Please Write for Details (14 page)

And they walked off with the girls and got into the station wagon and headed down toward the center of the city. Klauss and Torrigan stared at each other with mutual dislike.

Gil and Jeanie Wahl had gone to bed.

Paul Klauss made a quick and alert tour of the area and found to his disgust that Barbara Kilmer had disappeared. This was a damn bad beginning. The two Texas girls and the Kilmer woman were all prospects, and good ones. And he hadn’t managed to establish a decent contact with any one of them. The Killdeering woman was definitely off any list. From the neck down she was ten plus. But add the other factors and she came very close to being a minus quantity. He noted as he went through the lobby for the last time that Monica and Harvey Ardos seemed to be hitting it off splendidly. They sat in chairs facing each other, knees almost touching, while Ardos continued the speech that Torrigan had so fortunately interrupted. Monica was following every word, lips parted, head bobbing in agreement.

“… so I said to him look is there any law against a guy painting pictures? Show me in the constitution, wise guy, I said to him and what I do on my time off is my own business and if you don’t like it you can take your crummy job and you can …”

Harvey’s eyes glittered fiercely behind the thick glasses,
and a strand of dark hair had fallen across his earnestly corrugated forehead.

Paul Klauss went disconsolately off to bed, yet with a certain anticipation regarding the way he would occupy his mind while going to sleep. There were considerations of tactics and strategy. Which one to work upon first. How to split the Texas girls.

He pulled the chain but the room light did not go on. He undressed in the dark, put on robe and slippers and, carrying his toilet case, went thirty feet down the corridor to the bathroom. When he came back he shut the room door, took off his robe and sat on the edge of the bed, stretched and yawned.

Just when his stretch was at its greatest extension, fists high and wide, two warm arms suddenly clasped him around the waist from behind. He let out an explosive yelp and tried to spring to his feet, but the insistent arms hauled him back. And a woman was chuckling behind him, chuckling low in her throat. He turned around toward her, turned into an aroma of spice and cheap perfume and onion and woman, and was pulled protestingly, inevitably down into a Margarita labyrinth of humid warmth, and cooings and reassuring chuckling sounds, and questing, stroking, insinuating hands.

“Pobrecito
,
”
she murmured.
“Mi Pablito. No tenga miedo, pajarito
.
”

Paul was affronted, indignant, repelled by her. He struggled, but even for a man of his austere sexual patterns, there was a physiological limitation to protest, soon arrived at. In short, he was raped. And he knew it. And then, having been flung down to rest on the rubbled beach of one of the back islands of his mind, he lifted dazed head to hear the horrid, clarion, piercingly sweet, grotesquely gay: “Geef me ten dollar!”

He tried to cup the telltale mouth with debilitated hand, but the dark head was turned strongly away, and it came again, with laughter bubbling up through it, dark bubbles in molten silver: “Geef me ten dollar!”

With a sob, Paul Klauss got up and blundered to the bureau and carried his wallet to the chill moonlight of the narrow window and found the ten and took it to her.

He lay on the narrow bed with his eyes closed, heard the snap of elastic, the slur of rayon. Tiny pat of finger tips on his cheek.
“Conejito mío
,
”
she crooned. And went
clump-clop
to
the door. It closed firmly behind her. And, more softly, clop-clump-clop down the khaki tiles.

And thus was the hunter betrayed. A man poised in a blind, turning incredulously when he feels the tweak of the beak of the angry mallard. Or, in a grassy field, feeling the teeth of the rabbit meet in the flesh of his leg.

It was a reversal of values. It negated the labored pages of the journals. He had the tortured feeling that he had become a page in her journal, a quarry bagged so readily the incident would not merit more than two lines—with a ruled column on the right for gross profit.

Gloria Garvey awoke at ten-thirty on Saturday morning, the first day of July. Her mouth felt grimy and her heart knocked with a brittle, alcoholic insistence, and a strand of her hair lay under her nose, smelling like an ash tray. When she felt able, she slid her long husky legs out of the bed and planted her bare feet on the cool tiles and sat up slowly. She groaned and bent forward, elbows on her knees, fingers deep in the raw tangled mane of hair, scratching her scalp gingerly, her eyes tightly shut.

