A Key to the Suite

Three

At five minutes of three the Mulaneys were at last alone in their room in the Sultana. Jesse had checked the first room and decided it was too close to the rest of the AGM group, and Fred Frick had arranged a swap which gave them 832, a bedroom-sitting-room layout on the ocean side. Connie Mulaney was a trim, slim, handsome woman of fifty. Her hair was crisp and white, smartly coifed. Her bones were good, and her eyes were beautiful.

She hummed to herself as she performed the familiar routines of unpacking. Until the last few months, these past several years had been the happiest years of her life. After a pudgy girlhood and the nondescript years of motherhood, it seemed like a startling award for past meritorious behavior to suddenly come into one’s own in the middle forties, into a strange resurgence of youthfulness when you had an awareness of how rare and valuable it was. It had given her a confidence she had never had before, and out of her confidence she had been able to give of herself and become treasured by many people. She knew the styles which suited her. She knew the mercilessness of time and fortune. And so she lived her days to the fullest and took splendid care of herself without permitting it to become obsessive.

As she transferred a stack of Jesse’s white shirts to a bureau drawer, she looked at him in the mirror and stopped humming. He had stripped to his blue and white striped underwear shorts, and he sat on a bed staring out toward the ocean. Though she had never told him, and never would, when he was in repose he reminded her of a sad, tired clown resting after taking off his clown suit and his make-up. A big clown — the one who tags humbly along and keeps getting hit over the head with a bladder. He was a big man, overweight and flabby, with skin as white as milk, a heavy pouch of belly, yet with a bigness of frame and a solidity of back and shoulders to remind her of the hard and husky man he had been.

It was no longer possible to tell that his hair had once been red. But he had the fair complexion of the redhead, eroded and betrayed by the lifetime of rich foods, expansive drinking, and all the late late nights. His broad face was a pattern of small pouches, florid with small broken veins. And out of this corroded monument to the gregariousness of man shone the light-blue eyes, bland and young as those of any child.

She sighed inaudibly and finished the unpacking, and hung her travel dress away. She walked around to face him and said, “Now does it have to make you so dreary to have brought me along, Jesse?”

He looked at her in quick protest. “No, honey! Hell, I want you to come along with me. Every time.”

She sat on the arm of a chair. “Now listen to the man. All his life he’s been saying that, but lately I really think you’ve meant it, darling.”

“I’ve always meant it.”

“But if I’d always gone along, dear, think of all the pleasure you’d have never been able to give all those little girls at all the conventions and all the regional sales conferences.”

He showed by the sudden grin that he now realized she had been needling him. “Truly thousands of them, honey. Only a truly selfish man would have denied them the special joys of Mulaney.”

“Lecher!”

“Needler!”

She reached over and patted his knee and leaned back again, feeling a little familiar twist in her heart as she realized how much she loved this man. There had been the women. She was almost dead certain of that, but it was the almost which was the important word. And there might be others yet, but never flaunted, never admitted, never permitted to shame her in any public or secret way.

After a little time of silence she said, continuing an argument which had gone on in oblique ways for three months, “Couldn’t you maybe have had enough of all of it, dear? Couldn’t you, without wanting to admit it to yourself, be full up to here with all the... all the pressure and the quotas and all the nasty little Fred Fricks?”

“Nothing wrong with Freddy.”

“So I shouldn’t have said his name, but what about the rest of it?”

“The rest of what?”

“Please, darling. You know what I mean.”

“Hell, I’ve been under pressure all my life.”

“Not this kind, Jesse.”

“I’ve fought to keep my job fifty times and you know it.”

She moved over to sit on the bed beside him, and took his hand, lifted it to her cheek. “But before, darling, you always knew what you were fighting, and how to fight it. This time, you don’t know what they want, really. Maybe all they want is change, for the sake of change. And you can’t win if that’s what they’re after.”

“They can’t do this to me!”

“Darling, please.”

