John D. MacDonald Read online

  Mavis said, “Dahling, it would have been a dreadful day to stay in town.” Accent, intonation, huskiness—all a lovely imitation of Wilma Ferris. And she was drenched with that damn stuff Wilma uses. Blue Neon, it’s called. Twenty bucks an ounce, and our chemists say it’s one of the heaviest in the Ferris line. I wished Wilma Ferris would be suddenly taken dead. It wouldn’t affect my job. And it might give me my wife back.

  Once we got far enough north so that we had a reasonable assurance of keeping moving, I pulled over on the grass and put the top down. I’d needed the new car like a second head, but once Wilma had casually mentioned that she thought closed cars were terribly dull, I knew that sooner or later I would have to trade.

  We had the big fight before we got to Albany. I guess I started it. It was some damn thing she said that parroted an opinion of Wilma’s. And I asked her if she would please, for God’s sake, start being herself and stop being a cheap imitation of Wilma. And she told me that Wilma was the finest woman she had ever met, and Wilma was doing so much for her, and I ought to be grateful instead of stinking about it, and it was any wife’s job to improve herself and she wanted to be a credit to me, and it helped me for her to be so close to Wilma, her best friend practically, and I wanted to shut her up in a jail or something so she couldn’t have any friends, make a nun out of her or something. And then she got as far away from me as she could and she cried in a way that was entirely alien to her. An aloof weeping, full of pain and dignity. I just wished she would cry the way she used to. A lusty, puff-eyed yowling, full of snorts and wet noises.

  “It’s going to be a dandy week end, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Divine,” she said remotely.

  Traffic was heavy, but out of annoyance with her and with myself I drove too fast, so we got to Lake Vale a little before five. I looked at the marked map. Her place was on the opposite side of the lake from the village. Mavis sat forward, obviously excited at seeing the place. She was the one who spotted the sign. A varnished plaque swinging from wrought iron, with the name written on it in brass in flowing script with no capital letter, the same as on the trade-mark: ferris. I turned left down the narrow gravel road toward the lake.

  Except for the obvious fact of a power line and a phone line going in, the winding rutted road would make you think you were heading for a beat-up cabin. We went through over a thousand feet of woods, a thick stand of birch and pine and maple, all downhill, then we saw the blue gleam of the lake through the trees and saw the house itself. It would take your breath away, that house by the lake. Not just because it was so damn big. I’d heard she brought up some kid architect from Miami on the assumption that at least he’d do something different. He’d done it, all right. Stone and wood and a lot of glass, but none of that business about looking as though it grew out of the rock ledge on which it stood. That place looked as if it had glided in and was ready to take off across the lake as soon as you fired the rockets. Mavis looked at it in a glaze of ecstasy, lips parted, fingers wound in knots.

  There was a sizable parking area, with five cars already parked. One beat-up station wagon, Wilma’s little steel-blue Austin-Healey, which she drives like a banshee with her hair on fire, a yellow Buick Skylark that I recognized as the Hesses’ car, a new-looking black MG that might be Steve Winsan’s, and a white Jaguar with a little line-drawing caricature of Judy Jonah on the door, leaving no doubt as to its ownership. I parked our crate at the auto show and a big Mexican with a long sad face came trotting out. I unlocked the rear end so he could get at the luggage. He told us to take the path around the house.

  There was a big grass terrace on the right, all set up for English croquet with umbrellaed tables for the gallery. We went around the wing of the house to the big concrete terrace enclosed by the U of the structure. There were two sets of concrete steps that made slow curves down the rocky bank in front of the place to another and shallower terrace and two huge docks that stuck out into the blue lake. Two identical runabouts, fast-looking, well kept, were tied up at the dock. I saw water skis on the dock, or pier I guess would be a better word. They were built like Fort Knox, probably to withstand the ice in winter. Judy Jonah was down on the pier, face down on a red mat, and Gilman Hayes sat near her, his brown back heavily muscled, legs dangling over the edge.

  Wilma came hurrying across the big terrace toward us, making little sounds of delight. She spread her arms as though she would hug us both at once. She wore a white dress so painfully simple that you could almost read the price tag. She kissed Mavis and cooed at her, and patted my arm and got between us and led us back to the group. Randy Hess and Steve Winsan untangled themselves from some sort of lounge affairs.

