You Live Once

Chapter 3

I have been with Consolidated Pneumatic Products, Incorporated, for five years. It is one of the big ones. You hear more about G.E. and General Motors because they have consumer lines and keep the name in front of the public. C.P.P. sells strictly to industry. You find the two page ads in the technical journals. There are sixteen plants, of which the Warren Tube and Cylinder Division is one of the smaller ones.

I started out in Fall River, was moved next to Buffalo, and then out to Warren a year ago. C.P.P. believes in keeping all managerial talent on the jump. Three years in any one place is about as long as you can expect. It is smart policy. It makes your executive talent in all echelons interchangeable and broadens your men. It facilitates standard management methods and procedures. And when a boy graduates from the gypsies to top management he will know quite a few of the plants intimately, and know personally a great many men in the field.

So many of the big corporations have adopted this plan that it has developed a whole new class of people in this country, people without roots. Or, perhaps, people with a different kind of roots. There are thousands upon thousands of us — the married couples filling up places like Park Forest, Illinois, like the two Levittowns, like Parkmerced in San Francisco, and Drexelbrook in Philadelphia. And, of course, like Warren’s smaller version, Brookways. It is the new management caste, and what it will eventually turn into, nobody knows. Joe Engineer and his wife move out of Parkmerced and into Park Forest two thousand miles away. The first day they are there they can start playing do-you-know with their neighbors. Get the latest word. Wilsie quit and went with Reynolds Metals. Dupont sent Kingley back to the business school. The Bowens have three kids now. They live in the big developments, work on community committees, set up sitter banks and draw on each other’s time; live with a minimum of privacy and a maximum of borrowing of gadgets, party glasses and utensils.

As a bachelor, I have not yet gotten into the community living aspects of this gypsy existence. Doubtless it will happen to me one day. A married man seems to have better promotion chances with top management.

I reported to the Warren plant, to Harvey Wills, the plant manager, on a rainy April day thirteen months ago, as the new assistant production manager. I was flushed with brand new promotion and raise, though apprehensive about the personnel, even though Tory Wylan, my personal spy and friend in the home offices in New York had told me it was a good group.

It turned out to be fine. Ray Walt was a sweetheart. He gave me my head and we worked well together. Ray was transferred in January, and Dodd Raymond came in. Before Ray left he told me he’d tried to get me promoted to his job, but the home office and Harvey Wills both thought I was a little too green for it. He told me, though he didn’t have to, to keep my guard high with Dodd Raymond. He said Raymond was smart and ambitious, and had the reputation of always having a fall guy handy when something went sour. I thanked him.

Harvey Wills called me up to his office the day Dodd arrived, both to meet him and to give him the guided tour. Dodd shook hands the right way, said the right things, dressed the right way, and let me call him Mr. Raymond just one time. I wondered if Ray had been wrong.

But a week after Dodd reported I had a personal letter from Tory Wylan. He confirmed what Ray had told me. He filled in the details of some raw situations Dodd had been mixed up in. He’d trampled some good men and he’d come out on top. Tory wrote that Dodd had some of the top management fooled. The proof was in the fact that Dodd had been able to get a transfer to his own home town — a thing that was strictly against C.P.P. policy.

So, had I not been forewarned, maybe I would have thought Dodd a nice guy. He knew the business and stayed out of my hair. I protected myself by starting a work journal, dictating into it all orders he gave me.

After he and his wife got settled he had me to their place for drinks and dinner, with his wife and his mother. That was the beginning. That’s how I started to get mixed up in the lives of Dodd and Nancy Raymond. Were it not for Dodd, and his being a home town boy with a considerable social pedigree, I would never have gotten to meet Mary Olan, much less endure the motel fiasco and later find her body in my closet. Dodd threw me and Mary Olan together, because he needed a cat’s paw.

He had spotted me on the beach and he came on over. In grey suit and necktie he looked far too dressed up for Smith Lake.

“Hello, Marilyn, Clint. Certainly is a beautiful day up here. Getting hot as hell in town. Clint, can I talk to you a minute?”

It had more of a heavy-boss flavor than I liked, but I excused myself and walked over near the boat house with him.

“What’s up?”

“There’s nothing new about Mary. I dropped Nancy off at Mother’s camp. Clint, I’m really worried about her. This isn’t like her. She invited most of these people here.”

