The Institute

4

She rolled off, snuggled close, and lay for a long time without speaking. Then: “Lloyd, I’ve been thinking. I could give a little dinner and ask about six couples and let you do your stuff — talk about biography while your great big chest bulged your puff-bosom shirt — and hope one of the six would take the bait. But a better idea, I think, would be a little dinner for six. You, some dame I’ll think of to round it out nicely, Richard, me, and a couple I know of named Granger who’re not Du Ponts but are filthy rich and are already literary to some extent. They were friends of that pair of Du Ponts who were friends of the Henry Menckens — so they’ll know what you’re talking about. I imagine they might get a kick out of being a part, the main part, of something intellectually important. And I don’t see how Richard could make any trouble. He’d look awfully small, trying to.”

“But why would he?”

“I told you why.”

I thought that over and asked: “You think he’s out? Unless you change your mind?”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“I know, but is he out, once and for all?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just Brisket Palmer who hates to give up. He’s my one bird-in-hand, you know. Before going for birds-in-the-bush, I thought we might figure an angle on him.”

I probably said more, because I suddenly realized that I was talking along without getting any reaction. When I looked at her again, she was up on one elbow, staring hard at me. “Lloyd, you wouldn’t take advantage, would you?”

“How ‘take advantage’?”

“Of me. With Richard.”

Now, so help me, the only advantage I had on my mind, at least until then, was how to get in sync with her twitch. It hadn’t occurred to me, as apparently it hadn’t to her until just then, that if I wanted to take advantage of the situation, I now had her over a barrel. For several moments we had it, eyeball to eyeball. We both knew what she meant. But I couldn’t quite own up, and my mouth took over, to fudge. “How — make it plainer, please. How could I take advantage?”

“By betraying me, Lloyd.”

“I ask you to make it plainer, and you—”

“By telling Richard about it, what went on in this bed today — which would solve all of his problems, dirt cheap, as he would regard it — as well as all your problems. He’d be rid of me without having to pay me a cent, and you’d have your institute, sealed, delivered, and paid for. Because, of course, the amount you say it would cost — twenty million, I think it was — would be nothing to him, compared with what he would owe me as a property settlement in a regular divorce. Cheating wives don’t get paid, as I think you very well know. So that’s how you could take advantage. And for this institute, if you can, you will.”

“Just like that — chitty-chitty, bang-bang?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Couple of things wrong with that theory, though.”

“What things?”

“His reaction, for one thing. The way he might act, correct it. But, of course, as we lie here, we can’t be sure what he would do. Most likely, if I went to him with this tale, he would kick me out but quick. Then he’d go to you, and you’d tell him... what?”

“Why, the truth, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! Why—” She must have talked for ten minutes, saying how sure she was. Finally I cut in: “Or in other words, you’d lie, figuring it was my word against yours. Then he decides to take your word, and I’m out and you’re in. Chitty-chitty, bang-bang.”

She closed her eyes and lay there a long time. “But he could take your word, Lloyd.”

“Okay, I’m out and you’re out. So—”

“So what!”

“We’re out together — out there, in here.”

“You mean you think that after you had cost me my marriage, I’d come sneaking back to you? How stupid can you get?” She paused. “I see myself doing it, Lloyd.”

“I see myself doing it, too — in a pig’s eye, I do. The whole idea is silly, so silly as to be completely ridiculous. Why, the idea of my going to him—”

“You wouldn’t have to go.”

“You mean I could beam it to him by radio?”

“You could telephone and not say who you were.”

“And he wouldn’t recognize my voice? Or have any idea who it was that would know what you did in this bed? How stupid can you get? You, I’m talking about.”

“You could send an anonymous card.”

“Which, with the money he has, he could have traced in two days. Come on, make sense.”

“Would you take advantage of me or not?”

“I told you, make sense.”

“I want an answer — yes or no?”

“Okay, then, no.”

After a long pause she said: “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not looking at me.”

“I’m looking at you now — straight. Now, what do my eyes say?”

“Lloyd, they say you’re lying.”

“I wouldn’t know how to make them look any straighter.”

