In fact, if he had been out of condition it would have worked out a lot better. Then he could have said that he was too tired, which he did from time to time. It didn’t seem to make much difference, though. She would find something to do that would make him untired again. She found a lot of things.
And they always worked.
Some of them were things that nice girls didn’t do, and some of them were things that nice girls didn’t think about, and some of them were things that nice girls didn’t know about. Some of them, for that matter, were things that nice whores didn’t think about.
But they always worked.
By the evening of the third day Vince realized that his time limit wasn’t limited enough. He’d thought that four days with Saralee wouldn’t be enough. He was wrong. Four days with Saralee would be enough. Enough to kill him.
It was eight o’clock now and he was mercifully alone, eating a plateful of fried potatoes and washing them down with black coffee. Fried potatoes and black coffee did nothing at all for your virility, and this was the main reason he was eating them. What he really wanted was a blood-rare steak, but he was afraid that if he had a blood-rare steak he would find it a good deal more difficult to run out on Saralee.
Which was precisely what he was planning to do.
He stirred the coffee and took a sip of it. It was simple — Saralee was out shopping, the only other activity she found enjoyable. The stores were open until nine and she was getting in her licks. She wouldn’t be back until nine-thirty at the earliest, which gave him an hour and a half at the very least.
He was in a restaurant just a block from the hotel. He would go back, get the car which Saralee had moved to the hotel’s parking lot, and get the merry hell out of New York. It would be too bad about Saralee, of course, but if it was too bad about Saralee that was just too bad. He couldn’t feel particularly sympathetic toward her at the moment. She was a nice kid, and she meant well, and she was sweet and good and kind, but if he didn’t get away from her soon he would be dead.
Besides, Saralee would make out okay. If worse came to worse, she could always get a job. He’d heard how rough it was for an inexperienced girl to get a job in New York, but fortunately Saralee had plenty of experience in two areas. She could get a job in a drugstore behind the counter, because of all her experience in Brighton. Or she could get a job in a cathouse because of all her experience, period.
He laughed an evil laugh. It was going to be easy now. Back to the hotel. Pack the suitcase. Get the car. Drive off into the night. Stay the hell away from New York because a man could get killed if he stayed in New York long enough.
The check came to a dollar and ten cents, which was too much, but he paid it and left the waiter a forty cent tip, which was ridiculous. What the hell. It was her money, not his. He couldn’t take it along, because that would be stealing. But he could tip his head off, and that would be all right.
He no longer believed old Bradley Jenkins was over forty, the way Saralee said he was, and the way he looked. It seemed that way on the surface, but after you knew Saralee the way he knew Saralee, you got a different picture.
The way he figured it, Brad Jenkins was around twenty-three. When he married Saralee, Brad was big and broad-shouldered and hungry for sex. Being married to Saralee, Vince knew, would be a pretty debilitating experience. If three days with her could demolish a guy, a year could turn him into an old man before his time. More than a year was impossible to imagine.
Poor Brad Jenkins, fainting all over the place like that. The way Vince looked at it, Brad was fainting from sheer unadulterated joy. He was fainting because he couldn’t believe he’d actually managed to unload Saralee on some poor goof.
Named Vince.
The elevator deposited him on his floor and Vince walked to the room. It was simple now, very simple. He opened the door with his key, closed it behind him, and started throwing things into his suitcase. There was very little to pack and it didn’t take him long.
With the suitcase closed, he went to the door again, ready to ride back down to the main floor and get his car from the garage. And just about then something profound occurred to him. It was going to be difficult, very difficult indeed, to drive that car without the key. And he didn’t have the goddamned key.
Saralee had it. Saralee moved the car from the original lot to the hotel garage, and somehow in the bed-to-bed-to-bed confusion of it all, he hadn’t managed to get key away from her. At the time it hadn’t mattered. What the hell, he wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t need car, not then. So she kept the key. It was in her purse and her purse was with her, and she was not around.
Of all the brilliant, masterful, superb displays of creative stupidity, this won the Oscar. Of all the—
He didn’t unpack the suitcase. It might have been the best thing to do, so she wouldn’t suspect anything, but he was willing to bet she wouldn’t look in his suitcase. Not her. She would look at him, and then she would take off her clothes, and off they would go again on the old merry-go-round.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited. While he waited, he found a few more things to call himself and a few more things to call her. At a quarter to ten the door finally opened.
“Hi!” she called gaily. “I’m home!”
“I’m glad to see you,” he said honestly.
“Miss me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wait’ll you see what I bought.” She wrestled with a package, a massive white box all messed up with red ribbon. She uncovered the box triumphantly, hauling out a garment.
I mean, Vince thought, you just had to call it a garment. Because there wasn’t much else you could call it. Because there wasn’t much there, when you came right down to it.
It was black, and it was flimsy, and it was sheer, and it was about as concealing as a pane of glass. “What the hell is it?” he asked.
“Can’t you tell?”
“Frankly, no.”
“Well, what does it look like?”
“Looks like a hairnet.”
She laughed. “Here,” she said. “I’ll model it for you. I mean, I bought it for you.”
“You bought it for me?”
She nodded.
“I’d look awfully silly—”
That got another laugh. “I bought it so I could look good to you,” she said. “So you can look at me while I’m wearing it and get all excited.”
Here we go, he thought. Here we go, off on the goddamned merry-go-round again. She began undressing, clothes soaring all over the room, until in a short time she wasn’t wearing a damned thing. Then she was wearing something, but it was the hairnet, so the effect remained about the same. The hairnet, amazingly, covered all of her from shoulders to knees. It covered all of her and concealed none of her, all at once, which was fantastic.
“Vince,” she cooed, homing in on him. “Good sweet Vince. My little Vince. My baby’s going to be good to me, isn’t he? My baby’s going to make me feel good again.”
Your baby, he thought, is going to crap out completely. Your baby is going to fold up like a murphy bed. And the word bed made him wince a little. He wondered whether he’d ever be able to see a bed again without thinking of Saralee.
Or a floor, for that matter. Or a bathroom rug. Or a bathtub. Or a coat closet, or an elevator, or—
“Take off your clothes, Vince. There, Vince. Now you’re as naked as I am. Nakeder, because of this thing I’m wearing. It cost thirty-five dollars, can you imagine?”
At that price it cost about three times as much, ounce for ounce, as platinum. He looked at her, and he decided that maybe the thirty-five bucks had been well spent.