John D. MacDonald Read online

  “She wants me up there. She says it’s purely social. But she let me know Dorn would be there. And the sales manager, Dockerty. And Steve Winsan.”

  “My word to you. Drop Winsan. A luxury at this point. Look, girl. The standard advice, no commitments, is out. Because up there you get no offer. I can smell that. This is the hatchet.”

  “I think so too. Just a question of how she does it.”

  “That woman, she’s a sadist. She gets a sexy bang out of squashing people like bugs. You got to go up there with a special attitude. You got to go up there saying to yourself, I couldn’t care less. Can you do that?”

  “I can do it without even pretending, Willy. I’m just… so damn tired. I think I want the hatchet.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “Get out, Willy. Get rid of all the junk. Load the wagon and head west. Change this hair to black so I don’t get stared at. I want a mountain cabin twenty miles from no place, with a stream in the back yard and a grassy bank to lie on, and a bunch of books that will be tough to read. Hard books. There’s things I want to do. Learn the constellations. Learn to cook. You know, all I can do is fry stuff. I just want to slob around, Willy, and take walks and turn into plain Jane Jones.”

  “Take me along.”

  “We’ve been through that, Willy,” I said, smiling.

  “O.K. Look, don’t let that bitch unravel you, Judy. Ride with it. I don’t know Dockerty. That Wallace Dorn is a chunk of nothing. Steve will be on your side, just to save his fee on you, but he won’t be able to do a damn thing. Don’t let her get you sore. She’s the kind who’ll ask you to do some routines for free to entertain her guests. If so, you got a headache.”

  “A brute of a headache.”

  I said good-by to Willy. I went to see Carlos and Jane. They were shy and apologetic and they acted ashamed. But it wasn’t hard to see the joy and excitement when I told them I’d release them. Then they kept interrupting each other telling me about their chance. It sounded hot. It made me feel old. It made me feel as if never again would I be able to hoke up that much enthusiasm over anything.

  Friday morning after I packed I phoned the garage and had them bring the white Jag around. When I leaned out the window and looked down, it was parked right in front, and Horace, the doorman, was talking to the garage man, who was unhooking his little delivery motorcycle from the rear bumper. The Jag was pretty in the morning sun. From up there at the window, it looked like a boat. I took the two bags down and Horace helped me stow them in the car, one in the tiny luggage space and one in the spare bucket seat beside me. To Horace I’m a riot. I ask him what time it is and he goes into helpless laughter. It’s very wearing.

  As I drove north on the parkway, I pretended it was all over and this was the first leg of my trip west. But it didn’t feel right. Because, I decided, the car was part of the window dressing. Part of what I would be leaving behind. I loved it, loved its fine response, but it was just too damn gaudy for the mood I was going to be in. And not enough room in it for a girl to carry along everything she had left in the wide world. Nice as it was, there was something a little phony about it. A little bit too too.

  So this was going to be the hatchet, and I couldn’t care less.

  Or could I?

  Hess had mailed me a marked map, so I had no trouble finding the place. Steve was getting out of his car when I drove in. The place wasn’t exactly a cabin. It looked like an outpost of the United Nations. Steve and I talked a little business.

  Every time I talk to him, I keep remembering how I had to set him back on his heels. Guys like that. The town is loaded with them. That big palsy approach with the hand that wanders. I busted him across the chops. That public eye. Rumors and rumors. Snicker and smirk. Now you take that Judy Jonah. Man, oh, man. Hot pants. Dirty little men and it makes them big in the bars when they can give that reflective leer and lip smack and thusly label you round of heel. Round enough so the other dirty little men who hear them have to make their try at you. You smack them down, but their vanity won’t let them admit it to the brethren in the bars. Then they, too, add themselves to the mythical list of your lovers. It’s the same with any other presentable gal in show business. We all have to stand for the same thing. Rarely, very rarely, there will be one who tries to live up to the billing she gets in the cocktail lounges. And, in trying, will fizz out of the business like a wet rocket. The fringe gals, who end up by calling themselves models and paper the town with their uptown phone numbers. And collect pictures of ex-presidents. By the time they work their way down to Grant, they’re still around. But by the time they get down to Hamilton and Lincoln, they’ve moved their base of operations. Juárez or Troy. Milwaukee or Bakersfield.

