The Only Girl in the Game (8 page)

“I guess I got that idea because Miss Dawson has been here so long.”

Bunny had shrugged. “She’s not a big draw, but she’s got a following. She’s on the tab for room and food, so what Max pays her makes hardly any dent in his budget. She doesn’t make any kind of trouble, and she knows how to handle a drunk.”

“Shouldn’t she get better hours after being here so long?”

“Betty likes that shift, Mr. D. She really does. She has a point. She can sleep late, get up in time to catch some sun, have herself a nice evening before she has to go on. Other entertainers, you keep them on that shift too long, they start to bitch about it. Not Betty.”

“So she’s found her home away from home.”

“I guess she’ll stay quite a while.”

“Bunny, you gave that little remark a strange sort of emphasis.”

“There’s some kind of an edge working for her.”

“I’m getting goddam tired of the little hints about wheels within wheels around this place. What kind of an edge? What kind of an angle?”

“Don’t get sore. I didn’t mean anything by it. And it isn’t just this place. It’s the whole town. You hear things, that’s all. I don’t know anything specific about Betty Dawson. But
I’ve gotten the impression that … there’s some other kind of tie-up with Hanes and Al Marta, something that makes it unlikely they’ll fire her or that she’ll quit. I think she comes from a good family. I guess you can tell that. She’s a doctor’s daughter, they say, and she went to college, and for quite a while she had an act with Jackie Luster, and nobody ever got mixed up with him without coming out on the short end. He can pack any room in town and name his own price, but nobody in show business who knows him well can stand being in the same room with him except when working.”

And so Hugh Darren had added all the bits of information together, but it was not until nearly the end of his second month on the job that he got to know her. They had nodded and smiled and said the appropriate greetings whenever they met in the corridor or on the staircase or in the elevator.

He came out of his room at dawn one morning in October just as she was walking slowly toward her room.

“It’s time I thanked you, Mr. Darren.”

“For?”

“Nice little things going on. Nice, and appreciated. Better food, better service, and the whole gaudy joint is cleaner and smarter, inside and out. And all your little service people are … I don’t know how to say it … getting a better attitude about working. They act less like they’re doing you an enormous favor to fill your water glass or hand you your mail.”

“I didn’t know whether it was beginning to show, Miss Dawson. I’ve been too close to it to really see it.”

“Oh, it’s showing. And it’s wonderful. Living here was beginning to seem a hell of a lot like camping out, or like one of those collection points for refugees from disasters. You’re a pro, Mr. Darren.” She smiled at him. “And do you know what I like best?”

“What’s that?”

“The way you kinda drift around, no sweat, no strain. Just ambling around in a slow smiley way.”

“I keep pretending I’m not getting an ulcer.”

She yawned. “ ’Scuse please. I guess I hate fidgety, nervous little managers who trot to and fro, bobbing and wringing their hands. It wears me out watching them. You apparently get no rest at all, but you’re still restful.”

“And thanks for that too, Miss Dawson.”

“If it wouldn’t be showing too much familiarity with the hired help around here, you could make me more comfortable by calling me Betty.”

“And Hugh, if you please.”

“Hugh when we meet in the corridor. Mr. Darren in front of the troops, sir.”

“I like your work, Betty.”

“I know you do.”

“How?”

“You laugh at exactly the right places. And you keep coming back for more. So it hasn’t been any secret. So thanks, Hugh. And this is just about all the mutual admiration I can take at the moment. Seventy-one seconds from now I either fall into bed, or flat on the floor. It’s a delicate problem of timing. And a good morning to you, and a good night to me.”

From then on it was very easy to talk to her, so easy and so pleasant that he found himself making little adjustments in his schedule so that it would happen more often. He learned the likely time to find her out by the pool, or in the coffee shop, or having dinner in the Little Room. His was a lonely job and a hard job, and she was the only person he could talk to in an unguarded way. He learned that she was observant, and he found it to his advantage to check some of his conclusions about members of his staff with her. In one way it surprised him that she should know so much about the personal problems, the domestic situations of bartenders, bellhops, waitresses; she seemed to have little time to learn such things. But on the other hand she was a warm and sympathetic person, and her interest in other people was not forced, and so they talked about themselves to her. He found himself doing the same thing.

