Institute (4 page)

After awhile she said: “It was seeing your neck, your bare neck, your beautiful bare neck, in that picture ... that left me ...”

“Yes? Where?”

“Shook to the heels.”

“Give. Say it.”

“When I was in high school, I was invited for a visit to the home of a girl who lived in Maryland on a farm in the Greenspring Valley where her father raised racehorses. And one morning we hid out in the carriage house next to the stables, to see a stallion serve a mare. It was terribly exciting, more so than I’d have believed. He courted her like a schoolboy, prancing around in front of her, before finally going through with what he was there to do. Once, for a second or two, he was only a few feet from us—where we were peeping through the window—and for that long he arched his neck. We could have reached out and touched it. We could actually see the beat of his heart in the pulse of one of the blood vessels. Lloyd, it actually throbbed. Well, one day in Newark, when Delaware was playing Maryland, this Maryland boy threw a pass, and I could see his neck, which was bare. And it throbbed the way that stallion’s had. Lloyd, when I saw that picture just now, with the same bare neck showing, when I knew I was in the same room with that boy, with that neck, that beautiful neck, I had to sit down. But how did you know? How
could
you know how I felt?”

I told her about the sea nettle. “Strange,” she whispered. “You knew just by looking at me?”

“Let’s say I hoped. Don’t forget, I wanted you bad, from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

“They told me that your name was Palmer—Brisket Palmer. I memorized it.”

“Yes, and how that came about was: My football jersey itched. It was wool, and it felt like fleas. So I found a cotton shirt to wear underneath it, and that did it except for the neck. So my mother snipped it out with some buttonhole scissors. That left my neck bare. Every sportswriter decided the idea was to show off a thing of beauty. So one of them called me ‘the Brisket’—and it stuck. Just the media being fair and impartial and scrupulous, as usual.”

“It was a thing of beauty, and still is. So firm, so round.”

“Sign of physical strength, which I have.”

“Did you know it has a mole, a tiny double mole, beside the Adam’s apple? It looks like a little hourglass.”

“I shave over it every morning.”

She kissed it, then went on: “Now I’ll really be depraved. You know what? If such a thing were possible, if it could happen again, I’d climb on board once more and—”

“Well, what’s impossible about it?”

“You mean it can be done? Three times in one afternoon?”

“To a studhorse, with something as good-looking as you, all things are possible. Up, pretty creature, and on!”

“Lloyd, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It was the last carefree moment we had for some time.

S
HE ROLLED OFF, SNUGGLED
close, and lay for a long time without speaking. Then: “Lloyd, I’ve been thinking. I could give a little dinner and ask about six couples and let you do your stuff—talk about biography while your great big chest bulged your puff-bosom shirt—and hope one of the six would take the bait. But a better idea, I think, would be a little dinner for six. You, some dame I’ll think of to round it out nicely, Richard, me, and a couple I know of named Granger who’re not Du Ponts but are filthy rich and are already literary to some extent. They were friends of that pair of Du Ponts who were friends of the Henry Menckens—so they’ll know what you’re talking about. I imagine they might get a kick out of being a part, the main part, of something intellectually important. And I don’t see how Richard could make any trouble. He’d look awfully small, trying to.”

“But why would he?”

“I told you why.”

I thought that over and asked: “You think he’s out? Unless you change your mind?”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“I know, but is he out, once and for all?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just Brisket Palmer who hates to give up. He’s my one bird-in-hand, you know. Before going for birds-in-the-bush, I thought we might figure an angle on him.”

I probably said more, because I suddenly realized that I was talking along without getting any reaction. When I looked at her again, she was up on one elbow, staring hard at me. “Lloyd, you wouldn’t take advantage, would you?”

“How ‘take advantage’?”

“Of me. With Richard.”

Now, so help me, the only advantage I had on my mind, at least until then, was how to get in sync with her twitch. It hadn’t occurred to me, as apparently it hadn’t to her until just then, that if I wanted to take advantage of the situation, I now had her over a barrel. For several moments we had it, eyeball to eyeball. We both knew what she meant. But I couldn’t quite own up, and my mouth took over, to fudge. “How—make it plainer, please. How could I take advantage?”