  But the myth persists, and I won’t say that Steve had been suckered by it. I’ll say only that he’s the type that always makes the automatic try. Though seldom belted as hard as that. He had to wrap an ice cube in a napkin and hold it against his lip. Poor lad.

  He led me around the house. I could see that he had the jitters, even though he had anointed himself liberally with ersatz confidence. Wilma and the Hesses and Gilman Hayes were on the terrace. Hayes nodded at me with his normal cold-eyed contempt. Three times I have met him. I started out with a violent dislike, and each time since I have liked him less. But a chunk of male. Biblical movies he should be in. In the Roman arena, with shield and sword and one of those metal dinguses around his biceps. Everybody says he’s good. I saw one of his things. A bunch of black lines like a wrought-iron fence after a tornado, with some big blobby things behind it. It had a title. “Reversion.” I gave it my rapt look because the owner was damn proud of it. But it meant nothing to me. It could be good. That’s one of the things I’ll take along some books about.

  My room was plush and the weather was fine, so I skinned quickly into my suit and trotted down to the big twin docks. Hayes was prone in the sun. The water was blue. With eyes shut against the glare I felt as though Wilma, up on her terrace, were watching me, with some mental licking of chops.

  I concentrated so much on keeping my guard up that I sort of blinded myself to what was going on around me. Steve and Hayes and the Hesses and the Dockertys and Wallace Dorn were just part of the scenery. I suppose I nodded and spoke in the right places, but I was as aware of Wilma as is the mouse of the cat.

  I didn’t begin to react to people until after we had dinner, and I got snared into a Scrabble game with Paul Dockerty and Wallace Dorn, while Mavis Dockerty danced with Gilman Hayes, and Steve and Wilma played rabid gin. Wallace Dorn, whenever it was his turn, took a great deal of time. I sat and smoked and listened to the Latin music while Randy jangled around like a bride in the late afternoon. Noel Hess, mild, dark, watchful, and pretty, had gone to bed. She seemed to me like a toy I had once. A girl clown standing on a drum. You wound her up. She whirled around and around and the music was inside the drum. Then I wound her up too tightly and the spring snapped. No music and no more whirling for Noel. Randy had snapped her spring. It’s sad. It’s something that happens. It’s the reaction one sort of woman will have. Another would pack her bag and take off. Another would bend his skull for him. But the Noels sit around with snapped springs. I’m more the skull-bending type.

  I watched Mavis Dockerty. Her dancing was pretty clinical. Paul Dockerty sat at my left, studying the Scrabble board. What is that word? Empathy. Yes. That’s what I had then. For Paul. A nice big decent-looking guy with a very silly lady. And said lady under Wilma’s dark spell. I had the feeling they could have gone along indefinitely with a fair to middling marriage. But Wilma was steering it firmly toward the rocks. Using Hayes, perhaps, as one of the rocks. Maybe at one point in the past Paul would have got up and broken up the dance act. He had enough reason to. But they’d gone by that point. So he had to sit and sweat it out. I could see by the little glances he’d flash toward them that he was edgy about it, and didn’t know what to do about it. And maybe he was close to the point of not wanting to do anyth
ing about it. I saw Hayes dance her out onto the terrace. I guess Paul didn’t see the change of dance floors. I saw him look around and saw his face harden and change and saw him start to get up. I put my hand out quickly and stopped him and jerked my head toward the terrace. He looked through the glass and saw them. He relaxed a bit as he saw them. Then he looked at me. Grateful. I gave him a public-property-type grimace.

  Dorn beat us both badly and we paid off. I wanted some fresh air. Paul surprised me by asking if he could go along. I didn’t want to be any part of one of those husband-wife jealousy gambits, but I sensed right away that he wasn’t trying to pull anything like that.