By Christmas their friendship was close and comfortable, and very probably it would have leveled off at that point had she not decided he was looking a little too drawn and weary. She did not work on Wednesday nights. She talked him into taking a Thursday off, and she was most mysterious about the whole project. They left the hotel early in the morning on the seventh day of January, in her stodgy, elderly Morris Minor which she called Morris in a way that turned the designation into a personal name. There was a giant picnic basket resting on the back seat. She drove thirty miles out of town, and then three more miles over a track so primitive the small car moaned and sighed at each hump and dip. They were in the burned and ancient land on a morning clear and bright, dazzlingly new.

In country where for reasons unknown even the shacks of the desert rats are fashioned of boards brought from far away, the place where she stopped, at the end of the road, was
of the red-and-brown native stone. It was a small place, which blended against the lift of a small, angular hill.

She had a key for the crude, heavy door, and she was very much at home in the place. There was wood stacked for a big fireplace. There was a deep well gasoline pump with manual controls and a big pressure tank, a gauge to be watched carefully. There were propane tanks for a small stove and a gas refrigerator. There were gasoline lanterns.

Most of the interior was one big room—living room and bunk room, with the kitchen at one end, and a small bath. She enlisted his aid in getting the utilities operating. When all chores were done she looked at him with a pride in this feat, in this special place, and said, “See? Like for hermits.”

She stood, smiling at him, wearing pale tailored whipcords, a bulky white cardigan, and soft desert boots, her black hair ponytailed with a thick white length of yarn. Mirrored sunglasses made her eyes unreadable.

“It’s exactly ten thousand years from the Cameroon,” he said.

“And so it is exactly what we need, Mr. Darren dear. And first comes the picnic-type breakfast, and you build a fire to take the chill off this place, and then comes a walk to places I know, and then back here for drinks, and then lunch out on the picnic table in the sun, and a nap for the weary ones, and more drinks and the final eating, and some more fireplace-type atmosphere, and then back through the night to the tired old workaday smell of money. I’m going to schedule the hell out of your day, truly.”

She did. They were in the middle of fifty thousand years of silence, and it was a restoring thing. They moved the luncheon table to a sunny place out of the chill wind. They ate like wolves, and later they talked and they napped, Betty on the fireplace couch, he atop a gray blanket in one of the wide deep bunks.

It wasn’t until after dinner, sitting on the Indian rug in front of the fireplace flames, that he said, “Okay, so you won’t volunteer any information until I ask. Or, if it’s a secret, I’m out of order. But is this your place?”

“In a funny kind of way, I guess it is, Hugh.” Her voice was soft and thoughtful, and she was looking at the flames and mesquite coals, half frowning, hugging her legs, chin on her whipcord knees.

“Mabel Huss actually owns it,” she said. “She’s a fat, sloppy, ignorant woman, Hugh. Ignorant in book ways. She
runs a motel in Vegas, a little old junky place on one of the old streets, all crowded in between a furniture store and a big shiny operation with a name that haunts me because the neon used to flash in my window. Super-Drug, Super-Drug, Super-Drug, it said, all the night through. It was a cheap place, the cheapest I could find, and I was way down, Hugh. There are little pockets of despair in Vegas for people who are way down, Hugh. Down as far as they can get. The thing is, in Vegas or anywhere, you aren’t put down by the cruel world all by itself. You have to get in there and help the bastards bring you low. That’s something hard to learn. It’s so easy to blame everything and everybody else.

“I can skip the stinking details, except to say Mable was carrying me on credit for no good reason in the world, and there was one way I could get out of the whole dreary deal, but it was a way that made me feel a little sick to my heart to think about. But I was scared, and even though it wasn’t long ago, I was inconceivably younger than I am right now. I had that special kind of stupid pride which made me feel I couldn’t get on the collect phone and yell help to my father in San Francisco. So I decided to be real hardcase about it, and I told myself it was that kind of a world, and I walked right through the door the bastards were holding open for me. And it was worse than I had thought, Hugh. Don’t ever romanticize evil.

