All the way

“I might have known,” she said.

“I just thought of several more things I should tell you about myself,” I replied. “It was in Panama I first became interested in big-game fishing-”

“I see. And you’re afraid you might forget them before morning?”

“They might be lost for ever. But I don’t have to come in; I can tell you from out here in the corridor. Or through the door.”

She sighed. I couldn’t tell whether she was really angry or not. “Just a moment.” She disappeared. I heard a rustling sound, and then she pulled the door open and I stepped inside. She closed it. Her room was the same layout and color scheme. She’d scrubbed off what makeup she’d been wearing, even the lipstick, and had on a rather conservative nightgown under the neglige she was struggling with, but she was unbelievably exciting. I didn’t know why.

“Mostly trivial,” I said. “But revealing. For instance, when I was a kid, all the other slobs put their money in the Christmas Club, but I kept mine in a regular account. Got two per cent.”

“You don’t have to hit me over the head,” she replied. I kissed her. This was even more exciting, in spite of the fact she obviously didn’t care whether it was or not. She finally broke it up, but she said, “All right.” It was rather the way you’d buy a potato peeler from a salesman to get rid of him, but by this time I didn’t even care what the terms were.

 * * *

She was smooth, deft, experienced, and agreeably cooperative about the whole thing. I lay there afterwards in the annealed and quiescent dark trying to pin down her exact attitude, and decided the word I was looking for was pleasant. That was it. She was quite pleasant about it—the perfect hostess, in fact.

She said something, but I missed it. I was still thinking about her, trying to remember exactly what she looked like—”

“You’re not even listening,” she said.

“What?”

“Speech. It may have escaped your attention, but for a long time now people have been able to communicate—”

“Oh. I’m sorry. What was it?”

“You mentioned acting. Was that by any chance the truth?”

“Yes. But just amateur. In school. I never did try to turn pro; not enough talent.”

“Were you a fast study?”

“Fairly so,” I said. “I usually knew my lines by the time we finished the first rehearsal. For some reason I learn fast, or easily. Just luck, I suppose.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“I’m it, except for my step-father. My mother and father were divorced when I was about five. He was a geologist; spent most of his time in South America, usually at high altitudes. My mother wouldn’t live up there. He was killed the next summer; a station wagon he was riding in went off the road into a gorge. My mother remarried a couple of years afterwards. Widower several years older than she was, partner in a Houston brokerage firm. He’s retired now, lives on a big place near Huntsville and raises Black Angus cattle. My mother died while I was at sea, during the Korean thing. She left me a little money; that’s when I bought the bar in Panama.”

“What happened to the bar?”

“It was put out-of-bounds for military personnel because of a couple of bad fights, so I sold it.”

”At a loss?”

“No. I was lucky. This live one was fresh from the States and didn’t know what out-of-bounds meant down there. I think he wanted to make it a fag hangout, anyway.”

“What did you do with the money when you got back to the States?”

“Lost most of it in Las Vegas.”

“Tell me about the tout business.”

I reached over and turned on the reading lamp on the night table. She looked at me questioningly. “What’s that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just got tired of talking to you in the dark. I wanted to look at you.”

“Why?”

“Tell me,” I said. I raised myself on an elbow and ran a finger-tip along the line of her cheek. “You’re beautiful. Is that it?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I was never less silly. How about striking? Exciting? It’s a quality of some kind—fragile, elegant, cool, hard- boiled, and sexy—all at the same time. There’s no such combination? I was afraid not.”

She shook her head with exasperation, but she did smile. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. And I had some weird idea I was going to talk to you—”

“I am talking.”

“Like an idiot. Why the campaign; you’re already here, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be so cynical.”

“Turn out the light.”

I turned it out, and took her in my arms and kissed her. She came to me readily, and was as deftly and pleasantly co-operative as before. If that was the only way to achieve a calm and rational conversation, by God she was willing.

“What about the tout business?” she asked after a while.

“It was nothing,” I said. “You know how they operate. You’ve seen ’em by the dozens passing out their sheets at the entrance to racetracks—Clocker Joe, Stablehand Maguire, Exercise Boy—no imagination, competing with each other, and working for buttons. So I made a deal with this one; I’d put him in the big time for half the take. We set it up as a telegraphic service and I bought time on a Tijuana radio station to sell him—a real saturation build-up about the time Santa Anita was opening. Lot of spot announcements and a quarter-hour of hillbilly junk with a plug every minute or two. That’s about all there was to it, besides convincing him he had to raise his prices. Obviously, nobody has any confidence in a cheap tip on a horse race; you’ve got to charge plenty to be good. We were splitting two thousand a week for a while.”

“What happened?”

“He couldn’t stand prosperity; turned out to be a lush. Kept getting his records all fouled up so he couldn’t remember who got the winners yesterday. And you’re dead without records, obviously.”

“I see,” she said thoughtfully.

I woke once during the night. She was lying quite still beside me, but after a while I began to suspect she was awake. I put my hand on her thigh. It was tense and rigid. Her arms felt the same way, and when I slid my hand down to hers, lying at her side, I found it was clenched into a fist.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She made no reply. I asked again. She still said nothing. I gave up, and after a while I went back to sleep.

Three

When I awoke it was after eight. I groped for a cigarette, lit it, and turned to look at her. She was sleeping quietly with the dark hair like spilled ink across the pillow. She had the flat stomach and narrow hips of a fashion model and rather small breasts that were spread out and flattened as she lay on her back. I looked at the slender patrician face with the long lashes like soot against her skin; it was a willful face, I thought, and it just escaped being bony, but the bones were good. She was no pin-up, but she reminded me of something very thin and expensive that was made before good workmanship went out of style. I wondered what she wanted.

Her bag was on the dresser; it might tell me something, I thought. I went over and opened it. A thin folder