Authors: James Jones
He did not go into it further than that and did not question himself as to why he should panic over Agnes finding this out when he already knew that she knew about Geneve anyway, and when he drove up in front of the hotel on Michigan after dark and turned the car over to the doorman, he was feeling in fine fettle and very high, and looking forward to a three- or four-day idyll with his mistress.
However, that was not what he found.
S
HE WAS WAITING
for him in her room—they always took separate rooms—and as soon as he deposited his bag in his and got rid of the bellboy, he called her and went up there. She was waiting for him all dressed to go out except for her dress, which was laid out carefully to keep it from wrinkling on one of the twin double beds. The door was not quite latched and he went on in, and she was standing across near the corner by the desk-table waiting, just in her slip and stockings and shoes and under it you could see the raised ridges of the garter belt and her panty legs and that brassiere. Armor, he thought, the armor of women, my clasp and my helm, in which they gird themselves to go forth and do battle with the males, and which becomes armorplate whenever they need it. He knew she had posed so for him to see her when he came in and admire her. So he stopped for a moment by the door and did so. Then he sat down in a chair by the door.
“Come here,” he said, his hat still on his head forgotten, and his face and ears and other parts of him beginning to burn with excess blood. “Take off your clothes and walk across the room to me.” It had become almost a ritual with them.
This time, she hesitated. For a moment, there was a look of quite something else on her face, certainly not sex, but then she evidently thought better of it and put it down and began to comply, coolly smiling at him for admiration. Very slowly and gracefully, she slid her slip up and off over her head, revealing that thin small almost child’s body, smiling that smile which expected and required admiration; and which made him feel that if he didn’t show enough of it to satisfy her she would suddenly go into reverse gear and begin putting everything back on in the exact same way, like a movie sequence run backwards, and he himself would get back up helplessly and walk backwards out of the door.
She’s a real whore, he thought suddenly.
“Come here,” he said thickly, “let me do somethin to you,” and then became aware of his hat still on his head and flung it to the floor. He was aware of the look on her face, a look that was always on her face in sex, which was a look not only of physical pleasure but also of something else, another pleasure, as if she closed her mind to everything except a slit-eyed smug awareness of her power here, a passive domination, and he liked it, and he lifted her to him.
Once again, he thought of the time his mother had almost caught him, and had tried to make him admit it, and he had wound up on the kitchen floor where she had jabbed and poked and tried to hit at him with the broom handle her face red and her eyes blooded, until he finally admitted it, and she had whipped him, and momentarily, he had hated her, had hated his own mother.
Finally, when all the thunders and lightnings and A-bombs were all over, they were lying side by side on the other bed where her dress wasn’t, his clothes scattered all over the floor, and after a minute he got up dazedly and began to pick them up and straighten them out, so that they wouldn’t be more wrinkled than they already were if they were going to go out for dinner.
But they didn’t go out to dinner. Geneve lay on the bed and leaned on her elbow and watched him pick up the clothes. She had bought him two fifths of whiskey, which he saw sitting on the dresser, and when he heard what she was saying as she began to talk he wanted a drink so bad he did not even bother to pick up the rest of the clothes but went and got one and opened it without bothering to get a glass either and sat down with it, realizing now why it was she had hesitated so when he first came in.
“I’ve got some pretty serious news for you,” Geneve said by way of preamble. “Agnes has been talking about me.”
The upshot of what she had to say, while he drank, and then drank again, and then continued drinking, was that she had learned through several sources—one a young-married-couple friend of hers and Al’s, another Dotty Callter her boss—that Agnes had been talking lately to her friends about her husband having an affair with Geneve Lowe and what should she do about it? When she had left this time to come to Chicago, Dotty had laughingly asked her if there were any jewelry conventions on now in Chicago. Dotty was a good girl, and she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. And just before they left, Dotty had warned her, seriously this time, that she had better be careful, because several people—among them, Dotty had said, one who shall remain nameless except for the initial A—had it in for her. It was all right with Dotty what she did on her own time, but the store could not stand that kind of publicity and, Dotty laughed, neither could Dotty. And if it ever broke out in the open, Dotty wanted her to know ahead of time she would have to let her go—even though she was her assistant manager, and she was coming to depend on her more and more, and they had become such close friends.