This, she knew, was a bad start. One of those Abner Dean, what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here mornings. The morbid aspects of hang-over. You were better off when you did not wonder what you were doing, or why. With no consciousness of thirty-seven years strapped on your back like stones.

Damn Tammy Grandon and his pool and his drinks and his yak and his parties and fairy friends. Bits of the previous evening and awful fragments of her dreams were spattered and clotted against the black walls of her mind, unidentifiable, like the aftermath of a bomb in a crowded station.

She straightened and scratched her belly and looked with dulled interest at the four red lines her nails made. She plodded to the bureau and uncapped the pitcher and poured a glass of
tepid water, spilling some of it over her hand and wrist, and gulped it down. She poured another glass and stood, holding it, leaning against the bureau, a cut-glass drawer pull biting into her left buttock and looked at the strew of her clothing from bedroom door to bed. Skirt just outside the door, sweater just inside, then bra there, pants over there, shoes beside the bed.

With a dull burn of anger she said, “Sloppy damn drunken bitch.”

Anger became more vivid, and she took a step and kicked violently at the sweater. But she took the step into the pool of water she had spilled when pouring the first glass. And both feet went up, and she sat on the damp tiles with a spine-jarring finality that clacked her teeth, set off black-and-silver pin-wheels behind her eyes, and propelled the full contents of the second glass of water directly into her face.

She gasped and spluttered and was filled with an enormous helpless rage. And then, for a divine moment, she was privileged to stand aside and look at herself, and the laughter came. It hurt her head, but it felt good. She got up and drank some more water and, while the tub was filling, put water on the hot plate for coffee.

An hour later she felt much much better. She had wallowed like an albino seal and scrubbed herself pink and washed her hair and put on clean clothes. The peasant blouse was rather carelessly mended under the right arm where a seam had burst, and the bra was threadbare, and the elastic in the panties was without resilience, and, over the years she had owned it, the colors in the Seminole skirt had faded and run together, but she was clean and the morning thump had ceased, and she was permitting herself a liberal dollop of cheap local brandy in her third cup of coffee, a reward for industry. She checked the contents of her straw purse, bellowed for Gigliermina, the room maid, to come clean up the place, and walked to the garage and had them bring her car out. It would be interesting to see how Drummmy was making out.

She drove through the gates and parked and looked with interest at the six cars lined up there. A cream-colored convertible Mercedes with Texas plates, a new Ford wagon from New York, a big beast of a gray Cad from California, an Ohio Buick with a sickening color scheme, an old junker of a Dodge
wagon, and a drab black Chevy. Alberto was listlessly polishing the Buick.

There was no one in the lobby. She looked into the dining room and saw one of the maids setting up a big long table for lunch. She decided that if they all ate together it must be very grim.

When she went back into the lobby Drummy came bustling across the room toward her, wearing a wide nervous smile.

“Good morning, Gloria! Good morning!”

“Hi, Drummy. How is it going?”

He held a trembling match to her cigarette and shook it out and said, “It’s so terribly confusing, Gloria. I mean there’s so many things every minute. There was too much drinking last night. Those Texas girls, they arrived practically naked. Alberto was trying to carry their bags in and look at them at the same time and he walked right into the side of the hotel. It was embarrassing. Mr. Torrigan passed out in the lobby, and the Colonel and I had to get him to bed. He was too big to carry, but he slid rather easily on the tiles. Mr. Ardos and Miss Killdeering stayed up for hours, talking to each other and I couldn’t sleep. I could hear their voices. And then when Mr. Kemp and Mr. Barnum came in practically at dawn with the Texas girls, they were all laughing and singing. The food is really very bad, you know, and I don’t know what to do about it. And Fidelio is such a bad driver, nobody wants to ride with him. Felipe is being absolutely no help at all. And that Margarita served breakfast this morning with a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth. She is a very strange-acting girl. When she served Mr. Klauss she patted his face and he turned such a terrible color I thought he was going to be ill. Only seven of them showed up for Miss Keeley’s nine-thirty class, and she is most terribly upset about it. She blames it all on Mr. Torrigan. And Mr. and Mrs. Wahl haven’t had breakfast yet. And …”

“Whoa! Down, boy. Take it easy.”

