OPUS 21 (30 page)

I shouldn't have done it that way. He turned sheet-white.

"There isn't any report on the biopsy yet," I said. "Won't be till Monday. Makes quite a long weekend. But I have a hunch--"

"You God-damned dour Scotchmen! Maybe it's nothing."

"Tom thinks it's something."

He looked out the window for a long time-with his shoulders folded forward and the sun beating on his face, reflecting into it from the cement top of the parapet and bouncing at it from the tile terrace between. That ugly, fond mug.

"I suppose," he finally said, "when they have taken everything else and everybody else they come around for you in person."

"I never really expected to get even this old. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd never see thirty. As I recall, I didn't want to. Seemed a stale age."

Dave grinned feebly. "Ricky?"

I shook my head.

"She well now?"

"We think so."

"Get her down here, man!"

I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just might--might-and then--

"

"You didn't take a drink?"

Again.

"By God! What a reform!"

' I'm trying to get that serial done--"

"--strictly on Presbyterianism." I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a favorite old anodyne of mine--rolling up the sleeves."

Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his head toward my bedroom. "When he wakes up, tell him to come down to my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think of. I'll keep him stooging around--and sober, if possible--and see you later."

"Going?"

He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said you wanted to work. I'll be back."

"Okay."

2

I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at Needles.

It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in the shade said 125 degrees.

I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around-a dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He liked it.

My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry, too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.

I worked along--not minding much. But after all, even Negroes sunburn--even Papuans get lazy.

Around one o'clock I began to feel--not hungry but empty--and I went in to check on Paul. He was still snoring and sweating.

Four and a half grains of sodium amytal, by itself, wouldn't have knocked him that fiat that long. He'd have wakened in six or seven hours, I thought--feeling fuzzy and feeble and maybe a little sick. He still seemed good for more time, to me. It showed just how much sleep he'd left out in the past weeks, past months--worrying about that girl and worrying about making weapons with his beloved mathematics. It was possible, of course, that he'd explode awake any moment--look at his watch--throw an outside loop--

and get going like a jet plane.

I wrote him a note saying I was downstairs in the Knight's Bar and that I had a new search in progress. That would bring him.

I got dressed. The gabardine was like wet newsprint.

This time, air conditioning was a relief. I sucked in a lungful and Jay came up.

"Want to sit with Mrs. Prentiss?"

"Sure."

Exactly two days before, she had leaned over the same table, an immaculate grooming operation--hurt, snooty, aloof, reading her disguised book. A Cinderella. Avid and anxious--haughty and pretty hateful--beautiful and not much good. I could say what was different about her now but it would be difficult to convey the true impression of that. Her hair, for one thing. It was just neatly combed--just casual, gold-blonde hair whose owner hadn't taken pains for once, with every single filament. Her dress. Another plain, costly print--but the body inside it was relaxed and not subconsciously trying to avoid creases. It didn't seem to fit quite as perfectly, and yet it suited her better: it made--

would make--anybody, any man, look at the girl inside and the clothes after--not the other way around. The Musak was giving out with "Dardanella" and her foot was keeping time under the table.

"Hello, Yvonne."

She glanced up--from the morning paper.

"'Lo, Phil."

"Want company?"

"Love it." She moved over a little. I came around the table and sat down.

"You look right sweet this morning. Noon. Whatever it is."

She folded up the paper.

I ordered some cold salmon and potato salad and iced coffee.

She studied me--gravely for the most part. Once,
she showed a dimple. But her voice was placid. "You could be annoyed at me."

"What for?"

"Don't
be
obvious!"

"Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to
come
down. I said sure--and after she'd
been
there awhile--I changed my mind."

"That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."

"Did you?"

She looked at
me
with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."

"What?"

"Isn't it strange how much
we
attach to trifles--love and
sex
trifles?
Set
up a whole lifetime for happiness--but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."

"That."

She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything--so little!"

I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec--but it's robbery--"

"And kissing you in a cab the other night," she answered, "took only a couple of blocks and I don't love you in the least. We touched. A moment or two. It was fun. We'll never do it again. Or, say--we do. Is that like murder and robbery? Should it ruin lives?"

"Not to my way of thinking. I don't feel wrecked."

"Neither do I," she said softly. "Neither do I! On the contrary! You have to find out that how you feel is terribly important--terribly. But what you do--unless you make it important--that's such a tiny thing!" She smiled. "When you think that just forty-eight hours ago--I was sitting here shuddering over Rol--"

"It occurred to me."

"It seems--" she sought for the proper words--"sort of --caddish. Unchivalrous.

And hideously unsympathetic."

"Aren't you pushing yourself?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could have a reaction."

' I'm having one."

My lunch came.

"I mean," I said, "a reaction to this reaction."

