Carla (19 page)

Ronald Macon acknowledged the introduction and the two men shook hands. They looked vaguely like fighters waiting for the bell of the first round.

“Danny and I … love each other.”

Donald's face didn't seem to change expression. “I see,” he said.

“We want to get married,” Carla continued. “I want to get a divorce and marry Danny.”

“Are you quite certain?”

“I'm positive,” she answered at once.

Ronald sat down, resting his attache case on the floor beside him and placing his hat in his lap. His fingers toyed with the brim of the hat. “Suppose you start at the beginning,” he said pleasantly. “Give me a quick run-down, will you?”

Ronald's completely relaxed manner made things a good deal easier for Carla. It permitted her to relax and view the scene as one between three sensible adults rather than a tawdry melodrama. She started slowly but as she went along her voice picked up speed and assurance, and soon she was telling Ronald the full story of her affair with Danny, telling him how she first was physically attracted to him, how this changed to love, and how her desire for a love affair eventually ripened into a hunger for marriage, a home, and children.

As she talked she kept her eyes on Ronald's face. It was impassive throughout, and she itched to turn and look at Danny and see how he was reacting to what she was saying. Then, midway through her monologue his hand found hers and held it and she knew that everything would be all right.

When she finished the silence was heavy and awkward. Ronald lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully, blowing great rings at the ceiling and watching them rise and then disappear. His eyes grew misty; then they were once again directed at her as he spoke.

“My turn,” he said gently. “There are some things I should have told you awhile back in all fairness, but I've withheld them for reasons of my own. But now it's time for you to hear them.

“I've known for some time that our marriage was a mistake. The mistake was not mine, Carla, so much as it was yours. I got much more than I bargained for: a beautiful wife, an intelligent companion, and a person who actually cared for me.

“And what did you get? You got a father instead of a husband. You got money, and I presume you thought that was enough. Then you found that it wasn't.”

It was easy to see that the words were hard ones for Ronald to say. Carla could tell that he was going through a good deal of emotional strain, but years of courtroom training kept his voice even and his bearing flawless.

“I tried to make it easy for you. I saw that I was not enough for you, and I attempted to keep you secure on a leash by allowing you a certain amount of a certain variety of freedom. I brought Charles Butler to my house not because I'm that friendly with the man but because I suspected the two of you would be attracted to one another. And I knew that I was safe if you had an affair with Charles. He's not the marrying kind.

“You see, I tried to throw you into an affair because that seemed to be the only way to hold you. And here I misjudged you badly. It was unfair and I want to apologize for it.

“I thought an affair would be enough for you. I didn't stop to consider the deep reservoir of love in you Carla, or to realize that you had to be not only mistress but also wife and lover in order to fulfill your inherent potential and be happy.

“And I thought my money would hold you. At first I hoped it would—then I changed my mind. I even thought of settling some money on you so that money wouldn't enter into the decision you would have to make, but I soon saw the fallacy in that line of thought. I had to let you face the choice, or otherwise your decision couldn't have any meaning.”

He paused and cleared his throat. “Now you have made your choice.”

Carla nodded.

“You've chosen love over money.”

Carla nodded again, reinforced by the pressure of Danny's fingers on her palm. The full impact of Ronald's words was beginning to sink in. She thought back to the night Charles came to dinner, and again to the time Ronald had told her to take a lover if she wanted one. Bits and pieces of his actions over the past several weeks were starting to fall into place. She saw her husband all at once as a benevolent giant who sat behind the scenes, pulling the strings in an effort to make her happy.

“Love over money,” he repeated. “I think it's the right choice, Carla. At any rate it's the choice I hoped you would make. I wanted to give you a shove in that direction but I didn't dare. The choice had to be yours.

“I can't tell you how sorry I am to lose you. Nor can I tell you how glad I am that you've found your proper role in life.”

He stopped suddenly, and Carla could sense that he was close to tears. She felt her eyes filling, too, and the increased pressure of Danny's fingers told her that he too was emotionally moved.

