“Sure,” I said, and repeated the last thing she’d said. Chapman had been transferred to shore duty in Seattle.”
“Oh,” she said. “The way you were looking at me—”
“Simply because I think you’re beautiful.”
She sighed. Going into the bedroom, she returned with a pillow. She dropped it beside the coffee table. “Lie down, facing the other way, and close your eyes. Concentrate.”
I lay down. She went on, pausing now and then to arrange her notes so there wouldn’t be any blank areas on the tape. Chapman was a full lieutenant at the end of the war. He went back to Tulane Law School at the beginning of the spring term in 1946, and before the end of it he was married to a New Orleans girl he met at a Mardi Gras ball. Her name was Grace Trahan. She was a slight, dark girl with a delicate constitution, very pretty in an ethereal sort of way, and apparently frigid to the point of phobia.
“He never said much about it,” she went on, “but I gather it was pretty horrible on their wedding night, and never did get any better. Psychic trauma of some kind, I suppose; probably something that happened in her childhood.”
They tried to make a go of it, but there were other factors besides her aversion to the bed. She thought they should have more financial help from his parents instead of struggling along on the GI Bill. And she didn’t want to leave New Orleans. Less than a year after he’d finished law school and moved back to Thomaston to open his office, they separated. She went home to mother. Her health was growing worse. She was anemic, among other things.
Marian stopped the tape again. I looked at my watch and saw with surprise it was after ten. “How are you getting it?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. I sat up and lit cigarettes, and leaned back against the chair. “But when do you actually appear on the scene?”
“Very shortly,” she replied. “But I want to finish out this roll exclusively with Harris. It’ll be easier to refer to later.”
She made some more notes, started the tape, and went on, describing the town, the small country club, and some of his friends. We began to near the end of the roll.
“He has a fast, aggressive way of walking. He won’t admit it, but he can’t carry liquor very well. Becomes argumentative if he has too much, which is usually anything beyond the third Martini. Music means nothing to him, and he’s a poor dancer. For the past two years on these annual fishing trips he’s picked up girls, probably very young ones. He doesn’t know that I’m aware of this, but I doubt he’d have bothered to he about it. After all, we weren’t married.
“Maybe it’s because of the legal training and courtroom experience, but he’s totally unafraid of scenes and will argue with anybody, anywhere. Waiters impress him not at all, and I’ve been through some bad moments when he’s sent the same dish back three times, or refused to tip a waiter who gave poor service. I don’t mean he’s loudmouthed or uncouth, but he is demanding and perhaps rather insensitive. He always adds up a bill before he pays it. He buys a new Cadillac every year. He’s a very poor driver, and drives far too fast. He’s very self-assured with women, the same as you are. You’ll have no trouble playing him. When they describe you afterwards, if you learn all this, they’re going to be describing Harris Chapman to the last gesture.”
She stopped the machine, and stood up. “All right. Re-roll that tape and start playing it back. I’ll run out and get us some sandwiches.”
“Incidentally, what about the housekeeping arrangements? Do we go out for dinner?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It’ll be all right if we go round to different places so we won’t be remembered. We can fix our own coffee and orange juice for breakfast, and have sandwiches for lunch.”
“You turned the car back?”
“Yes. After all, I’m supposed to be in Nassau. You’ll rent one, of course, before he gets here, but in the meantime we can use cabs. All right, Jerry; re-roll that tape and get busy.”
She went into the bedroom. I started the tape, turned up the volume, and walked up and down as I listened to it. The bedroom door was open. I stepped inside. The blue pajamas were tossed casually on the bed and she was beyond it with her back turned, wearing only bra and pants as she stood before the clothes closet. I looked at the long and exquisitely slender legs, ever so faintly tanned below the line of her swim suit and pure ivory above as they flowed into the triangular wisp of undergarment about her hips.
She turned then. I must have taken a step towards her, for she said crisply, “No, you don’t! Outside!” She meant it. She took a slip from a drawer, and slid it over her head.
“I’m sorry, Teacher. But you’re a very exciting girl.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” She tugged the slip down. “I’m irresistible to twenty-eight-year-old wolves. I’m female, breathing, and within reach.”
“Thanks a million,” I said. “From both of us.”
“You’re welcome. Now get out there and get busy. And start the tape over; you’ve missed part of it.”
“So you will give yourself that much?”
She waved a slender hand. “Out, Cyrano.”
Five
I shrugged, and went back to my study of Harris Chapman. She came out after a while and left to get the sandwiches. I looked after her. She could disturb a room by walking through it, and leave it empty by walking out of it. I forced my attention back to the tape. What was the matter with me, anyway?
When she returned, we didn’t even stop while we ate. She asked questions about the things we’d covered so far, and tried to catch me in errors. “Who is Robert Wingard?”
“Robin Wingard,” I said. “He’s manager of the radio station.”
“Good. And Bill McEwen? What does he do?”
“Bill McEwen is a girl.”
She shot me an approving glance. “Very good.”
“Her real name is Billy Jean, she’s twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and she’s half the editorial staff of the paper, and sells advertising.”
“Correct,” she said. “But don’t get too cocky. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface.” She finished half her sandwich, threw the rest of it in the kitchen garbage can, and started a fresh roll of tape on the recorder.
“I was born in Cleveland,” she began. “And went to school at Stanford. My mother died when I was in my early teens, and my father never remarried. He was a physician. A gynecologist, and a good one. In about thirty-five years of practice he must have made considerably over a million dollars, and when he died a few years ago he left an estate of less than twenty thousand. Bad investments. Some day, maybe, somebody will write a book about the investment habits of doctors— But never mind. It was his money. The point I’m trying to make is that it was probably his horrible example that first interested me in business and investment.
When we entered the war she enrolled in a business college for a quick course in shorthand and typing, and went to work in a defense plant. And she liked it, from the first. She was alert, interested, and highly competitive, and in less than a year she was the private secretary to one of the top brass of the firm. In the spring of 1944 she met and married Kenneth Forsyth. He was a flier sent home for reassignment as an instructor at an air base near San Antonio, Texas.
They were happy enough, but she couldn’t stand the boredom of having nothing to do but police a one-room apartment, so she went back to work, this time for the local office of one of the big nationwide brokerage outfits. She immediately fell in love with the stock market as if she’d invented it. Here was something you could get your teeth into; this was the whole world of business and industry, distilled. She studied it with the passionate intensity of another Baruch, trying to learn everything there was to learn about it. Forsyth remained in the service after the end of the war, but was transferred to another field near Dallas. Keeping house still bored her, so she went to work for the Dallas office of the same brokerage house.
