Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (13 page)

It wasn’t a big laugh, and like Sylvester Cummings he didn’t spoil it by smiling, but it was good-natured enough to make him feel at ease, even a little jaunty, as he paged through the rest of the chart.

And on the final page, in twin columns, the prime consumer and the magazine’s reader turned out to be identical in every way. That page took longer to read than the others, which gave him time to glance over the pictures on the walls – much like Dr. Blomberg’s pictures except that one seemed to be a framed comic strip – and at the people, especially the girls. One wore her tan hair like Jackie Kennedy’s and had a face that made his heart turn over, but his several seconds of lust dissolved when he saw her long, slender legs: she’d be too damned tall.

“Well, so much for the flip chart,” he said. “I have a few other things here to leave with you. This heavy one—” he felt like Bill Costello handing over the Big Book – “is a very thorough demographic survey called
The Subscriber Self-Portrait;
I hope you’ll have time to look it over. And I’d like to sum up with a few points about our average reader. He’s forty years old. He earns more than twenty thousand a year, and his work is so highly technical that you and I could never understand it. But he doesn’t read the magazine at work; he reads it at home, and he spends four hours over each issue. I don’t know what you people do when you’re spending four hours at home with a magazine, but I – well, hell, I guess I commune with my favorite tipple.”

It was time to get offstage. “As you know, Northeast Distillers already has six of our back covers. The other six are still available, and I think you’d be making a good decision, as soon as possible, to pick them up. Thanks very much.” He shook hands with Frank Lacy and several others; then he got out fast and made for the reception room.

“That was nice,” said a girl walking beside him. It was the girl with the face and the long legs, and the top of her head came only to his ear.

“Well,” he said, “thanks. I always dread these damn things.”

“That’s what made it nice. I mean I could tell you hated it, but you did it well anyway. I think everyone was impressed.” They were out in the reception room now, alone except for the receptionist who sat cuddled over her phone and murmuring seductively in what couldn’t have been a business call. “Have you seen our terrace?” the girl said. “It’s really the only nice thing about this place.”

One panel of a glass wall slid open and she led him out onto a wide, windswept prairie of white pebbles. There were a few wrought-iron tables and chairs and a few stone benches among potted shrubs, but she took him straight to the low balustrade for a naked view of the city. To look out was spectacular; to look down was almost enough to scare the life out of him.

“We spent most of our time out here all summer,” she was saying, “but I like it even better now.” She didn’t even seem to mind that the cold wind was spoiling her Jackie Kennedy hair, and he was already half in love with the proud, slim way she paced the pebbles – she moved like a student of modern dance – and with her big brown eyes and vivid mouth.

“Been working here long?”

“Just since I got out of school last June. I thought it might be fun because you get to do a little of everything, but it’s – I don’t know. You know.” And she wrinkled her nose in disdain. “It’s still
ad
vertising.”

He asked her name – Pamela Hendricks – and when he’d tucked the whipping necktie back into his coat and tried to smooth his own flying hair he asked her out to lunch, which seemed to take her wholly by surprise.

“Well, no, actually, I’m afraid I’m—” And the brightness vanished so quickly from her eyes that he didn’t dare say How about tomorrow? She was probably Frank Lacy’s mistress anyway (Frank Lacy was a hulking, rock-jawed, big-shouldered son of a bitch, and he remembered now that they’d sat thigh to thigh during the presentation); she might well have brought him out here on the terrace only in some girlish attempt to make Frank Lacy jealous.

“Well. Maybe I could call you some other time.”

“All right.”

Then they were back in the reception room shaking hands, and he dropped thirty-nine floors in the elevator with a sense of falling back to reality.

Less than a week later he walked into his office to answer a ringing phone and heard, “John Wilder? Frank Lacy, Hartwell and Partners. Look: are those six back covers still available?”

“They sure are.”

“Good. We want to pick them up; I’m sending over a contract this afternoon.”

