A Key to the Suite (5 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve always meant it.”

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

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

“Lecher!”

“Needler!”

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

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

“Nothing wrong with Freddy.”

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

“The rest of what?”

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

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

“Not this kind, Jesse.”

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

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

“They can’t do this to me!”

“Darling, please.”

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

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

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

“Floyd Hubbard seems quite nice, really.”

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

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

“I can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you going to have a nap, Jesse?”

“I guess so.”

“Shower when you wake up?”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ll take mine now, I guess.”

“Go ahead.”

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

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

“A little bit.”

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

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

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

“Want to share?” he said huskily.

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

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

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

“We’re carefully screened,” she said.

“Love you, Con.”

“And I love you, Jesse Mulaney.”

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

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

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

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

A few moments later she was asleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Frick,” she said gravely.

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You
do
have the money, Mr. Frick?”

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

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

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

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