“Me, I’ve been in sales all my life,” Frick said.
“Yes,” Floyd Hubbard said. “I know.”
In that moment of exposure Frick tried to make a reading, and got no further than Hubbard’s brown friendly eyes. A metallurgist, Frick thought, and one hell of a man at a table stakes game.
“Come on in and meet the boys,” Frick said.
Three
At five minutes of three the Mulaneys were at last alone in their room in the Sultana. Jesse had checked the first room and decided it was too close to the rest of the AGM group, and Fred Frick had arranged a swap which gave them 832, a bedroom-sitting-room layout on the ocean side. Connie Mulaney was a trim, slim, handsome woman of fifty. Her hair was crisp and white, smartly coifed. Her bones were good, and her eyes were beautiful.
She hummed to herself as she performed the familiar routines of unpacking. Until the last few months, these past several years had been the happiest years of her life. After a pudgy girlhood and the nondescript years of motherhood, it seemed like a startling award for past meritorious behavior to suddenly come into one’s own in the middle forties, into a strange resurgence of youthfulness when you had an awareness of how rare and valuable it was. It had given her a confidence she had never had before, and out of her confidence she had been able to give of herself and become treasured by many people. She knew the styles which suited her. She knew the mercilessness of time and fortune. And so she lived her days to the fullest and took splendid care of herself without permitting it to become obsessive.
As she transferred a stack of Jesse’s white shirts to a bureau drawer, she looked at him in the mirror and stopped humming. He had stripped to his blue and white striped underwear shorts, and he sat on a bed staring out toward the ocean. Though she had never told him, and never would, when he was in repose he reminded her of a sad, tired clown resting after taking off his clown suit and his make-up. A big clown — the one who tags humbly along and keeps getting hit over the head with a bladder. He was a big man, overweight and flabby, with skin as white as milk, a heavy pouch of belly, yet with a bigness of frame and a solidity of back and shoulders to remind her of the hard and husky man he had been.
It was no longer possible to tell that his hair had once been red. But he had the fair complexion of the redhead, eroded and betrayed by the lifetime of rich foods, expansive drinking, and all the late late nights. His broad face was a pattern of small pouches, florid with small broken veins. And out of this corroded monument to the gregariousness of man shone the light-blue eyes, bland and young as those of any child.
She sighed inaudibly and finished the unpacking, and hung her travel dress away. She walked around to face him and said, “Now does it have to make you so dreary to have brought me along, Jesse?”
He looked at her in quick protest. “No, honey! Hell, I want you to come along with me. Every time.”
She sat on the arm of a chair. “Now listen to the man. All his life he’s been saying that, but lately I really think you’ve meant it, darling.”
“I’ve always meant it.”
“But if I’d always gone along, dear, think of all the pleasure you’d have never been able to give all those little girls at all the conventions and all the regional sales conferences.”
He showed by the sudden grin that he now realized she had been needling him. “Truly thousands of them, honey. Only a truly selfish man would have denied them the special joys of Mulaney.”
“Lecher!”
“Needler!”
She reached over and patted his knee and leaned back again, feeling a little familiar twist in her heart as she realized how much she loved this man. There had been the women. She was almost dead certain of that, but it was the almost which was the important word. And there might be others yet, but never flaunted, never admitted, never permitted to shame her in any public or secret way.
After a little time of silence she said, continuing an argument which had gone on in oblique ways for three months, “Couldn’t you maybe have had enough of all of it, dear? Couldn’t you, without wanting to admit it to yourself, be full up to here with all the... all the pressure and the quotas and all the nasty little Fred Fricks?”
“Nothing wrong with Freddy.”
“So I shouldn’t have said his name, but what about the rest of it?”
“The rest of what?”
“Please, darling. You know what I mean.”
“Hell, I’ve been under pressure all my life.”
“Not this kind, Jesse.”
“I’ve fought to keep my job fifty times and you know it.”
She moved over to sit on the bed beside him, and took his hand, lifted it to her cheek. “But before, darling, you always knew what you were fighting, and how to fight it. This time, you don’t know what they want, really. Maybe all they want is change, for the sake of change. And you can’t win if that’s what they’re after.”
“They can’t do this to me!”
“Darling, please.”
“I know ten thousand men all over this country, Connie. I’ve hired them and fired them. Some of them I’ve either outsmarted or outsold. Goddam it, woman, what will all those boys be saying and thinking if Jesse Mulaney gets thrown out on his ear two whole years before the first retirement option? Don’t you think I’ve got any pride?”
“I know you’ve got pride, Jesse. Too much, maybe. But what I mean is... is it really worth it? We’ve had good luck with the children. The retirement thing would be almost as much. And with the shrewd way you’ve bought stocks, dear, we don’t even need the executive pension. Can’t it be done in some way that would... save that pride of yours? A resignation for reasons of health?”
He slapped his chest. “I’d know I’d been whipped. And by what? Stupid forms, reports, evaluations, surveys. I’m being gutted by twerps. Crappy little slide-rule twerps, like Lansing and DeVrees and Hubbard.”
“Floyd Hubbard seems quite nice, really.”
He looked at her in a woebegone way. “Goddam it, Connie, I think of the ones they’ve pushed out in the past year. Ed, Chris, Wally. You know how it makes me feel? Like I was some big old extinct animal being chased through the swamps by a bunch of yapping dogs.”
She smiled at him. “But you won’t quit, will you?”
“I can’t.”
“Okay, Mr. Mulaney. I guess I’ll just have to accept that, and stop boring from within, weakening the structure. They’ll know they’ve been in a scrap. Okay?”
“Okay. I’m glad you’re along this time especially, Connie. They expect me to mess something up. Maybe I would have, if I was alone. Lots of times I’ve looked bad, and didn’t mean to, but it didn’t matter. This time it does. You... you sort of keep an eye on me.”
“Of course, darling. You don’t need it, but I will.”
She went to the other side of the room, took off her slip, bra and girdle, and put on a pale yellow robe. “What time do we have to be anywhere?”
“We ought to get to the suite about six o’clock.”
“Are you going to have a nap, Jesse?”
“I guess so.”
“Shower when you wake up?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’ll take mine now, I guess.”
“Go ahead.”
She stood at the bathroom door for a moment, looking at his broad white back. He sat with his shoulders slumped. She ran the back of her hand down the firmness of her hip and thigh. When this special attractiveness had come to her, late and unexpected, she had been delighted not only for her own sake, but for Jesse’s as well. It seemed such a special boon, a glory of late afternoon on what had been not a very pretty day. A special favor to the man who had chosen her when she had begun to wonder if anybody ever would.