  We went down onto the dock and he flipped the wet mat over to give us a dry side to sit on. There’s a funny intimacy about sitting in the night under stars. And I always talk too much. I’d wanted to keep my guard up all the way, but I found myself gibbering on about being tired. He was that kind of guy. The safe, kindly breed. The kind that always disarms me.

  Once upon a time a drunken psychiatrist told me, at a party, what makes Judy tick. He said, “Your spotty emotional life, dear, is the result of trudging through the world looking for the father you never had.” And it was just right enough to make me self-conscious. Just right enough to chill me.

  So it is with the Paul Dockertys that I find my hair coming down. I had yakked too much. It was late. I felt ashamed of myself, so I got up and clowned it, doing my Kid Jonah, the Boston Butcher Boy.

  So what does he do? He grabs me by the arm and sort of shakes me and tells me he likes me. I don’t know how I got off the dock without blubbering. I said some stiff-faced good nights on my way through the big room, and I got my door shut and draped myself carefully across my bed and said go. But no dice for Judy. No tears. What can you do with a girl like that?

  I know what I did with her. I scrubbed her face, brushed her teeth, put her in pajamas, and put her into bed. I managed one muted and unsatisfactory sniffle, and then I went to sleep.

  There was one dream that was a beaut. Like they say, significant. They had shoved me in front of the cameras. Something experimental. But not the cameras I’m used to. No booms, no dollies. A room shaped like the inside of a beehive, and the inside of it was all camera lenses. All looking in at me. I tried to make up lines, and when I would say them, all the echoes would get in the way. I danced and there wasn’t any music. Then all of a sudden I was in Delcy’s office standing and yelling at him, telling him I never was any good on ad-lib stuff and I didn’t like this new idea of his, and he just kept smiling at me, his eyes goggly behind those thick lenses of his. And he told me that it came out well, no matter what I thought. I asked him what he meant. And he said I was standing on it. I looked down and the floor of his office was all new linoleum, like a kitchen. Big squares. And in each square there was a naked photograph of me, in color. Then I suddenly realized that he’d tricked me. They hadn’t broadcast it at all. And each camera had made one square of linoleum. So he had no more use for me, because there’d been enough cameras to cover his whole office. Wall to wall. And he said in a voice that echoed around, “Look closer. They move. Look closer. They move. Look closer…”

  And I woke up and the sun was out and my heart was trying to jump out of my chest

  I ate much breakfast, swam some, and then went through my body-building routine on the dock, while the rest played. Midway through the routine I became aware of Paul watching me with unmistakable approval. I also noticed that he had started drinking bright and early. Mavis seemed pointedly unaware of him. She was busy shrieking and giggling and preening herself while Hayes taught her how to water ski. In a swimsuit she was a remarkable hunk of woman. I wondered what sort of sickly brawl the Dockertys had arranged after shutting the door behind them.

  I think that if Paul had been leering at me, or had even been sly about staring at me, I would have knocked off the exercises right there. But the big lunk just stared at me with such warm and wistful approval that I even added a few exercises I don’t normally do. Old Judy the Jonah, exhibitionist.

  During the croquet I saw the drinks catching up. Not that he was alone in making a fool of himself. There was one particularly nasty little scene when Wilma whonked Randy with a mallet. And Steve and Noel were getting that look in their eyes. And Gilman Hayes was bunching his muscles like a health ad. And Wallace Dorn is a fool all the time. Poor Paul was just honestly drunk. And getting worse.

  When he disappeared after being unable to eat anything, I looked for him and found him in the corner of the living room, sitting like a punished child, licking his lips and swallowing hard, eyes not focusing too well.

  “Upsy-daisy, baby,” I said. I got his hand and tugged him up. He was a weight. “Come on, now. One big fat foot after the other.”

  “Where’s everybody?” he said, with a ghost of the party fever.

  I got him into the hall, down to their room, and into his bed. I pulled his shoes off and covered him up with a blanket.

  “Predate it,” he said. “Predate it”

  I looked down at him. Poor guy. Out of his league. ’Way in over his head. All mixed up. “Poor old bear,” I said, and, on impulse, leaned over him and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then I went out and shut the door behind me.

