“Missed a spot,” she whispered.
“No I didn’t.”
“I guess you didn’t. I guess you’re one of these fellas who it doesn’t matter how much they shave, they still look like they need to.”
“Yep.”
“I guess you’re one of these fellas who doesn’t look so smooth but gets girls anyhow.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve got lots of girls, huh?”
“No. I’ve been on my own awhile.”
“I’m trying to decide, Mr. Corson, whether I’m stupid enough to have a little flutter with you. If you were a gentleman, you’d help me decide.”
I kissed her again. She had her hands against my chest, her fingers stiff and a little clawed, and her elbows between my belly and hers, holding us just a bit apart, and was doing all her kissing with her mouth. I closed my eyes and didn’t think about anything. I was happy. I could feel her back under my hands, tensing and relaxing again like a cat’s will when you stroke it. This time she was the one who stopped. We examined each other.
“No... ” she said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Not stupid enough?”
“Plenty stupid enough. Plen-ty. But you lied to me, Mr. Corson.”
“What about?”
“You told me there wasn’t anybody else.”
“I don’t have anyone else.”
“Oh no. There’s someone, all right. Maybe you don’t, um, have her yet. But I can see her in there, Mr. Corson. I can taste her.”
“I don’t have anyone else.”
“And I’ll tell you something about that girl, Mr. Corson. Whoever she is. She’s just like me, Mr. Corson. All her ideas are bad. I believe I’ll have Graham run me home now.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said.
“It’s past his bedtime anyway. Good night, Mr. Corson.”
She turned and walked off. I shut my mouth and watched her go. She went down the gallery, and I could see her through the glass, and then she turned again and I couldn’t.
“He’s a fairy, you know,” said Maddy behind me.
I turned. Maddy was in the corner, propping up the wall with her broad soft back and finishing her sandwich.
“He’s a big fairy. Grammy is,” she said. “How’s it feel, having a fairy beat your time?”
“You’ll get fat,” I told her savagely. “You are getting fat. And the sooner the better. I don’t like you.”
She picked a crumb off her front and ate it. “I’m sorry Miss Godalmighty gave you the air. You deserve her. You deserve each other. Why don’t you go home, Suit Man? I don’t see why you’re here in the first place. You don’t fit in. You’re not having any fun. You’re just making everybody uncomfortable who’s here to enjoy theirself. What do you want here, anyway?”
“Dope,” I snapped.
“Well, that’s easy enough,” she said, swallowing the last bit and licking her thumb. “Come on.”
She boosted herself off the wall with a shove of her rump and set off down the hallway without looking around. I followed her. We crossed the dining room and she led me along the other wing of the house into a woman’s bedroom, very untidy. Out the window was a dry fountain with a figure of a faun playing a double flute. “Come into my parlor, like they say,” she said over her shoulder. “Close the door.”
As she spoke, she was undoing the sash of her robe. She pivoted gracefully as it fell open and stood facing me, waiting for a trumpet flourish. Underneath, she wore peach satin drawers and a smudgy yellow garter. She looked like two dozen roses in a pink pot. I closed the door. She ran two fingers along the elastic of her drawers, slipped them inside just over her left hip, drew out a packet folded from patterned gold paper, and held it up. “You fuss around more’n you need to, Suit Man. Some things’re easy.”
“Not that easy,” I said. “It’s been a while since I bought any talcum powder. I’d like it to be a longer while.”
She nodded, took a short flat knife from under her garter, and flipped open the packet at one end with the tip of it, deft as a baccarat dealer turning a card. She slipped the knife inside and drew out a little mound of the powder, and held it in front of my face. Her hand didn’t shake. I’ve known a few sleigh-riders and maybe that’s why I was never interested enough in the stuff to try any. Anyway, I never had. I lowered my nose toward the knife, pressed my right nostril shut with my forefinger the way I’d seen it done, and snorted the cocaine up the left, praying I wouldn’t sneeze.
It bit into my head with cold teeth. For a moment I held still, feeling something like pain behind my eyes. Then the gold clouds in Maddy’s kimono seemed to swell, or maybe they just got very important-looking. Everything in the room looked very clear and important. I was most important of all. I was King Barracuda. Maddy was very beautiful and mysterious. The back of my tongue was bitter as lye. “Good?” she said.
I nodded, and she closed up the packet and put it in my hand. It was warm. I hefted it and tried to look judicious. “Quarter-plate?” I said.
When I spoke, my lungs felt cold.
“That’s right,” she said. She licked the knife clean and tucked it away. “Full measure. Twenty bucks.”
“How much more you got?” I said.
Her expression didn’t change. I opened my wallet and held it out to her. She glanced inside, then pulled two packets from her left hip, one from her right, and began rummaging around behind her, looking at the ceiling. “I sewed the pockets in back too deep,” she said. She got out one more and set them all in a row before me. “That’s what’s left tonight,” she said. “Like I said, it’s been a nice party.”
“I was thinking more of fifty than five,” I said.
She took back the four sealed packets and stowed them away beneath her tummy, and nodded at the one in my hand. “You tasted that and it was good, so you’re buying it. For the rest, you’ll have to talk to Billy when he gets here.”
I gave her a twenty and said, “When’ll that be?”
“When he wants,” she said, stowing the bill where she’d stowed the merchandise. “People wait for Billy long’s they have to.”
She was murmuring, but I couldn’t see why she had to talk so loud. I thought it might be a good idea to bust her one in that little nose. Or maybe marry her. They were both brilliant ideas. I felt like I could pick up the house and throw it if I wanted. It was an unrestful way to feel.
“Close that robe before I fall in love,” I said, and went back into the dining room.
After that, all I had to do was kill time. It didn’t die without a struggle. I went back out to the pool and had a couple more drinks and then took another stroll through the dining room. Maddy had finally put out that stack of sandwiches. I had one. It was delicious. But in the middle it began to seem very strange to go around putting things in your mouth and chewing them, and I left the rest of it on the mantelpiece and tried playing the piano in the sun room. I’ve never learned how, but it seemed worth a try. Outside, someone bounced on the diving board for a joke so that the record player fell into the pool in the middle of a song. I thought that was pretty funny. I saw a door I hadn’t noticed and went down some stairs. There was a long drab room down there with padding on the ceiling and side walls, and I remembered that Nita Paley had built an underground shooting range for some reason, but what they kept down there now was a pool table and a couple of busted easy chairs and some drunks, and I began playing pool for money. The first game, I wanted to jog around the table between shots. But by the second game I started coming out from under the powder, and soon I was thirty-two bucks up and the guy wanted double or nothing again. We were well along toward my sixty-four bucks when a thin man stepped up to my opponent and held out his hand for the cue. He nodded to him and to me and began to play.