  “Of course you know everybody,” Wilma said. “That’s the point of this whole party. We’re all friends. No strangers to adjust to.”

  Noel Hess smiled at us in her mild way. Steve shook my hand in that outdoor-boy manner he uses as stock in trade. Randy Hess greeted us with that sort of apologetic nervousness of his that reminds me sometimes of a child that suspects he shouldn’t be hanging around the grownups so much.

  “Your house is absolutely lovely,” Mavis told Wilma.

  “Thank you, darling. Now come on, dears. I’ll show you your room. José should have your luggage in by now.”

  We went off the terrace through a door in a glass wall and through a perfectly tremendous room, and then down the corridor of what was apparently a bedroom wing, to the first door. José was putting the last suitcase on a rack. We had a big window overlooking the lake. The room was paneled in some silvery wood. Everything was built in. A big dressing room between the bedroom and the bath turned it into a semisuite.

  “Gosh!” Mavis said. It was the first honest sound I had heard out of her in a month. She recouped lost ground immediately, saying, “It’s perfectly dahling, dahling.”

  “Suppose I send José in with a drink while you dears are freshening up,” Wilma said.

  “Please,” Mavis said. “A Martini…”

  “Extra dry, coming up. And you, Paul?”

  “Bourbon and water, thanks,” I said. Mavis gave me the stone glare. I am supposed to take up Martinis. It makes no difference to her that to me they taste like battery acid and get me howling drunk in twenty minutes. I’m supposed to conform.

  Wilma left and we did some unpacking in sepulchral silence. Mavis stalked into the bath first. José brought the drinks, Mavis’ in one of those little bottle things the way they’re served in the better bars. I laid out a pair of fresh slacks and a gray gabardine shirt. Mavis came out of the bathroom with her dress over her arm and took a fast knock at the Martini.

  “Go easy on that nitro, honey,” I told her. “Last time you lost your sawdust.”

  “Did I indeed?” she asked, one eyebrow high, a Wilma look.

  “Your samba with that Hayes phony was more utilitarian than graceful.”

  “Gil Hayes is a talented artist.”

  “Gil Hayes is a carefully calculated eccentric. The rhythmic integrity of spatial design.” I made a rude noise.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. It was the second honest sound she’d made within twenty minutes. Maybe there was hope left. From the neck down she looked very pink and pleasant indeed. She detected the examination and turned away quickly, saying, “Don’t get messy.”

  When I came out of the bathroom she was gone, glass and all. I sat on the bed and finished my bourbon and thought dark thoughts about the week end. We couldn’t legitimately leave until Sunday before noon. That meant getting through two evenings and one day of fun and games. And it would be a week end like one of those simplified models of the structure of the atom, with Wilma as the nucleus, and all her pet electrons whirling around the edge.

  I dressed and went out. I found Randy in the big living room. He was biting his lip and fiddling with Wilma’s high-fidelity setup. It was built into the west wall. I know a little bit about such things, so I went over and watched him diddle around. There was a Magnecord
tape recorder racked the way you see them in radio studios. It had the hubs for one-hour tapes. There was a big Fisher amplifier, a Garrard changer fitted into a drawer, a Craftsman tuner, a big corner speaker enclosure. There was a control panel with switches marked for the various rooms so you could shunt the music around where you wanted it, an electronic mixer panel, and a studio mike. It looked like a good three thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. Randy, with shaky hands, was trying to thread the tape around the empty hub and across the heads of the recorder. He gave me a nervous smile. “Little music coming up,” he said.

  Wilma came in off the terrace. “Really, Randy,” she said in a most unpleasant voice. “A simple little thing like that. Just get out of the way. Here. Hold my drink.”

  He held her glass. Her fingers were deft. She threaded the tape, fastened it to the empty reel, turned on the recorder. The tape began to turn slowly onto the empty reel. “Bring me a fresh one, Randy.” He hurried off obediently.

  The music started. It was alive in the room. Clear and perfect. It made the back of my neck tingle. She adjusted the volume, frowned at the panel board, then clicked a switch labeled “Terrace.”