Abruptly Ronald stabbed out the cigarette and sat upright in his chair. “Now for the details,” he said briskly. “You want a divorce, as I understand it.”

“That's right.”

“Divorces are messy, you know. One has a choice between running off to Reno or getting a New York decree on the grounds of adultery, and neither are especially attractive alternatives.”

“Would the publicity hurt your career?”

“It might,” he said, “if I
had
a career. As of today I'm officially retired from private practice. I've had enough, and the last case was almost too much for me. It's over and I'm done. I'm going to relax—take a fishing trip once in a while, read, putter around the house a bit. So my career has nothing to do with it.

“I was thinking more of you two. You see, with a divorce there's a waiting period, and there's a lot of legal rigamarole that's pretty much of a pain in the neck, and there's the sort of publicity that can't do you a hell of a lot of good.”

“I understand that,” Danny cut in. “But we want to get married, Mr. Macon.”

“Of course you do—and it's what I want for you. But a divorce won't be necessary. You see, Carla and I have never slept together—and she can easily and quickly obtain an annulment of our marriage on the grounds that it was never consummated. This is faster, easier, and free of the stigma that some people attach to divorce.”

“I never thought of that,” Carla said, half to herself.

“Why should you?” Ronald chuckled. “I'm the lawyer, you know. And now, while I don't suppose it's exactly standard procedure for a husband to toast his wife and her future husband, would the pair of you care to join me in a drink?”

One drink led to another, and the two drinks loosened the trio so that conversation flowed more easily. Ronald explained the legal mechanics of annulment procedure and Carla and Danny discussed when they would marry and where they would live and how many children they would have. It seemed vaguely ghoulish to talk of such things while they sat in Ronald's house and drank his liquor, but he had set them so completely at ease that it appeared quite natural.

“Speaking of children,” Ronald said, “I have a deal for you.”

“Let's hear it,” Danny said.

“It's quite simple. Perhaps I'm egotistical, but I'd like some sort of namesake to leave behind when I go. As I understand it, you need a certain sum of money to purchase the franchise for your gas station. I'll be pleased to give you the money as a wedding present if you'll name a boy after me.”

Carla's eyes widened. “Oh, Ronald—that's wonderful! Of course!”

“Mr. Macon,” Danny cut in, “I'd be very proud to have a son named Ronald Rand. But I couldn't accept the money.”

Carla turned to him. “Why not?”

“Because I want to make my own way,” he answered. “And I want to do it all by myself. It has to be that way, Carla. Otherwise it doesn't mean anything.”

She nodded, understanding. “Yes,” she said. “You're right, Danny. And I'm going to let you make all the decisions from here on in.”

A few moments later Ronald excused himself and the two were left alone. Several minutes later the telephone rang, but neither of them had the slightest intention of answering it.

THE END

A New Afterword by the Author

IN THE SUMMER OF
1958, my buddy Steve Schwerner and I flew from New York to Houston, Texas; hitchhiked to Laredo; disported ourselves across the river in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; took a bus to Mexico City; did some more disporting; and took another bus to Guadalajara, where a right-wing political party staged a riot while we were trying to get back to our hotel after dinner. A pair of enterprising cops arrested us, threw us in jail overnight, and played bad cop/worse cop with us until we signed over all our traveler's checks, whereupon they put us on a bus back to the border.

So I got home a little earlier than I'd planned.

And one of the things waiting for me at my folks' house in Buffalo was a letter from Henry Morrison, who was then my agent at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where I'd been lately employed. “I hope you know what a sex novel is,” it began, “and how to write one, because we've got an assignment for you.”

Now I'd already written a novel about a young woman's sexual identity crisis in Greenwich Village; Henry had read it and sent it over to Crest Books, then the country's premier publisher of lesbian fiction. They would in time accept it and publish it as
Strange Are the Ways of Love
, but that lay in the future. For now, Henry knew I could start writing a book and get to the end of it, and that was enough to get me this assignment.

