All These Condemned

Chapter Two (Paul Dockerty — Before)

It was a three-hundred-mile drive to Wilma’s place at Lake Vale, and in spite of the work I had piled up, Mavis, my wife, absolutely refused to arrive Saturday instead of Friday. She said that she had accepted the invitation and promised we would arrive Friday in time for cocktails.

And then she gave me that bland look which is such an infuriating copy of Wilma’s and said, “But, darling, you work for her, don’t you? I should think it would be important to you.”

Yes, I worked for Wilma Ferris. There was no denying that. But my lovely wife couldn’t seem to get it through her thick head that I also had a reputation in the field to uphold. Before I had gone with Ferris, Incorporated, I had been a senior consultant with Ramsey and Shaver, Management Engineers. I had specialized in revamping the sales set up of the client firms. The works. Distribution, outlets, advertising, market surveys.

And it was a black day indeed when I resigned from Ramsey and Shaver and went to work for twice the money for Ferris, Incorporated. I made the change after she spent a whole morning sitting across a desk from me and making good hardheaded sense. The company certainly wasn’t sick. It was highly profitable. But not what it could be. She gave me the entire picture. The factory was in Jersey. They had two lines of cosmetics. The Ferris line was the specialty-shop line, high-priced. Symbol of luxury. The Wilma line was the bread and butter. The chain-store stuff, big quantities, low profit margin. But distribution on both lines was a shambles. Sales had started downward. The sales manager had recently done the firm a favor by dropping dead. She wanted the sales trend healthy, the whole sales end revamped. She offered a good salary. I talked it over with Mavis. I accepted it.

Because, you see, Wilma Ferris had talked hardheaded sense. At one point her voice got throatier, huskier, and she looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t ever try to kid me about the business, Paul. I started it with these two hands in a fourth-floor walkup. I started with Ferris Kreme. I mixed the glop up in a vat. I bought the jars wholesale. I designed the labels and stuck them on. I filled the jars and capped them and peddled them and collected my own accounts. Don’t ever try to kid me.”

“Why tell me that?”

“Lots of people try. They think they can walk off with a piece of the business just because I spend so damn little time at it. I spend little time at it because I’ve earned leisure. I’ve worked for it. I enjoy myself, Paul. I enjoy myself a hell of a lot. I hire people and let them work and leave them alone while I play.”

I wish to God she’d left Mavis and me alone.

Because that was the first time and the last time she ever made sense to me. After that I began to learn what she was. But by then our standard of living had gone up to match my new salary.

“Besides,” Mavis said, turning from the lengthy business of brushing her hair, speaking as though it were the clincher, “the Hesses will be there, and Judy Jonah and Wallace Dorn, and you’ll certainly have a chance to talk business with them, won’t you?”

Mavis felt we had to go because it was the first time we had been invited up to that reputedly fabulous place at the lake. But I could guess what sort of mess it would be. We’d been at Wilma’s apartment enough times to learn that. And people who knew had told me that if I thought Wilma a bit extroverted during her apartment parties, I should see her at the lake sometime. Or in Cuernavaca.

Mavis took over the packing and by the time we were ready to leave a stranger would have guessed we were about to take a cruise to Norway, stopping at Bermuda on the way back. I shuddered to think of how much of my fat pay was stowed away in those suitcases. I got Herman to help me, and between the two of us we got it all down to the apartment garage and loaded it in the back end of the new car. I know that Mavis looked very nice indeed, but it was spoiled for me because of her hair. She had started to fix her hair like Wilma’s. She sees too damn much of Wilma. They’re built somewhat alike — both tall women solid in the hip, big-breasted, slim in waist, ankle, wrist. Women that look and act alive and have some warm substance to them. They have none of the anemia of the high-fashion ads. I am a big man but, contrary to legend, my tastes have not run to miniature women.

This fixation of Mavis’ needs some explaining. I hear that it happens often. I have just never seen it happen before. I’ll have to expain how she was in order to explain how she is. I met her six years ago. She was twenty-one, to my thirty. She was a file clerk in a client plant in Troy, New York. I worked at the client plant for four months. There was something vague and unformed about her. Uninformed, too. Not that I can afford to be any intellectual snob. My college background was too much concerned with work sheets, reserves for depreciation, and time and motion study. But regardless of background, people do seem to acquire some stable theories and philosophies of existence, right or wrong. Mavis believed earnestly in any idea with which she happened to come in contact. And she would jettison it immediately when she ran smack into the next idea.