“They seem to be doing fine.”

“Did she act all right when she dropped you off?”

“She was fine and dandy, Dodd. Just like I told the police you sicked on me.”

“Don’t be like that, boy! Hell, they asked me. I had to tell them.”

“You’re pretty jittery.”

“Mary is one of my best friends. You know that.”

Sure. One of his best friends. And he thought he was pulling the wool over Nancy’s eyes in fixing it up so Mary would date me and the four of us could make a nice jolly foursome. But I knew, as he didn’t know, that he wasn’t fooling Nancy a damn bit. Mary, in her own special way, had been making a fool out of Dodd Raymond. Maybe she actually wanted him. Or maybe she had been merely getting even for his unthinkable disloyalty in marrying a stranger without asking her permission first. I hadn’t been able to figure out which it was. I only knew that he wanted Mary Olan and that I had been a handy device to keep her within range. Mary had been seven years younger than Dodd. But they had known each other well before he had moved away from Warren. How well I could only guess.

“How is Nancy taking it?” I asked maliciously.

“She’s upset too, naturally. But let’s leave my wife out of it for the time being, shall we? You don’t seem to give a damn about Mary, Clint.”

“She’ll turn up,” I said.

“When you get dressed why don’t you drive over to the camp? Mother will be pleased to see you. We can have a few drinks and talk this thing over.”

I said I would. It would be pleasant to see Nancy, at least. When the sun had dried me I said goodby to Marilyn, who pouted at me for leaving. There was no need to say goodby to anyone else.

I drove down the lake shore road to the sign which said, in copper and stained wood, RAYMOND. Each year Dodd’s mother moved up to the small, comfortable camp at the lake with her nurse as soon as the weather was warm enough, leaving, this summer, the big house in town for Dodd and Nancy rather than closing it up. I imagined that it was a relief to Nancy to have the house to herself. Mrs. Raymond was an imposing, stone-faced, white-haired woman in her sixties, confined by arthritis to a wheelchair. She had positive opinions, and achieved emphasis through repetition. In her scale of values the fact that I worked for Dodd put me on almost the same social footing as the brawny Irish nurse who lifted her in and out of her wheelchair.

I parked the car in the drive and went around to the front where I knew they’d be. The shoreline is steep at that place. There is a patio on the lake side, and steep wooden steps that go down to the shallow beach. Dodd had changed to bright yellow shorts, and he had a can of beer in his hand. Mrs. Raymond sat in her wheelchair in the shade of a big beach umbrella. Nancy was stretched out on a padded chaise longue with wheelbarrow handles and wooden wheels. Her smile was what I had come to see.

“Well, young man,” Mrs. Raymond said, “I suppose they’re all running around in mad circles up at the Pryors’ now that it’s too late.”

The final two words gave me a jolt. “Too late, Mrs. Raymond?”

“Of course it’s too late. White slavers.”

“Please, Mother,” Dodd said. “Can I get you a beer, Clint?” I nodded.

“White slavers,” Mrs. Raymond said firmly. “You don’t hear much about them. They keep it out of the papers. You wait and see. Even if they didn’t get her this time, they’ll get her next time. You wait and see.”

Dodd came back out of the kitchen and handed me a cold beer. “Mother has them crouched behind every bush.”

“You can make it sound ridiculous all you want. You can jeer at me. But did they ever find the Cornwall girl? Did they? Did they ever find the slightest trace of her? No, and they never will. After what they do to them they’re ashamed to come home,” she said darkly.

“Maybe she just decided to go on a trip or something,” Nancy said.

“Ha!” said Mrs. Raymond. Nancy’s opinions always got a similar response. I suspected that Mrs. Raymond resented Nancy not only because she had married an only son, but because after some six years of marriage Nancy had yet to come up with a grandchild for her.

Nancy was wearing a figured grey sunsuit thing, with a sort of skirt effect. She stretched and said, “Gosh, the sun is making me sleepy. Anybody want to walk on the beach?” Her glance swept across me meaningfully and I rose to the hook.

“I’d just as soon.”

“You two go ahead,” Dodd said casually. A bit too casually, I thought.

