The third letter was dated the following Monday. It was the hardest to write, and I gave it three tries before I got the phrasing just the way I wanted it. It wound up like this—
I put away the typewriter and straightened up the desk. I took the carbons and the letterheads and the onionskins with me and slipped out of the office, locking it behind me. I walked down seven fights of stairs—it was easier going down than up. The elevator came. I rode to the lobby and walked out to my car. I ran the Ford to my new apartment, stuck the car in a parking place. The apartment felt like home already. I had a cigarette then and smoked it all the way down.
I re-examined the letters. They were on his stationery and were worded just as he would write them. The letters had been typed on his typewriter. They didn’t have his signature, but nobody signs carbons. And I was interested in the copies, not the originals. I shredded the sheets of letterhead and flushed them down the toilet. I did the same with the carbons.
Then I put the onionskin copies away in a bureau drawer. They would be useful, but for the time being I didn’t need them. They were props. When the rest of the stage was set I could put the props to use.
I drove across Main Street just before the shops closed for the day. I turned off, parked in a store lot and visited a few shops and bought a few things. The neighborhood was one of those marginal areas you find near the downtown business section of any good-sized city. Main Street was a few blocks to the west. Skid Row was around the corner. The Negro neighborhood ran north and east. In the middle was a snatch of surplus stores and hockshops and numbers drops and cheap bars. I didn’t figure to run into any business friends around there.
I bought a third-hand valise and a second-hand Broadway suit. I stuffed the valise with the suit and added a few shirts and a pair of beat-up shoes. I bought a new hat, black with a very short brim, which I crammed into the valise. The more beat-up the hat looked, the better. I added a flashy half-dollar tie, a showy and cheap signet ring. I stuffed everything into the valise and tossed it into the Ford and drove home.
From a drugstore phone booth I called the telephone company and asked them to install a phone in my apartment on Monday. Then I dropped another dime in the slot and called the Panmore to find out if there were any messages for me. There was one—I was supposed to call Seymour Daniels as soon as possible. I did. Mary Daniels answered and said hello very happily when she found out who was calling.
“Just a minute,” she said. “I’ll let you talk to Sy.”
I waited, started a cigarette. Then Sy was on, cheerful and noisy.
“Good to talk to you,” he said. “Got stung a little last night, didn’t you?”
“I gave a little money back.”
Sy laughed. “Pretty good game,” he said. “Say, I was wondering. Do you play bridge or is poker your only game?”
“I’ve played bridge,” I said. “Why?”
“Well, this girl Mary’s friendly with is dropping over tonight, see, and I thought you might like to make a fourth. It won’t be a very exciting evening, just cards and drinks and conversation. But the girl’s nice. You might enjoy yourself.”
It was the old conspiracy of the married against the single. There was a friend of Mary’s and there was me, and why not get the two of us together? I don’t need your friend, I thought. I’m busy making it with Murray’s wife.
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“We’ll expect you around nine?”
“Right. I don’t know how good my game will be, though. I haven’t played in a hell of a while.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said heartily. “It doesn’t make much difference how you play.”
I managed to slip off the line before he could realize how funny his last statement was. It was true—it didn’t make a hell of a difference whether I played like Charlie Goren or the North Park Every-Other-Tuesday Ladies’ Bridge League. Bridge wasn’t the important part of the evening. I was being fixed up with somebody, and that was more important than a deck of cards.
My bridge game turned out to be lousy. This didn’t surprise me. I had never played the game honestly in my life. Bridge happens to be the easiest game in the world for a cheater if only because communication between partners is a significant element in the play. You can cheat with a million various signals, and you don’t have to rely on card manipulation or anything of the sort. I would have played the game more often if there hadn’t been such difficulties in arranging a stakes game. Anyone who plays money bridge with strangers deserves whatever happens to him. You can be cheated forever and never know it.
All of which is intended to explain the fact I played a lousy game at Sy’s house. We played in the living room with soft music in the background, and Sy and Mary partners against Barb and me. That was my partner—Barbara Lambert, thirty-two, high school English teacher, married once and divorced now, no children.
She was a pretty blonde with a settled look to her. At the outset of the evening she seemed every bit as uncomfortable as she had every right to be, given her situation. She was an unmarried gal who was being fixed up by a friend, and this is not exactly a position of strength. But she warmed up and relaxed as the evening went on. Maybe my lousy playing encouraged her.
We played three rubbers of bridge, and in each one Sy and Mary beat us silly. They seemed a little embarrassed by the time they polished us off for the third straight time, so we put the cards away and sat around playing conversation. That wasn’t difficult. Barb was a sweet kid, intelligent if not especially hip, and we managed to keep the verbal ball going. Sy and I locked into a long discussion about the relative merits of mutual funds and syndications, and at the end of all this Mary poured coffee. We drank up and called it an evening. Mary had driven over to pick up Barb, a clever move designed to leave me with the chore of trucking her home again. I didn’t mind.
I drove slowly. She was quiet, sitting with her head back and the wind playing with her hair. I switched on the radio and we listened to rock and roll for a horrible moment. Then I switched off the radio.
She said, “Bill?”
I waited.
“I had a nice time,” she said.
“So did I.”
“It was a strange evening.”
“How?”
“Staged. All set up and arranged. At first I had the feeling that we were all reading dialogue that somebody else had written out for us ages ago.”
She stopped talking. I turned at the corner and she told me when we were at her house. I stopped the Ford and took her to the door and she didn’t say anything until we were standing on the steps.
Then she said, “Married couples do that all the time. They think they have to take people like us and bring us together so that we can get married and make babies and live fuller lives. Even if—if it worked, well, it would make