Her vacillating earnestness so delighted me that I didn’t pay much attention to her lack of any vestige of a sense of humor. I can’t remember the name of that play by Old Whiskers where he takes a dumb girl and has the guy make her into a lady. There is some of that tendency in every man, I guess. Not that I wanted to make Mavis into a lady. She was ladylike enough. But I thought I could start with this big pretty sort of formless girl and marry her and she would learn what I liked and become what I liked.

It didn’t work that way. I married her and she stayed the same old Mavis. Take her to a movie and for the next two days she’d be Betty Grable until she saw the next movie. She kept changing her hair, her accent, her style of dress, even her responses to affection. You couldn’t call it shallowness. She just hadn’t solidified into any one special individual. And I began to accept the fact that she never would, and accepted her for herself. She amused me. She fed me well. She was warm in bed. And she was decorative. If that is what you get, you can make it do. Even if there is no intellectual stimulation. Almost, I used to think, like having a great big beautiful playful red setter in the house.

That’s the way she was. Until we fell into the orbit around Wilma Ferris. Wilma is the strongest woman I know. My God, she’s strong. She keeps pressure on you all the time. As they say about certain entertainers, she’s always on. There is never any directness or simplicity. Only the impression thereof. And my girl became like a big fluttery moth circling the hot flame. She dived in finally and came out and she wasn’t Mavis any more. She was another edition of Wilma. Not deep on the inside, where Wilma is like steel. But all the outward manifestations. Wilma seemed to polarize her. To line up all her molecules or something. So she thinks Wilma is the mostest woman that ever walked the earth, and each day there is less of Mavis and more of Wilma. And the hell of it is, perfecting the facsimile means getting as close to Wilma’s standard of living as we can.

That alone I could adjust to. But my Mavis was a good girl. I mean good in the old-fashioned sense. Where things are black and other things are white. Wilma operates in an even shade of gray. And I have sensed that Wilma is superimposing her own moral standards on my Mavis. That frightens me.

I think there was a time when I could have told Mavis a little story about Wilma. And the little story would have severed that umbilical cord through which she feeds Mavis. But I waited too long, and if I told her now she might look at me with that derision I saw that afternoon in Wilma’s eyes.

Wilma asked me to come up to her apartment. A chat about our tie-up with the advertising agency, Fern and Howey. But from the moment I walked in, I sensed how it was. She had set her de luxe stage, and all I had to do was reach out. I damn near did. I was very, very close. But I kept remembering Randy Hess, remembering that big ring she had put in his nose, and I didn’t want any such ring in my nose. A business relationship was entirely enough. I gingerly untangled myself and made it just obvious enough so that she could hint that I was scared. I said it wasn’t that, exactly, and was rewarded with her look of derision. From that afternoon on she started seeing even more of Mavis. It sounds a little crazy to say that because she batted zero with me, she would concentrate on making my wife emotionally dependent on her, but not when you know Wilma. She has to win, somehow. I think it was Steve Winsan who told me about the titled lady in Cuernavaca who consistently and politely declined all invitations to attend parties at Wilma’s place. Not long after that the Mexican authorities found an irregularity in the titled lady’s residence permit, and the lady had to go back from whence she came.

Wilma had been entertaining the Mexican official who was in charge of those permits.

She has to win, somehow.

I can understand some of it and I don’t blame her. She came from nothing. From a complete nothing. The lower East Side, they say, where you learn a hell of a lot about survival. Maybe it was there that she learned she had to win all the time. And maybe if she was still struggling, that desire to win would be channeled in the right direction. But she has won, and so it has been diverted to a lot of social and personal stuff, where it becomes just so much malicious mischief, and worse. Like those two husbands she took on. One ended up a hopeless alcoholic, and the first one shot himself. They were sort of unstable guys to start with. I sometimes think she is attracted to instability, that she sort of feeds on it. Randy Hess is a pretty good example of that.

I’ve made her sound like a mess. Actually she is a hell of a lot of woman. You’ve got to admire her. But sort of in the way you admire a parade going by. With a lot of drums.

We got in the car and started up the parkway and you could feel what kind of day it was going to be in the city. A bake job. One of those Dutch-oven days followed by a night when all that stone would be radiating heat until dawn.