She considered that and her curls moved. "I doubt it. I'm--cured."

"Cured one way. Maybe you're going to suffer in another."

She seemed frightened for a bare moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "How can I tell?"

"Wait and see."

"If I suffer, I suffer," she finally said. And her eyes weren't alarmed. "Good for you!"

"May I ask a question?"

"Shoot."

I waited while she ate a little and formulated.

"Phil, what would you think of me now if I were your wife?"

It was quite a one. It was the second really tough one she'd put to me. "What would you ask God if He came in?" was the other.

"I hope," I said, "that I'd cherish you more than ever."

"But you might not?"

"I leave room for the possibility. I don't know, after all."

"Why would you cherish me?"

"For at last being honest with yourself about yourself."

"Easy answer. Why might you not?"

"I dunno. You might have found yourself--by that honesty--to be somebody who wouldn't like me. Ergo--how could I go on insisting--?"

"Only that?"

"Only that. It's a lot."

"You sure, Phil? Certain?"

"My--God--yes! A great, great many of the people I know, and am fond of, and admire, would look at your sin as just a sort of timid, dainty experiment. I suppose you're fishing around for rebuke. You'll never get much. Most women learn by doing--some men, by just thinking. What are you doing tonight, for instance?"

"I--I don't know yet." She flushed peach-pink. "I haven't--decided."

"Unh!"

"You sound like Rol. Like Rol--after-- Before I left. Dainty--he talked like that."

"They bring us up--in a desert," I said. "Because that's where they grew up." I thought of Needles and the metallic sunlight and the Moslem prince. "Still--there are other things in life besides sex."

"Not if sex isn't right, there aren't. Not any other things worth living for."

"Back to Freud and the Western neurosis. Yvonne--I have to scram in a moment.

Work. And a nephew. Maybe you'd care to meet him?"

"You'll forget to call me."

"Then you call me--later on."

"Probably I will."

I scraped up the last of the salmon and tipped the ice cubes in my coffee glass against my upper lip. Yvonne reached over and took my left hand. She ran the backs of her fingers slowly through it and shivered with a small ecstasy. "Phil! I'm all new!"

"You certainly let your hair down."

She leaned toward me. "I let down--!" She smiled and shook her head. "Am I so wicked?"

"Nope. If you tried, you might make it. Right now--"

I left her in that subdued, shiny-eyed jizzle.

3

The door slipped out of my somewhat moist palm when I opened it and was slammed not by the day's breeze, for there was no breeze, but by a draft that sucked through the Astolat Hotel--a current of air bearing the odors of food, carpets, paint, luggage, and the scents of rich women--a damp, thermal issue that would have incubated eggs.

Paul sat bolt upright in my bed.

He saw me, first. He stared at the room. He swung his feet to the floor.

"Gotta get going. Any news of her?"

"Take it easy, bo."

"What time is it?"

I told him.

"You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke.

"Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to your senses a little. Seems not."

"God damn you--you should have waked me up. I feel horrible."

"Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones, hanks of hair--and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne--an old pal of mine--working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the hunt this minute."

Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "I
thought
you'd take charge."

While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and ordered some breakfast for him.

But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl since the days of my youth--since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic.

He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back later in the day.

I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky, driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare.

Ambulances were collecting prostration cases.

Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery, and cleanliness of the millions.

The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers.

Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical auto-hypnosis, imagining the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections. It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million miles away and right here on my windowsill.

Still--I made fair progress.

The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered, when I got a call.

"Is this Phil Wylie?" It was a man's voice-bland, on the booster side.

"Yo." I was not very enthusiastic about being Phil Wylie.

"This is Socker Melton. Friend of your father. He told me to look you up, here--

and I've tried a time or two before now. Glad to catch you in. May I come up?"

What do you do? I told him I was working hard--on a rush operation-but to come up anyhow.

Then I raged around the sitting room for a bit.

Christ badger every old friend of the family!

The oaf's knock was pompous. Bonk and pause, bonk and pause, bonk.

Like the pass-signal to a kid's shanty.

I opened the door, being careful to cling to the knob.

My dimmest view was justified.

Socker Melton was a big chum--sixty-two or -three and about two-hundred and twenty-five. He had a face that would have been square if he'd sacrificed his extra chin--

large, blue, eager-beaver eyes--a babyish snub nose--and a rather thick mouth, not very clearly defined; but there was nothing repulsive in the ensemble--he looked like a star Buick salesman. He wore--maybe I should say sported, since he probably thought of it that way-a white flannel suit of a light weight and he carried a panama hat, the sweatband of which was earning its keep. A poor day for those big boys and I felt sorry for him. His clerical collar was doing its best to stand up for Jesus--but there were folds in it and his black dickey was mussed.