  She said, “You lose something if you try to operate too many speakers at once. This one is the best one here. I’ll turn it off so we can get the most out of the terrace enclosure. Don’t try to answer any question Judy might ask you about the program.”

  The abrupt change caught me off balance. I had the stupid idea she meant the program of music. And then I realized she meant the television program we had sponsored until Judy went off for the summer.

  “I can’t answer any questions because I don’t know the answers, Wilma.”

  She patted my cheek. “That’s a dear.” She was standing quite close to me. There is an odd quality about her. When you are close to her you are so very conscious of her physically. Her mouth looks redder, her skin softer; her breathing seems deeper. It is an almost overpowering aliveness, and it has a strong sexual base to it. It is impossible for any normal man to stand close to Wilma and talk to her without having his mind veer inevitably toward bed. It is, perhaps, the same quality that Miss Monroe had. It fogs up your mind when you want it to be clear. And she is perfectly aware of that.

  We went back out on the terrace. She frowned. “Randy, it’s just a tiny bit too loud out here. Be a dear and run in and turn it down just a shade more.”

  Randy went buckety-buckety into the living room. Noel looked down into her glass.

  Judy appeared on the terrace at the head of the steps. “The sun is gone, people,” she said. “Judith turns blue. Feed the girl rum. Hey there, Paul, Mavis. How do you like the gilded wilderness?”

  I like Judy. She got her start singing with a band. She didn’t have much voice, but what she had she threw around with abandon. When her face is in repose, which is not often, you realize with surprise that she is quite a pretty blonde. And when she stands still, which is equally seldom, you see that her figure is trim and good. But when she is in motion, with that rubbery mercurial face, with all her calculated awkwardness and grotesqueries of stance and movement, you see merely that clown, that Judy Jonah, that crazy gal.

  But I feel sad, watching her, because I know television has devoured her, and I know she knows it. The last forty weeks of Judy, the half-hour show that we sponsored until she went off in June for the summer, slipped in the ratings, week by week. There is a limit to the amount of straight comedy the public will take from one person. Situation comedy has a longer life. Judy’s was straight. And almost inevitably, she duplicated routines. I knew that Wallace Dorn, the account executive at Fern and Howey who has the Ferris account tucked neatly under his wing, had been scouting around for a new fall show, new talent for Ferris. So I wondered what Judy was doing up here without her agent. I suspected that Wilma had clubbed her into it. It would be so easy to trade on Judy’s uncertainty. “Don’t bring that horrible man, darling. We won’t talk business, believe me.”

  The music masked the sound of the last car coming in. We didn’t know Wallace Dorn had arrived until he walked around the edge of the terrace. He wore his country tweeds and an ascot. He is an ersatz Englishman. There seems to be a constant supply of them in New York. The military mustache, the carefully gobbled enunciation with the ends of sentences falling off into “d’y’ know.” Much talk of the club, no ice in mine, please, and, on occasion, a silly little stick to carry. Veddy, veddy country, old Wallace Dorn. Bachelor, sportsman, school-tie type.

  It was another hour before we were all collected on the terrace, Judy and Gilman Hayes back in clothes, José in a far corner standing behind a little bar on wheels, standing with the remote patience of a horse, and a little Mexican gal, cute as a button, hefty across the hips and shoulders, who appeared among us from time to time to pass little items of melted cheese.

  As the alcohol worked on them I could begin to smell more and more of the tension. I didn’t know what was up, but Wilma seemed both too gay and too smug, and everyone else too miserable.

  I finally had a chance before dinner to cut Steve Winsan out of the herd. I got him aside and said, “What goes, Steve? What the hell is up? Why all the sniping going on in all directions?”

  He shook his head sadly. “Lucky boy,” he said. “A nice safe clean job. Lucky boy.”

  “What is up? Is it a state secret?”