Mavis said, “Dahling, it would have been a dreadful day to stay in town.” Accent, intonation, huskiness — all a lovely imitation of Wilma Ferris. And she was drenched with that damn stuff Wilma uses. Blue Neon, it’s called. Twenty bucks an ounce, and our chemists say it’s one of the heaviest in the Ferris line. I wished Wilma Ferris would be suddenly taken dead. It wouldn’t affect my job. And it might give me my wife back.

Once we got far enough north so that we had a reasonable assurance of keeping moving, I pulled over on the grass and put the top down. I’d needed the new car like a second head, but once Wilma had casually mentioned that she thought closed cars were terribly dull, I knew that sooner or later I would have to trade.

We had the big fight before we got to Albany. I guess I started it. It was some damn thing she said that parroted an opinion of Wilma’s. And I asked her if she would please, for God’s sake, start being herself and stop being a cheap imitation of Wilma. And she told me that Wilma was the finest woman she had ever met, and Wilma was doing so much for her, and I ought to be grateful instead of stinking about it, and it was any wife’s job to improve herself and she wanted to be a credit to me, and it helped me for her to be so close to Wilma, her best friend practically, and I wanted to shut her up in a jail or something so she couldn’t have any friends, make a nun out of her or something. And then she got as far away from me as she could and she cried in a way that was entirely alien to her. An aloof weeping, full of pain and dignity. I just wished she would cry the way she used to. A lusty, puff-eyed yowling, full of snorts and wet noises.

“It’s going to be a dandy week end, isn’t it?” I said.

“Divine,” she said remotely.

Traffic was heavy, but out of annoyance with her and with myself I drove too fast, so we got to Lake Vale a little before five. I looked at the marked map. Her place was on the opposite side of the lake from the village. Mavis sat forward, obviously excited at seeing the place. She was the one who spotted the sign. A varnished plaque swinging from wrought iron, with the name written on it in brass in flowing script with no capital letter, the same as on the trade-mark: ferris. I turned left down the narrow gravel road toward the lake.

Except for the obvious fact of a power line and a phone line going in, the winding rutted road would make you think you were heading for a beat-up cabin. We went through over a thousand feet of woods, a thick stand of birch and pine and maple, all downhill, then we saw the blue gleam of the lake through the trees and saw the house itself. It would take your breath away, that house by the lake. Not just because it was so damn big. I’d heard she brought up some kid architect from Miami on the assumption that at least he’d do something different. He’d done it, all right. Stone and wood and a lot of glass, but none of that business about looking as though it grew out of the rock ledge on which it stood. That place looked as if it had glided in and was ready to take off across the lake as soon as you fired the rockets. Mavis looked at it in a glaze of ecstasy, lips parted, fingers wound in knots.

There was a sizable parking area, with five cars already parked. One beat-up station wagon, Wilma’s little steel-blue Austin-Healey, which she drives like a banshee with her hair on fire, a yellow Buick Skylark that I recognized as the Hesses’ car, a new-looking black MG that might be Steve Winsan’s, and a white Jaguar with a little line-drawing caricature of Judy Jonah on the door, leaving no doubt as to its ownership. I parked our crate at the auto show and a big Mexican with a long sad face came trotting out. I unlocked the rear end so he could get at the luggage. He told us to take the path around the house.

There was a big grass terrace on the right, all set up for English croquet with umbrellaed tables for the gallery. We went around the wing of the house to the big concrete terrace enclosed by the U of the structure. There were two sets of concrete steps that made slow curves down the rocky bank in front of the place to another and shallower terrace and two huge docks that stuck out into the blue lake. Two identical runabouts, fast-looking, well kept, were tied up at the dock. I saw water skis on the dock, or pier I guess would be a better word. They were built like Fort Knox, probably to withstand the ice in winter. Judy Jonah was down on the pier, face down on a red mat, and Gilman Hayes sat near her, his brown back heavily muscled, legs dangling over the edge.

Wilma came hurrying across the big terrace toward us, making little sounds of delight. She spread her arms as though she would hug us both at once. She wore a white dress so painfully simple that you could almost read the price tag. She kissed Mavis and cooed at her, and patted my arm and got between us and led us back to the group. Randy Hess and Steve Winsan untangled themselves from some sort of lounge affairs.

