The Only Girl in the Game (23 page)

He watched her for a few minutes and said, “Well, worse things have happened, I suppose, but I can’t seem to think of one offhand. I’ll tell Al Marta I’ll go along with that offer. We’ll lie low here until I get the cash in hand—it should take a week or a little more, they say—then I’ll go back into the den of the lions. I can unload everything and get squared away, darling. Johnny Sheldon will lend us that beach cottage of his to live in, I’m sure. And with the contacts I have, it shouldn’t take long to line up something to do. We’ll have the sun and the beach and each other, and that’s more than a lot of people ever get. I can’t run from it any longer. I just happened to get wiped out. And last night just topped it off.”

“What a sweet plan!” she said.

He looked at her, puzzled. “What in the hell are you doing?”

“Why, I’m packing, dearie. I’m putting things in suitcases. That’s known as packing.”

“We still have a week here.”

She went to her dressing table and got a cigarette, shook the match out. She studied him, her head slightly tilted. “
You
have a week here.
I
leave immediately.”

“Why go back before I do?” he asked blankly.

“I am not going back there. I am leaving you, Temple. Today.”

He stared at her. “I’ve got the crazy damn feeling I don’t even know you.”

“Maybe you don’t. I’m luxury merchandise, dearie. So long as you were able to pick up the tab, I was perfectly willing to be your lovely-dovey sexy little honeysuckle wife. And
I
am not to blame for your not being able to afford me any longer. And if you think I am the type to grub about in a sordid little cottage and slum about in a kitchen and mend
our clothing, then you are right, dearie—you don’t even know me. I’m something a well-to-do man can keep on display. I can entertain beautifully and run a household and decorate a dinner party. But, even if I loved you—don’t feel bad, because I’ve actually never loved anyone—I couldn’t afford to turn myself into a peasant at my age. I shall have to find someone to pick up where you left off, dearie. It shan’t be too terribly difficult, wouldn’t you say?”

With each phrase and intonation she had diminished him in his own eyes. She had exposed their marriage as the calculated farce it was. The older man, jolly in his conceits, and the younger wife playing the money game. He felt as though she had stripped the skin off him with the swift and indifferent efficiency of a trapper shucking a muskrat. He bled shame from every pore.

“Whore!” he whispered.

She pulled her tummy in, the better to adjust the cinnamon silk blouse under the waistband of her skirt. The posture exaggerated the soft weight of her breasts and, as she looked down, emphasized the future of the soft double chin.

“Oh, don’t be tiresome and dramatic,” she said. “If the word is right, you got full value, Temp. I never cheated on you, you know. And I could have, very readily. I always made you believe I was having a most glorious time, whether I was or not. Had your luck not gone bad, you would never have had to know all this. There’s a certain kind of morality in deceit. You could have lived it out, all the way, and I would have buried you with all the standard symbols of grief, and cherished your memory in my own fashion, darling. But suddenly you present me with the problem of survival, long after I thought I had it solved. And survive I shall, in my own style. I shan’t be alone long, I would say.”

She turned to frown over her shoulder at her reflection in the full-length mirror.

“You don’t leave me a damn thing, do you?”

She smoothed her skirt. “I must definitely peel some suet off these hips, you know. What did you say, dear?”

“I said you do all this so delicately, with such mercy and understanding. It touches my heart.”

She put her jacket on and looked at him with a half smile. “Once upon a time a very tender-hearted man had a dear little spaniel and he learned its tail had to be docked. He could not bear to hurt it by having its sweet tail nipped off all at once, so he took it off himself, a very little bit at a time, a little bit every day.” She glanced at her jeweled watch. “I
shall have breakfast in the coffee shop. If you care to be civilized about this, you can join me, dearie. Then I must make some toll calls. With luck, I should be able to give you an address before I leave.”

She checked herself out in the mirror, straightened a seam, patted her deliberately casual curls, gave a characteristic tug at her girdle and walked blandly out through the sitting room, closing the corridor door softly behind her.

Temple Shannard stood up. He felt a curious disassociation from all the norms and logic of behavior, as though he had suddenly lost his place in the rule book.