  “I’m just sore enough to tell you, Pappy. I lose one client, I figure on picking up another. Our Wilma lives big. Old Randy, the watchdog, has been nibbling on her very gingerly about personal expenses. There’s a tax matter pending. She put too many cookies in this layout. She’s living too high. She’s a client on a personal basis, you know. Not through the company. Randy thinks I should be cut off at the pockets. And he wants her to drop Muscle Boy as an expensive luxury, which means cutting me off there, because she has been paying the PR shot on Muscle Boy, the shot that made him a big wheel in the gallery world. I handle Judy, too. She’s got Judy up here to put the blocks to her. She promised Judy next year’s show but didn’t put it in writing, and at the same time told Jolly Boy Dorn to dig up something else for fall. He hasn’t found anything and Randy whispers to me that she’s lifting the account and putting it in another agency. Which Dorn damn well suspects. And don’t think he won’t put up a battle. Don’t think I’m not going to do battle too, my friend. I need a good lever. With same I will pry hell out of Randy and get him to tell Wilma dahling that she better keep me on. My God, if I lose all three, it’s better than six hundred a week that Stephan Winsan Associates stop getting. If I wasn’t half tight I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Pappy. You sure she’s not about to cut your throat too?”

  “You make me wonder.”

  “There’s one more wheel within a wheel too, Pappy. She tells our Randy that, as her tame and captive business manager, he should not have permitted her current expenses to get into such a state. The poor jerk. He begs and pleads and she ignores him, then she turns around and blames him because she didn’t listen to him. She’s got him so jumpy if you went up behind him and snapped your fingers he’d jump out of his shoes. This is going to be a gay, gay week end. Keep your guard up.”

  I tried to follow his advice. Steve’s briefing clarified the tension. I could watch the focal points. Judy was overly casual. Wallace Dorn became more British than Churchill. Randy Hess had the severe shakes. Noel acted as though she wished she were somewhere else. Steve was quarrelsome. As my Mavis got drunker, her imitation of Wilma began to border on parody. And you could almost hear Wilma purr. I half expected her to sit on the floor and start cleaning her shoulder with her tongue. We ate abundantly of the highly spiced Mexican food prepared by the doom-faced Rosalita, served by José, her brother, and Amparo, the cutie. It was semibuffet, with each of us filling our plates the first time and with Amparo trotting about with the hot casseroles providing refills. I saw Gilman Hayes sitting on the floor in a shadowy corner and saw the exceedingly primitive caress he conferred on A
mparo when she leaned close to serve him. Her only reaction was a bit of excess hip sway when she moved away from him. The stolid mestizo face did not change expression. Later I saw José watching Gilman Hayes with an equal lack of expression. I did not think I would care to be looked at in precisely that way.

  After dinner there was the softness of the good music in the big lounge, and all the world outside brilliantly floodlighted. Steve and Wilma played their normal vitriolic game of gin. Judy Jonah, Wallace Dorn, and I played a three-way game of Scrabble at a nickel a point. Noel Hess, pleading a headache, had gone to bed. Randy jittered around, taking care of the music, fussing with the floodlighting, rearranging ash trays, fixing drinks, kibitzing at both games. Randy kept South American music on the turntable at Gilman Hayes’s request. The light was bright on the Scrabble board, a spotlight with an opaque shade.

  My concentration was bad because I could not help being aware of Mavis dancing with Hayes. I had no cause for complaint, no legitimate cause. But the music was low, slow, and insinuating, and they did entirely too much dancing without moving from one spot. I felt alternately sweaty and cold. I could not turn and look at them. I would see them from the corners of my eyes. Fragments. A slow turn, his hand brown on the softness of her waist. An infrequent image of them in the glass. The music was full of rhythmic tickings and clackings and thumps, with a horn crying. Wilma was saying, in the other corner, “One card at a time, damnit, Winsan,” and Wallace Dorn gave a little grunt of satisfaction, then clacked the wooden tiles onto the board.

  I suddenly realized that Hayes and my wife were gone. I turned quickly and looked at the empty room. I must have started to rise. But Judy, with a quick shielded movement, pressed my arm. I looked at her. Wallace Dorn was studying his rack, chewing a fragment of his mustache. Judy made a slight motion with her head. I looked in that direction, through the glass, and saw that they were dancing on the big terrace now, in the light of the floods. They had a theatrical look, as though they were on one of those monstrous sets that the Hollywood geniuses create for Astaire. At any moment a silver staircase would unwind from the stars, and down it would come the sharp-shouldered chorus boys and a quarter ton of bare thighs.