“Gloria, could you please have lunch with us and then stay around a little while and just sort of … let me talk to you and advise me about things? I don’t know if I’m doing anything right.”

“Absolutely no, Drummy. I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot of things to do today. But I would like to get a look at them. Where are they?”

“Oh, they’re right out there in the patio with Miss Keeley. They’re sketching the fountain, I think.”

Gloria went out the side door of the lobby onto the loggia that encircled the open patio. Most of the ground-floor rooms opened onto the loggia. She stood in the shadow and looked out through the nearest stone arch at the group in the scrubby patio. Agnes Partridge Keeley had placed them in a semicircle on chairs taken from the rooms and the lobby, facing the fountain. Some used easels and others drew on their laps. Some of them glanced curiously at Gloria and then continued with their work.

“Good Lord!” Gloria said.

Miles, standing beside her, said, “What’s the matter?”

“That one, the one getting the instruction.”

“Oh, that’s Miss Killdeering.”

Agnes, looking over Monica’s shoulder, was saying, “Oh no, dear. You have the proportions all wrong. You have the base twice as tall as the little boy on top. You can see they’re about the same size. Measure with your eye, dear.”

Miss Killdeering was wearing an exceptionally snug dark-red leotard, and, quite apparently, nothing else. Her glossy black hair was tied back into a high pony tail. There in the sunlight she represented all of the anatomical distortions prevalent in girlie calendar art, from gun-turret breasts to super-pneumatic thighs.

“The schoolteacher from Kilo, Kansas?” Gloria whispered.

“That’s right.”

“She must lead a very repressed winter season.”

She tore her astonished eyes away from Monica and looked at the others. A gaunt old man in khakis, who wore a hearing aid and a look of utter boredom with the task at hand. A rather pimply citizen with unkempt black hair and thick glasses and a look of avid intensity. Cast that one as the boy Communist, she thought. And two elderly ladies in floral prints, biting their lips, as they peered from fountain to sketch block, charcoal sticks clutched with a certain desperation. And, beyond them, a very pretty man with dark-blond hair and regular, quite sensitive features. He wore a Basque shirt in gray and white, and copper-colored walking shorts. Gloria, out of her thousand years of instinct and experience, sensed that the pretty man was quite thoroughly aware of her presence there in the shadows. Hers was the instant response of the game creature sensing the presence of the hunter. But there was within her no flutter
of fear or interest. She looked at him and felt a dark amusement. It was as though she were the wise cow elephant standing in the brush and the heat of the day, trunk raised, ears tilted, wondering in a mild way whether to drift silently back into heavier bush country, or go and kneel on him and twist off his head.

Agnes went to give instruction to someone Gloria could not see because the fountain was in the way. She heard Agnes say in a teasing voice, “You came to class very late, Mr. Kemp, but I must say that you have a very nice technique. Yes, that is a very nice sketch indeed, and you did it very quickly.”

“Thank you,” a deep voice said.

Gloria moved along the loggia and looked out through the next arch. This Mr. Kemp was a big man. Early thirties. Dark hair and good heavy bones in his face, and knowledgeable eyes. There was a mildness and an amiability in his face that Gloria sensed was only part of the story. There were other things there, less obvious. Dignity and pride. Irony and strength. Passion and conviction. Here, then, was a man. There were so damn few of them around. Not a rooster, prancing and flapping its comb. Not a goat, stamping and reeking. He wore a white sports shirt, pale-gray slacks, a light-blue fabric belt. He looked solid and contained within himself. She ran her eyes again over the thick slant of the shoulders, and the strong column of the throat. And she felt that visceral tremor, that weakness of knee, that faint clogging at the base of the throat which customarily informed her of the awakening of her own desire for a specific male person.

It had always come to her with very little advance warning. And seldom had it been this strong. But, as with all the other times that it had happened to her, she was immediately aware of the basic reason for the past few weeks of irritable ennui, of gray and petulant depression. She felt perfectly capable of dropping to her hands and knees and galloping out there to him, howling like a dog, to lay her head on his knee and beam up at him, panting. Here was the standard cure for the grismals, a Band-Aid to cover the place where the soul leaked ancient sawdust. Here was a tidy and energetic way of becoming renewed.