All of which is intended to explain the fact I played a lousy game at Sy’s house. We played in the living room with soft music in the background, and Sy and Mary partners against Barb and me. That was my partner—Barbara Lambert, thirty-two, high school English teacher, married once and divorced now, no children.
She was a pretty blonde with a settled look to her. At the outset of the evening she seemed every bit as uncomfortable as she had every right to be, given her situation. She was an unmarried gal who was being fixed up by a friend, and this is not exactly a position of strength. But she warmed up and relaxed as the evening went on. Maybe my lousy playing encouraged her.
We played three rubbers of bridge, and in each one Sy and Mary beat us silly. They seemed a little embarrassed by the time they polished us off for the third straight time, so we put the cards away and sat around playing conversation. That wasn’t difficult. Barb was a sweet kid, intelligent if not especially hip, and we managed to keep the verbal ball going. Sy and I locked into a long discussion about the relative merits of mutual funds and syndications, and at the end of all this Mary poured coffee. We drank up and called it an evening. Mary had driven over to pick up Barb, a clever move designed to leave me with the chore of trucking her home again. I didn’t mind.
I drove slowly. She was quiet, sitting with her head back and the wind playing with her hair. I switched on the radio and we listened to rock and roll for a horrible moment. Then I switched off the radio.
She said, “Bill?”
I waited.
“I had a nice time,” she said.
“So did I.”
“It was a strange evening.”
“How?”
“Staged. All set up and arranged. At first I had the feeling that we were all reading dialogue that somebody else had written out for us ages ago.”
She stopped talking. I turned at the corner and she told me when we were at her house. I stopped the Ford and took her to the door and she didn’t say anything until we were standing on the steps.
Then she said, “Married couples do that all the time. They think they have to take people like us and bring us together so that we can get married and make babies and live fuller lives. Even if—if it worked, well, it would make a person feel as though someone else were arranging his life for him.”
I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were directed at me but she was staring past me, off into space. Her lips parted slightly. She looked as though she wanted to be kissed and it seemed like a good idea, so I kissed her. She was stiff at first. Then she relaxed slightly and then I let go of her. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. Barb said, “That was—nice, Bill.”
“I’ll call you soon.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“I know. I’ll want to.”
“I think I’d like that,” she said.
I turned away and drove home. I would call Barb, of course. The action would be a good cover. If I were dating a girl, people would be less likely to imagine anything between Joyce and myself. So I would call Barb Lambert, and I would go out with her.
In another world I would have married her, and we would have sold beautiful syndications together, and she’d be the beneficiary of my life insurance policy. She was living in that world. I wasn’t.
I slept late on Sunday. It was past noon when I awoke and I was hungry. I made it around the corner and bought breakfast food at a deli, lox and bagel and instant coffee. I ate, showered, and fancied a different set of clothes.
The second-hand Broadway suit was a little tight on me. That was fine. I took off the jacket, dropped it and walked on it. I picked up the jacket, then, and brushed it off and slipped it on again. I tossed the hat down and stepped on it, grinding some dirt into the felt. I straightened the hat out again, wiped it fairly clean. When I was finished, the chapeau looked as though I had owned it for ages.
I knotted the loud tie and toned it down with coffee stains. I stuffed my feet into the broken-down shoes and tied them. I checked myself in the mirror, tugged the hat down over my eyes. I looked shabby and seedy and not at all like me.
In a drugstore I bought a pair of glasses with plain lenses. They added a final touch. I carried my valise a few blocks south and a few blocks east. There were six hotels in a row on the cheap street and all looked appropriate for the second-hand suit and the battered hat. I tried three hotels before I found just what I wanted.
The third one was the charm. It was called the Glade, and the rooms rented for two bucks a night or ten bucks a week. I walked through what passed for a lobby with my head tossed back and my shoulders hunched forward. I leaned a shoulder against the desk and looked at the desk clerk. When I talked to him my voice sounded like all the wrong parts of Brooklyn, and my lips didn’t move much.
“I need a room,” I said. “Only I got no use for stairs. You got anything on the first floor?”
The other hotels hadn’t. The Glade did. The clerk showed me to a room in the back. There was a cigarette-scarred dresser, an army cot, a washbowl, a cracked hunk of linoleum on the floor.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
Out front the clerk said the room would run me two dollars a day or ten a week, payable in advance. I reached into a pants pocket and came up with two worn dollar bills. He wanted a dollar deposit for the key. “You think I’m gonna run off with your key?” I said. “Hell—”
I gave him the deposit, but not before I had haggled with him for a few minutes to preserve appearances. He passed me a registration card and gave me a ball-point pen. I leaned on the counter, studied the card, tapped the pen on the counter, glanced up at him.
“A few days,” I said, “I won’t have to stay in dumps like this one. A few days and I pull out of this town in a Cadillac. You believe that, Charlie?”
He started to tell me his name wasn’t Charlie, then decided not to bother.
“You better believe it,” I said. “You just better believe it. Little Augie is going to do fine.”
Then I took the pen and filled out the card. August Milani, I wrote. New York City.
9
I stayed at the Glade for an hour or so, then returned to my place on College Street and belted away some sleep. In the morning I drove downtown and to work.
Two salesmen were at their desks and poring over a brochure, and another salesman was jawing with someone on the phone. Perry Carver was in his private office. I made a few calls, filed three or four prospects under Call-Again-Some-Time, managed to make two appointments for the evening. Then Perry Carver called me on the intercom and I stepped into his office.
“Well,” he said. “How’s it going, Bill?”
“Fine.”
“So fine you have to work weekends?” Carver grinned. “I’m a detective, saw your desk rearranged. That’s always a good sign. This is no business for a clockwatcher, Bill. A man has to be willing to work long hours when the work is there for him and take it easy when the going is slow. I like the way you operate, Bill.”
We said a few more nice things to each other. I took off about eleven, grabbed a cup of coffee at a drugstore soda fountain. There was a men’s mag on the rack with a cover streamer touting an article on how to beat the crap tables at Vegas. I picked up the magazine and scanned the article. It was one of those bonehead jobs pushing the old double-up system—you double your bet every time you lose, and eventually you come out a winner. There was only one little flaw. Sooner or later you were bucking the house limit and the casino had you by the throat. I put back the magazine and crossed over to the phone booth.