A Key to the Suite (11 page)

“Anything I should do?”

“No, sweets. If it’s sour I’ll let you know and find some way to handle it.”

DiLarra stood up. “One thing that always gets me. Why do they buy it? Why do they pay so much? God, Alan, this town is so full of …”

“Use your head, sweets. Sure, any guy who isn’t a complete monster can kill himself down here on random tail, but he is always running into problems. Sometimes she turns out to be a teaser, or a lush, or even sick. Or she wants to fall in love, and that’s a problem. Or she’s two months along and is looking for somebody to set up for the marriage bit. Or she’s a nut. Or the cops want her. And even when you have none of those problems,
it still takes a lot of time and talk setting it up. And maybe, if everything else is fine, you end up with somebody with no talent for it. The busy, important man, sweets, does better with a high-level pro. All the questions are answered before you start. If he wants to do the town, he knows she’ll look good enough and dress well enough to take anywhere. And she won’t get plotzed or chew with her mouth open or leave him for somebody else in the middle of the evening. He knows just how the evening is going to end up, and he knows she’ll be good at it, and he knows there won’t be any letters or phone calls or visits a couple of weeks or months later. It’s efficiency, sweets. Modern management methods. And these days, if he travels first class, he’s working on a two-to-one chance she’ll have a college degree.”

“Are you selling me?”

“In any game in the world, Rick, never bet on the amateurs, because you’ll never know what the hell they’re going to do.”

In the murmurous, echoing emptiness of the Convention Hall, seven separate workshops were in progress. In private meeting rooms, committees were at work. In the Convention Hall men wandered away from the study groups when their interest lagged, and kibitzed other groups. The voices of the speakers, unamplified, droned in a sleepy, uncoordinated chorus. Men wandered and glanced at each other’s badges of identity, and joined in groups of two and three and four to talk in low voices about how drunk who got and who had what lined up. They asked about each other’s families, told stories about other conventions, exchanged gossip about who was going to be promoted and who was on his way out.

The hospitality suites were muted with a recuperative quiet, the stains removed, the liquor replenished. Of seven hundred delegates, perhaps three hundred would sleep until noon, and there was another much smaller group which was still out somewhere in the city, their hotel beds unused. Hangovers ranged from mild dull headaches to repetitive, uncontrollable nausea.

There was a constant trickling traffic through the exhibit ramp. Delegates picked up brochures and pamphlets, accumulating bright glossy assorted stacks which would clutter a bureau top for several days and then be dropped in the room wastebasket at the time of packing. At the AGM display, Bunny and Honey, in starchy, brief little cotton sunsuits, wriggled, pranced, smirked, passed out the literature, activated the displays, chanted the memorized answers to anticipated questions and, from time to time, when a group of at least ten had accumulated around the display, they would go into the routine, much like a prolonged television commercial, which Tommy Carmer had made them learn.

Several of the corporations, including AGM, had rented pool area cabanas for the duration of the convention. These were the gathering places for the rather small contingent of wives of delegates. They lay on the casually grouped chaises, greased themselves constantly, gossiped, practiced corporate gamesmanship, ordered tall rum drinks and made agonizing decisions about what to do with the rest of the day—such as to go shopping or take a nap or play cards.

Amid the forenoon silences on the third floor, north wing, several salesmen of a company which makes large industrial pumps, were in danger of strangling on their own attempts to laugh without making a sound while they played an innocent
game on one of their shyer associates. They stood outside the door of the company suite looking along forty feet of corridor to where the most inveterate practical joker of the group stood, tensed and furtive, within reach of one of the big aluminum housekeeping carts. The cart stood outside one of the rooms. The door of the room was ajar. At intervals of almost a minute, the joker would reach out, grasp the pull-bar of the cart and shake it, so that the soiled glasses and the containers of cleaning materials would jingle and clatter. Each time he did so, the observers would clutch each other and make small groaning sounds as they tried to stifle their intense amusement.

