“The most amusing thing about it is the way Dr. Face keeps plugging for virtue and morality. He wants to burn everything since Tom Swift, and he is not too certain about Tom. He wants a big crack down on movies, books, plays, song lyrics, public dancing. And he wants to be the one to weed out the evil. If he ever was turned loose in the west wing of Cal’s house up there at Stone Canyon, he would have a stroke. Cal keeps his various fields of interest quite well compartmented. It is a little frightening though, to think how quickly his little Dr. Face has established a huge eager following.”
“I heard Tomberlin gives money to Latin American projects too.”
“They tap him every chance they get. But he is most generous with the militant right, the savage little groups who want to buy arms and smash the peons right back to where they belong. He’s not a moderate, my friend. What should I call you? I want you to call me Connie.”
“John Smith is a little too much, I guess. Mack Smith?”
“You want to play it close, don’t you?”
“The name might mean something to Tomberlin.”
“How about the face?”
“It won’t mean a thing. When can you set it up?”
“Tomorrow evening. We’ll go to his house. He seldom goes out. There’ll be the usual group of sycophants hanging around him. I’ll invent some excuse for dropping by You’ll have to play a part, Mack Smith.”
“Who will I be?”
She stretched her long and opulent body and said, “I think the proper designation is Connie’s Latest, if you don’t mind too much. I shan’t kid you, my dear. It is the best protective device you could imagine. I am the complete bitch, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I have a very rational approach to my needs and desires. I am thirty-five years old, darling, and I shall never marry again, and there is no reason why, with my looks and my money, I should settle for an empty bed. My nerves get a little flippy when I do. But I also treasure my emotional independence. So I am notorious for averaging about three young men a year. They are usually somewhat younger than you, but built along the same lines.
“My God, this California has the world’s greatest supply of huge, healthy, beautiful young men. Tomorrow night you must act as they always do in the beginning-earnest and humble and anxious to please. That is when they are very nice, seeing to drinks and cigarettes and wraps, and holding doors, and looking so humbly grateful and happy. After a few months, when they begin to take too much for granted, then they get tiresome and I have to boot them out. Mack, my dear, I would look naked in public places without one of my young men at my side. I got rid of the last one over two weeks ago, and enjoying my little spell of spinsterhood, and I’m not yet ready to go prowling for the next. But Cal will be perfectly willing to accept you as the next one, the current one. Where did I find you?”
“I was running a boat for some friends of yours.”
“Perfect. I was up at Monterey last week. Their name is Simmins. Gordon and Louise. I hired you away from them because I am thinking of buying a boat. But Cal won’t be particularly curious.” S
he held her glass out and I made her a fresh drink. She brushed my hand with her fingertips and said, as she took it, “Are you going to suggest that we might as well have the game as well as the name?”
I sat closer to her and said, “It would be normal to think about it, Connie. You are pretty spectacular, and you know it. But I don’t think it is a very good idea.”
“That is what I was going to tell you. If you suggested it.”
“What are your reasons?”
“My dear, my young men think they are so bold and wild and free. But they are so easily tamed. And it is to my taste to have them tame. They respond to reward and punishment. So there is no emotional involvement. They are a charming convenience. Can you understand why I want it just that way?”
“I think so.”
“You and I would be another thing, my friend. It would take us too long to find out who is winning, and in the process I might lose. I would not want that. It would diminish my personal liberty. I fought hard for it and I enjoy it. I am a violent, petulant, spoiled woman, and I wouldn’t suit you unless you could dominate me and teach me manners, in and out of bed. I can sense that in you. And the money does not impress. I can sense that too. So I would not have that weapon either. No, I don’t play the games I can’t win, Mr. Smith, Mister Mysterious Smith. But what were your reasons?”
I smiled at her. “It would feel a little too much as if I had been standing in line, Connie.”
Her eyes changed to narrow slits of gold and her lips lifted away from her teeth. Then suddenly she gave that huge laugh and gave me a punch on the shoulder that made my hand go numb.
“See? You would beat me with that sort of talk. One day I would find myself weeping and begging your forgiveness. Like a woman. My God, we might be good enough together to take the risk. But no. Maybe five years ago. Maybe. Not now. I am too old to be physically beaten, and that is one of the things you would find it necessary to do. Because I am insufferable. I know it. Come with me.”
She took me into a study which was also a trophy room. African game. Some very good heads. Leopard, lion, buffalo. There was a case of fine weapons behind glass. There were framed photographs of her, younger, slimmer, just as vital, standing by the dead elephant, rhino, great ape.
“My guns,” she said. “My dear dead animals. I took my sainted husband on safari five years running, thinking it would turn him into enough man for me. He killed like an accountant signing a ledger. He bent over a bush to pick a flower for me and a snake struck him in the throat. He was dead before he could fall to the ground. If it was permitted, I would have his head in here, mounted like the others. And the heads of all the young men. Now you know me better, Mack Smith. You might be enough man for me. I think I will always wonder about that. It’s bad luck we’re past the years of finding out. Be here at six tomorrow. We will use my car. Good night.”
I found my way out. I heard that laugh as I was leaving. I wondered if she had laughed the same way after downing old jumbo, the tusker, shown in the framed glossy, recumbent beside Mrs. Melgar in her safari pants, her smile, her big bore weapon at port arms.
I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelts, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero’s grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white tail deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.
They have all their earnest rationalizations about game control. It is good for animals to shoot them. It may serve some purpose to gut shoot them with a plastic arrow. We have so bitched up the various ecologies in all our areas, game control is a necessity. But it should be done by professionals paid to do it, the ones who cherish the healthy flocks, the ones who do not get their charge out of going bang at something with thrice the animal dignity they can ever attain.