Lying nude on the bed and talking seriously, she looked very sweet. She was the most beautiful woman, Frank thought as he drank, that he had ever slept with. And as a mistress, she was just about as perfect, both in practicality and as a display piece, as a man could hope to run onto. And now Agnes and her goddamned gossiping friends were going to ruin it for him.
The other one, Geneve said, was the young married woman friend of hers, who merely told her she had heard it—about Agnes—and wasn’t it ridiculous: She must really be deluding herself about her husband if she thought somebody as young and attractive as Geneve would go out with him. To which, of course, Geneve agreed with her, and they laughed together over it, because Geneve didn’t know whether she really meant it, or was just trying to find out what kind of a reaction she would get.
In spite of a slight pique to his vanity, Frank was forced to agree she had been smart and done right. She was going to be a pretty powerful element in Parkman, he thought, someday, if she kept on going as sharply as she was now.
But the point was, Geneve went on, that it should not have ever even gotten around to this woman. She was not usually in the know. That in itself showed it was already getting around too much. What she would like to know was how Agnes had ever found out about it in the first place?
“It wouldn’t be too hard. The whole town knows about it. Probably one of her
friends
told her,” Frank said bitterly, and had another drink.
“Well, something’s got to be done about it,” Geneve said coldly. “I can’t take a chance on losing out with Dotty. Not after all these years I’ve put in there.”
“What the hell am I goin to do about it?” Frank said angrily.
“Find some way to make her stop,” Geneve said. “Or else it’s going to keep on until it breaks us up. Neither one of us can stand a scandal like that, and you know it. And I don’t want us broken up,” she added like an afterthought and smiled at him.
“If she was any normal wife like she ought to be,” she said coldly, “she wouldn’t pull something like that. She’d keep her mouth shut and let her husband have his affairs and be satisfied she was his wife, and have an affair herself now and then if she felt like it.”
Frank did not think so much of this idea. “She’s a good bit older than you,” he said, and took another big drink of whiskey. It was beginning to hit him pretty hard. He discovered with surprise that he had drunk almost half of the bottle. “Her generation was brought up different than yours.”
“Her generation, hell,” Geneve said. “I know lots of women her age who’ve lived like that for years. And they seem to make a pretty good life of it.”
“I guess she just loves me,” Frank said, and took another drink.
“Loves you, hell,” Geneve said. “So do those other women love their husbands. I love my husband. That doesn’t have a thing to do with it. She’s just not normal. Going around weeping on all her friends’ shoulders,” she said. “You’d think she’d have some pride.”
“Now, listen,” Frank protested, and had himself another drink. “She’s a good wife. As good as any man ever had. Don’t talk about her.” He looked at the bottle, wanting suddenly to throw his head back and drain it all. In the last minute and a half, he had become drunk. Quite suddenly. And he could tell he was going to become drunker. A lot drunker. Whether he drank any more of the bottle or not. “Why can’t you women ever get along?” he said. He took another drink. “I’m sleepy.”
