A Key to the Suite (17 page)

“Are you figuring on getting smashed? I mean, it’s none of my business, but I thought you’d play it cool all the way, Mr. Hubbard. But I guess, if you’re going, you can chug-a-lug a
few. I guess you wouldn’t have wanted to get too loose in front of everybody while you still … you still had work to do.”

“So good reports would go back?”

“I guess so.”

Hubbard finished the drink and dropped another cube in the glass and picked up the bottle. “Let’s just say that suddenly I’ve become highly nervous, Bobby. I’m so nervous I’m forgetting to be smart. I’ve got an unused gift certificate. Everybody reads my mail. I hit white-haired ladies between the eyes. My sunburn itches. I’m stronger than I would want to be, given the choice. I didn’t take a very good shower this evening. When the world is turning, you should be able to run fast enough to stay in the same place.”

Fayhouser looked slightly alarmed. “You lose me with no trouble, sir.”

“Losing myself comes next. Cheers.”

“Excuse me and all that, but you’re setting a pace. Thirty minutes you might last. Take it out of gear right now, Mr. Hubbard, and you could coast quite a way.”

Hubbard smiled at him. “You are so right, Bobby. I should coast, shouldn’t I? If I pass out, I can’t do the damage. I have to be able to keep walking and talking, or I’ll skip my chance to become a figure of fun. My God, you should have seen good old Floyd Hubbard at that convention!”

Fayhouser said, “Don’t get me wrong in the way I mean this, Floyd, but is there anything I can do?”

Hubbard put the empty glass down. The decorator colors were brighter. His lips felt rubbery. “You are a good man, Fayhouser. Keep your head down for a while. Keep the knees slightly bent, feet apart, open stance, slow backswing.”

“I don’t play. I’m only a caddy.”

“And I used to be on the house committee,” Hubbard said, and walked out of the suite. He went down to one of the hotel bars and drank the world a little mistier, right to the place where he could find his drinking grin, and his drinking uninvolvement, and walk slowly among the people, delighted by all things, but wary of the little edges of tears or panic or violence which, unless carefully watched, could move in and bust the holiday balloon in his chest. Time changed to bottle time, running raggedly, fast and slow, and the world became an inexpert hobby film, alternating vividness with blank frames, with a tilt to the camera and the focus unreliable.

After a time when the film was blank, he was in a corridor, edged into a corner, alone with Dave Daniels and being breathed upon by him.

“Get cute again, kiddo. Go ahead.”

“I’m terribly cute,” Hubbard said, and suddenly he had the corridor rug against his cheek, and he was articulating each suck of air. Daniels helped him up, and Hubbard felt a wild delight. “We could fight,” he said, still gasping. “Let’s find a place.”

“Shut up! I’m asking you again. Where’s that slut?”

“Have you been asking me?”

“Where’s Cory? Don’t horse with me, Hubbard.”

“Cory? Dave, boy, she doesn’t like you.”

“She likes me fine. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

“Aren’t we going to fight, Dave?”

“Later.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Yes.”

“If I tell you where she is, we’ll go someplace? And fight it out?”

“We sure will, Hubbard.”

He took keys out of his pocket. It took him a long time to sort them. After he gave Daniels the key to 847, the only key he had left was the one to 1102. It seemed a hell of a thing that it should take so long to sort out just two keys. He looked up to share this ludicrous joke with Daniels, but he found himself alone in the corridor. He shrugged. He listened. He heard laughter and music and the rumble of conversation from the rooms down the hall. He headed, smiling, toward the party sounds.

Again time took a tilt, a lurch, and when the image cleared he was in the crowded parlor of a smaller, unfamiliar suite, sitting in a straight chair pulled close to a corner couch, leaning forward, grinning, talking to one of the Honey-Bunny blondes, talking so intently about something so important that it slid out of his mind the moment this increase of awareness came upon him.

She sat slumped, flaccid and dull-eyed and slightly drunk, looking through him and beyond him. Close beside her, in the same slack, reclining posture was a man Hubbard did not know, a narrow man with a bandaged eye and shiny black hair. Honey-Bunny wore a pink, fanciful dinner dress, taut across her thighs. The man had his good eye closed, and a drink in his free hand. With his other hand he gently stroked the satiny thigh in the absent-minded way a man might stroke a dog. His head was turned toward the girl, and he spoke in a droning constant murmur which Hubbard could not understand. Each time he began to be too bold, the girl would pick his hand up by the wrist and drop it away from her.