“Well, that’s – that’s fine.”

“Great!” George Taylor said. “By Jesus, John, I knew you’d pull it off, if anybody could. Damn, I’d treat you to lunch if I wasn’t tied up.”

And the word “lunch” rode happily back with him to his own desk, where he called Hartwell and Partners and asked for Pamela Hendricks.

“Oh,” she said. “Hi, there. Congratulations.”

“How’d you hear about that?”

“Oh, well; word gets around.” Which probably meant Frank Lacy had mentioned it as she lay stroking his massive chest in bed.

“I was just wondering if you’d have lunch with me today.”

“Well that’s very nice, but actually I’m afraid I’m—”

And this time he cut her off in mid-sentence with all the authority of a man who has nothing to lose: “Okay. How about meeting me after work, then. For a drink.”

There was a slight pause. “All right. I’d love to.”

But two other calls had to be made.

“… Janice, there’s this guy on the Jaguar account flying in from London this afternoon; George wants me to take him out to dinner. No big deal; I’ll probably be done with him by ten, then I’ll hit one of the meetings … Okay … See you in the morning.”

The second call wasn’t quite so easy. “Mr. Paul Borg, please … Paul? John. Listen: I just want to know if you’re going down to Varick Street tonight. … Okay, good. Is it clean? Sheets clean? Towels clean?… What do you mean, how’m I doing? I’m doing fine. How’re
you
doing? …” He took her to the Plaza in the hope of impressing her, but she’d evidently been there many times before.

The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with
p, b
or
m
, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl’s nose to do.

She talked about her school, a small experimental college in Vermont called Marlowe, of which he’d never heard – “I mean it’s sort of like Bennington only more so;
and
coeducational” – and about her father in Boston and her older brother who was an “absolute genius” at the piano, and he began to realize she was a rich girl; maybe even a very rich girl.

“What does your father do?”

“Oh, he’s a banker. An investment banker. Anyway …”

And over the second or third drink she explained why she was never free for lunch: “I was – well, ‘seeing’ Frank all summer –
Frank Lacy – until his marriage counsellor advised him to break it off, and he did. But we still have lunch together every day to sort of prove we’re friends. I know that sounds silly.”

“And you’re still crazy about him.”

She shook her head and pressed her lips tight. “No. Not really; not at all any more. I mean it seems to me that a man who lets a marriage counsellor make his decisions for him isn’t – well, isn’t much of a man. You’re married, aren’t you?”

“Yeah; yeah, I sure am.”

“Well, would
you
let some marriage counsellor talk you into – Oh, never mind. It’s too complicated.”

During the prime-rib dinner, with wine, she complained that most of the other people at Marlowe had been “so terrifically creative – oh, I don’t mean ‘creative’ in the twerpy advertising sense; don’t get me wrong—” and she aimed her knife straight at his throat to make sure he didn’t. She meant poetry and painting and sculpture and music and dance; she meant theatre – “Everything from Sophocles to what’s-his-name, you know, Beckett – all that stuff. I was always the world’s dopiest, notalent square. Still am, in fact.”

By the time the coffee and brandy arrived her talk had subsided and she’d begun to look at him as if through a mist of romance; then at last he had his arm close around her in a taxicab.

“
What
street?” she said. “Where’s that?”

“Just a little place I think you might like.”

“You’re sweet, John.” And she offered up her mouth for the ritual first kiss, allowing his hand to cradle one breast as they began the long ride down Seventh Avenue.

She was great. At least that was the word that kept spilling from his mouth as they clung and rolled and locked and thrusted in the
bed beneath the sidewalk, with the Seventh Avenue subway rumbling under the floor: “Oh, you’re great … oh, baby, you’re … oh, Jesus God, you’re great … You’re great …” She said nothing, but her gasps and moans and her long high cry at the end were enough to suggest that he’d been – well, not too bad himself.