He did not know or remember what happened to Geneve after that. He woke up the next morning suddenly at ten o’clock and found himself in the bed they had partied in, still feeling drunk, and with a splitting head, and feeling as if all the water in his system had evaporated. Geneve was not there, she had gone out on one of her buying expeditions for Dotty. He did not know whether she had gone out for dinner last night by herself or not. There were no dirty dishes in the room. He had vague memories of her going on talking about Agnes to him after she had helped him to bed. It was as if a curtain had come down in his mind in the middle of the second act. The other bed had been slept in, and the party dress was hanging meticulously in the closet. It did not look wrinkled. The opened bottle sitting on the dresser was only a tiny fraction from being empty, and he wondered if he could have drunk all that? Christ, that was nearly a whole fifth, he thought, frightened. He went into her bathroom and drank large quantities of water, which helped neither his stomach nor his head. Then he got dressed and went back down to his own room, feeling wrinkled and crummy, and had a shower, which did not help him much, either, and made himself hang up his suits and dressed in a fresh one and sent the other one out, and then went downstairs to the cocktail lounge to get a martini. He had found by experience that a martini was the best thing for you when you felt this bad. They eased you off gently, and stopped the headache, and also helped your digestion to where you could eat lunch. But he never drank them at home in Parkman—only manhattans—as if in some way he could keep separated his two separate lives. It was as if the martinis themselves were, in Parkman, both an unfair advantage and slap in the face to Agnes, and marks of guilty evidence which she might be able to read.
He had three of them, sitting at the bar, although he had only meant to have one, and then got several good cigars—H Upmann Churchills—at the drugstore across the foyer, and went for a walk up Michigan Avenue. It was a cold, dry, sun-bright early-winter day, and he walked as far as the old waterworks, which looked like a castle, and then walked all the way back, looking in the store windows as he walked, had another martini and ate lunch, and went upstairs to take a nap and wait for Geneve, feeling much less guilty and frightened now that he had exercised himself.
But he could not sleep. So he wound up back down at the bar, there being nothing else to do, and when Geneve found him after having found the note he’d left for her, he was already pretty well loaded. Well, what the hell? he thought wildly, this was a vacation wasn’t it?
That night, they did go out to dinner. Geneve had two cocktails in the lounge (she always drank martinis) and he had two more martinis with her, and then went upstairs with her while she dressed. He sat in the chair and watched her, and when she was naked, he suddenly and without pre-intention got up and began to take his own clothes off, and they went to bed again, but this time—although he was pretty excited, and pretty drunk, too—he laid his clothes out neatly beforehand, and there was that strange look of smug power on her face again that he liked, and then they showered and got dressed and went out, and he made a mental note that he would have to do something about Agnes in order not to lose such a wonderful mistress. They went to the Pump Room at the Ambassador East, for dinner.
They went there because Geneve always liked to go there. They had such wonderful service, she said. And those uniforms. And the little Negro boys with the turbans and long feathers. He also suspected she liked to go there because it was expensive. But that didn’t matter. Because she belonged there, he thought, looking at her. In fact, when she made herself up, with the lipstick, and the lines of eye pencil at the corners of her eyes, and the darkened brows, and did her hair in that short tousled way, she looked exotic. Exotically beautiful; and enough like all these other women he saw in here to be one of them. In fact, he thought drunkenly and happily, it looked as though all the models of
Vogue
magazine had conspired to bring their escorts to the Pump Room on this one particular night. That was one of the reasons he liked to go out with her. She was a real display piece, and it made him proud, that she made them look like they belonged here. He wondered how many of them were wives and how many mistresses?
Geneve ordered for both of them, some French dish (men don’t have to order for women anymore, she always said, that’s old-fashioned today), and while they were having their drinks, looked over at a corner table where a rather large dark woman in a gold dress and big gold hat was seated with a number of men congregated around her and an unusual number of waiters hovering near. Geneve looked back at him, her eyes bright.
“I think that’s Dorothy Lamour over there,” she said excitedly in a low voice. “The movie star. See the one with all the men and all the waiters?”
Frank puffed on his cigar and sipped his drink and looked, but he would not have recognized a movie star if it was one. “I really think it is,” Geneve whispered. It tickled him. They planned to go on to the Chez Paree after dinner.
But it was during dinner that Geneve brought Agnes up again, and that he consequently got drunk again. He did not remember going to the Chez Paree, but Geneve told him later that they had gone.
Perhaps it was because she felt more secure there in the Pump Room, or perhaps it was because she had had several martinis, but she had suddenly brought Agnes up again and insisted on talking about it, this time more forcefully.