Earlier that morning, an enterprising one in the group had discovered that the maid for that end of the corridor was available for special service, at ten dollars a throw. She had obliged the others of the group in turn, all except the shy one. The romantic aspects of it left something to be desired. She was a tall Austrian girl with ginger hair, a sharp nose, bulging blue eyes, a turkey neck, a heavy accent, meager breasts and round heavy hips.

There were rules to be obeyed, ja? The door, it has to be open. The cart, it must be outside door always. And the cleaning schedule, it must be kept, ja?

After she had decided to take the risk of a multiple income, she had stowed her panties under the stack of clean towels on the housekeeping cart. She was too much in terror of the housekeeper to risk removing her gray and white nylon uniform. So she hitched it high, and performed with a strenuousness partially motivated by panic, and kept her eye on the room door at all times.

They had, with difficulty, talked the shy one into taking his turn. He had been very dubious about the open door.

Suddenly the joker tensed, whirled and came sprinting soundlessly along the corridor. The five salesmen erupted into the suite, gasping, hugging themselves. The joker, eyes streaming, said, “She … she cussed him out in kraut … and she … she said she couldn’t waste … any more time. Shh, you guys. He’s coming.”

The shy one walked in. He looked troubled. They asked him how it was. “Damn it. Every time I’d get set, some goddam noise in the hall would …” One of the salesmen could contain himself no longer and burst into a high wild guffaw that started the others going. The shy one stared at them with growing comprehension, then gave a roar of anger and charged the nearest one and made an almost alarmingly successful attempt to hurl his tormentor through the nearest window. At the expense of one split lip and one minor nosebleed, they finally pinned him down and sat on him until he had cooled off.

Out at the Pagoda Bar, beyond the Olympic pool, a florid sales manager decided after three Bloody Marys that he couldn’t face the idea of lunch, and the only thing to do with his hangover was take it back to bed and hope it would be gone by late afternoon. He looked at all the flesh exposed to the sun and fancied he could hear it sizzling. Two couples went away, leaving just two people at the bar for the moment, the sales manager and a dark-haired woman in a white bathing suit. She was deeply tanned, her shoulders gleaming with oil and perspiration. She was plain but pretty enough, and she looked bored. She was four stools away. He looked at her thighs, where the brown flesh bulged as it escaped the stricture of the swimsuit fabric. He was conscious of her having glanced over at him a few times.
Never when you want one, he thought. Always when you don’t. On a weary impulse, courting rejection, he took his room key out of his pocket, held it under the level of the bar, rapped it against the wood to attract her attention, then held it so she could read the number on the plastic tag, looking at her with a fixed stare of inquiry and defiance.

She looked away quickly, her lips thinning, her face darkening slightly. He felt relief. He signed the check, left a tip and turned to go. The woman coughed. He turned and looked at her. She stared at him without expression and gave him a single abrupt nod of agreement. As he started the enormous journey to his room, he focused his mind hopelessly on the memory of the bulge of thigh, trying to summon up visions of delight, anticipation, but feeling only the weariness of too many hotels, too many conventions, too many million miles back and forth across the land, too many women, so many that now the memories of all of them had merged at last into a single unstimulating vision, white, gasping, fatty, strap-marked and secondhand.

LITTLE MISS CORY BARLUND
came out of the eighth floor elevator at eleven thirty, paused to orient herself, and then began walking down the carpeted corridor that led to the AGM suite. She had the lithe walk of a model, all control, nothing sexy, nothing obvious. She wore her best “little nothing” dress, a junior dress, sleeveless, with a high collar, beltless, of such a calculatedly casual fit that it clung where and when it should, and swung free when it should, clinging and touching and releasing in the rhythm of her chin-high stride and the small movement of her toffee hair. The dress was the color of milk sherry. Her shoes were white and her small purse was white, and she wore gloves that matched the sherry dress perfectly. There were little gold buttons in her pierced ears. Her nylons were sheer as cobwebs, and latched to a riband of garter belt. Her panties were lace and her half bra was an A cup, and the
aromatic redolence of the perfume behind her ears and on her wrists and between her breasts was forty dollars the ounce.