“Of course you know everybody,” Wilma said. “That’s the point of this whole party. We’re all friends. No strangers to adjust to.”

Noel Hess smiled at us in her mild way. Steve shook my hand in that outdoor-boy manner he uses as stock in trade. Randy Hess greeted us with that sort of apologetic nervousness of his that reminds me sometimes of a child that suspects he shouldn’t be hanging around the grownups so much.

“Your house is absolutely lovely,” Mavis told Wilma.

“Thank you, darling. Now come on, dears. I’ll show you your room. José should have your luggage in by now.”

We went off the terrace through a door in a glass wall and through a perfectly tremendous room, and then down the corridor of what was apparently a bedroom wing, to the first door. José was putting the last suitcase on a rack. We had a big window overlooking the lake. The room was paneled in some silvery wood. Everything was built in. A big dressing room between the bedroom and the bath turned it into a semisuite.

“Gosh!” Mavis said. It was the first honest sound I had heard out of her in a month. She recouped lost ground immediately, saying, “It’s perfectly dahling, dahling.”

“Suppose I send José in with a drink while you dears are freshening up,” Wilma said.

“Please,” Mavis said. “A Martini...”

“Extra dry, coming up. And you, Paul?”

“Bourbon and water, thanks,” I said. Mavis gave me the stone glare. I am supposed to take up Martinis. It makes no difference to her that to me they taste like battery acid and get me howling drunk in twenty minutes. I’m supposed to conform.

Wilma left and we did some unpacking in sepulchral silence. Mavis stalked into the bath first. José brought the drinks, Mavis’ in one of those little bottle things the way they’re served in the better bars. I laid out a pair of fresh slacks and a gray gabardine shirt. Mavis came out of the bathroom with her dress over her arm and took a fast knock at the Martini.

“Go easy on that nitro, honey,” I told her. “Last time you lost your sawdust.”

“Did I indeed?” she asked, one eyebrow high, a Wilma look.

“Your samba with that Hayes phony was more utilitarian than graceful.”

“Gil Hayes is a talented artist.”

“Gil Hayes is a carefully calculated eccentric. The rhythmic integrity of spatial design.” I made a rude noise.

“Oh, shut up,” she said. It was the second honest sound she’d made within twenty minutes. Maybe there was hope left. From the neck down she looked very pink and pleasant indeed. She detected the examination and turned away quickly, saying, “Don’t get messy.”

When I came out of the bathroom she was gone, glass and all. I sat on the bed and finished my bourbon and thought dark thoughts about the week end. We couldn’t legitimately leave until Sunday before noon. That meant getting through two evenings and one day of fun and games. And it would be a week end like one of those simplified models of the structure of the atom, with Wilma as the nucleus, and all her pet electrons whirling around the edge.

I dressed and went out. I found Randy in the big living room. He was biting his lip and fiddling with Wilma’s high-fidelity setup. It was built into the west wall. I know a little bit about such things, so I went over and watched him diddle around. There was a Magnecord tape recorder racked the way you see them in radio studios. It had the hubs for one-hour tapes. There was a big Fisher amplifier, a Garrard changer fitted into a drawer, a Craftsman tuner, a big corner speaker enclosure. There was a control panel with switches marked for the various rooms so you could shunt the music around where you wanted it, an electronic mixer panel, and a studio mike. It looked like a good three thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. Randy, with shaky hands, was trying to thread the tape around the empty hub and across the heads of the recorder. He gave me a nervous smile. “Little music coming up,” he said.

Wilma came in off the terrace. “Really, Randy,” she said in a most unpleasant voice. “A simple little thing like that. Just get out of the way. Here. Hold my drink.”

He held her glass. Her fingers were deft. She threaded the tape, fastened it to the empty reel, turned on the recorder. The tape began to turn slowly onto the empty reel. “Bring me a fresh one, Randy.” He hurried off obediently.

The music started. It was alive in the room. Clear and perfect. It made the back of my neck tingle. She adjusted the volume, frowned at the panel board, then clicked a switch labeled “Terrace.”

She said, “You lose something if you try to operate too many speakers at once. This one is the best one here. I’ll turn it off so we can get the most out of the terrace enclosure. Don’t try to answer any question Judy might ask you about the program.”

The abrupt change caught me off balance. I had the stupid idea she meant the program of music. And then I realized she meant the television program we had sponsored until Judy went off for the summer.