We went down the steep wooden stairs, Nancy first. She is my favorite candybox blonde. Small perfect delicate features, silky floating hair. She has a thin little-girl voice with overtones of a lisp cured long ago. However, there is a level honesty and intelligence in her blue eyes that keeps her from being insipid. Her figure is flawed, if you can consider it a flaw. I have no doubt that she does, because her clothes, even the sunsuit, are styled to de-emphasize the flaw. She is very long-waisted. Her torso, discernible through any clothing, is long, ripe, muscular, perfectly formed. You see such torsos carved in old marble a lot oftener than you see them on people. Were her legs in proportion Nancy would be six feet tall. But the lovely torso rests on short heavy legs. They are shapely, but they do not fit. Understand, it is not something you see immediately. After you see her a few times you begin to realize that though she is lush indeed, the proportions are subtly off. Then you see why. Her hips are too far from her head, and too close to the ground.

We walked to a pine log a hundred yards up the beach.

“He’s pretty upset,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Clint, do you have any remote idea what could have happened?”

“Not the slightest.”

“It’s damned funny. I... I hope she never comes back.” Nancy said that shyly. We could not talk together of Mary Olan without constraint. She became shy when she remembered the way she had talked the second time we had all gone out as a foursome. Sober, Nancy would not have confided in me — I had been a stranger.

Dodd had set up the first double date. There had been undercurrents of tension that I didn’t understand. Mary and Dodd would begin to close Nancy and me out of the conversation by talking of old friends during the old days in Warren. Then they would remember their manners. Mary’s attitude toward me had been casual and friendly, but to Nancy she was patronizing. Nancy had kept her claws unsheathed just enough so they showed. I chalked that up to the normal stress you would expect between wife and old gal friend. I even assumed that Dodd had decided, since he was going to stay in Warren for some time, that the best way to smooth things out was to throw wife and old gal together and rub the edges off.

For my part, I was pleased. My social contacts in Warren were limited. The guys on my same level in the firm were out there in Brookways, well wifed and bairned. They had me out a few times for dinner. During the evening people would be drifting in and out, and some of them were lovely ladies. But each of the lovely ladies had a husband who just happened to be somewhere else that evening, and a place like Brookways — even if you had the inclination, which I most certainly haven’t — is no place to make passes amid the married set. Compared to Brookways, a fishbowl is a mountain retreat.

There were, of course, the gals in the office. But C.P.P. regards such goings on with a paternalistic frown.

Warren is a tight community. I was part of the new influx of postwar population, and a professional transient at that. The old part of town drew its skirts tightly around itself, talked about the dreadful habits of the “new element,” and quietly raised its standard of living with the money we were bringing in. So I had battered myself into apathy with workouts at the Y, with sheafs of work I brought home from the office, with library books that I had never gotten around to reading before. When restlessness got its sharp little fangs into me, I’d roam the Saturday bars. That is a forlorn pursuit, eyeing the tight-skirt little drabs in the neighborhood joints, or the enameled Vogue-like birds of prey in the dollar-a-cocktail lounges, nursing their pale poison during the five o’clock ritual of appraisal and rejection. The jukes hammer your head and your need is a sickness to be assuaged only by predictable shame.

During my five transient years I had come to learn that the more complex the civilization grows, the more violent are the effects of loneliness. I had learned why C.P.P., G.E., Dupont, Alcoa, Ford, General Motors, Kodak and all the rest of them wanted us safely married. Still, there were a lot of us still single, minds honed keen by Sheffield, Towne, Stanford, Harvard Business, M.I.T., and by day we made things run and move and grow. But by night we paced the neon sidewalks where nylon whispers on hips and ankles, and lipstick shows black when the light overhead is red.

A few times I had reached the point where the act of marriage became a goal in itself, apart from any specific woman. Marriage to a faceless being who was nevertheless all too vivid from the neck down, who by warmth and closeness would still the gnaw of the blood.

Thus I was grateful to Dodd for being willing and able to give me this chance to enter a world previously denied me. Mary Olan opened a door and the city changed. Sewell, through Dodd, sponsored by Olan, became acceptable. They saw to their indubitable surprise that I unerringly chose the correct fork, that my shoulders were unpadded, that I tied my own bow tie, that I could carry on a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with helical gears, cutter grinders and industrial abrasives. I soon learned that the old line families thought Dodd’s career with C.P.P. rather daring and eccentric. With law, medicine and banking open to him, he had become a technical man. Works down at one of those new plants beyond the river, doing God knows what. It’s really charming that he could arrange to be sent back home. They ship them around like cattle, you know. That little wife he found somewhere or other actually seems rather sweet. And it seemed so dreadfully obvious that he would marry the Olan girl. Much as I was amused and irritated by the attitude of Old Warren, I was sophomorically delighted to become known and accepted.

