I could call Lou in the morning. Lou needed me right now like he needed a hole in his head, but I needed him and I needed him bad. A writer without an agent is like a fisherman without bait. Whatever you catch is an accident.
An agent makes all the difference in the world. An agent can find you work and tell you what not to write. He can make sure your scripts get to the right place at the right time, and when he finds a buyer he can get the last lousy nickel out of him for you. A writer’s in no position to bargain by himself, especially when the refrigerator’s empty and he’s hungry.
I was pretty sure Lou would take me on again. Sure, I let him down the way I balled things up on the coast, but I also made a hell of a lot of money for him in the past. And I had the stuff to do it again, if only I could get the damned words on the damned paper.
If...
The paperbacks were buying; that much I knew. People stopped buying hardcover books in quantity a few years back and the paperback houses did better every year. It was good writing and writing I knew and writing that paid off. I could do it.
If I could get started.
If...
I hauled myself off the bed and headed almost instinctively for the pint of rye in the desk. There was nothing more to do now — not until morning when I could pick up a typewriter and get to a phone to call Lou. There was nothing to do but take in a movie or pick up a woman or swallow some rye, and there were no women or movies that I felt like seeing. I got the desk open and my hand around the neck of the bottle when I changed my mind for no reason at all and instead opened the compartment with the rent receipt.
The signature read Marcia Banks. It was signed with a ball-point pen, the loops of the letters neatly rounded and the writing small and precise. I slipped the rye back where it belonged and studied the rent receipt thoughtfully for a moment, remembering the face and body of my luscious little landlady.
She was a nice one, all right. I guessed her age at between 28 and 32 — somewhere in there. I walked back to the bed, still thinking about her and wanting her. I hadn’t wanted a woman since Allison. I’d had women since then — too many of them, maybe — but Marcia Banks was the first one I could recall wanting.
I stretched out on the bed again, enjoying the feel of the foam-rubber pillow beneath my head. My eyes dropped shut again and my mind filled with the mental picture of her, of her small breasts in the yellow sweater and of her rear end wiggling its way up the staircase ahead of me.
She would be nice. She would be nice, and with my eyes shut tightly I imagined just how nice she would be. I thought about her, remembering that quick smile in the doorway, and I also thought just how nice it would be if she would open the door and come into my room then and there.
She opened the door and came into my room.
It wasn’t quite that brazen; she knocked, and she announced herself, but she did come into my room and walk over to the side of the bed and look down at me with a half-smile on her face.
The look was the sort of look you have to recognize intuitively. There’s no describing it. It’s not hunger and it’s certainly not love and it’s not quite a combination of the two. It’s a look that says this gal is ready for action, and if you’ve seen it once you’ll know it every time. That was the look on her face, and I reacted to it without thinking.
I stood up from the bed and reached out for her and she came to me at once, her face nestling close to my chest and her lips pressing little kisses through my shirt. My arms went around her and held her and I tilted her head back with one hand, fastening my mouth on hers and forcing her lips open. Her mouth opened under mine and there was a sort of electric shock as our tongues came together.
I led her to the bed and lay down beside her. My hands lifted the yellow sweater over her head and her bare skin was smooth and cool to my touch. She propped herself up on her elbows so that I could reach the hooks on her bra and remove that as well.
My hands found her breasts and held them. She may have been around thirty but she had the breasts of a schoolgirl — young and fresh and firm and rounded. I kissed them and ran my tongue over them and the nipples turned to hard red dots.
I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt and reached for her skirt with the other hand.
“Wait,” she said. That was the first word she had spoken.
She stood up, gathering her sweater and bra up and carrying them to the uncomfortable chair. She removed her skirt, slipping it slowly to the floor.
There was nothing under the skirt.
Her calves were gently rounded and her thighs were like a white mare running. She stood there motionless for a moment seemingly unconscious of her nudity; then she came back to me.
It was perfect. The whole performance was perfect, from the moment she came into the room through the undressing routine all the way to the moment when we lay spent with our heads on the foam-rubber pillow and our bodies pressed together like sheep hovering together for warmth.
It was perfect — from the gradual crescendo through the racing, pounding fury to the completely simultaneous climax. I felt like a man again.
“This may never happen again,” she said.
I almost fell off the bed. For a second I thought I had heard her wrong, but a second later I was sure that I hadn’t. Then there was another second or more when I thought I had found another actress like the one I left in Hollywood.
“What are you talking about?”
She reached out with one hand and traced little circles on my chest with her index finger. “I just want you to understand,” she said. “I want you to know where I stand in... this. It’s better that way, don’t you think?”
I waited for her to go on.
“I wanted you,” she said. “I was sitting alone in my room and all of a sudden I wanted you. So I came in.”
“Did you get what you wanted?”
“Mmmmm.” She smiled again — not the quick smile she had flashed in the doorway but a lingering, satisfied smile.
“Satisfied?”
She went “Mmmmm” again.
“Then what’s the trouble?”
She grinned. “There is no trouble, Dan. It’s just that I may not want you again, or not for a long time. And I want you to understand that.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you?”
I didn’t, so I shook my head.
“Look, Dan,” she said. “I’m kind of a funny woman. I need men sometimes, and sometimes I can get along without them. And I definitely don’t want any kind of a man or anything remotely resembling a permanent relationship.”
“All right,” I said. “I can understand that.”
“I don’t mean just marriage. I mean anything where a man will start to feel that he owns me, or that I should be responsible to him. Hell, I had that once. I was married to a pretty wonderful guy, but he wanted to have me on a leash like a dog or something. I’m not like a dog.”
I reached out a hand and rested it on the smooth skin on the inside of her thigh, stroking her gently. “You’re more like a cat,” I said.
“That’s right — the cat who walks by herself, like in the story. I need to be independent, Dan. Maybe it’s unfair of me to ask it of you, but I don’t want you to make a play for me or even to throw passes at me. I’ll come to you when I want to, but no more. Is that all right? Because it’s the only way it can be.”
I leaned over and kissed her on her lips. “Marcia,” I said, “it’s a good deal more than all right. I can’t afford to get involved with anybody at this point, but I need women the same as any man does — maybe a little bit more than most.
“So you can call the shots. It’s hard to promise not to try to drag you into bed, but you can come around whenever you’re in the mood. Okay?”