“I can’t answer any questions because I don’t know the answers, Wilma.”

She patted my cheek. “That’s a dear.” She was standing quite close to me. There is an odd quality about her. When you are close to her you are so very conscious of her physically. Her mouth looks redder, her skin softer; her breathing seems deeper. It is an almost overpowering aliveness, and it has a strong sexual base to it. It is impossible for any normal man to stand close to Wilma and talk to her without having his mind veer inevitably toward bed. It is, perhaps, the same quality that Miss Monroe had. It fogs up your mind when you want it to be clear. And she is perfectly aware of that.

We went back out on the terrace. She frowned. “Randy, it’s just a tiny bit too loud out here. Be a dear and run in and turn it down just a shade more.”

Randy went buckety-buckety into the living room. Noel looked down into her glass.

Judy appeared on the terrace at the head of the steps. “The sun is gone, people,” she said. “Judith turns blue. Feed the girl rum. Hey there, Paul, Mavis. How do you like the gilded wilderness?”

I like Judy. She got her start singing with a band. She didn’t have much voice, but what she had she threw around with abandon. When her face is in repose, which is not often, you realize with surprise that she is quite a pretty blonde. And when she stands still, which is equally seldom, you see that her figure is trim and good. But when she is in motion, with that rubbery mercurial face, with all her calculated awkwardness and grotesqueries of stance and movement, you see merely that clown, that Judy Jonah, that crazy gal.

But I feel sad, watching her, because I know television has devoured her, and I know she knows it. The last forty weeks of Judy, the half-hour show that we sponsored until she went off in June for the summer, slipped in the ratings, week by week. There is a limit to the amount of straight comedy the public will take from one person. Situation comedy has a longer life. Judy’s was straight. And almost inevitably, she duplicated routines. I knew that Wallace Dorn, the account executive at Fern and Howey who has the Ferris account tucked neatly under his wing, had been scouting around for a new fall show, new talent for Ferris. So I wondered what Judy was doing up here without her agent. I suspected that Wilma had clubbed her into it. It would be so easy to trade on Judy’s uncertainty. “Don’t bring that horrible man, darling. We won’t talk business, believe me.”

The music masked the sound of the last car coming in. We didn’t know Wallace Dorn had arrived until he walked around the edge of the terrace. He wore his country tweeds and an ascot. He is an ersatz Englishman. There seems to be a constant supply of them in New York. The military mustache, the carefully gobbled enunciation with the ends of sentences falling off into “d’y’ know.” Much talk of the club, no ice in mine, please, and, on occasion, a silly little stick to carry. Veddy, veddy country, old Wallace Dorn. Bachelor, sportsman, school-tie type.

It was another hour before we were all collected on the terrace, Judy and Gilman Hayes back in clothes, José in a far corner standing behind a little bar on wheels, standing with the remote patience of a horse, and a little Mexican gal, cute as a button, hefty across the hips and shoulders, who appeared among us from time to time to pass little items of melted cheese.

As the alcohol worked on them I could begin to smell more and more of the tension. I didn’t know what was up, but Wilma seemed both too gay and too smug, and everyone else too miserable.

I finally had a chance before dinner to cut Steve Winsan out of the herd. I got him aside and said, “What goes, Steve? What the hell is up? Why all the sniping going on in all directions?”

He shook his head sadly. “Lucky boy,” he said. “A nice safe clean job. Lucky boy.”

“What is up? Is it a state secret?”

“I’m just sore enough to tell you, Pappy. I lose one client, I figure on picking up another. Our Wilma lives big. Old Randy, the watchdog, has been nibbling on her very gingerly about personal expenses. There’s a tax matter pending. She put too many cookies in this layout. She’s living too high. She’s a client on a personal basis, you know. Not through the company. Randy thinks I should be cut off at the pockets. And he wants her to drop Muscle Boy as an expensive luxury, which means cutting me off there, because she has been paying the PR shot on Muscle Boy, the shot that made him a big wheel in the gallery world. I handle Judy, too. She’s got Judy up here to put the blocks to her. She promised Judy next year’s show but didn’t put it in writing, and at the same time told Jolly Boy Dorn to dig up something else for fall. He hasn’t found anything and Randy whispers to me that she’s lifting the account and putting it in another agency. Which Dorn damn well suspects. And don’t think he won’t put up a battle. Don’t think I’m not going to do battle too, my friend. I need a good lever. With same I will pry hell out of Randy and get him to tell Wilma dahling that she better keep me on. My God, if I lose all three, it’s better than six hundred a week that Stephan Winsan Associates stop getting. If I wasn’t half tight I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Pappy. You sure she’s not about to cut your throat too?”