It was on my second date with Mary Olan that Nancy Raymond, inhibitions liquidated, bared her distressed soul. A woman with a top sergeant voice had phoned me at the office and given me my orders regarding a party she was giving at the Locust Ridge Club. I checked with Dodd and he said it had been his suggestion. I was to pick up Mary and the four of us could go together. When I phoned Mary I found out that she had been given her orders too.

It was an April Saturday night, a cocktail party for about forty in a private room at the club, then dinner and dancing. My appearance with Mary Olan made it essential that each one of the other guests meet me, categorize me and put me on a mental list for future parties should I pass inspection.

Nancy looked charming in a dinner dress that was exactly the right color and cut for her — a slate blue that enhanced her eyes and emphasized the incredibly fine texture of her skin. After I had been punted from group to group with rugby precision, I found myself in a restful corner with Nancy.

“The man who mixed these martinis belongs at White Sands,” I said.

Nancy was looking beyond me at Dodd, standing with Mary Olan in a group of eight. Mary, laughing heartily, had taken Dodd’s arm.

“Skoal,” Nancy said and thumped two-thirds of a cocktail down her throat in two gulps and handed me her glass. “Please, mister.”

I brought her a new one. She took half of it, said, “To White Sands,” and downed the second half.

“Easy, my lady. These can be poison.”

“Hah! Fade me again, Clint boy.”

“I will not be a party to self-destruction, Nance.”

“I’ll get it my own self.”

“Okay, okay.” It was not happy to watch. I wondered if our Nancy were a lush. I decided no. Female lushes carry the mark on them. Their faces coarsen, their features thicken, they grow fur on the larynx. So it had to be the Mary Olan situation, and an intensification of the strain I had noticed on the first date.

The four of us ate at a table for six with another couple. I was between Nancy and a hollow-eyed brunette with a staccato bray of a laugh which made her husband, across the table, wince visibly each time she tinkled the chandeliers with it. Nancy had somehow managed to get a double martini at the table. When Dodd reached over for it, she wrapped her hand around it. She had reached the glazed state, monosyllabic, practically inert. After too many awkward holes in the conversation, Mary Olan began to carry the ball. She did it well, too. Conversation bounced and pranced, passing back and forth in front of the dead eyes of Nancy Raymond. Mary kept hauling me in by the heels, but I still found time to whisper to Nancy that she should eat something. Her great slab of rare roast beef arrived and was removed untouched.

We were on coffee when she stood up abruptly. The conversation stopped and Dodd started to stand up too. “Not you,” she said to him with great clarity. “Have to walk. With Clint.”

He gave a little nod and I went off with Nancy. She walked with rigid dignity until we were outside and then clung tightly to my arm. There had been a misty rain earlier. The stars were covered and the grass was wet. We could see by the light from the club.

“Special service,” she said. “Walking drunk ladies.”

“Where do we walk?”

“Round and around. Hooo. Dizzy as a bee.”

We walked in silence back and forth across the wide grounds near the tennis courts. She kept lifting her head high and breathing deeply. We must have walked for fifteen minutes and then she said, “Sit down now. Over there.”

We went over to some benches beside the tennis courts. In the faint light the nets had a forlorn sag, the asphalt courts gleamed wetly. I used my handkerchief to wipe the dampness from a bench. We sat down and I lit our cigarettes.

“Clint, you ever try to... to match yourself against a great tradegy, tradegy... hell, tragedy.”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“That Olan bitch. Her mother went crazy. Murdered her father. Dodd told me all about it when we were married. He wanted to marry her. No she says. Can’t do. Insanity. Very tragic. I ask Dodd if he still loves her. No, no, no. Kid stuff. All over. Sure. Loves me. Just me. We’re fine. Good marriage, Clint. It was. Then he starts wondering if he can get back here. Mother all crippled up. Lots of old friends. Me, damn fool me, I say why not. So a year ago he starts working angles. Pulls strings. Real careful. Back we come. Warren! I hate it. Oh, how I hate it. You see, she’s here. And it isn’t dead. It never was. Not with her and not with him. Oh, I got the picture. She won’t play. She won’t sneak. Very noble. He wants to see her, it’s got to be right out in a open. Like this. Where she can work on him. Make me look bad. Pat the little wife on the head. Take him back just so she can show her muscles. Lots of money but a cheap bitch anyway, you know?”