She moved down the corridor and kept herself from thinking by focusing on a pleasant sensual awareness of the slight movements of the fabric touching her body and the rhythmic little thump of the camera pack against her hip, dangling from the narrow strap over her right shoulder.

When she was more than halfway down the corridor, a door not far in front of her opened and Dave Daniels came out. He started to close the door, then noticed her. Unshaved, he was in shirt sleeves, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. She nodded coldly and tried to move around him, but he blocked her passage.

She backed up a few steps and said, “Let me by, please.”

“After I tell you you’re not kidding me a bit. I got an instinct. I always know the score.”

“Did you start drinking again? Or are you still drunk, Mr. Daniels?”

“Come on in and talk it over.”

“Not today. Not any day.”

He reached for her but she backed up swiftly. She said calmly, “You’re an idiot, Daniels. How much do you think you can get away with? I took voice lessons for five years. I know how to breathe and how to project. If you touch me, I could make a noise that would open every door on this floor. And if you bother me one more time, I’m going to explain to all the rest of them that I have to drop the article because you’re making it too difficult for me.”

Daniels leaned against the corridor wall. “So what will work?”

“Give up.”

“But now I got you on my mind.”

“And that will be a terrible source of worry and concern to me, Mr. Daniels,” she said, and walked past him and on down the corridor. He watched her intently until she turned into the suite, and then he went back into his room, lifted the bourbon bottle and drank from it until an involuntary gag closed his throat. “I’m Dave Daniels,” he said thickly. “I never miss. One way or another, I never miss. Never have. Never will.”

It was quarter of twelve when Floyd Hubbard, nearing the open door of the AGM suite, heard and recognized Cory’s laugh. Though her voice was light and almost frail, her laugh, as he had noticed the previous evening, was full-bodied, earthy, as if she had borrowed it from a more vigorous woman. The laugh moved his heart up into the peak of his chest, and he swallowed it back down.

She was in the suite with Bobby Fayhouser, Charlie Gromer and Les Lewis, and she was taking a picture of the three road men against the background of the small AGM exhibit which had been set up in the suite. The flash attachment made its quick white flicker of light, and she turned and smiled at him, winding the film as she turned. “Hi, Floyd. I want one of you too, even though I don’t know what you do yet. Bobby and Les have been telling me that for their jobs, AGM picks only those men who show potential top executive abilities.”

“Now
hold
it!” Bobby said. “That’s what Les told you, Cory. I’ve been told I’m as far as I’m ever going to get. Mr. Hubbard is more the executive type. All the home office operations, except sales, have been moved to Houston, and that’s where he is.”

“Move over by the couch, Floyd,” she said. “About there. What is your title, really?”

“I’m an administrative assistant to the executive assistant to the assistant to the vice president.”

“It won’t fit under the picture,” she said. “I’ll make you a vice president. Hold still. Turn your head a little bit away from me. There!”

“I’m immortalized,” Floyd said.

“If it comes out good, you can get extra copies from the magazine.”

“No pictures of me ever come out good. I always look like a mechanic who just got promoted to service manager. Joe’s Garage.”

Just at that moment, Jesse Mulaney arrived with a group, and the road men sprang into action, fixing drinks, reading badges, memorizing names. Frick came in with some more strangers. Hubbard maneuvered Cory over into an area of some limited privacy and said, “Now you can say it.”

“Say what, darling? Good morning?”

“No. You’re supposed to say the sea breeze made you giddy, so kindly ignore the whole thing, phone call included.”

“Look at me, Floyd. Look right into my eyes. What do you think?”

“I think they’re not completely blue. There’s little brownish dots in the blue, close to the pupil.”

“Idiot! Stop being evasive. What else does it … do to you?”

“It … it makes me think we’re going to have to do a lot of talking to talk this to death.”

“I know. But we have to, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Because we’re grownups, aren’t we, Floyd? And because of Jan.”

“You better look away, honey, because I can’t seem to move a muscle.”

“And I couldn’t sleep. And all the way here, I couldn’t take a deep breath.”

“Cut it out!”

She turned away slightly. “It isn’t fair it should be worse today, darling. It’s supposed to be less.”