“We have published our schedule of rates,” Frazee said stiffly. “We have signed leases on the basis of those rates.”
“Good-o,” the governor said. “Now where you think it expedient, let our agents sign some leases at a little less than our published rates and suggest to the tenants that they would do well to keep their mouths shut about it.”
Frazee opened his mouth and shut it again carefully.
The governor produced that wolf grin. “You’re shocked? It’s what comes of a Racquet Club background.” He beckoned the waiter again. “We’ll order,” he said, “while I still have a little martini left. It’s going to be a long dull afternoon.” He consulted the menu, wrote out his order, and leaned back in his chair. “There are a lot of marbles involved, Grover,” he said. “Maybe you don’t care about yours, but I do care a great deal about mine. Gentlemanly ethics are all very well in yachting and golf and other harmless pursuits, but we built that building to make money.” He paused. “Let’s get on with it.”
5
Paul Simmons was already in a small booth in the rear of the restaurant when Zib arrived. He rose as she came toward him smiling, skirt short on regal legs, long hair gleaming, unbrassiered breasts jouncing gently. She slid into the booth with the grace he always associated with her. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said, and brushed the long hair back with both hands. “I ought to be going through piles of slush to try to find a piece of fiction we can use without too much shame.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“So I am all the more flattered.” Paul beckoned the waiter and ordered drinks—gin martinis, straight up, very dry, very cold, with a twist. Then he leaned back and smiled at Zib. “When am I going to see you?”
“You are seeing me.”
“Not the way I want to. Shall I explain that?”
“You are a male chauvinist pig.”
“And you love it.”
Her smile was secret, inscrutable. It lifted the corners of her mouth and brought tiny lights into her eyes. “There is more to us than sex,” she said.
“Is there?”
Zib smiled again. The subject of sex was pleasurable, fun to spar about in a civilized way. It had been so as long as she could remember. “You’re running true to type,” she said.
“There are times when I wonder what my type is.”
His secretary had caught him on the way out with Bert McGraw’s message. He had listened and said easily. “Call him back, honey, and tell him I’m tied up—”
“I tried,” the girl said. “But all he said was, ‘Tell him to be here.’”
And what in the world did that kind of peremptory summons mean?
Now, “Once,” he said, “I thought I was a pretty average sort of fellow—school, college, then probably some corporation where I could serve my time without too much strain.”
Zib watched him steadily. “And?” Her voice was quiet. The drinks arrived. Paul lifted his in salutation and sipped slowly. “You haven’t met my father-in-law, have you?”
“Nat speaks of him.”
Simmons set his glass down and studied it. He nodded slowly and looked up. “Nat would speak of him. They’re not unalike. Bert is a brawling two-fisted Irishman—”
“Nat isn’t. Nat is a lamb, sometimes too much of a lamb.” Zib frowned. “Don’t look at me like that. He is.”
“The last thing I want,” Simmons said slowly, “is to quarrel with you.”
“Then don’t say things like that.”
“We’re touchy today, aren’t we?”
“He’s my husband.”
“And you know him well.” Simmons nodded. But the fact is, he thought, she doesn’t know her husband well. In Simmons’s opinion, she didn’t know him at all, which was, perhaps, all for the best. “So,” he said, “we’ll stick to Bert McGraw, my revered father-in-law.”
Zib had one of her rare flashes of insight. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you?”
He sipped his martini while he considered the question and at last said, “Yes.” He had no wish to appear heroic; there was more to be gained by appearing otherwise, in effect throwing himself on Zib’s mercy. It was an approach he had used before with success. “You and I,” he said, “are anachronisms. We were raised to believe that all men were gentlemen and all women ladies. No cheating, no gouging no butting in the clinches, life played strictly by Marquis of Queensberry rules.” He was silent, watching for effect.
Zib was not sure that she understood exactly what he meant, but she was flattered that he would speak seriously to her about serious matters. Few men did. And she and Paul did come from similar backgrounds, so with that at least she could agree. She nodded. “Go on.”
“I think kids today see it more clearly than we ever did,” Paul said “They listen to the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments and they say they’re crap because nobody believes them any more. Well, that isn’t exactly true, but the people they point to, the ones we look up to, the ones who have been what we call successful, it is true that they haven’t always played by those rules if they’ve ever played by them.”
Zib thought she followed him now. “Your father-in-law?” she said.
“Exactly. Bert is a street fighter in a gutter neighborhood; he’s that much in tune with his environment. He’s in a tough trade, and because he’s tougher than most, he gets along fine.”
Zib looked across the table with fresh interest. “And you don’t?”
He shrugged, modest now. “I stagger along.” His smile was appealingly wry. “With Patty pushing me every step of the way.”
In a sense, he thought, he had been accurate when he said that he wondered what his type was. He was and always had been a chameleon, with a chameleon’s ability to blend into his surroundings. He had brains, technical competence—it would have been surprising if he had lacked technical competence after the education that had been provided for him—and he was long on charm, but there the list of assets seemed to end. Sometimes it seemed to him that an essential ingredient had been left out of his particular formula, a hardening agent perhaps, and the result was that he had never coalesced into a firm recognizable entity.
“I like Patty,” Zib said.
“You’re welcome to her.” Again he smiled. “That isn’t as far out a suggestion as it sounds. I wouldn’t be surprised if Patty decided to play both sides of the street. She’s unsold on men. Or me.” He paused. “Shocked?”
“Hardly.”
“The emancipated woman?”
“We face things as they are.”
The worst part about any aspect of Women’s Lib, Paul thought, is that it is taken so seriously that its disciples can speak only in clichés.
Zib studied her martini. She looked up. “I don’t really know you at all, do I?” She paused. “Sometimes I wonder if I really know anyone. Do you ever get that feeling? You know, that you’re—locked out?”
“Frequently.” Paul gestured to the waiter for another round of drinks. If he was going to face Bert McGraw, he thought, he wanted inner support.
“What you said about Nat,” Zib said.
“I said he was not unlike Bert McGraw.”
“And what did you mean by that?”
Paul smiled. “He’s a character out of the Wild West. He covers it well, but every now and again a little of it shows. ‘When you say that, smile, podner!’ That kind of thing.”