“They look too straight.”

“I don’t know any other way to look.”

“That’s it, Lloyd. You would take advantage of me.”

To change the subject, I pulled the covers down, turned her on her stomach, and massaged her backside a little, with good hefty slaps, one-two-three, so that it sounded like artillery. Pretty soon I asked: “Hey? Why don’t you beat me back?”

“I don’t feel that way about it.”

“What way is that?”

“I don’t feel friendly.”

“O.K., I do, but if you don’t, that’s how we play it, anything to please a lady. So, call.”

“What?”

“Get on that phone, there on the night table, and call — your husband, to say you’ve changed your mind. If I get credit for being a rat, I may as well get the advantage.”

“You’d take it — it’s what I said.”

“I said call, so call.”

“No use calling now. He was due in Philadelphia late this afternoon and won’t be back till tonight.”

“Then call him tonight.”

“All right.”

Suddenly she started crying. I took her in my arms and whispered that I loved her. “Get on,” I said.

“Oh no! That’s over!”

“Once more, to prove that I love you — and that you love me.”

“I couldn’t love a rat.”

“Rat loves you, though.”

“Dear God, don’t let me!”

“Hortense, didn’t you hear me?”

Turned out that she did.

At last, early that evening, we got up. Still undressed, she made the bed while I sat and watched. She admired the bed. When I said my mother had had it made to be slightly smaller than the beds in the stores, she looked it over again, touching it with her fingers. “It’s so simple,” she said. “Just the four turned posts and a turned piece in between, at the head, with the two side boards cut down in the middle. That’s all. And it’s maple; it’s not Wallace Nutting. I’m getting a bit tired of him.”

“Keep on. I love those friendly words.”

“Toward her! Your mother!”

“Almost forgot yourself, didn’t you?”

“I don’t forget anything.”

Then we bathed, she in the tub and I in the glassed-in shower. When we toweled off facing each other, her attachments shook breathtakingly. She said: “Heaven only knows what happens now. It’s my infertile time of the month — supposed to be! Heaven only knows how it’s going to be.”

After we dressed, we went down in the freight elevator and out the back way to the car. I took her to the Royal Arms where the specialty is roast beef, and we gobbled down the whole thick portion. But even while we were eating, she kept questioning me about biography and biographers. “Especially where I come in, or can come in, if you still insist on that call.” Her questions were penetrating, so much so that they surprised me, and I sharpened up on my answers, putting things on the line, while she took notes, writing on the back of the menu. She had her mind on it, and insisted: “If I’m to put on this show for Richard, I have to have things straight, so I make sense, so he believes I’ve changed my mind for the reasons I say I have. I still say it would be much, much better if you didn’t make me, Lloyd, if we simply forgot about it.”

“I’m not making you, Hortense.”

“Oh yes but you are.”

“You’re going to call so you can sleep.”

“I’m going to what?”

“It’s not me who has this thing on the brain. It’s you. You’re in my power — that we both know — and I know I would never take the advantage I have. But you don’t know it, you can’t be sure. It’s for that reason — pure, yellow-bellied terror — that you’re going to put in that call. To be safe from me, as you think.”

“If I withdraw my opposition, I will be.”

“O.K., whatever you say.”

“Well? Won’t I be?... I better be!”

“You are now. As you know, but can’t be quite sure.”

“We go round and round and round.”

Watergate’s on Virginia, but at her suggestion I parked on New Hampshire around the corner from it. I got out her bag while she got the light coat. She was wearing the mink. We walked around to the marquee, and the doorman came running to take the bag. When he’d disappeared through the door, she turned to me. “Lloyd, you still want me to do it, go through with this?”

“Hortense, it’s you who wants to do it!”

“Then, okay, I will.”

“You want a bump on the backside?”

“I’ll stop by your place in the morning, at ten sharp. Please be out front, so I don’t have to get out or go in that lobby.”

“I’ll be there waiting.”

“I’ll call Richard when I get upstairs. On the way to Wilmington tomorrow, I can tell you what he said.”

“Then we’ll be together on it.”

“Goodnight.”

And she dived through the door without looking back.