He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie’s bedroom.
He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed. Rosalie was lying on the bed.
In a moment she opened her eyes.
“Well, love?”
He said hoarsely, “What made it stop?”
She shrugged. “Koitska turned you off. Tired of monitoring us, I expect—it’s been an hour. I’m surprised his patience lasted this long.”
She stretched luxuriously, but he was too full of what had happened even to see the white grace of her body. “Did you like it, love? Would you like to have it forever?”
XIII
For nine days Chandler’s status remained in limbo. He spent that day in a state of numb bemusement, remembering the men and women he had worn like garments, appalled and exhilarated. He did not see Rosalie again that day, she kept to her room and he locked out. He was still a lapdog, but a lapdog with a dream dangling before him. He went to sleep that night thinking that he was a dog who might become a god, and he had eight days left.
The next day Rosalie wheedled another hour of the coronet from Koitska. They explored the ice caves on Mount Rainier in the bodies of two sick, starving hermits and wandered arm in arm near the destroyed International Bridge at Niagara, breathing the spray of the unchanging Falls. He had seven days left.
They passed like a dream. He saw a great deal of the inner workings of the exec, more than before. He had privileges. He was up for membership in the club. Rosalie had proposed him. He talked with two Czechoslovakian ballet dancers in their persons, and a succession of heavily accented Russians and Poles and Japanese through the mouth of the beach boy who came to tend Rosalie’s garden. He thought they liked him and was pleased that he penetrated where he had not been allowed before … until he realized that these freedoms were in themselves a threat. They allowed him this contact so that they could look him over. If they rejected him they would have to kill him, because he had seen too much. But by then a week had passed, and another day, and though he did not know it he had only one day left. Rosalie did what she could to make the days of waiting easy for him.
“Embarrassing, isn’t it? I went through it myself, love. Come have a drink.”
“When will I know?” he demanded fretfully.
“Well.” She hesitated. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you, love, under the circumstances—”
He knew what the circumstances were.
“I guess I can tell you. You need just over seven hundred votes to come in. You’ve got—” Her eyes glazed for a moment. She was looking through some clerk’s eyes, somewhere on the island. “You’ve got about a hundred and fifty so far. Takes time, doesn’t it? But it’s worth it in the end.”
“How many ‘no’ votes?”
“None.” She said gently, “You’ll never have but one, love, because that’s all it takes.”
He stared. The girl gook took up his hand and kissed it lightly. “One blackball’s enough, yes, but never fear. Rosie’s on your side.”
Restlessly Chandler stood up and made himself another drink. His head was beginning to buzz. They had been drinking on her sun terrace since early afternoon.
Rosalie came up beside him soothingly. “I know how you feel. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?”
“Sure,” he said, stirring the ice around in the glass and drinking it down. He made another drink absently, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome.
“Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins.” He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. “I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when—” her face was strained, even after years, even now that she was herself one of the godlike ones—“when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll booth I screamed but my—friend—let go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control. … We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way.”
She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself slicing a lime for her drink. Now she was talking about her friend. “I hadn’t seen him in six years. I was just a kid, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these.” She touched her coronet. “So,” she said brightly, “he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It’s all very simple, except the waiting.”
Chandler pulled her down on the couch beside him and made a toast. “Your friend.”
“He’s a nice guy,” she said moodily, sipping her drink. “You know how careful I am about getting exercise and so on? It’s partly because of him. You would have liked him, love, only—well, it turned out that he liked me well enough, but he began to like what he could