“By betraying me, Lloyd.”

“I ask you to make it plainer, and you—”

“By telling Richard about it, what went on in this bed today—which would solve all of his problems, dirt cheap, as he would regard it—as well as all your problems. He’d be rid of me without having to pay me a cent, and you’d have your institute, sealed, delivered, and paid for. Because, of course, the amount you say it would cost—twenty million, I think it was—would be nothing to him, compared with what he would owe me as a property settlement in a regular divorce. Cheating wives don’t get paid, as I think you very well know. So that’s how you could take advantage. And for this institute, if you can, you will.”

“Just like that—chitty-chitty, bang-bang?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Couple of things wrong with that theory, though.”

“What things?”

“His reaction, for one thing. The way he
might
act, correct it. But, of course, as we lie here, we can’t be sure
what
he would do. Most likely, if I went to him with this tale, he would kick me out but quick. Then he’d go to you, and you’d tell him ... what?”

“Why, the truth, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! Why—” She must have talked for ten minutes, saying how sure she was. Finally I cut in: “Or in other words, you’d lie, figuring it was my word against yours. Then he decides to take your word, and I’m out and you’re in. Chitty-chitty, bang-bang.”

She closed her eyes and lay there a long time. “But he could take your word, Lloyd.”

“Okay, I’m out and you’re out. So—”

“So
what!”

“We’re out together—out there, in here.”

“You mean you think that after you had cost me my marriage, I’d come sneaking back to you? How stupid can you get?” She paused. “I see myself doing it, Lloyd.”

“I see myself doing it, too—in a pig’s eye, I do. The whole idea is silly, so silly as to be completely ridiculous. Why, the idea of my going to him—”

“You wouldn’t have to go.”

“You mean I could beam it to him by radio?”

“You could telephone and not say who you were.”

“And he wouldn’t recognize my voice? Or have any idea who it was that would know what you did in this bed? How stupid can
you
get? You, I’m talking about.”

“You could send an anonymous card.”

“Which, with the money he has, he could have traced in two days. Come on, make sense.”

“Would you take advantage of me or not?”

“I told you, make sense.”

“I want an answer—yes or no?”

“Okay, then, no.”

After a long pause she said: “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not looking at me.”

“I’m looking at you now—straight. Now, what do my eyes say?”

“Lloyd, they say you’re lying.”

“I wouldn’t know how to make them look any straighter.”

“They look too straight.”

“I don’t know any other way to look.”

“That’s it, Lloyd. You
would
take advantage of me.”

To change the subject, I pulled the covers down, turned her on her stomach, and massaged her backside a little, with good hefty slaps, one-two-three, so that it sounded like artillery. Pretty soon I asked: “Hey? Why don’t you beat me back?”

“I don’t feel that way about it.”

“What way is that?”

“I don’t feel friendly.”

“O.K., I do, but if you don’t, that’s how we play it, anything to please a lady. So, call.”

“What?”

“Get on that phone, there on the night table, and call—your husband, to say you’ve changed your mind. If I get credit for being a rat, I may as well get the advantage.”

“You’d take it—it’s what I said.”

“
I
said call, so call.”

“No use calling now. He was due in Philadelphia late this afternoon and won’t be back till tonight.”

“Then call him tonight.”

“All right.”

Suddenly she started crying. I took her in my arms and whispered that I loved her. “Get on,” I said.

“Oh no! That’s over!”

“Once more, to prove that I love you—and that you love me.”

“I couldn’t love a rat.”

“Rat loves you, though.”

“Dear God, don’t let me!”

“Hortense, didn’t you hear me?”

Turned out that she did.

At last, early that evening, we got up. Still undressed, she made the bed while I sat and watched. She admired the bed. When I said my mother had had it made to be slightly smaller than the beds in the stores, she looked it over again, touching it with her fingers. “It’s so simple,” she said. “Just the four turned posts and a turned piece in between, at the head, with the two side boards cut down in the middle. That’s all. And it’s maple; it’s not Wallace Nutting. I’m getting a bit tired of him.”