“I know ten thousand men all over this country, Connie. I’ve hired them and fired them. Some of them I’ve either outsmarted or outsold. Goddam it, woman, what will all those boys be saying and thinking if Jesse Mulaney gets thrown out on his ear two whole years before the first retirement option? Don’t you think I’ve got any pride?”

“I know you’ve got pride, Jesse. Too much, maybe. But what I mean is... is it really worth it? We’ve had good luck with the children. The retirement thing would be almost as much. And with the shrewd way you’ve bought stocks, dear, we don’t even need the executive pension. Can’t it be done in some way that would... save that pride of yours? A resignation for reasons of health?”

He slapped his chest. “I’d know I’d been whipped. And by what? Stupid forms, reports, evaluations, surveys. I’m being gutted by twerps. Crappy little slide-rule twerps, like Lansing and DeVrees and Hubbard.”

“Floyd Hubbard seems quite nice, really.”

He looked at her in a woebegone way. “Goddam it, Connie, I think of the ones they’ve pushed out in the past year. Ed, Chris, Wally. You know how it makes me feel? Like I was some big old extinct animal being chased through the swamps by a bunch of yapping dogs.”

She smiled at him. “But you won’t quit, will you?”

“I can’t.”

“Okay, Mr. Mulaney. I guess I’ll just have to accept that, and stop boring from within, weakening the structure. They’ll know they’ve been in a scrap. Okay?”

“Okay. I’m glad you’re along this time especially, Connie. They expect me to mess something up. Maybe I would have, if I was alone. Lots of times I’ve looked bad, and didn’t mean to, but it didn’t matter. This time it does. You... you sort of keep an eye on me.”

“Of course, darling. You don’t need it, but I will.”

She went to the other side of the room, took off her slip, bra and girdle, and put on a pale yellow robe. “What time do we have to be anywhere?”

“We ought to get to the suite about six o’clock.”

“Are you going to have a nap, Jesse?”

“I guess so.”

“Shower when you wake up?”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ll take mine now, I guess.”

“Go ahead.”

She stood at the bathroom door for a moment, looking at his broad white back. He sat with his shoulders slumped. She ran the back of her hand down the firmness of her hip and thigh. When this special attractiveness had come to her, late and unexpected, she had been delighted not only for her own sake, but for Jesse’s as well. It seemed such a special boon, a glory of late afternoon on what had been not a very pretty day. A special favor to the man who had chosen her when she had begun to wonder if anybody ever would.

She dropped her toilet articles on her bed and went around and stood close in front of him. “You’re all tensed up, darling,” she said.

“A little bit.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m the best of all possible sleeping pills, you know. No barbiturate hangover.”

“I knew I’d run into a girl at this convention,” he said, and his voice had already changed in the husky way she knew.

She dropped the robe into the chair, and stretched out beside him on the bed, welcoming his arms, and all the familiarities of the sustaining, readying hands. This is where the meaning is, she thought. The final meaning, always so good that even when this too is gone, we’ll live the time left in the glow of it. Thousands of times of love with this man, so that we are a single creature. And no other man has known me.

“Want to share?” he said huskily.

“Not close enough, darling. Next time around. Make it all for you.”

So, reading the small clues rightly, she went astride him and took the guided depth of connection, and became lovingly industrious while he stroked the long lines of her back, until he surged under her, and gave a choking gasp, stilled the tumult of her hips with the strength of his hands, and gave a long dwindling sigh. She put her head on his chest and listened to the slowing canter of his heart.

“Getting better girls at these things all the time,” he said sleepily.

“We’re carefully screened,” she said.

“Love you, Con.”

“And I love you, Jesse Mulaney.”

When she came out of her shower he was snoring just loud enough so she could hear him over the endless exhalation of the airconditioning grill. She put a blanket over him. She called the desk from the phone in the small sitting room and left a call for five fifteen.

She turned her bed down and got in and looked over at him.

It isn’t fair, she thought. It just isn’t the least bit fair. Thirty-two years with them, almost. Maybe, if I get the right chance, I can talk to Floyd Hubbard. I don’t think he’s like the others. He might be. That look of warmth and honesty might mean nothing at all. That would make him worse than the others. I think he ought to know what it will do to Jesse.

