Her formality had iced over about two questions back; by this time nothing would crack it. And Hartley knew that he wasn’t being straight either. This bragging on love, bragging on violence — it wasn’t him. He slammed down the phone. He was still lying there, frowning and with his hands where his belt would be normally, when Garbeau came in.
Wet, her short hair had grown longer. Rivulets wandered slowly into the bottom of her bikini. Hartley was so disturbed he spoke up first.
“I tried to call home.”
Garbeau had been standing looking startled. Now, again, he’d made her laugh.
“Hartley, God.” She shook her head. “You are such a natural.” She sat, picked up the other phone, gave him a different look. “But I guess you didn’t get through. Poor boy. It’s still all wrinkled up like Mr. Froggy.”
She turned away from him and started making calls. More TV shorthand. So far as Hartley could tell, it was something about when he’d get his first check. Then, the phone still over one shoulder, Garbeau picked up a clipboard from the hotel desk and began making notes on the attached pad. The noise of the pages riffling back and forth grated on Hartley.
“It’s Friday,” he said finally. “Friday is when the wife does the errands. Plus Bobby and Janey are at school.”
Garbeau turned a couple more pages.
“The wife,” Hartley almost shouted, “is doing the errands.”
“All right.” She left the clipboard and phone where they were but met his gaze. “All right, let’s hear it.”
Hartley could only blink.
“I’ve sat through this riff a hundred times. You just go right ahead.”
A hundred times. So, Hartley thought. Men fell in love with her right and left. So he was Sap of the Week.
“Oh, come on, Slim,” she said. “It’s the real people like you against the TV people like me, right? All TV people are artificial. All TV people are parasites. They don’t have feelings of their own so they suck off everyone else. Right?”
Hartley felt his ideas going inside out and looking foolish. Suddenly he wanted just to hide in a hole somewhere.
“I mean, you married your high-school sweetheart. You have Bobby and Janey and they go to school. But a person like me, I’m hardly human. All a TV person like me wants is money and a good fuck. Well fuck you, Captain Hartley.”
Her face was wrecked. She whipped the phone off her shoulder and shook it at him.
“Maybe some of us didn’t go for that quaint-little-New-England crap! Maybe some of us thought a little more of ourselves than just, ‘the wife’! The truth is, Hartley, if I’d stayed in St. J. I’d be so godawful beaten-down by now you wouldn’t give me a second look.”
He lay there bewildered. He was hurt by the crack about wives, thrown by how far off base his own ideas had been, deeply embarrassed about his nakedness. He’d knotted his fingers over his stomach tight. Yet at the same time Hartley felt — and this was the bewildering part — honestly good. He felt as if he’d just got some bit of what he needed, this morning. There was an honest satisfaction in finding out another terrible thing about himself. Hartley began to think of wisecracks, and of how he might take off the rest of his clothes without insulting her.
But nothing came to him quickly enough. Almost at once, like putting the period with a sledgehammer, Garbeau went back to her phone calls. She looked a little thrown and embarrassed herself. Hartley had to watch her sit there stiffly, had to listen through two more conversations in that maddening shorthand code. The pages on her clipboard riffled again. So the more satisfied part of his mind dropped away as mysteriously as it had arrived. He couldn’t even decide whether or not to pull up his pants. Garbeau meantime went through a lot of gimmicks, ignoring him. She touched the stems and petals on the flowers he’d bought her last night. She wrapped the phone wire round her index finger. Somehow she found time for a cigarette too. Hartley understood the lines of battle had been drawn, that much he could trust, but he couldn’t be sure if a man in love was supposed to cross those lines or back away.
“Hey?” he said finally.
Another surprise: Garbeau smiled at him. She untangled her finger and lay the phone on her shoulder again.
“Okay, Hartley, okay.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I guess I—okay, I apologize.”
“No,” Hartley began. “No, don’t.”
“Let’s just say I brought a lot of stuff down on you that other people put on me.”
He wouldn’t nod, wouldn’t give any sign. He didn’t want those clear lines of force dissolving.
“But look, now, we’ve had a lot of fun these last couple days but, I do have work here—”
“Ronnie.” He actually waved a fist at her. “What I want to know is, what do you think of this? What do you think of how you and I can do this?”
The question, lumpy and badly put as it was, exhausted him. He watched as Garbeau changed the way she was sitting. And she took time for another cigarette. Between slow drags, plainly trying to feel for what he was after, she told Hartley that during these past couple days she’d come while he was inside her. “I mean, that’s pretty rare, you should know.”
Hartley shook his head. That was just something he’d learned over in Nam. He pressed his knuckles against his stomach muscles, felt the coffee down there bubble against his diaphragm. The only things that came to mind were more wisecracks.
“You’ve done this before,” Garbeau said. “I mean, God, with this war-hero business, what else do you need? The AP put what you did number six on the list of the ten greatest stories of American bravery since World War II.”
Again Hartley was waving his fist, as if to ward this stuff off.
“Hey, Hartley. You’re the one who goes around giving speeches. You’re—”
“I don’t give speeches,” he said quickly. It was such a relief to put in something simple and certain. “I hate speeches. I feel like the world’s biggest fake up there. The Army stopped making me give speeches a long time ago. They know I’m at my best working one-on-one.”
Garbeau bought some more time with her cigarette. Then she smiled.
“Well, so, that just proves what I’m saying. You’re a natural, Hartley. I mean, if you’re telling me these last couple days have stirred up some doubts,”—she snorted at the idea—“forget it. You’re what every man wishes he was. You’re lady bait.”
She laughed. The flowers changed color behind her scattered smoke. And when Hartley tried to chuckle in response, to help her blow away this silly idea of doubts, he discovered something that left him ruined. He was almost in tears again. His throat clenched round his breathing. Everything beneath the neck was straining, revving with the pedal to the floor. Hartley must have gone three years without crying and now he was breaking up two days in a row. He thought: What have these guys done to me? He flexed his feet in his boots, locked his fingers together tight, tight. What had they done, now that Hartley couldn’t ask a simple question? Garbeau’s laugh now was nothing special, only the same trick she’d been using on him since he came off the plane in Fort Lauderdale. She was only trying to keep the customer satisfied. But how was Hartley ever to get round that act, here with his dinosaur hanging in his way again, falling out over the edge of the bed, trolling across the hotel floor? Ladybait? Hartley had to get out of there. These users, with their codes and contracts — he had to escape.
Garbeau had stopped laughing. No doubt she’d seen he wasn’t going along with it. She sat back and waited for him to explain.