Hubbard very cautiously, very carefully, checked the aspects of this new reality, feeling that if he was too brisk about it, it would all merge and flow away from him and he would find himself instantly in some other place and time. He turned. The room was full, and most everyone was standing, laughing, yelping above the blare of music. He saw Charlie Gromer and Stu Gallard and Cass Beatty, but he did not know any of the rest of them. He found a half cup of black coffee in his hand. He sipped it. It was tepid, and too sweet, but he could not taste liquor in it. His tie was loosened, his collar open, and his knee was damp where something had spilled and nearly dried. He looked at his watch and saw that it was twenty minutes of ten, and wondered if he had had anything at all to eat.

He looked at the slack, young, disinterested face of the girl and leaned closer and said, “What was I saying?”

“What?”

“What were we talking about?”

She focused on him with apparent effort, yawned and said, “I wooden know. You were talking and talking. Who listens?”

“Who listens?” said the stranger with the bandaged eye.

Hubbard’s stomach felt sore. He pressed the soreness and remembered Dave Daniels, the looming size of him, the leathery equine face, the soured breath, the torso that looked as if it had been built of raw timbers and scrap metal. He marveled for a moment at his own idiocy in actually wanting to try to fight a beast like that. Then a pure terror came into his mind, like a silent white explosion. He started to spring up out of the chair, believing for one deadly moment that he had given Daniels the key to a room where Jan was, where she slept defenseless in the darkness. And then he remembered that Jan was far away, and Cory was in the room. He settled back into the chair and drank
the coffee and put the cup on the floor. He told himself there was never any such person as the Cory of the night wind, the sea wind on the flat roof over the cabanas. She had never been. There was only Cory-whore, who could handle Daniels.

He told himself it did not matter, not to him, or Cory, or Daniels. It was an incident at a convention. Conventions were thickets of incidence and accident. So he smiled in a rather rigid way at the Honey-Bunny blonde, and tried to think of something that might make her laugh and be happy. Water started to run out of his eyes, for no reason. He blinked rapidly but it would not stop. In his teary and distorted vision he saw her face change, saw it quicken with interest and a tender concern. She sat up so she could reach him, cupped her palm against his cheek and said, “Hey now! Hey now, mister!”

“I … I can’t make it stop,” he said.

“It’s real bad, isn’t it?”

“There’s nothing wrong. Really, there’s nothing wrong at all,” he said, and stood up, turned to the door, stumbled once, and made his way through the sound and the people and out into the corridor, and was astonished to find himself still on the eighth floor, and only a couple of doors away from the hospitality suite. He started slowly down the corridor toward the elevators.

The Honey-Bunny startled him when she took his arm. He stopped and leaned against the wall and, to his own vast annoyance, snuffled like a child. She stood close in front of him and dabbed at his face with a tissue from her purse, musky with her perfume.

“It happens to me, honest,” she said. “All of a sudden for no damn reason. Honest to God, seeing it happen to you, my heart all of a sudden turned over, you know?”

“It’s just from drinking. It’s a crying jag.”

“But you’re not drunk enough for that, sweetheart. You were talking fine. Gee, you still can’t stop, can you?”

“No. I can’t seem to stop.”

“You got a room here?”

He remembered the other key. He had forgotten the number. He took it out of his pocket. She took it from him and took his arm again and steered him to the elevators.

“This is idiotic,” he said.

“Don’t try to talk about it or think about it or feel sorry for it.”

They went up to eleven, and walked an incredible distance, and got lost once. She opened the room, and bolted the door after they were inside. She made murmurous sounds of comfort, eased him out of his jacket and made him lie down on one of the beds. She brought a small cold towel and folded it and laid it across his eyes, then unlaced his shoes and took them off.

He felt the bed tilt and settle slightly, and knew she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She took his hand.

“Better?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“What’s your name, dear?”

“Floyd. Floyd Hubbard.”

