"The bar? Allow me to show you, please."
He guided them down the vaulted corridor to a vast room which whispered with music and the hum of acoustically stilled voices. Then, having led the way through the dimness, he saw them seated at the bar, snapped his fingers at an attendant and departed with a low bow.
Icy martinis were set in front of them. The barman hovered obsequiously, lighting their cigarettes, moving the ashtrays a fraction of an inch closer. Assured that they needed nothing else, he at last left, them alone. Mitch lifted his glass to Red, murmuring that the atmosphere had warmed considerably.
Red agreed that it had, but she still didn't like the place. "Let's leave as soon as we can, honey. We don't belong here, and this gang knows it."
"Oh? I'd say we'd made the grade with flying colors."
"And footprints on the seat of our pants. Please, Mitch…"
"I thought we'd have dinner. Maybe a dance or two."
"We can have it somewhere else." She studied his face, frowning. "You surely aren't going to try for anything here, are you?"
Mitch hesitated, taking a sip of his drink. As she prompted him anxiously, he started to reply, then abruptly broke off. A man was on the point of passing them. A tall man, whose dinner attire was perhaps an unmeasurable fraction too elegant, whose face was completely expressionless.
As he went by, his knuckles rapped Mitch's spine. Lips barely moving, he spoke two words.
"Get out."
6
In the rationalizing part of his mind, Mitch was inclined to blame his mother for his marriage to Teddy. He was subconsciously seeking a mother, he believed, when he allowed Teddy to trap him. In his leniency with Teddy, he was making amends to his mother for his actions at their last meeting. Their one and only meeting since the death of his father.
Admittedly, his thoughts on the subject were very confused. It was impossible to think of Teddy without being confused. Almost as hard as it was to think of Teddy as a mother-type. What Mitch thought about the first time he saw her was certainly not motherhood, but rather that joyous biological preliminary to woman's noblest estate.
He was night belihopping at the time. Teddy, so he had learned, was the highly-paid night auditor for an oil company. Finishing her duties, she would eat in the hotel's coffee shop just as dawn was breaking, then have a cab called to take her home. It fell to Mitch, his second night on the job, to call the cab.
She was a very wholesome-looking young woman, with corn-colored hair and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Severely dressed, she still had a lot of stuff to show. And Mitch found himself looking at it as they waited together at the taxi entrance. He also found, after a moment, that she was studying him out of long-lashed green eyes. Embarrassed, he was about to shift his gaze when the eyes squinched shut in a double wink-an enticing nose-crinkling wink-and she growled at him. Yes, growled!
"Grrr," she said. "Rrrruff!"
"W-Wh-at?" he said.
"Grrr, woof!" she said. "Bow-wow!"
Well, Mitch didn't have to be hit in the face with a pie to know when dessert was being passed. In a little more time than it took to get her telephone number, he was at her apartment, figurative fork in hand. He warmly declared himself ready to share the bed which she was obviously preparing to retire to. Teddy demurely demurred.
"I'm saving my candy for my daddy," she explained. "I figure that if a man buys the box he ought to get all the pieces.
Mitch suggested that they lie down and talk it over. Teddy primly shook her corn-colored head.
"Now, you wouldn't want to rob my future husband, would you? You wouldn't want to take something that was rightfully his?"
"Well, look,"-Mitch frowned. "If that's the way you feel, why did you, uh-"
"I thought you might like to examine the merchandise," Teddy said. "I mean, how could you make a commitment unless you knew what you were getting?"
"Uh, w-what-huh!" Mitch gasped.
"But please handle with care," Teddy murmured, as she shyly shed her negligee. "None of these items can be replaced."
Crazy? Sure, it was! 'Who said different? Mitch was pretty crazy himself by the time she shoved him out the door, politely wishing him a good day's sleep. A good day's sleep, for God's sake, after all that seeing and not a single sampling!
He had never felt so frustrated. So furious. So-yes- flattered. Here was obviously a very high-class girl, a woman rather, who not only had everything it took downstairs, but a brain to go with it. A woman like that could have any man she wanted; she probably had to fight them off with a club. Yet she had chosen him, Boy Nobody, and she was prepared to go to any lengths (well, practically any) to get him.
And how could you knock a thing like that?
He was back in her apartment the next morning, and the next, and the next. Weakening, he tried to get at the reason behind her behavior, the why of her desire for marriage with him. But the answer, no answer, was always the same. "Because you're my sugar, my own sweet daddy."
"But you don't even know me! You never saw me until a few days ago."
"Oh, yes I do," she smiled serenely. "Oh, yes, I did."
"But how could you? I mean, when?"
"I know my daddy," she said. "I'd know my sugar anywhere."
At the end of the week, he married her. There were one hundred and ten delicious pounds of reasons for doing so, and no apparent reason not to.
On their wedding night they both got sozzled on champagne. So sozzled that he was a little hazy about his share in consummating the marriage. But awakening to the sound of Teddy's sobs, he charged himself with brutality. She shook her head, hugging him fiercely.
"I'm j-just so happy, darling. S-So glad you're not d-dead!"
"Hmm, what?" Mitch mumbled foggily. "Who's dead?"
"I know you couldn't be, darling! Everyone said you were, even the general wrote me a letter. But I knew, I knew, I knew…"
"'S'nice," Mitch yawned, and was suddenly asleep again.
He was not sure, the next morning, that it hadn't been a dream. In fact, he hardly thought about it at all, Teddy being a woman to give a man much more interesting and delightful things to think about. When eventually he became alarmed and consulted a psychiatrist-a permanent resident at the hotel where he was working-and was advised that Teddy quite probably had cast him in the leading role in her own private sex fantasy, something with roots trailing back into puberty, he was incredulous and angry.
It just couldn't be, dammit! It couldn't! Yet doubtless it was; he never had a better explanation for her. And the dream which he had become a part of-which Teddy had hooked him into being a part of-ultimately turned into a nightmare.
Meanwhile, there was the meeting with his mother. A meeting which, in a negative way, had at least one plus quality. It almost made Teddy seem like a dull-normal person.
It was about five years after his father's death had separated them, before he saw his mother. She wrote occasionally and vaguely, and he replied. But his letters were often returned for want of a forwarding address. Once he got an urgent wire from Dallas, asking for a hundred dollars. One year she remembered his birthday three times, each with a ten-dollar bill. Finally, after a silence of almost a year, she wrote him that she was married and very happy.