Sometimes he thought that he was waiting for a better opportunity — either a proposal of marriage or a permanent association with a woman who was very rich and, at the same time, somewhat desirable. On other occasions he thought that he was simply resisting the notion of being tied to one woman, living with her constantly and being always at her beck and call. As what he privately termed a free-lance gigolo he retained a good measure of his independence. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to relinquish it.
There was one other possibility that occurred to him from time to time. In two months he had come one hell of a long way from a one-room roach trap on 99th Street. He had changed both his way of life and his personality as well. From a two-bit punk without a pot he had metamorphosed into an intelligent young man with a savings and checking account. It only stood to reason that this process of change would continue. If he had come so far in two months, he would probably change still more in the following two months. There was no way to tell what sort of person he would become.
And as far as he could see he would be tying himself off if he hooked up with a woman on a steady basis. He’d be putting himself in a backwater trading his potential for growth in exchange for a form of security which he did not really need. It wouldn’t hurt him to wait. He was young enough to bide his time and see what was going to happen to him.
His watch told him it was five minutes past five when he downed the last drop of his cognac and put a bill on the bartop for the barman. He left the bar and caught a taxi back to his hotel. It was time to shower and shave and dress. Then it would be time to see Moira.
Moira Hastings was something a little bit special.
She was thirty, which made her young by comparison with the other women who were Johnny’s usual clients. She was also quite attractive. Her appeal was less the Hollywood image of beauty than the Vogue image of chic sophistication. She was tall for a woman and she was very slender, with firm, pointed breasts and very slight hips. Her hair, originally a rather mousey brown, was dyed a pleasant rust shade. She wore it in a French roll and did not let it down when she made love, which she did quite well.
Any number of men would have been more than willing to keep her company and join her in bed for no remuneration whatsoever. She was not the type of woman who needed a paid lover, and Johnny would not have been able to figure her out if he hadn’t boned up on some elementary Freudian psychology. Now, however, he knew pretty well what made her tick.
She was a modern woman in the full sense of the word. She had graduated magna cum laude from Vassar and had taken graduate work at a school of interior design. After distinguishing herself at that school she found a well-paying job with a top firm of interior decorators. She stayed with the firm until her contacts were established in the field and then struck out on her own. Now she was a leader in her profession. Her income was sky-high and her work ideal.
Moira had been married once, and briefly, to a man named Gerald Raines. He was a Wall Street investment counsellor and came from a wealthy and well-established Philadelphia Main Line family. She divorced him after less than a year, obtaining a Nevada decree on grounds of extreme mental cruelty. The divorce went uncontested. She asked no alimony and no settlement. She wanted only her freedom.
That, Johnny knew, was the whole story of Moira Hastings. She was a career woman to the core. She wanted to call the shots and she did not want to be tied to anybody or anything. This made her the type of woman who preferred a paid companion to a voluntary one, if only because she paid for what she got. The money she spent established her relationship to her lover beyond any shadow of doubt. She was in the driver’s seat, now and forever. Her lover was not her equal and was not designed to be her equal. In this respect she was not dissimilar to a man who preferred a mistress or a whore to a wife.
She was not bossy and she was not demanding. She made certain that her superiority was recognized but she never became obnoxious about it. She was generous — her orientation made her lover the more desirable as his cost to her increased. She never gave Johnny presents, as many women did. Only money.
Johnny liked her.
He called for her at twenty minutes of six. Her apartment was on 53rd Street near Park Avenue. She occupied the entire second floor of a reconditioned brownstone and, naturally, she had decorated it herself. The decor was a little modern for Johnny’s taste but he had to admit that she’d done a hell of a good job with the place.
She was ready for him and she looked lovely. There was a fragile look about her, as if a man might crush her if he held her too tightly in his arms. Johnny closed the door and she came to him, her face up to be kissed. He held her gently and kissed her on the mouth.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was reading and I didn’t notice the time.”
“That’s all right.”
They walked together into the living room. He went to the bar, took gin and vermouth and made them into a martini for her. He poured himself a very small drink of cognac and they sat together on the couch and sipped their drinks in silence.
“Hell of a day,” she said finally. “That bitch of a Sutter woman has the taste of a barbarian. I showed her the color scheme for her damned house and she screamed. You should have seen what she wanted me to do to the place. Her idea of decoration is a cross between Byzantine and Mayan stupidity with a little jungle stupidity included. I think I managed to talk her out of it.”
He said something appropriate.
“You should see the house,” she told him. “She must have driven the architect out of his mind. Try to imagine a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright and a romanesque cathedral.”
He did, and shuddered.
“Uh-huh. That’s the idea. I got the story on how she wound up with the house, too. She hired Jacob Rattsler to do it. He’s as good a man as you can find and his price is high. He’s generally worth it. Then she explained just what she wanted and Jake’s stomach turned over a few times.”
“I can understand why.”
“You only think you can. You never saw the house. Hell, you never met the woman, Johnny. He told her he’d give her just what she wanted but he refused to take credit for the house. He wouldn’t sign his name to the sketches. She was dumb enough to go along with it and Jake decided to make it just as rotten as it ought to be for her to live in it. He may have had a little fun, because he came up with the most incredible monstrosity in all of upper Westchester. And she loves it. She thinks it has character.”
“Why don’t you give her the same treatment?”
“I’d love to. I’d really love it.” She sighed and took out a cigarette, put it to her lips. Johnny lit it for her. “But Jake can afford something like that. He’s got a reputation for eccentricity anyway and he’s established at the top. I’m not that outstanding yet. And interior decorators aren’t supposed to be oddballs. They’re supposed to be sincere professional craftsmen, not nuts.”
She tossed off the rest of the martini and put the glass on the coffee table. “To hell with Martha Sutter,” she said. “Let’s get some food, Johnny. Where would you like to eat?”
He pretended to think about it, then played the game the way it was supposed to be played. “Anywhere,” he said. “I’ll leave it up to you.”
She always asked him where he wanted to eat. He always let her choose the spot. It was a little ceremony they went through, and he felt it was quite consistent with the rest of her personality. She wanted him to leave the decisions to her, and at the same time they had to pretend that he was doing this because he didn’t care one way or the other.