“Don’t feel bad about bawling. A man should be able to cry, you know? Hughie, the son of a bitch, couldn’t cry a drop unless maybe a horse runs out of money for him. That I should have known before I married him.”

“You’re the married one.”

“Yeah. Honey, with the mole. He’s on a gig in Jax.”

“What?”

“He’s playing in Jacksonville. Two weeks to go.”

There was a long silence. “What’s it like,” she asked, “when the tears come? What are you thinking?”

“It hasn’t happened since I was a kid, Honey.”

“But what were you thinking?”

“I … I don’t know. As if … everything was moving away from me, and I couldn’t get hold of anything any more. As if I’d never really known anybody and never would know anybody, all my life.”

“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it? When there’s no way to get close enough, and you wait and wait for wonderful things that are never going to happen. Floyd. Floyd, sweetheart?” She took the towel from his eyes, moved so she was looking down at him. “Look, I don’t mess around. You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“People get enough wrong ideas already, the business we’re in.”

“I can see how that might be.”

“But if you want me … right now this time it’s okay.”

“I don’t know if I can even …”

“So who cares? Mostly it’s just to hold you, that’s all. Somebody for both of us to hold, okay?”

She left a single lamp burning on a far table and draped it with a bath towel. She undressed and came to the bed and undressed him as gently and impersonally as if he were a drowsy child. He climbed under the sheet and blanket, and she came in beside him and sighed, and took him into the warm abundance of her arms, and hitched about until she could nest his head against her breasts. When, more out of a sense of duty than out of desire, he started to caress her, she said, in a murmurous whisper, “Don’t, sweetheart. Just you lie quiet. If it has to happen,
we’ll let it happen, and if doesn’t, that’s all right too. We’re both so damn tired. You know it? Tired of a million things.”

He drifted off and awakened and drifted off again and when he awakened again, he wanted her, but in a quiet, unemphatic way. It went easily, and it was drowsy and unreal, and not very important. There was the strong, steady, docile movement of her and, far away from him and below him, like something at the foot of a dark stairwell, a recurrent arcing and glimmering of specific sensation which neither diminished nor increased until finally she quickened, and became very strong, and, as she brought it about, sobbed once, sighed several times, and sweetly slowed to rest.

“Somebody close,” she said in a sighing voice, “to hold.”

“I know.”

“It was kinda sweet.”

“Yes.”

“Stay just like this, please, for a while.”

The phone began to ring.

AS SOON AS DAVE DANIELS
came sagging back down out of the wildness, back to awareness of himself, back to the ability to identify this time, this place and this woman beneath him, he pushed himself away from her and stood up in the dark room, his heart still hammering, his breathing still ragged.

He squatted and fumbled at his discarded clothing and found his cigarettes and lighter. He lit a cigarette and walked to the terrace door, slid it open and stepped out onto the tiny triangular terrace. There was a slight breeze in the humid night, and it felt more pleasant against his sweaty flesh than had the air conditioning in the room behind him, where the woman lay.

He perched one hip on the rough texture of the concrete wall and, as the heart beat ever less rapidly, he looked at another angle of the hotel, at the few rooms where he could see in, where people moved and talked in their little bright boxes. It made him feel remote, wise and powerful to be naked and unseen
in the darkness and look at people who could not know he was there. Below him were the areas of brightness and shadow, tinted spots on the palm trunks, twisted shadows of tropical plantings, the bright outlines of the lighted pools. He heard the merged sounds of many kinds of music and the gutturals of the sea and the constant soft alto of city traffic, pierced by a yap of car horn, a far siren, a woman’s bright tipsy laugh from the shadows far below him.

He knew he was still a little bit drunk, but not very much, because the prolonged strenuous taking of the woman had boiled it out of his blood. He felt tired, calm, wise and agreeably wicked. The bitch had been a disappointment. After fighting him so explosively, she had been stubbornly inert, but he had built himself to such a peak of wanting her that her reactions were not truly important.

Daniels scores again, he thought. Daniels never misses. Sometimes it is damned close to what they call rape, but they usually find out it’s exactly what they want. Twice it didn’t work out just right and it was expensive to settle it quietly. But not with this one. Not with a girl on call.