“You make me wonder.”

“There’s one more wheel within a wheel too, Pappy. She tells our Randy that, as her tame and captive business manager, he should not have permitted her current expenses to get into such a state. The poor jerk. He begs and pleads and she ignores him, then she turns around and blames him because she didn’t listen to him. She’s got him so jumpy if you went up behind him and snapped your fingers he’d jump out of his shoes. This is going to be a gay, gay week end. Keep your guard up.”

I tried to follow his advice. Steve’s briefing clarified the tension. I could watch the focal points. Judy was overly casual. Wallace Dorn became more British than Churchill. Randy Hess had the severe shakes. Noel acted as though she wished she were somewhere else. Steve was quarrelsome. As my Mavis got drunker, her imitation of Wilma began to border on parody. And you could almost hear Wilma purr. I half expected her to sit on the floor and start cleaning her shoulder with her tongue. We ate abundantly of the highly spiced Mexican food prepared by the doom-faced Rosalita, served by José, her brother, and Amparo, the cutie. It was semibuffet, with each of us filling our plates the first time and with Amparo trotting about with the hot casseroles providing refills. I saw Gilman Hayes sitting on the floor in a shadowy corner and saw the exceedingly primitive caress he conferred on Amparo when she leaned close to serve him. Her only reaction was a bit of excess hip sway when she moved away from him. The stolid mestiza face did not change expression. Later I saw José watching Gilman Hayes with an equal lack of expression. I did not think I would care to be looked at in precisely that way.

After dinner there was the softness of the good music in the big lounge, and all the world outside brilliantly floodlighted. Steve and Wilma played their normal vitriolic game of gin. Judy Jonah, Wallace Dorn, and I played a three-way game of Scrabble at a nickel a point. Noel Hess, pleading a headache, had gone to bed. Randy jittered around, taking care of the music, fussing with the floodlighting, rearranging ash trays, fixing drinks, kibitzing at both games. Randy kept South American music on the turntable at Gilman Hayes’s request. The light was bright on the Scrabble board, a spotlight with an opaque shade.

My concentration was bad because I could not help being aware of Mavis dancing with Hayes. I had no cause for complaint, no legitimate cause. But the music was low, slow, and insinuating, and they did entirely too much dancing without moving from one spot. I felt alternately sweaty and cold. I could not turn and look at them. I would see them from the corners of my eyes. Fragments. A slow turn, his hand brown on the softness of her waist. An infrequent image of them in the glass. The music was full of rhythmic tickings and clackings and thumps, with a horn crying. Wilma was saying, in the other corner, “One card at a time, damnit, Winsan,” and Wallace Dorn gave a little grunt of satisfaction, then clacked the wooden tiles onto the board.

I suddenly realized that Hayes and my wife were gone. I turned quickly and looked at the empty room. I must have started to rise. But Judy, with a quick shielded movement, pressed my arm. I looked at her. Wallace Dorn was studying his rack, chewing a fragment of his mustache. Judy made a slight motion with her head. I looked in that direction, through the glass, and saw that they were dancing on the big terrace now, in the light of the floods. They had a theatrical look, as though they were on one of those monstrous sets that the Hollywood geniuses create for Astaire. At any moment a silver staircase would unwind from the stars, and down it would come the sharp-shouldered chorus boys and a quarter ton of bare thighs.

I looked at Judy with gratitude, and with respect that she had sensed so quickly what was going on and how I could have made a fool of myself. Her face changed into the public Judy, and she gave me a distorted wink so vast I could almost hear it. Wallace Dorn gave his warning grunt and changed “own” to “clown” in such a way that the “c” changed “lean” into “clean,” and the “c” was on a bonus square.

After the game we both owed Wallace. We paid him. Judy yawned and said, “Not another. I know when I’ve been stomped, pardner. I am going to go stare at a star and then crumple into bed.”

“Need help looking at a star?” I asked her.

“You take half the light years and I’ll take the other half.”