“The head rolled into the basket and the crowd said ‘
Aaah
.’ ” His voice sounded too loud, and not quite like his own. He scratched his belly, walked to the mirror, stared into a face that was not quite his own, and spread his lips to inspect his strong, ridged, slightly yellowed teeth.

“Very few men who are close to fifty-one have all of their own teeth but one.” The voice was too faint this time.

He walked with a swiftness of purpose to the desk in the sitting room, took a piece of hotel stationery and wrote, “If there is anyone who should have the least concern or pity.…”

He tore away the strip on which he had written, wadded it, popped it into his mouth, chewed it and swallowed it.

“In his lifetime a man shall eat a peck of dirt, but they do not mention paper.”

He stood up and walked to the sliding door that formed a part of the window wall. It made a gentle rumbling sound as he slid it open and stepped from the chill hush of air conditioning to the bright heat of morning. He looked aslant at the pastel traffic on the Strip, at the tall creamy confection that was the Riviera, at the daytime silence of neon, at the oasis green of the watered places in contrast to the nubbly dun rug of the desert floor stretching to the rounded fangs of the empty hills beyond.

Temple Shannard looked up and down and to both sides and congratulated that architectural ingenuity which protected the balconies of the better suites from the surly envy of the gaze of those in cheaper quarters.

A trailered sailboat caught his eye as it was being towed along the Strip, and he felt pierced by a shaft of fierce hot joy.

We anchored, he remembered, off an island no one had ever seen, and the
Party Girl
moved lightfooted in the breeze at the end of the anchor line under a hot cardboard sun pasted to the middle of a child’s blue sky. We swam to the beach and back,
naked and playful as savages. Later we were forward and she sat with her back braced against the trunk cabin and I lay with the nape of my neck fitted to her thigh in a way of excruciating perfection. She fed me peanuts one by one, pretending I was a dangerous animal to be soothed and placated. I looked up, squinting against brightness, and saw the twinned fruit of breasts curving across a third of the blue sky. A gull slanted down the breeze at that moment, and the
Party Girl
swung on her line, and she laid her hand in gentleness along my lips and said in that small, clear, precise voice ‘You are truly a lovely husband, husband’ and I could have died right then of joy, because we were three weeks married and I knew the twenty years did not matter to her at all.

He watched the sailboat out of sight and wished her fair winds and gentle care, then took off his slippers and spread his toes against the sun heat of the concrete.

The rail was waist-high, and about eight inches wide, with decorative tile set into the top of it. He stretched cautiously out on his back on the rail. He felt a shallowness of breath that was like a sexual excitement. He shut his eyes tightly against the sky glare. A big red sign was hung against the utter blackness in the back of his mind, flashing off and on in the same rhythm as the beat of his heart, reading
GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD

There was a worm of nasty excitement burrowing in his loins, and he slipped his hand inside the robe to clasp the inert genital sac for a moment.

“I never knew what They wanted,” he said in a patient voice of explanation.

And then he lifted his knees, crossed his arms hard across his chest and rolled off the railing. He opened his eyes and, with remote wonder, watched the wide blue bowl of the sky whirl around and around him.

Hugh Darren sat at his desk at noon and surreptitiously studied the face of Vicky Shannard, who sat very erect on the chair beside his desk, her hands folded placidly in her lap. Somehow she had found the time to change to black unrelieved by any ornament. Her lips were sparingly made up. Aside from the suggestion of pallor, and the rather exaggerated care with which she made each move, he could see very little change in her.

“You are being enormously kind, Hugh. I am very grateful.”

“I hope this doesn’t sound callous in any way, but actually a large part of it is … standard routine in large hotels.”

“Especially here, I would imagine. Where people’s reasons become … more immediate. I cannot get over how smoothly and quickly it was handled, the way the police officials functioned, and how few people actually ever even learned about it, Hugh.”

“They avoid all bad publicity for the industry,” he said bitterly.

