They buzz around the country and the world in little groups, where everybody is always laughing, and at the resorts and airports and executive dining rooms, at the padded bars and the swinging casinos, in the groups there are always the Mary Smiths, pert, tidy, high-style, voracious and completely with it, eyes a-dance, freed by The Pill to happily pull down the game the manipulator fingers for her, the new Gal Friday who has become the Gal Friday Night.
It is a new breed that did not exist a few years back, but cultures seem to have an uncanny way of spawning creatures to fill any need. So situation ethics, plus profitable manipulation, brought this merry regiment out of the wings, as if they had been waiting there all along. It would be pointless to conjecture about immorality or amorality, or make analogies about whoredom, that word with the ring of biblical accusation. A Mary Smith would not even be upset, merely puzzled.
In the diagonal light she rested her chin against my fist, her two warm and shapely little hands holding it there, elbow-braced, and made her eyes huge, then dipped and turned her head first one way and then the other, to slowly drag first one sheaf of the dense and fragrant hair across the back of my hand and then the other.
I remembered the shaggy and ancient joke of the young man in the strange city who had arrived with the phone number of a hundred-dollar girl. He called her up and was invited up to her luxurious apartment, where she cooked him a gourmet meal, recited French poetry, played the piano for him and sang with professional skill. She mentioned that she spoke six languages, had a master’s degree in psychology, and had designed and made the gown she wore on her lovely body. At last as she led him in toward the canopied bed he had to ask. And so he said, “Please would you tell me how a girl like you got into… a business like this?”
She twinkled up at him and sighed and said, “Just lucky, I guess.”
Mary Smith took a deep and shivering breath and said, “There is a steak, darling, and it is not frozen and never has been, and it is in the meat-keeper thing in my apartment, which is, God help us, a condo-min-i-um, which will never cease to sound like a dirty word, and the apartment is twelve and a half minutes away, give or take ten seconds, and the steak will keep for us, darling, until three A.M., or until twelve noon tomorrow for a Texan’s breakfast for us because I don’t have to tend the store until Monday morning, and that twelve and a half minutes might just be the longest twelve and a half minutes in my life up till now.”
The temptation was to accept the whole con. But there is an immense perversity in the male animal at the most unexpected times. And why didn’t you climb Mount Everest, Sir Hillary? Because it was there, fellow. And I could see her in memory in an other bar, by daylight, teeth set in that meaty little underlip, eyes half closed, listening to Tush, and turning her head slowly from side to side in a denial as definite as the slam of a door and clack of the lock. She would be exquisite in all detail, from earlobes to cute little toes to the dimples at the base of the spine. She would be fragrant, immaculate, prehensile and totally skilled, and she would ring all the changes, and pace herself beautifully, and draw me to her pace, and inflate my ego with her breathless astonishment at how it had been the most fantastic and lasting that had ever happened to her and how she had thought it could never even be equaled again, but lo and behold, when it had happened again, it was even more so, and if it ever got to be any more than that, she just couldn’t stand it at all; it would blow her out of her mind, and how did we get to be so great, darling, so that really and truly it is as if it was the very first time ever with anybody.
The temptation was to take the man’s Ferrari around the track a few times, just to prove to yourself you couldn’t get hooked on a great piece of machinery or on the whole speed competition bit.
But it was right there and it was buzzing with it, and how do you sidestep without creating some unhappy suspicions about the whole approach? It would have to be some fancy footwork, and it would have to be on her terms, something she could comprehend immediately.
I slipped into my elk-hide ring-shoes just in time, just as her eyes narrowed and she said, “You’re not exactly overwhelming the girl with enthusiasm, old buddy.”
“Decisions, decisions, decisions,” I said. “I seem to have this hex lately.”
She let my hand go. “What’s to decide?”
“There is this very pigheaded man sitting in a hotel suite and looking at the phone and getting madder and madder by the minute. I have been trying to unload this and that for cash money so I can get the maximum out of our little gem of opportunity. And he flew down from Chicago because this particular item happens to be worth about twenty thousand more to him than to anybody else in the world, for reasons I will not go into at the moment. So I told him I had to delay our meet because of something that came up, and I would try to get there by eight. And right now it is quarter to nine, and he is the type who feels unsure of who he is right down in the gut where it matters most, the type who to prove he is who he thinks he is might wait about one minute more and cut off his nose to spite his face, or he may have cut it off already and be on his way to the airport. I have been looking at you and trying to get a little controlled piece of amnesia about him, but it doesn’t seem to work so good.”
She sat taller and gave a little shake like a toy poodle who has just been lifted out of her doggy-bath, and gave her hair a few pats, and gave a hitch at her complicated sweater and said, “Darling, you are an absolute idiot! Why didn’t you say something? Didn’t you think I’d understand? I’m all grown up and everything.”
“Let’s say I was enjoying myself. I was listening to the message of the Poo Bear Smith.”
She reached and patted my arm and with a crooked little smile and a bawdy wink said, “Let’s put it Us way. The twenty grand won’t keep. You hustle and phone him. There’s a phone at the end of that hallway over there that goes to the biff.”
I went to the phone and lit a match and looked up a random number and dialed it and asked a nasal woman if I could speak to Mr. Bannon. She told me
I had a wrong number and hung up, and so I talked for a while over the empty wire to Tush and told him the news of the moment, with a few comments on the weather. He didn’t have a thing to say.
I went back to the table and told the chicklet that my man was very frosty, very frosty indeed, but still available for negotiation. She said, “Darling, if you’d lost him on account of me, I was sitting here deciding I was going to make one hell of a try at being worth the whole twenty big ones, but no broad in the world carries a tag like that. I might have choked up and blown the whole match.”
“I like a practical woman.”
“Can I drop you at his hotel?”
“Thanks, but I gave myself time to go pick up my car at the Sultana, if you want to drop me there.”
“And wait for you, I hope, I hope?”
“I guess you better wait at your place, because I am not exactly together on price with this clown yet.” She lifted her purse onto her lap, opened it and dug around inside and took out a little flashlight. She gave it to me and I held it for her while she took out a little golden notebook with a snap fastener. She opened it and slipped the little gold pencil out of the little gold loop and said, “I just realized I’m absolutely starving, dear, so let’s say it’ll be ten before I get home. This is the unlisted number. And this is the address, on Indian Creek Drive, on the west side going north. Look for a raspberry-colored thing with a white canopy and white awnings and white balconies. Call me first, love, because I want the delicious feeling you’re on your way ‘to me.”