We went by the dancers. They seemed unaware of us. We went down the stone stairway and out to the end of the left wing of the dock. Judy kept her hands shoved deeply into the big patch pockets of her wool skirt and scuffed her heels, shoulders a bit hunched against the night chill. There were almost too many stars. The red mat she had been sunning herself on was wet with dew. I flipped it over to the dry side and moved it near the edge. We sat down, dangling our legs toward the water. I lit her cigarette and turned and looked up over my shoulder toward the high terrace. The music was faint. Sometimes I could see them as far down as the waist when they moved near the edge of the terrace. Other times they were back out of sight.

“Pretty fancy tumbril to ride in,” Judy said.

It took me a moment to follow her. “How sharp is the knife?”

“Sharp enough. People have heard it being sharpened. So I got canceled out of a couple of guest spots on summer shows. And the gang is beginning to break up. Can’t blame them. They need a warm spot come fall.”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I’m just so damn tired, Paul. I can always grow a new head. I’ve done it before. I’m a rough girl, Paul. I’m a fighter. So I keep telling myself. I could get a Vegas deal. But I’m just pooped. I don’t know. I’ve made it and I’ve kept more than most and it’s stashed where I can’t touch it, thank God. I’m supposed to react, I guess. Maybe she wants a down-on-the-knees response. I can always act, if it’ll keep her happy. Me for bed.” She got up. I stood up beside her. She put her fists up and began to wobble around the end of the dock, rubber-legged, lurching, snarling, “Yah, you never touched me, ya bum.”

I was suddenly aware of the very special quality of her courage. I took her by the arms, holding her arms tightly just above the elbows. I shook her a little. I said, “I like you, Judy. I like you a hell of a lot.”

“Leggo, or I’m going to cry right in your face.”

I stood out there and watched her walk back to the shore, up the steps, out of sight across the terrace. I finished another cigarette and then went up. It was after one. Steve and Wallace Dorn had disappeared. Wilma and Gilman Hayes sat on a low couch. They stopped talking when I came in. Hayes sat with his big arms folded, looking at the ceiling. He looked sullen and stubborn.

“Mavis went to bed,” Wilma said. We said good night. Hayes gave me a vague nod.

Mavis, just a shade unsteady on her feet, was getting ready for bed, humming one of the Latin numbers. She gave me a warm moist smile. We went to bed. She was very ready, with swollen and eager readiness that completely ignored our increasing coolness toward each other. There was nothing flattering about it. Gilman Hayes had readied her, and the alcohol had primed her, and the music had quickened her. I was merely a convenience. A perfectly legal and uncomplicated and available convenience. There were no words of love. It was all very sudden and very tumultuous and very meaningless.

Afterward I heard her breathing deepen and change into the breathing of sleep. The music was gone and the floodlights were out. There was a sound of water against the twin piers. She had managed to kill something. I did not know precisely how it was done. But I lay there and looked at the light patterns I could make when I squeezed my eyes shut, and I searched through my heart and could find no love for her. I was certain there had been love. But it wasn’t supposed to go away, like throwing away the pumpkins after Halloween. I looked for fondness, and found none. I looked for respect, and found none.

She slept beside me, and she was just a big, moist, nubile, healthy, sycophantic young woman, too damn selfish to start bearing the children I wanted, big in the vanity department, small in the soul department, a seeker of sensation, an expert in the meaningless, a laboratory example of Mr. Veblen’s theories. I wanted to be rid of her, and I wanted to cry.

Saturday was bright and hot and still. Breakfast was served in sections on the terrace as people got up, an affair of rum sours, huevos mexicanos, and Cuban coffee that was closer to a solid than a liquid. The combination melted mild hangovers. As people began to come to life it became pretty obvious that this was going to be one of those electric frantic days, with everyone galumphing about, working muscles, short of temper, drinking too fast, and playing too hard.

Gilman Hayes put on a pair of trunks of jock-strap dimension and was hauled up and down the lake on water skis by Steve at the wheel of one of the runabouts. Hayes looked like one of the lesser inhabitants of Olympus. Mavis ahed and cooed from the end of the pier. I guess Steve got tired of it. He made a bad turn and put slack in the towrope and yanked hell out of Muscle Boy. Muscle Boy got indignant. Steve told him to go to hell and stretched his stocky body out in the sun and yelled to José to make with the Scotch. Randy, at Wilma’s request, took over the towing job. Hayes instructed Mavis on how to stay up on the skis. There was much giggling and shrill yelps and the support of an arm like an Atlas ad.