“I don’t think it’s like that.”

“Oh you don’t! What do you know anyway? You’re the patsy. You don’t take her out. You just make her handy so she can work on him. And I can’t do a damn thing. I can’t say we don’t go out with you two. That makes me look worse even. I have to stand still for it. I have to just wait and watch everything blow up. Good sport. Good old Nancy. Fine! Clint, you could fix it. If only she’d just... If you could make her... No, I can’t say that. Won’t say that. Won’t ask you to do anything like that.”

“Want to walk some more?”

“It was so wonderful. We had our kind of friends. Everywhere we went. Not like these people. They act like his job stinks. Like it’s a... a hobby. These aren’t my kind of people. You know what? He won’t let me tell anybody here. It was okay to tell it other places where we lived. Big joke. We could laugh. Here he hasn’t got any sense of humor. Know how I met him? Want to bust laughing? I cleaned his teeth. Dental hygienist. Kept coming back to get his teeth cleaned. Had the cleanest teeth in the country. Had to marry him before I wore ’em right down to the gums. Other places we could tell that. Not here. Here it would be like dirt. Like I’m something to be ashamed of. Gee, it isn’t something you can just do. You have to study for it. I studied hard. I was good. What’s wrong with that?”

She sounded so lost I wanted to take her in my arms. I wanted to anyway — even drunk she was a desirable woman. And I wanted to smack Dodd Raymond right in the nose. There wasn’t a damn thing I could say to her.

She stood up suddenly and said in an awed voice, “I’m going to be sick.”

We went over to some bushes. I held her and held her head as she was wrenchingly ill. Then I went up to the men’s room at the club and got a wet towel and a dry towel and took them back down to her. She bathed her face and then used the towels on the spattered front of her dress. As she bent over, working on her dress, she said, “How awful, Clint. How perfectly awful.”

“It happens to the carefullest.”

“I wasn’t very careful. You’re sweet, Clint.”

“Friend of the family.”

“Would you do me one more thing?”

“Sure.”

“Drive me home. Don’t tell Dodd you’re doing it. Tell him when you get back. If you tell him now he’ll insist on taking me home. He won’t say anything later but he’ll have that damn patient look that will mean I spoiled the party. Added to everything else, of course. Do you mind?”

“No. Want to leave now?”

“Please.”

I drove her to the Raymond home. It was a high-shouldered job, mansard roof, iron fence, in a neighborhood that was decaying in slow genteel fashion, preparing its soul for the inevitable invasion of funeral parlor, supermarket and masseuse. The big house was dark.

“We moved Mother Raymond up to the place at the lake early this afternoon,” she explained. “I wouldn’t dare come home alone if she was here. She said it was earlier than usual for her. Then she sighed and she said it would be nice for us two young people to be alone. And she sighed again and said she hoped it wouldn’t be so damp at the lake this time of year, and so cold that it would hurt her arthritis. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Damn it all!”

I walked her up to the door and she handed me the key. I opened the big door and it creaked as it swung back. She reached inside and found a switch that turned on the light in the big narrow gloomy hallway.

“Clint, I talked too much. I talked an awful lot too much.”

“I can’t remember a darn word, somehow.”

“Can I tell you you’re a nice guy?”

“Sure.”

“You’re a nice guy. What I said is between us. I’m unhappy here and I drank too much and I’m ashamed of myself. This isn’t my house and it doesn’t seem like my husband any more and I became a fool tonight. I won’t do it again. That isn’t the way to fight this thing. That’s the way to hand him to her on a platter, with an apple and cloves. I’ll do better.”

“I know you will, Nancy. Temporary lapse. Maybe overdue.”

She smiled. “If I wasn’t so messy, I’d like to be kissed.”

I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead. “That do?”

“It does fine, Clint. Goodnight... and thanks.”