“Keep on. I love those friendly words.”

“Toward
her
! Your
mother
!”

“Almost forgot yourself, didn’t you?”

“I don’t forget anything.”

Then we bathed, she in the tub and I in the glassed-in shower. When we toweled off facing each other, her attachments shook breathtakingly. She said: “Heaven only knows what happens now. It’s my infertile time of the month—
supposed to be!
Heaven only knows how it’s
going
to be.”

After we dressed, we went down in the freight elevator and out the back way to the car. I took her to the Royal Arms where the specialty is roast beef, and we gobbled down the whole thick portion. But even while we were eating, she kept questioning me about biography and biographers. “Especially where I come in, or can come in, if you still insist on that call.” Her questions were penetrating, so much so that they surprised me, and I sharpened up on my answers, putting things on the line, while she took notes, writing on the back of the menu. She had her mind on it, and insisted: “If I’m to put on this show for Richard, I have to have things straight, so I make sense, so he believes I’ve changed my mind for the reasons I say I have. I still say it would be much, much better if you didn’t make me, Lloyd, if we simply forgot about it.”

“I’m not making you, Hortense.”

“Oh yes but you are.”

“You’re going to call so you can sleep.”

“I’m going to
what?”

“It’s not me who has this thing on the brain. It’s you. You’re in my power—that we both know—and I know I would never take the advantage I have. But you don’t know it, you can’t be sure. It’s for that reason—pure, yellow-bellied terror—that you’re going to put in that call. To be safe from me, as you think.”

“If I withdraw my opposition, I will be.”

“O.K., whatever you say.”

“Well? Won’t I be? ...
I better be!”
“You are now. As you know, but can’t be quite sure.”

“We go round and round and round.”

Watergate’s on Virginia, but at her suggestion I parked on New Hampshire around the corner from it. I got out her bag while she got the light coat. She was wearing the mink. We walked around to the marquee, and the doorman came running to take the bag. When he’d disappeared through the door, she turned to me. “Lloyd, you still want me to do it, go through with this?”

“Hortense, it’s
you
who wants to do it!”

“Then, okay, I will.”

“You want a bump on the backside?”

“I’ll stop by your place in the morning, at ten sharp. Please be out front, so I don’t have to get out or go in that lobby.”

“I’ll be there waiting.”

“I’ll call Richard when I get upstairs. On the way to Wilmington tomorrow, I can tell you what he said.”

“Then we’ll be together on it.”

“Goodnight.”

And she dived through the door without looking back.

I
SPENT A BAD
night, though the beginning of it was nice as I lay there in the dark thinking how well the day had turned out. I even snickered now and then at the way her conscience was working, how, in order to neutralize danger, she was doing the one thing she knew and then blaming it on me. For awhile that seemed pretty funny. Then, down in my gut, something started to twist. I suddenly asked myself if that was how things were, if that was how they really were, if there wasn’t perhaps a little more to it. At long last the question popped out in the open: Where did I come in?
How
did I come in? At first, it had seemed to be her doing, the idea of telling Richard that she had switched. But now I made myself face the truth that there was more to it than that, that maybe my eyes were telling her things I hadn’t guessed yet even about myself. In other words, deep down inside, I began to suspect that I would take advantage of her, that I would somehow think of a way; that being the case, the way she was acting made sense. But often, when you realize something, you realize it all at once, so that it hits you in the face and things aren’t the same anymore. All of a sudden it wasn’t quite so funny, what she was about to do. Then out of the dark a hot flash shot at me. It said we were playing with fire, that however the thing turned out, it couldn’t turn out well. After a couple of these, I lay there asking myself: Should I go to Wilmington with her? Get out from under, the flashes said, get out while the getting is good, or it’s going to explode in your face in a way you’ll never forget. I’m human, and all this shook me. Then I thought: nothing risked, nothing gained. In a poker game there comes a time when you shove in your stack or quit with what you’ve got. And this was like poker, wasn’t it?