I swam a little and drank a lot. Judy Jonah went through a regular conditioning routine, knee bends, back bends, holding one leg straight up, handstands. She had a trim figure. I enjoyed watching her. Wallace Dorn paddled around in the water between the two docks, looking as if he were enduring this indignity for the sake of mingling with the herd. Noel Hess sat fairly near me, ordering her drink freshened each time I did. I wondered about her. She’s dark and small and quiet. You never feel as if you know her. She seems to be watching you all the time. Yet you get a feeling of a lot of slow dark fire burning ’way down underneath all that placidity. She wore a yellow swimsuit and I noticed for the first time the almost textureless purity of her skin. The way she was built seemed to emphasize the ivoried intricacy of ankle joint and wrist and shoulder, making you conscious of the human form as something of delicate and vulnerable design. Wilma swam for a time, with a lot more energy than skill, and then waved in the trio off the lake and whooped up a game of croquet. She appointed Randy scorekeeper and referee, and the rest of us split into two teams of four.

I was teamed up with Judy, Wallace Dorn, and Noel Hess, with Hayes, Mavis, Wilma, and Steve as the competition. Wallace, playing with bitter concentration, and Noel, with an unexpectedly good eye, kept up our end of the score. Judy clowned it, and I was getting too tight to be much good. There were ground rules. If you captured a ball you could hammer it into the lake. The person knocked into the lake had to chugalug a drink, retrieve the ball, replace it on the edge of the parking area. Whenever one team had gone the length of the course, everybody had a drink. It got pretty blurred for me. They kept knocking me into the lake. The voices started to sound funny, as though we were all in a tunnel. The stripes on the wooden balls got brighter. The grass got greener. I remember Judy pleading on her knees, hands clasped, while Steve took a gigantic swing and, losing his footing, knocked both her ball and his own down the cliff into the lake. I don’t know who won. I think I had some lunch.

Then, in some mysterious way, I was in the living room, weaving, trying to focus my eyes, and Judy Jonah was supporting me.

“Come on, now,” she said. “One big fat foot after the other.”

“Where’s everybody?”

“Out being mad and gay. Banging around in the boats. Churning around in the water. Come on, lamb. Judy won’t let you fall on your head.”

There was another blank and then I was in bed, and Judy was looking down at me, shaking her head. She walked to the foot of the bed and took my shoes off. I was still in my swim trunks. She floated a blanket over me.

“Preciate it,” I said. “Preciate it.”

“Poor old bear,” she said. She leaned over me, kissed me lightly on the lips, and then she was gone, the door shutting softly behind her. The bed started to veer dangerously around a circular track. I grabbed hold of it and steered it carefully into sudden sleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I looked at the window. The outside floodlights were on. I heard laughter. Somebody was running water in our bathroom. The door opened, and through the dressing room I could see Mavis outlined against the lighted bathroom as she turned in the doorway and clicked off the switch.

As she moved quietly through the room I spoke her name.

“So you aren’t really dead after all, dahling?”

“What time is it?”

“About nine. It’s quite warm. We’re all swimming. I imagine you feel dreadful, I hope.”

“Thanks so much.”

“You made a spectacle of yourself, you know. Stumbling around like that. I hope you feel stinking.” She swept out and banged the door shut.

I drifted off again. When I woke up I had a feeling it was much later. I felt a little better. I drank three glasses of water, put on a bathrobe, and went out into the living room. Two small lights burned. The music was FM unattended, some asinine disc jockey who said, “And it’s thirty seconds to Cinderella, cats, so I guess that winds up the ball game. Sorry, Eleanor, we didn’t get to spin that Julie platter for you, but...” I found the right knob and cut him off. I walked out on the terrace, to a warm night of a billion stars. Somebody came up the concrete steps with reckless speed. The hurrying figure rushed to the switch box and the banks of floodlights began to snap on, one section at a time, dimming the stars. I blinked at the lights and saw it was Steve. The others were down on the dock.

Steve grabbed my arm hard. “Paul, Wilma’s gone.”

I was fogged by long sleep. I stared stupidly at him. “Gone where?”

“We think she drowned.”