I drove back to the club. The dancing had started. The five piece orchestra sounded like an awkward fusion of Meyer Davis and Bobby Hackett. Every other number was mechanical Latin, gourds and all. Dodd wasn’t on the floor. I tracked him down over in the men’s bar. He was talking down at a man who looked like a bald Pekingese. When I caught his eye he wound up the conversation and came over to me, glass in hand.

“Where’s Nancy?”

“She didn’t feel good. She had me take her home.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have taken her home.”

“She wanted it that way.”

“I’ve never seen her do that before. I can’t understand what got into her.” He glanced at me sideways, suspicion shining in his eyes.

I made a noncommittal sound. It was no time for a brand new friend of the family to tell husband he knew what was wrong with wife.

“Did she tell you what was eating on her?”

“No. Is something?”

“There must be, for her to act like this. My God, she knows how this town is. They’ll clack for a week. I suppose I ought to get on home. Wait a minute, we all came in your car. Well, I can get a taxi.”

“She sounded as if she’d like it better if you stayed, Dodd. She said she didn’t want to spoil your evening.”

“Any more than she already has.” He finished his drink, reached over and set the empty glass on the bar. “I might as well hang around, I guess. Buy you a drink, Clint?”

“Not right now, thanks.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a couple of squeezes. I was born with a catlike aversion to such stray gestures. I merely endure them, hoping my expression doesn’t give away my distaste. Besides, there was something forced about the way he did it. He looked at me intently. “Clint, I’ve never had a chance to tell you how damn well much it means to me to come out here and find a guy like you to help carry the ball. I mean that.”

“Well, thanks, Dodd.”

“You know what you can get sometimes in this outfit. A politico. An oily switch artist. Hell, I know where you stand.”

He took his hand off my shoulder, made a fist out of it and punched me lightly in the arm. “We’re both going places in this outfit, boy.”

I told him I hoped so and watched his broad back as he went off toward the festivities. It was obvious that he had just enough quasi-feminine perception to sense that Nancy had somehow acquired an ally; how much else she might have in me he couldn’t tell. He wanted to pour a little water on the flame. Deciding that wouldn’t do, he had built a back fire. I cannot say that it was ineffective — mellow words from the boss are always welcome. And he was almost a nice guy.

Between eleven and twelve the party was in overdrive. Every time I saw Mary she was with Dodd. A junior miss who took considerable pride in the gaudy details of the recent escapade that had gotten her tossed out of Sweet Briar on her pretty tail, had taken me over and kept bruising my morale by frequent references to how much “older men” appealed to her.

She steered me, not too unwillingly, out into the darkness. But when I came to kiss her she sagged softly against me, a boneless, gasping, wide-mouthed horror. I have no idea where and how such a response happened to become fashionable among the younger set. Maybe they think it sets a mood of sweet surrender. You reach for a firm-boned young morsel and she falls into suet. I pushed her away and eased her back into the bright lights.

After the first cut-in I moved back out into the shrubbery alone. The clouds had thinned and a moon cruised blandly through the ragged edges. Music thudded out across the somber fairways. I fingered an empty cigarette package and remembered the half carton in the glove compartment. I walked across the grass toward the parking lot.

I was close enough to the car to touch it when I heard Mary Olan’s voice coming from inside the car. Her tone was lazy, taunting. “My dear, you aren’t on the basis where all you have to do is whistle. So I won’t take your key. Any time I go back there — if I ever do go back there — you’ll damn well be there waiting for me, not I for you. This isn’t Back Street, sweets.”

Dodd’s heavy voice said, “This double-dating is childish.”

“Is it? I know what you want. You want me waiting there for you any time you happen to take a notion. You don’t want me to go out at all. I happen to like this arrangement. Clint is sweet. Wasn’t he sweet with your plotzed Nancy?”

“Are you falling for him? Damn it, if I find out you’ve let him get to you, I’ll get him shipped so far away from here he’ll...”

“Jealous, darling?” she drawled.

“Why don’t you just take the key and then...”

“You want one cake to eat, one to look at and one in the cupboard. No thanks. I might decide never to pay you another visit there.”

“Mary, listen to me...”

“You listen to me. You’re boring me. That wasn’t in the agreement. I’ll continue to go out with Clint. You’ll continue to come along too, with Nancy. It’s a cozy arrangement... And I’m getting sick of sitting here like a college girl on a date.”