I wonder what Freddy Frick was being so darned conspiratorial about, taking Jesse off in a corner like that before we even got our luggage off the flight? Freddy is a shifty little bastard. When they came back to me, Jesse had that look he gets. Whenever he’s guilty he looks right at me and makes his eyes rounder, and he speaks more carefully.

A few moments later she was asleep.

At a few minutes after five the phone rang in 1102, and Fred Frick stopped his pacing and grabbed it.

“Mr. Frick? This is Miss Barlund. I’m in the lobby.”

“Oh! Come right on up, please. Eleven-oh-two. Can I order a drink for you while you’re on your way up?”

“Yes, thank you. Scotch and water, tall, please.”

After he placed the drink order, he opened the door a few inches and resumed his pacing. He had been almost positive Jesse would veto the idea. But he’d had to go through the motions with Alma, to be covered in case Jesse and Alma got together this trip. But Jesse had thought it over and said, “Why not? No matter what happens to me, I’d like to catch one of those little bastards acting human just one time.”

“It could be a good piece of money, Jesse.”

“Now are you trying to talk me out of it?”

“No. Nothing like that. But Hubbard shouldn’t find out about it.”

“Are you going to tell him? Am I? And Alma wouldn’t send over anybody who’d pull anything cute. As far as the money goes, I’m not about to pinch a penny on a thing like this. If Alma says she’s good, that’s enough. How is Alma?”

“Same as ever. She’s telling the girl she has a personal interest in this working out. And she’d like you to phone her. I’ve got her new number. She wants to thank you for the way the stock thing worked out.”

“Go ahead with it, Freddy. Set it up. You make an outlay, you’ll get it back. But Hubbard isn’t going to be easy.”

So now he was in it, and nervous about it, convinced it was a mistake before it had even begun.

At the knock on his door he hurried to it and opened it and got his first look at Corinna Barlund. Though he maintained the smile on his salesman face, he felt acute disappointment. She was of medium height, and to Frick she looked more scrawny than willowy. Her hair was more nearly brown than blonde, soft, cropped, casual, with a careful-careless arrangement of bangs. She wore a blue sheath dress, a little white cape effect, blue high-heeled sandals, white gloves, smoked glasses, and a Jacqueline pillbox hat. She carried one of the largest handbags Frick had ever seen.

“Mr. Frick,” she said gravely.

“Nice you could make it, Cory,” he said as she walked in.

“Thank you.”

He stared at the rearview of her as he closed the door. She certainly walked in a pleasant, classy way, but who goes for the walk? Most teenagers had her whipped in front, and all she had in back was tan skinny legs and about as much can on her as any eleven-year-old boy.

“Sit down, Cory. Sit down. Drinks will be right along.”

She turned and smiled and lifted the big handbag. “I didn’t know the uniform of the day, so I brought a change along, dinner dress and goodies to go with it.” She turned the straight chair away from the desk, sat down and put the bag on the floor beside her. She put her dark glasses on the desk, shrugged her cape off her shoulders onto the back of the chair, and pulled her gloves off. She bent and delved in the big bag and came up with cigarettes. Frick hurried to light her cigarette. He sat on the bed and smiled at her and said, “Well, now!” Her bare shoulders were nicely tanned, but they looked too bony to him.

There was a second rap on the door. A waiter brought the two drinks in. He seemed far more polite and attentive than waiters usually were, Frick realized, when they brought you and a broad a drink. She had style, certainly. And what he classified as a society manner. This was the kind of bitch you’d see playing tennis when you looked over the wall into one of the private clubs. He suddenly decided she was maybe some society house-wife Alma had lined up, a bored doll short of money and looking for kicks.

She sipped her drink. He smiled at her. He wondered what was the most graceful way to bring up the problem.

“You do have the money, Mr. Frick?”

“Uh? Oh, yes. Yes, I got it right here.” He took the envelope out of his inside pocket and took it over to her and went back to sit on the bed.