  I went down and took what I thought was enough sun. Steve and Noel, in one of the boats, had disappeared behind a distant island. That was sad too. Everything was sad. I was depressing myself. What wasn’t sad was nasty. Jude the Prude.

  I thought of old days, old places. The boys certainly got wild enough and weird enough, and, from certain angles, nasty enough. Thumb-in-the-eye nasty. Broken-bottle nasty. Tear up the joint, smash the mirrors. Take advantage of dumb little music-struck girls. Hit the tea and steal liquor and take a quick hack at the wife of the guy who owned the particular joint where we happened to be playing.

  But at least, with all that, they were doing something. They were making some music. Giving that horn a high wild ride on top of that fat beat of the bass. Lordy! Blue smoke and people thumping tables and that wild horn riding, riding, glinting the yellow brass lights, the rapt eyes half shut. Sure, a rough and nasty crew, but making something. And this crew was nasty in subtler ways and they didn’t make anything. They just stirred each other with sticks.

  I went up to my room. As I went by Wilma’s half-open door she said, “Judy, dear?”

  I shrugged and went in. “Hi, Wilma.”

  “Are you having a good time?” She was sitting at a dressing table doing something with her nails.

  “A dandy time,” I said.

  “Please sit down, dear. It’s time we had a little talk.”

  “Isn’t it, though!”

  She gave me a glance like a scalpel and looked back at her nails. “I’ve been thinking about you, Judy. Trying to find some answers. You see, just out of loyalty, I’d like to be able to use you again this coming fall. I hate to let people go.”

  I wanted to tell her that at no time had I been aware of exactly working for her. But I remembered Willy’s warning and so I just sat.

  “I’ve wondered what made you so popular for a time. I think I know now. You’re a rather pretty woman, Judy. There’s a certain amount of sensitivity in your face. And you have a pleasant little voice.”

  “Thanks,” I said a bit darkly.

  She rode right over me. She frowned. “Humor, I suppose, is really the unexpected; isn’t it? So really there is something grotesque and, I suppose, amusing, about an attractive girl throwing herself around and trying to look her worst instead of her best. Goo running down your face and all that. And it will charm the public for a while. But it isn’t anything you can continue indefinitely, now, is it?”

  I had news for her. She had a few things to know about timing, emphasis. How you can smell the audience and underplay when you should and underline when you have to. How you work on the show, adding stuff, throwing stuff out, picking what’s best for you.

  She put her tools down and faced
me squarely. “You have to face the fact, dear, that as far as the public is concerned, you’ve ceased to be funny. All you had was a certain shock value. I’ve told Wallace to try to find a replacement for you. But, you see, I take a personal interest in your future. Have you ever thought about taking acting lessons?”

  I lit a cigarette and huffed the smoke in her general direction. “Back up a minute, sis. I’m through. Is that what you’re saying?”

  She smiled. “Quite.”

  “You, milady, are a rough apple. You’re rough as a cob. But leave us restate the case. I sold you my services through my agent and through your advertising agency. Your opinion of my future, or lack of same, interests me about as much as does spherical geometry. So let’s knock off the personal approach, shall we?”

  “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, dear.”

  “You haven’t,” I said, trying to match smiles, but my hand trembled and I knew, damnit, that she saw it.

  “I don’t care if you despise me, Judy. I’m just saying this for your own good. You’re young. You’re at a dead end. You must start thinking of what you’re going to do with your life.”

  “I’ll do fine with my life.”

  “You’ve had the sort of publicity that can go to a person’s head. You people fall into the trap of believing what other people are paid to say about you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “It happens to some.”

  “I didn’t want to do this through middlemen, Judy. I thought we could talk nicely to each other.”

  “We’re talking.”

  “Smart promotion made you queen for a day. That day is definitely over. You must face that, you know.”

  I got up. They don’t call it a retreat any more. They call it shortening your lines of communication. A big one-legged Marine told me that. “I appreciate all your advice, Mrs. Ferris. Miss Ferris. Whatever it is legally. I can scoot off right now, or stay through to the bitter end, whichever you please.”

  “I wouldn’t think of your leaving now.”