“But tonight Clint took her home and we could...”

“We could but we won’t, dear. Not tonight. Face it like a brave little man.”

I had stood there and listened. And learned a great deal. It was a situation that smelled faintly of mental illness.

“But Mary...”

“And, darling, I didn’t like that phrase ‘get to me.’ People don’t ‘get to me.’ I get to people. Now if you’d take that slightly clumsy hand off my breast...”

I moved back fast as the door latch clicked. She got out of the car quickly. She’d have seen me if she’d turned my way, but she headed off, heels punching the gravel, toward the front door of the club. I was back in better cover when Dodd got out and lighted a cigarette. I watched him take three long draws, then snap it away toward the wet grass. He followed her slowly. When I got my cigarettes the interior of the car was heavy with the perfume she used, a musky, offbeat scent.

When I drove them home I dropped Dodd off first. Mary Olan didn’t move over next to the door after he got out. She stayed pleasantly and encouragingly close to me, the side of her leg touching mine. I took her out to the Pryor place where I had picked her up. Though a lot of the old line families have stayed down in the shady quiet streets of town, a few, such as Willy Pryor, have built out in the country. It has a stone wall, a bronze sign, a quarter mile of curving drive before you get to it. Probably the outmoded term for it would be a machine for living. You know the type — all dramatics. Dramatic window walls, dramatic bare walls, dramatic vistas. Two floodlighted pieces of statuary — one all sheet aluminum and the other a grey stone woman with spider limbs and great holes right through her where breasts should have been. The architects do fine, they can really set up a place. The only trouble is that no one has been similarly occupied redesigning people. Such machines cannot sit in sterile functional perfection. We people have to move in — bringing, of course, our unmodified belch, our unreconstructed dandruff, our enlarged pores and our sweaty love.

I parked and Mary made no move toward the door handle, so I gathered her in and kissed her. She hesitated for a stilted second and then baked the enamel on my teeth. She was no pulpy junior miss. She brought to the task at hand a nice interplay of musculature, a crowding enthusiasm, and the durability and implacability of a Marciano. She stopped all clocks except the one in the blood, so that on terminus, I was dimly startled to find myself merely sitting in my own automobile.

“You’re an agreeable monster, Sewell,” she said softly.

“Likewise.”

“You should get a bonus for overtime.”

“A truly obscure remark,” I said, pretending young innocence.

“Would, Sewell, that I were a touch more charitable and I would make of myself a suitable bonus, because I suspect you are a nice guy who deserves a better deal than you are getting.”

“Tonight is my night to be told I’m a nice guy. How do I go about arousing your charitable instincts, lady?”

She permitted a second flanking operation. During same I investigated traditionally, hopefully, a breast warm and classic. She rebanked her fires and extricated lips and breast, putting a cold foot of distance betwixt us.

“No sale, Sewell.”

“Anything my best friends have neglected to tell me?”

“Nope. You are a fine crew-cut, long-limbed specimen of young American manhood, my dear.”

“They why?”

“Don’t ask it with a pout. I guess it is because you are what you are. For a man to intrigue me he must have a wide streak of son-of-a-bitch.”

“I can work on that.”

“Hardly.”

“Could you force yourself?”

She reached a quick hand and knuckled the top of my head. “That would be pure charity, sweets, and you have too much pride for that, don’t you?”

“And the next line is let us be good friends.”

“Seriously, I’d like that, Clint. I need a good friend.”

I sighed with resignation. “Okay, what do you want to do with your good friend on the morrow.”

“Wouldst go to church with me, sir?”

It was quite the last thing I expected. “Yes. Of course.”

“Pick me up here at twenty of eleven then.”

I walked her to her door. She smiled up at me. “You are sweet.”

“Then pat me on the head, damn it.”

“Temper, temper! Kiss goodnight.”

As that kiss ended I took revenge with my long right arm. She yelped and took a cut at me and missed. As I drove home I knew that if she had a full-length mirror and looked back down over her shoulder within the next ten minutes, she could admire a nice distinct hand print.

Looking back I can count over twenty dates with her, including the time at the motel and the last one on the night of Saturday, May fifteenth. But not including that last ride we took together, up into the hills. Date from which she would not return.