“Now that’s a different story,” I said. “Not at all similar to Helen’s case. He wouldn’t blush.”
“Look—”
Look, listen, huh. A spectacular vocabulary. “He wouldn’t cry either. He’s not exactly the tearful type.”
“Listen—”
“Huh,” I concluded. “On the other hand, he would get physically aroused. In marked contrast to Helen, he would get very much aroused. He’d probably spend his lunch hour with Jodi, or someone comparable. Or locked in his private bathroom with the pictures.”
Al looked uncomfortable. Jodi was still laughing, louder and more happily than ever. I seemed to have fallen upon an advantage, though I wasn’t too sure how or why. I stood up, dropped my cigarette onto the rug and squashed it. When you had an advantage, you were supposed to press it. They teach you that on Madison Avenue.
“You said something about a proposition,” I said forcefully. “Let’s hear it.” I almost added My time is valuable, but that phrase just then would have been uncomfortably ludicrous.
“Yeah,” Al said, slowly. “Yeah, a proposition. I don’t know, little man. I think you’re all bluff, you know that?”
I didn’t answer.
“Then again,” he went on, “I don’t know if maybe I don’t have enough chips to call.”
He turned from me to Jodi. “I think this one is a waste of film,” he told her. “He don’t seem to scare. I could shove him around but that won’t do any good. I think we should find somebody else.”
“I told you,” she cooed. “Harvey’s a nice guy.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Al said. “I think he just might be a louse. But unless he runs one hell of a bluff, he honestly don’t give a damn.” He raised both arms to heaven. “Now how in hell,” he wanted to know, “can you pressure someone who doesn’t give a damn?”
There was a moment of silence. I looked at Jodi, at green knit dress, at crossed legs, at expanse of thigh. I wished Al would go away.
“The proposition,” I said.
“Forget it, little man. We’ll get somebody else. Go home to your wife.”
I shuddered at the very thought. “Let’s hear the proposition.”
“I told you—”
“Oh, tell him, Al.” Jodi smiled. “Harvey’s a nice guy.”
“Why tell him? What the hell good—”
“I just might go along with it,” I said. “Without the pressure. I’m a real oddball.”
Looking back on this conversation, the inference is inescapable that I could have sounded like the damnedest dolt on earth. The whole episode, complete with whore and photographs, resembled nothing so much as blackmail pitch. The “proposition” could only be a demand for money. And here was I, successfully excavated from the pressure, suggesting that I might go along with the proposition for the hell of it. Just tell me about it, I was saying in effect, I’ll pay through the nose just to be a good sport.
But at the time blackmail did not even enter my mind. Perhaps I had watched too many television crime shows — they filled the time between various commercials that I had to catch. Blackmail was too simple. I expected more complicated plotting. At a grand for a half-hour script, one has a right to expect complicated plotting.
Besides, if Jodi was whoring herself into twelve thou a year, money could hardly be their problem. And Jodi was not the blackmailing type. There was something far too honest in her emotional makeup. She wasn’t that sneaky.
So I took it for granted that they wanted a patsy, not to pay them, but to perform some task for them. I had no idea what such a task might be. And I was tremendously curious. Chalk it up to the monotony of the day-to-day existence. Chalk it up, if you will, to Hellish Helen who was waiting for me, and who would be so not nice to come home to. Chalk it up to the Vat 69, or to Jodi’s creamy thigh. Or to profit and loss.
Al said: “Jodi, I think he’s nuts.”
“He always was,” she said. “A little. But he’s a nice guy.”
“They finish last.”
She looked thoughtful now. I studied her face and her expression was disturbingly familiar. Then it came back to me. She had had just such a look in her pretty eyes when, in bed, she was engaged in figuring out a new way to do it.
“Al,” she said, “maybe we ought to tell him.”
“Don’t be a stupid.”
“We should,” she said, positive now. “I’m sure of it.”
“And if he blabs?”
“He won’t, Al. Harvey’s a—”
“—nice guy,” I put in.
“A nice guy,” Jodi said. “Besides, I think he really might go along with it. And he’d be perfect, Al. You know damned well he would be perfect.”
The damned took me aback. Jodi was not the swearing type.
“I know he’s perfect,” Al was saying now. “That’s what I was telling you, and you tried to tell me to leave him out of it. Now I want to leave him out, and he wants in, and you say he’s perfect.” He paused a moment to let that sink in. “I think,” he wound up, “that I’m maybe going nuts.”
“Maybe,” Jodi said. “But just think about it, Al. He’s perfect, just as you said. And if he goes along with it, because he wants to, he’ll be a lot better than if he’s forced into it. When you rape a girl, she doesn’t put her heart into it the way she does when she’s interested in the game. Right?”
He nodded. The image must have been right up his sewer. I wondered how many girls he had raped, and whether they had put their hearts into it. They evidently had not, because this was the argument which convinced him. He resumed nodding his head, so forcefully that I thought for a moment it might part company with his body, which would have been no major loss. Then he stepped over to me (I was still standing, and smoking a second of Jodi’s cigarettes by this time) and jabbed a forceful finger into my chest, as if pushing a doorbell.
“Little man,” he said, “I think maybe you’ve got rocks in your head. But if you want in, you have in. If you don’t want it, you will have to for everything which Jodi tells you, because otherwise you could have a bad accident.”
“Huh.” I said.
“Listen,” he said, to both of us. “Look. I am getting out of here, Jodi. This has been a very bad night for me, Jodi. First I take a roll of pictures, which as it turns out we can use for wall paper, or maybe to start a fire in the furnace. Then you and this bird play some kind of Ring Around The Rosie and I don’t quite get what is coming off. I am going home, Jodi, and I am going to bed.”
“You aren’t telling Harvey?”
“You tell him,” Al said. “You tell him whatever you want to tell him. and tomorrow you can tell me what the hell is coming off. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jodi said.
“Huh,” I chimed in.
If you can picture an orangutan stalking off in a huff, you can picture the exit of the Abominable Cameraman. He picked up his sneaky little camera, a pudgy finger smearing the baleful lens, and he hulked haughtily to the door. He opened it, and stepped outside, and the door slammed shut.
That left me alone with Jodi, which was a marked improvement. Jodi paced the floor for a moment or two, and I sat down once again on the couch and time passed on little cat feet. Now and then Jodi turned to me, and cleared her throat, and opened her mouth as if to speak, and closed her mouth, and looked away, and resumed pacing.
“Harvey,” she said finally, tired of parading like a caged lion, “I am very sorry.”
“Why?”
“That I let Al... take pictures. And try to put you on the spot.”