an old drunken woman, and I don’t know how to handle the new people. I say the wrong things. Hell with it. So I can say the wrong things to you. What’ll happen to my Jesse?”

“I don’t know, Connie.”

She looked at him with a great intensity. “What’ll you say should happen? The new kind of people never tell you anything. It all comes out later on punch cards. You got the guts to tell me?”

He looked out across the ramps and terraces, the pools and plantings. The sun was low, and the slant of its golden light accentuated the tan of the few who were left, the last ones who were leaving. The pale flanks of the hotel structures rose toward the graying sky. His heart felt like a stone, but somewhere within him was a pride without mercy.

“I don’t know what they’ll do,” he said, making himself look directly into her eyes. “But I’ll report what I believe. That’s what I’m paid for. I’ll say that due to the seniority policies of AGM, he got about three big steps higher than he could have gone on merit. I’ll say the job he holds is so far beyond his capacities, he makes wild swings in the dark. I’ll say that the whole structure, personnel, policy, recruiting, control methods, needs a complete revamp, and it will be facilitated by getting him entirely out of the picture as soon as possible.”

She looked at him and tried to speak, moistened her lips and tried again. “I... I’ve known that. He has too, I think.” She brought her hands up to her face and sat with her chin lowered.

“He won’t be told that way,” Hubbard said.

“Did I have to be told that way?”

“Maybe I was wrong, Connie.”

She dropped her hands and snuffled once. “Oh, you couldn’t be wrong, dear! You new people are always right. There’s always a reason. It’s never evident in the beginning.” Her face twisted. “You know what I miss? Kindness. There used to be a lot of it around. When there weren’t any reasons for it, I guess. But now it’s a different kind of thing. You don’t want kindness from somebody who won’t bring their own troubles to you. Because if it goes just one way, it’s like pity. It’s like social workers or something. We’ve got to find our way through a maze, and you people look down through the glass and turn the current off and on to sting our feet, and you smile at us when we come out right.”

“Connie, it isn’t like that.”

She gave him a smile almost of triumph. “But that’s the way it feels, dear. To us. So what the hell difference does it make how it feels to you? There’s a chart someplace where you can look Jesse up, and there’s a footnote to turn to page seventy-eight, paragraph four, and there I am. You see, dear, if it kills him, there’s nothing I can do to you. Nothing.”

Jesse and Jud Ewing came strolling toward them, laughing at a joke. Jesse said, “Well, honey, we bombed them all, and you too, it looks like, and the party is over. What have you been bending Floyd’s ear about?”

Hubbard felt sudden tension. “Oh, I’ve just been rambling on and on, boring Floyd with stories of the old days.”

“It’s been very interesting,” Hubbard said.

“Well, let’s all get prettied up, and we’ll see you in the suite, Floyd. You drop in too, Jud.”

Mr. and Mrs. Mulaney headed off toward the hotel.

Ewing said, surprisingly, “I was so damn bad off in love with her a whole damn lifetime ago.”

“You were?”

“I worked for him in Nashville. I was single, and I used to get asked over for dinner. She was beautiful then, in that way they have when you can tell they’re going to stay beautiful until the day they die. Without her, Jesse would still be making sleeper jumps and lugging a sample case. I married twice, pretending I was marrying her, but those things don’t work out. And do you know something? This is the first time in thirty years I ever saw her get tight. Jesse always did enough drinking for two.”

“She’s a fine woman, Mr. Ewing.”

Ewing gave him a long shrewd look. “But there comes a time when finally there just isn’t any last string left on the bow. See you around, Mr. Hubbard.”

Hubbard picked up his towel, lotion and sunglasses and followed slowly. Waiters moved through the dusk light, picking up glasses, moving furniture back where it belonged. A muscular boy was folding the trampolines and hooding them for the night. Sweeping crews were moving across the sun cot area. Other crews were vacuuming the pools. The outdoor bars were closing.

It was easy, Jan, he said to himself. Nothing to it. Like falling off a log. Like falling off the top of a sixty-foot log. Why, with the edge on my little hatchet, I could shave with it.