“He was just starting to dress when I left the suite, and he said he would join me for breakfast. I hadn’t the slightest clue until I looked up and saw you coming toward me with that very odd look on your face. Then suddenly I knew, before you told me, what must have happened.”

“Haven’t you told me that too many times?”

She looked at him solemnly. “I don’t know what you mean. If I’m being a bore, it might be because I’m rather upset, you know.”

“He was broke when he died, Vicky.”

“Which is a rather poor reason for killing oneself.”

“I can’t imagine Temp killing himself for that reason. He had too much confidence.”

“Then, of course, I hurled him off the balcony and scuttled down and ordered my breakfast.”

“Don’t be silly, Vicky. I just thought that maybe he had gotten the idea somewhere, somehow, that in losing all his money he’d lost you too.”

She widened her eyes slightly as she looked at him. “I must admit, dear Hugh, that I
am
rather a luxury item, and so he could have made the perfectly absurd assumption he had lost me, but I feel rather insulted that he would. I am very tough, you know. I have survived … a great many curious situations. Surely I could be expected to survive a temporary setback.”

“You said nothing that could have made him believe, wrongly, of course, that you might walk out on
him?
”

“I find that impertinent and hateful, Hugh. Had I the slightest idea it was in any way my fault, I’d be unable to live with myself, really. He seemed quite depressed about losing so much money so foolishly, but I remember telling him that pieces of monstrous foolishness are the tokens of being human. I don’t know why you feel you have to be ugly to me. It’s unfair, you know.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, Vicky. I just feel so damn bad about it. I’ll have to stay far away from Max Hanes and that miserable Ben Brown for days. Right now I think I’d try to kill them.”

“But you can get over that, of course.”

“What do you mean?”

“You couldn’t hold this job long if you went about trying to kill people, could you? And it’s a very nice job.”

“Okay. You’re even. Let’s call a truce.”

“I would be delighted. I want to keep on being your friend, Hugh.”

“Okay. As a friend, what are you going to do?”

“The forms and papers will be pure horror. It’s terribly awkward to die so far from home. I shall phone Dicky Armbruster. You remember him, of course—our long-suffering barrister in Nassau—and unload most of this problem on him. Like a perfect coward, I wired Temp’s children rather than ringing them up. But I think I should phone them, a little later. It may be possible to arrange to bury him in a family plot in the States. His first wife is buried there, but I shan’t mind that. That would be a macabre jealousy indeed.”

“But how will you manage, Vicky? How will you be fixed?”

“Perhaps that was what Temp had on his mind, Hugh. I believe I shall be quite well-situated after the dust settles. We have a very small estate tax in the Bahamas, you know. And poor Temp carried a large amount of life assurance. I never urged him to do so. In fact I rather resented the size of the payments we had to make. But he felt, being older than I, that it was only right to give me as much protection as he could afford. I do not believe that some of his creditors will be able to come back on me for payment. And I believe the others will be inclined to be patient. It would be dreadfully bad form to press me, wouldn’t it? So I should be able to retain his land holdings and then, because I have no head for business, put it all in the hands of some terribly earnest bank officer and let him manage it for me. I will have the house, of course, and I can sell it and buy or build something smaller and easier to manage.”

“I didn’t know you had it all thought out.”

“Oh, but I didn’t! I’ve been thinking aloud. I know he has borrowed against his policies, but that should only be a small dent in their face value.”

“I feel sick about this, Vicky. Depressed and sick.”

She reached out and touched his hand with a quick and almost deliberate shyness. “Of course, you poor dear. I’d forgotten how much you were planning on poor Temp to finance your little hotel.”

He felt his face turn hot. “I didn’t mean that, damn it!”

She looked at him with gentle mockery, her China-blue eyes bright. “Is there any good reason, my darling Hugh, why old friends should try to play noble games with each other? Would
you care to try to tell me that the money has
not
entered your mind?”

“Well … I think it’s a perfectly natural thing that I should relate it to my plans … when you’ve dreamed of something for so long …”

She leaned toward him in a way that created a special intimacy. “We are much more alike than you would ever admit. I know that. I’ve always felt that, Hugh.”