“I solved my problems in what they call one fell swoop, buddy, and I caught the brass ring, and it was so damn bad, every implication of it, I knew I had to die. I had lost myself. And though I didn’t have to, though I could have started going first class right away, I went crawling back to Mabel’s Comfort Motel, knowing that all the trouble I’d thought I was in before was nothing at all. I spent twenty hours in a stupor of self-disgust, and then that fat woman, without saying much of anything, loaded me and some cartons of food in her old car and drove me out here and left me. It was a special kind of wisdom, Hugh. This is the kind of aloneness you need when you have to mend yourself, when you have to form some kind of adjustment to the sort of person you have suddenly become through making a bad error.

“She left me here for five days, and when she came out and got me, I’d put myself back together. Her husband built this place. They had good times here. He died. She’s never wanted to sell it or rent it, and she hadn’t wanted to spend time here herself. But she knew what it would do for me.
She knows I still need to come here from time to time, to put myself together, so I have her permission to come here any time. I stop at her place once in a while and tell her how I’m making out. This is the first time I ever brought anybody here.”

“I feel honored, Betty.”

She turned her head to smile at him. “Ah, you should be! If you’re real good, maybe I’ll bring you back sometime.”

“A day like this can be like taking a whole week off.”

“I know.”

She had her head turned, looking at him in a quiet way, and it was in those long moments their relationship changed to something else that perhaps neither of them particularly wanted. He had had a perfectly normal physical awareness of her as a handsome and desirable woman, but this awareness had the objective and rather abstract quality of admiration he would have given any woman equivalently endowed. But in those moments it became a personal, emotional awareness, a strong and specific desire for her, underlining their isolation and building new tensions between them which became all too tangible.

He had long since learned that his habit of sexual continence was no indication of basic coldness or meager drives. He drew upon this unused energy and channeled it into his work, driving himself harder with this extra fuel. Many men in his situation of bachelorhood and wide opportunity would, he well knew, have indulged themselves in all the meaningless available ways, but he suspected that such men had some well-concealed doubts about their own adequacy, so that they needed chronic proof of their own desirability and potency. He had no feeling of self-righteousness about his policy of continence. At times events had conspired to make a minor conquest too easy and too attractive to be ignored. But he sensed in himself an idealism which made such casual episodes unsatisfying. It was that same streak of idealism which had blocked the marriage he had almost made when he was twenty-five, and had left him with rather more skepticism than was healthy.

They looked into each other’s eyes by firelight for those long moments, and then a coyote made a quavering, gibbering cry of despair in the starry night. She shivered and then rose lithely to her feet and said, “Time we policed the area and took off, Hugh.”

The relationship had moved into another dimension, as yet unexpressed, and it created awkwardness between them
in small ways. He felt it on the way back in the little car. And he felt it during the days that followed. It left small and curious gaps in their conversation, as though they had begun to speak to each other on a new wordless level.

They went to the little house in that desert again in January, and on only one Thursday in February—because that was a very busy time for him—and they managed it again on the tenth day of March, which was, if her phrase was correct, the day of their reckoning. They had taken every sane effort to make their excursions inconspicuous. They sensed there was some staff gossip about them, a thing unavoidable in the encapsulated social complex of any large resort hotel, but they knew it was intelligent to provide the gossipers with as little factual information as possible.

On that tenth of March, a rare blowy blustery day, all the tensions were stronger and more obvious to each of them. They had known each other for seven months. And it did not come about through the accidental touch, through any half-accidental blundering. He had replenished the woodpile, and it was midafternoon. He had fattened the fire and was standing, one hand braced on the stone mantel, watching the wood catch. He was aware, suddenly, that she was very still, and he looked toward the kitchen end of the room and saw her standing, looking at him, her dark blue eyes wide. She wore a soft white leather jacket, dark flannel slacks, a yellow silk scarf around her throat.