I couldn’t help it; I looked ceilingward. Somewhere in this building, a ravenous insatiable bed was vibrating, all by itself.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” the desk clerk said, being brisk and standard now that he understood the situation. He was more a computer than a man, anyway; every possible encounter would be met by a pre-programmed response. (That’s why Ms. Scott and I had thrown him off. There was no program for a couple like us.) A vibrating bed obviously called for the broken-TV response: “I’ll phone the engineer right now, sir. Could you tell me your room number?”
“Two-fifteen.”
The desk clerk repeated the number, in a not entirely convincing show of competence, and turned away to make his call.
Leaving the man to his own devices, between Ms. Scott and me. He flashed her one agonized look — she was still absorbed in photographs of women in long white dresses standing over croquet mallets — then turned his back toward her, hunching his shoulder for added protection; which brought him face to face with me. “I don’t like to complain,” he told me.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Normally,” he said, “I don’t even go to bed this early.”
“Ah,” I said. Eight o’clock was early; he had a point there.
“But I have a meeting tomorrow at Wilkes-Barre.” Talking seemed to calm him a bit, so he did more of it: “I must be at the airport by four A.M., and I must be alert for the meeting. It’s vitally important.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Normally, Mr. Wilcox would have handled it,” he explained, “but of course Mr. Wilcox is recuperating from his hemorrhoid operation and he, uh — his operation, he’s, um, he’s recuperating, he, um, his operation—”
The man’s very ears were stretching, like Spock on Star Trek: had the woman behind him heard the dread word ‘hemorrhoid’? Surely if such horrible sexual embarrassment were a genetic trait, in the very nature of the affliction it would have been bred out of the race by now; so it must be a cultural acquisition.
And the man was stuck in it, well and truly stuck, very much like his vibrating bed. Without help, he wasn’t ever going to struggle past Mr. Wilcox’s operation. So I provided help, saying, “Tomorrow’s your big chance, is that it?”
“—recuper— Yes!” His gratitude was immense. “That’s right!” he cried. “Tomorrow may be the most important day of my career. I must be alert and well-rested. I realize it may sound, well, it may sound, um, odd, for a grown person to go to bed this early, and to use that, um, that, in the bed. You know, the bed.”
“The vibrator.”
The poor man turned as red as his robe. “Oh, my God,” he whispered. “Is that what they call it?”
“I really don’t know. I was guessing.” Then, because ‘vibrator’ was even more paralyzing than ‘hemorrhoid,’ I helped him again: “But you just wanted to be sure you got your proper sleep,” I suggested, “even though it was so early.” (I was hoping the word ‘proper’ would soothe him.)
It did: “That’s right! That’s exactly it! I may have gone to, um, bed before eight o’clock in the evening, I may have been using that, uh, uh, uh—”
“Machine.”
“Machine. Yes. But I do assure you — I assure anyone at all, in fact—” (with slightly raised voice for the benefit of the lady learning all about Lake Erie) “—that my reasons for being there, at that time, and using that, that machine, were strictly business.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second,” I promised him, and at that point the desk clerk returned to the conversation with his own promises, saying, “Sir, the engineer is on his way to your room right now.”
“Thank you very much,” the man said. “I really don’t like to complain.”
“Not at all, sir.” But then the desk clerk smiled and said, “It’s probably just a loose screw.”
Unfortunate. The man had been getting calmer and calmer, but that last phrase sent him right up the wall again. “Yes yes yes,” he said, backing away from us all, nodding spastically and smiling like a poison victim. “I’m sorry I had to come,” he said, then twitched all over like a marionette. Now he was appalling himself. “But I have to snatch what sleep I can,” he told us. There was no way out for the poor man; every word he spoke was another electrocution. “It’s hard on me!” he wailed, clapped both hands over his mouth, and fled.
6
The trouble is, there hadn’t been any sexual problem between Ms. Scott and me. You very early learn in this business that a cabdriver is not a man; at least, not to a good-looking woman. Women who wouldn’t dream of having a casual chat with a strange man on the sidewalk or in Bloomingdale’s will have long relaxed talks with cabdrivers, because they know there’s no possibility of misunderstanding. And the cabby knows it, too. (The exceptions don’t last long.) Women in my cab have told me about their love lives, their operations, their troubles with their mothers, their difficulty with the next-door peeping tom and I don’t know what all; if the same women had said the same things at a party, I would have assumed we were in the opening skirmishes of a flirtation. But not in a cab; that’s neutral territory, and everybody knows it. It’s like a cop not drinking on duty, or a clerk not taking personal calls at the office. You don’t even think about it.
But then the man with the unstoppable bed entered our lives, and all at once that morgue-cold Holiday Inn lobby was absolutely tropical with sex. Somewhere in my mind that rampant bed vibrated, while on it, sweat-gleaming and softly butting, writhed — well, all bodies are anonymous once you get to bed, but one of those bodies was very similar in shape to Ms. Scott, standing here beside me at the Holiday Inn counter, demurely filling out her registration form.
Ms. Scott wore no bra, which was nothing out of the ordinary. Many women in New York go braless in summer, and have for several years; the sight of nipple-bump through cloth has long since ceased to astound. I’d been aware of Ms. Scott’s breasts from the time she first got into the cab, and — no, from before, when she heaved her two suitcases into the cab ahead of herself. I’d been fully aware then of her breasts, her legs, the slender curve of her hip, the excellent good features of her face — I mean, I’m not blind. But nor am I a crazed billygoat; seeing one attractive and fully clothed woman on the street in the sunshine doesn’t exactly make me paw the ground.
So it was a surprise to feel this sudden rising heat. What had happened, that goddam man with his goddam vibrating bed and his goddam sexual nervousness had thrust the idea of sex between Ms. Scott and me, and all at once the sexual content of the moment overcame everything else. We were traveling together, unknown by the people around us. We were in a motel together. Somewhere a bed vibrated, and the world filled with men and women having sex together, murmuring and moaning, thrusting and grasping, rolling and tumbling. A great insistent pulsebeat occupied all of life, with Ms. Scott and me at the hot throbbing humid center of it. All at once, I was not the easygoing cabby anymore, I was — I don’t know what I was, but it made my hands shake as I tried to write the cab’s license plate number on the registration form.
And when I pushed forward my completed registration card, coincidentally at the same moment as Ms. Scott’s, so that the edges of our hands accidentally touched, and she started like a fawn, yanking her hand away and staring straight ahead, lips slightly parted, an added touch of color in her cheek, I suddenly realized that she was feeling it, too.