The note went on to explain that a fellow named Harry Shorten, who'd created the cartoon “There Oughta Be a Law,” had started a publishing house called Midwood Tower. He was looking to develop a line of erotic paperback novels much like those of Beacon Books. And Henry had picked me to write one for him.

Well, OK. I went out and picked up one or two Beacon novels, and if I didn't exactly read them I did look them over to see what they were. They didn't require scrutiny. Because I did know what a sex novel was, and I seemed to know how to write one.

So I went ahead and did just that. The protagonist's name was Carla, and that was my title.
Carla
, by Sheldon Lord.

It never occurred to me, not for a moment, to publish the book under my own name. I wasn't ashamed of it; I didn't think that my writing it was evidence of moral turpitude, but neither did I entertain the notion that it was a contribution to the world of literature. It was a sex novel, for God's sake, and it was to be published by a publisher of sex novels, and what kind of a ninny would put his own name on such a thing?

(Well, Charles Willeford would and did, as I was to find out years later. Some low-rent paperback houses, Beacon among them, published early work of his, and he used his own name. But Charles was one of a kind, a man who had elevated not giving a rat's ass to the level of an art form. Never mind.)

The name I chose was Sheldon Lord.

Now
Carla
was not the first book I wrote, but it was the first book I sold, and the first to be published. It was not, however, Sheldon Lord's first appearance in print. I'd first used the name when I had two stories slated for the same issue of one of the digest-sized detective story magazines. The editor wanted to use a pen name on one of the stories, and I came up with Sheldon Lord.

(Richard Stark, the name Don Westlake used on all his hard-boiled Parker novels, had a similar origin. Don was sleeping, and a call from his agent awakened him, albeit barely. He had two stories in the same issue of a magazine, and what name would he like on the lesser story? “Richard Stark,” Don snarled, and went back to sleep.)

Sheldon Lord. And where did that name come from? Well, I'd known a girl at Antioch College named Marcia Lord, and I really liked her last name. And I liked the name Sheldon, too, though I can't offhand think of anyone who bore it. Sheldon Lord. I used it on that second short story, and I used it on a batch of articles I wrote for a couple of male adventure magazines. (I mean, would you want your own name on “Reinhard Heydrich, Blond Beast of the SS”? Well, neither would I.) There was one similar article I wrote that purported to be an as-told-to piece, and my byline on that one was “by C. O. Jones as told to Sheldon Lord.” The editor got the joke and spiked it, changing my evanescent collaborator to C. C. Jones.

Carla,
by Sheldon Lord. I sat down in my bedroom on Starin Avenue, at the same maple desk on which I'd written
Strange Are the Ways of Love
a month or two earlier, and I wrote the book and sent it off. Harry Shorten loved it, Henry wrote, but the book wasn't long enough. It needed another chapter. Could I write another chapter to be inserted anywhere in the book?

So I wrote the chapter in which Carla goes on the prowl and winds up with Lou, and we have to wait all the way to the scene's end to realize it would play out a little differently than we'd thought. I sent it in with a note saying that here was a chapter, and it could be inserted anywhere in the book.

The book's set in Buffalo, New York. I was born and grew up in Buffalo and lived there briefly on a couple of occasions after college, but I haven't set much fiction there. Buffalo street names can be found in several of my stories about the criminous criminal lawyer Martin H. Ehrengraf, although their settings remains unspecified. A lost crime novel, one I called
Sinner Man
, had a Buffalo setting; it was sold after many turndowns but doesn't seem ever to have been published, and its setting might as well have been the Bermuda Triangle. The only book in which a Buffalo setting carries any weight is
A Week as Andrea Benstock,
which bore the name Jill Emerson.

Is it significant that my very first published novel takes place in Buffalo? I don't think so. It was a locale of convenience; I was in Buffalo as I wrote the book, so what would be more natural than to set it there? The book itself took the sort of situation James M. Cain and his many imitators used all the time: a triangle with a rich old husband, a hot young wife, and a youthful lower-class lover. Nothing original there, and certainly nothing that screamed Buffalo. I didn't know any people like that, in Buffalo or anywhere else.