She counted it and put it in her purse. “And you do understand the way it’s set up?”

“Alma said you’d make up your own mind, as you always do, and if you say no dice, you give me the money back, except for a hundred bucks.”

“Fifty for me and fifty for Alma. But she’ll try to find somebody else for you, of course. As I understand it, an old friend of yours and Alma’s will be helped out if a certain youngish married man makes a fool of himself at this convention. I’ll have to meet him and have a chance to talk to him a little bit before I tell you if I’ll take it on. I have an instinct for these relationships, Mr. Frick. And I can make a very good guess — which will keep you from wasting your money. Now tell me about this man.”

“His name is Floyd Hubbard, and lately he’s been working out of the Houston office. His wife is named Janice, and he’s got a little boy four years old and a little girl not a year old yet. He gets good money, and he’s a metallurgist by trade, on the research end.”

“Describe him.”

Frick did, to the best of his ability. As he had been talking, he had been looking at her. He had the strange feeling he could not bring her face into the proper focus. When he looked at the flat planes of her cheeks, he could not see the rest of her face. When he looked at her eyes, dark and gray-blue, the rest of her seemed blotted out somehow. Feature by feature, from the lean little nose to long firm heavy lips, to the small round imperative chin, everything seemed just right, except he could not see it all at once, as a face.

As he re-examined the rest of her, he had the feeling she’d acquired more curves and more ripeness since she’d walked in. He thought it strange that there seemed to be just exactly enough of everything. And everything had begun to look curiously precious, as if this woman had been fashioned with more than ordinary care. Suddenly he saw all of her at once, saw her face as a face, an entity, and saw that she was so lovely, he felt as if his heart had been slit and drained and hung empty in his chest. His hands began to sweat. To restore perspective, he began to examine her bare shoulders again and discovered that he could see no ugliness of bone, only a tenderness of hollows which demanded the gratitude of many kissings.

And it’s all for sale, he thought. It was an incredible thought, one that threatened to blow a ragged hole in his brain tissue.

“That’s all you can tell me about him?”

“That’s all I know. Cory... uh... how did you... uh...”

She gave him a cold sweet smile. “How did a girl like me get into a life like this? Just lucky, I guess. Let’s not waste time with that sort of nonsense, Mr. Frick. We have to come up with a plausible way for me to be thrown in contact with Floyd Hubbard, some way that won’t make him suspicious. Any suggestions?”

“I haven’t been able to come up with one. I mean we could say you’re working for me, but it would look funny, I think.”

“It would look implausible. I have one contact I could use that might work out. And it’s actually a kind of work I tried to make a living at, approximately ten thousand years ago.”

“Huh?”

“A friend of mine publishes a regional magazine, Mr. Frick. I even sold him some junk articles a long time ago.” She looked at a tiny gold watch. “It’s too late to phone him now. Conventions are a big local industry. I know I could sell him on the idea of my doing an article on one particular company at one particular convention. What’s your company?”

“AGM. American General Machine.”

“If I go ahead with it, my friend can clear me with the hotel PR man, and then anyone who happens to check will find out it is all true, true, true.”

“So how come you pick this convention and pick us?”

“This convention fits into my busy schedule, let us say, Mr. Frick, and picking AGM was just the result of closing my eyes and sticking a pin in a list. The winners never question their luck, Mr. Frick. The losers are the ones who say they’ve been jobbed.”

“You know,” he said, “I like it. I really like it.”

“Good.”

“Just... just how will you work it with Hubbard, I mean if you decide you can handle it okay?”

He saw that sweet icy smile again. “Things run to pattern,” she said flatly. “We will become terribly attracted to each other, and get around to admitting it, but we’ll agree to fight it. Then I shall tearfully permit myself to be seduced, and it will be such a compelling and glorious experience that we won’t be able to stop. We will agree that this will be our little stolen time of magical love, and when it is over, we will go our separate ways. But then, you understand, because I am so much in love I can’t stand the thought of the heartbreak ahead, I will get a little drunk, and make some horribly slutty embarrassing scene in front of all the people he most wants not to know about his sneaky little romance. Will that do it?”