They lay silent for a long time afterwards while he pondered the remarkable truth that he was thirty-six years old and had never known this much pleasure with a woman before. He almost said it: You know something? I’m thirty-six years old and that’s absolutely the best I’ve ever – but he checked himself. She might laugh at such a confession, or pity him, after all her damned “creative” boys at Marlowe and a whole summer of romping with Frank Lacy. Instead he said “Pamela? How old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty-one in February.”

She disentangled herself, got up and walked naked across the linoleum, reminding him of the girl on the raft that weekend after Bellevue. How could any girl his size have legs like that?

“That first door’s just the toilet,” he called after her. “The sink’s in the kitchen.”

“Oh,” she called back, “I see. Like a French apartment.”

So she’d been to France too – probably all over Europe, on long vacations since childhood – and as he padded to the liquor cabinet he allowed his head to fill with maddening images: Pamela shyly opening those legs for some oily nobleman at a champagne breakfast in the Bois de Bologne; Pamela delirious and clawing the back of some grunting Spanish peasant in dirty straw; Pamela sprawled and breathing “
Te amo
” to some Italian racing driver on an Adriatic beach …

But soon she was back with him. He had made a couple of drinks and pulled on his pants; she was wearing an old raincoat
of Paul Borg’s that she’d found in the closet, and they sat close together on the edge of the bed. “This is a cozy little place,” she said. “I hardly noticed it when we came in because I was so – you know, horny—” And it was all he could do to keep from saying Horny? Honest to God? For
me
? “—but it’s really sort of nice.”

“Well, it’s not much of an apartment, but it serves its – I mean, I like it too.” He touched the rim of his tinkling glass to hers. “So. I guess this is what might be called a man’s communion with his favorite tipple.”

“Mm,” she said like Dr. Blomberg, and so he learned that weak jokes didn’t go over very big with Pamela Hendricks. Twenty years old or not, she required something funny to make her laugh. Another thing: never once that night did she say “What’s your wife like?” or ask if he had children, or make sly inquiries about how many girls he’d brought down here, and that alone set her apart from the others.

After a while she began pensively stalking the floor in Borg’s raincoat and went back to her old and apparently favorite topic: the dilemma of being the world’s dopiest, no-talent square.

“… One funny thing, though,” she said while he fixed himself a new drink, “I know I can’t act and I don’t photograph well, and I certainly can’t write and wouldn’t know what to do if somebody handed me a camera, but I’ve always had this feeling I’d be good at making movies. Good movies.”

His drink was made, but he let an extra shot of whiskey slide in over the ice cubes before he looked up into her wide, deadserious eyes.

“Me too,” he said.

The air is very thin in the mountains of Vermont, and nothing there seems real to a city man. The massed trees are overwhelming, the browns and greens of the earth are unbelievably rich, and there is too much sky.

“Right around this next turn,” Pamela Hendricks said. “You’ll see a sign.”

He was driving a yellow Avis Rent A Car so massive and fluid that it seemed to drive itself, with the back seat full of luggage and bottles of bourbon. “It’s the funniest thing,” he told her. “None of this seems real. I can’t believe it’s really happening.”

“Well, you’d better start believing,” she said, “because it is. Slow down a little now, or we’ll miss the sign. No, wait; there it is – see?”

And the sign read
MARLOWE COLLEGE, 5 MI
.

It was late summer again, and the past half year had been the most jubilant time of his life. After the first few winter weeks, on nights when he was supposed to be at AA meetings, he had stopped taking her to Varick Street; instead they used her own “luxury” apartment in the East Eighties, for which her father paid the rent. He would ride uptown in fright that she wouldn’t answer the door – or, worse still, that another and bigger man
might answer it for her – but she was always there alone, sometimes still in her street clothes, sometimes fresh from her bath and wrapped in a loose terry-cloth robe, sometimes in a nightgown whose only purpose was to be slipped off and dropped weightlessly to the floor as they made for the bed.