“Dear God,” Frick said, awed and humble. “That would sure do it.”

“It’s a scene I’ve played before. And the first two times I played it, I thought I meant it.”

“One thing. Can anybody show up who’d... spoil the act?”

“I’m not notorious, Mr. Frick. I haven’t taken on regiments. I’m not on a police blotter anywhere for anything. I have the quaint idea I resemble a lady.”

“I only meant...”

“I’d say the odds are distinctly against it, certainly at the Sultana.”

“Good.”

“And if there was one of those little coincidences, I’m sure I could handle it very quietly.”

“I’m sure you could.”

“I suppose the most reasonable time and place is in the suite you mentioned, in another... fifteen minutes? That’s when you’ll all be gathered. Say! Suppose the boss man, whoever he is, doesn’t like the idea?”

“The boss man,” Frick said with a barracuda grin, “is Mulaney.”

“You can tip him off, then. I’ll be playing it to the others as well as Floyd Hubbard, so even if Hubbard isn’t there, tell your Mr. Mulaney to be... reasonably skeptical.”

“Sure, Cory. I’ll fix it up.”

“I have the suite right? Eight sixty? I guess I’m dressed all right for that sort of thing. You could probably fit me into the dinner arrangements... if I decide I can help you.”

“No trouble at all.”

Miss Cory Barlund stood up, slung the oversized bag over her arm and began working her gloves back on. “I’ll kill some time downstairs, and get to the suite about six thirty, if that sounds all right, Mr. Frick.”

“It sounds fine. Just fine, only...”

“Only what?”

His lips felt slightly numb, and he knew it wasn’t the drink. “What I mean to say, Cory honey, we’ve set up a sort of little business arrangement here and I don’t have to get up there right on the dot, and I was thinking maybe we could... sort of seal the bargain...” She devoted her entire attention to putting her gloves back on. He swallowed and said, “I... I could sweeten the pot a little.”

She smiled at him, but something in her smile warned him to stay just where he was. “Mister Frick, let me set an imaginary scene for you. You walk into a good restaurant. You see me eating alone at a table. You’ve never seen me before in your life. Now how would you judge your chances of coming over, introducing yourself, and even being permitted to sit at my table and watch me eat?”

“Maybe not so good, but that would be because I wouldn’t know...”

“What I am? You know what I am. At least you think you do.” Her smile became more intense. “Let’s make our relationship clear. At a rate of a hundred dollars a second, Mr. Frick, I wouldn’t let an insect like you kiss the back of my hand.”

He sprang to his feet and in a strangled tone said, “Listen, you! Listen to me!”

“Careful!”

“No high class whore is going to...”

The envelope of money appeared with the abruptness of magic, was slapped solidly across his mouth and fell to the floor at his feet. He looked stupidly down at it and then at Cory Barlund walking briskly toward the door.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey, wait!”

She had the door partially open before she stopped. She stood still for a moment, then slammed the door violently and turned and faced him.

“It seems to mean something to Alma,” she said quietly. “And I seem to owe her more than a little. And your terminology is... rude but accurate. I’m a pretentious bitch, Frick. I’d like your apology.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. Pick up the money and bring it to me.”

She took it from him and put it in her purse again. “Try me again in ten years,” she said. “By then I may have lost the freedom of choice. That’s supposed to be the standard pattern, isn’t it?”

She closed the door quietly. He walked back into the room and called her every foul name he could think of. She had left a faint trace of her perfume in the room. He looked at the stain of lipstick on the two cigarette butts she had left in the ash tray. There was a fainter stain on the highball glass. There was a half inch of her drink in the bottom of the glass. Without much conscious thought he fitted his mouth to the pattern her lips had left and drained what was left of her drink. When he put the glass down he could taste the remote aromatic pastiness of her lipstick.

It was ten minutes before six. On impulse he phoned Alma. He let it ring twelve times before he hung up.